READ MY WORK

Ideas Above Our Station
new collection of shorts, one of which was written by me,
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292

Nine Stop Trip
even newer collection of shorts, all of which were written by me,
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=65

Ever get that feeling like, every time you pick yourself up you just get kicked in the nuts again?

I've been on a mission over the last few weeks to take some direct, positive action towards not feeling quite so shit all the time. Moved into the spare room, did some writing, even started building myself a bit of a social life.

The various weights of a soul destroying day job, dying grandparents, a stalling live in relationship, old scars and recent pains were all hanging fairly evenly from my depression and I felt I was starting to get the balance.

Now funnily enough I was starting to feel a little bit weird again last week. Back to not being able to sleep, then endless mentalist nightmares when I do.

Thought I'd just ride it out however, so the spontaneous drink and drug fuelled bender on Saturday night courtesy of a visiting GeordieKeith, (easy bro ) was a welcome distraction.

After a lot of consumption and very little sleep however, I was rudely awoken by the phone and my mum telling me that she's leaving my dad. They are done.

Nice huh?

I don't think it's really sunk in yet, and I'm sure there's plenty of mileage in this one yet, but to be honest it just feels like one more shovel load.

Having to take my dad's car back later that day after just a few short hours kip wasn't brilliant but fuck it. It's shit and it hurts, what else is new?

I'll be alright, or at least I'll be about the same. It's just one more reason to become a hugely successful novelist and tell everything in my life to fuck right off.

A warm house surrounded by green in which to smoke, write and party. That's the dream peeps, that's the dream.

Apologies for the prolonged and whinging preamble here but just as this blog spans a multitude of topics it also serves a multitude of purposes, one of which is to serve as a vent for me

So anyway, I have notes for about half a dozen blogs on hold here on my desktop. Just trotting out cold ideas doesn't feel right for here somehow so I either write about it straight away or wait until something inspires me to explore an idea further.

This is one I've had sat around for ages but only had two examples. The third fell into my lap today however and so here we are.

Finishing a long, breakless day at the office, everything was sitting on top of me and I was feeling pretty grey as I headed for the outside.

As I stepped out into the car park however, something happened. The sky was violently blue and the sun painfully yellow and for an instant there was nothing else.

Glorious, glorious sunshine made me feel utterly free and at peace, just for a few moments.

Walking on to the bus I reflected on this experience and got a feel for where the liberating aspect of standing in the sun stemmed from.

It seems to me that that experience is one that we can share with every single human since before humans were humans, not to mention most animals too.

A deeply primal thing, these few simple seconds can reach right through the trappings of our 'civilised' society and into the backs of our brains.

Grabbed by the stem, we are animals once more and, as with animals, there is no concept of material things as we, and everything else, are just parts of the world.

You may say hippy nonsense and I may say bite me, but the fact is we're nowhere near as far away from our ancient 'pre-Eden' selves as we love, or hate, to think.

Second up there's another seemingly universal feeling, (is there anyone out there who has never experienced this?) the whole, jumping-awake-because-you-feel-you-are-falling thing.

That jolt is not just a mild unconscious scare, but is apparently a hang over not from before we were humans, but from before we were even upright! It is reportedly an instinct we developed to stop ourselves falling out of trees as we slept.

Now I can't remember where I heard that so I can't reference it. Whether this particular point is true or not though I find it fascinating to recognise how much we still share with ancestors we thought so distant.

The third is the whole feeling-that-someone-is-watching-you sensation. Sometimes there is someone, sometimes there isn't, or at least you don't see anyone.

It's a bit creepy, especially when you feel there's someone watching you from behind, ie. you're not seeing them out of the corner of you eye, you can just feel it.

Well apparently this is another appendix, another evolutionary hangover. Back in the mists of prehistory the was a time when our ancestors were not kings of the earth but prey just like everything else.

The purpose of this sensation then, be it the result of normally imperceptible sensory stimuli or just an occasional random feeling, was to protect us from things with big fuck off teeth.

Not only do these things remind us of how connected to our past and the planet we are but they also demonstrate the kind of timescales within which evolution operates.

Is it any wonder then that the more technologically advanced our society gets the more a strange pervading sense of alienation, disorientation and isolation grows among inhabitants.

Adbusters have spent years describing this weird and terrible feeling. Check them for more.

