TRANSCLUSION: A thing existing in more than one place at once

SON OF/ "NAKED FAMILY 2"

back in the xmas/new year of 00/01, when i was continuously-naked in prison, my mum wrote to me, saying how proud she was of me.

its her 70th birthday next year.

80% OF AMERICANS CAN'T FIND BUSH'S TARGET

From Richard Wallace, US Editor, in New York

Even more worrying - one in 10 couldn't pick out America.

When the Daily Mirror carried out a poll of 100 people on the streets of New York yesterday, we found that 80 per cent didn't have a clue where Iraq was.

GEORGE Bush is on the brink of invading Iraq - but most Americans have no idea where the country is.

A survey revealed that only one in seven aged between 18 and 24 could identify Saddam Hussein's land.

And while more than half knew that al-Qaeda and the Taliban were based in Afghanistan, only one in six could find the country on a map.
(daily mirror, thurs 21 nov 02)

on this day 1963

Kennedy shot dead in Dallas

CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER

the first nominations for eviction.

it doesn't matter that all of the six housemates know rationally that its a game and someone simply has to go. the emotional sense of group rejection must still be hard.

on this day 1990

Thatcher quits as prime minister

Margaret Thatcher is to stand down as prime minister after her Cabinet refused to back her in a second round of leadership elections.

TODAY

Serg and Fi are back from their 5 month south american adventure.

meanwhile my earlier excitement over discovering how to make a drop down menu was premature. drop down was all it did. it looks like maybe a navigational menu requires java. i'll get there eventually i guess.

QUASISPECIES: A fuzzy distributions of genotypes characterizing a population of quickly mutating organisms or molecules.

HITCHING

Freewheelers is free, it provides an online database for people offering or requiring lifts, linking drivers and passengers to share the cost of travel... Saves you money, helps other people and reduces pollution.

Concepcion Piccioto and William Thomas

while clearing out scraps of information i'd kept over the years i came across the peace activists who have been living on the pavement opposite the Whitehouse since 1981.

BIOCHAUVINISM: The prejudice that biological systems have an intrinsic superiority that will always give them a monopoly on self-reproduction and intelligence.
[K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation, 1986]

"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
(Lyall Watson)

TUESDAY

MONDAY
Monan daeg, Montag, maandag, lundi, Dies Lunae, Som-var, Peer or Somwar, Tanang- la, Sin, Tsuki, Getsu Youbi.

HYWEL SIMONS

the second most popular search-hit here this week has been for the actor Hywel Simons, including at least one search for "Hywel Simons naked".

he plays a gay cop in the itv police drama "the bill", and i'd blogged about the number of complaints itv received after he kissed another male cop awhile back. (if my memory is correct he was also in a 'controversial' drama for schools about 2 gay teenagers falling in love, back in the late 80's/early 90's, that was banned from afternoon viewing and was eventually screened late at night)

the curious thing about the novelty of having stats is that with discovering so many people are visiting in search of things that aren't really here, i feel it would be a kindness to place something here to satisfy them. so perhaps later i'll find a naked Hywel pic and post it somewhere.

DREAM

the priest, played by Donald Pleasance, was enraged when i insisted that catholicism, like all religion, is entirely the same as coca-cola.

"NAKED FAMILY"

this has been my first full week of having stats on my page. the most common search hit is people looking for "naked family".

i'm just back from spending the night at my mum's. but somehow i don't think i'm ever going to be able to talk her, my step-dad, or my sister into posing for a naked group shot. sorry to dissapoint.

while on this theme, friday morning, before leaving home, i recieved a video copy of Lisa Seidenberg's naked protest documentary, "Being Human", (screening in New York at Anthology Film Archives sometime soon). Lisa came over from america last summer and along with tv crews from Spain and France, she documented the last naked protest, Green Park to Parliament Square, that Vincent and I participated in.

i took her video with me to my parents to watch, along with a copy of my own short "Naked" (screened last year at the Horse Hospital, London, and in Brazil as part of the Carlton Arts festival). but as neither film contained car chases and had far too much talking and artiness, my parents quickly lost interest.

also on friday, before getting a train to Littlehampton, i had arranged to meet with the lovely Kris Cohen, who had contacted me in relation to his academic research into the use of photographic images in blogging. his contacting me has enthused me to put more work into my image archives.

so while at my parents i went through their photos and have brought a number of treasures back with me to eventually scan and upload. gems such as my nan as a baby, end of the 19th century, aswell as pictures of my sister who is currently invisible in my image archive narrative, and me as a child in the 'purple prince' outfit my nan made for a primary school play.

many pictures are sadly lost. in the mid-eighties my parents moved to Spain and then they couldn't afford to keep up the storage payments on stuff packed up in England, which included the big bag of photos. but subsequently, since the deaths of my nan and my mothers two brothers, we have reacquired some pictures from their old albums.

AUTOMORPHISM: "Living as art", a sub-movement of transhumanist art where self-transformation and living itself is the medium.

SCRAPPLEFACE.COM

The publisher of The New York Times today announced that the paper will begin adding a "source code" to each story it publishes on paper, or on the internet. The code system will help the reader understand how the story came to be written.

"Walter Cronkite used to end his newscasts on CBS with the phrase: 'And that's the way it is,'" said Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., "But that was a lie. What shows up on TV news or in the paper is a highly-subjective list of stories spawned for a variety of reasons from political to mundane. This new coding system, is just the latest in our ongoing efforts to be transparent and vulnerable with our readers."

Here is initial list of codes which will appear just under each headline to explain how the story came to be:

* RIP= Reporter's Investigative Piece: our reporter came up with this idea, did the research and wrote the story.
* SH= Something Happened: Some event took place and we reacted by writing this story.
* TB= Trial Balloon: person quoted in story is floating an idea to see how our readers will respond.
* SRTRQ= Source Reacts to Reporters Question: source in story was forced to comment on some topic by persistent reporters' questions. Story presented as if source had brought up the subject.
* NRE= News Release Edited: story is little more than a PR news release edited to make you think we did some actual journalism.
* NRU= News Release Unedited: story is verbatim news release. We don't care what you think.
* OFI= Old Friend Idea: a former reporter, now doing PR, planted this story. Reporter 'owed him one'.
* SND=Slow News Day: speaks for itself.
* WUS= Watch Unnamed Source: Anonymous source in story is same as named source, speaking on "background" (see also TB, above)
* DBI= Drinking Buddy Idea: speaks for itself.
* TDI=Top Down Idea: someone in corporate headquarters emailed an editor and asked, "When's the last time we did a story on...?"
* SI=Stolen Idea: some other news organization just did a piece on this, and we were caught with our pants down. Now, we're trying to appear to be more 'in-depth' than them on the topic.
* AI=Astrologer Idea: the paper's 'advisor' said it would be a good day for such a story.
* TT=Thesis Theme: story is shorter version of reporter's doctoral thesis, and he can't wait to get that Ph.D. so he can get into academia and teach journalism instead of being faced with the daily grind of cranking out garbage that no one reads.

