So, what do people think of the new look?

Thought I'd finally get to grips with the new design features on offer. Not sure I'm totally happy with it yet, still a few things to iron our. I'm just tinkering at the office during my lunch breaks at the moment since my home dial up connection is utter shashpaps.

Speaking of work I've had the most stressful day today. So many things to do, and almost all them urgent and vital. Managed to get out of there relatively early but once I'd got home and finished off half a joint from last night I was spark out on the sofa.

Woke up a few hours ago but still don't really feel awake. Anyway I woke up with a new angle on an old idea and couldn't be arsed to carry it all the way upstairs to bed, so I'll dump it here with you guys instead if that's ok.

The last time MSM and I, and a few others, were adding to our long standing discussion about the nature of consciousness etc, I wrote about the human brain. I outlined how I felt the common feeling of distinction between the physical and non-physical self could actually be our way of perceiving the distinction between our brain stem and frontal lobes.

The brain stem, I suggested, was what we perceived as our physical selves. It makes our hearts beat and lungs breath, it also houses our 'instinctive' knee-jerk reactions. Now at the time I was looking at this in terms of the relationship between different parts of the brain. Tonight however I was inspired to think about this part of the brain in isolation.

In one of the very first issues of Adbusters I ever read there was a phrase I have never been able to fully forget. I can't remember the context, or even the exact wording, but the concept is still clear: 'you find yourself crying at scripted TV shows and adverts but unable to feel anything when considering your own real life,' The mindset this describes felt uncomfortably familiar to me at the time of reading.

Anyway, I was flicking in and out of Big Brother earlier and found myself watching the contestants receiving letters from home. As the letters were read out it became apparent that one of the contestants' mothers has cancer, but this was just the most powerful of a barrage of tear jerking moments.

Now I think, to be fair, there a far worse examples of this, I just happened to see Big Brother tonight. Anyway I found myself getting a bit choked up but also found that I felt uncomfortable about it. I realised that I wasn't really engaging with the show at all on any conscious level, but that this emotion was being evoked directly from my subconscious.

I felt ambushed by my own emotions and vaguely annoyed that the TV seemed to have a direct line to the back of my brain. They are real people I suppose, their emotion was genuine and unscripted so it could, i admit, just be a case of human compassion. When I saw a Lebanese guy burying his wife and all his kids on the news the other day however, it didn't feel like this.

So this thought was bubbling away somewhere when I noticed that 'Lost In Translation' was on Film Four. I'd wanted to see it since it came out but i heard a lot of conflicting views on it and never seemed to get round to it. In short, (because I want to go bed,) I have to say I really liked it. It was almost a pretentious piece of crap but two fantastic lead performances gave it the innocence to be great.

I found it to be a genuine emotional journey. Somehow the emotions, positive or negative, felt more honest than the drama of BB. I felt more comfortable being moved by more the complex feelings portrayed in the film.

Now I've written this I'm actually unsure as to which of these two experiences demonstrates the Adbusters quote and which denies it. I thought I had it sussed before I started writing this, but looking at it now both experiences seem to work both ways.

Oh well, the idea is to explore the different paths to the back of the back of the brain. There's the direct approach, straight to heart without consulting the head, or taking a considered stroll through the higher functions to finally settle into experience.

In both cases I made a conscious decision to expose myself to the media that evoked these reactions and was aware at the time of what was happening. Thinking about these two however I, as always, came upon a third part to the puzzle.

I had another experience earlier today that, in retrospect, I now recognise as being relevant. In the course of busting my ass at work today I was on the phone to a colleague trying to sort our various problems that no-one else in the council would touch, (welcome to my working world.)

Eventually we managed to sort things out and I hang up only to receive a bollocking for being on the phone too long from our department manager. I was informed afterwards that he was just in a mard over various other problems and I happened to be in his way when he blew, at the time however I didn't really see it like that.