The point being that the technology and practices we are developing are evolving far faster than we can cope with. The more we try to move away from our roots in Eden, instead of embracing them, the more lost we become

Seems like you can take the man out of the garden...

READ MY WORK

Ideas Above Our Station
new collection of shorts, one of which was written by me,
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292

Nine Stop Trip
even newer collection of shorts, all of which were written by me,
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=65

For anyone who's interested there's a petition here:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SFOruleoflaw

demanding that the Government allow the Serious Fraud Office to reopen their enquiry into BAE's dealing with Saudi Arabia. It'll take less than a minute of your life, what else are you going to do with that time that's so important?

Had a pretty good day today. Slept all morning then bounced about to some monstrous tunes before spending the whole afternoon at lunch with a mate, having a friendly toke and heading home to read some manga and write this.

After so many pleasant hours it's harder than usual to summon my regular bile and outrage, but I'll try, just for you Here's your three:

First up a dream I had a few years ago that pretty much sums up the today's particular vibe to be explored. Vivid as fuck, full colour, all senses, went a bit like this.

Everything on the earth is mud, except for the people trudging through it back and forth, heads down, clothed in brown rags. Everything above the horizon is dark, sheet metal grey, brooding and grim.

Everyone has somewhere to be, hurrying along, pushing past each other. I've just found myself here, I don't know what's going on. I have nowhere to go.

I look around at all these grubby, pissed off looking people, it's all a bit weird. Then I look up and what do I see?

An enormous ball of flaming rock, tearing through the sky and bearing right down on us. Well fuck me, I think, probably best get out of the way of that.

So I start to shout and point and grab people. Only nobody cares, they shrug me off and curse me, not a one raising their eyes from the swill.

The rock's getting bigger and I'm starting to freak. No-one's listening, there're more and more of them. Because I'm standing still everyone's knocking into me and eventually I get knocked to the floor.

One step at a time I get trampled down into the mud, everyone's shows are solid steel. They tramp on over me, still not looking up until I'm buried except for my face and all I can see is the rock in the sky getting bigger and bigger.

Nice huh?

The point here is the hopeless feeling of seeing impending doom but being unable to repel it alone or convince others to help.

So let's move from the unconscious to the barely conscious, ie. the office. Work's been pretty frustrating of late. As of April 1st the ALMO(1) I work for will cease to exist, along with the five others in Leeds.

In their place will emerge three new ALMOs. I won;t going to things in great detail here, (I've spent all day bitching about this in one way or another,) but let's just say this change has not been managed quite as efficiently as perhaps it could have been.

Basically it's an absolute fucking shambles. Now I've recently been tasked with compiling some stats that are supposed to benchmark the ALMOs against one another.

Some bright spark senior manager came up with what he apparently felt was a good way to go about this. Namely pick ten examples of a job, (eg. changing a tap,) and just average out the price.

Now a lot of these managers have spent most of their working lives in the building trade and I wouldn't dream of telling them how to put a house.

By the same token however I feel that the certificate on my wall that reads Master of Physics & Astrophysics entitles me to point out that this methodology is the most spurious bullshit I've ever come across.

In our ALMO alone we raise about 50,000 jobs a year meaning that the ten job sample constitutes 0.02% which, according to long held theories of classical mathematics, is representative of fuck all.

The slightest anomaly in the price of just one of those jobs would be sufficient to render the resultant average utterly useless.

I've tried to make this clear to various managers via various examples of scale such as this which I included in a report I submitted last Friday:

"..this methodology is comparable to taking census data from one tenant in each of our 12,000 properties and using it for the 60,000,000 population of the UK.. "

It's all to no avail however. The various concerns my line manager has raised regarding serious failings in the use of the IT systems have been similarly ignored, partly because she's not fro the trade, partly because she's not a senior manager but mainly, I suspect, because she's a woman.

Frustrating? You don't know the half of it! There can't be may things more demoralising in the work place than seeing things falling apart and being actively prevented from doing anything about it.

Still, maybe that's just an isolated incident. Surely central government, heads of state even, don't act like this.

Well I think anyone such as myself who watched the Trident debate and vote on Wednesday and was utterly sickened would, I'm afraid, dispute that.

If I can just take a moment here to ask a simple but pertinent question:

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

As my good friend and lunch buddy said earlier today, 'we're all just insane children'. The world and everything in it are in the hands of madmen.

We are committed to disarmament and the non-proliferation treaty, but before we can get rid of the nukes we have to get some more.