JELLO AQUARIUM

on this day 1989

Berliners celebrate the fall of the Wall

A FOX,

in broadest daylight, midday, trotting along a busy pavement in holborn, central london. it walked right past our red double decker bus.

i bought a lamp. £54 reduced from £130. i have no money, but i wrote a cheque for it and will deal with the finger-wagging from the bank when they post it.

went to see the zombie movie "28 days later". it reminded me of a feeling from long ago, when i first wandered into a cronenberg/ romero/ argento movie in the late seventies, with no previous knowledge or dreary 'cult' status attached to what i was seeing. before the mac-horror of the contemporary industry.

AT THE SPEED OF DARK

by hook and by plenty of crook the dastardley bush regime now has control of the whitehouse, the american senate and their house of representatives.

meanwhile.... in last sunday's Observer, GORE VIDAL CLAIMS 'BUSH JUNTA' COMPLICIT IN 9/11

America's most "controversial" novelist calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen

"according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point, who writes, in 'The So-called Evidence is a Farce':

'I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks'."

on this day 1984

Sandinistas claim election victory

Nicaragua's ruling Sandinista Front (FSLN) claimed a decisive victory in the country's first elections since the revolution five years ago.

Within hours of the count beginning, the leader of the country's left-wing junta, Daniel Ortega, said he had gained nearly 70% of the vote in the presidential election.

In spite of the Sandinista victory being declared fair the United States continued to interfere.

on this day 1995

Israeli PM shot dead

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was been assassinated.

The gunman, named as Yigal Amir, was believed to be one of the founders of an illegal Jewish settlement on the West Bank and a member of an extreme right-wing organisation.

Israel TV said Yigal Amir, 27, had confessed to shooting the prime minister and had told investigators that he did not regret his actions.

"GAY MEN"

i'm just back from seeing a gay-male workshop-devised afternoon performance, that Steven was participating in. and i also bumped into a few familiar faces from my act-up london AIDS activist past. (must scan and upload act-up archives)

ultimately i'm kind of the wrong gay-male audience for this sort of work. and i discovered i had a mighty low tolerance thresh-hold for hearing the words "gay man" or "as a gay man". a low tolerance that was unfortunately stretched to its limits within the first few minutes of the show.

but as someone in the bar highlighted afterwards, it is important for people to be able to process their identity narrative stuff somewheres/sometimes. and one performer's monologue, about his appreciating growing-old in the context of dead friends and lovers who never did, was especially poignant.

a posthuman manifesto

He spoke of human beings, of their freedom to grow into godhood, or to remain gloriously human, to become human for the first time.

NAKED PROTEST: REWIND

some treasures from 00/01:-

the guardian, 26 apr 01
"a replica of Michelangolo's David now wears a white loincloth after complaints by residents of Luke Alfred, Florida."

the independent, 14 jan 01
"an unhappy mistake at the Times on friday. the paper's european edition carried a caption about princess Margaret saying: "the princess, usually happy to go out, has spent most of the past 3 weeks in bed". Above it was a rear-view picture of Vincent Bethell, the nude protestor, climbing into a taxi in his birthday suit."

metro, 22 nov 00,
"one in 4 businesses allows staff to wear casual clothes at least once a week.....but a magazine survey of 1,000 workers found women in particular preferred a smarter dress code.......3 out of 5 women said they hated casual dressing in the office and many described dress-down days as 'baffling and confusing'. a third of women and 1 in 4 men said they wouldn't have a clue what to wear if a casual dress code was introduced by their employers. most women said they would have more confidence in their bank manager, lawyer, or doctor if they wore a smart suit rather than jeans and a t-shirt,"

evening standard, 22 aug 00
2 pages on from reportage of vincent's 5th naked bail/arrest of one week ("laws an ass, says naked rights man"), was news that mo mowlam's hubby likes to paint naked. he says: "i don't like clothes, anyway. i've turned down a couple of banking jobs because i can't stand the thought of putting on a suit again"

evening standard, 20 sept 00
"this season zoe williams will mostly be wearing a naked man. its the latest must-have accessory. all the fashion advertising campaigns say so."

the times, 13 jan 01
the Times' picture caption competion (prize: a fujifilm fotonex). this week readers were invited to offer a speech bubble for naked Vincent Bethell, immediately after a unanimous jury found him not-guilty of "public nuisance". there was also last weeks winning caption of Sadam Hussein shooting a rifle into the air and saying "i hereby declare this international disarmament conference open".

evening standard, 25 jul 01
"a photo of 1959 art prankster Alan Abel, with his campaign placard that reads: "clothe all animals for the sake of decency".

the guardian,12 jan 01,
"mr. Bethell's historic victory was followed by a curious exchange with the judge, George Bathurst Norman.

Bethell (naked): "being human is not a crime."
Judge (in wig): "i would not go away too much with that idea."

apart from this being gibberish, is it not a little worrying that our judges appear to believe that being human IS a crime? i rest my case."

NAKED PROTEST links and texts

"Homo sapiens? You need to upgrade."

ENTRAINMENT

"Feelingless is generally thought to be a word with negative connotations.

It is practically blasphemy to announce that one wishes to be an emotionless bastard.

More to the point, we hurt our own species out of pure hate/jealousy/*insert appropriate feeling*. We then proceed to trumpet ourselves as the most superior organisms (or nation) due to our morality and ability to experience emotions."

for me the most truly frightening aspect of sept 11th, at the time, was the almost total censorship, a smothering of any dissent from the one prescribed emotional script. it was near compulsory to be feeling the event, as if it was different to all the other deaths and tragedy on the news, everyday, that we generally don't really feel.

i worry that similar grand emotive spectacles will follow, where most of the population is, for a time, entrained to a single drum, extremly vulnerable to manipulation and is highly intolerant of any alternatives.

(the guardian newspaper Sept 17 2001): "journalists who have asked sceptical questions have been inundated with furious calls calling them a disgrace to their profession and even traitors."

OLIGARCHY

last monday's guardian, report on the Russian hostage fuck up, talked of the Russian "pro-government tv channels, which are run either by appointees or rich friends of the Kremlin".

isn't our tv and media run exactly the same?

the bread-and-circus illusion of free-speech in this country is ultimately a matter of who and what interests can speak the loudest, most often and most repetetively.

i would compare the monolithic coverage of sept 11th, with say the regular sized reporting earlier the same year of the indian earthquake on 26 January, which killed an estimated 30,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless in the western Gujarat state, as an example of which interests are considered to be of greatest value by those in control.

AMANDA BARRIE

there was one of those rare revitalising tv moments a few friday's ago, on the 'richard and judy' show (afternoon uk tv), when a mainstream celebrity, 67 year old ex-soap (and carry-on) star Amanda Barrie, voiced her common-sense opinion in favour of triangular/polygomous relationships.

wasn't it also in the newspapers once upon a time, that it was Amanda who made Jade's dress for her exit from the big brother 3 house?

