Well, having visited the city centre midweek and the supermarket today I am tempted to cast the piggy crown pretty wide this week. Throngs of ignorant, anti-social, self absorbed wankers seem to be choking all transport routes, road and foot. Of course Leeds’ student population is back in force but it would be unfair to lay all the blame for the throbbing vein in my head at their feet.

No, in order to maintain the select nature of this dubious award it is important to depend on calculated outrage rather than flashpoint annoyance. Significant and/or telling acts of Swinery must be held, like the filling of some freakish social sandwich, carefully between the mild irritations and the real horrors that are the bread and butter of everyday life.

Now the very moment I saw this particular incident on BBCN24 I knew, there’s my Swine, and yet the exact name to add to the list is a tough one. I am talking, of course, about the physical assault upon, and demeaning ejection and detainment of, 82 year old Walter Wolfgang, Vice Chair of CND and long serving Labour Party member, from the Labour Party Conference.

This shameful scene struck three wrong chords with me on impact:

There is clearly something very wrong with using physical violence to remove a man in his 80’s from anywhere, especially when he volunteers to go peacefully, regardless of what he’s done.

All he had done was call out one word, ‘Nonsense!’ during Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s speech. Given that he’s a little old man, sitting right at the top and back of a gigantic conference centre and that practically no-one, certainly not Mr. Straw, even heard him I’m not sure this even qualifies as heckling. However his actions are to be described however, they apparently warranted the use of the Terrorism Act, under which Mr Wolfgang was held following his ejection.

Finally, just how stupid were the people involved? Where was the great Labour spin machine? Did it not occur to anyone that attacking an old man, while wearing the Labour Party logo, on national TV might cause a bit of a stir? You might thank that the governing party of our country should would be able to organize security for its own events with a slightly higher degree of professionalism than your average nightclub. Apparently not.

So there’s the piggy act in all its porky glory but who is the Swine? It was the Labour Party’s conference, the members paid for it and made it happen, so maybe the whole party should carry the can, or perhaps just their leader. Somehow this doesn’t sit right for me, I feel like if we’re going to crown the lot of them, or certainly him, it could be for something else.

Maybe just the thugs themselves then, those guys half the age and twice the weight of their pacifist victim. No, still not quite the bacon. These guys were either doing what they were told or doing what they do, either way whoever hired them holds further responsibility.

In the end I think we have to plant this one on the chairman of the Labour Party, Ian McCartney. In the end, if a political organisation like the Labour Party can’t ensure that people it employs act with reason and respect, let alone with some degree of publicity sense, then it’s down to him.

So there you go Mr. McCartney, you’re this week’s Swine Of The Week thanks to your own people shooting you in the foot. These few dirty seconds of amoral and unprofessional behaviour have overshadowed the entire conference but then, was that the idea all along...?

PS
My girlfriend told me this joke which I think you guys will appreciate, creased me up anyway

Donald Rumsfeld enters the Oval Office and says to George Bush, ‘Mr. President, we’ve received some disturbing news.’
Bush asks what it is so Rumsfeld continues, ‘three Brazilian people have been killed.’
To Rumsfeld’s surprise the President is deeply shocked and moved, he sits down heavily and weighs his head in his hands.
After a few minutes of whispered prayer the President looks up at Rumsfeld and asks, ‘Tell me again Don, how many millions in a brazillion?’

I've recently witnessed two particularly slick and professional media presentations, each with it's own method of conveying it's own perspective on the state of society. First, on Monday, I saw 'Land Of The Dead' and then yesterday, Blair's big conference speech.

Both were exactly what I had expected them to be and both were the very finest examples of their craft. 'Land' kept up the traditions of Romero's series perfectly, building on past work to push the whole thing a step further. Blair's speech was the exact opposite, exactly the same old reasonable dogma, and why not? Both presentations did exactly as their creators hoped.

Yes the acting in 'Land' is crap and the script cheesy, but the earlier films were just the same. The brilliance of it is in the situations it explores and the social commentary, blatant and biting, that can be saved for a future post of its own. The fact it's almost impossible to form anything but the most basic connection with any of the characters only serves to turn your attention to what's happening.

Conversely Blair comes across as the seasoned pro. Even despite the occasional and worrying mannerisms he seems to have picked up from Bush like ticks, he puts on good show. Key words in key places with just the right tone of voice, passionate hand gesture, caring frown etc. He engages the eye of the party faithful and public to a point where what he's actually saying becomes secondary.

Of course my own blatant bias toward the medium makes me far from objective when talking about 'Land', but what I really liked was that the film not only seemed, to me, to be saying something but it was something I agreed with. I was sitting in a big multiplex cinema seeing a message I actually agreed with, that felt good.

Despite my own blatant bias away from war criminals, and Blair's own smokescreen, I did my best to really listen to what was being said and I didn't like what I heard. There is only one way forward, he's the only guy who can lead us down that one road, this is not an option, there is no choice etc.

Now 'Land' displays fictional violence, gore and suffering up front and subsequently entertains and makes some points about society. Blair entertains and makes points about society while subsequently inflicting unseen, real violence, gore and suffering on innocent people. This being the case I find his cries to: follow me for it is the only way, distasteful to say the least.