In order to get rid of something we need to get more if it.

Doublespeak anyone? Next they'll be telling us peace is war.

Anyway, we're getting our nukes. Our proud and noble elected representatives kept us in the running for annihilation by roughly four to one, shower of bastards that they are.

So sorry all you kids who need operations, people who need somewhere to live and something to eat, our 'civilised' society has better things to spend money on.

At the end of the day the fact is we hate the needy so much we'd rather gamble on getting wiped out all together than dirty our hands by helping them. (Yeah, I reckon the bile's back don't you?)

I don't believe we can solve any of these problems individually, meaning both that we can't solve them one at a time or on our own. What we need is a titanic cultural shift to a whole new way of life.

Out of the question you say?

Well that's just what the people staring into the mud, the wilfully ignorant managers and the scumbag politicians would say.

Turns out titanic cultural shifts are what we're all about. One such shift, the move from hunter / gatherer to farmer made us what we are. More recently the industrial revolution changed western Europe beyond all recognition.

Change is easy, even the greatest changes take no effort at all, all you need is a better idea than the current one. Got one? Me neither, not yet anyway but it's coming, and if not from me then from someone somewhere.

In the meantime however, here we are, in our heads, at our work and in our country, just watching it go.

footnote

(1) ALMO: Arms Length Management Organisation, there are currently six of these in Leeds, private companies completely owned and run by the City Council to manage all social housing, I've worked for one of them as an Assistant Information Officer for just over a year now.

READ MY WORK

Ideas Above Our Station
new collection of shorts, one of which was written by me,
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292

Nine Stop Trip
even newer collection of shorts, all of which were written by me,
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=65

An old friend and former bandmate of mine is currently drumming with local success story Silverlode.

The launch party for their new album is at Bar Coco on Sunday 15/04/07 and I'll be down there with some mates.

Anyone in the Leeds area, head down from 6:00pm onwards and I'll see you there!

Everyone else check out www.SilverlodeOnline.co.uk.

READ MY WORK

Ideas Above Our Station
new collection of shorts, one of which was written by me,
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292

Nine Stop Trip
even newer collection of shorts, all of which were written by me,
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=65

So this is how it was supposed to go down:

You have an elected elite to run the show within a larger one that creates the laws.

You then have an independent, qualified elite to put the law into practice.

This is all cool because the people under the law control it by electing the people who make it.

The sinfully undemocratic non-electedness of those enforcing the law is begrudgingly accepted because they only carry out the wishes of the elected, not to mention the fact that they actually have the knowledge and experience to do the job.

In a country the size of ours however how can the all empowered voters possibly be sure that these elites in their distant towers are indeed doing the jobs they were chosen to do?

Bear in mind that, in terms of population, we're a pretty small country. Of course it goes without saying that every single one of us wants the history-ending panacea of democracy to saturate the globe, (either that or we're terrorists.)

Again, how can so many people be accurately informed of the actions of so few, thereby ensuring that society progresses in the direction best for all?

Well into that breach step another proud and noble elite. The fourth part of the equation, the people who provide that vital link, the defenders of our very freedom, they are...

...the media.

That's right, these people are essential to the very existence of liberty and civilisation, or so the story goes.

And it is a story, an inspiring work of fiction.

I find it a bit depressing when I realise I'm writing the same things on here over and over but for some strange reason all the worlds ills just refuse to disappear. Anyway, before I get onto a familiar rant about the media, just let have a quick familiar rant about polarisation.

Thanks to polari-fucking-sation I've ended up on the same side of arguments as the BNP in the past and none of the three examples that follow leave a better taste in my mouth.

First up let's talk about 'the injunction'. Both the BBC and The Guardian got very excited about being gagged regarding the contents of a paper drafted by a No 10 aide.

The gagging itself became the story and you see they were loving it. Freedom of the press is one thing but it's not very noble or exciting. Seems like you can only feel like a real, full sized journalist if people are telling you to be quiet.

Maybe they're jealous of all those journalists around the world who regularly risk torture and death to record and communicate the truth. I guess on the west running the risk of getting sacked or prosecuted is a kind of fat free version.

Anyway, what pissed me off here, other than the fact that they've caused me to side with Bliar and his greasy bastard mates, is that this was nothing unusual and it was entirely in the public interest.

Now regular readers may be surprised to hear me advocating any kind of censorship but I wrote recently about how it's not what we're entitled to know, but when we're entitled to know it.

