“No balcony but that view makes up for it”, I said when I moved in. I used to spend hours hanging out of the windows watching the world. Til the nets went up. It is not just that I have lost the view, I have lost the use of the windows for the purpose of looking out of. There’s a difference. It is engendering of a sense of imprisonment to see the netting every time one looks at or out of the window.

“The problem is not focusing the eyes, but rather ‘fusion’ of the
eye’s as they converge on the netting or the more distant objects. What
happens is, when they converge to either, the other images do not fall on
the corresponding regions of the retina. One then gets double vision or
‘rivalry’ as the brain can not combine the images. The point about a net is
that there are a series of positions for which the eyes will find
corresponding points and so give stable vision, but for each the background
objects have different disparities. This is extremely confusing, and can
indeed give nausea.” - from one of the world’s leading authorities on human vision and optics.

Last week I lost the first of several legal battles with the London Borough of Newham Council over this issue on a minor legal technicality. It is only a question of time until I win in court. The Judge last week - despite declaring there was no remedy the law offered him in the current legal approach - also described the netting as “not the best way forward” and a “mistake” and described Newham Council’s handling of the case as poor.

The first independent environmental health officer who visited exclaimed “what on earth made them think they could get away with that. It’s certainly illegal and a health hazard” - that was two years ago. The second confirmed it’s illegality and advised the council should “consult with appropriate experts to avoid further potentially expensive mistakes”.

Having spent thousands on illegally erecting the netting, Newham Council have wasted £8,000 defending the indefensible in court. This is just one of several looming court battles over the issue … meaning that not only have Newham Council been acting against the idependent advice they have had in hand for two years but are prepared to waste thousands and thousands of ratepayers money trying to defend something they know to be an illegal health hazard.

When my housing officer visited when I first complained he said “I can see exactly why you have a problem with it but now its up you will have a hard ime getting it removed”. I wish he hadn’t been so right. Yet for the London Borough Of Newham the rule is: “if you can avoid changing something you have already done then do so”. I wonder how much more of your money  Mayor Sir Robin “Everyone Blind” Wales and the Burgesses of Newham Council want to waste, in order that they avoid admitting and rectifying their “mistake”.

An accoustic solution similar to the mice scarers most of us know is available and would have cost Newham Council around £2,000 to purchase and install - a fraction of the costs spent on erecting this illegal health hazard and a quarter of the money they have just wasted in court. details at http://www.pestcontrol-products.com/birdcontrol_repellents_superbird.htm

Mortido and Libido, Freud said, ruled our lives. These ad-hoc structures are but points on a scale, limits within which one finds all aspects of self. Habits of perception and being dictate patterns that assume control. Parts of a whole, a system of control. A little commitee.

Crossing the River Seine, heading from, the left bank to the right, I am stopped by a tourist asking me to take a photograph of himself and his family. “I’m English”, I say, “so now I am going to say ’say cheese’”, before taking the snap, which puts a smile on their faces - even though I am certain they haven’t a clue what I am saying or why. After taking the picture and exchanging a few words with him, and discovering he is from Macedonia, I walk on.

At the next bridge, as I leave the Ile de la Cite there is a man taking a picture of a young woman. He takes the photograph and hands back the camera. I had thought they were lovers but she thanks him, in English and they part, heading in opposite directions. There are people smiling and laughing in the cold but beutifully sunny and clear light of late morning.

I start to remember, having not set foot “en France” for several years, why I love this country so much. People here are enduringly polite to each other and deeply rooted on the ground and in the moment to moment reality of being, in a way the English are not. People here help each other, whist in England, the overuling principle is to help oneself, whether legitimiately or not.

Many English and Americans would no doubt disbelieve this, but then those people are stupid enough to come here without having learned a word of the French language. I have no doubt a Frenchman who walked into a coffeeshop in Detroit or Birmingham and asked for the toilet or a cup of coffee in French would find the response he got less than enthuiastic or informative.

I love France, I love the people and I love the languague so I am heavily biased myself of course. Yet having grown up in England and at various times lived in France for a total of four years, I know both countries, both peoples and both languages well enough.

