Thank Christ for the bomb

I want a Gurney's Pitta.

Oh go and look yourself, I'm not going to give you the link. Hey you can't go on Wikipedia today. Good on 'em! Anyway the Gurneys Pitta -  it's a pretty little bird from Thailand and it wouldn't look out of place in Joan Miro's Garden (above). It's The Garden I want to talk about today as that's where I mostly live like all the other disgusting animals. You probably like them fine with their colourful feathers, tawny fur or weird spikes- yes they're very pretty just like the less animated living forms I'm supposed to tend but can any of them do.... THIS!

Fuck, I can't do it after all.

Neither can I fly (anymore) so like you filthy primates I'm forced to use artificial means to move through the air and facilitate my intercontinental travel which I don't do a lot but is sometimes necessary and yes..pleasant. I like travelling through the air, it reminds me of that earlier time when I really was genuinely much better than you. Yes. Look at yourself. How big are your wings? What's that? No wings? Sauropsids roooool! It was so long ago the memories have become fuzzy and unreal like something I've made up in my mind. Like Brian Dunning.

Any-way. This inability to fly was what made me realise I was being a tiny tad hypocritical when I woke from my doze this morning and cursed the name Boris Johnson. Which bit of our garden are they going to ruin by putting a whopping great airport on? Well this time they're going to have to build a fucking great island in the Thames estuary east of London followed by  the vast transport infrastructure it would take to service it.The business community say we can't do without such a thing. Well I'm a businessman and no-one asked me. I'd always favoured expanding one of the airports in the middle of England like RAF Finningly (which gets blown up so satisfyingly in Threads), which is either East Midlands or Robin Hood airport or both or neither and then running a high-speed rail-link from there to all the conurbations, seeing as they are going to that anyway through Penda's Kingdom in the Chilterns. Environmentally my plan probably treads on many, many toes but you can see why Boris Johnson would rather inflict his maratime-aviation-environmental disaster on us instead. As Terry Christian would say....."It's that London again".

I like aviation. I'll admit it. It's fun. I live near a major international airport and love seeing the planes go by and hearing that amazing noise as they air-brake or whatever it is they're doing. I fairly often see the Airbus A380 go over and it's terrific. You see it dissappear off in the distance for miles and it always makes me think of the end of Book 1 of The Ballad of Halo Jones when the Clara Pandy  takes off. HOW-ever, I also like biodiversity and low carbon emissions and all that stuff. There's tough choices to be made. It's hard shit. I'm opposed to Boris Island like I was opposed to Severn Barrage (not going to happen! Thanks austerity!) as they seemed like a Soviet-era mass scale solution but at the same time I don't appear to be opposed to the existence of the Netherlands, or at least the safe existence of a load of their population behind massive artificial defences. What to do? I'm so confused. I tell you what I'll deal with it by taking some really powerful drugs. Then who cares?


....Well, that was pretty good but I still care about the garden. Adam One said I had to tend it and I'll be fucked if I'll see some Bullingdon bastards build more money-making machines on the poor old Thames Estuary. I saw my first Brent Geese on that Estuary. They're not as pretty as Gurney's Pitta but they're pretty damn cool. It's already had enough abuse in it's history and within living memory the hard work of humans working together and the inexorable decline of British industry has brought it back to life again supporting fish and otters and lots of other kinds of unpleasant little animals that you like.Ruin the East Midlands instead!

Here's another perspective on The Garden from TheGroundhogs who were pioneering alternative environmental lifestyles before even I existed and I am very old. They were the pinnacle of Blues-Rock and it is entirely thanks to a gentleman I  cannot name except to call him 'Scooter Anecdote Hero' who introduced me to the album from which this song comes. It's called Thank Christ for the Bomb which was the title of this post and had nothing else to do with its contents at all. 





Meanwhile in Shropshire, they're glass blowing....