At the time it felt like I was being accused of slacking off when I was actually grafting. A second later I found myself on my feet telling him, albeit in a politer tone, to bite me. Now this particular route to the back of my head, to anger and confrontation, definitely passed through the higher functions but it was not the ponderous amble described above.

This was more like rational thinking being overwhelmed by point blank ignorance and simply defaulting back to basics. Interesting no? Well don't worry, we can tie these ideas back into the real world to give them some more earthy credentials.

Take your traditional left and right wings of politics. It could be argued that the reactionary right demonstrate use of the first route described. Straight to passionate action without wasting cognitive time. What's left, is the left: Careful consideration leading to considered outrage at first but then frustration at the inability to communicate with the right leading to the defaulting to passionate action.

Just idle thoughts from a tired mind but. Looking at yet more highly emotionally charged and horrific shit kicking off in the world however maybe some more time spent thinking about how people are driven to the actions they take wouldn't be such a bad thing.

So I've had a fantastic idea and this is it:

Cancer in the UK, it really, really sucks. Several people die every day and many more suffer greatly from it. We don't really understand it and most of us spend at lest some time being scared of it, a senseless and evil killer that can strike out of the blue, any second, any day.

Well this is how I propose to solve this problem and end the death, fear and suffering of so many of my countrymen, it's a bit out there but stay with me. Basically, every few days we get a hundred or so healthy, ordinary, non-British people, over a third of them children, and slaughter them, painfully.

By sacrificing these foreign kids and their foreign families to abrupt, agonising and terror filled death we will appease the forces that inflict cancer upon us. The mass graves their friends will have to dig for them will spare us the dignified individual burials we have had to endure for so long.

So what do we think?

Oh no, wait, that's not even bullshit is it, it's genocidal lunacy.

In fact there are three very good reasons why this is patently nonsensical. Firstly, I'd be prepared to bet that most UK cancer sufferers would choose to keep their tumours rather than see scores of children butchered.

Secondly, there would surely be a broad consensus in our society that the price is simply to high and that, more significantly, there must be another, less costly, way. Thirdly, and most importantly I feel, HOW THE FUCK IS KILLING LOADS OF INNOCENT FOREIGN PEOPLE GOING TO SAVE A FEW INNOCENT BRITISH PEOPLE?

Now am I just wasting your time here? Suggesting a nonsense idea and then disproving it at length? Well to be honest guys, I really wish I was. Unfortunately, watching various flavours TV news yesterday, two sickening images stuck in my mind.

The first was most dreadful of sights that which should NEVER come to be anywhere or anywhen: the digging and filling of mass graves in Lebanon. To hear or see of such a thing chokes me up and gets me really pissed off.

The second, and this was what really turned my stomach, was the procession of sub human scum(1) in suits declaring that various vague political plans took priority over an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and that, effectively, mass graves were currently acceptable.

What the hell is going on?

Mass graves, forced migrations of peoples, putting political ideals before human life, does none of this sound familiar? Not even to Israel? Dress it up how you like, wrap yourself in the safety of powerful sounding words, what we are witnessing on our TVs are crimes against humanity. The oldest and dirtiest parts of human culture being played out afresh just as if we never stopped smashing each other's heads in with rocks.

I don't have much time for absolutes, I don't trust them and they tend to cause a lot of problems. That said however, I can't get away from the fact that there are some that, to me, actually do feel absolute. I'll work on it and define some criteria but for now forgive my dogmatism when I say:

THE KILLING OF INNOCENT LEBANESE AND ISRAELI CITIZENS IS POINT BLANK WRONG AND THE IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF THIS VIOLENCE TAKES PRIORITY OVER ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING ELSE.

