Lesson # 435

Ladies and Gentlemen

Firstly I’d like to thank you all for staying awake for the past 25 years, I’ve tried to vary the presentation at times but I’m aware it’s been a tedious process for us all. Nonetheless I would like to continue with our lecture with a slight aside. Put quite simply it’s a matter of advice imparted from a man that knows full well what he should do but still doesn’t do it. That advice is ‘Alcohol and Seroquel DO NOT MIX!’
I hope you’ve all got that.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some pretty, pink pills to wash down with a pint of Wychcraft Blonde Beer. I’ve provided some print outs that cover the salient points of the lecture and if you haven’t got one then that’s just tough shit.

You Can Pretend That You’re Pretty.

Give me a castle! Go on who doesn’t want a castle? I love them. You can hide away in a castle and pretend the world just doesn’t exist…stick your fingers in your ears nyananananah! I can’t hear you! Safe in your buttressed walls you can plot strategies with the world simply oblivious outside. You can push little toy soldiers around on a giant map that has you as its epicentre and when you tire and traipse back through your lonely, echoing corridors, pass underneath the cloisters where the ghosts you try to keep at bay flit in and out of sight; you can leave those sad, little soldiers alone in the dark, standing grimly and holding their muskets aloft endlessly sighting against whoever you felt like fighting.

In my castle I live alone, there are the usual preternaturally blonde robots and they fan me with giant leaves whilst I watch endless episodes of Bottom, feel the brains leak out of my skull and pick at the bones of all those who ever joined the Conservative party. For dinner I dine in a draughty hall, brought lamb saag curry by a clockwork penguin and sit at the head of a table made for fifty. At night I sleep in the topmost tower, hear the sounds of the world falling to pieces and wake throughout with the certainty that you just passed through. Such thoughts they lead me on long winding trips through the dusty halls lit only by the light of a billion and one glow worms and bathed in that green glow I forget everything that I can, sink into some forgotten room and do my best to turn into dust.

Liberal Editing

Oh the joys of the subtext.

The Postman brings…

Dearest Disappointment

I didn’t think I could still feel like this at least not in the same way anymore but maybe, just maybe that old spark can alight, like some impossible flame licking stone cold granite until all that is left is ash and dust and all the memories and ghosts of feeling, just for once; comfortable with another human being there beside you.

Feeling the mad desire and the drive and it is so much ugly animal passion underneath. Oh it drives me insane just to think about how inglorious we really are under our romance and our dressed up dreams, the grating, acerbic and jagged rocks that wait underneath the covering of soft and silent snow, the broken bottle placed with such ill intent within the sandcastle, the nails and spikes and cutting edges that surround your prison cell. Sometimes just sometimes my so bitterly sweet disappointment I am so consumed with my loathing of the dirt that sticks under my skin and leaks from my very pores, the poison that courses so malignantly behind this stupid, beaming face. So eaten up with my hatred of everything that makes me human that it rises in my throat, catches like bile, I retch… I retch because I am such a disgusting creature, because we….we all are.

Scrabble, scrabble little rat in the muck and in the dirt and oh it feels so good, everything you build like faulty castles in the sky is make-believe, fairytale bullshit. Maybe they got it right, maybe all those money chasing fucks got it right and that is all there really is, just cold, hard power in glinting little pieces of corruption and rot and dreams? You are a dream, you always were because like all dreams you are my disappointment and you’ve left me for this reality, it is like those moments I dream you are here and then you’re gone and every time I wish so hard that it were real but it never is; it never fucking is! All the warmth, be it savage, biological chemistry designed to make us fuck and be fucked like the basic mammals we are, all that warmth it’s all I had and every time I wake up in the middle of the night it dissipates with the hazy recollection of your face and I’m left with not just the cold and dark side of the bed but my little room, in my little world in which I try so hard to be better than the cogs and gears that construct this robots soul but it’s coping tactics and nothing they do, nothing I can do, nothing any fucker in this world can do will change my see-saw heart nor fix that bad switch in my head.

So ride it as far as it will take you and don’t let up, there is a whole world of people that lie and stare at the dispassion of the ceiling at night and you know it’s a cold world my little avatar of failure, it’s such a fucking cold world at times.

