ipolli.com

Now I’m watching series two episode 2 and it is getting worse – I hate it – the family is severely disfunctional and the policeman her – Mike? – is really screwed, he’s even a villain perhaps, things he does.

It chafes at you, it irritates you, never a sensible conversation because always talking at cross purposes or one party won’t listen… especially between dad and Sadie…  Dad won’t listen to anyone or anything… and he’s totally wrong…  and the ‘forensic psychiatrist’ he’s having it on with and has got Sadie going to is truly a murderous villain..

Yep, drama to the melodramatic stage… but not yet far enough to be farcical and give me the relief of laughing at it…  it still gets me screwed up and irritated…

Good movie making, that, eh?

But it is too real, the acting is too good, totally believable.. this director and perhaps these actors know all about family drama and the realities of humdrum life in a way that few in the movie making world apparently do.

It’s horrible… no wonder the series died… it is too good, too true.

How would we take it if we were exposed to a really true depiction of life in a war shattered Iraqi home, or something similar?

Too gritty, too dirty, too cruel, too unrelieving awful, too hopeless, too provocative, too ‘in your face’… we couldn’t/wouldn’t take it and that’s why no one tries to produce such a film, I guess.

Well this is the same. I think. Something like that.

But, horrible as it is it is nowhere near as horrible as reality.

A reality we all love to hide ourselves away from.

I strongly recommend Taki’s  article on Gaddafi and Libya in ‘The Spectator’ for 26 February 2011.

He tells it as he sees it and he tells it as it is.  We should be cringing in shame. ‘We’ ?  The Western World ? Yes.  The Western World,  America, UK, Australia etc… all of us.

But in particular Australia.  In particular.

Read Taki and judge for yourself.

I just started watching Durham Country Series 2.  I’ve seen maybe ten minutes of the first episode.

I see immediately that Dad is the problem. Sadie is the only human being in the show – Dad is buggered up, Mum is buggered up, the Antagonist ( caught and jailed in the last series – what’s going on here – another ‘master criminal behind bars calling the shots’ thing? ) is by definition majorly fucked and all the others are either of no consequence or exhibit failings of professional competence or whatever…

Only Sadie.

And we get the whiff – have since the last series – that Dad is hiding something. It is not clear (to me) but seems to be something about running down this antagonist in his car but (it is claimed) really trying to run down his ex wife (?) or girlfriend (?) because he was so screwed up about her going with this ‘antagonist’ as I keep calling him, because I can’t remember his name.

We’ve been given a clue in the last series where a detective reckoned he’d checked out the story and found that there was no snow, no ice, that night (day?)  – well if this is so there’s certainly something very significant hidden in this guy’s past.

Is that what it is all going to be about?

Sucks me in.

🙂

where nothing else does.

p.s.  A few minute further into it – the baseball game – and I’m reminded of this    (movie)  attitude of Americans towards their women and their children – in particular, very, very obviously in particular, their girl children.  Anyone hurt them and your typical (movie) American will be so furious the heavens will tremble and terrible things will be done….

Forget the nonsense about the wrath of the fathers/boyfriends/husbands the interesting thing is this apparent elevation of women/girl children to such a high place.

Why is this? What does it mean? Why has it been done? Why is it maintained? What purpose does it serve? How real it is?

I surmise that it is a manifestation of the awfulness of American society, the American reality.  Life is so terrible in their dog eat dog world that a little love, a little unbought, freely given, true love, is now their holy grail, their eternal dream, their hunger, their want, their need.

And it is represented by them, to them, for them, by women and girl children.  Sweet, lovely, harmless, love-giving, love-bearing, girl children and the ideal wife.

The significant thing there being that the ‘ideal wife’ is in fact mainly a ‘mom’. Not a ‘wife’. A ‘mom’.

It  is her status as producer, owner, repository, access door to these pure, beautiful, harmless, lovely little darlings, the girl children, that  makes them sacred, too.

Without this they wouldn’t be so sacred.

Are not so sacred. The low status of so many women in American wife is clearly documented everywhere.  They despise and denigrate thousand and and thousands of women – harlots, ‘bull busters’, ‘dykes’ and on an on. I guess the greatest denigration of all is to simply ignore.

And the vast majority of – in fact the totality – of American women is just that: ignored.

What is admired, extolled, adored (?), sanctified, etc (in movie land) is ‘mom’.  Not ‘American women’.

And that’s purely strange in a country so jingoistic that it can bring itself to tears at the very thought of ‘America’.

Yes. It appears to me to be a country that dearly wants a mother’s breast to cry on.

