The doubt of a trout
Sylvia shawcross
Well, we all get these stray thoughts sometimes. They are orphaned from our lives and our doings and just appear quickly like the flash of a trout in cool water. Quickly gone.
Sometimes we see them again and catch them with that wide net of curiosity that our mind throws out there. We never know which ones we’ll catch for the moment—what speckled shiny idea will find us with a cup of tea in reverie.
These kinds of things happen to people who do not live on cellphones. I’m fairly certain it happens very rarely in those who do. They are not capable of knowing what a bored brain might do to fill the spaces unlit by ever-present screens because, well, they have no time.
The screen has decided they have no time and they have accepted this. If they actually stooped to reverie, it would have to be part of some multi-tasking thing like exercise and dog-walking and yoga and emptying the mind meditation. Which is not reverie at all. Well, not the kind I speak of anyway. But that is neither here nor there.
Just this day I caught an odd fish of an idea. One of those “why” ideas I always seem to get as if I’d not grown any older than a four-year-old in all this time. Some of us are like that.
This idea wasn’t a rainbow trout idea but more like a brown trout. Brown and fishy and uninteresting really but nevertheless an idea worth making a cup of tea for to watch the snow that skeletons the branches of leafless trees against a white sky.
This idea is not new nor particularly interesting really. Everybody knows it. In their hearts. If they were honest: why is it that the very thing that seems to be making us all miserable is proffered to us as the solution to our misery? See, I told you it was a boring ubiquitous idea but if you REALLY think about it….
Technology has caused incredible harm in every direction and yet is supposed to be our salvation. Sure, it has also accomplished amazing things in many ways but it has virtually (and that is not a pun) destroyed human interactions and play.
In other words, it had no business getting involved with people at any social or psychological level. It should have stayed where it belonged—a resource, a tool to science and engineers, a reference, a practical service.
Instead of recognizing this, the solution is always the same… keep upgrading technology that should not be there in the first place. If children are depressed and confused then keep upgrading. Offer more games, more names, more shames until they disappear into a world we don’t share and probably never can. Until they are lost entirely.
Everyone knows this whether they wish to admit it or not. How many more scientific studies do we need? All this social media in particular has broken humans and particularly the children. We know this and yet we do nothing. Because we have no time.
No time to watch the children.
Now, if any of us were serious about rebelling about how the globalists want to turn us into machinery or in service to it, we’d throw away cellphones. Maybe just get ourselves a flip phone. But we won’t, will we? That would mean we were actually serious. Do any of us have a right to complain if we don’t?
I don’t know of course. As ever. I am just going to watch the snow. Some days it feels like the frozen tears of angels weeping on us all. They aren’t wearing masks apparently.
Here’s a favourite quote from Edwige from a comment section on my last article:
Those seagulls will need a chip van 15 minutes from their nest….”
…and here’s an earworm:
Syl Shawcross lives in the province of Quebec, Canada.
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I have freaked out a fellow I used to bike with.
I hadn’t seen him in about 6 years. I was on my bike; he was walking.
Of course, the talk went almost exclusively towards my bike and my present take on bike tech.
“What? no Computer on your bike?!”
“Which home training kit you use? Swift or Strava?
Well, even though I run a bike shop it is not retail but only service and repair. I want nothing to do with the “new ” generation of tech know-it-alls. Mechanical operation, please.
So I say, “I don’t bother. I just ride the bike.”
Or, “I will not do electronic shiffting. With the ease of operation of mechanical electronic shifting is redundant.”
“Why are you blowing the tech off,” he cries.
Me, “(Sigh) Because I have an attention span! I am happy to ride without any electronics, including personal music. Ya know, I plug my ears with industrial plugs so I can keep my head or lose it, as I choose.”
“That’s just fucking stupid! There are so many training programs that you can keep going forever!”