The media are prevented from publishing information every single day, and for very good reason.

What happens if someone has been charged with, but no convicted of a crime and the press print a huge full colour picture of him along with his name and the fact that he had motive and opportunity?

What happens is the guy goes free whether he did it or not. There's no way he can have any kind of fair trial, therefore he can't be proven guilty, therefore he has to be assumed to be innocent and walks.

Is anyone bitching about this? Is anyone saying that our individual rights to be informed take precedent over the systems the keep society ticking over? Well probably a few but fuck 'em, let's stick to the sane in the interests of keeping this relatively brief.

In this instance it is my understanding that the police requested the injunction because they felt that if the contents of that drafted paper were made public it would reduce their chances of getting a conviction.

So why all the bad noise? Nobody's saying we're not ever allowed to know, the 'secrets' will be presented as evidence at a public trial for fucks sake!

Personally I think this is about the only way we're ever going to get anywhere near Bliar and his mates actually facing any kind of justice.

Next up let's look at that infamous CCTV of a copper apparently beating a teenage girl while he and his mate sat on top of her.

Yet again you're going to be shocked but I'm finding it tough to get all high and mighty about the 5 0 here.

Yes I've been harassed, threatened and and even knocked on my arse by our boys in blue in the past. I am certainly not the biggest fan of our state foot soldiers.

That said however, the media have yet again pushed me into bed with particular unpleasant fellow.

When talking about this in terms of right and wrong we have to be very careful. There's your own personal view of what's cool and what isn't and then there's what's by the book and what isn't.

Where the police are concerned we, (technically, through the magic of democrazy,) write that book. Their powers are set out in laws that we create by proxy.

In this light I think there are only two questions to be answered:

was he using official techniques?

was he in control?

As damning as that footage appears to be, I believe the guy was actually using a recommended technique for police and prison officers.

As I understand it the procedure goes like this: if someone's kicking off to a violent degree and needs to be subdued you get four people, (or as many as you have,) to grab hold of them and you try to get them into handcuffs.

If they make it impossible for you to put the cuffs on you twat them in their upper arm until it goes dead so that you can.

Now regardless of how humane that sounds it is a technique we've prescribed for their use. To be fair getting a dead arm is better than getting shot or gassed or electrocuted or sprayed or just getting the living fuck beaten out of you which seem to be the other options available.

With regards the second question however, I believe the officer in question lost his temper and was not in control.

My basis for this belief is his quoted statement in which he details the extreme provocation he was presented with, ie. a reason to lose his temper.

Then the fact that he reported hitting her once and then twice more, when in fact the CCTV shows four blows instead of two, suggests that he actually did lose it.

I don't think the guy was lying when he said that, I think he genuinely didn't realise how many times he hit her because he had lost control.

Now I couldn't be a copper, I'm not up to physically nor mentally. Keeping your cool when it's all kicking off, even when you're in serious physical danger, is no mean feat and I do respect people who can pull it off.

If you can't do that however, you're probably not in the right job. Another officer was quoted that he witnessed the girl foaming at the mouth during the incident suggesting that, rather than resisting the coughs she was having a fit.

How did the guy sat on top of her not notice that? Maybe because he was seeing red.

Now these are exactly the kind of stories we need a fourth estate for. This is precisely where the media are supposed to ensure that the people and the elites they've put in place above them are singing from the same hymn sheet.

For the most part however, the media reported this complex story simply as the UK's answer to Rodney King. Fascist bastard police beating a black person, a teenage girl no less. Juicy, exciting, more at eleven.

Finally I wanted to share the contents of a New Internationalist article on Iran that I found exceedingly interesting. Just have a think about that nation, it's president in particular, and a couple of strong recurrent themes in the media.

How about the fact that he said Israel should be wiped off the map, or his desire to have a big red button to match ours?

Well, according to NI, who I'm inclined to favour, both these items of common knowledge are untrue.

Just to pre-empt the polarisation disease let's make something clear: Iran's president is a shortarse fascist fuckwit cut from the same cloth as Hitler and Bush. This doesn't alter the accuracy, or lack thereof however of the 'facts' listed above.

Let's start with the Israel thing. It is suggested that the 'wiped from the map' comment was in fact a slightly giddy and very biased translation.

A more accurate version, apparently, was as follows: 'the regime running Israel should disappear into the pages of history'.