'Land' just goes to show that talking about what's wrong with the world and the values that are important doesn't have to be so boring that we leave it all to gits in suits, especially not that git.

During a conversation with a good friend of mine a few days back a strange thought occurred. We were talking about, among other things, money, where it comes from and where it goes. Now it's an established fact that rich are perpetually getting richer and the poor poorer. Looking at the way things work today this is no surprise.

The less money you have the more expensive life is and the quite horrific boom in the business of credit is the most obvious but certainly not the only testament to this. So it seems to me that, thinking of the world in purely monetary terms as many do, that there is a great inverted funnel, sucking up all the little bits of cash from the masses and delivering them to the piles of the elite.

'Trickle down economics' states that it's ok for a select elite to receive all this cash as they then spend it thus creating jobs for the little people and perpetuating a harmonious cycle. The clear flaw in this theory is that the elite don't spend as much as they make, not least because in many cases it's probably impossible for them to do so.

Now looking at this as a physicist what I see is net flow in one direction but this is the strange thought. Surely there is a limited amount of cash in the world and so, if it's ultimately going in one direction, why doesn't it run out? How much bigger can the bubble get before it bursts?

On initial inspection it seems to me that there are, (surprisingly,) three possibilities:

1. There is something else fundamental happening that is unaccounted for in the picture I have painted above. Remembering our own limits and including them in our thinking is an essential practice neglected by too many people these days. If anyone can see something obvious that I've missed please let me know.

2. The picture is exactly right, the bubble just hasn't burst yet. This would mean that, if things don't change, our economic systems are building towards an eventual catastrophic collapse. Basically the rich will eventually have absolutely everything and the rest of us will be left to rot. Of course things won't get this far because, invariably, the masses revolt.

3. The whole thing is an abject scam and money is actually meaningless. If this is the case then things can theoretically continue as they are forever.

Of course these solutions are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive but I just can't seem to shake the idea that material wealth is not only a distraction from what's important but actually a barrier to a better world.

I have recently decided that I want to severely cut down on the amount of TV I watch as I realised just how many hours of my life I am wasting watching crap I'm not even interested in. Having said this however, i would not wish to cut TV out of my life altogether as there is a small minority of programming I find genuinely worthwhile.

One such example of this is the BBC's Question Time. I've watched it for years and was even in the audience when it came to Leeds a few years ago, (albeit to attempt a protest demanding the release from Strangeways prison of the founder of a UK cannabis coffeeshop, which didn't work incidentally as the Beeb simply avoided certain camera angles when filming the audience.)

Anyway I flicked into Question Time last night and caught the back end of debate about the current situation in Iraq. At one point a woman in the audience made the point that it is naive for anyone, let alone world leaders, to think that we can walk into a country and culture that is millennia old and expect to fundamentally alter it in a matter of months.

This week's Swine, David Miliband MP, chose to respond to this point by saying something to the effect of: "I disagree with that lady's comment that democracy cannot be introduced to middle eastern countries." When I heard his response I was literally agog. 'That isn't what she said!' I shouted pointlessly at the TV.

Now compared to previous weeks this may seem like a relatively minor crime, perhaps not worthy of the piggy crown but bare with me and I shall explain. This was a prime example of something that not only annoys but also scares the hell out of me, (not much hell left in here I can tell you.)

I'd heard the words the woman had spoken just moments before, as had the rest of the panel, studio and TV audiences. It was plain for all to see that his version of events was flawed and yet he went unchallenged. The worst thing about it was that I honestly don't believe he was spinning things to his own ends but that he actually believed his own bullshit.

The people we pay to run our country do this all the time and it goes far beyond politicians simply being 'out of touch'. Instead of listening to comment and criticism they interpret it and this in turn demonstrates the real problem, namely simple, downright arrogance.

All forms of protest outside our rigid political structure are gradually being dismissed, discredited or even outlawed by our leaders. It is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for anyone outside of a tiny elite to have any impact whatsoever on government.

This is not, as it is tempting to portray, because those at the top are evil wannabe dictators, but rather because these people truly believe that they know best and that our submission to their 'superior' knowledge is for our own good.

This is why this week's Swine Of The Week is David Miliband MP. Congratulations Dave, you were in the right place at the right time to become my poster boy for the political arrogance that is currently eroding both our national culture and safety. You suck, but you are not alone.

Despite expounding the wonders of the horror genre over the last few days I still found myself distinctly unsettled by the real life horror on my TV screen this week: Angry mobs stoning and burning British tanks and British troops rolling, aflame from their vehicles, not to mention a few more Iraqi deaths, (but we don't even really notice those anymore do we?)

Casting my mind back to the run up and beginning of our war against the Iraqi people I was incensed once more by the memory of one particular bit of right wing gibberish that caught hold for while. The rabid rhetoric went that those of us who were pro-peace were anti-troop, 'shut up and get behind our lads' was the flag hugging cry.

Well my reaction to seeing our lads in mortal danger the other day was to think, 'what the hell have we got these guys into?' How dare anyone suggest that the pro-peace camp don't care about our troops when we were the ones wanting to keep them from such an impossible and potentially lethal situation.

