For most of my life I've been very non political, instead thinking more about myself, individuals and the small groups of people around me. I've pretty much always disagreed with what government was doing but I just kind of left it at that really. Now I'm actually starting to think a lot about these things and this coupled with a twelve hour bus ride results in this rant.
I know I'm the crazy/eccentric one but here are a few things I just don't seem to be able to understand.
A few people have commented that I was silly to go to a protest, but if it wasn't for people making a fuss we wouldn't have a lot of the great things like democracy that we enjoy today.
Money has no intrinsic value, we just made it up ... its a collectively imagined principal that we pay an awful lot of credence to. By and large money seems like a good system it massively simplifies trade but it has some huge holes. Remember we lost the gold standard in the forties so there is more money in print than we have actual resources to justify it.
The environment is a real thing, the major cause of us continuing to pollute it is money, so here we have an imaginary concept that's actually harming our reality. Even if money was real we won't really have much use for it if the human race mostly dies out. CFC's the 100% proven ozone killers are not to be phased out completely till 2040, what kind of crazy time scale is it. By some good fortune we have a protective layer around our planet that protects us from nasty radiation from the sun. Why on earth is it taking us fifty odd years from when we found out that CFS where destroying it to stop using them?
We live in a world full of imaginary lines people on one side of the line can be the richest in the world and people on the other can be starving to death ... to me this is crazy. The reason we are not feeding/clothing and educating these people is basically because its not profitable to do so. Again numbers going down instead of up on some computer screen is causing real harm to the world. Travel and where you are allowed to live/work is restricted based on what random country you happen to be born in. I believe where ever you are born you are a person and deserve the same rights to the planet as everyone else.
The more we can start to become one race of people hopefully the more we can drop all this nonsense about different people hating other people because of something that happened several thousand years ago. The idea of land ownership is just completely stupid ... who are we buying it off? Why do they have any more claim to it than us? What gives someone the right to grab an area of the planet and say its theirs? Just because someone wrote down on a bit of paper a long time ago that the land is theres? An army gives you a means to do it but it doesn't confer a right to do it.
I feel its also worth mentioning all the parasitic humans who just do things like trade shares or currencies they don't actually produce anything just steal small amounts of money off an awful lot of people. When they trade currencies governments and central banks also have to trade to stabilise things, effectively money from the public purse gets given to them everyday. I'm going to include lawyers in this too, they are really only needed as the law has been made completely over the top complex, mostly because it was made by other lawyers. Imagine a law that's written that you can easily understand. Imagine how much easier tax returns could be if they weren't based on deliberately complex laws that artificially create the need for accountants and lawyers.
Religion ... I'm not even going to start on this one, sufficed to say that as part of our continuing evolution its really past time to take the emotional nappy of religion off. If your an adult with an imaginary friend please keep it to yourself and don't use it as an excuse to do anything other than making your life and the world a better place. Good Dam it! Jesus Christ! Religion makes me angry ... your continued belief in magic is doing real harm to society and which no longer covers you over my global belief that you can do/believe what ever you want as long as you don't harm another person. Please just stop for a moment and think about how childish and harmful faith based reasoning is, don't let it continue to another generation please. If that voice inside your head when you pray really is god then hes spoken to me too, he said
'Tell the others forget about all the dogmatic religious crap, be nice to everyone and have fun. If you really must worship me, have an amazing and good life. Oh and tell them its best not to mention me in public it makes them look a little crazy'
Why do we put up with this crazy system of voting once every five or so years for someone that's going to lie to us and not even do what the few things that we voted them in for. If only there was some way of collecting every ones opinion together rapidly and easy and using that to shape the future, oh hang on a second we do, the Internet! If a bank system can work why not a voting system? wouldn't it be nice to actually have people involved in the debate and deciding there future? Think about all the great things the Internet has achieved by bringing peoples minds together and start to wonder what else it could achieve.
I believe political assassination should be the standard way of handling wars, if some crazy guy at the top wants to start a war then it makes sense that he should be the one getting shot at.
All the power in the world resides with the people if only 10% of the people in the world own 90% of the wealth then they are exceedingly outnumbered. What ever continues to happen to us on our planet is our choice there is a cooperate machine trying to turn us into a giant dollar sign but we hold the plug in our hands.
Showing posts with label apec. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apec. Show all posts
Monday, 10 September 2007
Saturday, 8 September 2007
APEC Day 2
The news in the morning was the best I had ever seen, the three hundred million dollar security operation had been breached by a group of Australian Comics named The Chasers who just got three motorcade looking cars put a Canadian flag on the front one and drove through all the security. Once they got outside George Bush's hotel they decided they better turn around before they got in trouble, when one dressed as Osama Bin Laden gets out ... and ... well attracts surprisingly little police attention. Stop now and watch the video in the link (episode 15 if your reading this at another time) its amazing, they really stole the show and I have an incredible about of respect for them. George Bush was on normal form, as he blundered through his speech he called the conference the OPEC conferences and thanked the people of Austria.
