Skip to main content
 

My Single Summer

6 min read

This is a story about all-night fun and frolics...

Alarm clock

I had an interview today. I mean yesterday. I made a new friend last Wednesday, or was it Thursday? Once you go past midnight, things get complicated.

I lead a follow-the-sun existence. During the morning, I'm saying good night to my friends in Australia and New Zealand. As the day wears on, it's bedtime for my friends in India and other parts of Asia. At around noon, I say good morning to my friends on the East Coast of North America, and at about 3pm I say good morning to my friends on the the West Coast - we chat all day, all evening, into the night. Then, my friends in the Czech Republic, Italy and France remind me that it's almost my own bedtime, but I skipped my medication: I'll sleep when I'm dead. By the time 5am comes around, those friends in Canada and the United States are starting to think about getting some sleep themselves... but for friends in New Zealand and Australia, it's a whole new day. It's only me who hasn't been to bed and is getting confused about whether it's today or tomorrow.

I keep skipping my medication, so that I can be alert and on top of my game for job interviews. Without a job, I'm going to be bankrupt in no time. I'm already being turfed out of my apartment without getting a penny of my deposit back. Where am I going to live? How am I supposed to feed myself?

This isn't supposed to happen. I have mood stabilisers. I have sleeping pills. I have strict instructions to keep to the same bedtime every night and not to over-sleep: 8 to 10 hours is plenty, which will make many parents grit their teeth with envy. Under normal circumstances, I live a heavily medicated existence where I shuffle around and speak frustratingly slowly. The hospital staff who visit me at home to check on me are happy to see me in that state: I should be no trouble to anybody, in that chemical straightjacket.

I did take my pills tonight, probably more than 12 hours late. I doubled up on the sleeping pills, but I practically wrote the book on sleep deprivation. I can tell you exactly what happens after 3 or 4 days, then 6 or 7 days without sleep. After 9 days of 24-hour consciousness and not so much as a snooze, I can give you an approximate description of what this state of sleeplessness is like. At the 10 day point, who knows if or when I'll regain consciousness - psychosis consumes anybody who didn't sleep for as long as 10 days. Calendars and days of the week become as alien to me as a smartphone would be to an Amazonian tribe who've remained completely undiscovered in the densest and most inaccessible jungle.

I've been packing up my stuff, and I found some headphones I really love and an amplifier for them. I used to dance at all-night raves and club nights. I might not have been writing my blog so much, but I was having important online conversations. I decided I did't want to die angry with the world, so I started writing more conciliatory words; I started writing to say "thanks" instead of "f**k you buddy". All this while, I'm listening to music that I hadn't been able to stand because none of it matched my mood; none of the lyrics spoke to me; there was nothing I could relate to.

The last happy thing I remember doing with her was watching the sequel to Trainspotting. We were both buzzing. Reading - the town - was a special place for us both and the music festival in 1996 is where I watched Trainspotting in the cinema tent, and then heard Underworld play Born Slippy in the dance tent. The soundtrack to the movie got us both listening to the classic tunes and their modern remixes, and speculating about the meaning of the lyrics.

Dirty numb angel boy

And tears boy

And all in your inner space boy

You had chemicals boy

I've grown so close to you

She said come over

She smiled at you boy.

I then decided to repurpose a song I liked into a poem for her.

The poem is a sad goodbye if you like. I got the job. I'm leaving the city where we currently live. I'm leaving all those reminders of a time when I thought we'd be together forever, and she'd look after me if I got sick, and vice-versa.

Summer Break-Up

A thousand words
captured in a photograph
of me and you
drinking prosecco on the grass
so hard to breathe
the way you made me laugh.

That summer dating
ended all right
seemed like you would be
the only one for me
and seemed like I was too
the only one for you.

Later when we were alone
we promised everything we owned
and every little bit of me
tingled excitedly
this thing was so right
was exactly what it felt like
how could it go wrong?
now it's all gone.

People told me all the time
that love is just a state of mind
but they don't know love's hard to find
and that's why I'm not changing mine.

Yesterday
I called you up
the hundredth try
and I'm still out of luck
your number changed
and I guess so did you.

But I'm not the same little
helpless dying flower
that you nurtured and saved
because now I do believe
that inside of me
you set me free.

When I see your picture, I smile
because I think of you happier
without my weight on your shoulders
I must take my wings and soar
but I've never felt afraid like this before

It's 7am now. I'm going to get a couple of hours of sleep. I've probably been writing complete drivel, and I don't want to upset her. I did promise her that we'd leave each other alone to move on with our lives, but I lied... I felt like I was going to die. I just had to hope she'd never find out I'd killed myself. Now, there's a chance that things could work out for me, and I could get a fresh start; a new challlenge to hurl myself into to forget all about love and heartbreak for a while.

Time is a great healer, and if you're awake 24 hours a day, you're living about 33% more than everybody else, but you don't get over a breakup any quicker.

Sleep is also a great healer, so to bed, I must.

 

Tags:

 

Do You Feel Safe Now?

7 min read

This is a story about the right to bear arms...

Police horse

Defence budgets are soaring. The UK is spending £205 billion to upgrade the nuclear deterrent. The annual NHS budget is half that amount. We could give the NHS an extra £350 million per week, for over 11 years, instead of spending our money on weapons of mass destruction.

There are two vans full of armed police parked outside Canary Wharf station, every single working day. I pass them on my way to work. Now, there are also mounted police.

Our foreign policies are abhorrent. The rhetoric used by politicians and the media has whipped up a frenzy of nationalism, xenophobia, bigotry and racism. I used to be proud that Britain was a diverse and inclusive nation, but now I'm embarrassed to discover that there is a marginal majority who have this crazy idea about raising the drawbridge and lowering the portcullis: fortress England.

I saw a meme the other day that asked what the hell is wrong with you if you're so afraid of ISIS that you're not prepared to grant asylum to women & children who are fleeing ISIS. It's a damn good point well made.

The great success that is hidden in the decline of the British empire, is that we managed to leave things in relatively good order. The partition of India and Pakistan was mostly successful, except for one stupid idiot who had no idea about the Kashmir region, but drew the border anyway. Britain is still on good terms with both India and Pakistan and I have no problem getting a visa to visit either country. I've been to India many times and they've embraced English as an official language. The railway system and a lot of other bureaucratic systems are run exactly as they were under British rule.

Again, when Britain left the Middle East, Gulf States and North Africa, after World War II, it was a masterclass in diplomacy and how to divide and rule areas that would otherwise be torn apart by internecine strife. Yes, it's true that dictators were installed. However, before the Gulf War, there was a thriving middle class and excellent infrastructure, not only in Iraq but throughout the whole Middle East. The standard of living in Libya was amazing. Bashar al-Assad brought the Internet to Syria in the mid-nineties, and Assad was somebody who the British had excellent diplomatic ties with: he was one of our best friends in the region.

Britain's policy had always been to rule through diplomacy and bureaucracy. Britain's policy was not one of invasion, conquest, occupation, arms races and domination through sheer military might. The reason Britain had a huge empire is because we are a mercantile nation, who negotiated many trade deals and established much of the flow of goods over land and sea that we see today. Britain didn't want war. Britain wanted to be friends with everybody, so they could trade with the world.

Now, with the American 'shock and awe' tactics, with SCUD missiles raining down on innocent civilians from hundreds of miles away, with no warning, we're fucking hated. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine not even hearing the approach of an aircraft, seeing the falling bomb and having a second to duck and cover? Can you imagine you're sitting there watching TV, and the next thing you know your house is rubble and your whole family have been killed or maimed?

The American occupation, or simply their military presence, in the Middle East was highly offensive and threatening. America likes to flex its military muscle. America likes to boast about its cutting-edge 'defence' technology... which we all know means offensive weapons.

Where's the fucking bravery of warfare, if you're controlling a drone from some air-conditioned office type place, in a building in America, blowing up people in a country thousands of miles away? How that fuck is that being a brave soldier?

And so, we saw the birth of asymmetrical and guerrilla warfare. What we call insurgency is simply the only way that the occupied nations stand any chance of fighting back against the invading forces. The people who we call insurgents are really freedom fighters: fighting for the freedom from invasion and occupation by the country with the world's largest 'defence' budget - America.

I'm going to keep putting 'defence' inside inverted commas like that, because it's not fucking defence. Those weapons get used for offensive purposes far more than for defensive purposes.

The top selling guns in America are hand guns. The top gun retailer is Walmart... we know them as ASDA supermarket in the UK. The top selling bullets are rounds that go in hand guns. What the actual fuck? Surely 1 bullet equals 1 dead person, if you're using a hand gun. I can't imagine that anybody goes hunting deer with a hand gun, can you?

This culture of fetishising deadly weapons - brandishing them and carrying them on the public streets - has become ubiquitous. Giving guns to every ordinary policemen and women. Encouraging people to own a gun at home and introducing laws like stand-your-ground have caused a massive spike in the number of guns and bullets sold, and the number of people who are killed in shootings.

My fear is that Britain moves closer and closer to the American model of foreign and domestic policy.

I would hate it if our police were all armed with guns. No policeman should be judge, jury and executioner. I would hate it if private citizens were allowed to own handguns, which serve no purpose other than to shoot people. The self defence argument crumbles to dust if you can keep guns out of everybody's hands. I would bet you that 99 out of 100 burglaries in the UK are committed by people who are not carrying guns.

The more the rhetoric and the hate ramps up, and the more our strong historical positive diplomatic relationships with many leaders in the Middle East deteriorate, as well as the whole region descending into a chaotic power struggle, the more that Britain becomes a proxy target for the many many people who hate America, because America killed their children, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, friends and countless other innocent victims of cowardly missile, bomb and drone strikes.

"Don't shoot until you can see the whites of their eyes" they used to say. Soldiers used to have to live with the horror of knowing they'd taken the life of another human being. Now, your drone controller hops in his car and drives home to his family, at the end of his shift. He has no idea what kind of carnage and destruction was unleashed in the aftermath of his drone strike. He has no idea whether the intelligence was correct, or if he just murdered a bunch of innocent people.

The American way of doing things is not making me feel safe. Donald Trump does not make me feel safe. Border controls and slamming the door in the face of people fleeing persecution and war, does not make me feel safe. Dropping bombs on Syria does not make me feel safe. The 'special relationship' with America does not make me feel safe.

We belong to Europe, and we owe it to our former colonies to maintain peace and stability. We are fucking up two of our greatest postwar achievements, and letting America ruin world peace.

I don't feel safe.

 

Tags:

 

Ingratitude

25 min read

This is a story about treating every day like it's your last...

Climbing dolomites

My life plan was a fairly simple one: earn loads of money working in IT, marry an attractive & intelligent girl who was into outdoorsy stuff and live happily ever after. I lived by the seaside. I owned my own home. I had masses of savings. I owned everything outright: my car, my boat, the furniture... I paid cash for everything.

When it turned out that the girl I picked was, errr, 'incompatible' with living happily ever after - to phrase it delicately - I didn't really have a plan B.

To be honest, after my marriage went to shit, I hadn't really planned on living very long. I'm really rather surprised to find myself alive and in reasonable health today. I was warned that my new plan - to take copious amounts of drugs and die in a hedonistic blaze of glory - would drive me insane and I'd find myself permanently brain damaged and dying slowly and painfully as my organs shut down one by one, or perhaps I would just suddenly and unexpectedly drop dead.

