FEBRUARY 2004

OPTIONS FOR THE MIND

Articles under this heading appear in the Classified Archive under "Philosophy" However as they serve no academic function, and only occur here as a commentary from an active mind I ask your patience for category mark that is really only the passing tide of thoughts and words that irrepressibly function in my mind!

The constant binary play in all this internet political debate has one sure fire gun - wether there is or there is not a God. Personally I am not interested in the subject - but I am unable to forget the many stages of my mental development that was arrested by mystery, confusion, fear, lies and danger. During the arrest or suspension of thought and rational decision both Jesus and aspects of God can seem appealing.


The problem of God is, and was always since the era of ancient Egypt, political. A young man, fully intending to avoid his sacrifice, persuaded the citizens to believe that he was given a mask by a God, who intended the young man's reign to be maintained, and further... inherited. This absurdity prevails today in all the "sovereign" nations of the globe and in all the political cadres all over the globe. The fact that it is absurd for one, is perhaps accepted by citizens because they are lazy and like to have a fool to laugh at, and two, they like to live within the tenure of a so-called Law and Order, cheating it when they can, or when they have to. I can no longer accept that mankind seeks leaders anymore - we all now know too much.

.Are citizens now more responsible for the shocking torment of many populations than ever before? Governments play for "democratic" solutions, but only listen to the lobby of those with their fists full of money. Here in Ireland the lobbyist against environment and planning permission now has to pay a large sum in order to be heard. And ofcourse on certain other social needs protest is virtually called terrorism.

Here I would like to quote Mark Twain who wrote about a visit to Egypt, he visited the Sphynx:

After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a begnignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing - nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time - over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding closed nearer and nearer together, and blended atlast into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man - of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was memory - retrospection - wrought into visible tangible form. All who know what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanished - albeit a trifling score of years gone by - will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before history was born - before tradition had being - things that were, and forms that moved, in a vague era which even poetry and romance scarce know of - and passed away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange new age and uncomprehended scenes.....The Sphynx a hundred and twenty-five feet long, sixty feet high....carved out of one solid block of stone harder than iron.(Innocents Abroad 1867)

(In this diary he also wrote of a visit to Baalbec and a night's adventurous walk from the shore to the Acropolis with a wonderful description of that place such as the white light of the moon and their eager fingers, searching the surface of sculpture, revealed to them.Enquiring readers had better be prepared for the sarcastic and sceptical nature of his that surveyed the squabbles and obsessed nature of those "pilgrims"with whom he visited the Holy Land.)

However, what this interlude brings us to, is an aspect of Edward Said's book on the Orient.One of the main theories from his Sphynx like gaze and grasp of the history of European knowledge of the Middle East, is the fact that the structure of such knowledge in the Western world up to this day, was culled only from academic study and the travels of exceptional individuals, and the distortion of reality that that ensured. Journalists cannot create messages or pictures that give a true view or even a detailed or intimate view at any turn. Today the journalist is "embedded" and circumscribed at every turn by the owners and editors of newspapers, let alone by the military . Throughout this incredible period, and the imprisonment of hundreds, or thousands, of Arabs and Muslims who have "disappeared" in theatres of war, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Palestine, and those who have disappeared in USA, UK and other countries - one of the main reasons that newspapers avoid taking fair play, or considered sides, is that their internet connections would be hacker attacked with thousands of e-mails by zionist and American lobby attractas (an attracta is a pattern in chaos theory).

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Following a row between Sweden and Israel over a controversial art exhibit, Prime Minister Goeran Persson's office has been bombarded with thousands of protest e-mails at the request of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a government official said Tuesday.
"This morning we had received 13,603 online protest letters," government registrar Ulla Hildert said in an telephone interview.

No structure of appeal or template of Middle Eastern concepts can be found by the general public who therefore resort to films and notions of "Arabia" to support idle conversation about this problem of geo-political significance, or a financial problem that appears to deride future essentials that must be turned toward energy research. Instead political journalists may write like an article in the Observer , during January, by Will Hutton on the "demographic" needs of the future. He suggests among other things that "we will need to ask the young to take a cut in the length of their years of university education" ...to look after the aged citizens of the furure!! He also explains that at none of the seminars he has attended on population maintenance in Europe can there be found a bank of females prepared to have babies.... Turning aside from suchlike nonsense Media Lens provides a response from their files :"There are lots of journalists here, like people everywhere else, who either try not to think about the impact climate will soon have on their lives and their children, or have genuinely not got the message. There are others who argue that we need a mix of stories to keep the readership happy, reflecting their interests. As I think I said before we need to be commercially viable to survive."Paul Brown of the Guardian.

There is recourse today to the Irish Sunday Business Post (25thJan.)to recommend satisfaction, because of their main writers, Tom McGurk and David McWilliams. (Though far from our subject, the Middle East,) we can read there an article of major importance "Who is going to police the secret armies in the North?" (TMcGurk) and a very amusing and seemingly accurate insight into European business affairs: "A pint of plain is your only man."(DMcWilliams).
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There are ofcourse many books to be read about the Middle East crisis and time will tell which rises to the top, having grasped the true essentials of the terror and the political moral Gordian knot that mankind is tied in. At the present time the internet offers an extraordinary kalaedescope of historic and factual texts of exceptional value, these and texts from many observers and members of the International Solidarity Movement can transform Western public opinion about the Middle East, in addition there are the excellent news services from Canada, the International News: sherif@unforgettable.com and Australia the News Report,Neil Baird nbaird@goanna.net.au There are also many hard-working individuals scanning a large number of news resources.To many of these I am indebted for texts.

A curious media void is the Dennis Kuchinic election programme in USA, which has gained strong audiences among the ordinary working people wherever he goes. One of his well known supporters is that old stalwart Studs Terkel , as is Tim Reynolds :

Tim says: "I believe Dennis Kucinich is the only clear voice for peace and compassion in an otherwise hopeless, fake, made for TV political arena.  He is truly the embodiment of what a caring public servant can be, a man of principal above politics".

Having drifted far with my intended run of thoughts, I'll sign off.... jocelyn braddell, editor.


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........\/\/...................WATCH THE CHESHIRE CAT SMILE.......................

Slowly, slowly, the administration is reworking its language, readying for the moment when it must acknowledge that Iraq, in fact, had no weapons of mass destruction, and one of the chief rationales that took the US and Britain to war was flawed.

This linguistic retreat from certainty has been going on for a while.