This was the day of the big march and I'm not sure how but they managed to find even more police, the route of the march was completely enclosed by police and police buses. I'm not sure how but one protester had managed to get a poster up on one of the buses. For those of you that haven't been on a march yet its really fun, there is a carnival kind of an atmosphere and everyone is having a really great time. Well apart from the police you could see on there faces that even though all of them where here they where still massively outnumbered.
The march carried on with much chanting, lively music and on the way back to Hyde Park, once there the police surrounded the park leaving only one way in or out and it was time for the speakers to do there bit. The speakers where very good but had some very different messages to say. Some would be thanking us for being peaceful and other speakers would try and incite the crowd to go and attack the fences around the CBD. Things remained fun very much like a music festival this was great I didn't really feel like toppling global capitalism today, it was slightly rainy after all you really need a sunny day for that.
The news that evening was great, Australia like England and America has two main political parties the really right wing one and the not quite so right wing one. So the news tends to be polarized to either supportive of the government or against it a bit. Watching the news that evening was great in a small way I had just taken part in history. It was nice to see the new reporting on what we had been doing today. Also for the first time I had first hand experience to judge the accuracy and bias of the news. They all agreed that during the day there had been 17 arrests, mostly for small infractions like spraying tomato sauce on the Pro Bush protesters who where there too. Seems a bit over the top to me, but I'm pretty biased on this one.
Then depending on which channel you watch there where between three thousand and ten thousand protesters and the police presence was described as either completely over the top, aggressive and trying to provoke the protesters or as the good guys that kept Sydney safe from the hordes of evil anarchists. I'll add the press to the list of things that I should fix when I take over the world ... evil laugh
This was the day of the big march and I'm not sure how but they managed to find even more police, the route of the march was completely enclosed by police and police buses. I'm not sure how but one protester had managed to get a poster up on one of the buses. For those of you that haven't been on a march yet its really fun, there is a carnival kind of an atmosphere and everyone is having a really great time. Well apart from the police you could see on there faces that even though all of them where here they where still massively outnumbered.
The march carried on with much chanting, lively music and on the way back to Hyde Park, once there the police surrounded the park leaving only one way in or out and it was time for the speakers to do there bit. The speakers where very good but had some very different messages to say. Some would be thanking us for being peaceful and other speakers would try and incite the crowd to go and attack the fences around the CBD. Things remained fun very much like a music festival this was great I didn't really feel like toppling global capitalism today, it was slightly rainy after all you really need a sunny day for that.
The news that evening was great, Australia like England and America has two main political parties the really right wing one and the not quite so right wing one. So the news tends to be polarized to either supportive of the government or against it a bit. Watching the news that evening was great in a small way I had just taken part in history. It was nice to see the new reporting on what we had been doing today. Also for the first time I had first hand experience to judge the accuracy and bias of the news. They all agreed that during the day there had been 17 arrests, mostly for small infractions like spraying tomato sauce on the Pro Bush protesters who where there too. Seems a bit over the top to me, but I'm pretty biased on this one.
Then depending on which channel you watch there where between three thousand and ten thousand protesters and the police presence was described as either completely over the top, aggressive and trying to provoke the protesters or as the good guys that kept Sydney safe from the hordes of evil anarchists. I'll add the press to the list of things that I should fix when I take over the world ... evil laugh
Friday, 7 September 2007
APEC Day 1
Firstly I know going to a big protest on a tourist visa is a bad idea, its a especially bad idea when the Australian police are all over the news saying how they are prepared for Riots and have a new water cannon so powerful it can kill people (and to think the rest of us in Australia has to take 4 minutes showers because of the drought).
But with George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao and Australia's Neo conservative John Howard all in one place at one time who could resist a four for one protest bargain? Well the answer to that is probably most of you. These are the people most directly responsible for making the world a more polluted and dangerous place and when the time comes I at least want to say that I did something, even if it was only add myself to the large numbers of people on the streets saying I don't like what your doing.
Being as part of the reason that I was going was due to environmental grounds me and Gena decided to get the bus from Melbourne to one of its neighboring city Sydney. Flying there would only take an hour but it would make us hypocrites and I'm willing to sacrifice some comfort and convenience to avoid that. A bus ride sounds innocent enough till you get on the bus and realize the trip is going to take twelve hours plus. Australia is huge, really huge and just going to a different state normally involves driving for longer than it would take to traverse the entire length of England. My English mind find it really hard to process the huge amounts of undeveloped natural land in between the cities, this really is the new and almost totally empty world.