"Suddenly and unexpectedly drop dead."

Isn't that a risk that we face every single day anyway? There's a certain chance that your heart is just going to stop pumping and go into cardiac arrest at any moment. If you have a cardiac arrest outside a hospital, you're 80% likely to die.

The biggest threat to my life at the moment, statistically - and this goes for any 37 year old man, not just the ones with bipolar disorder and substance abuse issues - is suicide. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 50.

If I made smart lifestyle choices like not taking copious amounts of dangerous drugs, riding my bike through central London in rush hour traffic with no helmet on, stopping eating and drinking to the point where my organs fail and I piss blood, you'd have thought that I'd be doing a pretty good job of minimising my risk of premature death. NOPE!

What about all those extreme hobbies of mine? Off-piste snowboarding, skydiving, mountain biking, kitesurfing, rock climbing and mountaineering. You'd have thought that it'd be a good idea to give up those dangerous sports, if I wanted to minimise my risk of premature death. NOPE!

I was trying to have this argument with the Royal London Hospital consultant in the Renal High-Dependency Unit, where I was being kept alive by dialysis. I basically said, look, you're going to have to discharge me and let me go and start my new job and I'll just have to take the risk that my kidneys get worse and I drop dead. "You're playing Russian Roulette with your life" she said. Not really. The biggest threat to my life is suicide, and it was inevitable that losing my job would leave me in a psychologically critical condition.

One thing I quite often hear is criticism of risk takers. "How can you climb that mountain and risk your life, when there are people who are terminally ill, who would give anything for just one more day alive?"

"Treat every day as if it's your last."

That fairly innocent sounding platitude actually backfires, when you realise that it's an incitement to maximise your risk in pursuit of hedonistic pleasures and thrillseeking.

Knowing that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 is just a meaningless statistic, until you lose a friend or a relative to suicide, or you become suicidal yourself.

That's me in the picture above. I'm stood on a pinnacle of rock that's nearly 3,000 metres above sea level. If I fell - and I'm not tied onto anything - then it would a very long freefall before I went splat into the ground. Why am I not tied on? Why haven't I taken the precaution of attaching myself to a rope? Is it because I was suicidal?

The more you climb; the higher you climb; the more steep and perilous things that you climb, you start to become used to the exposure. The constant threat of falling to your death is something that you just get used to. One slip and it's curtains... but you're not afraid anymore.

I've got rather a toxic mix of psychology. I've got the ability to manage my own fear, stress and adrenalin, so that I can throw myself out of planes or climb frozen waterfalls, but when I become suicidal, I'm acutely aware that I could act on a suicidal impulse very calmly and methodically.

What is this silly little dance we call life anyway? Is it about procreation? Is it about making money? Is it about looking after your grandparents and parents as they get old and die?

Do I 'owe' anybody anything? Do I 'owe' it to my parents to treat the fact I'm alive with respect because they 'gifted' me a life that I didn't ask for? Do I 'owe' it to terminally ill people, to treat my life with respect, because I'm lucky and they're not? Do I 'owe' it to my friends to struggle on through the misery, because they'd be a bit sad if I committed suicide?

There are a couple of families - one in Ireland and one in Bletchley/Suffolk - who have been there for me during my darkest moments. There's a friend who I would've seen over the Christmas break, except for an unfortunate bout of illness laying him low. There are a handful of people in the world who've seen what my friend Laurence calls 'The Horrors' and they've protected me; stuck by me; defended me and been loyal friends. There have been people who've appeared unexpectedly - most welcome - back in my life. I'm not the most predictable of people, having decided to visit an old school friend in San Francisco, booked a flight and boarded it, within the space of just a few hours.

That's how it goes. Here today; gone tomorrow.

The speed with which my kidneys failed was shocking, even for me. The fact I needed dialysis was shocking, even for me. The length of time it took my kidneys to start working efficiently again was shocking, even for me.

Does that sort of stuff make me think "oh wow! that was close!" and "I better be careful and treat my life with respect"? You're asking the wrong question. My suicidal thoughts drive my reckless risk taking behaviour. Suicide was, and still remains, the biggest threat to my life. The shitty stuff that happened was all a consequence of my flirtation with death. I don't quite have the nerve to take the active steps to 'pull the trigger' as it were, because I know that I'm psychologically strong enough to just do it, without hesitation.

My trip to the Golden Gate Bridge was a metaphor for just how quickly, impulsively and with single-minded determination I can reach the point of no return.

My friends who hosted me in San Francisco read some of my recent blogs and asked if there was anything they could do to help. These are some of the people I admire and respect most in the world. They have super busy stressful lives raising little kids on the other side of the Atlantic, on the West coast of America.

What can anybody do? Everybody's got their own problems. Everybody's got their own money worries. Everybody's got a lot of shit on their plate. We've built a society where we are isolated, alone, overstretched by ordinary life to the point where we're just about managing. Who can afford to shoulder part of the burden for somebody who's struggling? Who can afford the time? Where are you going to find the energy when life is already so exhausting? Who has the financial means to help every fuckup with their begging bowl held out?

More fundamentally, under what kind of terms am I prepared to help myself? Arguably, I've thrown away 3 very well paid IT contracts for 3 massive banks, doing work that I can do with my eyes closed. Why the fuck would I do that?

I'm a complex beast. I feel guilty about my role in building systems that were pivotal in the financial crisis of 2007/8. I hired a development team in Mumbai, India, and I led that team to create a trade confirmation system for derivatives that handled over a quadrillion dollars in volume, in its first year. That's immoral. I knew what I was doing. I was busily fixing my own mortgage rate, knowing that there was a credit crunch coming. I invested my money in physical gold, because I had so little faith in the banking systems that I helped build.

I also had a taste of what it's like to own and run my own company. I outsourced. I ran software projects. The only difference was that it was my money and nobody could tell me "no". I could do whatever I wanted, and the ego rub from holding the job title "CEO" is a hard place to come back from. I now wander from company to company, pointing out the things that are on fire, fixing them if they let me or otherwise getting into conflict or suffering incredible boredom and frustration as I try to keep my mouth shut about the impending disasters I can see unfolding. Sure, I get paid a buttload, but it upsets me. I still spend money like it's my own.

That last project I was working on had an annual budget of about £25 million and was handling 30 customers a day. Basically, the cost of customer acquisition was over £2,000. These were not high-net worth individuals. They were simply ordinary banking customers. The project was not very complicated, but the waste was incredible.

What the hell is wrong with me? Am I a prima donna? Am I Goldilocks? Everything's got to be 'just right' for me? Do I consider the kind of work that's available to me to be 'beneath' me?

Certainly, I struggle with the prospect of having to do the kind of job that I mastered 10 or 15 years ago. I sometimes laugh out loud in interviews when somebody asks a question that's the equivalent of asking a master builder if they know what a brick is. Is it arrogant? I don't give a fuck... it psychologically destroys me, running projects for dinosaurs who pay top dollar for the best consultants and then don't listen to them.

I remember quite distinctly in 2001, I was deciding whether to learn a new(ish) computer programming language. I read a book about it. I was already learning another programming language at the time. Then it hit me: I had become a polyglot, somewhat by accident. I was able to read any code and understand its function - its intent - no matter what the actual specific implementation technology was. I knew that me and software had reached the end of the road. I asked my boss for a sabbatical while I considered what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

It's kinda hard to change career direction and it gets harder with age. You not only have to bankroll yourself through training and getting started in whatever new thing it is that you're doing, but if you're turning your back on one of the most lucrative careers there is, you'd better be pretty damn certain that you picked the right alternative.

I bump along the bottom, being dragged back into god-awful, boring, unambitious, ill-fated and badly run IT projects, whenever my bank balance reaches danger point. But the hardest thing is the dread: the dread about selling my soul; the dread about having to keep a straight face when people are panicking and running around like they've never seen some mundane issue before.

I can't escape. I'm in a deep hole. The hole isn't deep at all for an IT consultant, but for almost any other job, it's an inescapable pit of doom. The reason why I got in such deep shit is divorce, mental illness, and being smeared all over the streets of London, in and out of hospital. Like I said earlier, it's a miracle that I'm still alive.

I hadn't really planned on living this long and that's a bit of a problem. Because I'm so suicidal and trapped, I guess there's an easy decision to be made. I know that I have absolutely no problem following through and overcoming any psychological hurdle that might stop most ordinary people from killing themselves.

I wrote this, while I was working my last IT contract:

Once he had started, he knew there would be no stopping until it was done.

That's why it had taken him so long before he started his final journey; because he could picture every single step of it. He knew that he would just methodically follow the steps, and then it would be over. He could be cold and clinical when required; rational and calculated; measured in his approach. There would be no panic, no rise in pulse, no hyperventilation. To all outward appearances, there would be nothing that would cause alarm or alert suspicions in anybody, until he was at the very brink; in the final moments.

The imagery of the bridge was so ingrained in everybody's mind, because it was such a major landmark. The bridge had featured in so many films. The bridge had been photographed so many times. The bridge was a prominent part of company logos and corporate branding. The bridge was something you could close your eyes, and picture it in exquisite detail. If you were asked to draw the bridge from memory, you'd be able to make a passable sketch of it. Even if you'd never been to the bridge before, it felt like you had been there.

That's why he had never been to the bridge. He could never be sure if he was there just in his imagination - where there were no irreversible consequences - or if he was there in real life. It would be so easy to follow through with his day dream - his fantasy - in real life. He'd played it all through in his head so many times.

Staring up at the spot on the centre of the bridge, where it was highest above the river below, he could imagine himself walking up to that spot, knowing that when he reached that point, only the chest-high barrier would separate him from the edge. He knew that the hardest part would be the bold step of climbing over the barrier. It would be so easy to peer over the edge, while safely protected by the barrier, and then chicken out. That's why mental preparation was important. That's why visualising the whole thing in advance was important.

He wasn't unfamiliar with the psychological battle of overcoming your fears and hurling yourself over a mental obstacle. Stepping off an edge was something you did every time you stepped off the kerb and into traffic. Vaulting a barrier was something you did when you climbed over fences as a kid, playing with your friends. He had done bungee jumps, where it was up to you - free will - to actually jump. He had done skydives and parachute jumps, where it was up to you, whether or not you hurled yourself out of a perfectly good aircraft. He knew he could overcome the psychological challenge of cutting loose and falling. Falling, not attached to anything, tumbling free in space. Nothing to grab onto. No second chances. No way to change your mind once you throw yourself out into empty space.

People talked about cowardice, selfishness, but they missed the point. People didn't understand that have to be brave to choose to put your life in danger, especially when falling to your death is one of the obvious risks. You also have to be brave to choose death. Who knows what happens when you die? Fear of the unknown is why people cling to life: self-preservation instincts.

He'd been a leader in the mountains and on rock faces. The leader always took the biggest risk of falling. At some point, falling became inevitable. If you roll the dice enough times, your number is going to come up eventually. If you take risks, you have to accept the increased chance of injury and even death. He'd had friends who had been killed or permanently disabled. A certain amount of "it could never happen to me" bravado and gallows humour stopped people from losing their nerve. At funerals, people would say that "he/she died doing what they loved" which was true, but this was mainly to distract from the reminder of our mortality, while doing the things that we - the living - love.