England, America and the “help yourself” mentality embodied in the cultures, sytems and peoples of those countries stink. England and America in their new colonialism towards the Middle East, in order to secure political division amongst those peoples and supplies of oil for themselves, are commiting attrocities worse than a thousand Jihad Terrorists could achieve. Individualism stinks. It creates greed and a feeding frenzy of the ego that dehumanizes us and we do not even see it happening.

Since the Regan-Thatcher era, when the Iron Bitch announced there was no such thing as “society” and then set out to destroy wholesale that which she proclaimed was not there Britain has been heading steadily downhill, towards the cultural low that is “The American Way”. I can see so clearly in the light of this French day why the French are “contre” - against - everything for which that stands.

Together yet apart is the only way man can live, be it in the field of economics, international relations or even something as everyday as marriage. The me against you attitude embodied in the politico-economic domination of the Anglo-Saxon way is killing our planet. It is time the peoples of America, Britain and their followers in the world woke up to reality and smelled the bad odour of the path they follow. Total individualism and Britain, I’m sorry to say, stink.

“Wherever bicycles are broken or threatened by international communism Bicycle Repair Man is ready”, so said Monty Python in their excellent sketch “Bicycle Repair Man”.

Now Communism is dead, Russia Our Friend and Putin our ally, division in the world had to come from someplace. The middle east was perfect for the Nouvelle Riche families that now run the show. The invention of “International Terrorism” is such a masterstroke of genius. If only it wasn’t dumb as muck and see through as air.

Its strange to me and always has been that people will accept what our society offers in return for their willingness to submit to its rules. It does not get less strange as I get old, but more so. This world this society, this constructed way of being to which we submit is becoming more Orwellian by the day.

Billions are being spent on measuring, monitoring, surveilling and accounting for your behaviour. A picture is being built of your moves, mates, connections, comings and goings. Your emails, phone calls and other communications are logged. Your moves are monitored and soon those of your car will be satellite tracked. This is 1984. And if you tolerate this your children will hate you. For they will live in a divided world full of hurt, anger, hate and violence. Their lives will not be the leisured imaginings of yesteryear about the future.

This is being done in the name of the war on terrorism. Literally billions are being spent and it is a war without end. The war on terror will lead to more terror and more war. It is business, fuelled by oil and the need for it, and creating $$$. The people who get the money do not want the flow of it to slow or stop. the war on terror is perfect for them. No wonder two of the richest families in the world started it: The Bush family and the Bin Laden Family.

No wonder over seventy per cent of the worlds scientists work in “defence research”. We should stop fighting war, especially those with no end. And in which “we” “lose” significant battles like Iraq and Afghanistan. Then we could solve the world’s problems in ten years or so at a rough guess. There would not be many angry bombers around. Your children would inherit a world of peace, prosperity and leisure. So why do politicians not go for it? Well then they would not have power, of course, and would not be significant. So the price of their ego trip is this state in which we live, this “civilisation”.

According to BBC Breakfast a survey of teenagers from around the world has shown that they consider terrorism to be the biggest problem facing the world. Surprisingly this came out ahead of environmental problems and global warming - something children in the western world have been learning about now for years in school.

Terrorism has probably killed a conservative total of perhaps 50,000 people worldwide in the last ten years. Approximately one in three of the teenagers surveyed will have been subjected to invasive sexual abuse and only about one in three of the victims will even be remotely aware of the fact. the ones who are not aware will go on to lead lives out of control: they will make up 90% or so of the next generation of prostitutes, drug addicts and imprisoned criminals. Between them they will extrapolate their own unmanageable lives to those around them through crime, drug use and violence.

In the third world the problem is even worse: 250,000 or so children in South Africa alone will be violently raped next year. This does not include those who will be subjected to quiet ongoing abuse in their own homes. The number is a wild guess, of course, but it is the best guess of those in the field and in the know: and in South Africa they know more about this subject than almost anyone else.

Replicate this throughout the third world and add in the victims of fatherly abuse  and rape from the middle east and other Muslim countries and you start to see the picture. As I have written before you do not become angry enough to kill yourself and several thousand other humans by flying a plane into a building unless you have endured a childhood replete with pain and injustice: you just don’t grow up with that potential unless control of your own body is violently forced from you at the hands of an adult.