To help pass the time on the twelve hour trip they played a movie, that's right one movie in a twelve hour trip ... immediately I saw a hole in their plan. The movie came on and it was a Kevin Costner one ... well at least it was going to be a long movie. Luckily I had Gena sitting next to me and some conversation and shenanigans helped the trip pass much more pleasantly.
When we arrived Sydney was completely empty, our coach was driving through Sydney during rush hour in the morning and only had to stop if we happened upon a red light. It was a ghost town, we walked around the botanic gardens in the heart of Sydney and it was about 10 minutes before we saw anyone. There was a strange eeriness about the city streets and the thought kept recurring through my mind, this would be a great time to film a zombie or post apocalyptic film.
This was till you got to the green/red zone, the Australia government had erected a seven foot tall metal fence with concrete blocks behind it basically sealing off the Sydney CBD, when you got here there was a lot of people, they where all wearing the police uniforms but at least they where people. It was like being on a set of a movie, this obviously would be the bit in the movie where the zombies/anarchist looters attack the area where all the survivors (who in a new tradition have all trained as police) are starting to rebuild civilization.
Its really hard to just describe how many police there were ... near the Green zone whenever and which ever direction you looked there would be at least a handful of police there and a police car or two. I've never felt so safe and so in danger at the same time I got to wondering with this many police here it would be a great time to commit a crime somewhere else. Seriously what are the terrorists thinking about with all the security eggs so obviously in one few square mile basket why don't they attack somewhere else?
Being a veteran protester now ... after all this is my second protest I was prepared for anything ... we went to Hyde Park. Then something I really wasn't prepared for happened ... nothing! There where a few stands, a stage with a few people singing and talking and the normal bunch of anti capitalists trying to sell you things and a couple of hundred people milling around Then at three o'clock that ended and we just ended up doing some sight seeing.
But with George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao and Australia's Neo conservative John Howard all in one place at one time who could resist a four for one protest bargain? Well the answer to that is probably most of you. These are the people most directly responsible for making the world a more polluted and dangerous place and when the time comes I at least want to say that I did something, even if it was only add myself to the large numbers of people on the streets saying I don't like what your doing.
Being as part of the reason that I was going was due to environmental grounds me and Gena decided to get the bus from Melbourne to one of its neighboring city Sydney. Flying there would only take an hour but it would make us hypocrites and I'm willing to sacrifice some comfort and convenience to avoid that. A bus ride sounds innocent enough till you get on the bus and realize the trip is going to take twelve hours plus. Australia is huge, really huge and just going to a different state normally involves driving for longer than it would take to traverse the entire length of England. My English mind find it really hard to process the huge amounts of undeveloped natural land in between the cities, this really is the new and almost totally empty world.
To help pass the time on the twelve hour trip they played a movie, that's right one movie in a twelve hour trip ... immediately I saw a hole in their plan. The movie came on and it was a Kevin Costner one ... well at least it was going to be a long movie. Luckily I had Gena sitting next to me and some conversation and shenanigans helped the trip pass much more pleasantly.
When we arrived Sydney was completely empty, our coach was driving through Sydney during rush hour in the morning and only had to stop if we happened upon a red light. It was a ghost town, we walked around the botanic gardens in the heart of Sydney and it was about 10 minutes before we saw anyone. There was a strange eeriness about the city streets and the thought kept recurring through my mind, this would be a great time to film a zombie or post apocalyptic film.
This was till you got to the green/red zone, the Australia government had erected a seven foot tall metal fence with concrete blocks behind it basically sealing off the Sydney CBD, when you got here there was a lot of people, they where all wearing the police uniforms but at least they where people. It was like being on a set of a movie, this obviously would be the bit in the movie where the zombies/anarchist looters attack the area where all the survivors (who in a new tradition have all trained as police) are starting to rebuild civilization.
Its really hard to just describe how many police there were ... near the Green zone whenever and which ever direction you looked there would be at least a handful of police there and a police car or two. I've never felt so safe and so in danger at the same time I got to wondering with this many police here it would be a great time to commit a crime somewhere else. Seriously what are the terrorists thinking about with all the security eggs so obviously in one few square mile basket why don't they attack somewhere else?
Being a veteran protester now ... after all this is my second protest I was prepared for anything ... we went to Hyde Park. Then something I really wasn't prepared for happened ... nothing! There where a few stands, a stage with a few people singing and talking and the normal bunch of anti capitalists trying to sell you things and a couple of hundred people milling around Then at three o'clock that ended and we just ended up doing some sight seeing.
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