the Bogeyman cometh

The recent serious loss of service experienced by many social network site, I include Google in this, could simply be due to the paranoia of nations states as they try to syphon off the ever increasing chatter, within their own country and equally that of friendly or foe states. The secret state surveillances that we know are taking place may be failing top keep up with the traffic growth. It is possible that their collective snooping has crashed the very sites they are so desperately keen to snoop on.

All for our own good and safety of course. If it was not for their constant vigilant monitoring we would be overwhelmed by all those terrorists out there for ever creating ever more sophisticated plots to overthrow us. On the scale of probabilities I am most likely to die in a car accident than encounter anything even peripheral to terrorist action. Set aside the probables in life and let us look at more extreme scenarios. I am much more likely to be raped or knifed in a street brawl than suffer even a minor graze resulting from a terrorist action. The collective paranoia and the accumulative hype about terrorism far exceeds the capacity of the terrorists to action. They do not have any super-powers, they do not have laboratories with highly skilled technicians dreaming up ever more complex devices, they do not have a highly organised and covert secret organisations able to baffle and confuse, no. They are relative simpletons, bumbling along making it up as they go along, limited to a few devotees and preying on the disaffected, disillusioned and despairing youth who are willing to commit suicide by strapping bombs to themselves. This is the true cost of the social inequality that is being so vigorously promoted, disaffected youth beyond hope.

We live with the awareness of unimaginable horrors, large numbers of people dying unexpectedly in dreadful circumstances, but we get on with life, we dont freeze up and cancel life. Not just natural disasters either, but man disasters. Planes do fall out of the sky, from time to time, we carry on flying, learn the lessons, but life carries on as normal. A few extreme acts of terrorism have been carried out, no one can forget the shock of 9/11, shocking but isolated, yes and in the scale of daily events exceptional. Sometimes through our own inefficiencies they get in their view, lucky. But terrorist acts are not the norm, they are not a constant in daily life. Despite what our security services would have us believe. This motley incompetent collection of the disaffected, that talk big, boast about their 'elaborate' plans but seldom have the nonce to succeed, are talked up by the security services. They promote them to arch enemy status and invest in them all the skills needed to justify the ever more elaborate defensive screens the security services think would be nice to employ. The Government, being the government, have to be seen to act, so can only support the only advice they can turn to, and up the security screen to the next level. There by confering on the bumbling terrorist the prize of being taken seriously and more credible than they are in reality.

The collective fear that has been talked up is just a later day version of the witch hunt. The Inquisition were on the hunt for witches, our Security Services are on the hunt for terrorists. The Inquisition were on the look out for covens, our Security surveillance seeks out terrorists cells. The Inquisition duck boarded witches to prove their innocence, we water-board our suspects to prove they are not terrorists. The Inquisition had to protect society from the evil spells cast by witches, the Security Services have to protect us from being radicalised. The Inquisition required everyman to denounce his neighbour, the Security Service listen in to all our gossip and speculations. The Inquisition looked for trademark features of witches, the Security Services check suspects against their radicalised muslim profile. The Inquisition and our Security Services justify their actions for the safety and peace of the State. We are degraded by their actions in our name. We are intimidated into giving up precious freedoms and rights for fear of the dire consequences that otherwise will arise, or so we are told. The terrorist wins the long game when we close down every day actions in anticipation, when we abandon cherished high ideals because of what they might do. When fear enters the mind and displaces rational thought, the terrorists have won.

Drawing a line

Eddie Shah's plea of foul sounds hollow, just because he was caught doing what a lot of others were doing at the time does not absolve him for being responsible for his own action. He is right of course there is a distinction to be made between the actual act of violating another person against their wishes and a technical definition of a act against a minor.

An adult of course has an overiding duty and a responsibility to protect the innocence of youth, to understand their immaturity, their gush of unchannelled surging hormone and rising desires with their lack of perception of the realities against the fantasises in their so vivid minds. That is why we have the technical definition of rape with a minor, consummated or not, to protect our not yet adult and mature young. Fine.


If an innocent and naive pubescent youth decides to strip off their clothes and gyrate infront of a adult male to draw their attention to them and that that adult male decides to consumate their sexual arousal, it is not an unexpected consequence. Maybe the youth had no comprehension of what consequences might follow but they had put themselves in a very vulnerable and highly sexually charged position, not the best spot for cool dispassionate reflection. Still not right. The adult being the adult should control their desires even when provoked by a 'willing' minor clearly lacking in modesty or inhibition. Not right , not defensible but understandable perhaps in the circumstances.


What we, our society, has to ask are the harder questions. Why is a minor so free of all restaint or guardianship as to be alone with a unknown adult, so free as to be able to shed their clothes? How come our minors consumption of sexually provocative images and behaviours are so common place that they think it right or natural for them too to act that way? Why do our youth reject the counsel of older and closer family members and instead become fixated with illusions of celebrity razzmatazz. Why are our teens so resentful of authority and so willing to flout any self-control, getting so blinded out of their minds as to be incapable of making any judgement of their exposure to risk. We have a youth mentoring problem. This cult of the youth, this rapacious selling to the youth market, this capitulation to a youth driven agenda has supplanted the norms of restraint and caution. 

So clearly Eddie Shah was wrong to take advantage of a minor, offering what a minor should never ever have been in a position to offer, but we too are to blame for allowing our minor's to get so beyond our reach that they feel no constraints on their actions. Our duty is to protect them in a safe enough environment until they have matured enough to make their own mistakes when they have some skills in realising the consequences. We, not just Eddie Shah, have failed them all.

Got a pram?

Not so long ago, maybe as little as ten years back, when a major significant government plan was announced, we gasped when the number of millions it would involve were revealed. Nowadays millions are ten a penny, still large but no longer significant or a rarity. How many home owners in the home counties now have a pad worth a million plus, can you still buy a property in London for less than a million? Today's currency is now billions, but large corporation toss around their billions will a devil may care attitude, a billion is coming to be small change for governments and our multinationals. The trillion is beginning to creep into our every day vocabulary.  

Look in your pocket, do you any longer bother to count the pennies? No. Their value has become worth so little they are just a nuisance loose change. It will not be long before the penny drops out of our currency and a ten pound coin is introduced. So what is going on. Quantitative easing, that is what is going on. Sounds so technical, so solid and so reassuring no need to inquire further what is quantitative easing. Just a fancy name for printing more money or as we used to call it, inflation. Lots of quasi professors of economics theories are strutting around telling the world about these wonder clothes that solve all the world problems, clothes called 'quantitative easing', invisible to all but those who cling on to hope that they are real. How they oooh and aaah about the beauty of these invisible clothes and how they smooth out all their problems. Just fantasy.

Cast your mind back to the Deutsch Mark pre-WWII, remember how we laughed at the germans having to wheel their pram loads of money to buy a loaf of bread only to find they now needed two prams of money for the same loaf when they got there. That is called inflation. That is the 'rescue' path we are now on. Print more money, keep on spending and the pains of excessive loans will just disappear. Fine if you are locked into the gravy train that shovels more money into your account for every new shed load of money printed. For the likes of you and I where our income is frozen, or more likely reducing, the ever escalating prices of all those goods we need to survive put our very survival into jeopardy. Got a pram anyone, I need to buy a loaf of bread?