As far as I can see, and please do correct me if you feel you can, any argument to the contrary is equivalent of putting a gun to child's temple and pulling the trigger. Is it really so wild and unreasonable an idea to expect that no-one should EVER have to dig a mass grave again? Well it would seem that, according to our esteemed and honoured world leaders, yes, it is.

footnotes

(1) this is not a phrase I'm comfortable using but I'm really angry about this, in my eyes humanity is a single creature with a fundamental drive of self preservation, therefore to actively encourage mass death and suffering is sub human; these suits are people, I must admit in calmer moments, just as worthy of love and respect as the rest of us, they just don't act like it,

It was a Sunday just like any other so my mate and I were making our way down into the city to do our weekly food shopping. We were chatting away about the usual, catching up on personal events of the past week and discussing what was in the news.

Of course there's only one thing in the news at the moment and that's the almighty shitstorm brewing in the Middle East. Now at one point I was outlining to my good friend some multifaceted criticism of, what I consider to be, the quite obscene behaviour of the Israeli government.

Round about this stage in the conversation a young guy overtook us on the pavement before abruptly stopping and wheeling round to face us. I suddenly found myself stood in the sunny streets of Leeds being vigorously harangued by this guy.

His wide and angry eyes blazed at me while he shouted about how the Israelis had been in Israel over six thousand years ago and that that lands was theirs and they had every right to defend themselves etc etc. Eventually he paused to draw breath at which point I, very calmly I thought, offered my response.

"That's fine mate," I said, (or something similar,) "I just think it'd be a good idea for everyone to stop killing one another." With real venom still in his eyes, the guy just scoffed and stormed away. Now at the time I was caught completely off guard and the whole thing happened so quickly that it didn't really sink in until later, at which point I was really quite annoyed.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for talking to strangers, (among consenting adults anyway,) and I think there should be a lot more of it. I'm always happy to enter into a conversation, or even a debate with anyone and one of the things I already miss dearly about my beloved Elephant Books are the random conversations with random people.

In retrospect there were three things that really got on my tits about that guy however. I also feel that these three things are symptomatic of the whole Middle East crisis and the various other stages across the globe on which the exact same problems are being played out day after day.

Firstly, the guy made sweeping assumptions regarding my position on the matter, clearly deciding that I was an anti-Jewish(1) terrorist sympathiser. The argument I was actually making was that Israel's response to the situation was counter productive for all involved and morally wrong.

The argument he was challenging with his dogmatic outburst was that Israel had no right to exist. Had he stuck around long enough I would have asked him just who he thought he was arguing with given that I didn't particularly disagree with anything he was saying.

Now I've written much in the past about our horrifically dangerous tendency towards polarisation and this is a case in point. As far as a lot of people are concerned you're either a pro-Zionist, pro-US, Arab hating fascist or pro-terror, pro-Iran, Jew hating communist.

Clearly, trying to split the world into two neat halves of opinion is utter nonsense. As far as I'm concerned Judaism and Islam are forms of mental illness just like all other religions and, given that I don't believe in skin colour or race, all I'm left with from my perspective are humans killing humans. This, in my book, is always wrong and never useful.

In the interests of honesty and balance however, I must concede my conformity to one particular stereotype. I make it my business not to hate anyone and while there are plenty of practical and philosophical justifications for such a practice I'll be honest and admit that it's sheer laziness.

Hatred takes a huge amount of effort to sustain and I am, in the words of self styled cock-rock god Dave Wyndorf, a "lame, dope smoking, slacking little sucker." Can't be bothered with it, especially as it really isn't worth the effort.

Secondly, I wasn't particularly impressed with the point the guy tried to make. For a start it sounded suspiciously like he was simply repeating things he had heard on TV. Also, at no point did I get the impression that he could qualify or explain in detail anything he was saying, these were words being used as a club rather than to share ideas.

The idea that Israeli's have a claim to a particular piece of land because their ancestors 'owned' it thousands of years ago has also always struck me as a very weak argument. Surely for this to be valid it has to applicable to other situations as well, after all there's is nothing special or different about those people or that bit of land.