Now I'm not suggesting that that's a great deal better, it is vitally different however. Instead of calling for the outright annihilation of a nation he is suggesting that a standing government should be toppled for the greater good.

Clearly western voters learning that this little psycho is puking the exact same rhetoric as Bush and Bliar would be bad news for both respective scumbags.

But fuck it, our media is there to make the politicians answer to the people right? To ensure that the power is still in the hands of the masses. So what went wrong?

What I found far more surprising was the whole nuclear issue.

Now the fact that Bush is the guy with his finger on the button is a long held source of stress and despair but then he's the president and that's what presidents do.

Or is it? In our efforts to take ignorance to new and dizzying depths we have all somehow agreed to assume that Iran is just like the US.

For some reason the guardians of out liberty have not chosen to point out to us that in Iran the president is not the head of state and, if they ever did get the bomb, would not be the guy with his finger on the button.

Iran has a supreme spiritual leader above both the parliament and the president and this is the guy who would do any button pushing should it come to that.

This is also the guy, it turns out, who has issued decrees stating that it is not in Iran;s interests to have nuclear weapons and is also one of the many people who really doesn't like the president.

It would seem that the president is part of a relatively obscure Islamic sect and this doesn't sit well with the supreme leader. Other people who don't like him are most of the people who voted for him.

Like most successful fascists he got himself elected by telling people the easy answers they wanted to hear and making promises he couldn't keep.

As has been pointed out recently, the price of tomatoes in Iran is probably going to solve the problem of this weird little man before anything more drastic is required.

So why isn't this common knowledge? Why are we walking around with a dangerously inaccurate picture of this country in our minds? Why does the media give the appearance of serving political interests at the expense of ours when it should be precisely the other way around?

Because they're a shower of bastards is an easy answer and to be honest, about as useful a one as you're likely to get.

Now I poured scorn on the 'big plan' at the start of this blog and that was mainly due to the way things have worked out. To be fair it does look good on paper and whether we like it or not we're in it now.

I've often said in the past that it's no good bitching if you've no better ideas so here's mine.

It's a golden oldie but just like with capitalism, don't fight the media, just ignore it and sort things out for yourself.

If you're reading this blog then you have access to pretty much all the information the media do, it's called the internet.

We can't rely on our fourth estate to protect us, they have become utterly compromised and worse than useless to us now.

The only option then is to keep ourselves informed.

By all means use the media, I do, I watch BBCN24 all the time, just don't trust it, find out for yourself. In fact why don't you go find something out right now? There's nothing more going on here today and the porn will still be there when you've finished

READ MY WORK

Ideas Above Our Station
new collection of shorts, one of which was written by me,
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292

Nine Stop Trip
even newer collection of shorts, all of which were written by me,
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=65

I've discovered something strange: 72 hours is the exact length of time it takes for me to completely readjust to not being at work.

A weekend isn't quite long enough, for the first two days I'm just in a daze. Three days however is sufficient for me to forget all about work and fall back into my dole scum routine.

Coming to the end of my week off now, the prospect of returning to the office is looming over the horizon but I don't feel too bad. I've got quite a lot done so can't say that I've wasted my time I'd just rather spend the rest of my life sitting here writing than sitting there working.

Speaking of which I've also encountered something else a bit weird. I've been meaning to write a short story for a lit mag and have just finished it. Took me a couple of days, which isn't unusual, but the deadline is still over a week away, which is.

Normally I write shorts quickly because I've left them until the last minute. I was quite excited about this one however and, to be honest, a bit bored so I got on with it and now it's done, save for a bit of editing.

A major source of boredom has been the fact that pretty much everything I see on TV at the moment seems utterly shashpaps. In fact I've probably watched less TV this week than I would during a normal working week.

Maybe it's because I'm not so ground down by the day job that I demand a more satisfying standard of entertainment.

Who knows, the fact is, as no doubt everyone has said at one time or another, there are more and more channels and yet less and less worth watching.

It must surely be true that we, in the decadent west, are exposed to and have greater access to more information than any human beings throughout history.

From an evolutionary point of view this may present a problem. As with most technological advances, this change has come about too quickly for us to adapt as a species.

We have never had to process such volumes of information before. Is it any wonder then that so many people choose to withdraw into apathy?

A few examples of this phenomenon of info overload have become apparent to me lately, provoking this post:

Firstly there's the G2 cover story from ages ago that I've quite managed to forget. This related the results of a study suggesting that more western toddlers recognise McDonalds than know their own name.