Sigh. “I am 63 years old. Who, where and why should I bother training. I do not feel any lack for going “Sunday afternoon married-man fit!” (Weekend warrior)
You get the picture. Those that are bored of tech are not bored! There is so much richness left by living on intuition and not wasting time to internet research every consumer lost leader that comes around, then rationalizing its purchase. There is much enjoyment being the only person in a queue not vegging on a phone. Often, when I know there is time to pass I will bring a novel. Even sitting for a half hour staring at trees or clouds or the wall can be therapeutic!
Technology has come upon us so quickly I think it’s still magic to many and folk are in awe and feel dependent. I have always had the sense that eventually we’ll get over it and return to a more balanced lifestyle where it becomes nothing more than those tools the use of which is interspersed with normal human living. The human spirit will come to realise just how much the worship of such ‘gods’ is to our detriment.
Well, Sylvia there are many sources for those thoughts that flash through your mind….
Here’s one source: “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1)
One the other hand my wife. (of 58 years) who possesses far greater “intuition” than I, will often say to me, “I have this feeling I need to call “so and so”. (with whom she hasn’t any contact in six months or so), and invariably something has recently transpired in their lives and they were so happy for the call and to share that “something” with someone from her past that she trusted deeply.
All this to say that we live in both physical and spiritual realms. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (1John:4:1)
I may be a rarity in the world but I have never owned a smart phone and don’t use a mobile phone at all. I prefer to use a hard-wired laptop, via a router connected to a landline. It is very efficient and limits (slightly) the amount of electro-magnetic radiation I am subjected to…. however, my electrosmog meter tells me that, regardless of my efforts to eliminate WIFI devices from my home, I am still bombarded with multiple and pulsed signals from my neighbours and overhead satellites.
Short of dressing entirely in aluminium foil, what protection can I find for sale? Only silver threaded clothing and bed canopies which cost a small fortune!
We should not have to protect ourselves from invasive weaponry being beamed at us 24/7!
As your article focuses on how much our opportunities for reverie are curtailed and how much this changes the mind state of children, I would suggest that the issue of electro-magnetic radiation has far more serious impacts on the health of all living things. I would also like to point out the alarming similarities between the symptoms named as reactions to Covid19 and those KNOWN to be caused by certain electro-magnetic frequencies.
Until 5G is fully up and running, the only thing one can effectively do to limit (but not eliminate, of course) electro-magnetic radiation is get as far away from cell phone towers as possible – but I’m sure you already know that.
Once 5G is on every street corner, there’s not much to be done. Leaving the big cities only slows it down: it’ll be everywhere eventually.
From my own experience, I bought some devices from an online site (Less emf) to cover a router which I specifically told the installer I DID NOT want wi-fi set up on – but which, when I tested it, jumped all the way to the red.
Regarding emf, the old adage “You can run but you can’t hide” pretty much says it all.
Thank you all for your kind (and maybe even the unkind one) words. I’ll refrain from interrupting the flow of dialogue here.
Once again such a great article Sylvia. Thank you.
I have written extensively about the dangers of technology, but never really touched the soul of it as you have here. This is like poetry, and really is the most effective way to address it. The objective mind is allied with the advancement of technology, the soul-mind is not.
I love your musings Sylvia, excellent earworm choice, I didn’t have to listen, it played immediately in my head. Trout are such beautiful creatures…
Good article. We should get rid of our “smartphone” if we are really serious about doing something against the new world order. But the difficulty is that they’re too addictive and I’m reading this wonderful article on a smartphone screen.
Three hundred words of poetical musings before we stumble across three little dots that indicate we have arrived at The Idea…
“Technology has caused incredible harm in every direction and yet is supposed to be our salvation. Sure, it has also accomplished amazing things in many ways but it has virtually (and that is not a pun) destroyed human interactions and play.”
Firstly, many high end personal computers are Gaming PCs. And even the most humdrum PCs have games. That’s a lot of play.