This very situation in Basra, among other things, demonstrates the vital nature of well functioning rule of law to a peaceful society. From law making to law enforcement, anything other than the highest standards can lead to chaos and death.

Now in the build up to our illegal war a majority of our elected representatives believed Blair when he said he knew best, they trusted his judgement and that of his government on our behalf. Pretty much everything predicted by critics of the decision has come horribly true but as Labour remained the least worst electable party in most people's eyes they're still there and asking us to trust them again.

Is it really so crazy then that when our Home Secretary wants to lock people up for months on end without charge or throw others out of the country without any judicial process that I can't find it within myself to give him the benefit of the doubt?

There's much debate over whether Gordon Brown will be the next PM but to all intents and purposes Clarke seems to hoping to reinvent the position of Home Secretary as that of a dictatorial ruler. The introduction of catch-all laws to restrict free speech again rely on his own personal judgement as to which law breakers are a threat and so should be prosecuted. What happened to open courts and public justice?

I'll admit I was a little disappointed with the response, or lack of it, to my early call-to-arms post, 'let's do this thing' (1) but I can't be too upset as I've been struggling to come with something myself, the gauntlet I threw down is indeed a heavy one. The idea was to come up with a simple, mass reproducible, humorous graphic that would violate these new laws and demonstrate their absurdity.

I realised that I needed to know a bit more detail about the laws if I were to break them in such a precise manner and so visited the home office website ( www.homeoffice.gov ) and found Clarke's 'list of unacceptable behaviour' ( www.homeoffice.gov.uk/pageprint.asp?item_id=1351 ) These only apply to foreign citizens but that just makes it even more ridiculous, especially given the backgrounds of the men who bombed and attempted to bomb London.

Please do have a look yourself but, to me, the parts most appropriate to this particular endeavour are these, the following actions will be illegal:

"writing, producing, publishing or distributing material" or "running a website"

if they "express views which"

"foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs"

Now it's easy at first glance to see this as being just, right and proper but the devil is, as they say, in the detail. What, exactly, counts as terrorist violence? What, exactly, counts as encouraging, justifying or glorifying it? The problem is that these definitions are to be defined purely by the Home Secretary's own opinion.

Now initially someone like Nelson Mandela would have been defined as a criminal under these laws but such a politically incorrect state of affairs has been avoided by the introduction of a twenty year backward limit. As someone recently pointed out this neatly protects people like Charles Clarke, Jack Straw or Peter Hain from prosecution for the various public protests and statements they all made while at university.

The fact is that words alone do not make a terrorist and gagging those who's opinions we don't like does nothing to remove the predisposition in some that leads to violence. All these laws are doing is dodging the far greater task of looking seriously and honestly within ourselves to try and understanding what it is about ourselves that is producing and inspiring such hatred.

Anyways, back to the matter in hand. Having looked at the info above one of the first things that occurred to me was the vagueness of the phrase, 'particular beliefs'. It would surely be political suicide for the Home Secretary to proclaim certain beliefs, read as certain religions, as being inherently criminal.

This being the case could our graphic perhaps be in the name of some clearly satirical cause? This mean that the image would still be illegal, (or at least it would if it came from some 'dirty foreigner',) but would also make it less likely to alienate people.

Three (of course,) possible examples:

Campaign Against Religious Extremism, C.A.R.E

A group believing that religious extremists are the root of most of the world's problems and so calls for all those with strongly held religious beliefs to blow themselves up asap for the good of humanity.

Conflict Helps Everyone Earn Revenue, C.H.E.E.R

A group believing that, as one of the biggest industries in history, the arms trade brings wealth and prosperity to millions and so calls for the perpetual continuation of war and terror for the good of humanity.

Human Extinction And Rights for Trees, H.E.A.R.T

A group believing that humankind is too great a danger to nature to exist and so calls on all concerned environmentalists, (emphasis on the mentalist,) to blow themselves up asap for the good of the planet.

I hope these initial thoughts and the more detailed framework of Santa's retarded cousin's latest power trip outlined at the Home Office website help inspire someone out there. There's a postcard on the wall behind me that reads: 'when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.' While that is true no-one ever said that duty couldn't be fun.

PS Please feel free to leave comments with your ideas or email me any graphics you come up with, (check my profile for my email address,) do remember though that whatever you come up with may end up being widely copied and distributed for free.

footnote

(1) to read my earlier post, 'let's do this thing', please either scroll back a a few days or follow this ridiculously long link: http://www.blog.co.uk/main/index.php/viewfromthecheapseats?s=let%27s+do+this+thing+%28wutio+Church+Of+Misery%29&sentence=sentence&submit=Search

Day Of The Dead

Another decade on and Romero only just managed to make the third, and by far the bleakest film. In order to make Day, Romero had to sell the rights to Night, allowing it to be horrifically colourised and franchised. Thankfully he made yet another brilliant film, the series continued and the sacrifice was worth it.