The poor bastards.

The world’s premier nation.

Later:  Woops… Sadie tells lies… Sadie got a wild temper….

Woops (more ‘woops’)  it is turning into a psychological drama….  really screws your (my) head around that does, no significant conversation ever takes a sensible course, misunderstandings, communication failures, multiply…. the whole scene, the whole situation, gets madder and madder… crazier and crazier…

I don’t like it, I won’t watch it… valid it may be, may well be, maybe that’s the whole of natural life (especially in our (america’s?) fucked society, but I still don’t want to see it.

What’s to see? It could all be condensed into a line: “This mob went crazy..”

Mmmm… halfway through the episode….. it handles, well, involves itself with, reall, nitty gritty true things… family parent/child situations, family parent/parent situations… things that are full of homicidal drama but which are at the same time never ever talked about generally in the world but are the very stuff of the (our) world.

It is horrible….

And I know that. Because I know this stuff. Don’t we all? Whereas the horror of serial killers, homicide generally, grand theft (auto?) is the stuff of my entertainment, ethereal, unreal, flimsy, phantasmagorical…

But, yes, this is real…  horribly real and ordinary…

I’ve been reading ‘The Spectator‘ and I think everyone should read it and I would very much like to know if there is anything else like it or – wonder of wonders – perhaps even better.

The Wikipedia article I’ve linked to up there gives a good run down on the magazine but never says what I would say.

What I would say is that it reveals truths no one else reveals. Not distant, fine detail, abstruse, arcane truths – no, everyday kind of things that we all ought to be aware of but which nothing else makes us aware of.

Our media is pitiful. Our existences are pitiful.  We are at a mad hatter’s tea party.  The news of the day coming so fast from so many quarters that there’s no room, no time, and possibly no interest, in expanding on what’s important, relevant.

If we took notice of all the facts we would run our countries, which is what we boastfully claim our much vaunted ‘democracy’ allows us to do.

But actually our democracies are run by a handful of powerful activists here and there.  Political parties can be elected by a mere handful of voters.  Policies can be manipulated, created, modified, by a handful of power brokers.

We love looking at the ‘third world’ or the ‘undeveloped’ world and finding ‘corruption’ and misuse of monies. But read The Spectator for 12th Feb 2011 ‘Councils of Despair’ and get a line on just how endemic our own corruption and misuse of funds is – inasmuch as there’s an entrenched, deeply entrenched, system of certain people voting themselves large salaries out of all proportion to what they do.

We all know this is true.  The Spectator issue I mention refers to local Councils doing it.  But we all know the Banks do it. The Investment Funds do it. Public ‘Institutions’ such as the Telecomms with public money do it.

We know it is done everywhere in our own countries, in our own proud  stain free ‘democracies’.

But it is blatant, obvious misuse of funds and corruption of duty of care etc…

It is obvious corruption of our democracy.

We know about it.

But we don’t care about it.  The fact gets one – liner reportage and no one says anything at all.  Newspapers, reporters, drop the subject because apparently no one is interested.

It is bigger than that. Also reported in the Spectator. One of their issues points out that we spend billions (‘we’ the western world, mainly UK, is what we’re talking about) on Africa, for instance, nominally to help the poor bloody Africans, living in the abject poverty we are all so familiar with.

But these funds are routinely misappropriated.  This is no secret.  This is, truly, ‘routine’.

We fund this ‘routine’.  How culpable are we?

Yep. Everyone should read ‘The Spectator’.  And whatever else there is of the same ilk.  And there is more. I know there is.

We should pull our heads up out of the sand, out of those tv boxes, out of those pc screens, away from the football game or wherever we’ve got them stuck. Pull our heads out and look around and see what we are and what world we’re living in.

Why? Because we are not what we think we are. The world is not what we think it is.  So it is good, refreshing, natural, true, lively, honest, to see the truth.

It is a better life. It is coming to life. It is ‘waking up’.  It is time we ‘woke up’.  It is.

It is time I woke up, I know that, and I find myself belatedly doing just that… dumbstruck by the revelations I run across these days…

I began this blog, and the web page behind it, in the interests of exposing some truth because of a lame approach to their jobs of some teachers, administrators, politicians relevant to my own locality, my own children and their schools right here where I live.

But now I find many things. I find no one is interested on the one hand. On the other hand I find many people interested as indicated by the number of venues already doing a better job than I could even dream of to reveal this kind of incompetency and maladministration, injustice, farce, whatever…

Venues such as web sites and such as magazines like ‘The Spectator’.