Yours in faith that it will change

Boy

There’s no price on maturity

I read recently about Ahmet Oguz Celikkol the Turkish ambassador to Israel’s less than gracious reception at the hands of Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister. Among the snubs were the prominent positioning of Mr. Celikkol on a lower seat to Mr. Ayalon, the lack of refreshments, the lack of a handshake and the presence of a Israeli flag but no Turkish flag on the table. During the meeting, at which there were cameras present  and speaking in Hebrew, which the Turkish Ambassador does not understand (though I have to say he probably should if he’s the Turkish ambassador to Israel) Mr. Ayalon said: “The important thing is that people see that he’s low and we’re high and that there is no flag here.”
Now obviously all this snubbing wasn’t taken too kindly, I’ve even heard that Mr. Ayalon kept Mr. Celikkol waiting, which is just plain rude. I really have to wonder why Mr. Ayalon didn’t resort to pulling the Turkish ambassadors hair or calling for the teacher because his actions seem to me to be a fit of schoolgirl pique. For the love of chaos this man is meant to be a government minister, doesn’t that entail, surely, having some professionalism. Perhaps it is a good thing that Mr. Celikkol didn’t meet with Avigdor Lieberman the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs otherwise he might have sat down on a whopeee cushion or even worse a drawing pin placed with evil intent upon his chair. Of course the iron laws of cause and effect have played their consequential role and poor Mr. Ayalon was eventually forced to issue an apology under the threat of having Turkey withdraw it’s ambassador from Israel proving his hissy fit to have been counterproductive to say the least.

You have to wonder how these people get to where they are, and also what Mr. Lieberman had to say when he got back from his fishing trip or round of golf and casually asked Mr. Ayalon how the meeting with the Turkish ambassador went down.

Mr. Lieberman. Woh, you wouldn’t belive it Danny I shot a 73 today
Mr. Ayalon. Wow that’s really great I wish I could shoot a 73, you’re my hero Avi
Mr. Lieberman. Yeah…right. So anyway how’d the meeting with the Turkish Ambassador go, tell him you didn’t like the series?
Mr. Ayalon. Ah yes…about that their kind of threatening to withdraw their ambassador if I don’t apologise.
Mr. Lieberman. What! How the hell do you manage that?
Mr. Ayalon. Oh…I…I’ve no idea.
Mr. Lieberman. Danny! I’ve told you! Don’t tell lies!
Mr. Ayalon. Well I wanted to make him look stupid so I put him on a lower seat than me, didn’t put a Turkish flag on the table, didn’t shake his hand, didn’t even give him a glass of water and had television cameras film the entire thing before releasing it on to national television…oh and I didn’t smile.
Mr. Lieberman. Danny…you’re a diplomat right?
Mr. Ayalon. Yes?
Mr. Lieberman. Did it ever occur to you that being a diplomat might entail being ‘diplomatic’ at any point?
Mr Ayalon. Uh…no.
Mr. Lieberman. (pulling a nine iron from his golfing bag) Danny I think we should talk.

What was all this about? Well apparantly there is a television series in Turkey called  Kurtlar Vadisi, “Valley of the Wolves”, which is the kind of nationalistic, ultra violence that you’d expect from any self-respecting American television drama series…except it’s Turkish so that’s not alright. The particular episode which provoked this world masterclass in Diplomacy showed the series’ hero, Polat Alemdar, Stephan Seagaling his way though an Israeli diplomatic mission in order to rescue a Turkish boy who had been kidnapped by Israel’s Special Operations Organisation-Mossad. Alemdar kills an Israeli agent and then justifies his action saying it is no different from what Israel does.

Oh dear!

Of course national stereotyping with a religious-violent religious bias isn’t very nice but then nor are complete blockades of civilian populations resulting in what you might call a humanitarian crisis but then that is exactly what Israel is doing to the people on the Gaza strip. In it’s futile attempt to dislodge Hamas, the party-militia that won power in 2006 (via an election by the way, another case of people getting all confused about this democracy business and doing something that the US and Israel didn’t like) it is collectively punishing 1.5 million people in direct contravention of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 which quite explicitly states.

Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

Given that about half of the population of the Gaza strip are children, Israel’s ongoing blockade amounts to one of the biggest cases of child abuse in the world, recent reports suggest that 1 in 10 children are severely malnourished and what with Israel’s antics during the Gaza War, the once flourishing agriculture based economy is now a big, smoking crater cut off by the blockade from its natural markets in the Levant increasing the social and economic deprivation of an already deprived peoples. Now unfortunately for Israel, Turkey is getting all upset about this massive abuse of human rights and so it is that anti-Israeli sentiments begin to wheedle their way onto crap television shows. Damn that cause and effect!

There is a breathtaking arrogance in a nation which thinks it can inflict that much suffering onto so many innocent people and onto so many innocent children and then throw its rattle out of its pram when another country dares to portray it in a negative light! We can only remain thankful that we have cool-headed negotiators like Danny Ayalon to sort these things out.

Just stick it to ‘em

The sorry saga that is American health care reform has of course see the magical, mythical ‘Left’ transform the great and free states of America into nothing more than a moribund Communist bloc, next we’ll see red tanks rolling down Wall Street demanding that vast amounts of public money be taken from the banks and thoughtlessly given…back to the public! It doesn’t get much more obvious that the ‘Left’ has gotten it’s own way when Democrats like Joe Lieberman have managed to bypass any public option and instead of the proposal that there be a government run public healthcare service, people be mandated to purchase health insurance from private companies. Yeah damn that dominant ‘Left’ lot of Reds with their ’sidecar reconciliation’ and their fawning and pandering to rich, multinational corporations.

I don’t quite know what kind of planet you need to be living on to think that somehow the ’Left’ is controlling affairs in puppetmaster style but I’m willing to bet money that its a planet with an atmosphere made up entirely of recycled helium, given that the ‘Left’ has gotten exactly nothing that it wanted thanks to corporatists like Evan Bayh compromising the Democrat mandate right up a fucking wall I’ve got to wonder how people have the goddamn nerve to even squeak that the Democrat administration is being planned (presumably centrally) by sinister vanguard socialists let alone inform ABC News reporters that this is the case

All this barracking and stalling and prevarication just reminds me of my own attitude toward learning deponent verbs and is therefore depressing, as such I feel the ‘Left’ might actually get to start fulfilling its role as the bogeyman of people who just don’t know any better if something like the following could be provided

Seperate Beds

When you’re a teenager one of the biggest novelties is sharing a bed with your partner and partly this is due to the facts that you hardly get the chance to do so and you are absolutely desperate to get your end away. I remember, back in the heady days of my scrawny, acne-blighted teens when I stayed over at a girlfriends house-much to the ire of her father as I recall-and I remember one prominent thing about that night, which was I didn’t get any fucking sleep! This fortunately came before the day when I realised I could actually do something with my haywire mind so it didn’t actually matter that my mental capacity was somewhat reduced; this being the conclusion reached from research carried out by Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna.

Well it seems I’m not alone in finding sleeping with someone a bloody inconvenience as studies show that a man who sleeps with a bed mate will find his sleep disturbed whether he has sex or not and consequently will be next-to-useless the next day. Now that’s a worrying thought and I’d be tempted to say it’s worse when there’s no sex involved because then you’re just lying there feeling frustrated with precious little chance of finding a self-sourced solution to your impasse leading to heavy levels of sexual ideation involving any female colleagues you may have, or male colleagues for that matter. Worse still  if there’s a girl there you can’t indulge in all your favourite things, like eating a big bag of pretzels whilst reading yet another book about Archaic Greece or playing Civilization 2 until the small hours despite the fact you fucking hate that game. At least I wouldn’t feel happy doing that if there were a girl there mainly because she might snaffle my pretzels or insist that I stop trying to build a Gaia Controller Core and pretending that I’m representing the Culture in a game for the worst of nerds.

The sad thing is, there is every chance of me ending up like this

Except instead of Battlelore I will rediscover my teenage enthusiasm for painting overpriced Warhammer elves.
Sleeping together can be fun, let’s not go down that track of miserable singledom and let’s not pass over the fact that sleeping together usually entails sex, which is almost as pleasant a pastime as lying in bed eating a bacon sandwich and reading a Philip Marlowe novel but I’m going with the idea that you should keep it as a novelty, like being a teenager again except without the nigh-on epic struggle to work out how the condom is meant to go on (you wouldn’t believe how wrong I’ve got that)

Lest you think me cold and uncaring, below are pictures of my perfect bed partners (slut that I am)
 
Yes it’s all true, I am indeed a crazy cat man but the fact of the matter is, my cats care little should I sit up watching Bottom and eating a takeaway curry, and that is really all I’m looking for from life.