This time we’re in a government bunker with a group of scientists, a group of soldiers and a couple of technical staff. These last two are a super cool black helicopter pilot and an unbelievably clichéd Irish radio man, (the guy drinks constantly and says, 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' at every given opportunity!) Our main hero this time is the level headed female scientist.

The nation's last hope of finding a solution to the crisis, these guys are running low on supplies and, living together underground, are starting to climb the walls. There have been no communications from Washington for weeks, the nearby cities, when visited, are desolate and overrun and as people begin to crack under the stress the apocalyptic atmosphere is almost unbearable.

These are people living in the dark final days of the world, a feeling familiar to many people who lived through the 80's. The gung-ho thug commander of the troops becomes increasingly totalitarian in his methods as his abject fear gets the better of him. The intellectual head scientist, on the other hand, lives in a little world of his own, convinced that the zombies can be trained to behave.

Caught between these two arms of authority, extreme opposites, yet equally removed from reality, our female scientist tries desperately to make both see sense but is fighting a losing battle. The troops have had enough, relying on the weed being grown up top by the helipad and bawdy humour to keep themselves sane, while the scientists know they don't have the resources to solve the problem.

There is no hope and no way out and when our lass finds that her boss has been experimenting on the fallen soldiers, and feeding them to his pet zombie Bub, she knows that their tiny subterranean society will explode any day. Despite the obvious hopelessness of it all, and in the true spirit of the hero of Night, she refuses to give up on humanity, she must fight to the end to do what she can, even if it means her life.

IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE FILM ENDS, SKIP THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS.
In the end the bunker erupts into chaos as the head scientists gruesome methods are discovered and our heroine, the pilot and radio man are thrown to the zombies. Somehow they manage to survive and she is finally forced to admit that the only choice is to abandon the last remnants of a once great society and flee to start again. They manage to reach the chopper and find an empty island.

Meanwhile Bub is set lose and, finding his master shot dead, takes a gun and seeks revenge. (Zombie with a gun, wicked!) One of the soldiers finally snaps and opens the gates to the compound allowing the hordes to flood in and there are cheers all round as the military commander meets an especially grisly end in the finest gutrip of any horror film, (only Dylan Moran's death in Shaun Of The Dead approaches this.)

OK, CARRY ON.
The leaders of society are lost in their own little worlds as everything goes to shit. If only the thinking man and the practical man could communicate they might stand a chance but they don't even seem to speak the same language. Political as well as social commentary this time in a dark portrait of humanity at its worst.

It's been well over a decade since Day and so I have the highest of hopes for Land Of the Dead. Given the events of recent years I think there's plenty for George to talk about and the special effects now available should make this the goriest living dead film yet, I can't wait!

I love the terror that truly great horror films can inspire, like the way my heart pounds when, in John Carpenter's seminal classic Halloween, the silent slasher Michael Myers stalks across the street toward a desperate Jamie Lee Curtis struggling to get into the house.

I was lucky enough to see the UK premier of 'Ring' at the cinema, (the proper one, not that US abomination,) and when Sadako twitches her way out of the TV at the end I was literally crawling up the back of my chair. Japan seems to be the only country producing quality horror at the moment and these are mostly adaptations of Koji Suzuki’s books, eg. Ring, Spiral and Dark Water.

Besides this though, it’s such a great vehicle for social commentary. The 60‘s zombie flick, ‘The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue’ is an out and out classic where the fascist police inspector is convinced that the horrendous murders and mutilations taking place are the work of ‘drug crazed maniacs’, long hairs and devil worshippers.

The confrontation between him and the hippy hero, George, encapsulates the friction between the counterculture and the establishment of the time, not to mention producing possibly the best comeback to any insult ever given, (as sampled by Electric Wizard at the start of ‘Wizard In Black’):

“You’re all the same the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes; drugs, sex, every kind of filth, and you hate the police, don’t you?”
“You make it easy.”

Well three days is probably enough on this subject, for now, but once I’ve seen Romero’s latest I can’t promise I won’t go off on one again. Thanks for indulging me and my weird passions, just be glad I wasn’t talking about weed, I’m not sure I’d ever stop.

Dawn Of The Dead

Romero’s second instalment came almost a decade later and is probably the most commonly seen of the three with another wonderful tagline: WHEN THERE’S NO MORE ROOM IN HELL, THE DEAD WILL WALK THE EARTH. Right from the start this is darker, the advances in special effects mean that the gore is more effective and, as the tagline suggests, humanity is less the innocent victim and more the deservedly punished.

In the cities the epidemic is spreading like wildfire, especially in the densely populated slums. We meet a couple, both working for a TV station. She’s a producer, he’s a helicopter pilot and the society is crumbling around them.

The tone of the film is set early on when our heroine insists that the details of rescue centres be taken off air as most are no longer active having been overrun by the zombie hordes. Her boss screams at her that without those details people will change channel and they’ll lose viewers.

At a time when the liberal views of the 60’s had faded but the liberal lifestyles were gorging themselves sick, Romero portrays prioritising of the material over life as the sin for which people are finally paying the price. Our couple hook up with a couple of SWAT guys for whom clearing a slum building of the undead is the final straw.