So should we be giving most of Europe to Italy? The Roman Empire 'owned' most of it a few thousand years ago after all. Or is it just a case of who was there first? In a way I that is the idea, because if it is it's even less feasible. The people that were anywhere first are dead and I'm afraid there's just been too much travelling and too much shagging in the intervening time for anyone to claim that they are the same.

Technology can be a wonderful thing and the advances we've made in communications technology can certainly have society changing benefits for us all. These same advances however have also made it easier for dogmatic propaganda to not only reach, but through context convince, huge numbers of people.

Consequently we find ourselves in the situation where people mistake parroting impressive sounding words for voicing a considered opinion. This has a tendency to deadlock debates and stall progress and so is possibly worse than having no opinion at all.

Finally, and by far the most annoying thing about this whole incident, the guy was just not interested in actually listening to anything I had to say. As far as he was concerned he knew the 'truth', so what was the point of listening? There was nothing else to know.

Now I make pretty firm statements of belief on here all the time. Once I arrive at an opinion I'll voice it, explain it and defend it to the best of my ability. I accepted a long time ago however that we never, ever reach final viewpoints on anything. I am always willing to be corrected and, most importantly, to learn.

As outlined in the 'quantising experience' part of my last post, we're all subject to change all the time. A single experience, observation, line in a book or song can turn our thinking upside down in an instant at any time.

What really got on my tits was how practically useless this guys attitude was. Surely the one thing everyone(2) can agree on is that the current situation is not the best possible and that therefore change is desirable. Yet how is anything ever going to change without discussion, without debate?

So there you have it, the guy didn't know who he was talking to, what he was talking about and wasn't interested in finding out. Those were the words on the street and they don't sound any better in retrospect than they did on the day.

Hang on tight guys, this shit is going to get worse before it gets better.

footnotes

(1) I passionately dislike the phrase anti-semitic as it is invariably used inaccurately. As I understand it a Semite is someone who comes, or is descended from someone who comes, from a certain area of the Middle East. These people, as a Jordanian friend of mine explained to me, are not exclusively Jewish.

(2) everyone except those making huge financial profits from such conflicts, such as arms manufacturers, and those politicians whose own agendas are well served by continued carnage and suffering,

Well, it's been a while, again.

Had both the week before last of work and the intention to put the time to good literary use. As it turned out I spent the first half of the week doing absolutely nothing, just lolling in a grumpy funk, (now there's musical genre just waiting to be explored!) Then on the Wednesday some mates, including our very own GeordieKeith, came over to stay.

Significant quantities of dope, booze (them not me,) pills, computer games and frisbies, without any pesky distractions like work or sleep, meant that I had a much better end to my holiday. Thanks to all involved, let's do it again soon

Anyway none of that left much time for writing and then it was back to work. A bleary eyed Monday morning email check brought serious but positive news. Turns out some work I submitted months ago is going to be published in a collection, AND I'M GETTING PAID FOR IT!, while my own publishers had issued a kind of final demand for the collection of shorts I'm supposed to be writing for them.

So this week, besides catching up on my duties as both Admin Officer and Assistant Information Officer at work during the day, I've been up nights writing. Got in on Thursday and went for a nap about 6pm, didn't wake up until 7am Friday. As you may expect I'm pretty glad it's the weekend.

Anyway, that was supposed to be an explanation not a list of excuses, next time I'll just get a note from my mum shall I? While I may not have been physically attending to my blog recently I've certainly been thinking about it, and about you guys too. Turns out no matter how much I abuse my body, my head just will not switch off. This being the case I've a whole load of crap built up since the last time I wrote on here so here we go:

different types of food

Talking to one of the temps at work the other day I mentioned that my ipod is often the only thing that can get me to work in a morning. Now this is partly by way of distraction, just closing my eyes and losing myself in the tunes, not thinking about the day's work ahead.

There's more to it than this however. A distinct lack of food and sleep over the last couple of weeks has left me in a bit of a state to be honest, floating in a kind of grey where engagement with anything real just seems like too much effort.