I’m from the US and I’m here to help

The earthquakes which devastated Haiti have of course brought the usual ‘muddled and confused’ international relief efforts into swinging action and no country has proved its sincerity to international aid more than the United States of America which has thoughtfully and compassionately donated 10′000 US troops to relief efforts. Haitians picking up the scattered remains of their shattered lives can now do so safely and happily in streets occupied by US troops, sounds good to me I mean you know what kind of Anarchy reigned in the aftermath of the disaster…
Or perhaps, just perhaps it wasn’t quite the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max scenario that the media has been whipping up as a rather emphatic quote from Doctor Evan Lyon of Partners in Health suggests;

“We’ve been circulating throughout the city until 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning every night, evacuating patients, moving materials. There’s no UN guards. There’s no US military presence. There’s no Haitian police presence. And there’s also no violence. There is no insecurity.”

But Hey! let’s not go taking any chances now I think a couple of regiments of machine-gun armed troops will be the first thing people will want…screw the medical supplies, screw the food, screw shelter oh and…screw the 3′500 UN troops who are coming along to help organise their distribution. What Haiti needs is it’s main airport in Port-Au-Prince to be completely clogged up with US military flights, which has forced Humanitarian groups such as Doctors Sans Frontiers to have flights re-routed through the Dominican Republic delaying aid reaching people who badly need it.

Why oh why would the US want to go sending that many troops to Haiti?

Perhaps it’s something to do with previous US involvement in the country, a far from glorious record. The last two centuries have been a merry circus ride of screwing  Haiti since its founding by a slave revolt in 1804 including the rather unpleasant occupation by U.S. Marines from 1915-1934 as well as atrocities under dictatorships aided and abetted by Washington (no! Really?) Now this could just be viewed as water under the bridge since it happened well before Sex and the City was popular and therefore is what you might call ‘ancient history’ and is thus irrelevant (did you know that? History has absolutely no bearing on where we are now and that is because it is ’old news’, don’t believe logic and people with an IQ of over 140 who might suggest otherwise)  However in 2004  Haiti’s democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was kidnapped by the United States and flown to exile in South Africa, this was of course back in the dark days of rampant regime change being a justification in itself for meddling in the affairs of states too weak to defend themselves and boy of boy are we glad that has all changed. This only being six years ago it is unfortunately ‘recent news’ and it might have to be conceded that it is directly relevant to the present situation.

The United States, together with Canada and France, openly colluded for four years to destabilise Haiti’s elected government, cutting off almost all international aid in order to destroy the economy and make the country ungovernable. What do you know they succeeded in this wholly worthwhile aim. Now if you’re wondering why there are no Haitian government institutions to help with the earthquake relief efforts, then there’s a damn good explanation. Equally this might just have something to do with why there are three million people crowded into the area where the earthquake hit. U.S. policy over the years also helped destroy Haitian agriculture, for example, by forcing the import of subsidized U.S. rice and wiping out thousands of Haitian rice farmers.

Aristide’s first democratic government was overthrown in 1991, by military officers later discovered to be in the pay of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Presently Aristide wants to return to his country, something that the majority of Haitians, with clearly no understanding of ’Democracy’, have demanded since his overthrow. But the United States, that great crusader for democracy, freedom and disaster Capitalism does not want him there. The current Preval government, which is to Washington as the gimp is to the leather industry, has decided that Aristide’s party – the largest in Haiti – will not be allowed to compete in the next elections, now that is what I call Democracy (capital-fuckin-D)These free and fair elections are of course likely to now be delayed.