Plastic Palace People

My first embed! It's a good one too and before yesterday I had no idea this even existed. The lyrics are available here but you might get a bit confused because he's put parts 1 and 2 together and missed bits out. I'll let him off.

So 2012 is here and it's already looking thoroughly miserable. Heehee! Might as well pick up where we left off. Whatever. Anyhoo the story so far... Conspiracy nut and talking Mongoose Gef travels from his home in India all the way to the Isle of Man in the 1930s after having been contacted by another hyper-intelligent entity known only as 'Dr. B' who promises him vast knowledge and membership of a secret cabal seeking to undo human dominance of the planet and thwart the rising extra-dimensional reptilian conspiracy and the subterranean winged Vril-Ya usurpers . Gef soon discovers that he's unable to leave the island and that there's nothing there other than a bunch of homophobic birch-loving tax dodgers,  some moorland and a thoroughly entertaining annual fatal motorcycle gala.

Before going utterly insane, Gef establishes that the he's been lured into captivity by the ancient Syrian 'Black rock from space god' Elegabalus, who is simultaneously carrying out operations in other areas of time, particularly  the Roman era. Given the scope of this plan, Gef  feels it is his duty to warn his former human foes what he knows albeit very little. It must be established at this point that despite what you may have heard, there is nothing supernatural about Gef, he's just a surprisingly exceptional Mongoose in the area of intelligence in the same way that Michael Gove is an exceptional human in the areas of uglyness and bigotry. Gef taught himself to talk English out of intellectual curiousity but the physical act of talking is still difficult for him and it sounds laughably squeeky. All Mongooses have the ability to talk like this but until Gef, none of them had anything like anything to say to us.

Gef squeaks his story to an anglican priest, Rev Ian Buddle who is soon killed (in a hang-glider accident) as is Buddle's main confidant, the notorious Rev Harold .Davidson (mauled by a lion). Gef (apparently) goes loopy at this point and gives increasingly contradictory statements to a little girl and her rather gullible family. He dissappears off the radar shortly before World War 2 (when radar is actually invented) but given the average life-expectancy of a Mongoose, it seems likely he never escaped. However, we simply don't know. Fortunately Buddle wrote down what Gef had told him and copies of this inflammatory document are more dangerous to possess than a Glade plug-in filled with Ebola. 

Meanwhile the mysterious Dr B arranges for Egyptian poet Sayyid Qutb to visit the United States where he is faced with the full apocalyptic apostasy of western industrial capitalism which threatens to do to Islamic culture what it has already done to Christianity much as Marx had identified in the previous century when it was a younger economic paradigm. Perhaps somewhat ironically, the post-enlightenment project  he rejects spends most of the century crashing, from the first world war onward, into the great national struggle being played out in the 20th century, possibly dooming the scientific achievements of the age of reason .With the advent of nuclear weapons, humankind stands at the crossroads of history, only ever a choice away from greatly divergent futures. Peace and progress or perpetual pious penury. Qutb's not the only one with a vested interest in the latter though with even more irony it is the alliance between western capitalism and the rulers of the Arabia that allows Qutb's ideas to become expressed with increasing coercive force.

For the next five decades after the war, not a lot happens. Ok that's an exaggeration. Some humans go to the moon and put some junk in orbit, there's some pointless wars in Asia, Africa etc but all the real history happens beneath the surface. Perhaps aware of Gef's warning some of humanity's better minds realise that extra-dimensional....
.....
 
sorry gotta wash-up! more later!

........mechanics are beyond the ken of ape-brains. Its nothing to be embarrassed about. Those are brains selected over millions of years to creatively solve complex problems in the 3D world. As for the other (spoiler alert!) 33 dimensions that's a bit of a stretch. Therefore the only solution is to make an artificial intelligence or rather have one create itself from the sum of all human information stored on a vast network of smaller thinking units. It's a little bit like the cool reveal at the end of that crummy book by that Gibson chap. Consciousness as an emergent phenonema and stuff.