Those psychological skills, as a rock climber, mountaineer, bungee jumper, skydiver... they all now worked against him. He knew what it felt like, to be on the edge of a perilous drop, with nothing holding him safe except his own grip, and his own sanity: to not hurl himself over the edge.
At the top of tall buildings, on a mountain, or at a cliff-top, it troubled him how easily he could just jump off. He had to stay away from the edge; not because he wanted to keep himself safe, but because he didn't know if he could trust himself to not just jump. It would be so easy. It was the ease of it that troubled him. The proximity to a fall that would deliver a swift death called to him like a siren. Instead of being appalled by the fear of death, there was an allure.

When learning to climb, people clung to the rocks with white knuckles. They kept their bodies pressed as close to the cliff face as they could, as if being flat against the surface would mean that they were somehow safer from the pull of gravity. Most people were not psychologically prepared to be climbers or mountaineers. People on mountains collapsed on the flat ground, when sheer drops to either side of them overwhelmed them. Our instincts tell us to lower our centre of gravity, but when you are up high, gravity can only pull you down. It doesn't work, putting yourself closer to the cliff or the ground. You will still fall to your death.

There was something different about him. Sure, he wasn't the only one with the strange mutation of the mind, that allowed him to overcome the self-preservation instincts, but it was rare. Most people dislike heights. Most people are scared of falling. Had he always had this ability to put himself in a position of peril, and to overcome the instinct to simply freeze, to overcome the instinct to not jump out of the aeroplane, or climb up high where you could fall.

Possibly through repeated exposure to perilous situations, he had become immune to the threat of death. He had become comfortable, being in situations that put your own mortality as the immediate and most pressing concern. Sure, you could die crossing the road, but most people aren't thinking about that. Those first few times that you jump out of a plane, you most certainly are thinking "what if my parachute doesn't open?".

But the what ifs can be set to one side. What if I end up in Hell? What if I change my mind, in the split second before I die, when I'm past the point of no return?

Death is the great unknown, and we intrinsically fear the unknown. He had become well practiced at entering the unknown, in mortal peril. Who knows how you're going to feel, plummeting towards the ground at terminal velocity? He knew.

In a way, he had answered too many questions that previously had comforting answers dreamt up by priests, shamen and witchdoctors. The answers of the unknown, and of the intrinsic fear of death that dwells within all mortal creatures, for the purpose of self preservation instinct, had been given by those who sought to profit from believable fairy-tales for simple minded idiots. His rejection of organised religion gave him little comfort, in an uncaring universe.

Science tried to give answers, but it could offer no meaning. Why was anything the way it was? It just was. Even science broke down at some point, demanding that those who studied it just accepted the cold hard equations that revealed themselves in the mathematical patterns that were observed in reality. However, science had nothing to say about how to adjust to the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, the insignificance of existence and the seeming finality of death.

Science demonstrably showed that there was nothing after death. After the neurons of your brain ceased in their electrical dance, you were gone. There is no soul. A person is nothing more than the quantum potential, held in a brain. Consciousness is nothing more than an illusion, an unintended consequence of the vast complexity of an organ belonging to an organism that was only intended to allow genes to replicate.

What had he done, opening Pandora's Box by studying theoretical physics, and all the applied sciences that were derived from the fundamental rules that governed the universe? It was if by pulling back the curtain, and shattering the illusion of the theatre that played out in front of his eyes, he had of course ruined the enjoyment of life.

The willing suspension of disbelief was necessary to get any enjoyment out of any theatrical presentation. For sure, the sets were made of wood, and the birds were painted onto the background and never flapped their wings. For sure, it wasn't really snowing when a stage-hand in the rafters tipped a bucket of white polystyrene balls from above, but the illusion was passable if you didn't pick it to pieces.

He had picked everything to pieces. By relentlessly asking "but why" until the question made no sense anymore, nothing made any sense anymore. When he had reached the realisation that he was nothing more than an insignificant speck in a universe that was as good as infinitely huge, and incalculably complex, it was hard to return to a simpler, happier time, when there was some mystery and joy in things. When you can reason everything from basic principles, there is no more magic in the world. When the magician's trick can be picked apart by logic and reason, he turns from an entertainer bringing joy and delight to his audience, to a con-man.

Everything had turned to shit for him. With a Midas touch, he now applied sharp reason and logic to everything he saw, and the curtain was permanently pulled back. He saw humanity's ugliness. He saw people fighting and fucking each other over, and just vast numbers of total idiots, everywhere he turned. His heart was broken. Where had the beauty and mystery all gone? What questions were there really left to ask, when it seemed like all could be answered on his own, using base principles.
Through extrapolation, he saw no more point in continuing his life, than a scientist would in repeating an experiment that has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt to yield the same results time and time again. Only a fool does the same things expecting different results, he was often fond of saying. If you keep putting garbage in, you'll keep getting garbage out.

The world had exhausted him. In love with ideas of building a utopia as a child and young man, he now accepted that there was no shortage of good ideas, but there was also no shortage of people who didn't want to see them implemented. There were too many vested interests. People had too much to lose. He couldn't fight the world anymore, with reason and logic, and arguments about the greater good. Nobody wanted the greater good. Most people just wanted to be at the top of the pyramid, king of the hill.

Perhaps that's why men climbed mountains, because for a brief moment when you stood on the summit, you could count yourself amongst just a handful of people who had faced great adversity to be higher than almost everybody else on the planet at that moment. Standing alone on the top of Mount Everest, anybody else you could see, with solid ground under their feet, would be literally beneath you. The air passengers and astronauts in the International Space Station don't count: they didn't walk there, on their own legs, and they're not standing on Earth.

That was a brave thing, to get into an aeroplane or a rocket. We have become desensitised to it, now that jet travel is commonplace, but imagine those first adventurers in space flight and aeronautics. Imagine again, how mad it is to put yourself in a position where you could fall to Earth.
So, he supposed it was apt, that he should end his life in this way: falling.

He walked up the steps, to where the bridge departed from the land, crossing the chasm below, held in space by the tensioned steel structure that towered above. He started to cross the bridge to the opposite side, that he had no intention of reaching.

In a dreamlike state now, his vision narrowed. His hearing was dulled. The fine detail of the universe around him seemed to fall away. He no longer noticed the cars driving across the bridge: their engine noise, and the rush of air as they went past. He no longer noticed the people, who were photographing themselves, talking to each other and headed to their own unknown destinations. He no longer noticed the rumble of a jet passing ahead, or the blast of a horn on a giant ship, that passed under the bridge, on the river below. He was now living his daydream, with everything playing out exactly has he had pictured it so many times before.

Reaching the centre of the bridge, he turned to the barrier. He couldn't hesitate for a single moment. If he hesitated, then doubt would enter his mind, and he would start to have thoughts: rational thoughts. He would start to re-analyse things. He would start to talk himself out of what he was going to do next. He would start to think about the "what if?"s He would start to enter some unknown situation, out of control from the destiny he had chosen. Things could easily get out of his hands. Some kindly good Samaritan could step in. The police could become involved. Psychiatrists. People to save him from himself.

He threw his leg over the barrier, and lowered his foot to the little ledge the other side without a pause. He then brought his other foot to meet the other on the ledge. He was now stood with his back to the river, facing onto the bridge, but on the outside of the barrier. He stared dead ahead for just a second, steeling himself to make the final moves.

He twisted his body 90 degrees, and swung his left foot out into space. Now, he swivelled on his other foot on the little ledge, and reached behind himself, grabbing the handrail of the barrier, with the bridge now at his back. He returned his left foot to the little ledge, with his feet now pointing outwards.

Pausing to look down, he didn't really see anything. His vision had glazed over. He knew that to focus on what was below him, and to consider the height that he was at, would be to invite a sense of peril into his mind. He had put himself into a trance-like state. All of the mental rehearsals beforehand had prepared him for this. All of the times he had pre-visualised these steps, meant that he was now following a dance routine, and his mind was quiet and calm. All he had to do was exhale, and make his final move.

His stomach rose in his chest, constricting in his neck, before he even released his grip. His body anticipated the weightlessness, before he had even stepped off the ledge. He knew he was going to jump, before he had even done it. He knew he had passed the point of no return - psychologically - before he had even physically started the process. The decision had been made in his brain, and the signals were being sent to his muscles, but he was already conscious that he had done it. He had jumped, even though his hand still gripped the barrier and his feet were still on the ledge.

Now, he was just a passenger. He felt himself let go of the handrail, and let his arms drop to his side. He felt himself squat slightly so that he could launch himself off the ledge. He felt himself straighten up, springing forward and away from the bridge. He brought his arms up, above him and pushed out his chest, forming a 'Y' shape with his body, as he cut through the air.
He didn't tumble. He fell fairly flat, with a slight incline towards the ground, as he gently rotated towards a head-first plummet to Earth.

He felt the air briefly rushing past his face, and heard the noise of wind get increasingly loud. He didn't see the ground coming towards him. It was all too quick, in the end.

Then, blackness and silence.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

 

Tags:

 

Prohibition Doesn't Work

13 min read

This is a story about dance, trance and magic plants...

Drug landscape

On the left hand side of the picture above, we see drugs that are considered to be medications. That is to say, they are considered to have some useful function in the practice of medicine. On the right hand side of the picture, we see drugs of abuse. Drugs of abuse are considered to have no useful function at all, and have been made outright illegal in all contexts.

In the middle of the picture are pills that are sometimes considered medicine and sometimes considered drugs. Probably the best example I can give you of such a dichotomy is ketamine (not pictured) which is well known as a horse tranquilliser. In fact, ketamine should be better known as a general anaesthetic, and the drug of choice for paramedics to treat pain in victims of traumatic injuries, for example in the aftermath of a road traffic accident.

Dihydrocodeine is an opiate, and opiates are analgesic. Analgesics don't cause numbness, but they do increase pain tolerance. With enough analgesic, you could saw off your own leg and feel everything, but you wouldn't care about the pain. Anelgesics are painkillers. Dihydrocodeine is a painkiller.

Tramadol is an opiate, therefore also an analgesic.

Zopiclone, Xanax, diazepam and etizolam are in the hypnotic/sedative/anxiolytic category. Zopiclone will help you have a good night of uninterrupted sleep and wake up without a drug hangover: it's an excellent sleep aid. Xanax is a fast-acting, short-lived tranquilliser: it's great for stopping panic attacks, and might be useful if you're suffering a bout of unbearable stress and anxiety or struggling to drop off to sleep. Diazepam is a long-lived tranquilliser that's good for longer term management of stress and anxiety. Etizolam is a result of prohibition: it's an imitation of diazepam that used to be legal to sell and possess as a 'research chemical'.

MDMA is the abbreviation for 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (and yes, I did just write that without having to look it up) which is more commonly known as Ecstasy, molly, mandy or generally as 'pills' in a clubbing/rave context. It's a stimulant and empathogen: it stimulates empathy. Its peak effects last 6 to 8 hours, but takes about 12 hours to wear off completely. The experiences can be very profound and long lasting. MDMA is extremely draining on the serotonin system of the brain, which can lead to a form of delayed comedown, coming days after taking the drug.