Stealing the station’s helicopter the four flee the city and end up holing up in a shopping mall. (The influence of this series can be seen when, en route to the mall, the four stop for fuel and the black SWAT guy is forced to kill some zombie kids. No-one else sees this but it clearly affects him deeply. Compare this to an almost identical scene in 28 Days Later.)

The four clear and seal the mall as their stopover becomes their new home. They are surrounded by what appears to be everything they could ever need and, over time, kit themselves out with the very best in clothes, decor, food and equipment. Between the mindless zombies who, ‘just remember they want to be in here,’ and the luxury the four furnish themselves with Romero creates a fantastic atmosphere of decadent stagnation.

IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE FILM ENDS, SKIP THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS.
Having lost the white SWAT guy to an unlucky bite, our three remaining heroes begin to recognise that no matter how nice the golden bars, they are in a prison. The emergency signals have long since stopped on the TV and radio and their lives stretch out ahead of them in terrible, comfortable monotony.

In the end their hand is forced when the mall is attacked by a predatory biker gang. Though the pilot is lost to the undead, let back in by the rampaging thugs, the now pregnant woman and black SWAT guy, who only just comes back from the brink of suicide, manage to escape in the chopper. They leave behind all their riches and comfort in order to be able be free and alive.

OK, CARRY ON.
This time it’s the folly of greed and a reminder of the only thing that really matters. A scathing critique of the rise of consumer culture and capitalism.

Something happened to me the other day, something that set my heart pounding and got me very excited. I was doing some (mostly window) shopping in the city with a mate when a bus pulled up at the lights beside us. Admittedly, this in itself was not an especially moving experience but when I happened to glance up at the huge poster covering the side of the bus all that changed.

On the 23rd September the mighty George A Romero's fourth living dead film, 'Land Of The Dead' comes to UK cinemas. This might not seem like much to most, especially considering Romero's recent work, but I've been waiting for this film my entire adult life. I knew it would come eventually, (though rumour had it the film would be called 'Twilight Of The Dead', for reasons that will become clear below,) and now here it is!

I've been a horror fan since I was far too young, when as a child I used to creep downstairs once my parents were asleep and watch the terrible, terrible horror films saved for the early hours of the morning. Of the broad and bloody horror church Romero's living dead series is without a doubt the best for one simple reason: there's fear, there's gore and there's genuine social commentary. Entertainment with something to say, it's what I'm all about

There're plenty of people who dismiss the whole horror genre out of hand and given a great deal of what's out there, especially contemporary stuff, I can't really blame them. But their loss is our gain so let me bring you up to speed with the living dead series so far:

Night Of The Living Dead

This black and white classic is my favourite of the series and one of my favourite films of all time. Made at the end of the 60's with the fantastic tag line: THEY WON'T STAY DEAD! the standard living dead format is quickly established: A small group of people come together by chance and struggle to stay alive while under siege by the ever growing legions of the undead. The zombies provide perpetual background tension while the human relationships under unimaginable stress are the feature.

For a start this film was made against the background of the civil rights struggle and having a black guy play the lead hero role was a bit of a coup in of itself. As the TV announcer explains, there is no real explanation for the nightmare into which the world has been plunged, one day the dead just start getting up and attacking the living.

This taps in beautifully to two aspects of the cold war fear of the time. Firstly the threat of sudden overwhelming attack with no warning and secondly the insidious creeping menace that turns your nearest and dearest into mindless robots bent on nothing but your own outright destruction.

The title of the film sums it all up as the tiny cast fight simply to survive the night. Desperate plans are made, and fail, but the indomitable human spirit just keeps on marching on. In the face of increasingly woeful odds our hero grits his teeth, just trying to hang in there. Unlike many contemporary films, you really feel for this guy. You want him to make it because you get the feeling that if he can’t, none of us will.

IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE FILM ENDS, SKIP THE NEXT THREE PARAGRAPHS.
The morning finally comes and only our hero has survived, through horrific bad luck or their own stupidity, everyone else has fallen. We see the military and armed militia sweeping the countryside, picking off the wandering dead at range as the authorities finally seem to be responding and taking back control.

The redneck rescue parties are having a ball and as the slow moving zombies suddenly appear hapless and helpless the whole thing is one big duck hunt. From inside his broken but just about barricaded refuge, our hero spies salvation approaching. He has survived the night of the living dead and we breath a collective sigh of relief.

Then, seeing movement within the house, one of the militia raises his rifle and shoots our man dead. That’s it. The closing montage of black and white still photographs is heartbreaking as we see the militia using meat hooks to drag away the corpses, including that of our hero, before piling and burning them.

OK, CARRY ON.
In the end the only thing scarier and more destructive than a rampant pandemic of flesh eating corpses is our own fear, ignorance and stupidity and that’s the central message in the whole series really. Chilling.

I have been inspired by a great blog and a comment on my own blog. Looking at the 'Church Of Hate' blog (find on my friends list or @ http://churchofhate.blog.co.uk ) I was rather taken with the idea of purposefully breaking the new anti terror laws on supposedly condoning or inciting terrorism in order to demonstrate both their amoral and impractical nature.