The point is that when overloaded with info you just can't take it all in so, at some level, you select what you perceive to be the most important bits.

When you consider how much time parents are able to spend communicating with their children and compare that to how much time companies communicate with those kids through advertising it becomes clear who has a greater influence.

Secondly was the story of the reported discovery of the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. There were so many things that pissed me off about this story that I'm not even sure where to begin.

How about the fact that several media outlets kept referring to the tomb as potentially being that of Jesus Christ? The point being that if that is his tomb then he's wasn't the Christ was he? He was an ordinary bloke who died and stayed dead.

As I say, there were lots of things that annoyed me about this one but by far the worst was the omission of the single most important piece of information by every media outlet I encountered.

The key to the whole story is surely whether or not the Jesus they've found was the Jesus. Now there was more than one body in this tomb, the others reportedly being those of Mary mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene wife of Jesus and Judah son of Jesus.

There was some mention that a statistician had been employed to calculate the likelihood of the tomb belonging to a different bunch of people with the same names.

His findings were reported as stating that it was almost certain that this was the Jesus and his crew. I had to go online however to find out what he actually said.

This guy stated that the odds were 600-1 that it was someone else. The point here is that this stat means nothing without telling us how many people were living in the area at the time.

If there were just a few hundred families knocking about then then it looks like they may well have found the J man himself. If there were millions of people there however suddenly it doesn't look so good.

This number was the single most important piece of information in this story and yet it was just about the only thing we WEREN'T told amid mountains of crap.

So much information and yet not a bit of it useful for anything more than idle conversation at the water cooler.

The third and final example of quantity over quality came to me when watching BBC2's The Conspiracy Files regarding the death of Dr David Kelly.

A fairly interesting series, this programme doesn't stick its neck on the line. You get half an hour of conspiracy theories, then half an hour of debunking and then a final shrug of 'who knows?'.

Anyway the point that stuck out in relevance to this issue was the effective outing of Dr Kelly by the media. For whatever reasons the media couldn't actually come out and announce his name, (I'm unclear as to whether they didn't know or weren't allowed.)

What they did do however, was enter into their usual competition as to who could provide the most information about the mysterious man.

In their rabid fervour to supply the greatest number of facts they basically gave so many clues that anyone in the know would know exactly who the 'leak' had come from.

Of course the media, the mighty fourth estate, has a responsibility to inform the public and thereby keep the executive, the legislator and the judiciary in check.

That being the case however, how much of that information about Dr Kelly did we actually NEED to know? Was the public interest served by divulging all those little details?

I can already hear people crying censorship and state control of the media etc but that's really not the point.

A good example of one of the few instances in which we get this right is when one of our servicemen dies overseas.

As part the electorate responsible for sending them into harms way it is essential that we are informed of such losses.

We do need to know about this as soon as possible, we do not, however, need to know his name, at least not until after his family have been informed.

The point is that it's not actually in anyone's best interests for us all to know everything. As demonstrated by the examples above the problems with this are as follows:

we simply can't handle being told everything,

sheer volume of info distracts from the what is actually relevant and important,

the desire to communicate such volumes of info blinds people to the very purpose of that communication,

It's funny but this often happens. I'm writing what I think is an original post only to find myself on familiar ground.

I've said it before and I'll no doubt say it again. This does not have to come down to a polarised choice between all info and no info.

What's required is effort on the part of the media and the public:

The media need to grow a pair and start reporting what needs to be reported rather than just competing with one another over numbers.

The public need to start developing skills of discernment to recognise the value, or lack thereof, of the information put before them.

This is also the only way for the public to recognise when vital info is not being released and subsequently be able to demand it.

There is, as always, another thorn on this rose however. The explosive expansion of the western media, 24 hour rolling news channels etc, has been sold to us in the name of choice.

The ideal seems to be that eventually you'll over ever watch things you want to see, be told things you want to hear. The media will be personalised to your individual needs.

Unfortunately however there are, and always will be, things that people need to know but don't want to hear.

Encouraging people to withdraw into bubbles within which they hold dominion can have no positive consequences for anyone except those coining it in at the other end of the wire.

It's tough I know, standing up to the perpetual torrent of shit, but it has to be done. The Egyptians knew that whoever writes history controls the present and subsequently the future.

It's up to us to decide where control of our society's information, and hence it's future, lies. Your hands or theirs, it's up to you.