Yes. I found all this. And it has shut me up somewhat.  Staggered me.  My own little issues seem so petty compared with what I find now.

But petty or not what I find now is that the biggest problem we’ve got is so much going wrong, heading in the wrong direction, being misadministered, being badly done, and not enough interest, not enough attention on our part, we the public, not enough feedback, kick back, reaction, protest, input, manifestation of ourselves….

So I find myself back with my own petty issues and a ‘directive’ or motivation or something from this realisation, this fact I’ve found of the ‘way things are’, that makes it imperative that I pursue my own little ‘petty issues’ because that’s exactly what is wrong, exactly, just that: no one is pursuing their own ‘petty issues’ and the field is taken by default by those who wouldn’t work in an iron lung, those who maladminister, those who cheat and lie and steal… etc…

So that’s the point I’ve, as usual, floundered around spending so many words finding… everyone should read The Spectator and similar publications so that they can, after being deluged and inundated, swamped, by the enormous amounts of information regarding the parlous state of the world, our world, come to see the nub of it, the hub of it, the centre of it, the point of it: We are needed, to get up and speak, to do.

Like, perhaps, they are doing now in the Middle East.

Only we don’t need to be so extreme.

But we do need to be very aware, very clear, very well informed.

Here in Australia they’re (the Federal Govt) going to introduce a ‘carbon price’ – which means carbon producing industries will have to pay a tax to the government for every ton of carbon (dioxide? what?) that they produce.

The idea is to cause a reduction in Australia’s production of ‘greenhouse gasses’ – a contributory factor in global warming.

There is never, ever, any mention of what effect even a total reduction – to zero – of Australia’s greenhouse gasses would have on global warming, now and at different times in the future, nor what effect it might have on the effects of global warming, now or in the future.

‘The effects’ being what we don’t like, what we’re frightened of.

So – what good will reducing our emissions do? To us and to the world?

Well – we produce about 1.5% of the world’s emissions.

Therefore we can, at best, reduce world emissions by that much. Actually no one can reduce them. They’re climbing all the time. We could reduce the rate of climb by that much if we produced none.

And what difference would that 1.5% reduction in gasses have on global warming?

Zero.

What difference would that zero effect have upon the effects of global warming that might adversely affect our country?

Zero.

Hence it is obvious it is a waste of time and resources.

Time and resources better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of global warming.

No post here for a while. I’ve been thinking over the question: ‘What’s it all about?’

The blog, I mean.

And that very soon leads into further questioning – computers generally, society generally, life generally…

I see us all as rowers on a slave galley.  I see us as slaves, rowing away…

Something after the style of Plato’s chained figures in a cave…

And Lemmings, like Lemmings, we are. Or like we assume Lemmings to be.  According to Wikipedia they are not really so, they don’t really slavishly follow each other to certain death – but in that case the myth enshrined in our language has a life of its own, is a thing itself and that’s what I’m referring to. I’m using a convenience. An artifact of our language.

And, like slaves in a galley, like chained prisoners in Plato’s cave, like (mythical) lemmings, I have been living my life.

Up to an including this blog.

I’m now ready to stop it, end it, cut it off. I’m ready to stop, end, cut off my whole computer interaction inasmuch as it is computer specific interaction rather than incidental to some other task, effort, interest.

I see that I have been following a lemming interest. I have been looking at shadows in the cave. I have been rowing with all the rest, devoting my life, my energies, to this vast ship I’m part of, rather than consciously to myself.

It remains, on this day, for posterity. For my kids. That’s all. To leave a trace, to leave some footprints, to leave something.

At this time it still exists and that’s why it exists. I see no further reason.

There could have been many other reasons, of course: it could have been a business enterprise, it could have been a facility intended for the use of others, it could have been a work of art, it could have been a work of ‘portfolio’ – to demonstrate ability – and so on…

The blog remains, now, after my tiny epiphany only for the sake of leaving something which is genuine demonstration of myself for the sake of my children.

And that, itself, only really because I wanted so much something from my parents and got nothing, never, ever. They left nothing. My mother left many paintings, my brother, probably, destroyed, gave away, sold, them all – I never even saw them.

So I want to leave something for them.

And that’s what this is.

And now I look around and see what else I am leaving. And it is a big mess. I am leaving much. Much mess.

A mess itself can be a great treasure, I know, I admit, I don’t mean to denigrate what I’m leaving, I only mean it is in a disordered state.

I will try and order it somehow and at the same time chronicle my attempts to order it…. as part of ‘it’.