Reading graemephillipsuk's comment on yesterday's post, 'who are you', a specific way to do this came to mind. The sheer hypocrisy apparent in our definition of the word terrorism is just so frustrating and I found myself beset with the soon-to-be-illegal-image of a T-shirt baring the stark logo: WE ARE TERRORISTS TOO across a Union Jack.

One possible drawback to this specific thought is that it may alienate too many people in the mainstream and in fact increase support for the governments new measures, the wider idea, however, is still sound. What we need is a simple graphic, possibly a slogan but better an image, the publication and distribution of which would be utterly and clearly in breach of the new laws.

Something humorous would probably be most effective in avoiding the pitfall mentioned above and something very stark and simple could be posted on blogs, printed on flyers and T-shirts, (that iron-on T-shirt printer paper is a really cheap and easy way to make up T's,) and stencilled just about anywhere.

What I'm asking of you guys today is to have a think about it and let me know if you have any ideas. It has to be simple, funny and highly illegal under the new laws. At best it might make some small difference to the state of our nation, at worst it'll be a bit of laugh.

Some of you guys on my friends list are creative types, artists, writers, designers, and others are politically minded, but whoever you are, friend, blogger, visitor and wherever you're coming from, surely between us we can come up with something great. We have nothing to lose so come on, let's do this thing!

PS Please feel free to leave comments with your ideas or email me any graphics you come up with, (check my profile for my email address,) do remember though that whatever you come up with may end up being widely copied and distributed for free.

Reading a heavy but interesting book at the moment in which Jeremy Paxman explores the nature of 'the establishment' in the UK. It's well written and raises a wide variety of issues but one point in particular caught my attention.

One of the main problems with such an exploration is that while most of us have a feel for the idea of 'the establishment' it's actually incredibly difficult to pin down and definitively define. Consequently he begins in the first chapter by looking at a time past when things were not so complicated and Britain was basically run by a couple of hundred titled families.

He describes a time when the aristocracy, or the 'ruling class', simply were the establishment before going on to look at how this ceased to be the case. Our shared picture of the establishment today seems like a kind of hangover from this period, despite the industrial revolution and two world wars that changed things forever.

Anyway, within all this was an interesting idea that caught my mind's eye. Now it seems fairly intuitive that the rich ran state and local government, the church and the military simply because they were rich but this is not the full picture. The other side of this golden coin is that they were rich and powerful because they had such influence.

Right or wrong, the ruling class saw themselves as providing an essential service to the nation and what they did made them who they were far more than the great houses and art collections. This may seem unremarkable at first but, as you would expect, I have two more examples of this notion.

With, what I consider to be offensively snobbish and prejudiced, words like 'chav' becoming not only commonly used but also examined of late, the question, whatever happened to the working class? seems to be bouncing around at the moment.

How did we get from tight knit communities and noble hard working people to no go inner city areas of deprivation and violence? Well let's pretend for a moment that this isn't a sickeningly romanticised vision of history and focus on the grain of truth it contains.

The answer to the question above seems perfectly obvious to me, the working class died when we took away the work. The working classes were not simply those at the bottom of the pile who did the shit jobs no-one else wanted. They were people who performed skilled and physically demanding tasks that drove the primary industry on which the rest of the nation depended.

I couldn't graft down a coal mine or in a steel mill, my nice middle class life has left me far to soft and pink for that, but if someone hadn't we wouldn't have got to where we are today. For this reason those workers could take pride in what they did and because these industries required large numbers of people to live and work in close proximity strong communities were almost impossible to avoid.

Again it was what these people actually did day to day that defined them and their lives. The easiest way to get a detailed understanding the death of this way of life is probably to look at Thatcher vs the miners but that's a whole issue in of itself.

The third and final example is a simple phrase I've quoted before, my father's voice ringing in my ears: "A writer is someone who writes." Basically, you can ponce about in scruffy clothes, go to the hippest parties and hang out with the weirdest peeps, but if you're not creating art you're not an artist.

Maybe this is all very interesting, maybe it’s not but if you’ll indulge a final tangent I’ll explain a more pressing relevance to these abstract musings. From the description I heard on BBCN24 today various things I have posted on this blog over the past few months will soon be worthy of several years in prison, for example:

I’ve said in the past that while I certainly didn’t think the US deserved 11/09/01, they did ask for it. This could arguably be construed as condoning, or basically making any comment other than condemnation of, a past terrorist act and could technically earn me five years in prison.

I’ve also said in the past that if you push people down far enough and remove any kind of effective peaceful system from them then violent action is all that can be expected, even though it can never be condoned. Now this could be taken as, either intentionally or negligently, inspiring people to perform terrorist actions or supplying them with some kind of justification, punishable with up to seven years in prison.

The ramblings above have tried to show that we are what we do and so I guess that the creation and publication of such dangerous sentences, coupled with over a decade of cannabis possession, make me an out and out criminal. To be honest I’m ok with that, I can defend my lifestyle and views and would rather die an honest law breaker than a law abiding hypocrite.