DEATH TO REALISM
last night's thoughts-and-video wash-cycle. BLAH BLAH

i was surprised to hear recently that cities exist in our world without cctv.

if when asked to quickly write down things associated with badness, would a large majority within any group of people compile similar lists? are the lists likely to contain: fatty foods and too much tv and litter and murder and smoking and selfishness and blood-sports and list making and blah blah you can recite the drill too, right? does it stand up as evidence of an effectively embedded human coding/virus of irrelevant chicken/egg origins, but of great influence in human daily realities?

another battery-farm inspired debate is whether our new mass populations can ever be trusted with absolute freedoms

or

wether we're in constant need of shepherding (patriarchy/matriarchy, toilet seat up/down, pepsi/coke, freewill/fate, same difference).

its a debate about us as communities, as consumers, as large gatherings of human individuals, and it dominated 20th century thinking and activity, it is well researched, documented to within an inch of its life and workshopped on a global scale.

any pavlovian tinge to our human realities is amply showcased through the tv psycho-art of Derren Brown aswell as by the embodiment charms spun from Trinny and Susannah. Tv at its best, but aren't you sometimes left in the audience afterwards wondering wether some things may just aswell be chip implants, you know, right here right now, get it over with, lube the bloody screwdriver etc

"eXiztenZ is paused". (face down in the restauraunt table/bed morph)

J dropped by for a few hours. he'd been out the previous night distributing food through the anti-war gathering. i was part way through a season 3 buffy video from the library.

the question arose: might in-built capitalist restrictions such as finite budgets, person-power, worker's hours, have the potential to negate any increase in effective surveillance gathering about every inhabitant of everywhere. you know the game character script about "the bad hyper-surveillance/information-gathering society. everybody riot now."

take that old chestnut "the faster and faster intelligent machine" and roast it to its core popular assumption: that a machine at a particular thinking level will automatically be tyrannical/oppressive.

its equally as likely not to be.

a certain level of machine intelligence may make something akin to the emergence of feelings, within its decision making, inevitable.

this potential means that the mythologically omnipotent machine-intelligence, capable of hyper-collating from a host of nano-surveilance bots, forever and everywhere, amen, has an equal chance to not feel like bothering. or it may be interested in surveillancing Alphabetically and Armadillo culture is fascinating.

Ants sure were.

though our immersant culture relocated us wholesale through the looking-glass long long ago, ontologically embodied narcissism ensures that humanity is bedazzled by infinite reflections of its fragile point-of-view. we are growing unacustommed to channeling the unknown.

on this day 1957

Russians launch dog into space

The Soviet Union launched the first ever living creature into the cosmos.

The Soviet authorities said the dog, called Laika, died painlessly after a week in orbit but in 2002 new evidence revealed the dog died from over-heating and panic just a few hours after take-off.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

1: A senior officer in the Republic of Ireland's police knew the Real IRA was planning a car bomb attack in the north three weeks before the Omagh blast, but decided against passing the information to RUC colleagues for fear of exposing a valuable informer, a detective has claimed.


2: Joe Gormley, the miners' leader who presided over two successful strikes against the government in the early 1970s, was named yesterday as a police special branch informer.

Ray Buckton, the long-term leader of Aslef, the train drivers' union widely derided as militant, was also a special branch informant, it was claimed yesterday.


3: According to ex-MI5 officer turned whistleblower David Shayler's account of MI5's 'infiltration' of Class War, He described the debriefing of a particular agent who bragged about beating up uniformed police officers as part of his cover

4: "21st century warfare is about becoming the enemy, recognising no fundamental differences in your ideologies, seeing only the crinkly edges of complexity.."
(the invisibles)

"The posthuman extends his/her possibilities through conscious design."
(--Henry W.Targowski)

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

over the past 7 days i heard from 3 individual friends that i hadn't seen or heard from for quite awhile:

a txt mssg from friend 1 : "please don't let any secrets slip out. thanks, you're a pal. hope to see u soon. xxx"

an ansafone mssg from friend 2: "i'm really unhappy and the worlds a horrible place."

a txt mssg from friend 3: "i'm so depressed i could die...just needed 2 tell someone. trouble is wherever i go i take myself with me. i wish i was different."

last night i visited my aunt, who'll be 80 in a few weeks time. she's my mum's only remaining sibling, the 2 brothers are dead. we don't really know one another as adult people. the one and only previous time i remember going to her house was around 1971. after a few hours together she began to tell me about her childhood. more acurately she considers that she didn't have a childhood.

she said that when she was 6 she was taken to a train station, without any previous explanation, put on a train with a name label around her neck and was met by someone the other end. she discovered she had been sent to a boarding school, where she used to wet the bed, and she didn't come home again for six years. one day, when she was 12, she was taken aside and told to put on some different clothes, it was then she was told she was going home.

at home she discovered she had a new baby sister, my mum.

at home she says she became like a servant, made to clean the whole house by herself. this was the 1930s without modern cleaning conveniences. and she said that her step-father, my nan's 2nd of 3 husbands, used to abuse her.

on this day 1983

US troops invade Grenada

United States marines and army rangers invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada, seized the country's two airports and took Cuban and Soviet prisoners.

on this day 1966

Double-agent breaks out of jail

One of Britain's most notorious double-agents, George Blake, has escaped from prison in a daring break-out believed to have been masterminded by the Soviet Union.

Blake was charged under the Official Secrets Act in May 1961. During his trial, part of which was held in camera, he pleaded guilty to five counts of passing on secrets to the Soviet authorities.

He was sentenced to the maximum of 14 years on each of three counts, to run consecutively - a total of 42 years. It was the longest jail term any British court had handed down to an individual to date.

During his time as an agent, he is believed to have betrayed the names of more than 40 British agents to the Soviets. Many disappeared, and were thought to have been executed.

His actions devastated British secret service operations in the Middle East. He is believed to have passed on the names of almost every British agent working in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut.

After escaping from Wormwood Scrubs, George Blake made his way to Moscow, where he has lived ever since in a state-owned flat.

In a television interview broadcast by the state television channel in 2002 to celebrate his 80th birthday, he described the years he has spent in Russia as "the happiest of my life".

NAKED TRIAL

Steve Gough's Southampton Magistrates' Court (U.K.) trial on the 18th October was adjourned because he turned up to court naked and was then arrested and charged with 'indecent exposure' (a sexual offence despite his behaviour being non-sexual). Information about trial dates, with regard to the previous charge of 'disorderly behaviour' and this new charge of 'indecent exposure', will be posted here as soon as such information is available.

"Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live."
(Henry Van Dyke)

MINDKIND

"in thinking about thinking we should remember that not all thoughts are memes.

in principle, our immediate perceptions and emotions are not memes because they are ours alone, and we may never pass them on.

however, in practice, because we use memes so much, most of our thinking is coloured by them in one way or another. Memes have become the tools with which we think."
susan blackmore/the meme machine

"meaning is not in things
but in between them."
'norman brown'/velvet goldmine

"with world war one, a new phenomenon appeared. Avant-garde movements committed themselves en bloc to political parties as enthusiastically as they espoused particular theories of art and, at least in the 20th century, art and politics have been inseperable."
helena lewis/ the politics of surrealism

Fear Controls Knowledge. Knowledge Controls Fear.

on this day 1988

New law erodes right to silence

"The British Government has announced plans to change the law regarding a suspect's right to remain silent so that remaining silent could incriminate rather than protect a suspect."