So is that all of it? Is that the end, then, of ‘Ipolli’ with a raison d’etre of it’s own?

No. I haven’t suddenly pared myself down to some inner ‘bone’ and divested myself of all my interests, habits, obsessions, hobby horses…

‘Ipolli’ is meant to try on concentrate on things of merit, find them, comment on them, express interest in them, whatever… and it will still try to do that.

Why does it do it when there are so many other places?

I can list some that I refer to myself, that I draw my material from:

‘ The Weekly ‘
‘ The New Scientist ‘
‘ The Economist ‘
‘ The Spectator ‘
‘ Quantum ‘

and so on… there’s heaps of them..

And blogs and web pages without number…

So what’s the point of me adding to the clamour?

Just adding to the numbers, mate, that’s all. Just throwing my weight behind that direction…

Just one more signpost showing that particular way..

I’m so dumb I can’t even define the ‘way’. I couldn’t even tell you if I am a Liberal or a Conversative or a Labour or a Green or Calathumpian….

I just am what I am.. trying to figure it out for myself…

I work on my instinct and bring to bear what intellection I can, whatever common sense I can, whatever critical analysis I can… but I inevitably finish up with another betrayal of my own shortcomings and prejudices etc….

A revealing of myself.

Well, that’s okay. That’s what it is all about. As we human beings reveal ourselves on this internet, within this amazing machine ( see Marion Bride )
then the expression of the single organism which is the human presence of planet earth becomes more clearly defined and capable.

It’s like we vote, nowadays, in our ‘advanced’ and ‘democratic’ countries, when we are given the opportunity and give expression to ourselves, our desires, our wishes for the common government, the common direction and methods, attitudes, organisation, values, etc…

That’s when we are permitted. When we are asked. When it suits those that are manipulating this machinery.

Once in a while we are called upon to manifest ourselves.

Well, the web enables us to continually manifest ourselves. We become constantly living presences.

This fact, the mutation of the nature of the human organism on planet earth – the evolution of it – has simply not been recognised by hardly anyone…

In fact I know of no one.

But I expect there’ll be someone… I’ll try and find them…

In the meantime, this web presence, this blog, is part of this new structure, this new ‘humanity’ this new expression of the will of the whole (as distinct from ‘will of the majority’, the ‘democratic’ ‘justice’ and ‘universal suffrage’ and which itself is everywhere in practice mutated into the ‘will of those with the levers’ ).

No, the established controllers don’t know.

They didn’t know about the financial meltdown, did they?

The leaders lag, they don’t lead. That’s the point.

The ‘leaders’ are yesterday’s news.

These are the last days of the traditional ‘leaders’ in all respects in all countries – I mean ‘democratic’ leaders and tribal leaders and authoritarian despotic leaders – all ‘leaders’ – their days are finished..

the human organism has reached some kind of critical mass and has become self organising in a way that Plato couldn’t, I suppose, have possibly conceived of.. not having any way of knowing of the web.. unless he were to intuit it all as an expression of the mass mind, or some kind of groupthink, or communion of souls, I don’t know…

But now we are different organisms. We manifest differently. Those who manifested via robot computer programmes buying and selling derivatives helped somewhat with the conditions of the financial meltdown and are helping now to create the conditions for the next crisis…

Those individuals simply manifest as a ‘position’, I think they call it, with respect to their trading and their trading actions given various scenarios.

In our monetary democracy, our totally money oriented society this makes them part of the very machinery like never ever before.

Once the machinery was only dumb passive paper documents etc. and the ‘masters’ and ‘manipulators’ were a few (relatively speaking) individuals possessing of great wealth and influence.

Those few masters could do much, of course, and, of course, were always keenly looking for an opportunity to do as much as they could to manipulate events of all kinds to suit themselves for their own profits.. this is the history of the world… wars for the sake of munitions manufacturers profits… for the sake of garment manufacturers profits… for the sake of profits…

But what they sought to manipulate was slow and cumbersome, enormous and unwieldy… masses of paper were required at all times, for any thing to happen…

The organisers, the racketeers, the manipulators, the overlords, the parasites, were people, the mechanism was ‘stuff’, inanimate, inert, passive.

But now the ‘stuff’ is electronic, capable of changing overnight, over a second, a split second, and the manipulators are any tom, dick or harry…

As the traditional manipulators in their greed urge ever more and more people to join in the market they inevitably undermine their own importance, they become of diminished significance as against the mass of people in the market with them..