Secondly, the very first computer I was allowed to communicate with (it filled a room) greeted me on Xmas with a merry Jingle Bells — which one of our mathematicians had playfully programmed into it. I have been a fan of digital music ever since — I even digitalized my digital CD collection onto my smartphone, to be nearer to playful Beethoven.
Thirdly, people who muse about whether their idea is a speckled trout of an idea or a brown trout of an idea have no idea of the amount of ultra high technology Nature has miniaturized into the cells of a trout — including its brain cells.
Technology is Life, not salvation — with all “the boredom, the horror and the glory” of Life.
Christ is our Salvation.
But not “tech before human beings”.
My meat computer has many more gigs in it than a smart phone. I can conjure up easily in my head anything I have listened to in analog.
No use of questionable labour and work safety practices to produce something to achieve activation of neurons.
No invoking of Christ as the only way out.
No time to watch the children.
I was not watched very well as a child. I even called the police on my parents because they were late one evening and were way past the time they typically came home on a night out.
I was not afraid for myself. I cooked my lunch in grade school because I refused to eat sandwiches. I liked my freedom. I was afraid something happened to them.
The police gave them a talking to nevertheless.
So it’s not a big deal if theres no time to watch the children. The children can watch themselves to some degree. Sometimes too well as in The Lord of the Flies.
My point is that it’s more important who’s watching the kids when you’re not able to and why are you not able to?
We should not shun science. We should shun those that take it and warp it and then use it against a dimwitted populace that allows itself to be. Why?
Simply because we are not intelligent enough. Schooling aside, the majority simply are not up to speed with the power the new science is offering.
We are not intelligent enough to stop and limit corrupt individuals, NGO’s and corporations from harming us with the new science.
I don’t prescribe to the notion that because of them, we should stop the science.
As some children do not need a parent to “watch over them”, similarly a society does not need such entities to watch over them.
Now theres a flash of a trout in cool water.
And for my video song… I’d suggest Supermax – World of Today 1977 and end with Love Machine.
As someone who does blame science itself for the atrocities it gives rise to, my view is that science cannot be used for good because humanity is incapable of good.
Perhaps there is an alternate science, developed by some other creature on this planet; but so limited it can only be used for good. That would be nice.
But science as humans have configured it is primed and ready to go for evil. And it sure has.
“We should not shun science. We should shun those that take it and warp it and then use it against a dimwitted populace that allows itself to be. Why? Simply because we are not intelligent enough.”
I don’t think it’s not a question of intelligence, because I have friends and relations with PhDs in science who fell nonetheless for Con-19. Science is more like Christianity: an attitude of humility before Objective Power and Wisdom, greater than anyone can imagine, which nevertheless allows us to share in its truth. An attitude of personal responsibility — one signs one’s thesis with one’s own name, and humbly submits it to the scrutiny of one’s peers — and of the Creator. Because if one’s thesis is against the Laws of Nature, it simply will not work.
I believe that arrogant Con-men, who take the name of Science in vain and think they can get away with it, are destined for the same place as those who take the name of The Lord in vain.
“To the sure ground of Nature
Trusts the mind that builds for Eternity” — Wordsworth quotation on the masthead of ‘Nature” science journal.
How the solution to technology destroying our lives and health is supposed to be more technology, I just don’t understand. 🙁
I never felt more alive than when playing pond hockey. No refs, few parents, just pure kid fun. We agreed when to take a break, when to change the teams. Not complicated and low tech.
Somehow this has become impossible in today’s world. So sad.
Very nice Syl. Thank you.
beautifully said!
Thanks for this, syl. Like wardropper said, wise and poetic, with a serious warning.
