The devil within

 

Subject: The devil within

As another terrorist attack takes place in New Zealand one has to start to question the cloak and dagger approach to terrorism in democratic law abiding societies. This guy a Siri Lankan was known to the police and the phrase "a person of interest" was used.

When does 'a person of interest' to the police become 'a person of interest' to the general public, usually only after a heinous crime has been committed. Isn't it our right to know who is a person of interest so we can collectively have an interest in them to protect ourselves.

In the 1800s' the small town market place held in its stocks people who were 'people of interest' or people who had been convicted of crime, they were held in the market place so people could see who they were and, if they had a mind to, pelt them with rotten fruit. This public shaming is now a days thought too harsh, it inflicts on their civil liberties and only when the blast riddled carcasses are strewn across the pavement do we wake up and announce our fears.

The face of a 'politically correct' chief constable strikes fear in my heart as they use the media savvy phrases "we will learn from this event" it's a smoke screen to prevent us knowing how bad the situation is. Afraid to set community against community they teeter on the path of deceit to the point where they loose all respect.

And speaking of communities where were the communities who spoke out against these nascent terrorist, no man is an island and people close would know something. Where are the voices in those communities, in the mosque and in the neighbourhood to warn the jahid ideologue that they were known to their brothers and sisters and they must stop. This undercurrent of them and us only fosters taking sides but in this case extremism should play no part in the lives of people living here, or in New Zealand.

Perhaps the law of anonymity should be changed and 'people of interests' made known to us all so we know the devil within.

Cataract removal

 

Subject: Cataract removal. 

The body repair shop nearby was open for business again yesterday so I was wheeled in under the bright lights of the ophthalmologists scalpel to have a cataract infected lens in my right eye removed for a new synthetic lens.

I mentioned the other day listening to the surgeon describing to his pupil how to gather the skin on my temple, like a tailor finding spare cloth when letting out a pair of trousers, the surgeon described his cut and stitch job as I listened prone on the slab. It's one of those disconnect moments where you are de-identified  and become,  an object.

Yesterday as a  local anesthetic was used to made me amenable to the knife. In a relatively routine cataract removal procedure made a little more risky because I am blind in the left eye and heaven forbid if something should go wrong. Laying there locally anethatised the procedure started with the unceremonious pressure of a ring being forced into the eye socket to hold the eye open and then a antiseptic cover is suctioned on to focus on and keep sterile the eye itself. These procedures are not painful but it's the anticipation of pain or something which reminds you that from here on, you are an observer not a participant. Your observation is purely mental since unlike procedures on other parts of the body, this is crucially taking place right at the connection with the mind and the intensely bright lights of the apparatus used by the surgeon only intensify how important this all is to your performing the tasks which make you who you are. Destroying  the old lens, vacuuming up the debris and inserting a new lens were in themselves disturbingly enough, working on this optical conduit into the brain through the optic nerve seemed to make everything more surreal.

The imagination works overtime as "Henry" sucked up the bits.  Would it work, would the confidences placed be rewarded or would my mind be singed forever with the words "I'm sorry Mr Wood, something unusual occurred"

You all be happy to know that it didn't and like everyone who has had the operation  it's remarkable to get crisply defined sight back with colours and hues you had forgotten existed

The paraplegic champions

Subject: The paraplegic champions.

As the paraplegic games in Tokyo draws to a close the UK has done tremendously well coming second to China. It could be argued that fielding so many talented paraplegic athletes speaks volumes for our attitude to disablement and our encouragement for disabled people to live a normal life.

There are nations who cast aside the disabled as being a burden, demanding facilities to make their lives easier and to this end years ago I questioned the installation of a lift specifically for the disabled, not for staff who already worked for the company but in case any applied for a job!!

Lifts are horrendously expensive and I didn't think it economically sensible to make such a provision.

Ramps onto pavements, special drop down steps on the tube and on buses and secure places for wheel chairs inside the vehicles are a boon as are disabled toilets.  It's costly but it recognises that as a community, we function as one and to be born with or suffer a disability is a chore enough not to have any more hurdles than necessary.

The clubs and the associations for the disabled are many and the term disabled is a misnomer when you see the Herculean strides these people have made to compete. This is not the fathers egg and spoon race on the village common this is serious athletics not a mile away from what an able bodied athlete would produce. The hours of physical torment trying to recover mobility is enough if you have your limbs in working order but without a leg or without both legs the mind boggles. I watched what appeared to be a football game only to learn  that all the players were blind and relied on some sort of sensor to give them a sense of their surroundings. I would be a wimp sitting in my arm chair, these guys are competing on a world stage.

So when you see someone battling in a wheelchair to get over a step or a blind person hesitant to cross the road, stop what your doing, stop the frenetic pace to be somewhere else and take time out to help, they might not be Olympic champions but they deserve our respect.