The ability for a judge to consider the meaning of a suspect's silence became law the following November as part of the Criminal Evidence (NI) Order 1988.

In 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act came into force and included a section outlining the fact that a person's reason for remaining silent could be interpreted by a judge and jury.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein


"the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand

The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.


They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.


The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.

to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories,

In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense."

TRANSHUMAN MANIFESTO

"Humans are too stupid for anarchy. We become gods first, then anarchists."
(Mike Price.)

on this day 1989

Guildford Four released after 15 years

The Guildford Four have had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal following an extensive inquiry into the original police investigation.

As he emerged from the court, one of the four, Gerard Conlon, announced to the waiting crowds: "I have been in prison for something I did not do. I am totally innocent."

"The Maguire seven are innocent. Let's hope the Birmingham six are freed" he added.

The investigation into the case, considered to be the biggest ever miscarriage of justice in Britain, was carried out by Avon and Somerset Police. They found serious flaws in the way Surrey police noted the confessions of the four.

"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.  If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders."  ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me.  If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.  I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."  (~Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)

la guerra es la paz

"There has been a spectacular surge in support among British voters for military action against Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the terror attack in Bali,.......support for a military attack on Iraq has risen 10 points in the last week from 32% to 42% of voters."

International Federation of Journalists Report Confirms Fear for Journalism After September 11
"The declaration of a "war on terrorism" by the United States and its international coalition has created a dangerous situation in which journalists have become victims as well as key actors in reporting events." writes Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary, in the final report on the aftermath of September 11 and the implications for journalism and civil liberties.

Shortly after the September 11 th 2001 attacks on the United States, the IFJ carried out a brief survey with its member organisations seeking information about the immediate impact of the terrorist attacks. The report, to which journalists’ groups in 20 countries responded, was published in October 2001 and revealed fears of a fast-developing crisis for journalism and civil liberties. Some eight months later, these fears have been confirmed. The recently published final version of the report is based on information from IFJ members and press freedom groups. It reviews developments up until the beginning of  June 2002. Full-text of IFJ Report: Report (pdf, 450k) IFJ: www.ifj.org

the Security Services (MI5 and MI6) have been lying to ministers, failing to stop known terrorist bombs and even committing terrorist acts themselves.

There is a fundamental problem that any act of terrorism can be and is used to justify the continued massive public spending on the secret state.

Meanwhile, a fiercely libertarian nation subordinates itself willingly to a world of checkpoints, patrol boats, long delays due to security at airports and stations and the closure of public places. Security and surveillance measures, and draconian detention powers, which at any other time would cause outcry, gallop on to the statute book with no more than an unheard whisper from right- and left-wing libertarians and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Bush's sunny demeanour in the Florida school at which he heard the news was apparently undaunted by reports of the first plane attack. Once his face had dropped and he was scrambling aboard Air Force One, he managed to mumble: 'This is a difficult time for America' and promised that the 'folks' who had killed 4,700 people would be caught.

On 6 and 7 September 2001, there was a huge surge in trading on options in airline and insurance sectors. In particular, insurance companies such as Swiss Re and Munich Re, which face massive liabilities from the destroyed World Trade Centre in New York, experienced heavy trading. British Airways saw huge volumes of 'put' contracts on Liffe, the London futures and options market. In Amsterdam, traders were 'astonished' to see huge rises in put options in KLM, the Dutch airline. Buyers of put options try to make money from an anticipated fall in a company's share price.

Conspiracy theory proponents have heavyweight backing. Last weekend Ernst Welteke, the president of the German Bundesbank, said there were unusual movements in equities, oil and gold on the Thursday and Friday before the terror attacks.

la guerra es la paz

Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the Church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages.

Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots

Sixteen essays make a contribution to "cyborg anthropology" and "cyborg feminism." Volume considers human reproduction through the lens of an interrogation of the cyborg metaphor, its power, pleasure, promise, and threat. Exceptional introduction by David-Floyd and Dumit provides historical/theoretical overview of cyborg metaphor as quintessential postmodern myth and tool.

Section one essays discuss medico-technological interventions in conception and contraception including production of "technosemen."

Section two includes essays by Emily Martin, Rayna Rapp and others, examining gestation and the use of medical imaging (ultrasound) and screening (amniocentesis) technologies to produce "normal" and "healthy" fetuses.

Section three essays consider technobirth, focusing on the medical monitoring and management of the mothers body.

Section four considers childrearing in a digital culture, including essay by Sherry Turkle on cyborg babies in a culture of "simulation."

posthuman manifesto

on this day 1999

Police award Silcott damages

The Metropolitan Police Force (the Met) has announced a £50,000 out-of-court settlement to Winston Silcott, wrongly convicted of leading the murderous attack on Pc Keith Blakelock during the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot.

The policeman was beaten and hacked to death with a machete by a mob after he became separated from colleagues on Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London.

In 1987 Silcott, along with Mark Braithwaite and Engin Raghip, was convicted of the Pc's murder but all three were cleared in 1991 when their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal. At the time, Silcott received £17,000 in compensation.

Silcott, who is still in prison serving life for the murder of boxer Anthony Smith, was in the process of suing the Met for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution when the award was announced.

Forensic tests suggested evidence against Silcott may have been fabricated by police officers.

DREAM

the queen was enjoying hanging out with me. i was affectionate and tactile with her. we laughed about things. she helped me paint a wall and didn't mind that she got paint on her jacket.

on this day 1973

Thai army shoots anti-junta protesters

Numerous testimonies indicate the regime opened fire on unarmed civilians. The official death toll was 77, over 800 were wounded, in the Thai capital of Bangkok in street battles between government troops and demonstrators.

Most of the victims were students from Thammasat University, who had gathered in large numbers for a second day of protests against the Thai military regime.

"Bangkok is now under a state of emergency. Newspaper censorship and curfews have been imposed, and schools in the capital will remain closed until the situation calms down."

Cyborgasms

Cybersex Amongst Multiple-Selves and Cyborgs in the Narrow-Bandwidth Space of America Online Chat Rooms. an MA Dissertation by Robin B. Hamman 30 September, 1996

on this day 1988

Government loses Spycatcher battle

The British Government has lost its long-running battle to stop the publication of the controversial book Spycatcher, written by a former secret service agent.

Law Lords ruled the media can publish extracts from former MI5 officer Peter Wright's memoirs, because any damage to national security has already been done by its publication abroad.

But they agreed Mr Wright's book had indeed constituted a serious breach of confidentiality, the principle at the heart of the government's case against him for the last three years.

In his memoirs as an MI5 officer Mr Wright alleges the security service operated beyond the law.

Some of his more controversial revelations include the claim that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was the target of an MI5 conspiracy and that ex-chief of MI5, Roger Hollis, was a Soviet mole in the 1960s.