I was reminded of a couple of related references:
Disconnected from Reality: How Smartphones and Social Media Create a Schizophrenic-Like State
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
-Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
We live in a virtual simulation of reality. This simulation is millennia old and has been installed by non-human entities as portrayed by The Matrix with its analogy to energy acquisition and batteries. Many of the ancients knew this and wrote about it. In particular Plato’s cave, the Christian Gnostics with their Nag Hammadi scrolls, and even the Sanskrit Vedas with their reference to ‘maya,’ our world of illusion. Current virtual reality makes the description far easier for the average person to relate to. Imagine every baby emerging from the womb and immediately stuffed into a full body virtually reality suit unimaginably more technologically advanced than what exists currently. The infant as he ages thinks the suit is a natural part of his body. A false reality with false rules and perceptions is then all this person will know. He identifies with his fake avatar thoroughly. Plato did an excellent job conveying this with his “cave.” The actual player outside the game, which is our spiritual (not soul) body knows what is happening, but it is just a vague feeling of uneasiness to the consciousness of the player, which now almost fully identifies with his avatar and its virtual reality. This is our condition and has been so for ages.
But the puppet masters are no longer satisfied with this one step removed fake reality. They wish to inject a second degree reality within the first degree. They call this the ‘metaverse.” It will be installed into humanity this century in a far less intrusive way than the clumsy VR suits, via fake Twitter hero Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chips, his near earth orbiting satellites broadcasting 5G, 6G, ….. XG microwave pulses to every corner of the planet from the hive mind ‘cloud.’
Smartphones are only the beginning prior to cerebral implants. I do have an “ancient” iPhone 4s which is kept on airplane mode over 99% of the time. I also have a microwave meter to verify that AM works, and also a Geiger counter, and a dirty electricity (AC voltage transient wave) meter. My house is wired with ethernet and I only use wifi for a few minutes a month. I live in the country in Lain American and do not have access to a wired telephone service. I find some apps on the ancient iPhone useful, specifically the mp3 player, the clock, and the calculator. I also have a Nokia flip in working condition dating to 2010. Living in a non-English speaking country, and at the age of 76 finding the acquisition of Spanish difficult despite continuously working at it, I do download English language books and read them on an iPad even more ancient than the iPhone. I simply do not have the income to mail them internationally, though I would prefer paper books.
I applaud you for a balanced approach to embracing technology. Too often utility, frugality and spirituality are reserved for antiquated art forms like flint knapping. You’re applying it in a modern context.
However I might disagree with you when you start referring to our faultless overlords. I feel like this is an unhelpful level of pernicious despair, and rather masochistic. A subtype of ‘govern me harder, daddy’ thinking.
The individual who’s thrifty and self contained and knows there are games within games and knows this physical realm is largely BS could be the most powerful person in the universe.
Like that guy in a cave in Hitchhiker’s Guide. No need for overlords.
Perhaps the ‘overlords’ are only next-tier gulgafrinchams? Hopeless middle managers trapped in a system they will never understand? 😄 A2
in other words figments of ” our ” over-imagination ?
Hi Sam, I do not understand the meaning of this paragraph.
“However I might disagree with you when you start referring to our faultless overlords. I feel like this is an unhelpful level of pernicious despair, and rather masochistic. A subtype of ‘govern me harder, daddy’ thinking.”
Could you elucidate it? I use the Overlord term sardonically. That is how they regard themselves. I do not regard them as “faultIess in any respect. I do not think they will succeed with their “project,” though I expect them to create much more misery for humanity over the coming decade.
As to middle managers, I agree when it comes to the power pyramid. If we know their names, they are middle managers.
Pedantic point: The Who song is actually called “Baba O’Riley”.
Somebody tell me what a ‘flip-phone’ is.
When I bought a mobile phone 15 years ago, I was told that there was no longer any such thing as a simple ‘phone’.
Am I to take it that there is still hope?
Are you asking or is this rhetorical?
Not rhetorical. I want a simple phone without “the cloud”, or anything else which tells my mother-in-law where I am at any given moment…
I gave up on flip-phones a couple years back. I never wanted a mobile phone because it’s too cumbersome (and I only carry a phone when driving since I have a long long history of car trouble).