But they are not even people in the market with them… they are computer programmes…

What will happen in the world depends so much on these ‘money markets’ (which term, for me, here, includes all derivatives markets, the whole ‘wealth trading’ farce ) – when they collapse everything collapses…

But no one can guard against their collapse. Because no one can comprehend it all. No one can encompass the totality of it.

And that’s because of the web. And ordinary people’s involvement in it. ‘Ordinary people’s…’ There’s the thing, you see. ‘Ordinary’ people were never, ever ‘ordinary’.

‘Ordinary’, ‘the mass’ , ‘the people’ always meant something smaller, something less, something not ‘up there’, something not good enough, something from low down, something without power, without ability, without standing, without real presence…

Throughout the ages the ‘people’ have never been a threat except at times of hysteria, brief hysteria… survive the brief hysteria and soon the status is restored.

Here’s from Wikepedia on the Krupp organisation, which build Germany’s war machine:

After Germany’s defeat, Gustav was senile and incapable of standing trial, and the Nuremberg Military Tribunal convicted Alfried as a war criminal in the Krupp Trial for “plunder” and for his company’s use of slave labor. It sentenced him to 12 years in prison and ordered him to sell 75% of his holdings. In 1951, as the Cold War developed and no buyer came forward, the authorities released him, and in 1953 he resumed control of the firm.

45 – 53. That’s eight years. After eight years it was business as usual. What do you think was happening in the dining rooms and the stately homes and the business board rooms, etc., etc., all the normal daily habitats of the powerful, influential, wealthy? Did they shun the Krupps? Were the Krupps ostracised? Did the Krupps eat shit in a back alley?

No. The Krupps retained their ‘position’ within the establishment.

Wikipedia on the Krupp organisation

That’s how it is. That’s how it always was. It never recedes, it never diminishes, it never goes away. The powerful, the rich, retain power and retain wealth, they help each other to do this. Of course. They don’t help you and I. They help each other. They live in their own bubble, like those ridiculous beings the ‘hollywood actors’, well divorced from reality.

But now it gets different. Now the people are a threat. Are a presence. Once they were only cannon fodder in uniforms to be sacrificed and then ‘dealt with’ when they returned home at the end of the war and discreetly cleverly turned back into humble civilian slaves again, divested of their war machinery, their warlike abilities, any danger.

But now they are there all the time. All the time. And everywhere. They can see everything. They can hear everything. They can communicate with each other across the whole world in seconds.

But more than this, more ‘integral’ than this: they ARE the machinery of the modern world. They ARE the computer programmes that buy and sell derivatives, stock and shares. They are the sea. They always were the sea. But the sea used to have no consciousness – now every molecule of the sea has a human consciousness behind it.. we now have a thinking sea… a conscious sea…

We’re not quite there yet… we haven’t really hit ‘critical mass’ or the ‘trigger point’ because the sea hasn’t become aware of itself as yet…

But it is getting there quickly….

There’s a most beautiful day out there… I can see it through the window from the kitchen.  Blue sky… couple of little fleecy white clouds just for good measure…  trees standing tall and quiet in the windless air… temperature mild, balmy… peace everywhere, the suburbs stretching out around me, everyone happy in their own little patch…

A beautiful sky, a beautiful world, beautiful environment, a sane and sensible, humane civilisation, no wars, no famine, no disease – ah, yes, floods and fires raging elsewhere on the continent but not here… calm and peaceful, healthy, conducive to life here, wonderful…

And amidst this:  children squalling and fighting, pestering, interfering, disturbing, upsetting, breaking, spoiling, damaging, filling the air with noise, commotion, unpleasantness, greed, selfishness…..

What?  They are impervious to the beauty of the world. They know nothing about it. They take it for granted, such of it as they recognise.  They give no thanks for it. They have no gratitude for it… They have no sense of it.

All that matters to them is that ‘he’ took ‘my’ toy… and similar ludicrously, childish, stupid, nonsensical bones of contention…

They are simply not human.

This is a bald though startling fact.  It should not be startling, being such a basic ubiquitous fact but it is. It is because we ignore it and pretend otherwise.

Our whole child thing, our relationships with our children, or social structures for dealing with our children, the way we talk about our children, our apparent understanding of our children – it all avoids this truth.

There are or were primitive peoples whose method of bringing up children was to virtually ignore them until they were about 9 years old.

Back a hundred years in Western society children were to be ‘seen but not heard’ and ‘speak when spoken to’ and so on….  There was a definite understanding of the place of children as below, beneath and other than that of people.

And that’s how it should be.

That, effectively, is how it is. Though we disguise the fact.