In short childhood sexual abuse will in the coming year produce one hundred times as many victims next year as terrorism has in the past ten, it will be responsible for most of the social ills of western society, and it produces adults capable of rage so great they become terrorists. The kids got it wrong. They, like government and almost everyone else, are pointing their fingers at the wrong kind of terror: One that is much more socially acceptable and supports the unsupportable theory that we are civilised.

An attempt has been made to shut my mouth so I stop embarrassing those in the medical profession whose negligence has harmed me. The Medical Defence Union, representing several of the doctors concerned tried to have my host take down freedomforall. net.

For whatever reason there has been a wholesale failure to appropriately investigate my physical health issues and provide a care plan. One of the doctors concerned originally said he took the view that there was no point taking a view on my psychology but that it was obvious my physical problems had not been “fully investigated”. This was before he turned tail in the face of God only knows what kind of coercion or argument.

According to the two osteopaths who have worked most closely and recently with me this has now gotten dangerous. One says it has put my physical health and possibly even my life at risk. The other that it is medically unsafe to attempt further treatment and that my physical and psychological well being is now at risk.

Having stamped all over my human right to health, and threatened my human right to life, the doctors now want to keep me from my human right to free speech. Silence is golden? Not when, as one web host put it “Its always the web host who gets targetted as its a way of getting material removed without a judge having to look at whether the material is true or not. In other words by threatening a web host they can get material removedwhich may actually be true but which they don’t like.”

I will shut up about what has been done to me when the damage is put right, or when I pop my clogs, whichever comes first, and not before. Either way the negligence of those persons charged with caring for my physical health care - and paid by the state to do so - will come to light.

Politics is not often a subject of Buddhist teachings, however, this does not mean that Buddhist teachings have nothing to say about the subject. Buddhist teachings about peace, compassion, non-violence and the nature of person-hood are all relevant to a our daily world. War and politics intermingle seamlessly as the interface between powerful men. The law as the tool of poltics, and it’s enforcers from judges to prison warders, are the interface between the powerful, the governors, and the governed. The basic dynamic has remained unchanged for milennia.

From parents and schools and churches and company law and accounting and one thousand other namesless enshrined systems, we learn who we are and how we are to be. Politics forms a very significant portion of ego, and to this extent, it is a bad thing. Freud with his fictitious substructures of personality and sytemetised nonsense would have disagreed. The super-ego, he would have argued is what lifts us from barbarity. He was wrong - this is what drives many to break the norms.

Buddhism teaches us to undo ego and hence politics as real forces that dictate our lives. It opens us to be real feeling human beings. Buddhist wouldn’t make great soldiers. To pick up the gun is abhorrent. It is contradictory to the fundamental nature of man. Man is not a “barbaric” creature it is the cage of other peoples ideas that causes the barbaric acts of those driven to the edge. They are the roadkill of power politics and economics that by definition empowers the strong by tappping the poor.

Buddhism teaches that it would be better to spend our energy on solving problems than waging war. It teaches us that peace is a real and virtuous and available place, personally and politically. It teaches that compassion grows from your own awareness and that you can grow your awareness. And that compassion leads to outer and inner peace. As a practical philosophy Buddhism says a lot about the nature of our society and its ways, even though aimed principally at self transformation.

Buddhism has always been a personal and political issue for me. I have never separated the two ends. This site has included many political stories and themes and they are interwoven with the personal ones and with Buddhist Dhamma (”teachings”). I was therefore quite chuffed today to discover I am nominated for a “Blogissattva” Award It is of course an ego-thing to be quite chuffed - but never mind; “You can’t win em all”.

According to Radio Four this morning there are £450 million worth of unused foot-spa’s and £431 million of unused bread makers languishing unused in British homes. These items, unwanted gifts, show us much that is wrong with the way we do things.

£881 million of technology, human effort, scarce resources, all wasted. Of course, this is just bread makers and foot-spa’s. Think of all the other unwanted gifts and you start to get to very scary numbers. The resource waste is the most appalling aspect. The manufacture of many of these gifts uses energy, water, plastics - oil and precious metals. These are all scarce resources which could, without exception, be used to great benefit elsewhere.

Gift-giving is about the ego of the giver. Presents are bought to support the self-image of the buyer. This is why they are so often wrong for the receiver. Will your gifts end up on the ever expanding “Crap Gift Mountain”?

I take back my earlier post about gift-goats. At least goat shit can be used to cook a meal, unlike the £431 million of bread makers.