But it just got to be too difficult getting service for the flip-phone. All the carriers do their best to discourage flip-phones (such as Trac Phones). But they do still exist.
I remember in jr high school going to the library to look at copies of National Geographic, looking for the nudes. Rarely did it disappoint, though admittedly some nudes were better than others. But always the same, some tribe somewhere, kids sitting in the dirt, playing w pebbles, mom, dad, grandma. And I would think, as an American 13-year-old: what do these people expect from their lives? Turns out they were from the future, because all this photos, I noticed something else — they were smiling.
I must admit that wasn’t the sort of thing that I would have associated with the National Geographic.
Wise and poetic words, with a serious warning.
I do hope that whatever is left of human warmth today will survive to offer drastic reversals of the apocalyptic evils currently assailing us all.
what the hell..?
I’ve just seen the new off g article about kingpin shills ‘project vartias’ written by kit and now the article has disappeared.
still there for me…
Would technology even be what it is if TPTB weren’t the ones that created it?
The primary responsibility of government is to protect our rights and manage infrastructure.
Instead it is all about standing militaries, intelligence agencies and regulatory agencies. All things focused on control, or destruction, of people.
So while it is easy to blame technology for our predicament, I would argue that technology has been bastardized into a tool for control, that is being exploited by government, at the detriment of people.
The Tree of Liberty is thirsty.
The primary responsibility of government is ceasing to exist. Oh, and read Ellul or even just Postman or Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television to get a contrary take on technology’s neutrality.
While I don’t disagree that the absence of government is optimum, as in Anarchy, reality of human behavior creates cause and effect.
It would be possible to have no government, if the majority of people lived in accordance with a righteous moral code, and had good ethics and character.
Until then, there has to be a balance. I for one believe that the USA’s Representative Constitutional Republic, is the best form of government conceived of by people to create a balance.
Where that form of government is today, is not a refutation of the form of government, rather a result of We the People not fulfilling our responsibility of vigilance against tyranny. As a result humans running the government have become tyrannical and breached the contract. The remedy for breach is clearly expressed in the Second Amendment. Time to change the guards, and by force if required.
I will be ready in a minute.
But the majority DO live in accordance with a righteous moral code, don’t they? Which is to say, most people do not harm others.
Even if you were right, government does not solve that problem anyway. I would say governments make people LESS moral.
Serious question, how bad does it have to get before the argument “but things would be REALLY bad if we had no government!” is exposed for being completely ludicrous and insane?
So you think a US sized government is pretty cool? Or should we just go ahead and make it global?
Technology is inevitable. The industrial revolution which brought us the steam engine and textile machinery was financed by plunder from the sub continent. The ascent of Europe arose because of the post Columbus looting of the Americas. It’s Faustian bargains all the way. We embrace the manna that technology brings not thinking about the morality and the cons and the long term implications. Instead of wise old greybeards we have the cunning but shallow banksters leading the way. We have now painted ourselves into a corner. The automobile and the airliner and the old fashioned telephone had their charms and their indisputable benefits. What is upstream and current is horrifying. Radioactive dumb phones which can irradiate and track you without any real benefit. Driverless electric cars ? For Christ’s sake. There are only the (possibly) surviving 400 North Sentinel islanders that are free. They have been left alone possibly as an experiment. They live in the Andaman islands in the Bay of Bengal and violently resist assimilation. I certainly don’t blame them.
i do not think we have invented anything better than the bicycle and sewing machine, everything else is obviously devolution and definitely not progress in any form……just my opinion
The islanders killed a US missionary a few years ago. Isolated tribes in the Amazon have also tried, but Bolsonaro and his sponsors wiped out some of them.
In a world of no machines, would a body be a thing?
Or a brain?
Imagine living like a tree, necessarily
Accepting all that could ever be.
Wouldn’t it be better if everything simply was?