 

Loving someone

 

Subject: Loving someone

Love is like an aphrodisiac, it's chemistry at its most deceiving, it often plays us for a fool. There's nothing rational about love, it's ephemeral , transitory, it ebbs and flows, its of the mind and has little rational basis. It often binds us in a vicelike grip making us do crazy things in the postponement of sensibility. I'm not speaking of a mother's love for her child, that deep unfathomable maternal connection or a fathers love for his children but I'm speaking of an attraction towards someone else for reasons which are hard to define. I'm also speaking of a gender based love since my love for another man would for me be philosophical, not physical. So it has to be a girl and she can't be a member of my own immediate family.  Lust can play a part but it's transitory and short lived, so we exclude that as deviant. What is it in that attraction for a woman where a thousand girls wouldn't cause a ripple and yet the one becomes fascinating.

What is this fascination is it their looks, of course yes but it's much more than that, is it their posture the way they hold themselves as they go about their business, is it their vigour or singleminded persona, is it the way they speak, their accent, what they say. Is it that unfathomable cross current of emotion, like a zephyr which strikes your antenna.

It doesn't happen often but when it does you are beguiled like a sailboat caught in a sudden draught of wind, unstable and off course.

We do crazy things when our minds are turned but especially love as we play with its consequences. Our normal progressive step by step assumptions are blown away as you risk everything on the pitch and toss of reciprocation.  I remember having left my love standing on the quayside in Sydney to sail home on a promise to see my parents only to receive a Dear John letter not long after landing in Blighty. A normal rational human being would have bided their time but no, some sort of madness unfurled in my brain and it demanded flying half way around the world to have the truth, which was staring me in the face, spelt out to me, that she had moved on.

In the film Mrs Wilson, based on a true life story an army officer who worked for military intelligence and lived a cloak and dagger existence in the work he did, also lived cloak and dagger in his personal life having three clandestine marriages and supporting a charade of the loving husband and father to all three families. On his death the truth slowly reveals itself and the women try to make sense of their lives living with a multiple adulterer. The story is further muddied by his working for Intelligence and they, knowing of the deceit were fully complicit happy for it to be hidden behind the Official Secrets Act.

It's a story of a man's love acted out in three families and the ghastly truth that his definition of love was so different from theirs, he role played the loving husband in the knowledge that as far as he was concerned, no wrong was done and the provision of a home for each, plus with a complicated division of his time, his marital responsibilities were complete having fathered sons to all three  and his responsibilities to them were met by being their loving but partly absent father. So in this bewitched state he planned his life, to have children and make commitments "till death do us part". His love survived in all of them as they remembered the time he spent with them fondly and it was only when the charade was revealed on his death that hurt and recrimination surfaced.

Love then in a monogamous life is both a force and sometimes the cause of so much unhappiness. In it we continue to strike out, time and again basing our decisions on ephemeral  things rather than by plotting a course, step by step on a reality which only others see.

The Muslim practice of arranged manages is perhaps a better way of consummating our desire based on the practicality adage, "the family knows best", instead of the firework show and bright lights which, only when dimmed reveal the true nature of the affair.

Divine right

 Subject: Divine right.

The scenarios now emerging from the debacle that became the American mission in Afghanistan are quite grave given that Islamic extremism is a thread which runs through it all. The question of Joe Biden’s miscalculation regarding the pull out, his inability to communicate with any of his ally’s, even though they had the spilt blood of their own soldiers on their hands and had spent billions in the effort to keep the Taliban at bay, still the Americans felt fit to go it alone. Their hubris will be remembered, their nation less trustworthy, their aid will be questioned and the entente cordial irreparably damaged.

Successive Presidents have been accused of self delusion. Obama in defining the opposition as having the same principles and therefore doing nothing when action was needed as in Syria. Trump in his bully boy simplicity in believing financial power was sufficient not realising that religious belief is a much greater driving force than political belief. . And Joe Biden, the arch manipulator, the political survivor who dealt in political time scales and the provisional result of the ballot box.

Currently we are focussed on the people left behind who fear the reprisal of the Taliban but soon we will fear the activism of the Islamic Jahid as they mobilise to strike in the major cities around the world. There’s no greater stimulus than winning and to win back the caliphate from the west instils great belief in their invincibility. The Taliban are a home grown phenomena their horizon is within the mountains of Afghanistan itself but Al-Qadeda, ISIS and the offshoot ISIS-K are already in the country consolidating their forces and in many ways are as much a threat to the Taliban as to us in in the west.