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool. (...John J. Miller, And Hope to Die)

A MESSAGE FROM THE MINISTRY OF HOMELAND SECURITY

HETEROSEXUAL DICTATORSHIP

There has been acres of media coverage about the man who died in the swimming pool of Micheal Barrymore. Its a pity the same amount of airtime and column inches is never given to the people who die in police custody. Or bearing in mind the underlying whiff of salacious homophobia permeating the Barrymore story, its a shame that a similar level of publicity isn't given to the murder victims of homophobic attacks.

Earlier this week, on the Richard and Judy show, i heard the mother of the dead "father of two" (as we're constantly reminded) saying that if her son was gay she'd have known about it. Aside from the obvious concept of denial, its a ridiculously arrogant statement to make. How many parents know anything at all about their offsprings' adult sex lives and desires? Similarly most people know nothing about their parents sex lives. its bad enough that we continue to collude in the linguistic nonsense of labelling ourselves gay/bi/straight, but there are numerous reasons why anyone will choose to have sexual secrets. The fairy-tale knee-jerk tyranny of monogamy being just one good reason. Hatred and brutal ignorance being another.

On the subject of ignorance, i caught a moment of the satirical bbc tv sports quiz 'they think its all over' last night. where regular team member jonathan ross stuck a moustache on a woman in his team and remarked that she looked like Rhona Cameron. The sheer crappiness of this 'joke' relies on the fact that there are so few out lesbian celebrities, that Rhona's name therefore is allowed to represent every redundant lesbian stereotype.

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. …Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other."
(DONNA HARAWAY)

IN 15 bite size LINKS

Summer

Simmer

Dimmer

Dimmed

Dammed

Damped

Damper

Hamper

Harper

Harder

Warder

Wander

Wanner

Winner

Winter

THE POSTMODERN GENERATOR VERSUS THE CYBORG ACRONYM GENERATOR

"Consciousness is impossible," says Debord (Digital Electronic Being Optimized for Repair and Destruction); however, according to Haraway (Hydraulic Artificial Replicant Assembled for Warfare and Accurate Yardwork) it is not so much consciousness that is impossible, but rather the absurdity, and eventually the economy, of consciousness. Thus, the characteristic theme of the works of Rushdie (Robotic Upgraded Soldier Hardwired for Dangerous Infiltration and Exploration) is the role of the observer as writer.

The subject is interpolated into a rationalism that includes narrativity as a paradox. It could be said that Derrida (Digital Electronic Replicant Responsible for Infiltration and Dangerous Assassination) uses the term 'surrealism' to denote not narrative, as Lyotard (Lifelike Ytterbium Organism Trained for Accurate Repair and Destruction) would have it, but postnarrative.Therefore, Hanfkopf (Hydraulic Artificial Neohuman Fabricated for Kamikaze Observation and Potential Fighting) holds that we have to choose between surrealism and the subcapitalist paradigm of narrative

In the works of Joyce (Journeying Organism Yearning for Calculation and Exploration) a predominant concept is the distinction between destruction and creation. The main theme of the works of Joyce is not deconstruction, but predeconstruction. If Sartreist existentialism holds, the works of Joyce are empowering. But the primary theme of McLuhan's (Mechanical Cybernetic Lifeform Used for Hazardous Assassination and Nullification) essay on postpatriarchial sublimation is the rubicon, and hence the stasis, of precultural society. If one examines modernist rationalism, one is faced with a choice: either reject subcapitalist desublimation or conclude that truth serves to entrench sexism, but only if reality is interchangeable with art; if that is not the case, we can assume that reality must come from the masses. The premise of postcapitalist discourse implies that language may be used to marginalize the proletariat, given that Sartre's (Synthetic Android Responsible for Terran Repair and Exploration) critique of subcapitalist desublimation is invalid.

Marx (Mechanical Android Responsible for Xenocide) promotes the use of Sartreist existentialism to modify and analyse sexual identity. "Sexual identity is fundamentally unattainable," says Foucault (Functional Obedient Unit Calibrated for Accurate Utility and Logical Troubleshooting). However Bataille (Biomechanical Artificial Technician Assembled for Intensive Learning and Logical Exploration) uses the term 'neodialectic textual theory' to denote the dialectic of patriarchialist society. It could be said that Foucault therefore promotes the use of semiotic postcapitalist theory to challenge sexism.In a sense, a number of discourses concerning not narrative, but subnarrative exist. We are again urged to choose between surrealism and capitalist desituationism.

FUCKED OFF
48 fucking hours not being able to get online at home. and its a continuing headbanging lottery getting through tonight.

DREAM
an informant butterfly is chased by our hunter-killer butterflies.

4D
"let us assume that the 3 dimensions of space are visualised in the customary fashion, and let us substitute colour for the 4th dimension. every physical object is liable to changes in colour aswell as in position.

a physical interaction between any 2 bodies is possible only if they are close to each other in space aswell as in colour. bodies of different colours would penetrate each other without interference. (just as a regular person on the 20th floor will not bump into someone on the 2nd floor. or just as a person at map reference xyz at 2a.m. will not collide with a 6p.m. person at the same map location.)"
Hans Reichenbach 1927/Rudy Rucker 1985

2D
draw this figure in one continuous line
without crossing a line, retracing a line, or lifting your pencil from the paper.

on this day 1981

teenage boy fired blank shots at the Queen

he was charged under the 1848 Treason Act and jailed for five years.

He was released in October 1984 aged 20.

TIME VERSUS MONEY VERSUS PURPOSE AND PLEASURE

today was my second day this week trawling my printed cv around the high street looking for a job. since i chose to give up shoplifting last year ( a story i'll cover another day), the unsupplemented state benefit (£53 per week + £58 rent a week) is simply too little over any extended period. plus i had reached the stage where they kept trying to send me to mandatory 8 week long fucking job-search programmes, which i ignored. just because i'm technically unemployed doesn't mean i'm going to put up with being treated like a schoolchild. so i signed-off 3 weeks ago.

i now have no incoming money, theres 30p in my pocket (the remains of winning £10 from wednesdays lottery), theres £6 remaining in my electric metre, i've a small stock of tinned and dried food (including cat and hamster supplies), i owe £1,400 to the bank, £16,000 to the student loans company, and my landlords are taking me to court for re-possession over rent arrears (again). as usual i'm conducting this experiment without a safety net, no adoring rich lover, no financially comfortable parents. but aside from all that a credible wage for awhile could wittle through that wish list of hard/software that would make my screen life that much spankier.

the thing i most resent about employment is its assumed role as master sculptor of my temporal existence. from a protean anti-shape into a regulated minimalist cube. i must sleep at time (X), wake at time (Y), and fit everything into free-time (Z minus T+O). T being the level of tiredness and O being other overspill from work-time (A).

time-freedom, thinking-freedom, has always been of greater value to me than money-freedom. but time is money. without an inheritance you've got plenty of one or the other, but rarely both. we can swap some time for money (at a pretty poor rate of exchange) through work. money, as compressed time, allows consumer convenience, which becomes nescessary due to the corraling and fencing off of our (newly contextualised) free-time. a train rather than walking, a restauraunt rather than growing and cooking (or stealing) our food, a cd rather than making music (though random algorythmic generators possibly supplant both).

so why am i looking for a job in a shop or bar rather than some kind of personally meaningful or enjoyable paid work? well apart from long term paid creativity remaining, as yet, an elusive mystery to me, a number of difficulties arise. i've had a few goes at articulating this, but in such a small space, frozen in text, its ended up sounding kind of naively precious. so here goes again.

i think the point is that i'm protective of the few things that give me pleasure and the things that motivate my continued existence (something that i question and examine constantly). friends often suggest, for example, that i try looking for video editing work. but i would rather take a personally neutral job in a shop, than one which is only an approximation of my interests, and which is in fact more likely to be using my skills to contribute to the tsunami of mediocrity. because it will kill the pleasure of that skill, along with aneasthetising my ideals. thus i seriously might aswell be dead.

whatever. i've got to come up with something soon. tick tock tick tock.

on this day 1988: Cubans blame shooting on 'CIA plot'

Medina Perez, a Cuban diplomat, opened fire in a crowded London street because of an American plot to make him defect, his government has said.

