“There is growing evidence that smoking cannabis causes mental health problems”. The BBC headline being pushed as the major news story this morning is bad science. There may be a growing body of evidence that smoking cannabis and having mental health problems are linked but the link and causality are far from proven.

Since the sixties when R.D. Laing’s promoted his ideas about Schizophrenia being principally a political and social fact our understanding of the “disease” has not gained much ground. The dismissal of Laing’s theory was bad then and part of the same problem we are encountering here. People who suffer mental health problems, in short, do not suffer the new original sin of genetic problems. They suffered growing up in families and a world which do not make sense yet pretend to.

That people who ask for mental health support are unlikely to get is much more likely the causal issue here. People suffering senselessness in this world are left to their own devices and self-medicate using alcohol, drugs or experience to fill the gaps in themselves created by upbringing.

The locus of control being placed outside of the individual by family and society is the principal gap forming problem. Persons raised in controlling families and society lack self control. They are then very ready to give it up to an outside substance or person. It keeps them where they are comfortable: In a semi-infantile state where they will not have to address, understand and deal with the families and experiences that fucked them up.

Sir Bob Geldof on Margaret Thatcher: “She lashed out at every institution she saw. The Monarchy, The old Tory party, the old Labour Party. She was a Punk”.

Humanist weddings are legal in Scotland from today without the need for a separate civil ceremony. Some fellow on BBC breakfast this morning said that humanism was recognition that there is no God, that religion will not save you and that it is up to each of us to do their best in the world for themselves and others. I think if the historical Buddha were alive today he would identify more strongly with Humanism than with much of what bears his name.

The phrase “the three R’s” for reading, writing and arithmetic was clearly formed by someone who was not too hot on the first two of them. They seem to have been able to count to at least three which shows a better hold of the last. These things are meant to be the foundation of a good education, the tools to help each child negotiate their way through life.

It seems to me they are not up to scratch in the world in which we now live. Is it time to replace them with “the three P’s”: psychology, philosophy and politics? These things would give each child the tools they need to understand the world in which they live. Our world is constructed principally as a world of human thought and most of these thoughts - even the ones we think of as integral to “who we are” - are regurgitated: they are someone else’s thoughts.

Of course, a population who were psychologically, philosophically and politically literate would be somewhat harder to control or fool than we are now. It would be quite anarchic if people were offered the power of understanding in this manner.

I guess that is why the politicians won’t ever do it. They would lose their power of hiding and be revealed from behind their veil of secrecy: if people could understand all these complex issues for themselves there would probably be no call for a political class to interpret the world for us.

We have, by and large, done away with the priesthood - at least in Britain where only 7.5% of the population attended a church in 1998. The politicians are the new priests interpreting and presenting our place in the universe for us and creating the rules that guide and steer us.

After the Iraq war debacle I am starting to contemplate taking up church going. It’s a way of voting with my arse. This feels especially right after reading The Downing Street Memo today. Conclusive proof, were it needed, that the US and British Governments had made all the decisions about invading Iraq long before the public presentation of this decision making. That veil of secrecy again.

Michael Jackson has been found not guilty of all the charges against him relating to the alleged grooming and abuse of Gavin Arvizo. Some would say he was vindicated. The jury in post trial interviews gave a different story. They felt that not enough evidence was presented to convict which is very different from vindication.

Presented with a weak prosecution case reliant on weak witnesses the jury had little choice in reality. There must have been some doubt even in the minds of jury members who felt there was a case to answer here. In this we are presented with a perenial problem of legalistic justice: it is always partial, always conditional.

Much evidence is what people say they heard, saw and thought. Juries must take a view on the voracity of these things. In doing so they can take the wrong view. Evidence is subject to review, updating and new analysis forever. Verdicts can not be continually updated to match.

Justice in the true sense of the word has not been well served in this case. Tom Sneddon, by chasing his own dragon of Jackson’s “Guilt”, has left the scene more difficult for victims of sexual abuse. There will be a little bit less belief and a little bit more reluctance to prosecute than before the trial. Tom Sneddon has hurt abused children and helped abusers - something he surely must regret and which must have been far from his mind when pressing for this ill-advised prosecution.

“You’ve really fucked up”, My friend was not happy at the computer he had purchased on my recommendation, “The screen is too small”. I went round to visit him and see what he meant.

“Look it’s only twelve inches across”, he said, “It’s supposed to be seventeen”. “It’s seventeen diagonally from corner to corner”, I said, “in fact it will be an inch or so less because thats the size of the tube. You can always see a little less”. “No-one measures screens diagonally”, said my friend, “it’s a twelve inch screen”. “Everyone measures them diagonally”, I corrected him, “but you go ahead and measure it how you like - you will just be doing it differently to everyone else in the world so remember to point that out if the subject comes up”. I have discovered this person needs to be given a way to be wrong and right at the same time or they get quite unbearable.