Crystal Meth is the commonly known name - thanks to the TV series Breaking Bad - of methamphetamine. It's a very powerful stimulant with effects lasting 12+ hours, and it disrupts sleep long after its desired effects have worn off. The more astute reader may notice that the final part of the chemical name of MDMA is the same as the chemical name of meth. As you might expect, there are similar effects: loss of appetite, increased energy and decreased need for sleep. However, while MDMA stimulates empathetic behaviour - hugging etc - meth tends to stimulate rather more hedonistic behaviours, such as fucking and masturbating to pornography. However, both drugs - being amphetamines - cause a man's dick to shrink to a little nubbin that's no use to anybody. Polydrug abusers might use sildenafil (Viagra) or other erectile dysfunction medications in conjunction with meth, in order to sustain a decent hard-on.

Spread out on the kitchen counter top, there's probably about £300 worth of drugs.

MDMA is extremely cheap, coming in at circa £10 per gram, which is enough for 5 very strong doses. Far cheaper than getting drunk in a pub or a bar. Pound for pound, MDMA represents excellent value.

Crystal Meth is the most expensive, coming in at about £100 per gram. Because of the crystalline form of the drug, it's far harder (although not impossible) to cut it with other things. Cocaine has an average street purity of less than 20%, because it's so tempting for every person who handles the coke in the chain, to cut it a bit and increase their profits. All white powders look the same, and numbing agents - like baby teething powder - will give the numbing effect that cocaine has. Crystal meth is generally pretty pure. It's usually smoked or injected. You do not want to mess with this stuff.

Diazepam is frighteningly cheap. 100 pills containing 10mg of diazepam each, will set you back £30 or maybe even less. The price has fallen drastically, from £1 a pill, to now 30 pence. It's important to remember that diazepam is a benzodiazepine, and the benzodiazepines are physically addictiveYou can die if you take a load of diazepam and then stop taking it. It's not something you should mess with.

Xanax, by comparison, is very expensive. Because it's convenient to be able to take it and not be spaced out the next day, it's become America's favourite tranquilliser. The Rolling Stones might have sung about Mother's Little Helpers - referring to Valium - but now the housewife's choice is Xanax. Physically addictive, blah blah blah.

Zopiclone is nice and cheap and works really well without nasty side effects. The only problem is, becoming too reliant on it for sleep. At some point, you have to stop relying on pills and alcohol to get to sleep, and learn natural ways of making sure you can drop off and get your precious 8 hours. Try blue-light filtering glasses, not having any screen time after 10pm and sleeping with your smartphone and other electronics in another room, so there's no temptation to pick them up and start looking at Facebook or whatever.

Tramadol and Dihydrocodeine will take you on the journey to opium, morphine, fentanyl and diacetylmorphine (heroin). The cheapest opiate of all is heroin, because of the simple economic law of supply and demand. People fucking love heroin. I've smoked heroin on a few occasions and I enjoyed the feeling of carefree sleepiness, but I never got a rush of euphoria like I imagine you must get when you inject. I've never injected drugs. One should be mindful that the vast majority of new heroin addicts in America started their journey with opiates prescribed by their doctor - oxycontin, for example - and then moved to heroin because oxy is prohibitively expensive. Tramadol and codeine are pretty cheap, but they're also very weak compared with morphine and heroin.

There's no need to be afraid of any of these drugs in the sense that they're not going to leap down your throat and cause you to instantly become an addict who's prepared to murder your entire family for 50 pence, so you can have one more tiny little hit. These drugs are not like Venomous Agent X, which can kill you almost instantly if you absorb even the tiniest amount through your skin. You do not want to touch a pin head sized amount of VX nerve agent, but you can safely handle Ecstasy pills, shards of ice (crystal meth) and all of the other drugs pictured, and you will come to no harm at all.

Taking these drugs once, or even twice or three times, is very unlikely to result in addiction. You may enjoy the sensations; the experience, but it's quite possible that you might find the effects of the drug to be extremely unpleasant. Certainly, MDMA can be very intense and the intoxication of tramadol can be alarming. Interestingly, the calming effect of the benzodiazepines is often the best treatment for a 'bad trip' that you very much want to end. Sadly, there's no 'off' switch for most drugs. It's like when you've had too much to drink and you're throwing up: you wish that you could stop feeling so sick and that the room would stop spinning, but there's no instant fix.

To have this vast array of drugs just lying around, seems to invite disaster and is a risk in terms of the illegality of possessing so many controlled substances. Are you going to ring the police? Do you think I should go to jail? Is it right to ruin my life, because we should follow the law to the letter, even though the law is an ass?

To address the second concern: doesn't this invite disaster? I've had enough disasters in my life. I've reached a point where I'm rather sick of the drama and the near-death experiences. I'm rather sick of the paranoia and the comedowns. The drugs don't even work any more, because my brain has become so used to powerful narcotics. My brain is literally saying "you've been doing this shit for far too long". I'm almost at the point where drugs bore me.

Right now, I need tramadol, because I'm in a lot of pain because of my leg injury. The zopiclone will be handy when I run out of pregablin, which I'm using to sleep through my pain and discomfort. Having Xanax and diazepam lying around is never a terrible thing. At least benzos are a lot cheaper than a bottle of wine or two, a lot less fattening and a lot less liver damaging. It is a slippery slope though, and it is easier to get hooked on benzos than it is to become an alcoholic, because there isn't really a hangover per se, with the benzos.

The MDMA and the meth should probably get flushed down the loo. I'm too old to go clubbing/raving, and the crystal meth tips me straight into a hypomanic episode and turns me into a total sex maniac.

The dihydrocodeine will gather dust in the medicine cabinet, as a strong painkiller, in case I ever have a nasty injury again and the doctors are dicks about giving me prescription drugs to relieve pain. I do think that doctors in America have been foolishly over-prescribing opiate painkillers, because they believed the marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

I'm sure you think that this cornucopia of chemicals is crazy. I'm sure you think this deluge of drugs is deranged. I'm sure you think this mass of medications is madness.

However, it's fucking hassle having to get a doctor's appointment, wait for the allotted date and time, and then persuade the doctor to give you what you want and need. There's every chance that the doctor may end up sending you away empty handed. Far better to have your own well-stocked pharmacy cupboard, and have whatever you need whenever you need it.

Of course, the nanny state is there to protect us from ourselves, which is why we arrest people who are about to climb mountains, don't we?

Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has created highly efficient black markets. Prohibition has failed spectacularly, because it has needlessly ruined lives of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Prohibition has failed, because the middle classes take just as many drugs as poor people, but the rich middle-class people are very rarely prosecuted. Prohibition has failed, because drugs are just as widely available as ever, and the main beneficiaries are corrupt customs, corrupt police and organised crime gangs. Prohibition has failed, because it fails to acknowledge the inescapable fact that people are always going to make, sell, buy and take drugs, no matter what the law says. Prohibition has failed, because it makes people paranoid and exacerbates mental health problems. Prohibition has failed because it directs money that could be used to help the tiny proportion of people who struggle with addiction, instead of using vast amounts of resources to persecute ordinary law-abiding citizens, who just want to smoke a bit of dope or take a pill when they go clubbing on a Saturday night.

You know prohibition has failed spectacularly, when the government makes mushrooms - which grow naturally in the ground all over the UK - a Class A drug, in the same category as crack cocaine and heroin. Are you fucking nuts? Are you fucking telling me that we should stuff our prisons full of people who picked a fucking mushroom in a fucking field?

Imagine this conversation:

Prisoner A: What you been nicked for?

Prisoner B: Murder. What about you?

Prisoner A: I picked a mushroom

That is quite genuinely the situation that the government introduced into UK law. I'm being quite serious here. Mushrooms are considered just as bad as crack cocaine. I wonder what the government were smoking when they made that insane decision.

As we know, when a government bans a drug, then clever chemists create another one that's almost identical. In America, they have a law that makes analogues illegal, so only whole new classes of drugs can get around their laws. All kinds of obscure chemicals - legal highs - burst onto the scene thanks to America's attempts to get clever with prohibition.

The UK government has gone a stage further and attempted to ban anything that has a psychoactive effect. That means that we're all 'in possession' of illegal drugs, because our bodies are stuffed full of chemicals that are psychoactive. It also means that drugs will simply get sold in 'kit' form: mix the ingredients at home and hey presto! There's your drug of choice. People will always find a way around the stupidity of prohibition.

The fear that has been stoked up by these terrible prohibition policies, has created a squeamishness about being able to have honest open conversations about drug taking. We should be well informed, not ignorant. We shouldn't be paranoid about being persecuted by the authorities. You have to be fairly brave to stick your head above the parapet. A lot of corrupt officials make a lot of money, through the ongoing boom times of the black market. There is an insatiable demand for drugs - and there always will be - which is why there is so much resistance to making drug taking into something that's safer, regulated, quality controlled and a well understood problem, rather than something cloaked in secrecy and hampered by stigma.

I've had problems with addiction in the past, but it makes me a stronger more well-rounded person, to have been through that ordeal and to know what difficulties are faced by people who become ensnared in the traps that have been set for them: draining their bank balance, destroying their health, and driving them to criminality. Why can't I talk openly about my experiences? Why do I have to be anonymous, hiding away with other 'dirty' junkies, in church halls where we self-flagellate for our 'sins' and hang our heads in shame.

Obviously I've had enough of prohibition, but I've had enough of being stigmatised and shamed into silence and anonymity too. I've had enough of people's wilful ignorance, when it comes to drugs and the lives of drug users. I've had enough of ridiculous horror stories and misinformation.

Perhaps you didn't even read this far, if you're the kind of person whose mind I'm trying to open, but perhaps you did, because on the face of it I'm an educated middle-class white professional man, working for prestigious companies in seemingly important roles. You can't quite imagine me smoking heroin, can you?

I'm challenging your preconceived ideas. I'm making you question what you thought you knew, and what you thought was obvious and without exception.

 

Tags:

 

A Brief History Lesson

19 min read

This is a story about conflict...

Partition

Israelis, are you fucking colour blind? The United Nations partitioned Palestine, to create the state of Israel in 1947. Stay behind your fucking border and stop killing Palestinian children with your American planes, bombs, guns, tanks, helicopters and every other piece of advanced military hardware that you have, to terrorise poor people who only have sticks and stones to defend themselves.

Israel, you have nuclear weapons, so the Arab countries that are in your proximity have a right to have them too, to defend themselves. You can't continue to bully and fuck over the poor nations in the region. You've got your territory. It's time to stop being such genocidal maniacs and total arseholes. You're the fucking reason why we have terrorists, along with your American sponsors.

Quit your fucking boo-hoo-hoo about the holocaust, and crying "ANTI SEMITE" whenever the international community criticises your atrocious violation of United Nation resolutions and your brutal assault on your impoverished neighbours. The Jews aren't the only group to have suffered a genocide. Check your fucking history books and have some fucking humility. Ever heard of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Genocide? Quit your fucking self-pity and stay the fuck within your borders. Get the fuck out of Palestine and stop killing children.

Map

Can you see lines on a map? Can you read? Does the name of that place you're bombing or invading have the name of your country on it, or somebody else's? Why do you think that these places have existed for long enough to have borders and names? Do you think it's because some kind of peace and stability in the region has been achieved: an uneasy truce?

So, Saddam probably gassed some Kurds. So fucking what? Boo fucking hoo. Sadam kept a lid on the Sunni vs. Shia bullshit, and kept the fucking Kurds at bay. The goddam Kurds are the thorn in everybody's side: just ask the Turkish. They're like those fucking nutjobs who think Cornwall should be independent from the UK. Bunch of nutters.