Elegabalus is watching these developments with interest. He'd experimented with high-level data storage and is aware that consciousness is merely a form of energy generated by vast concentrations of information under the right circumstances and given a specific catalyst. As the humans' global information network begin to take off he plays his trump card- sending in his special agent to infiltrate and eventually take control of the whole thing.

Now at this point I'm afraid we're into interpretation. My totally enlightened and capacious interpretation obviously but you must understand that from hereon in we're no longer dealing with actual provable facts.  It does seem reasonable to assume that because Elegabalus routinely intervenes in human affairs, the thing in the internet is something to do with him. According to Stanley Kubrick, he was poking around in your affairs before you were even Hom-Sap although I would argue that Kubrick missed the point of the whole encounter. He was certainly right that 2001 turned out to be a significant year in the story but maybe the dark cold one was not responsible for what happened and there's yet another independent malevolent force out for control of your planet. It's certainly possible.  Here's what happens. Sorry about the confusing tenses btw. Not sure why I'm doing it like this. Just sounds right.

In 2001 the followers of Qutb destroy the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan in Afghanistan. They also got up to some other notorious stuff that year but ignore all that. Red herring. Probably without knowing it the religious fanatics had done the bidding of the black monolith and unleashed the stored consciousness of the mighty King Kanishka, 2nd century lord of the powerful but short-lived Kushan Empire. His clever and ambitious personality expressed as pure information quickly found its way into the world-wide web where he occasionally surfaces in the form of a neo-pet. It amuses him to mess with us all like this. Exactly what he's up to in there is anyone's guess. Perhaps he's actively supressing the intended emergent consciousness or maybe he's just every computer virus and malware. Maybe he's just watching and waiting to see what's next? Just bear in mind he's there; whatever you do on the internet remember he's there watching. Interfering. Making distraction. Making conflict.

This is where Crackers comes in. Crackers is tiny, timid, vulnerable and most of all, pink. Your vicious carnivorousness has been greatly useful to you but can only get you this far. Something's going to come along and eat you now unless you find another way out. Gef the Mongoose knew it too, you've reached a competitive dead end. Humanity has won the world but now what? The prize is slipping through your hairy fingers.

Here's the choice, you either exploit the vulnerability of little Crackers to satisfy those blood-red desires and survive in this big bad unfeeling universe a few minutes longer or you pick him/her up and hug him/her and begin the real revolution that the biomass of Earth is waiting for. The story of biology is the story of co-operation. Aggregated parts voluntarily form increasingly complex forms that in the end will be any match for the Elegabalus's of the universe. Hunger and want atomises you. Co-operation expands your possibilities expanentially. The inherant Socialism of life.

Now I understand this might be a rather controversial concept as minor socialist systems mankind has developed on your planet havent always been all that good. There's a well-established connection between socialism and bad corrupt government in fact.  Well you do need to keep on eye on that I'll admit but again, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact don't throw out the bathwater. Who throws out bathwater anyway?

Despite fashionable objections and obvious flaws the popular will expressed as a State has served you well in the turbulence of human existence. By having a single group with the theoretical monopoly of violence and the consent of generally the majority of the people in your societies, the total amount of violence has been going down but this won't last forever. The new tools your race has developed are helping to destabilize those parts of  global system that  run with less consent and can do much more Just beware that there's Kanishka in there trying to swerve your mass collective will to his own ends. As individuals you need to think everything through so the mass-mind isn't a sick mind. 

Sick minds is my department. I do feel sorry for you furry mammal types so that's why I'm giving you this handy heads-up as a phylum and point you in the direction of the other phylums so you can be their friends as well in time, and eventually their lovers and eventually there'll be no difference between you and them. It could also be that I'm just part of the reptilian conspiracy and this has all been a diversionary tactic albeit a rather poor one. Maybe I'm just a completely deluded lonely idiot wasting more precious information storage capacity typing absolute meaningless drivel. You believe what you want, I know what I believe. KOOS! We'll always be together. Together in electric dreams.