No regret, no instance of warmth, no dreamy tunnel of recognition?
Rivers of temperatureless anythingness running and running.
Destruction the same as creation the same as forever the same as never.
No.
Outside my front door the world is real.
It can fuck off and die.
Twice.
Inside my front door is my head.
Inside my head, is me.
THAT is what’s real.
Poem is being rhetorical.
Yes. But I disagree.
So wait, with yours, what is real? The world outside your door or you inside your head. The poem states that both are real. Is that correct?
And what exactly can fuck off and die? Twice? (besides me please).
Both are real.
The world outside is real, for sure.
For millions of people the world, as sold to them, is real
The world inside my head is real, as well.
I know which one I trust.
In answer to your question, the world, as sold to them, can fuck off and die .
Twice.
Not you.
People speak of a divine spark inside each human (soul or whatever). Maybe; but there’s also a corresponding demonic spark somewhere lurking inside.
It’s this demon thing that absolutely, positively, unequivocally demands at some point something (or many somethings) evil from technology – or just about anything else humans can come up with.
Technology created the combine to help ease the pain of growing food. But it also created the bioengineered crops which eventually creep into every field everywhere and render the farmer a mere serf of the likes of Monsanto.
A trade-off: sure. But the trade keeps getting darker and scarier every day.
Well said, Howard.
My stepson is currently dying of the consequences of alcoholism. He won’t last the weekend. There you see that demonic spark at work. A brilliant, energetic and creative mind, apparently utterly destroyed by a mere bottle. But what lurks behind that bottle is a demon.
These things are real.
Regrets for your stepson. A very good friend of mine got hooked on crack (which has been proven to have been a CIA plot to poison inner city blacks). It never ceased to amaze me the excuses he could come up with for why it was crucial for him to get high.
A neighbor told of a good friend’s son who was addicted to alcohol. He got throat cancer. And even as he was dying, in a hospice, he managed to sell his pain pills so he could get a bottle of wine.
It isn’t, as they say, “Demon Rum.” The demon is much closer to the one who takes the drink.
Network
There is in every country an elaborate network to produce and peddle alcohol. The stuff is profitable as well as damaging and helps keep the populace docile. The Bronfmans made their fortune from the stuff during prohibition. The Purple Gang that spawned Max Fisher transported it across the Canadian border. Fisher mentored Kissinger who in turn mentored Schwab. I know firsthand the damage it can cause.
I hope you’ll forgive me my next opinion piece wardropper.
People see “technology” as an “inevitable” part of human “progress” and therefore see these new technologies, apps etc. as the “gee-wiz” “what-will-they-think-of-next” developments. As if these technologies just happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. The technologies that have most shaped our lives, did not just happen. They take a lot of money, resources and planning. Who has those resources? Big Business and the State. Some technologies are developed and others not? Why? When a new gadget arrives on the market, why don’t people ask that question? New technologies, new products are developed, not to make our lives easier, more convenient, but for two reasons primarily: the potential for profit and control. As Simon Elmer said in an interview, “convenience breeds complicity.”
I have another theory: That divine spark in all living beings residing in the pineal gland is smothered by toxins and EMFs, and that’s why those who wish destruction or enslavement upon others, the socio and psychopaths in the world, can feel no empathy, no real joy; they have no flexibility of mind and are disconnected from the natural world.
Absolutely agreed. The psychos are disconnected…by choice. They choose wealth and power, a combination guaranteed to drive anyone from reality and straight into the arms of madness.
I do have a flip phone. Never wanted a Smart Phone.
The article reminds of the “auto-fill” or “auto-complete” feature that comes (unasked for) in my workplace MS Outlook email. I sometimes think its handy when it completes a word I am typing (I am not a fast typist), but it is often wrong. I could see how people might be seduced by the technology. But I see it as insidious, the convenience would eventually conform my words to what the algorithm is programmed to. It would be teaching me not to have my own thoughts. That is what is happening to all these people addicted to Smart Phones. They are becoming homogenized by Big Tech.