This blog isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be, all about me however and so the wider effects of the various changes currently being wrought to the UK character via this new legislation must be considered. It’s very easy for us to convince ourselves that such things are necessary to defend some incorporeal vision of Britannia, that while our practices might change, the face of mother England will always shine as beautiful as ever.

The thing is that there is no floating vision. The past has gone and words are just useful noises, it is the actions we take day by day that define who and what we are. If we adopt legal measures befitting a fascist state we will not be a free and wonderful country with some dodgy laws, we will be a fascist state.

As part of my Duke of Edinburgh Award at school I did a first aid course with a woman from the St. John's Ambulance Service. We were taught vital techniques that, in an emergency, could potentially save someone's life. Unfortunately for anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in such an emergency in my presence I can only remember one thing about the whole event and it has nothing to do with CPR.

At the start of the course the woman took our names and this was certainly nothing particularly exciting or memorable, until she got to a guy called Huw. For whatever reasons his parents had chosen the Welsh spelling of the name, a decision they couldn't have expected to cause him any problems in life. She asked his name and he told her, mentioning the less common spelling.

There ensued one of the most ludicrous arguments I have ever heard wherein this clipboard wielding lifesaver insisted that she knew how to spell my schoolmate's name better than he did. Quite rightly Huw got pretty pissed off with this.

What makes such behaviour so annoying, besides the obvious frustration, is that it demonstrates an utterly arrogant lack of respect on the part of the ludicrous insister. This weeks Swine could have earned his title for any number of reasons but it is this particularly obnoxious habit that has put him in here this week. Let's consider the evidence:

left = right

The issue was the 'memoranda of agreement' between the UK government and various other nations intended to ensure that any 'potential terrorists' deported to these countries would not be tortured. Critics of such a system, including several high court judges besides us woolly lefties, said that they didn't feel that such agreements were 'worth the paper they were written on.'

In response to such criticism, this week's Swine very cleverly tried to make liberal concern for human rights appear as 'neo-colonialism' and convince us that left was in fact right so as to paint himself as the moral crusader.

Now suggesting that it is somehow racist not to trust the countries in question is clearly abject nonsense as the concerns over the behaviour of these states come from their past record not any cultural stereotype. A further flaw in the tactic of the Swine can be nicely demonstrated by the procedures i go through in order to receive my dole.

In order to receive benefits I can't just promise that, 'yes I will look for work, honest,' but, quite rightly, have to provide regular proof that I am doing just that. If I cannot show that I am sticking to my 'jobseeker's agreement' then I will lose my benefits. So our Swine is giving out cash he insists that there is a system of checks and punishments. When it comes to human lives however, what amounts to a promise scribbled on the back of a beer mat is sufficient.

black = white

Defending the use of racial profiling in security precautions this week's Swine has insisted that it would contribute to the practices, not dominate them thereby maintaining the equality and freedom enjoyed by all in our fair land. We're all equal, regardless of colour, except for those who look a bit dodgy.

If I were a terrorist mastermind I'd have started trying to recruit white women the moment I heard this. To be honest though, putting a young Asian guy in an expensive suit would probably be enough to evade these cutting edge profiling techniques because, after all, terrorists are never rich people are they?

down = up

This Swine has insisted that the introduction of various new powers, mainly powers for himself to use without any form of legal restraint as it happens, will raise our level of safety and so raise our quality of life. The concerns raised by a wide variety of people that such measures may well actually lower our level of safety are simply ignored outright.

Interestingly, many of the people making detailed and sensible arguments warning against the negative side effects of our Swine's new superpowers, are the same people who's predictions about our ill conceived war against the people of Iraq have come horribly, horribly true.

In case there's anyone left in any doubt let's finally lower the crown of bacon onto the piggy head. This week's Swine Of The Week is none other than Santa's retarded cousin, our Right Honourable Home Secretary. For assuming that the British public are thick enough to believe you that left is right, black is white and down is up, Charles Clarke take your place on the list.

To hear Charles's own side of the story check out his work's website: www.homeoffice.gov.uk or his very own personal blog: http://churchofhate.blog.co.uk

The pot is off! My hand's still quite sore and is now apparently clothed in the skin of a 90 year old man but I can type freely once more and that's what's important. Before I jump right into one of the ideas that has been burning a hole in my mental pocket I'd just like to thank everyone for their kind words. Not being able to write, coupled with the general annoyance of being effectively one handed, really got me down and your comments cheered me up and meant a lot, so thanks guys.

I noticed that among the comments of my regular friends were a couple from some guy calling himself GeordieKeith. Now given that this guy is an utter reprobate I should probably deny all knowledge of him but unfortunately he's one of my best and soundest mates.

The project he mentions is a computing masters he's been working on recently, the object of which, as I understand it, is to produce a visual representation of four spatial dimensions. I've been meaning to write a post about this since I started blogging, (if only to make some use of that damn piece of paper gathering dust on the wall in the far corner of my office,) but before you all flee in abject horror let me explain why.

GK and I have spent many a night over the past few years grappling with this problem over weed and wine and found something quite compelling about the challenge: it's impossible. The human mind is apparently simply unable to visualise this idea. However we tried to approach it we always came up against the same invisible wall and I found that I loved the sensation of pushing against what seems to be an actual limit to my imagination.