We have institutions known as ‘primary schools’ which pretend to be institutes of learning but which are in fact primarily jails or holding pens for child minding… somewhere to put the children outside of our society.

They serve to do something with the children while parents are at work, sure enough. But they also serve as somewhere to put the children when parents are not at work and have no such ostensible reason for having the children cared for elsewhere.

These institutions struggle to control the savage unbridled uncivilized behaviour of the natural child. They struggle to push the child into a mode of behaviour that they can deal with: i.e. ‘controlled’.

The whole, sole intent of these places is simply to control the child.

Hence they are at bottom authoritarian, didactic, dogmatic, inhuman, aloof, uncaring, unfeeling institutions without any empathy with children or the world and without any ability to teach – which is their pretended reason for existing.

The institutions, seeking to control this mass of inhuman humanity which is itself outside of the human society becomes itself outside of human society.  A fact which is frequently demonstrated in so many way.

At my local primary school they have this term taken to broadcasting overloud, cacaphonic music to herald the ‘five minutes to get to class’ time.

This is such an outrageous assault on the ears I was moved to ask them in the front office if they’d do something to mitigate it and perhaps return to their practice of the previous years, when the music was melodious, acceptable, recognisable and hearable without ear injury.

They said they’d investigate whether or not that ‘ipod’ had a volume control.

A ludicrous approach in the first instance.

And then this morning the music (!) is, if anything, worse.

So this demonstrates in one small event so much:

. The disregard for parents and children.

. The technological inadequacy of supposed ‘educators’ and academics.

. The authoritarian attitude that whatever faults, errors, misdeeds, impositions, improprieties they commit they are well within their rights: they can do as they wish.

. Their total contempt for any individual parent.

. Their total alienation from any concept of caring, or understanding or humane interaction with the people and the society about them.

They are a prison. Staffed by warders.  Sinecured warders.  And that’s how they manifest.

Of course.

We can’t see the wood for the trees, can we?

Given so much information, so many colourful, professionally, expensively produced information videos/movies/documentaries that in fact we learn nothing….

I’ve just been watching such videos on four different subjects:

Education: the fact that our system is not educating but is simply indoctrinating – and that to no good effect itself.

Invasion of Iraq: the fact that our governments deliberately and systematically lied to us about the need and the reason for going to war there.

Climate Change: The  science behind the contention that it is our emissions that cause climate change and, conversely, could stop it if reduced.

Marijuana: Analysis of all the evidence pro and con for healthy/unhealthy effects of marijuana.

Four hours of my time for these four subjects.

Result: virtually nothing I didn’t already know.

That, or inconclusive or suspect ‘science’ to make an indication.

In other words – a wasted four hours.

Given four sheets of A4 paper all the worthwhile things these programmes had to say could have been said in print, in text, and I could have scanned them in a couple of minutes.

But instead I had to sit through four hours to find out I was wasting my time.

Books, documents, give you indexes, chapter listings, source listings, etc…  Video documentaries give you none of these at all.

They are, in effect, rubbish. Time wasting crap.

What we need is, up front, a summary of the conclusions.  Followed by a summary of the steps used to reach these conclusions.

In that way we might be able to ascertain pretty quickly if we wanted to view the thing.

But no such precis is ever offered. The whole thing is inevitably treated as a kind of mini movie – a story with characters and plot line, to be revealed slowly, tantalising bit by bit.

Every metaphor, every simile, has to be illustrated by appropriate photography…

“Jim works in the science department” becomes a film clip of Jim driving to work, parking his car, walking into the science building..

What total crap! What utter time wasting nonsense.

And yet I’ve never, ever, heard any kind of outcry about this…

This is the information age, information overload is a catchcry.. so wouldn’t rationalisation of information presentation be a topical subject?

Nope. No interest whatever.

Why?

Because we are asleep! We are asleep.

And our awakening will be very rude, I imagine, I can’t see why it would be otherwise… while we sleep there is no one plotting and planning to give us a warm and loving awakening.. no one is preparing happy birthday parties for us….

🙂

This is a joke.

I have two children perforce attend a primary school that has displayed some unfortunate behaviour: demonising my child, coercing parents to put children in uniform, that sort of stuff. You can see: authoritarian.

They have a Principal – drawing some $70,000 a year I believe, who tries to coerce parents into putting their children into expensive uniforms – parents who try to support numerous children on less than half that sum.

A Principal  who refers to the sight of a bevy of identically dressed schoolchildren as ‘fantastic’.

Good teacher for your child’s English class, eh?