Well said. Our freedom is reduced by the options they give us on digital screens.
Technologism is when conflicts are denied, delayed or evaded by repackaging to a saving or solving narrative.
So discovering bacteria. calling them germs and assigning the role of pathological agency to them launched a war on Germs “that will not stop until we are dead” under the hubris that evils would be done away with under an enlightened scientific era. So eradicate the problem Out There – and interpret toxic treatments as the disease’s incredible mutating ingenuity!
Solvation via repacked fear, guilt & debt drives the dark economy of destruction under false premise and following false profits.
So of course our problems will not be solved externally – but they can be piled up there as trash in hell to pay.
Predictive control is the technological use of the mind as a weapon set over life, by the belief that we can stamp the past on the present and force it to be what we say. Reality has nothing to do with our perceptual tantrums but that we set our own version to mask over it – in case we are disclosed unto ourself a sham.
Binra,
For me? Profound. Thanks.
Ann
This one hits home for me. Especially now while facing the teeth of tyranny. Better to go into the snow.
https://youtu.be/dMrImMedYRo
It’s a genetic thing:
This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Lovely writing, thanks Sylvia.
Midazolam Matt ‘assaulted’ & called a murderer in packed Tube carriage.
https://youtu.be/uX_b5P2hDEY
There will be a lot of mimbling at the CPS.
If they pursue this, they will be fucked.
My guess is it will be quietly dropped.
Kit called it recently – beware fake localism:
https://dumptheguardian.com/global-development/2023/jan/27/wake-up-davos-global-leaders-must-think-local-to-solve-the-worlds-problems
More fiercely independent journailism – sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Never owned a phone/television/car or been in debt. Having an analogue intellect in a digital age hopefully allows in the light of a little wisdom as I disgracefully age.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
Fair enough, but where to park
In a poem, a question mark?
I would paste the question mark at the very end. For the entire stanza is a compound question.
Entirely agree Paul; it’s just that the original doesn’t seem to bother with one at all, which irks my inner pedant.
Paul:
Dem votes, dem votes, dem down votes…
upvote, downvote, don’t give a hoot.
Good man, me neither.
are you commenting from a library computer?
i’ve a pc, and an old smart phone for video calls. and general phone stuff, if i’m out.
all on for a few hours tops.
and a tv for dvd watching.
Dear sabelmouse, I borrow my wife’s tablet. She allows me to live in other centuries. Sometimes I wear pantaloons and caper around on tables speaking truth to power, bonking the nobility with a pig’s bladder on a stick. Today I am angrily prodding a keyboard elsewhere like one of Kubrick’s early hominids. Back to the poetry; I am not going gentle in to any good night; I’m full of effin’ rage (though if I’m honest I actually prefer RS Thomas).
:))))))))
I used to take two suitcases on holiday.
One for clothes, the other for books.
Reading was my escape.
I couldn’t do it at home because I felt guilty for not doing stuff around the house.
Two weeks of ouzo and books was my holiday.
Then my wife and I bought each other a kindle.
I no longer needed the other case.
I had a device.
The first flush of excitement disappears when you fall asleep and your entertainment crashes onto the hard tiles of your rented apartment.
Then, it slowly hits you that it’s a bit like reading a book but it’s not really.
It’s just another screen.
Even the ouzo doesn’t taste so good.
It’s fake reading.
It’s progress.
I do like my Kindle, did not think I would but I do. Mine is vintage 2011 and has an LCD screen with no blue light. I treat it gently as I cannot find a replacement for it now since all of them use the blue screen and I hate that. There is a pretty good little library on it and I have never put any of those books on the cloud. I do realize I had best start getting some of those books on paper though, my poor little archaic Kindle will eventually crash and burn. But til that day, while it is a device it doesn’t function much like one so I’ll use it.