I'll describe just a couple of the ways we tried to picture it so that, if you're interested, you can do the same. Let's start with the basics. We can all handle two dimensions, flat pictures on a flat page for example, where there is just up/down and left/right, no problems. Three dimensions are, if anything, easier to deal with as this is how we perceive the world about us our entire lives, objects have width, height and depth.

The first problem with trying to imagine a fourth dimension in space is that, instinctively, your mind just says: there isn't one. Well imagine for a moment a race of 2D creatures, they're totally flat, their whole world consists of left and right, forward and backward.

The concept of height would be utterly meaningless to these weird little guys. They would never look up out of their pancake world because, for them, such a direction would be inconceivable, it just wouldn't exist. We know, however, that there is such a thing as height and that the rest of the world carries on in all its 3D glory despite the fact that these guys can't see it.

In exactly the same way if there were a fourth spatial dimension we would never see it simply because it would never occur to us to look in the right direction. So ok, there could be a fourth dimension, (or a million of them, but let's not get carried away,) but how can we even begin to try and imagine the fundamentally unimaginable?

Well the method is very simple and we've already used it in the last three paragraphs. Look at something 2D and look at its 3D equivalent then apply the same relationship this time starting with 3D. Confused? Don't be, it's easy, honest.

Example 1

Think of a circle drawn on a piece of paper. (I'm only using circles and spheres because they are the simplest shapes, the actual shape isn't important.) The line is unbroken and divides the paper into two definite areas, inside the circle and outside the circle.

Now consider a spherical balloon. The surface area of the balloon is unbroken and divides space into two definite volumes, inside the balloon and outside the balloon. The next stage is to try and picture a hypersphere. Yes it all sounds very Star Trek but forget that, it's just a stupid name for the next thing on the ladder.

From looking at the first two examples we know that a hypersphere must be an unbroken volume, ie. a solid object, and that it must divide four dimensional space into two definite bits, inside the hypershpere and outside the hypershpere.

Now If you really try to dig this you should find that your brain is trying to imagine something that is hollow and solid at the same time. When you get the feeling that there just isn't quite enough room in your head for this object then congratulations, you have arrived, this is the edge of your imagination. If you try hard enough and long enough it's probably the edge of your sanity too!

Example 2

Phrases like, the direct visual expression of a three dimensional object in a two dimensional format are the kind of bullshit that some people like to spout in order to make themselves appear superior and compensate for something lacking elsewhere. The fact is that we've all dealt with just such a thing as this as small children.

Imagine a piece of card with a shape drawn on it. You cut out the shape, fold it along the marked lines and bingo, you have a hat, or a puppy or anything else that never quite stops looking like just a piece of folded card. Anyway, some people would call the initial flat plan a 'net' for reasons that escape me.

One possible, nicely symmetrical and vaguely religious looking net for a simple cube is as follows:

Fairly obviously the square in the middle of the cross forms the base of the cube; the four squares around it fold upwards to make the sides and the base of the cross folds over again to become the lid. So this is our 2D to 3D, what about the next step.

Well the 'net' for a 'hypercube' is known as a 'tesseract'' and is an arrangement of eight cubes thus:

I actually made one of these out of paper and keep it here on my desk so that every so often I can bend my mind a little. Now when the cube is made out of the flat plan above every side of every square ends up touching one side of another square. Also, the squares are not deformed in any way, just moved.

It follows then, that in order for this thing here to be transformed into a grandly titled ‘hypercube’, every face of every cube must end up touching one face of another cube and the cubes must keep their shape. Once more if you can ignore the instinct to give up and call it impossible you will find yourself pushing against the glass ceiling of your mind.

Is this all just a waste of time? Well, probably, as I said it is impossible. My good and Geordie friend has endeavoured to produce a computerised representation of a 4D object but that’s about as close as we can get with our limited little minds. The thing is that things will not necessarily always be this way.

Einstein’s brain featured a weird and subtle mutation meaning that the past of his brain that dealt with abstract mathematical thought was larger than average. This is surely a large part of how he was able to invent quantum physics.

Maybe one day a kid will be born with a slightly misshapen brain that allows them to picture what we cannot here and who knows what the potential uses of that may be. Limits and boundaries, no matter how indestructible and unassailable they appear, exist only to be overcome.

There are six billion of us floating about on this little rock and any one of us could have the innate ability to solve a problem like this, perhaps cure cancer, end war or even get one of my books published. Of course in order for any of this to happen that one special person would have to be born in one of the tiny pockets of fat, stable society that dot the world, otherwise we are fucked.

PS. Don’t worry, I’ve got a couple of more usual posts in mind for the next few days considering things like the class system and Charles Clarke, y’know him, Santa’s retarded cousin.

PPS. ‘Flatland’ by Edwin A Abbott explains the concepts I’ve clumsily tried to get across above in a much more entertaining and effective manner. Although it was written in 1884 it is still as relevant as it gets and well worth the RRP of £1.25 for the Dover Thrift Edition.

Last Friday was not a great day for me. A