Well now they’ve topped it. Or bottomed it or something. Revealed all.  Because they’ve now got a brand new web site and right at the top, almost a masthead is the proclamation:

“Blah Blah South Primary School prepares students for effective participation in society by providing a broad and balanced education in a safe, supportive and stimulating environment.” .

‘Blah blah’ in order to avoid embarrassment to the guilty.

So now we know.  Students surviving the rigours of this Primary School (It surely deserves capitals) are ready for ‘effective participation in society’ !  Job done. No worries. No need for any further education or upbringing.

What we need now is to channel all the many thousands of people in our society into the arms of this primary school and they, too, can be taught to be capable of ‘effective participation in society’.  What a wonder! What a miracle! Who knew that such a tool was available?  No one, I think. No one.

And the environment within the school which seems on cursory examination to be inhumanly authoritarian is, in fact,  “a safe, supportive and stimulating environment.”

You know what the Principal would say that was?

“Fantastic.”, I think.  And I’m inclined to agree.

Just learned something: ‘Boat People’ arriving in Australia since the ‘concerns’ began (not sure of that date, missed it) : about 20,000

Immigrants settled in Australia during that same time: 3,500,000

Yep.  Three and one half million against 20,000

That twenty thousand are people who’ve gambled everything on getting here (and often failed, lost the gamble, died, family and all, in the attempt).

That twenty thousand was overwhelmingly bona fide asylum seekers as witness the Immigration Department’s own statistics on percentage of visas granted:  Check this here

What is going on?  People on the run from a hostile, cruel world, driven to chance all on extortionately priced trips on leaky boats find themselves facing authoritarian, Kafkaesque brutality, hostility, intransigence, unfairness right here in Australia?

Knock it off. What bullshit is this?

It is the bullshit of the remorseless rise of authoritarianism.  I’m no political pundit, nor even a social commentator and certainly not a journalist.  I’m just me. A nobody. Happier in his own backgarden or out in the bush – but courtesy of this wonderful tool the internet able to take a look around the world at the kind of things that are happening without even having to put myself out so much as to purchase a daily paper…

So I look around. And I find these things.

And I call it a ‘rise of authoritarianism’ and that seems right to me but if some academic tells me I’ve got the wrong phrase then I apologise – please tell me what phrase to use.

What I mean is a rise in the number of people enjoying exercising ‘authority’ (I put it in quotes because I question its validity) over others.

I mean a rise in the number of transgressions one can be deemed to have made.

I mean a continual reduction in the safeguards and natural rights we thought we had.

I mean a rise in the distancing of the government and their offices from the people – so’s you can no longer talk to anyone but a machine on the  phone, are on hold for hours, are fobbed off with this answer or that….

I  mean all that kind of stuff. That is nothing like a comprehensive list of it all but it is certainly sufficient for anyone who cares to look at it all objectively to know exactly what I’m talking about.

We are being crushed. Our country is being crushed. It all began (here’s a bit of an aside) when they voted ‘Waltzing Matilda’ out and put in whatever you call it…. Gert By the Sea.

That was a vote to throw out the idea of a freeman battler dying rather than be oppressed by the rich and greedy and owners of the instruments of authority,  pounced upon for only trying to keep himself alive by eating some ‘game’ that the fat pigs had in over abundance and which in common humanity they owed to the man (and certainly in mealy mouthed Christianity which we can be sure they professed every Sunday).

Throw out this idea. Too raw. Too real. Too ordinary the people in it. Too close to a fundamental truth.

Without doubt – I say “Without Doubt” the greatest national anthem in the World at that time.  The Greatest.

An illustration of the triumph of ordinary man – beaten down by greedy bastards and unjustly thrown out of his own country, separated for the rest of his life from family and friends, taken in chains, beaten, tormented, trodden upon – and yet still built a free nation of healthy, proud, capable people with ‘fair go’ and ‘mateship’ as their creed.

That is what it illustrated.  That is what it demonstrated. That is what it announced.

And the pusillanimous descendents of that viciously greedy and unfair squatter and his bribed and docile three constables voted it out and replaced it with a piece of sanctimonious emasculated garbage.

And this country started going to the dogs.

And now we see it.

The more you’ve suffered, the lower down the heap you are, the less you’ve got, the more we’ll tread on you.

Come here with your millions and we’ll find a place for you even if you’re known to be a filthy crook.

Fly in comfortably on a visa obtained by deceit and trickery, bribery, dishonesty, with cheating in mind, and you’ll be welcomed..

