Throwing down the Gauntlet

OK. I've come to a decision. There are people in this world who piss me off beyond belief. High profile people, people I see on TV and read about in newspapers. What I usually do is write about them on this blog or elsewhere but increasingly I find myself so angry that words will no longer suffice. It is time for action. I'm going to send the following to George Galloway:

Dear Sir,
Your repulsive ideology and you're rampant egotism have aroused my fury for the last time. I am normally opposed to violence in all its forms, but I see it as my duty as a responsible citizen to knock your block off. I hereby challenge you to a fight. You and me. Man to man. In a car-park somewhere. If you are a man of honour as you claim to be, then let's settle this the old fashioned way. Also, we can sell the TV rights and make a pretty penny.

Yours faithfully,
Ben

Only problem is, I'm not sure that I won't be arrested. Is it a crime to challenge a politician to a fist-fight? Lets find out.

Galloway: crook or just an all round repulsive individual? You decide.

I spent about half an hour tearing Galloway a new arse and when I tried to publish the whole damn thing disappeared. I say its a conspiracy. Anyway, why did he get so close to Saddam and his repulsive sons? He denies he made money out of the relationship, if he did he's just a crook who doesn't mind cosying up to mass murderers in order to get a payday, which is pretty bad. But if he didn't, doesn't that make him something worse? If he's innocent it means he was so close to Saddam because...he liked the guy. He chose a man who committed genocide against his own people-the marsh Arabs-, who nerve gassed a village full of civilians, who executed his political opponents and their families, as a friend? Choosing him as a business partner is bad enough, but just as a friend is worse.
There are no good guys in this affair. The war has killed almost as many civilians as Saddam, sanctions killed half a million children but if George Galloway thinks that these facts justify Saddam's own crimes he is a sick individual. And this from a man who claims to stand up for the victims of the world. Galloway is a liar and self-promoter with all the moral integrity of a snake. Even if he's not guilty of fraud his relationship with the butcher of Baghdad condemns him.

Galloway again, and some immensely depressing observations.

Crazy French Bastard

Just read some really hilarious news. Old Jaques Chirac, speaking at a nuclear submarine base, said that a French response to a terrorist attack "could be conventional, could be something else." So he's talking about nuclear weapons. Crazy; I mean, who is he going to nuke? If they have a situation like in London and they're attacked by french extremists what's he going to do, nuke Paris? Even if you could link an attack to a state basically what he's saying is; 'kill some of our citizens and we'll massacre millions of men, women and children.' The man is off his fucking trolley! Or maybe he's just planning to fire them all off at random and blow up the entire world...who knows? Who knows what's going through his head? Silly sod.

Gaspalert

Today...nothing has happened. Yet. I had a thought at about 11am that I was going to write down here but I've forgotten what it was...yeah, this post is going really well...
So; go read another blog, specifically http://www.gaspalert.blogspot.com, created by Swif who reached out across this empty void we call the internet to comment on my last post which, I'm not ashamed to admit, made me extremely happy. For a moment or two, but thats good for January. I never really got the hang of Januaries.

Something bubbles up from my childhood. I respond by learning to play the snooker theme tune.

Well, I sent the text. Now, I am chilled, cool as a cucumber. Relaxed as...Actually I'm still a wreck but hell, I'm used to it. I've been sleeping normally for the past week or so, you know, waking up in the morning and everything. Normally that is, save for the sudden and unexplained recurrence of having strange visions before I fall asleep. This happened to me when I was a kid, about six or seven, almost every night. I'd see some odd things like a hand trying to pick up a sewing needle, and some huge pulsating thing with a doorway into it. This was accompanied by the feeling that I had grown incredibly huge and everything around me had become tiny. It was very similar to vertigo. I'd often get up in the night and sleepwalk down stairs, shaking like I was having a fit, my hair standing on end and babbling in what my mother described as an 'alien language'. So, I'm getting the wierd vertigo sensation again. I actually had it this morning while standing over this very keyboard: I suddenly felt like I was looking down on it from a great height. Odd. I'm hoping the night terrors don't come back. I think I've been stressing myself out too much recently with questions like: if I'd done something different in the past, where would I be now? And: where did I go wrong? And: how can I make things better? And: why are we here? What's the point in life? Where is it heading? What's the difference between a goblin and a hobgoblin? If a tree falls in the woods and lands on a squirrel and there's no-one there to see it, what is the gross national product of Bolivia? And so-on.
On a happier note, I can now play the theme tune to the snooker on BBC 2. This is no mean feat.

Galloway: No Left Wing Hero

He doesn't like abortion or euthanasia. Whether you agree with him or not, at least its a principled stand I suppose. It was when he kissed Saddam Hussein's enormous murdering arse that gets to me. Lets not forget, Saddam is a monster; a paranoid Stalin-worshiping psychopath who murdered in excess of a hundred thousand Shias and Kurds in the eighties and nineties. Also, George still refuses to make public the accounts of his charity, set up to bring medical supplies in to Iraq, from which more than a million dollars went 'missing'. If he's innocent of skimming this money, he could easily just release these records and prove it. He won't. Conclusion: he's guilty. In the past he has endorsed the fatwa on Salman Rushdie("if you don't respect religion, you have to face the consequences") and the murder of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. Galloway is being set up as a hero for the anti-war movement. Set up by Blair and the Bush regime because they can very easily expose him for what he is: a self-promoting crook with a frightening ideology. He's the anti-war protestor of their dreams, one who really does sympathize with terrorists and dictators.