“I’ve seen a screen this size before. That was OK”, he said starting on a slightly different tack, “because the letters were bigger. The letters on this screen are tiny“. I pointed out that you could change the size of the fonts and screen resolution. “I know that”, said my friend, “I’ve done loads of computer courses. I know all about them”. I showed him how to change these things anyway, despite his protest that he knew how. He clearly didn’t or he would never have made the complaints he made.

I had asked my friend, before advising him, what he wanted to do with the machine. “Email, letters, browse the web, bit of photography, play music”, said he. My advce was to buy a low end machine from dell. Not the cheapest way to get the spec he would get but far from the most expensive and one of the most reliable. I think someone came round and told him he could have got a much better machine from the newspaper for the same money.

What my friend forgot to take into account is that he doesn’t need a better machine. He will only use 10% of the computing power of this one in all probability. And should something screw up it’s easier to get service from Dell than from a two-bit shop in the newspaper.

The latest policy initiative undergoing “media trials” from the Blair Government is widespread road pricing using satellite tracking. There are so many problematic issues that arise from this that each could have a book written on it. Most already have.

• The combination of existing vehicle ownership databases, the new national identity database and a satellite system capable of accurately positioning and tracking millions of cars is pure orwellian nightmare stuff.
• A system proposed to cost £1 billion will always cost three times that if ordered by the government. There is a simple reason: Unlike the private sector no one in public management will draw a line in case they were wrong. As complexity and requirements rise they feed themselves without hinderance.
• The system will not work properly and will then get scrapped.
• The same or better result can be achieved by hiking fuel duty to encompass all vehicle taxes and environmental premiums. With horrendously expensive fuel driver behaviour will be modified to reduce congestion. It is cheapest to drive on a clear road at a steady moderate speed. Most expensive to be in a stop start jam.
• It’s Tony Blair’s idea
• Media trialling everything to see what you can get away with is poor form.

I have a right to my health and recent attempts to beg for the money to pay for it have so far not succeeded. I should not have to be doing any of this. A total failure to diagnose and deal with my physical health problems has lead to serious decay.

Now I am having to take a very risky strategy. I have this week found a human rights lawyer who is prepared to fight for my right to healthcare. If our discusions next week go well an application will be made to court ordering the hospital to admit me and properly investigate and treat these issues. Of course there is healthcare and there is healthcare. I am concerned that by ordering Doctors to do something they do not particularly wish to do I am asking for trouble of the “oh he just slipped away under the anaesthetic” type.

Somehow that seems a better option than slowly sinking under the weight of disinterest the doctors have in my collapsing body. A better option is that a phillanthropic soul finds this website or comes across my case another way and pays for me to get the treatment I need.

It was suggested by a well-intentioned “Buddhist” - although rather unhelpfully - in response to my most recent post that money could not solve my problems. I should, instead of asking for help, aspire to be reborn as a rock and help all sentient “beans and beings”.

There is a lot of rather frightening magical-thinking in this of the kind the Buddha abhorred, as well as a rather backward trajectory in terms of conscious development: “Use this precious human life to become an unconscious material object”, is not a teaching I have ever heard. The magical thinking that your aspiration at death will condition your next life is certainly irrelevant and, I suspect, beyond the correspondent’s personal field of knowledge. The point is to strive diligently in this one to end craving and wake up so you can truly, practically, help others. You will also understand the Buddha’s teachings on the circle of life if you achieve this.

Reality in this case has many manifestations: 1/ the western medical practitioners I have met so far have pooh-poohed the reality of the physiological shock reaction that has resulted in serious injury to my body, 2/ the delays this has caused mean I now need their medicine as I almost certainly require some temporary or even permanent steel in my back to allow my body to heal, 3/ More delays will mean more harm, 4/ Our fantastic free British healthcare system can not cope well with anything a little unusual, 6/ I therefore need to pay for private orthopaedic surgery and post operative physical rehabilitation if I am to avoid being an expensive wheelchair bound burden on the rest of society for the rest of my life.

Aspiring to anything is another form of craving. Aspiring to another life rather than aspiring to full awakening in this one makes you not a Buddhist. The ego makes a decision to wipe itself clean when it becomes Buddhist. Undoing that Gordian knot is the process and the path. Aspiring to be a rock is frankly as dumb as a rock.

Practical solutions and alternatives are QUITE welcome. Mixed up schizophrenic mumbo-jumbo, NO THANKS.