BOASTING WARNING !!
Mine is paperwhite so you can read it on the beach !!!!
You still can’t spread it over your face to make a sunshield
Perhaps Sir Rod CBE was just having a quiet moment when he spontaneously decided to do this:
https://news.sky.com/story/sir-rod-stewart-calls-in-to-sky-news-to-donate-for-medical-scans-after-hearing-nhs-crisis-stories-12796105
After all. he’s always been so political.
Or perhaps his handlers gave him the order and it was obey or that video footage might leak out….
‘change the bloody government’
Yeah that’ll do it Rod!
All I really want to do is raise chickens and goats, build a house, be left alone, and grow a big garden. I know how to do all these things, just don’t have a place to do it.
there it is.
If you are a home owner with some equity you could almost certainly do it if you wanted to.
Depending on where you wanted to live or, more importantly, what you are prepared to put up with to achieve it.
If you went to SE Asia with £100,000 you could probably live the live you “really” want to.
I’ve done it as much as I want to for a couple of hundred thousand with the chickens and grow your own stuff.
You need a couple of acres and some hard work.
A little advice:
Don’t get sick.
That really sucks when you can’t gather enough wood to keep warm in Winter or you can’t store enough food to last you until Spring.
Oh, and don’t have a crop failure or a disease running through your livestock (See above)
Sorry, almost forgot.
Whatever you do, don’t get old.
That really sucks because it”s like having all of the above happen to you slowly and if you’re in one of the low rent areas of the world the state safety net is not going to be very strong.
Follow your dream.
Is that the same state safety net that gently guides one onto the covid death pathway?
Take your chances with nature, or with the bastards that want you dead.
This is a really interesting point
Something which is becoming VERY relevant.
I’m going to cover this point in a separate post.
It’s best to raise chickens and grow your own food etc. within a close-knit community where you come to each others aid when something goes wrong.
I agree.
I haven’t been sick in over 30 years. Nothing. Getting old…. well that can’t be helped. I have little money, but if ten people with little money get together they have enough money between themselves to establish a communal set up. I think the time has come for people that wish to opt out the system to re-visit the idea of establishing communes. Not lazy, sitting around, smoking dope communes, but the real deal. Functional, hard working communes. It isn’t that difficult, and if organized well could be enormously successful. You can produce a lot of food on 10 acres of land. I don’t think I ate grocery store vegetables until I left home. Somehow my Dad, (while working a full time job in a factory) cultivating about an acre of land provided most of our food (family of 7) all of our years growing up.
These are suspect activities and liable to make you an enemy of the state.
Spot on – the key is being left alone without anyone telling you what to do.
Which country are you living in where you’re claiming you don’t have a place to do these things?
‘ Technology has caused incredible harm in every direction and yet is supposed to be our salvation.’
Technology is like Plato’s cave. A cave can give some comfort, but it’s only a cave. There is more in life than living life in a cave.
The problem with Plato’s cave is that cavemen loved their servitude and paid respects to the shadows of the that what was projected on ‘the screen’.
Our cave is iPhone (which is the new tv). I am not sure if it should be completely abolished (there are some good things with iPhone and tv), yet it has also many side effects.
The biggest side effect is that people unlearn to see life through their own eyes by watching iPhone, tv, to even reading y reading a book.
If only people could learn that the ‘shadow making’ of technology in principle is boring and cannot compare with real life, they might look back and see that the shadows are just beams of light that make a projection in your brain (literally brain washing). It’s not impossible (if we could do it, they can do it), but it’s not easy and quite painful at first glance.
Oh, I am rambling.. such an old story. When will people learn?
“Technology misused by War Racketeering Corporate Fascist Eugenicist Mobster Psychopath Criminals is definitely a problem.”
Liz and David are brown bread now so Charlie Boy and Dave Jr need to be on top row with Frankie and the Rothschild. Apart from that a brilliant meme!