The shooting occurred yesterday afternoon in Bayswater and left one man slightly injured. Scotland Yard said the wounded man was a member of the UK security services and not the CIA.

Mr Perez was on the way back to his flat when he fired on a group of people who were shadowing him.

Havana officials said the group contained a former Cuban intelligence agent who defected to the West in June 1987.

Florentino Azpillaga is alleged to have threatened Mr Perez and tried to persuade him to defect, but ran off when the diplomat fired his gun.

No official statement giving a full account of the incident was ever made by the British Government.

But leaks from within the UK and US intelligence communities said the Cuban defector, Florentino Azpillaga, was with an MI5 team shadowing Medina Perez.

The sources also said the agents may have asked the diplomat to defect.

on this day 1977: Steve Biko dies in custody

The leader of the black consciousness movement in South Africa, Steve Biko, died in police custody.

Biko had been in custody since 18 August when he was arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act. He was the 20th person to die in custody during the past 18 months.

Two weeks later preliminary results from a post mortem examination revealed Biko had died from severe brain damage.

The inquest into his death in November 1977 cleared the police of any wrong-doing.

But after the election of the ANC Government in 1994, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up under Archbishop Desmond Tutu, denied an amnesty to five policemen who admitted being involved in his death, although they have never been prosecuted.

on this day 1970: Hijacked jets destroyed by palestinian guerrillas

Palestinian militants blew up the three planes they had been holding at an airfield in the Jordanian desert.

The 40 hostages were taken from the planes minutes before the explosions destroyed the grounded jets.

Two of the planes had been captured by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) six days earlier.

The last plane was seized on 9 September on a flight from Bombay to London and forced to join the others at Dawson's Field airstrip - a former RAF base.

Members of the Popular Front freed the majority of the hostages - mainly women and children - on 11 September and took them to the nearby Jordanian capital, Amman.

But they moved 40 hostages to a secret location - 35 men and five women whom they said were members of the Israeli army and therefore "prisoners-of-war".

"If our demands are not met we will not release them - but there will be no reprisals and we will treat them well," a PFLP statement said.

The liberation of the remaining hostages hinged on the release of the captured PFLP militant being held in the UK, Leila Khaled, and six other Palestinian guerrillas being held in Switzerland and Germany.

The UK Government faced the dilemma of releasing Ms Khaled - and risk being accused of giving in to terrorism by Israel and the United States - or endangering the lives of the British hostages.

But all the Palestinian dissidents were released on 30 September and the remaining hostages were freed unharmed.

FBI DEFINITION OF TERRORISM

"Terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. "

on this day 1973

democratically-elected president overthrown in Chile coup

President Salvador Allende of Chile, the world's first democratically-elected Marxist head of state, died in a revolt led by army leaders.

General Pinochet's new regime was characterised by brutal repression and 3,000 people were killed or disappeared during his 17 years in charge.

thousands of declasified US documents explicating the US role in the coup have been synthesised in a book, 'The Pinochet File', by Peter Kornbluh.

on this day 1978: dissident Bulgarian Georgi Markov died four days after he was stabbed with an umbrella at a London bus stop.

Coroners ruled the following year that Georgi Markov had been "unlawfully killed" after being injected with the deadly poison ricin.

Nobody was charged, but it was widely believed to have been the work of the Bulgarian Secret Service backed by the KGB.

CULTURE OF FEAR
sept 11th hype prompted me to search for 'culture of fear'.
heres some sights along the way:

Culture of Fear (why americans are afraid of the wrong things) by Barry Glassner
...."more than three times as many people were killed by lightning than by violence at schools."....

Culture of Fear (risk taking and the morality of low expectation) by Frank Furedi
...."compared to the past, or to the developing world, people in contemporary societies have much less familiarity with pain, suffering, debilitating disease and death. We actually enjoy an unprecedented level of personal safety."....

the Culture of Fear by Noam Chomsky
(the introduction to 'Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy', a 125-page book by Javier Giraldo S.J., written in 1996.)
"...."the vast majority of those who have disappeared in recent years are grass-roots organizers, peasant or union leaders, leftist politicians, human rights workers and other activists," over 1500 by the time of the U.S. State Department's praise for Colombia's democracy and its respect for human rights."....

rewind: in the news september 10 2001

10sep2001: Judge says court was close to backing Gore

George Bush might have been prevented from entering the White House if a US supreme court judge had had another day to work on persuading his colleagues, according to a new book.

David Kaplan writes in The Accidental President that the liberal Justice David Souter met a group of prep-school students one month after the court ruled 5-4 in favour of stopping the Florida recount, making Mr Bush president rather than Al Gore.

"If he'd had 'one more day - one more day,' Souter told the students, he believed he would have prevailed," says Kaplan, according to an excerpt in this current issue of Newsweek.

"The sands of history will show Bush won by a single vote, cast in a 5-to-4 ruling of the US supreme court," says the book, touted as the first behind-the-scenes look at how the court handled the fallout from last November's disputed election

it reports that Animosity among the judges broke out while they were the hosts of a visit to Washington by six Russian justices. "In our country," one of the Russians is quoted as saying, "we wouldn't let judges pick the president." Kaplan writes: "The justice added that he knew that, in various nations, judges were in the pocket of executive officials - he just didn't know that was so in the United States."

10sep2001: Market slump signals 'era of pessimism'

Today's reaction in the European markets reveals a lack of faith in a quick recovery of the US economy. The US treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, tried to soothe the markets at the weekend by insisting that the US economy would soon show signs of recovery.

The trigger for the latest rout came on Friday, when economic figures disclosed that US unemployment soared to 4.9% in August - its highest level in nearly four years - with businesses slashing 113,000 jobs. The figures reinforced fears of a protracted slump in the world's largest economy. The Dow dropped 235 points to 9,605 points and market nervousness has spread. If the US fails to avoid a hard landing despite seven cuts in interest rates this year, the rest of the world will also feel the bumpy ride.