Despite this however, on the bus yesterday I was staring out of the window listening to Nebula's 'Atomic Ritual' when a particular line in a particular song actually gave me goosebumps, I mean every hair on my bare and sunbathed arms was up on end.

No matter ho far removed I find myself , the right books and music have always been able to cut straight through all the crap and reach me. I've thought and written a great deal about the physical and the non physical and this is about as close I get to the idea of the 'soul' so eloquently argued for by my good friend MSM in past months. (1)

Sitting there on the bus, looking at the bumps on my arms and feeling the shivers down my spine, I remembered something I hadn't thought of for years: a brief conversation with a brief uni housemate of mine.

We were in the kitchen and I believe I was making myself a brown sauce sandwich for tea, classic cuisine of the skint. Apparently overcome by a fit of maternal instinct, she was pressing me as to why I'd spent the last of my money on a CD when my cupboards were bare. Now for all my great love of words I have to admit that, for the most part, they approximate the ideas they convey. Every so often however, and almost always without conscious design, they work just right. I don't know where it came from but, like I told her, there are different types of food.

Watched a film the other night though I can't remember the title so can someone help me out here please. It was, overall, a pretty lame dystopian vision saved only by the usual magnificent performance by Christian Bale. A future where the population are drugged to remove any emotion in order to live in orderly peace without art or expression. Bale is the man on the inside who wakes up etc etc.

The punchline of the piece hinged around a conversation he has with Sean Bean at the start. Bean is a colleague who has become a sense offender, ie. stopped taking his meds and started feeling, secretly reading books.

Bale reels off the rhetoric about art and emotion having too high a price to society and asks bean if he is really prepared to pay that price. "I would pay it gladly," Bean says as Bale executes him. Then of course at the end Bale is about to kill the Big Brother figure, (Father I think he's called, seriously it was about the least original thing I've ever seen!) and they have the same conversation. Very good.

When I was at uni I had the feeling that anything went as it was only for a limited period. The future was the murky place where maybe I'd grow up and take things a bit more seriously. Turns out I'm still here though, still just paying lip service to the physical and only really living in my head.

I'm sure there'll be a price to pay but to be honest, and not to give too much credit to a cack film by quoting it, I'd pay it gladly.

technical truth

As John Stewart pointed out on the consistently entertaining Daily Show last night, holy shit it's world war three! After a few years of seemingly moving towards peace, even if just by a little, the Middle East is erupting into a shitstorm that has the potential to go all the way.

Reading the Guardian online at work yesterday I read a piece by some guy called Jonathan Spyer, who I believe works for some Israeli thinktank or other. He struck me as a classic fascist, lots of absolutes and easy answers, everything was simple and all blame easily allocated to evil people.

I read with waning interest, the guy's opinion had to be respected but he just sounded like a million other dogmatic nutters and it's hard to give them your full attention when you've heard it all before. Whose mind did he think he would change with that rant? As far as I could see, his work served no purpose.

Overall I wasn't really moved in any way by piece, other than been a bit annoyed that I'd wasted some of my lunch break reading it. Then I came across something that really pissed me off.

Just another beat on his, 'these pesky Arabs don't want peace' drum, he described how the Lebanese government had rejected a UN resolution, clearly thereby proving that they deserved everything they got from Israel.

What got right up my nose about this was the way he presented it. He reported that the Lebanese government had rejected UN resolution 1559 which stated that, and gave a two line description and quote. Now I'll hold my handsup and admit that I've never read a UN resolution, but I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that they're generally longer than a couple of lines.

I'm sure it is a fact that the Lebanese did reject that resolution, but this is not what Spyer was really saying. He presented the situation to suggest that the Lebanese had rejected, what he presented as, the ideas behind the resolution. Quite obviously however, the Lebanese may have fully embraced the idea but rejected the resolution because of some specific condition or clause.