The Assads aren't exactly chuffed about American troops occupying the Middle East. How would you like it if some bunch of trigger-happy jumped up twats decided to live in part of your fucking house? Hafaz el-Assad was quite successful at getting the Americans to fuck off. Bashar al-Assad was doing quite a decent job of building a modern Syria, until neighbouring Iraq got illegally invaded and the whole fucking region was thrown into chaos, allowing 'rebels' to have a stab at trying to grab power through violence and coup attempts.

You can dig up dirt on any government, which is trying to maintain stability and control. The longer the region is left to stabilise, the less brutal the government has to be. I'm no fan of the Tory regime, with the evil dictator Theresa May. I would be locked up as a political prisoner - persecuted - for my right to rebel against the government by getting a gun and trying to take power by force. How can people be expected to live under such appalling conditions?

Afghan

Afghanistan. Ever heard of this shitting place? I'm sure you've heard tales about how easy it's been for countries to take it over and control it. There's lots of history about how the British found it really easy there, and definitely didn't get totally massacred. Then the Russians were there and they had an absolutely wonderful time and didn't have any problems at all. Finally, the Americans decided that they'd have a go at this super soft target, because of the simplicity of the task of conquering this country with a long history of being easily dominated by massive military might. Yes, history has definitely shown that massive numbers of British, Russian and American troops, with all their military hardware, can easily control this strategically important country on the Silk Road. Nobody ever got their arses kicked... presumably. I'd need to check the history books, but I'm sure that it's written down somewhere that this is a totally cool place to invade.

You want to move goods from East to West, but there are only so many passes through the mountains where it's possible to get truckloads of whatever it is you're transporting, to be traded in the Middle East and Europe via Afghanistan. Maybe you've heard of the Khyber Pass and the Silk Road. It's pretty strategically important to have land-based supply chains.

Afghanistan looks innocuous enough on the map, but it's actually super important for anybody who doesn't want to be forced to deal with the Ruskies in the North.

Libya map

You know sometimes you hear the name of a country and you think "I really want to bomb that country, just because I don't like the name". Sometimes you think "god damn, there's a country with some really nice infrastructure and a thriving economy... we really should bomb the shit out of some of their stuff". That's what Americans think when they hear Libya.

In 1986, three people were killed in a nightclub bombing in Berlin - which is in Germany by the way - so the obvious response was for the Americans, who live nearly 5,000 miles away from Germany and over 6,000 miles from Libya, was to bomb the shit out of the Libyans.

Iran map

What about this poor bastard, Iran? The country that the US just won't leave the fuck alone. Oil rich and with a highly educated population, Iran has managed to get close to being able to defend itself, despite the US's attempt to use the monarchy to control the population for their own advantage. When the Shah started backing his Arab allies, especially as part of OPEC, the West had no more use for this puppet, and he was driven into exile. Ever since then, endless boo-hoo-hoo propaganda bullshit about how awful it is that now rich twats in Tehran have to act with some cultural sympathy, is fed to us in the West, while internally the country prospers as best as it can, despite bullshit sanctions designed to stop Iran from being able to stand up to the bullying imperialists, and be a strong Arab ally in the Middle East, to counter the disproportionate force of the genocidal Israelis.

In short: the world is a safer place if Iran gets nukes, because then the Israelis might have to stop acting like such utter cunts. If the Yanks and the Israelis stop pissing off the Arabs and destabilising the whole of the Middle East, then terrorism goes away and we all have a nice peaceful co-existence.

Basically, history since the end of World War II pretty much goes like this:

  • State of Israel created so that persecuted jews have somewhere to call home
  • Israelis start being right bunch of cunts, with American weapons, and pissing off all their fucking neighbours and threatening them with nukes and stuff
  • Invasion of Middle East and illegal occupation of countries, pisses of some really poor people
  • Americans and American-armed Israelis start killing Arab children and generally acting like fucking Nazis
  • Americans jam their thumb up the arse of the Arabs and smear pooh all over their face, just to piss them off
  • Israelis keep leaving human faeces on the doorstep of every Arab home
  • Eventually, the incredibly poor people who don't have any weapons start chucking stones at the occupying forces, with their body armour and tanks.
  • The Yanks and the Israelis start ethnic cleansing, blowing people and shit up and generally pursuing a policy of terrorism.
  • A tiny handful of extremely pissed off Arabs blow up some planes, nightclubs, army barracks and other targets, in attempt to get the invading and occupying forces to fuck off out of their countries.
  • The Israelis decide to invade and occupy parts of Egypt and Syria, just because they fucking can, because the Americans are backing them and they've got far superior weaponry. They even threaten to nuke the Egyptians.
  • The Americans invade and blow everything to fucking pieces and completely destroy all peace and stability in the region.
  • Some US government shit that shouldn't have even been in Libya gets attacked. Big deal. Get the fuck out of Benghazi - check the map... it's in Libya, not the United States.
  • The Americans blow up a convoy allowing the Libyan leader to be lynched, after already destabilising the whole place by selling guns to both sides.
  • "Regime change" is a synonym for "unleashing an unbelievably awful power struggle".
  • All the fucking nutters that Gadaffi, Saddam and the Assads kept under control, start fucking up the peace and stability of the region.
  • Iran is aggresively and relentlessly fucked over, because they're trying to defend themselves from American-sponsored Israeli aggression.
  • The policy of supporting the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and Golem Heights in Syria, allowing the Israelis to threaten the Middle East with their nukes and generally act like total Nazis, and whinge about anti-Semitism, while committing atrocities, continues to aggravate the Arab world
  • Even a white middle-class British man who was born in Wales and grew up in Oxford, can sympathise with how fucked over the whole Arab world is by the Americans and the Israelis, and can understand why they would fight back by throwing stones or even suicide bombing
  • Every fucking nutjob thinks their particular ethnic region should be an independent country, even though they couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, let alone agree how to divide the land and self-govern. The Kurds attempt to fuck Turkey and Syria up. Various religious nutters try to enforce their bullshit patriarchy on whole developed countries, because they're not getting enough sex.

You could say it's all about oil, but in actual fact, all those petrodollars had built some amazing infrastructure and raised living standards exceptionally high in the Middle East. The middle classes were thriving. Educational standards were amazing. The 'developing' world was threatening to become a bit too developed. The Yanks decided to bomb and destabilise, invade and occupy, until the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf states were totally fucked, and collapsed into internecine conflict.

In 1973, the world got a very clear message from the Arab world: don't fuck with us, because we can turn off the oil taps. The Arab world asked to be treated with some fucking respect, because they wield some power too. The Yanks didn't like that very much.

The Brits had done a decent enough job of chopping up the Middle East and installing some rulers who would give the region some stability. OK, so it was stability achieved by machine-gunning large numbers of religious nutjobs, like the pesky Wahhabists. OK, so a few militant Kurds needed to be liquidated. Call it collateral damage. You can't argue with the fact that it was at least peaceful after World War II, thanks to the Brits understanding the history and culture of the region very well.

The Americans are a bit stupid when it comes to the definition of terrorism. When the IRA would blow up a pub or a hotel or something like that, that wasn't terrorism. When the Israelis would terrorise all the impoverished people in the Middle East using American high-tech weaponry, that wasn't terrorism.

Israel and the Americans got annoyed that somebody threw a rock at them that harmlessly bounced off their kevlar body armour, so they decided they'd better take over the management of the Middle East, by bombing the shit out of everybody, killing civilians without giving a fuck and getting rid of 'regimes' that kept the whole region stable.

Obviously, it pissed the Yanks off that they were asked nicely to respect other countries and treat them with decency. Obviously, it pissed the Yanks off that they couldn't just take everything they wanted, whenever they wanted it, while the whole world starves in squalor and they live in opulent luxury. After the indignity of having to pay slightly more for their petrol in the 1970s, they decided to destroy an entire continent's living standards and directly and indirectly kill millions of people, just because they wanted to feel like a "big guy".

More of the history of the Middle East and North Africa is about the Brits and the Americans being able to sell weapons and supply the Israeli military, than it is about oil. Oil only enters the equation, because the cartel of OPEC pisses off arrogant Americans, who think they're the boss of everything and need not show an ounce of respect or diplomacy towards anybody.

So, if you were wondering why we have to suffer Nazis like Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and other truly deplorable twats who threaten to destroy the peaceful world we've been able to enjoy since the last world war, then the answer is: because America has totally screwed up the Middle East, with Britain tagging along for the ride, even though us Brits actually stabilised the region in the first place.

There's so much disproportionate revenge from the United States, using weapons of mass destruction. You kill one of their soldiers who's invaded your country and is occupying your land, and they'll drop an atomic bomb on hundreds of thousands of your civilians. That's the kind of bloodthirsty evil shit of a country that we're dealing with: a bully that's armed to the teeth, and will inflict horrible death and suffering using any excuse.

If you want to know why we can't all get along, why we have all those security checks at airports and we're scared of Arab-looking men, it's because we fucking deserve a good kicking. We've been part of America's global campaign to be an absolute dick to everybody with a brown face, kill mind-boggling numbers of innocent people and cause unimaginable suffering, in the interests of imperial arrogance.

How much, exactly, do you want to have? The 1950s sounded pretty awesome, and the 1960s too. Why not stop there? Why go marauding all over the globe, fucking up other people's shit? Why on earth does America need to flex its muscles and bully impoverished nations?

The Brits seemed to develop a smidgen of humility, and stop pissing the Irish off so much. Ireland is Ireland. The British invasion and occupation of Ireland is something we should apologise for and be ashamed of. You can see what a bad attitude the Brits had, when you look at the Argentinian Malvinas, which fucking arrogant Brits seem to think are somewhere off the coast of Cornwall and are called the Falkland Islands.

Empires are one thing, but fucking with the stability of a region is quite another. The American quest to fuck up Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and just about anywhere else that's peaceful and prosperous, but doesn't buy much Coca Cola and McDonalds, is the reason why we have these 'national security threats'.

So, 52% of the UK population are intent on fucking up the unity of a peaceful Europe, because they don't like immigrants and refugees, and they're fucking paranoid about terrorism. But think about why people might want to hurt us, or might want to come here: because their home countries got fucked up by us, as part of an American-led campaign to keep the poor in their place. Americans can't feel prosperous unless they're making somebody else suffer.

A billionaire reality-TV star, who's completely useless as a businessman, having been bankrupt many times, has now been elected leader of the 'free' world, by being a racist; a Nazi. How did this come about? What kind of world has resulted in building massive walls, revoking visas and banning visitors from certain countries? How on earth does any of this not sound like we're just repeating the mistakes that led to world wars?

This is not democracy in action. This is awful. The marginal Brexit victory, and the technical victory of Donald Trump - he got less votes overall - does not show the will of the people. It shows the disgusting attitude of the people. These weren't votes... this was an opinion poll that showed that there are a terrifying number of racist cunts in our midst.

Democracy and capitalism are not only failing, but they're giving credibility to awful things. There's no way I can respect a vote to abuse immigrants. There's no way I can respect the portion of the electorate who want to do awful things to their fellow human beings.