Dream Theory. NSA. Orwell. Etc.

I often dream about films I've seen. I've been wondering about this...Maybe films and TV confuse your subconscious, so that it sends you dreams about them rather than dreams that relate to your life. Maybe, seeing as dreams are supposed to keep you sane, this might account in some way for the rise of mental illness during the twentieth century. Maybe. Who knows. Then again, the dreams don't tend to be related to the plots of the films, or the characters...They generally revolve around my being shot by one of the stars. I've been shot many times in my dreams. Don't ask me why. I don't know. Maybe I deserve it.
Still, I like my theory. Shame nobody reads this site. Apart from James obviously(who is James? The mystery deepens). And, of course, the NSA. Probably. They do listen in on millions of Americans. Its their job. And they have a huge listening post in England. Its not a Big Brother situation, but if a totalitarian regime were to emerge in the States they'd find all the infrastructure conveniently in place. I think its a testament to the good grace of George Orwell that he hasn't come back from the dead and started shouting 'I told you so' at everyone. I would.
These are the thoughts that completely fail to preoccupy me as I sit here trembling, yes trembling, nerves all shot to pieces at the thought of sending a simple text message tomorrow.
Sigh.

The Riddle of the Hitler Midget

Dreams. Messages sent from our subconscious, coded signals rich with meaning and purpose, reflections of our deepest, most hidden drives. So why, last night, did I dream about having an underwater fist-fight with a two foot high Hitler midget? I don't remember much else from the dream; I remember being in a newsagent first of all, which is where the midgets first appeared. Their bodies were about a foot tall but their heads were normal size. There were, I recall, good midgets and bad midgets. I have a hazy recollection of a series of adventures leading up to my final confrontation with the Hitler Midget, which took place inside a big metal tank filled with water. I'd got hold of his ears and was slamming his head against the wall while he kicked me in the chin when my alarm went off and woke me up. I had to fight a powerful urge to go back to sleep and finish him off.
Some dreams are clear as crystal in their meanings, others are not. This, I think I can safely say, was one of the latter. Perhaps if I write a poem about it...

In the corner shop I found you,
Shrink-wrapped in your plastic bags,
With heads too big, you led me on,
Through an odyssey of good v bad,
Til that dreadful fall into the tank,
Clouded with its water load,
Frozen round me as I sank,
Wherein a midget Hitler rose.
We joined in battle, I and him,
The fight to end it all,
His midget boots pounding on my chin,
As I banged his head on the wall.

No, that hasn't helped.

Fooled. Again...

Oops. Looks like the mothers against noise thing was a marketing hoax. I thought it was too good to be true. Oh well. It was funny while it lasted.

Nietzsche again and some other stuff. Iran etc.

Oh, that was a bad weekend. Oh, I'll never let those pills run out again. (Shudder.)
Read a great book though; 'The Consolations of Philosophy' by Alain De Botton. Great book, he takes examples of work by Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche giving you their thoughts on things like being unpopular, having no money, a broken heart and so-on. I think I got more from the Nietzsche chapter than I did from reading the entirety of 'Beyond Good and Evil'. All I got from that was a slight headache and an immense sense of my own intellectual inadequacy. I generally find that when I read this kind of stuff I get more interested in the philosophers themselves rather than their ideas. Nietzsche was a fascinating person, he suffered throughout his entire life with loneliness, illness, a shitty love life, but just before he went completely insane he hit on possibly the most consoling thought there's ever been; that suffering is an essential step on the road to fulfillment and achievement. Epicurus and Shopenhauer thought that the aim in life should be to avoid suffering, but Nietzsche realized that not only was that impossible but also that it would never get you anywhere. And if Nietzsche hadn't died young, the world could be quite as different place. If he'd lived its unlikely that his work would have been corrupted by his mad sister and then used by Hitler to justify his own sick philosophy. Nietszche had no time for anti-semites; he declared war on them at one point. At the time he was quite mad and thought he was Napoleon, but you get the idea anyway. His ubermenschen idea had nothing to do with racial purity; he was thinking of people like Goethe and Montaigne: great artists and thinkers. But he died at the wrong time. Syphilis has a lot to answer for and no mistake. Lalala.
Looks like those crazy yanks are thinking about attacking Iran. Things would get quite interesting if they did. Iran has a huge army, a fully functioning airforce and navy, lots of missiles. No-one knows anything about their chemical and biological programs. Also they have a mutual defense pact with Syria. Syria has the second largest military in the Middle East. And, of course, China gets a lot of its oil and gas from Iran. China has about a trillion US dollars in reserve. If it decided to dump those dollars, America's economy would collapse. Imagine what could happen in Iraq too; the new government is dominated by shia parties with close links to Iran. America could end up fighting the government it put in place. Not to mention the possibility of thousands of Iranian and Syrian tanks pouring across their respective borders. It would be chaos. Unfortunately chaos is exactly what huge defense companies thrive on, companies who are phenomenally over-represented in American politics. Hmm. Are they crazy enough to do it? Yes. That's plainly obvious. But it probably won't happen. Or will it? No. But perhaps yes. Maybe.
?
Anyway, here's a final thought from old Schopenhauer:
"We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness."
And Montaigne:
"I first of all found that radishes agreed with me; then they didn't; now they do again."
Bye!