10sep2001: US pulls the plug on Muslim websites

five hundred websites - many of them with an Arab or Muslim connection - crashed last Wednesday when an anti-terrorism taskforce raided InfoCom Corporation in Texas.

The 80-strong taskforce that descended upon the IT company included FBI agents, Secret Service agents, Diplomatic Security agents, tax inspectors, immigration officials, customs officials, department of commerce officials and computer experts.

Three days later, they were still busy inside the building, reportedly copying every hard disc they could find. InfoCom hosts websites for numerous clients in the Middle East, including al-Jazeera (the satellite TV station), al-Sharq (a daily newspaper in Qatar), and Birzeit (the Palestinian university on the West Bank).

in addition, InfoCom is the registered owner of ".iq" - the internet country code for Iraq.

10sep2001: Taliban hint at jail swap with US

The Taliban's foreign minister hinted yesterday that the hardline Afghan Islamic movement might consider swapping eight detained foreign aid workers for a Muslim cleric jailed for life in the United States for plotting to blow up the World Trade Centre and the UN.

Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil said the Taliban would consider a proposal by Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman's family to exchange the blind cleric for the four Germans, two Australians and two Americans who werearrested in Kabul five weeks ago on charges of preaching Christianity.
Sheikh Omar was jailed for life in 1995. He is said to be in poor health. There has been no comment from Washington on a possible deal.

10sep2001: police raid protestors in advance of tomorrow's arms fair

Police have raided squats in south London to head off what they fear could be violent demonstrations against an arms fair which begins tomorrow in the capital's Docklands.

Activists accused the police of over-reacting, claiming they plan peaceful protests at the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition, or DSEI, at the ExCeL centre. Almost all major arms companies will be represented, with state-of-the-art weaponry from hundreds of companies on show.

Amnesty International and the Campaign against the Arms Trade have strongly criticised invitations to some of the countries expected at the exhibition, run by a private company in association with the government.

Amnesty International has attacked the government for inviting countries with poor human rights records - Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria among them. Countries such as Angola, Pakistan, Morocco, Algeria, China and Turkey have also been invited, although government guidelines state that arms should not be exported to countries where they could be used for internal suppression or could exacerbate internal or regional conflicts.

on this day 1973: Bomb blasts in central London

Scotland Yard was hunting a teenage suspect after two bombs at mainline stations injured 13 people and brought chaos to central London.

The first explosion at King's Cross - which injured five people - occurred seconds after a witness saw a youth throw a bag into a booking hall.

Fifty minutes later a second blast rocked a snack bar at Euston station, injuring a further eight people.

"The IRA said they were behind the explosions."

Two days before, on 8 September, there were bombs in Manchester city centre and at Victoria station in London.

And forty-eight hours later further blasts in the country's capital rocked Oxford Street and Sloane Square.

HOMOTECHNICUS

"Humans have taken thousands of years to naturally evolve. Technology now gives us the opportunity to take the next step in human evolution into our own hands. The advances being made now have immediate consequences for the medical world, and implications for the future of all of us. This is certainly not a small step for man and especially not for mankind".  
(Mark Gasson, Design Engineer at University of Reading)

CHOMSKY ON IRAQ HYPE
...."Washington's present justifications to attack Iraq have far less credibility than when President Bush Sr was welcoming Saddam as an ally and a trading partner after he had committed his worst brutalities - as in Halabja, where Iraq attacked Kurds with poison gas in 1988. At the time, the murderer Saddam was more dangerous than he is today. "....

DREAM
little bright blue insects that look like woodlice made out of scouring sponges.

PHILOSOPHY JOKES

Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness.

He says to the waitress, "I'd like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream."

The waitress replies, "I'm sorry, monsieur, but we're out of cream. How about with no milk?"

on this day 1970

hijack

Four New York-bound airliners were hijacked over western Europe in an unprecedented operation carried out by a militant Palestinian group.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) demanded the release of three Arab dissidents held in a Swiss jail in return for the 382 passengers they were holding hostage.

The Pan American jet was flown to Cairo airport in the early hours of the morning on 7 September and blown up after the hijackers had led all the passengers to safety.

The other two planes held at a former RAF airfield in the Jordanian desert were joined by another hijacked jet - a British Airways flight from Bombay - on 9 September.

Most of the hostages were released on 11 September, and the hijackers escorted the remainder off the planes just before they blew them up the following day.

Six passengers were held by the PFLP until 1 October, when they were exchanged for the release of Leila Khaled - a captured female hijacker.

LITERACY

today's lunch-time bbc tv news reports that children have no problem spelling 'beckham' or one of those harry potter words, but they have problems with words such as 'parliament' or 'edingburgh', which i'm not sure i can spell either.

a voxpop teacher says something about the popular culture they're exposed to and a need to introduce them to jane austen and shakespeare. but she fails to articulate a single reason why they should be introduced to austen or fucking shakespeare.

its like those fretting middle-class adults who grieve the lack of book reading (a self-referential skill loop) amongst children, and fear they spend too much time with their playstation (another self-referential skill loop).

literacy has become one of those mythologised treasures as pure and enriching as myths about green nature, god or sodding therapy-culture. it is julie walters in that movie with micheal caine. it is the shining first born media, pitted against its upstart screen siblings: tv, computers and games. it is the heavenly gateway to blah blah.

in the beginning was the word.

Guttenberg's first infestation was a bible in every home.

then god was dead and we were all 'individuals'. the end.

literacy, like many things has, and has had, its uses. but there are endless alternative ways to represent and navigate through realities other than the straight lines and spells of print. the dead weight and deafening chorus of the recorded past colludes in trapping us in a sedimented narrative manifestation. for one it perpetuates the linear (that literary bias) concept that only the past, not the future or any other dimensional direction, has influence on the present. why don't literate people use the intelligence they believe they've gained from it to start thinking and challenging their memeplex directives?

The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.

THE HETERODICTATORSHIP

on this day 1957

Homosexuality 'should not be a crime'

A report sponsored by the government suggested homosexual behaviour between consenting adults should no longer be a criminal offence.

The proposal was the principal and most controversial recommendation put forward by the 13-member committee chaired by Sir John Wolfenden, Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, investigating the current law on homosexuality and prostitution.

After its three-year long inquiry, the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain came to the conclusion that outlawing homosexuality impinged upon civil liberties.

Under the law at the time, various homosexual offences can incur anything from a £5 fine to life imprisonment.

But the government rejected the proposal. Homosexual men would have to wait another ten years before the law permitted sexual relations between adults over the age of 21 - "in private" and not at all among members of the Merchant Navy or Armed Forces.

(In Scotland sex between two men was not decriminalised until 1980.)

The age of consent for gay men was lowered to 18 in 1994.

A law equalising the age of consent for gay men in line with that for heterosexual adults to 16 was forced through parliament in February 2000.

video: Sir John Wolfenden speaking to the BBC

DOWNTIME
All this week i've experienced increasing difficulty getting online. Plus tonight, once i'm finally connected, I am unable to access my url.

DANIELLE DUVALL
todays local bbc tv news reported the trial chip-implant tagging of children. The featured child, Danielle, said "i think its really good, coz it keeps you safe." Which reminded me of the front cover of a magazine this week, where a teen says something like "prison was good for me".