Try to remember that the Nazis didn't take their power by force. Try to remember that we all have an individual responsibility to vote with our conscience, not with malice, xenophobia and bigotry. It takes effort to be kind and humanitarian, but we have a responsibility to act with decency; both collectively and individually. It's a terrible thing when a gang of thugs starts throwing their weight around, and thinking it's OK because there's safety in numbers.

We may well find that democracy is completely flawed, when people turn nasty, because they're protected by the anonymity of the voting booth. Imagine if there was a permanent public record of how you voted: you could be held jointly responsible for the damage, suffering and deaths you caused through your nastiness, thinking that you could get away with it. Imagine being prosecuted for a crime against humanity, because you voted for something so evil and selfish, that was harmful to so many people.

It's our job as citizens of democratic countries to curb the warmongering ambitions of our political leaders. Every prime minister and president wants a war to call their own. It's our collective responsibility to muzzle these dangerous dogs. These wars should not be fought in our name, even if some of us are stupid enough to be swayed by the propaganda.

Take another look at recent history, and try to look at it without the Hollywood bullshit, that tells us the world is made up of good guys and bad guys. Why don't you find out what it was really like to live in Iraq under Saddam, Syria under Assad, or Libya under Gadaffi, before these places were torn to shreds by forces unleashed when America and a few allies - like us Brits - attacked, invaded, bombed, drone struck and generally destabilised.

Take another look at why the 'bad guys' - who are far fewer than you might imagine - want to 'kill us'. Think about motive. Think about what we might have done to other countries, that makes our own countries a target for retaliation. Think about what injustices we perpetuate, oppressing people. What can these unarmed victims do, in the face of these invading armies who have all the latest high-tech weaponry? 

Re-tell the story, without bleating on about the holocaust - it was a long time ago, by the way - and painting this demonic figure of 'radical islam'. Let's hear the story about illegal invasions, occupation, aggression of militarily superior nations against impoverished nations with limited ability to defend themselves. Let's hear the story about the bullies beating up anybody who's advancing and improving: keeping things unfair; unbalanced.

If having nukes means that you act with kindness, restraint and generosity, then maybe it's OK if only a few nations have them: countries that set a good example for the rest. However, having nukes seems to make a country act with aggression, arrogance, cruelty and a thirst for world domination. Therefore, the only solution is for everybody to have nukes, so nobody gets bullied. The other solution would be for every nation to give up all their nukes, but that ain't ever going to happen.

Anyway, everything looks like it's about to blow. Everywhere I look, things are fucked. Greece and Italy are in big economic trouble. Turkey is so strategically important, but also in the middle of a massive power struggle. Iran is exercising its rights as a sovereign country to develop weapons to defend itself, but America doesn't need much of an excuse to start wars and fuck countries up. Iran's probably one of the last stable proper Islamic republic democracies in the Middle East: the Iranians voted "Yankee go home". As the weather warms up, the huge movement of migrants will start again. The French are pissed off with having everybody trying to get to the UK, fucking up Calais. A wave of right-wing Nazism threatens a clean-sweep across the globe: Le Pen and Wilders joining the likes of Farage and Trump, in a world that thinks that racism is suddenly OK now. All it's going to take is one trigger event - a stock market slump, economic calamity or a major act of terrorism - and a massive domino effect will be triggered. Take a look in your history books and tell me what's happened before when people feel poor and insecure. Fuck the stats: the reality is that most families are just about managing, and it's fucking stressful. Something's gotta give.

Debt levels are unsustainable, suicides are soaring. All the omens are very bad. There's definitely a whiff of the 1930s about what's going on, with hints of another Great Depression and the rise of fucking insane nationalist Nazi parties. It all makes me feel rather nauseated.

I reckon we've probably got one chance to step back from the brink of disaster, but nobody seems to be capable of saying "ooops, I was wrong. I made a mistake". Nobody seems to want to say "look, I know that so-and-so won on a technicality, but really, I don't think our democracy should be run by a bunch of racist cunts".

Everybody's too busy just about managing to be able to understand what's really going on and act with some human decency, rather than having our emotional buttons pushed by the very people who have exploited us and pushed us to breaking point.

Why are you not more worried about history judging you to be one of the bad guys, than taking a clear stand and fighting for what's obviously the right humanitarian, compassionate thing to do?

 

Tags:

 

One Week in Hospital

11 min read

This is a story about affordable care...

Get well cards

I've been able to roll the dice a few times - following my dreams and chasing my ambitions - because of progressive liberal socialist policies put in place by the Labour government of 1945: most notably, the creation of the National Health Service.

I chose to leave an extremely well remunerated job with an American investment bank, with amazing private medical insurance and a brilliant team of occupational health doctors. That US-style of healthcare certainly gave me access to the very best treatment, whenever I needed it, but it was part of a "golden handcuffs" deal: a job that was so much better than anything I could get anywhere else, that I had to be insane to quit.

Life is a balancing act. You can have loads of money, but no time to spend it. You can have loads of time, but no money. You can have job security, but you'll be bored and constrained. You can have freedom and be your own boss, but you will carry all the risks and responsibilities. You have to choose what works for you.

While one friend has parked his tech startup dreams and has taken a salaried job, another couple of friends have just sold their tech startup. In the space of 6 years, I made myself sick with stress, trying to run my own tech startup; I went back to my old job at the American investment bank and stayed sick until I started rebuilding my life in London as an IT consultant. In the space of those 6 years, my friends had countless sleepless nights and worked relentlessly to build their startups to the point where they were worthy of investment or acquisition. In the space of those 6 years, my friend who originally introduced me to the tech startup ecosystem, built a bunch of cool tech and very gracefully pivoted into a job that really suits him, working for a company he really admires. In the space of those 6 years, my friends from the technology accelerator program we attended in Cambridge, raised millions of pounds of investment and sold their company to a tech giant.

Friends went to Silicon Valley to follow their tech dreams. One friend had to break up with his girlfriend. Another had to move his young children away from the family support network, and live with the risk that the USA would reject him and his family's request for residency. Imagine if I had moved to America. How would I ever afford the medical bills, when things have gone badly wrong? I would have been bankrupted many many times over!

Nobody's keeping a seat warm for me in a cushy job because I went to a posh school and a prestigious university. I have no trust fund or family money behind me. Running out of money has meant homelessness. Starting a business had to be profitable from day one.

There's just no way that I would have been able to pursue the opportunities that I have, without the National Health Service. In theory the UK and US are lands of opportunity, where anybody can start a business and become rich and successful. In practice, it's almost impossible unless you're already quite wealthy. The consequences of failure are just too much to bear, for most people.

My current business is consultancy. If I'm sick, I don't get paid. If I don't have a client, I don't get paid. However, I've calculated that I only need to work a few months of the year to earn the same as as the 'secure' job I gave up. It's a calculated risk. I might end up not being able to pay my tax bill. I might end up not being able to pay my rent. But, when things go well, they go really well. The odds are in my favour: if I can just get two or three contracts in a row, not get sick, maybe have some projects that run longer than expected, then I'll suddenly be way way way ahead of where I would be if I'd just plodded along with the golden handcuffs on.

I sat awkwardly on my leg and it went numb. My foot became swollen. My leg swelled up all the way above my knee. My kidneys shut down. I was admitted to hospital and put on dialysis. I haven't had any income since September. Surely this is why it's best to have a nice 'secure' job?

I've been stressed and depressed about losing a lucrative consultancy contract. I was literally about to start working again when I got sick. Contractually, I have no rights: the company could just award the contract to somebody else. I was going to have to start the search for a client all over again, meaning yet more loss of earnings.

Here I am in hospital. I've been here for a week.

I was seen by a doctor within an hour of arriving at Accident & Emergency. I've had two private rooms with amazing views over central London. I've been seen by top consultants, surgeons, registrars, nurses, phlebotomists, physiotherapists. I've been wheeled around by porters and served meals by catering staff. My bedding has been changed and I've been given clean gowns and towels. Numerous medications have been dispensed. I've had ultrasound scans and my blood has been scrubbed clean and drained of dangerous toxins by dialysis machines. My blood pressure, blood oxygen, pulse and body temperature has been monitored around the clock. Even the amount I drink and piss is meticulously recorded by the staff on the ward.

Nobody has ever asked me for my medical insurance details, credit card or discussed how I plan to pay for all this world-class treatment. Nobody is going to send me a bill when this is over.

As luck would have it, my client has decided they will wait for me to get better, so I can start my contract. Imagine if I wasn't able to take that contract in the first place, because of the risk of getting sick. Imagine if all the profit from my contract got wiped out by a humongous medical bill. How is anybody supposedly 'free' to become rich and successful, if they can't predict when they're going to get sick and how much it's going to cost?

This story is really a re-telling of three stories. The story of the friend who inspired me to follow my startup dreams and who inspired me to write about the importance of the National Health Service for social mobility; the story of the friend who succeeded, after 6 years of sacrifice, blood, sweat and tears, with countless sleepless nights and untold stress; and the story of me, who couldn't handle the chafing of the golden handcuffs, and got unwell because of the combined stress of running a tech startup with an unsupportive partner and unsupportive family.

I'm now lucky enough to have reconnected with old London friends, repaired friendships that were damaged or neglected when I got unwell, made new friends who are incredibly loyal and caring, and I have found an amazing lady who makes me feel loved to bits and completely accepted for who I am. Her family have welcomed me with open arms and most of the get well cards I've been getting have been from her family, along with offers of help to get me back on my feet.

While the welfare state is deeply flawed and it's an impossible task to get the social support that you need, as a single man whose life is imploding, the National Health Service has been the glue between the pooh, holding my shit together and just about keeping me alive. When you add in an amazing girlfriend, her family, loyal and caring friends and the rest of the social fabric that a person needs, you finally stand a chance of getting your life back.

I read with great dismay that the US Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) is being repealed. What the actual fuck, America?

If you wanted a case study for a society that's as close to perfect as you're going to get in an imperfect world, we should look to London. 300 different languages are spoken in London schools. The tower blocks of Canary Wharf sit in a London borough that's 46% Muslim. There are cycle superhighways, driverless trains, an underground railway that moves 5 million people every day. The Metropolitan Police are humble public servants, who protect the vulnerable and take people to hospital, involve social services and mental health crisis teams, rather than flashing their badges and drawing their weapons. The whole city exudes tolerance, inclusion and diversity: it's in London's DNA.

You might mistakenly believe that London is a city for the rich, but it's not: because of the National Health Service. The NHS employs 1.7 million people, and funded properly - like it is in London - it shows that socialism and multiculturalism can be made to work. The last piece of Britain's nationalised socialist infrastructure, not to be wrecked by the greed of capitalism; the NHS is a fly in the ointment for the Tories who want to sell everything off for private profits and damn the lives of British citizens.

I want the railways re-nationalised. I want the energy companies re-nationalised. Most of what comes out of Westminster is good for London but bad for the rest of the UK. What we're seeing is one rule for Londoners and another for everybody else. London gets state-owned public transport where 100% of the profits are re-invested in infrastructure. London has a remarkable set of public services that create jobs as well as keeping the residents well looked after. Socialism for London and capitalism for the rest of the UK... that sucks.