I don't know if that's the case or not, but that doesn't really matter. Spyer was attempting to mislead his audience by at once telling a technical truth and an effective lie. We're surrounded by this kind of thing all day everyday, it's called advertising.

The technical truth is that their product does this or that, but the effective lie is the unspoken suggestion that buying the product will make you happy, safe, popular, etc. As I've stated in the past I consider this to be, in the consistently outstanding words of Zack de la Rocha, "mass mind rape".

At least it is to be expected in advertising however, at the end of the day we all know they're trying to sell us things and if we forget then more fool us. What got me angry yesterday was finding the exact same practice masquerading as professional journalism. It's all around us peeps, it's everywhere, and our only defence is to recognise it for what it is.

Beware the technical truth.

quantising reality (wutio Guns n Roses)

Had a thought some time ago about the video camera, but first let's consider a number line:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The question is, what lies between these numbers?

More numbers. More accurately in fact, an infinite number of numbers as there is no limit to how many decimal places you can go to.

The numbers listed above are arbitrary landmarks of convenience. There's no actual difference between that number line and this one:

1.37 2.37 3.37 4.37 5.37 6.37 7.37 8.37 9.37

We use the first as it is easiest, and why not, it seems to work pretty well doesn't it? There is a technical limitation to these number lines however, let's consider a couple of places along these lines:

1.370002

and

1.370003

We cannot distinguish between these two places using the number lines above. According to our lines these numbers are in fact the same. What we've done with these number lines is to quantise that infinite mess of numbers, ie. break down into a standard unit so that we can use.

So, the video camera.

What occurred to me was that a video camera basically quantises reality(2). If we think of reality as an, effectively, infinite flow of information all about us, a video camera breaks it down into twenty-five uniform pieces per second.

Of course there's an infinite amount of info lost in this process, ie. everything that happens in between those twenty-five frames per second. This is ok though as it's close enough to fool our brains, ie. it does the job.

There you go, so what?

Well it got me thinking. I had a stoned revelation(3) the other day wherein I finally got a proper grip on an idea I'd had for a while about life as a string moments, just once instance after another.

So many times I've come across a statistic or a phrase or a few bars of music that have completely changed the way I see the world. Each one of these moments, each of these 'nows', has the potential to rewrite everything we know. In fact I'd been leaning towards believing that each of them does change us, to just varying degrees.

The obvious question then, is to compare the human body to the video camera. Could it be that this perceived string if instances, this perpetual reinvention of self, actually results from our physical sense quantising reality in the same way as the camera?

Well into our three day bender, and not long after we'd dropped some pills, I broached the subject with GeordieKeith and my other visiting friend. The followed some lengthy speculation about the mechanics of human perception but we were ultimately stumped by a lack of technical knowledge about EXACTLY how our eyes and ears function.

The key area, it seemed to me, was, for example, the transition of information from the eye to the optic nerve. Are our eyes sending a constant flow of data to our brains, ie. a system fundamentally different from the number lines above; or discrete packets of info to the brain, ie. quantisation.

As I say, we were frustratingly limited by our ignorance of biology so I'd certainly appreciate any knowledge anyone has to share on this subject. It's a work in progress and no doubt I'll encounter another life changing moment in the future that'll tie in with it and allow me to progress further. It's so weird to be able to use a system without being able to understand how it works.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (wutio Electric Wizard)

I remember seeing this film reviewed on BBCN24 and thinking that I'd be interested to see it. Of course I promptly forgot all about it and would have missed it were it not for a glowing recommendation from a work colleague. (Thanks again for that by the way, if you've found your way on here )

So I went to see it the other night and was deeply moved. I could, as always having witnessed a genuinely great piece of cinema, wax lyrical for pages and pages about the experience. This post is already taking on truly monstrous proportions however so I'll be brief.

I'll no doubt be referring back to this film when I finally get my anti-democracy post together but for now I'll focus on the film itself. Set in Ireland in the early twentieth century it follows portrays the British occupation and the emergence of the IRA.

