Dear Mick,

People have different emotional reactions to events like the recent Tsunami and to people making jokes about it.

I reacted to seeing people search for jokes about the Tsunami. It distressed me when the dead had not even been found let alone buried. I am not saying I was right to do what I did or that the persons seeking jokes are wrong or sick. It is their way of coping, mine - at that point in my life - was to do what I did.

freedomforall.net is not a joke website. It is a political comment site, Buddhist inspired, and the main theme is the needless deaths poverty inflicts in our world.

I believe that when people honestly examine their minds to establish why they behave the way they do the world becomes a better place. I have examined mine and realised there are things I wish to change and do differently. I would not behave that way again for exactly the reasons you point out and because I do believe deeply in freedom.

However when public servants spend their time at work trawling the net for personal matters any citizen has a right to be concerned. We live in an age of personal irresponsibility and corporate wastage which is ruining our planet. Public institutions in this country used to have a public service ethos which Thatcher ruined because of her personal belief that there “is no such thing as society”.

Personally I believe that a good society is the only hope we have of undoing the dilemmas we are now faced with. I am an anarchist however (which I know will make you fall off your chair laughing) and believe that good society must come from within individual persons who are willing to face up to themselves and take responsibility.

By the way, I did not advise Edinburgh council to do anything other than advise employees that their internet activities were a) trace-able and b) reflected on the council. If this makes me a sick, petty, authoritarian, informer I live in a different universe to you.

Best Wishes

Matthew Jee

Mick Hume comments on my actions in the Times Online

The Legalise Cannabis Campaign circulated this document to delegates at the Cannabis and Mental Health conference - 2nd and 3rd December, Institute of Psychiatry, London. It has a much more scientific and realistic approach to cannabis and mental health issues than that of Rethink, the British mental health charity, discussed in an earlier post.

Mr Blair wishes to reduce the “dependency” culture, specifically that of persons receiving incapacity benefit. His answer, in part, is to halt the current increase that claimants on the benefit for over a year are awarded.

When I first became too depressed and life too meaningless for me to work I was under great pressure. Surviving on £56 per week is no easy feat. My medical problems were misunderstood for many years by the doctors and only reluctantly are they now starting to give me the proper help and assistance I need.

This follows four years on benefits, fighting to survive and fighting for proper healthcare and support. My energy would have been better spent on my recovery and had I been given a proper living level of income and proper healthcare from the start I would have been working again within two years or so.

After a year of struggling on £53 a week, as it was then, the increase I recieved to £75 a week made a marked difference in my ability to survive with some level of dignity. Later I was awarded Disability Living Allowance, although at the wrong rate which is now being reviewed. Again the shift in ease of life made a marked difference in my ability to take action to heal my injuries. Yet still the level was basically subsistence.

Mr Blair’s plan will result in a drop in the costs of these benefits. It will also make an already dificult system harder to cope with. It will force more people who are geuinely ill to waste time living at subsistence levels and fighting for healthcare that does not exist or does not care. It will result in many thousands of people already struggling with depressing medical conditions over the edge.

If these plans are fostered watch out for the suicide rate increase amongst those on incapacity. It will be rapid, marked and entirely Mr Blair’s fault - he does not understand, nor does he wish to understand, the desperation of those forced to accept meagre state handouts in order to cope with life.

The Observer | UK News | London’s Olympic dream in tatters

So London’s Olympic “Dream” is in tatters, and not soon enough. I live within a mile of the proposed games. My life would have been made hell by the media fuelled ego fest that is modern sport at it’s worst. I have argued previously for housing to be built on the area immediately for the many tens of thousands of local people whose lives are being ruined by poor quality temporary housing.

I really do not believe that anything as environmentally unfriendly as the Olympics should take place. All those plane flights pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, helping our wee planet warm and die. All that building facilities that may never find permanent use. All that fast food. Is everyone blind to the mass-stupidity of our times?

A full page advertisement appeared in a Mexican newspaper today paid for by, and making the demands of, prisoners within the state detention system. The prison systems operation has recently been taken over by armed forces following increasing problems from the drug gangs who had previously been in charge.

Prisoners are now subject, the advertisement claims, to a loss of their human rights. Hooded gangs of soldiers are roaming the prisons at night subjecting inmates to harrassment and torture. The advertisement demands an end to this humiliating behaviour imported from US style incarceration camps.

Furthermore prisoners are demanding the right to have a range of soft drinks available in the vending machines. As if prisoners taking out advertisements in newspapers were not bizarre enough, the linking of demands for an end to Abu-Ghraib style torture with a return to the availability of Coca-Cola makes this story of Mexico importing Americanisms get weirder and weirder.

The Earth is a system partially open to space yet somewhat closed by nature of it’s atmosphere and gravity. We don’t fall or fly off for a start. Heat and energy enters and leaves the atmosphere both from and to space and the substance of the earth itself.

As climate change induces higher average temperatures in the atmosphere the flow of heat into the earth at any point on its surface and in time will be increased and out reduced, thus the temperature of the body of Earth itself will on average increase. As temperature rises so does pressure.

Such an increase in temperature and pressure may have been partially responsible for the particularly large earthquake that caused the recent Tsunami in the Indian ocean. Certainly if global warming is real and my theories half accurate we can expect to see an increase in the frequency and strength of large-scale geothermic events.

Mr Blair is trying to convince George Bush that climate change matters. Mr Bush believes God put him in charge, not Tony, so that effort is of course destined to fail. Mr Bush listens first and foremost to the little voices in his head. Hopefully one of these will soon speak up.

Otherwise, as America has more than its fair share of geological faults, we can expect the earth to do for us what Mr Blair will not be able to do. America will join the rest of the world in taking these issues seriously when they suffer a couple of catastrophic earthquakes or volcanoes. And when a respected American scientist with more weight and mathematics to throw at the problem than I makes and promotes this link.