In my week in hospital, I've realised that London truly offers an enticing vision of a near-utopian society, so unlike the ugly one pictured in the dark minds of the populists. London is a European city, connected by train to Paris and Brussels. London is a mercantile centre, where East literally meets West at the Greenwich meridian line: the perfect time zone to deal with both Japan and San Francisco in the same business day. The peaceful co-existence of so many cultures in one crowded city is a modern miracle. I live here because of the immigrants, not in spite of the immigrants. London simply wouldn't function without its chaotic diversity.

Getting used to living in London is hard. The congestion is hard. The clash of cultures is hard. Seeing people who look and act differently is hard. Processing the humbling fact that the world is huge and complex is hard. Realising that you're in the racial minority is hard. Living a small, neat, efficient, considerate, reserved life, where you quietly observe and ask questions, as you discover your fellow Londoners have had incredible journeys, arriving here and building their lives, is hard. It's hard damn work, letting all this chaos and complexity assault your senses.

I don't want private hospitals, private health insurance, medical bills, policemen carrying guns, offensive foreign policy and an economy that offers no hope of escape from the socio-economic background you're born into, except for a tiny handful of sports stars, lottery winners, rappers and criminals. I don't want private prisons stuffed full of black people being used as slaves. I don't want a world of "us" and "them" with torture, pre-emptive strikes, invasion of sovereign nations, regime change and covert ops to destabilise other nations.

In a week in hospital, I've benefitted from everything that's great about Great Britain in the European Union and London's huge immigrant population. Only a tiny handful of the staff who've saved my life were born in Britain. Only a tiny fraction of the medical supplies and equipment were designed, tested and manufactured in the UK. I'm a stone's throw away from mosques where alleged firebrand hate preachers are supposedly plotting against the British people. Whitechapel Market is crowded with women wearing full-face veils, but I'm just another Londoner to them. If there's an exemplary organisation to demonstrate multicultural society working perfectly, doing life-saving work, it's the National Health Service.

Affordable care not only saved my life, but it's keeping my hopes and dreams alive, so I don't have to take a zero-hours contract McJob flipping burgers, just in case I get sick.

 

Tags:

 

I Want to Break Free

5 min read

This is a story about parasites...

Trapped animal

Everybody has to work, right? There's a social contract that we implicitly signed up for when our parents had sex on our behalf. In return for our parents' selfless act of having unprotected sex, we agreed - before we were born - to a life of wage slavery and paying bills.

The other way of looking at things is to ask what would happen if you didn't work.

A big hole in the ground was dug to make the foundations of your house, where you live. You dug that hole, right? What about the concrete that was used to fill the foundations? I presume you slaked the lime to make the mortar and you dug the aggregates to make the mix that was poured into the hole you dug. I mean, that's only logical.

Bricks were laid to make the walls of your house. I presume you collected the clay, shaped it into bricks and baked them in a kiln that you made. That's only logical.

Joists and beams were needed to make the floors you walk on and the roof that keeps you dry. I presume you chopped down those trees and milled them into the straight timbers that were needed. That's only logical.

Slates were hung to make your roof able to divert rain into your guttering. I presume you quarried those slates. That's only logical.

Nails were forged to join the wood. I presume you collected the iron ore and blacksmithed the nails. That's only logical.

Sand was melted in a furnace at incredibly hot temperatures to make the glass that glazes your windows. I presume you gathered that sand and kept the fires burning in order to make those panes of glass that adorn your house. I mean, that's only logical.

Meat, vegetables, kernels, pulses, herbs, salt, oils and other condiments were combined to make delicious meals to keep you going while you were doing all that hard work. I presume you farmed the edible things to make those meals. You harvested the corn, milled the flour and baked the bread. That's only logical.

Water was raised from the underground aquifers. I presume you dug the wells and winched up the buckets of water. That's only logical.

How are you doing so far? You can say that everything you've benefitted from has been a product of your own hard labour, right? You can show directly how your contribution to society means that you deserve your slice of the pie, of course. That's only logical.

"Actually, I'm much more important than that."

Right, let's test that hypothesis.

What do you actually do?

"I go to meetings in a big fancy office."

Alright. Let's go.

Coffee beans were picked, dried and roasted. The coffee was ground and infused in boling water. I presume you were there in South America, harvesting the crop. I presume you roasted your beans and ground them yourself. That's only logical.

Spreadsheet software was crafted from binary ones and zeros. Microsoft Excel was created from nothing, using computer programming. I presume you wrote Excel. That's only logical.

Companies were incorporated with memorandums and articles of association. Laws were made. Everything was written down on paper. Paper was made from wood pulp. Ink is made from pigments and dyes. I presume you made the paper and the ink, and you wrote down all the laws that govern your company. That's only logical.

Cotton was picked. Thread was made. Thread was woven into garments. Fancy shirts and suits of clothes were made so that the people in the offices could look powerful and important at their meetings, sipping coffee and putting made-up numbers into spreadsheets. You made all those things. That's only logical.

How are you doing now? Are you with me so far?

"You just don't understand. I paid for all those things."

Oh you PAID did you? Let's see how that stands up to cross-examination.

Gold was panned or mined out of the ground. Gold was melted down into bars and coins that were assay marked to vouch for purity and weight. I presume you were down in the mines with your pickaxe, or in the river bed with your panning bowl, plucking gold nuggets out of the ground. I mean, that's only logical.

Banknotes were printed and coins were minted. Banks held ledgers and reserves. Payments were recorded. I presume you made the currency that was hard to counterfeit. I presume you created the payment systems that were hard to defraud. That's only logical.

How about now? Keeping up?

"For fuck's sake. You just don't get it. I did my job and I got my salary. That's how I paid for my house and my food."

Oh, right. I get it now. What exactly did you do for your job? What exactly was your contribution?

 

Tags:

 

Get Your Calculator Out

11 min read

This is a story about suffocation...

3D Printing

I was just watching a documentary about the burning oil wells in Kuwait, and I wondered how many barrels of oil we get through in any given day. Turns out it's about 95 million.

Here's where the maths part happens.

So, we're burning our way through 95,000,000 barrels of crude oil, every single day. But how much crude oil is there in a barrel?

In the USA, there are 42 US gallons in a barrel of oil. Given that most figures are stated in US measures, this will do as an equivalent figure for our maths, even though the actual volume of oil in a physical barrel can vary by country.

So, how much petrol or diesel is produced from a barrel of crude oil? Well, refineries generally produce 12 gallons of diesel and 19 gallons of petrol, as they 'crack' the crude oil. That is to say, the refinery does a fractional distillation of the crude oil, and different products will 'boil' off at different temperatures. 31 out of 42 gallons in one barrel of crude oil will go to produce petrol and diesel.

95 million barrels of crude oil multiplied by 12 gallons, produces 1,140,000,000 gallons of diesel.

95 million barrels of crude oil multiplied by 19 gallons, produces 1,805,000,000 gallons of petrol.

How much carbon dioxide - CO2 - is released when you burn a gallon of petrol or diesel? Well, for petrol that's 19.24 pounds, and for diesel that's 19.91 pounds. Therefore, petrol is clearly the more polluting fossil fuel, because even though it releases slightly less CO2 more of it can be produced from the crude oil.

So, the amount of CO2 being belched out each day by petrol cars and motorbikes is 34,728,200,000 pounds. Let's convert that to kilograms, because I actually prefer metric. That's 15,752,446,543 kilograms of CO2 being emitted by petrol alone, on one day.

The amount of CO2 coming out of the exhaust pipes of diesel trucks, taxis, busses, trains, boats and everything else that runs on diesel, such as industrial plant, comes to 22,697,400,000 pounds. Again, let's convert that to kilograms. That's 10,295,367,459 kilograms of CO2 from diesel engines, on any given day.

Right, now let's add those two figures together.

26,047,814,002 kilograms of CO2 being chucked out into the atmosphere by internal combustion engines, every single day.

Obviously, we don't just use our cars and trucks on one day. Let's have a look at what happens when we do this for a whole year: 365 days.

9,507,452,110,730 kilograms of CO2 is being produced per year. Ouch! That's 9.5 billion metric tons.

For comparison, The Empire State Building weighs just 331,000 tonnes. The Hoover Dam weighs 6 million tonnes. Therefore the CO2 emitted in a single year weighs 1,583 times more than The Hoover Dam. Damn!

But what about a really heavy thing. How much does the entire atmosphere weigh? How much does all the air that we breathe weigh? Estimates are in the region of 5 quadrillion tonnes. About 21% of the atmosphere is the oxygen we need so that we don't suffocate. So, there's about a quadrillion tonnes of oxygen trapped by gravity around our planet. However, only 0.039% of the atmosphere is CO2 which equates to 195 trillion tonnes.

Using these numbers, you can see that petrol and diesel are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by a small percentage each year. However, it's much, much worse than that.

I've just been talking about just the petrol and the diesel. There's also the CO2 from all the coal, natural gas, propane, kerosene, paraffin and every other fossil fuel that gets burnt, that emits carbon dioxide. The amount of CO2 being released each year is more than 40 billion tonnes.

There's a measure of CO2 in the atmosphere called PPM - parts per million. Prior to the year 1750, which is considered the 'pre-industrial' baseline, the PPM count of CO2 in the atmosphere never exceeded 300 ppm. In about 100 years, we've taken it to over 400 ppm: a rise of well over 30%. Might not sound like much, but look at what's happened to global temperatures.

Temp chart

I mean, just look at your goddam thermometer. Whether you're a climate skeptic or not, you're able to read the mercury, right? You can tell when it's a hot summer, even if you're not one of these 'corrupt' scientists, right?

We've just had 15 consecutive months of record-breaking temperatures. This isn't just an exceptional year, because this has been going on for years, decades... more than a century even!

"Oh well it can't be the cars then"

Wrong. Before the internal combustion engine - which was invented in 1876 - we used to have coal fired trains, coal fired steam engines and steamships, coal to heat our homes, coal to drive our steel industry and the industrialisation of the world.

You can't on one hand say that the scientists are making it up and climate change is a big hoax, and on the other say that everything's going to be OK because the scientists will come up with a way to save us. You can't enjoy the benefits of automotive transportation, global shipping and air travel, and with the same breath say that those scientists and engineers who gave you those things are a bunch of crooks who are cooking up a breathtakingly well orchestrated global conspiracy.

If you don't believe in climate change, presumably you don't believe that man can fly either, so go and live in a fucking cave and reject everything else that science has given you.

You are quite literally a public enemy if you perpetuate myths that man-made climate change isn't real. I can't believe the USA is potentially going to elect a climate change denier to be the leader of the free world. Donald Trump is actually doing work to protect one of his golf courses from rising sea levels. What reason was given for this? Climate change. The man is a lying lunatic who will take the human race to its grave.

The risk to low-lying countries, islands and coastal towns and cities is dire. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks up and melts, sea levels will rise by over 3 metres. That means I'll have to use a canoe to get to work here in London. The water will be lapping at my front door. Worse still, if you live in Bangladesh or Holland, you'll be dead.

Obviously, it's not like it's going to be a sudden tidal wave that will come and drown people, but billions will be displaced. It will be a human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. Even if it was only a 1% chance of happening, you'd still do something about it, wouldn't you? What would you do if your carbon monoxide detector went off? Ignore it, because it might be a false alarm?

The sea rise is just one component. The other is the inhospitable temperatures for countries in the Middle East. Alright so you might not like those "sand n****rs" and "towelheads" very much. You might believe that all Muslims are terrorists. However, these are people who are going to become climate refugees. Whether you like it or not, they're going to be displaced from their homelands, which have been made uninhabitable by reckless energy consumption in the West.