An even greater threat is the inclusion of these extremist Jahid into the volatile ferment that is Pakistan. Pakistan, a considerable nuclear power with 160 nuclear ☢️ warheads and the rockets to target their payload. A politically troubled country with a secular government controlled by a religious ulama operating from the madrasa, it teeters on the brink of becoming a caliphate itself. Imagine the suicide bomber astride a nuclear weapon, imagine the delicate balance of power which held the cold war in stalemate broken by an insane assumption of divine right.

Who should pay the tax

Subject: Who should pay the tax

The news paper are full of stories of the shortages, HGV drivers, nurses and doctors, fruit pickers and the lik
e. These same newspapers now agaste at these shortages were the same newspapers who wilfully denied it would happen when we left Europe and the pool of labour it provided. The lull in observing those consequences, the blatant mistruths of reporting “we told you so” when things seemed to be continuing as before whilst ignoring the fact that regulations hadn’t kicked in during the interim between signing and implementation. Now as the shutters come down on our own producers selling into Europe, European producers are doing a roaring trade because the much vaunted  alternative supplies from other countries simply hasn't materialised.

As the supply chains fail and the supermarket shelves empty, will the empty words of Boris and  his coatery be recalled and more importantly, will they pay any meangful price for misleading us.

The Tory party is currently working itself up into a lather as NI taxation is proposed to rise to pay for the huge dislocation of the NHS and the enormous backlog the pandemic has caused on the normal business of hospitals which has only added to the realisation of the perilous state of our Social Care.  It appears Tory back benchers are more dismayed at a broken election promise, not to raise taxes than the need to repair the financial roof.. When do manifesto promises not get broken but the thought of tax rises fills them with dread. It’s not as if increasing NH Insurance will hit the retiree, retired people don't pay NI  but the people it will effect are the low paid who do pay NI, which as a percentage of earning, is much much higher than a person earning 70.000 a year. Progressive taxation, taxing the dividends of the wealthy as well as the undisclosed earnings of the Tech Companies seems beyond HMRC. But the Tory party, having become something of a hybrid winning so many Labour seats at the last election,  Boris needs to keep these voters to re-elect those seats in his promised to "level up" the economy and invest in the North.

Our economy is limping and with so many imponderables such as the effect of Brexit, and now the pandemic it's hard to see, in a world where Covid has laid waste to the delicate balance of economic self sufficiency where the economic upturn will come.

Of course we could go back to our wartime indifference over the lack of things and introduced the ration book again and imposed restraint on our purchases. We have been conditioned to expect out of season produce on our shelves and the constant competition between the supermarkets have held prices down to the detriment of the supplier. As shortages become the norm and the supermarkets scramble for  limited choice, the opportunity or necessity to raise the prices of the dwindling choice will be impossible to resist.

Watching the shiny new electric motor cars revealed at the German motor show one sees a nation gearing up for change whilst we squabble over the old chestnuts of who should pay tax.

 

The Second Coming

Subject: The Second Coming





As the Taliban direct our gaze to what a caliphate looks like and we see reflected the authoritarian hold Islamic countries have over their nation state it would serve us well to understand why the rise of Islam is happening across the world.

 25% (1.8 billion) of the worlds population is Muslim, the next largest cohort is the Catholic at 1.3 billion whilst the total Secular population is only 14 %.  The difference between Muslim, Catholic and Secular is that the latter two respect the view of the individual. In the Catholic religion with confession, and in the secular world completely, whilst, one of the strengths of the Muslim faith is its ritualistic conformity, its adherence to the doctrinal word of god, of who there is no gainsaying. It’s not a question of right or wrong, there is no such distinction, only Gods instructions set down in the Quran.  It’s a powerful arrangement,  to take out of the hands of man the important decisions about man himself, it absolves mankind of any responsibility other than to follow the word because god is omnipotent and his word unquestionable. In the extreme case it’s the reason people strap explosives to themselves and are prepared to die for an interpretation of the holy book or, at a less fervent level prostrate themselves in the mosque. There’s nothing even close to this subservience of faith in a supernatural being and in so doing it makes being a Muslim extremely powerful. Since we potentially have the essence of competition, anyone who is not Muslim should feel concern.

This post is not a diatribe against the Muslim faith or faiths in general but the history of militarism and a marginal contempt for non Muslims makes we wonder if non Muslims aren’t sleep walking into something more serious especially since it’s become sacrilege to offend or offer any alternative opinion regarding this particular religion. The elephant in the room is the size of the population in this country 5-6% of the total and given there were non up until the 18th century and that the increase is 10x the non Muslim population political demographics should concern us since by 2050 they will be the majority voice and uniquely since they largely sing from the same hymn book (no pun intended) and because they have their own cultural law (Sharia) which dictates their actions both social and religious the the non homogeneous rest of us must give pause for thought before it’s too late. 

Of course if you see the merit in the Muslim community which many do since thousands convert every year, then this maybe the second coming !!