And finally...

Crikey, I'm really churning out the old posts today. What else has been in the news? Hmm. Charlie Kennedy had a drink problem. He won't get treatment on the NHS. People say he should resign because of this. But I say to them, aha, but Winston Churchill had a drink problem. Aha. And old George Bush of course. Ah America, where nothing is a barrier to power. Apart from being poor, being a woman, being black and so-on. But being an incompetent, alcoholic,
intellectually sub-normal sociopath is fine. What else? George Galloway is on celebrity big brother, the fool. Yes, it was great watching him tear those American senators a new arse, but ask him what he thinks about abortion. Controversial. Oh, and my pills have run out. I can't get more until next week, but I did find a few Seroxat left over from my old stash. Take one and you're stoned the whole day. Take two and strange things happen such as one of you're pupils getting really big while the other one gets really small. Its going to be an interesting weekend.

Nature's Own Remedy

Ariel Sharon is dying. Good riddance I say. This guy was responsible for the massacre of more than 600 Palestinian refugees in 1982. His troops let Christian fanatics into two refugee camps and stood by as they slaughtered men women and children. He was found responsible and was barred from ever holding public office again. Yep. Barred. From EVER. Holding public office. AGAIN. EVER. How the fuck did this guy become Prime Minister? He should have just faded away into obscurity after what he did. Instead they let him back in, and a few years ago his visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem sparked off the al-Aqsa intifada. Oops. How could anyone believe that a man who allowed his troops to stand by and watch the massacre of Palestinian civilians that they were supposed to be protecting could ever contribute to a lasting peace. Yes, he withdrew from Gaza, but he also announced that West Bank settlements would be expanded contrary to international law. He also started building that enormous fucking wall which cuts through Palestinian territory, contrary to international law. The fact is that there will be a much better chance for peace once he's out of they way. But not much of a chance. The idiots are in control on both sides of this thing, suicide bombers kill innocents in Israel, Israeli missiles kill innocents in Palestine, and so it goes on. No-one wants to back down. Where's Ghandi when you need him? Oh, I forgot, someone shot him.

PFI, NHS FUBAR

I live in Sussex. I'm not proud; its just where I've ended up, thats all. There are many good things about Sussex. I can't think of any off the bat, just take my word for it. However, one of the things thats gone wrong here is the jolly old NHS. Its in a huge amount of debt at the moment, and operations are now going to be denied to the obese because its they're fault that they're fat. Alchoholics could also be denied treatment, which is interesting because alchoholism is a psychological condition. In the future I expect I'll be denied treatment for lung cancer because I smoke, though this won't be a problem for me because I intend to be a cyborg by then.* Basically the lack of funding is causing a dramatic decrease in the quality of services which is going to get worse. Patricia Hewitt blames this on overspending by the trust, but I, in my wisdom, have another explanation: PFI.
NHS trusts can't get funding for new buildings and services unless it involves private consortiums in the projects. Basically what happens is a consortium comes in, buys the land and pays to design, build and maintain the hospital or clinic or whatever. The NHS trust then pays the consortium an annual fee for this, like a mortgage. This fee goes towards maintenance, staff costs and so on, but mostly it goes into the pockets of rich investors. What happened in Coventry is a good example. Their trust needed to rennovate its two large hospitals, but a rennovation scheme would not pull in private investors. So it was scrapped and under the PFI, a private consortium was brought in to demolish both hospitals and build one much smaller hospital on an out of town site. The hospital was designed small so that the consortium could use the remaining land for more profitable developments. This represented a huge cut in staff and beds. The trust in Coventry is paying this consortium £36 million a year for this reduction in services and will be until the contract expires in about 30 years. The origional rennovation plan would have involved a one off payment of £30 million. Things like this are happening all over the country, and it basically amounts to a massive transfer of public money into the private sector. There are a lot of other issues associated with this, have a look here http://www.unison.org.uk/pfi/index.asp if you're interested in this fucking enormous scandal. Don't listen to that Hewitt creature. She's lying in your face. Watch the next time she's on TV. See what I mean? She's lying. And she's patronising you. If your not interested...well, fuck you.
*I'll elaborate on my plan to become a cyborg in a later post.

Madness

Oh, haha, I just found this crazy websitehttp://www.mothersagainstnoise.org
Its nuts. I might send them an obscene e-mail. Or I might not. Ahahaha.

In case you can't tell; I'm being sarcastic

So, a new year has begun! Again. Yippee. Hooray. Woo. Hoo.