Frank Davis - Science fires - lovely today

I was reading Frank Davis as my morning treat - How Do You Sleep At Night?

I had a  thought - in the same era as Second Hand Smoke has been used to manipulate our behaviour, we have to also deal with Climate Change laid squarely at our feet. Both are designed to control us - to engineer society - to make us profitable. The first has made the Pharmaceutical and Government Corporations a fortune, and the second is yet another opportunity for extortion. The social engineering surrounding Climate Change is still evolving.

When I was a young woman, I remember being frightened of Nuclear War (in first place) and global cooling (in second place) and population explosion (in third place).
Nuclear war was immanent always in those days. A second ice age was already on its way and the world population explosion would give each human a metre square living space in thirty years time.

Well - that's what scientists said.

Now, I'm mostly frightened of politicians - a new career opportunity for academics instead of real people. In the UK, everything we do is overtly "evidence based" and "politically correct" but behind the scenes, God knows what actually happens. Science/Scientists have been compromised by its/their use to provide the evidence base for political manoeuvrings. Science is now in cahoots with anyone that can fund them, instead of living in garrets and discovering stuff!

I just loved Frank Davis's post - quote -  So I see science as a bit like a campfire burning in the night. In the light of the fire you can see a lot of the things nearest to it. But further out they’re harder to see. And beyond that everything is lost in shadows. What we “know” lies in a little circle around the campfire. And what we don’t know lies outside it, and extends for hundreds of miles in all directions. So what we don’t know is vastly more than what we know.

I think a lot of scientists (and politicians too actually) are just sitting in the light of their own little fires - if you looked down on them from a satellite, there would be thousands of little pinpoints, making a lovely glow in the sky. The danger in that is believing it is your personal fire that is causing total illumination.

Oh dear - so sorry - I really am

The neighbours had two huge Lielandii in their garden that leaned menacingly in our direction, blocked out the sun and housed a ton of little birds who woke us up every morning with an eardrum piercing dawn chorus. Even I could hear it and I'm classified "seriously" deaf.

On Saturday, tree fellers came along and took the two trees down. It was miraculous to watch how efficiently and neatly they did it. We had a jubilant day. The sun has reached our garden from the west for the first time in many many years.

But there is now no dawn chorus. Instead, there are tons of desperate little birds looking for their homes! Oh dear, so sorry. In my jubilation, I never once thought of you.

We have to have Gods!

In prehistory we worshipped the Gods of the mountains, of Nature.  We prayed and sacrificed to them.

Then we wrapped our spiritual impulse in religions where ONE God needed to be placated and promoted even in the sacrifice of life in war.

Then we chucked that out and became scientific. We learned to kill as powerfully as any of the old gods. But our God slot is empty.  So we fill it with climate science and Medical science and vast corporations so we can feel controlled again. We practice guilt and sacrifice just as we ever did for the good of the whole.

We have replaced our old gods with new.  We believe everything will get better if we worship them.

One size fits all - modern western medicine

If you follow my blog, you know my husband recently had a heart attack.

He is not right and its nothing to do with his heart I don't think.

He is on pills, pills and more pills. Nine different medications actually because he is diabetic also. Only two are for that - the rest are inherited from the hospital admission. Two treat the same condition and another two treat two conditions he doesn't actually have! Three of five of the seven medications have "depression" as a side effect and the other two, the side effect of "not feeling well". 

No wonder he's not right!

I think our National Health Service just issues a "one size fits all" list of medications to give to people when they have a heart attack - even pills for conditions they don't actually have!

Well, I think the size they have given to my husband is ill-fitting indeed. They need tailoring, yes?

Bonfire night - not again in the rain. Nah! But thank god for the mud.

It rained, it poured, it still went on. It was physically horrible for me. Wrong clothes, leaky raincoat, freezing wind, glasses steamed up and dripping raindrops, squelchy mud and soaking feet, frozen hands.

The firework display started late and the introduction was a massive thunderclap that set off howls of terror in lots of little kids, leading to a grand exit home by mommies, daddies and grandparents. I helpfully grappled with the pushchair home, leaving the younger generation to enjoy the show,  Don't they make god-awful pushchairs for kids now days? The wheels are totally unco-ordinated; the half-handles like baby elk's horns make them as heavy and difficult to steer along the cobbles as if they were indeed live elks struggling aganst capture!

At home, I realised I'd dropped my glasses (which I took off so I could see!) in the mud squished up by a thousand feet at the Bonfire viewing point. And we found them later, in perfect condition, protected from crushing feet that had simply splooshed them down deeper into the swamp. What luck! They washed up well.

Next year, if there is even the vaguest hint it might rain, I'm not going. Its not my idea of "fun". Bah Humbug!

Once apon a time

Once upon a time November 5th was Guy Fawkes Night. Poor old Guy Fawkes effigies were trundled out every year and burnt at the stake (our bonfires) in remembrance of the real Guy Fawkes who was a very naughty man who tried to blow up The Houses of Parliament on  the 5th November 1605.

Guy Fawkes was demonised by his enemies and the celebration of his death went on for 300 years till modern times that even I can remember. It was really ghoulish to burn the Guy that we had spent many loving hours creating out of old stockings stuffed with hay and dressed in clothes we had once worn and filled with sqibbs and firecrackers. We prepared for Guy Fawkes. We collected wood, saved our money to buy fire works, spent hours making our Guy and the families that I knew, celebrated with a personal display in their own gardens. The daddies set off the big fireworks and we had sqibbs and jumping jack and sparklers - loads of sparklers.  I loved Guy Fawkes Night. I never once thought it was ghoulish because, like Christians eating the body of Jesus and drinking His blood, never stop to think of the way others might interpret their actions, it didn't seem strange for ordinary people to execute annually a poppet of a man long dead.

So Guy Fawkes went out of fashion but was replaced with "Bonfire Night"  and this seems to encompass all sorts of fire events.  Most seem to be co-ordinated  by local authorities and you go out to see the fireworks instead of staying at home with Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, Grannies and Grandpas all together for a family gathering.

Now kids run around with glow sticks and dress up in Halloween costumes. In our village, they have a Halloween Pumpkin competition and all the entries are on display on tables so everyone can see them. Our display of fireworks is shortish and much more humble than the London Eye at New Year! But the kids love it.  It all starts at 6:00 o'clock and that's early enough for the very young and the extremely old. And there's a hog roast to raise funds for next year's Bonfire Night.

Once upon a time, we kids revelled in lighting matches, scaring people by lobbing jumping jacks at their feet, writing our names in the air with sparklers, removing gates (why did we do that?), and finally setting the old Guy to death in the flames on his stake in the pyre and nimbly avoiding the blasts and explosions that emanated from him in his final moments.  The frisson of danger was just wonderful!

But the village kids here where I live, seem to enjoy their glow sticks and the firework display put on for them, that they cannot approach because of health and safety, the mixture of the foreign Halloween celebrations, pumpkins, witches and broomsticks and Munch's "Scream" masks. The fact that they can never experience the danger like we did, or the wildness of it, the fear, the laughter and the relief from near misses or even the ghoulish execution that repeated itself in millions of English homes, doesn't matter. They will remember their own sanitised Bonfire Night with love - and that's what really counts. The world has changed.