For a start it is clearly obvious that Ken Loach is a director of vast experience and talent. This was made obvious to me by the fact that he managed to walk the line between presented beautifully framed shots without that beauty detracting from the what was actually happening. The very best direction is usually that which you don't notice and it comes from the confidence to be subtle.

Another wonderful element to this film are the stumbles. There are several verbal and least one physical stumble which have an truly unscripted air. Far from making the piece seem unprofessional these instances lend a vast weight of realism to the film, making the events that take place feel even heavier to witness.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough and though I wouldn't go as far as my colleague and say it was one of my favourite films of all time, it is certainly a truly excellent piece of cinema. For me the most heartbreaking thing about the situation presented was the sickening familiarity.

A brutal occupying force with fear, ignorance and hatred on both sides driving the violence to ever deeper realms of brutality; the seemingly insurmountable sectarian divides and the intolerable yet relentless suffering of innocents throughout.

Throughout history and across the globe this situation occurs time and time again. An early scene in the film sees British troops lining young Irish men up against a wall and demanding their names. When one refuses to speak in English they are all forced to strip and he is taken away and beaten to death.

Change the scenery, the accents and the uniforms and we could be in Iraq, Chechyna, Palestine and any other number of tragedy soaked man made hells. I believe Ken Loach came under fire in the right wing press for making this film, partly for portraying the British army in a bad light and partly for dredging up the past.

In Loach's defence I have to say that firstly, I'm unfortunately pretty sure that there've been people wearing the uniform of our country doing unspeakably awful things to foreigners for a very long time. Secondly, both vicious brutality and brave compassion appear on both sides of the conflict in the film.

In response to the criticism of dragging up the past, the past clearly needs to be dragged up, again and again and again, until we learn the fucking lessons it teaches us! The mistakes and the crimes and the suffering shown in Loach's film are still tearing us apart today and so, despite being set over half a century in the past, this is an incredibly relevant film.

What more can I say? Lots probably, but I won't. The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an amazing film, watch it.

babykillers?

Finally, I promise, I wanted to canvass opinion on another debate I had with my mates during my holiday. One of my friends, who shall remain nameless, (unless he wants to name himself?) works for BAE Systems, (they used to be called British Aerospace,) and is currently involved in designing computer systems for fighter jets.

Now luckily my mate and I are both tolerant and open minded enough to be able to discuss this without having to resort to fear based hysterical dogma. Basically I told him he was, in my eyes, a babykiller. He made a conscious choice to be a part of the war machine, a machine that kills children on a daily basis.

He didn't disagree outright but simply said that he felt so removed from the ultimate outcome that he didn't really think about it. He also pointed out that we all pay the taxes that fund this work so we're all involved to some degree.

My question is, is it fair to call my bro a babykiller? We're all involved, but he's chosen to be more involved. It's a stone cold fact that if everyone throughout the defence industries of the world refused to do their jobs there could be no more war. Does that make my mate directly responsible for the children killed by the jet he helps build?

Wow, that really was a whole load of crap. For those who've made it to the end and actually read all this, well done! You have no idea how much I appreciate it, thank you Back to some posts of normal length and style over the next week or so I think.

footnotes

(1) GeordieKeith provided me with an amazing metaphor for the non-physical: apparently on the first space shuttle mission the engineers asked the IT guys how much their software would weigh. The IT guys explained that the software didn't weigh anything, it was the HOLES in the punch cards. What a beautiful way of thinking about it, won't forget that in hurry, cheers man, love ya

(2) was very hesitant to use the word reality as I'm not generally happy with sweeping assumption that there is a single external reality within which we all dwell, for the purposes of these notes however that assumption will do for now,

(3) one of those abrupt shifts of perception whereby something previously beyond comprehension suddenly becomes clear and obvious, oh how I love sweet Mary Jane!