Naturally this raises the question of why Aristide was deposed by the US in the first place and I think it’s worth noting a few of the terrible crimes that this awful proponent of liberation theology inflicted upon his people during his democratically sanctioned reign, which included;

 -The decline in infant mortality from 125 to 110 per 1000 and a drop in the percentage of underweight births from 28% to 19%.
- 195 new primary schools and 104 new public high schools being built including in rural areas where no schools ever before existed
- Reducing the illiteracy rate from 85% to 55%
- Disbanding the Haitian military – trained by the U.S. to be an instrument of civilian control and to use fear tactics to do it. This allowed the Haitian people an unprecedented level of freedom of speech, assembly and personal safety.
- Raising the Minimum wage
- Constructing housing for the lowest paid
- Reducing malnutrition from 63% to 51%

I think you’d all agree, the man is clearly a monster and for a fuller description of his awful dark deeds please do thumb a lift here

So could it be, could it possibly be that Washington’s fear of democracy is the reason why the United States is now sending 10,000 troops and prioritizing “security” over other needs?

Then again there’s that whole pact with the devil business…

God bless Semantics for they will redefine all

I realise that in the past I may have inadvertantly given the impression that I am in some way a ‘poor’ person, that is, not possessed of wealth. I apologise copiously because of course I am not actually a poor person, merely a rich person who hasn’t got any money.

I’m glad that’s been cleared up

And in other news, Scotch eggs contain…eggs!

The Labour Government is announcing new plans to increase social mobility, which include such ground-breaking initiatives as encouraging top professions and universities to attract people from deprived backgrounds. I don’t know about you but I thought the whole point of Capitalism was the bullshit about aspiration and that acting as an incentive, you know poverty being this wonderful inspiration to do better in life…ad nauseum.

I know the BBC has to remain at least nominally impartial but when it reports something like this

“[A] report from ex-cabinet minister Alan Milburn found lucrative professions are dominated by people from affluent families.”

It could at least add afterwards;

“No shit!”

Top Universities and professions being dominated by the spawn of the elite! You’re kidding me!

Of course it’s a damn good thing that Alan Milburn went out and discovered that economic inequality is happily buttfucking the deprived while at the top level things stay essentially the same because otherwise we’d have never have known that people from disadvantaged backgrounds were less likely to end up as the CEO of planetrapistco Ltd than Nobby Nobson from toffton boarding school. Cheers Al!
The many, many studies and reports conducted into this subject have of course met the stalwart and, let’s face it, incontrovertible argument from the Right that these people just need to try harder, socialism being of course too idealistic hmm.
Among these reports I would like to concentrate on one put together by Goretti Horgan on behalf of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Some of the more salient points included the following;

How most children experience school is determined by the level of disadvantage they face. Poorer children in the study accepted that they were not going to get the same quality of schooling, or the same outcomes, as better-off children.

Children and parents identified the main costs of school as uniform (including shoes), lunches and school trips. Children in disadvantaged schools were very aware of all the costs and of the difficulties parents faced in finding as little as 50 pence or a pound for school events.

The experiences of school for children from poorer families were narrower and less rich. For example, children in disadvantaged schools had limited access to music, art and out-of-school activities that children in advantaged schools generally took for granted.

All of the children agreed that education was important, but for different reasons. In advantaged schools, children saw education as a way of ensuring a good life as an adult. Children in disadvantaged schools were more likely to view education as a way of avoiding problems in the future.   

A lot of it is about expectation and entitlement and whilst we here in this country seem to go apeshit when people from poorer backgrounds (gods forbid we say Working Class in this ‘classless’ nation of ours!) get in on this whole entitlement act we seem to turn a blind eye to the incredible sense of entitlement bred into the ahem upper income bracket. It’s all in the report plain to see, children in disadvantaged schools have the bleak outlook of success equalling staying out of trouble whereas children in the top schools see success as two terms as Primeminister at the very least, failure being just the single term or being a mere Cabinet Minister. In my own sad way I just can’t help but thinking that the world is full of blithely ignorant fools who seem to think that you can break the link between child poverty and educational achievement or eliminate the effect of class…oh no sorry social background on people’s lives but perhaps I’m just jealous because their idealism clearly outstrips mine, then again it’s easy to talk in expansive terms about what is good for the poor when you’ve got that CFO job waiting with GlaxoSmithKline.

Ah ‘Equality of Opportunity’ one of the greatest lies of our age, but hats off to whoever managed to come up with a concept of equality that actually manages to justify inequality…because we all get the same chance now don’t we?