Come here penniless, starving, wrapped in rags, in the bottom of a foundering boat, sick with nausea and fear, cold, hungry, frightened, alone….  and we’ll tread on you…

Because you are not one of the chosen 3.5 million.  Because you are not one of the 50,000 who stay without proper documentation each year…  they are entitled to humane treatment when apprehended, if ever… no, you are not one of them… you are human flotsam, drifting in rubbish boats piloted not by humanitarians seeking to help but by scabrous criminals, the ‘lowest of the low’, ‘people smugglers’, who apparently constantly engage in the strange practice of smuggling people into Australia in leaky boats that nearly send all of the them to their deaths, including the ‘smuggler’. What a vile strange villain this is, that nearly dies with his victims..

I can see no sense or justice in any of it.

Let them be apprehended  if you wish. But treat them well. Treat them right royally. For we profit by our immigrants.

Only one thing: One day Asia may decide to come to Australia. And if that day ever happens – maybe some ‘black death’ killing millions in Indonesia – maybe famine throughout China,  I don’t know, but if it ever happens that Asia wants the open land of Australia then they’ll take it. By boat.

Then they will come in the boats. Then the boat people will come. Their governments in such a scenario would be keen to let them come, would do nothing to prevent them coming, may even help them.

Thousands upon thousands. Like Dunkirk in reverse.

Unarmed. Why use arms? No Asian country wants a fight with us. Why fight?  Just let the boats come. We would be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

Without a doubt. Nothing we could do to prevent it.  Swamped.  Overwhelmed.  The boats would come in dozens, then hundreds, then thousands….

Is it the anticipatory ghost of this that makes us act in this way?

Perhaps.  But then we should see that our reaction is hopeless, powerless, ineffectual in stopping any such thing.  Nothing we do now with the pitiful handful of people that come drifting our way will have any effect whatever on preventing such a mass Asian exodus from Asia and invasion of Australia. Nothing. No effect. Zero.

So lets’ stop it, eh?

Let them come. Welcome them.

Because we’re getting in such a mess. We don’t even welcome ourselves.  We in fact banned ourselves, barred ourselves, when we turned out backs on Waltzing Matilda.

What if those people should jump in the water rather than be taken alive…..

I’ve been trying to be upbeat and happy. Didn’t want to keep reiterating all the bad things….

But they are so  bad. I just keep finding out so much more..

Now  I have run into Noam Chomsky’s speech on ‘The New War on Terror’ :

The New War Against Terror
By Noam Chomsky
October 18, 2001 – Transcribed from audio recorded at The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT The Talk (audio)

Here’s a tiny little paragraph from it:

Colombia and Turkey
The worst human rights violator in the 1990’s is Colombia, by a long shot. It’s also the, by far, the leading recipient of US military aid in the 1990’s maintain-ing the terror and human rights violations. In 1999, Colombia replaced Turkey as the leading recipient of US arms worldwide, that is excluding Israel and Egypt which are a separate category. And that tells us a lot more about the war on terror right now, in fact.
Why was Turkey getting such a huge flow of US arms? Well if you take a look at the flow of US arms to Turkey, Turkey always got a lot of US arms. It’s stra-tegically placed, a member of NATO, and so on. But the arms flow to Turkey went up very sharply in 1984. It didn’t have anything to do with the cold war. I mean Russian was collapsing. And it stayed high from 1984 to 1999 when it
Human Nature Review – Volume 1, 2001, Page 45
The New War Against Terror
reduced and it was replaced in the lead by Colombia. What happened from 1984 to 1999? Well, in 1984, [Turkey] launched a major terrorist war against Kurds in southeastern Turkey. And that’s when US aid went up, military aid. And this was not pistols. This was jet planes, tanks, military training, and so on. And it stayed high as the atrocities escalated through the 1990’s. Aid fol-lowed it. The peak year was 1997. In 1997, US military aid to Turkey was more than in the entire period 1950 to 1983, that is the cold war period, which is an indication of how much the cold war has affected policy. And the results were awesome. This led to two to three million refugees. Some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the late 1990’s. Tens of thousands of people killed, 3500 towns and villages destroyed, way more than Kosovo, even under NATO bombs. And the United States was providing eighty percent of the arms, in-creasing as the atrocities increased, peaking in 1997. It declined in 1999 because, once again, terror worked as it usually does when carried out by its major agents, mainly the powerful. So by 1999, Turkish terror, called of course counter-terror, but as I said, that’s universal, it worked. Therefore Turkey was replaced by Colombia which had not yet succeeded in its terrorist war. And therefore had to move into first place as recipient of US arms.

I am simply speechless.