The Duvall parents, along with a compliant sample edit of adults, were of course never asked if they themselves would be prepared to be tagged.

There was no perspective given concerning the statistics relating to the rare threat of stranger-danger, as opposed to the abuse of children within their families.

Nor any debate around the issues of an overprotected generation becoming adults, lacking the maturing skills gained through dealing with danger on their own.

Kevin Warwick was on hand as an expert. I was dissapointed to see him involved in this bollocks.

FUCKING STREAKERS

i've just put myself through the torment of watching one of those crappy itv 'streakers' programmes. if ever there was a meme-war airstike targetting any ground gained through naked protesting, then this was it.

a 40 minute slice of prime time saturday night telly, crammed with exhibitionists, full frontal saucyness, people motivated by 5 minutes of fame, people paid by fucking advertisers to strip, a talking-head psychologist who must have graduated from the murdoch institute of tabloid psychiatry and someone who once joined a naked protest 2 years ago.

i wouldn't have minded if they'd just stuck with the people who run naked at sports events. but no, just like their previous 'streakers' show, they recklessly muddy a small segment of naked protest into the mix, yet fail to bother including anyone articulating anything of weight on the subject. our messages are drowned in the dominant frivolity of the show. surely the simple implications of our human appearances being illegal, or mere sites of novelty and amusement, is an issue worth giving some time to.

i think my next major campaign will involve the maiming and torture of tv programme makers. in court i'll giggle coyly as accounts of their mutilations are read out, and instead of an intelligent defence i'll plead that it was all just a bit of fun.

NAKED PROTEST links

AN OUTLAW BLOG FROM 2014

COMMENTS

those bloody Enetation comments buttons keep dissappearing. plus you can't see what your fucking typing even when they are available. need to replace them.

IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS

i long to meet someone whose core knee-jerk beliefs are founded upon something other than 18th century romanticism and the work ethic.

there are far too many people fundamentally driven by the romantic concept that suffering is of greater value than pleasure. this, combined with the industrial concept of worthiness-through-productivity, ensures that people waste time pickling their minds in guilt unless they're bee-ing busy busy busy.

similarly i'm so tired of that romantic cliche the noble savage. a zomboid belief-concept so deeply and unquestionably accepted as fundamental truth, rather than just another 18th century mind-contagion. how much longer will i have to endure people stating with all sincerity and without hesitation that green nature is ultimately richer, more spiritual, more natural than technology? blah blah blah.

middle class bloody hippies, me-generation managers and ultra-anal health and youthfullness obsessives. its taken your plague breed a couple of centuries to conquer the world, but surely now your time is up. surely its time to start thinking again.

CYBORG = cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction

“the boundary between science fiction and social reality is a construction”
(DONNA HARAWAY)

KILL ALL STYLISTS
preferably after machine stitching their eyelids closed and applying hot curling-tongs to their tongues.

why is it that in bubblegum mags like Heat, whenever a grown-up celeb appears to have got dressed all by themselves they're ridiculed as 'worst dressed'. While the majority of celebs featured, wearing outfits that my 69 year old tory voting mother would be proud of, are to be aspired to as the height of fashion cool.

its an insidiously poisonous message of homogenised timidity, perpetuated by a dominant alliance of seemingly innocuous magazines, tv, ultra safe labels and "expert" advisors. it feeds upon low self esteem, whilst it incapacitates imagination and individuality.

CYBORG ACRONYM GENERATOR
R.U.S.S.E.L.L.:
Robotic Upgraded Soldier Skilled in Exploration and Logical Learning

courtesy of brunching shuttlecock

UP ALL NIGHT

must sleep now. but wanted to get the "me me me" photo link uploaded. it needs sorting out, but will suffice for now.

i'm having a problem with how my fonts appear on the rest of this site. its like each letter has been chewed and spat out onto the screen.

S is back from dublin, desperately heartbroken.

spoke to mum on the phone, she's had a stairlift installed.

my sisters' baby is imminent.

time to sleep.

JOKES.
the man sat next to me earlier this evening, in a circle around a fire, likes jokes. twice i even heard him phone people to tell them the one about the 2 rats in the sewer, where one rat says "fuck this shit, i'm going on the piss."

i hate it when people start telling jokes, because its rarely long before their repertoire becomes racist, and mr. joker next to me was no exception. i hate it because, if the joke is founded on a redundant stereotype, then my consistently blank reaction becomes spotlighted within the ritualised confines of friendly lightheartedness. all the more when everyone else is straightforwardly entertained. its not disaproval that i'm registering, its undiluted resentment that i can't get up and escape mid-joke, without such action becoming a grand statement.

often enough i don't even get the punchline anyway, because its prejudicial premise simply does not compute.

for example, one of his jokes began "there were two ethnics on a bridge....". 2 ETHNICS!? and the punchline relied upon a shared understanding that black men have huge cocks. i need to articulate that i'm not being politically-correct here, it just would never occur to me to think in terms of black men having big cocks. why does anybody think they might have? why am i the only one not laughing? why am i sat right next to son-of jim davidson?

the whole concept of pc in fact clouds my effort here to articulate my non-response in these situations. firstly pc will undoubtedly be the tidy package that the amused folk will bundle me into. secondly, pc is, i believe, a deliberate concious stance. where as i feel more like someone taken hostage at gunpoint against my will. i just don't want to be there and i didn't ask to be made to stand out by retaining the non-laughing face that i had before the joke began.

at its root, i guess, i naively believe that pointless stereotypes are as outdated as a shared understanding of chaucerian language. its the 21st century for fucks sake.

ITS RAINING.
J has just left to go out and enjoy the thunder and rain. he told me that on his way here he popped into a nearby abandoned building to have a wank.

while discussing reality-tv, surveillance and privacy, i brought up the recent occaision when he knocked at my frontdoor and after my not replying he called through the letter box that he "wasn't gonna stay for long". but i still didn't reply.

we're already fine with the fact that there are times i just want solitude and its ok that i don't answer the door, even if its obvious that i am in. but i needed to articulate that it doesn't matter how long he or anyone else intends to stay, its about me not wanting to change my mental space at the time. not wanting to shift into human interaction nor adjust myself for the witness / judgement presence of another person.

the larger issue is that we, all of us, keep each other within prescribed social boundaries. we are friendly cctv-wetware. we are the well trained thought police and the patrolling prison guards of mutual reality. its an efficient and, most importantly, a cheap means of generally controlling ever expanding mass populations. especially now that omnipresence and hellfire alone will no longer suffice. we worry about the more blatant implications of increased technological surveillance, but i think that's a case of stable doors and bolted horses. i am a camera. you are a camera. he/she/it is a camera. hey kids, lets put on a show.

UH OH.
now my comments buttons have disappeared. does this mean i can only put it once on a page, rather than after each blog?

TIME FOR BED.

i've blogged, i've learnt how to put in links, i've added a comments button....though don't yet know how to add the enetations' gif, i'll learn that tomorrow.

"its the 21st century. time to evolve"