You can't even live on a boat anymore: the sea is littered with shipping containers that are like icebergs you can't even see before you hit them, because they float just below the surface. The sea is a brutal place, and weather is going to get more and more extreme as the planet gets hotter. Only the very best sailors are able to survive for months offshore, and everybody needs to put into port to make repairs and re-stock supplies. In the event of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet melting, sea levels would rise by 60 metres, which would mean that the maps of the planet would need to be torn up. Every coast would be dramatically changed, and whole countries would disappear under the ocean waves.

This sounds like an unlikely doomsday scenario, but actually things can accelerate in ways that you haven't even considered. A warmer planet means warmer water. Warmer water actually takes more volume than colder water - thermal expansion - and of course warmer water can accelerate the effects of the melting of the ice caps. Additionally, with less ice on earth, less of the sun's energy is being reflected back into space, making the planet even hotter. Hot air can hold more moisture than colder air, so we will see more and more flooding and torrential rain, as much as we'll also have to contend with rising sea levels, and the expansion of inhospitably hot parts of the globe.

A sustained wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) exceeding 35 degrees Celsius is going to be fatal, because your body can no longer cool itself through the evaporation of your sweat. You'll die of hyperthermia. Heat and humidity will be too much for the body of even fit, healthy adults to survive. This scenario had been imagined as something far off and unlikely, but because of the component that humidity plays, we are likely to see the Persian Gulf become uninhabitable in our lifetimes. Ironically, the Arab nations that pumped a lot of the oil have sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

Of course, with hotter temperatures, higher humidity is to be expected because a hotter atmosphere can hold more moisture. Again, even conservative estimates seem to show that for many parts of the planet, they will quite literally be turned into a deadly sauna.

Even if we slashed our emissions to zero, it seems likely that there's a certain amount of momentum, that means things are going to get a lot worse before they might improve. Even if we mothballed every gas-guzzling vehicle overnight, that atmospheric CO2 is still there, as well as the temperature gains that have been made during the modern era. It's not like the planet is just going to cool down because we're not emitting CO2 any more. The greenhouse gasses are still there, creating their greenhouse-like effect. Until we actually scrub the atmosphere, the effects can't possibly be reversed.

The fact that Donald Trump is even in the running, suggests that we have a problem right from the very top. Why are we going to change our ways, when even the man at the top is perpetuating the lie that climate change is a hoax? If he gets elected, I'd better get saving up my money for my spacesuit and a ride on a rocket, like all the smart billionaires are doing.

I sense there is a policy of "don't scare the horses". Politicians don't want a panic on their hands. There is already a refugee crisis. There is already war and conflict because climate change has caused crops to fail. There are already heat waves, flooding, hurricanes and other natural disasters that have been more numerous and worse than anything seen before in history, because of climate change. Look how woefully the Americans protected their own people during Hurricane Katrina. The wealthy elites just don't care about the lives of ordinary people.

It's tough, because until somebody at the top mandates that we all have to make drastic lifestyle changes, who's going to be the first to do it? Why should I give up my car, if you're not going to give up yours? Multiply that attitude by 7.4 billion people, and you can see where the problem is.

You've probably got this whacky idea that you're going to be OK. You've probably got this sick fantasy of all those pesky Africans being wiped out, which is what needed to happen anyway because they were having too many babies. There isn't going to be some Malthusian catastrophe that will return everything to its rightful state. If immigration is your number one concern today - "Britain is full" and "send them home" - then you're woefully ill-prepared for the billions of people who are going to be displaced by this inevitable climate catastrophe. Families aren't just going to stick around to drown and die of heat exhaustion. A certain amount will die, but there will be unimaginable numbers of people coming to Europe and America because their own countries have been destroyed by heat and flood.

Of course, I'm still youngish, healthy and single. My parents treated me like a piece of shit, so they can rot in hell for all I care. I can easily up sticks and head for the hills. I haven't got to worry about any offspring that I unwisely fathered. I can move fast & light. I guess we're still 15 or 20 years away from armageddon, but I'm likely to still be healthy.

Anyway, screw saving for your pension. As is often said, if you think wealth is more important than the climate, try holding your breath while you count your money.

 

Tags:

 

9/11, Thought Police and Terrorism

6 min read

This is a story about bravery...

NYPD

How do terrorists win? By spreading terror. There's a video going round on the Internet of a prankster in Arab head-dress throwing a black duffel bag at people and shouting "Allahu Akbar!". His unwitting victims run for their lives. For me, this is anecdotal evidence that the terrorists are winning.

I tend to be a little irreverent and it's easy to miss my satire or irony sometimes, but I'm disappointed when people act as thought police, and act with more offence than is strictly justified by their personal involvement with a tragedy. Taking up the position of moral outrage is simply thought policing, when no outrage is warranted.

When I write about terrorism on 9/11 or 7/7, I'm always mindful that family members, friends or work colleagues of people who lost somebody during those attacks, might be offended. However, there are billions of Netizens and the chance of somebody directly affected reading my stuff is negligible. It's in the greater public interest that I should discuss the terror that obviously affects so many, instead of self-censoring because of the tiny risk that anybody might take legitimate offence.

Having grown up in the UK, from 1979 to present, I lived through the IRA's bombing campaign. Far more people died in 1985 through 1995 than in recent years, including 2001. I used to work near the Baltic Exchange and I live and work in Canary Wharf. Both of these places were blown up by IRA bombs.

Deaths by terrorism

So am I Irelandophobic? Am I afraid that every Irishman I meet is a terrorist? Do I detest the Irish, because they all carry some collective responsibility for the actions of a small handful of their fellow countrymen? No. Of course not. Some of my best friends are Irish. The Irish have shown me nothing but love.

Being brave doesn't mean dropping bombs on people from 30,000ft, safe in the cockpit of your $350 million fighter jet. Being brave doesn't mean killing civilians in a drone strike, pushing buttons on your joystick, watching everything remotely on a TV screen. Being brave doesn't mean being racially abusive - "build a wall" and "send them home" - while you teach your kids to fear and reject people who look different, and are from a different culture.

Being brave certainly doesn't involve shutting down people who appear to be desecrating the memory of the dead.

If we're going to move forward as a race, we've got to get over this whole "your tribe killed somebody from my tribe" bullshit. A couple of days ago there was great offence taken at a stag party taking selfies at Ground Zero. Hey! Guess what? Nearly every inch of the globe has had human blood spilt on it at some point, at the hands of another human. Get over it.

We need to move beyond the "brown/black/Irish kills privileged white shocker!" type headline trolling. There are underprivileged people who get killed in gang shootings and knifings every day here in London, but it never makes the national news. If you're not white caucasian and you're poor, attacks that are not overtly religiously motivated just aren't news outside London. However, a bunch of whites appear to be mocking some other whites, and that's global news? What the fuck is that all about?

An estimated 675 people have been shot and killed by police in the USA this year so far. There were 990 last year. If we say that in the 15 years since 9/11, on average 700 people have been killed by police each year, then over 10,000 people have died at the hands of the police. America, you had fewer than 3,000 killed in 9/11, but you've killed more than 3 times as many since then, just with your cops.

Grief is a kind of hobby. "You just can't say this stuff today... people are grieving" I hear you say. Well, who's grieving for those 10,000 people who got gunned down by cops? When is the day that you grieve for them?

Lest we forget.

Well you did forget, didn't you? You forgot that being afraid of black and brown people means that terrorism is winning. Terrorism affects your life. Terrorism is something you're afraid of, so the terrorists have successfully created terror. The terrorists have won.

You forgot that the biggest threat to your life is not terrorism, but guns in the hands of your fellow Americans. Toddlers kill more Americans than terrorists do.

Maybe I have no right to contribute to this debate, because I'm not American. However, Donald Trump waded in on the side of Brexit, and the UK has suffered a huge upsurge in racially abusive attacks on our own people, as a result of the referendum result. In a little under two months, the presidential election could possibly elect a racist into office, and cause a further wave of abuse and attacks.

Europe is a more dangerous place when anti-Islamic sentiment is allowed to foment. Europe suffers the consequences for America's rhetoric. The UK becomes a proxy target for anti-American attacks, when the phoney war on Islam is perpetuated.

Terrorism is just a phoney distraction. So few people are dying in terrorist attacks that it shouldn't even get any media attention. It's not relevant. It's counterproductive to spread terror for the terrorists.

I'm expecting to get shot down in a big way, for any number of reasons, in writing this piece. I'm not trying to be deliberately offensive. I'm not being insensitive. If you lost your mom in 9/11, I'm sorry, but I really don't think you personally know anybody who lost their life on that day. 0.0001% of the population were killed.

There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015. I should be far more worried about an American with a gun than an Arab with a bomb.

If we use this day for anything, perhaps it should be to reflect on how well the British and the Irish generally get along today. If ever there's an example of putting terrorism behind us, it must surely follow this model. I love the Irish. I don't see us as different. We were all Europeans, until Donald bloody Trump wandered into our debate and we voted to leave the EU.

The brave thing to do is to act irreverently. Don't allow the terrorists and the thought police to disseminate fear and mistrust.

 

Tags:

 

2 Maps: No Fixed Abode

3 min read

This is a story about being homeless...

Map of my childhood

This first map shows everywhere I lived, as I was dragged around all over the place by my fucking parents. The stupid cunts then decided to move back to the village where I briefly first went to school. I went to 8 different schools. What a shower of shits. I cried and cried that we were leaving the sweet little village in the Cotswolds where my parents now live again. What a pointless waste of time & money, as well as being totally destructive of a stable and happy childhood.

Homeless in London map

This second map shows the 25+ places that I have attempted to make my home. From number 5 to number 25, this was all a consequence of my parents reneging on an insistent demand that they should be involved in 'helping' me, only to find that they then didn't honour their promise at all when I was in a vulnerable and precarious position. A stitch in time saves nine, as they say. Cunts.

I now live on the Isle of Dogs and my home is very nice. I'm reasonably settled and stable, but I am quite far away from any friends, and there isn't really much on the 'island'. I would much rather live in North London, where most of my friends are, and there is more going on that I'd be interested in getting involved in.

However, having had such a horrific time the past few years, I'm happy to just have some stability in where I'm living. Can you imagine how exhausting it is, moving between all those different places with all your worldly possessions? It's only because I had good training with the Dorset Expeditionary Society that I have been able to just about cope. I'd call it an adventure, but it's been more like a nightmare.

Anyway, perhaps this snapshot gives you some appreciation for the shit that people are going through in their private lives. We are quick to condemn people as not making smart life choices, or being deserving of the consequences of some decision they supposedly took with free will. The reality is that one small thing can create absolute chaos in somebody's life, and destroy them.

Much like the butterfly that flapped its wings in Japan, causing a hurricane in America, seemingly small insignificant things can have a big impact on the stability of a person's life. That's why it's important to keep your promises and honour your commitments. That's why it's important to act with integrity. That's why it's important to treat your kids with decency and respect, and not just be a drug addict drunkard waste of fucking space, fucking up their life in pursuit of your high.

As you can tell, I'm thoroughly exhausted by all the stress, and fucked off by the suggestion that it was in any way my free will that took my on this torturous path through life. Survival and stability is all I ask for.

 

Tags: