Uponnothing.co.uk

The Excellent Tim Ireland has this warning for the rest of us, time to take heed…

If the average person starts work aged 18, and retires at 65 (47 years), working the average UK working week of 40 hours, then minus 25 days a year for holidays/bank holidays they will spend around 91,080 hours at work. During the same time the average person will sleep 8 hours a night, 136,864 hours, and will spend 4 hours a day watching TV, a further 68,432 hours. So in those 47 years taking into account just 3 factors we have already accounted for 296,376 hours of that time – around 24% of the total hours (410,592) spent at work. So, during our 47 years of work we have just 114,216 hours to spend doing something other than working, sleeping or watching TV. So what else have we got to do? Well we have to eat, say breakfast is 20 minutes, lunch we’ll assume is taken during work, whilst evening meal - cooking, eating and subsequent cleaning - say 1 hour 40 minute to keep it simple. So at just 2 hours a day that takes care of another 34,216 hours. What about getting to and from work everyday? Some lucky sods work from home, but the rest of us must spend at least an hour a day commuting, that’s another 11,385 hours gone. If we are eating and working that means we must also be shopping: food, clothes, furniture, gadgets, tat, that’s another 6 hours a week or 14,664 hours gone. If we are buying stuff then we are also making mess, how many hours of our lives do we spend tidying up? I reckon at least 7 hours a week are spent just tidying stuff, 17,108 hours gone.

That means we have used a total of 359,085 hours of our 47-year working life, and have just 51,507hours left. So, what do we do with the rest of our time? It would be fair to say that the average person goes out twice, maybe three times a week, that’s probably 14 hours a week spent in pubs/clubs (as a conservative estimate), so that would get rid of another 34,216 hours, leaving just 17,291 hours remaining. Imagine all the things you have or want to do in that time: you have to wash, dress, shave, go to the toilet, travel, attend funerals, weddings, christenings, stag/hen nights, talk, read, go to the cinema, go to the beach, have hobbies, run, exercise. You may want to: have kids, relationships, write a book, paint, see the world, play sports, go to the gym etc…

You have just 17,291 hours or 720 days to do all this.

However, do we really need to go through all this hassle? Given that we choose to spend over 68,000 of those hours watching TV, and are forced to waste a further 136,864 at work, then why bother? In the UK only 37% of men and 25% of women take the recommended 30 minutes of moderate exercise at least five times a week, 88% of men and 83% of women consume too much saturated fat. And salt intake is excessive in 85% of men and 69% of women. The UK has the fastest growing rate of obesity in the developed world; we have the money and greed to eat ourselves to an early grave.

So, can we really be responsible enough to even live with the slightest degree of freedom? I don’t think so. Remember the Matrix, the fictional world where people lived life in a computer generated reality, they were simply plugged into a cocoon supplying energy to the robots running the world; in exchange the robots gave them a false reality. It was has since led to many people questioning the reality of our own lives, as if we really look at the way in which we live we have far more in common with the Matrix than we would want. Our freedom of thought is controlled by ‘education’, work and the media, who are all controlled and centralised bodies that together operate much as the Matrix does. In the US 99.5% of the population own a TV, whilst 95% of the population watches it everyday.

Ours is the first generation to have essentially moved its life inside television; to have replaced direct contact with people and nature with simulated edited recreated versions. Television is the original ‘virtual reality’.

The vast majority of global television imagery, as well as film, books, newspapers, entertainment imagery, and Internet outlets are owned by a tiny handful of corporations. Aol/Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and a couple of others, are controlling most of the world’s broadcast, publishing and entertainment industry. They are ‘directly assisted by the rules of the WTO and other global institutions that grease the pathways for their investments, takeovers and mergers.’ These are the people who control us; they don’t need to plug us into a computer system, we willingly obey their message and live in their world. Billions of people all across the globe in darkened rooms sit staring, blankly, passively, brainlessly at the TV, night after night, year after year. They are told what to wear, what to desire, what to buy and from whom.

Between school, work, and sleep most of our precious time on earth is accounted for, most of it by corrupt systems of repression, the rest we choose to waste sitting in front of a box. So why not save time, why waste money on weapons (over £546 billion worldwide last year), when we should be constructing a Matrix system. When the Matrix system is complete we can all just be plugged in, we can obey the same gods, live in the same repression, but at least they could control our diet.

Reality is a direct reflection of ourselves, so if we choose to live in the Matrix, lets at least do it properly.

The above article uses some quotations from Who Benefits Most? By Jerry Mander. I strongly recommend you read it.

As from now Uponnothing will be spending 2 weeks somewhere hot and sunny. So no more updates for a while, unless Mo gets his finger out…

Back in 2 weeks.

From theIndependent Online:

In a flat West Yorkshire accent, Mohammed Sidique Khan declared: “Our words have no impact upon you, therefore I’m going to talk to you in a language that you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.”

In the video, which was broadcast by the Arabic television station al-Jazeera, Khan said: “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.”

Khan, who worked as a learning mentor to children at a primary school in Beeston, Leeds, said: “Until we feel security, you will be our target. Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight.”

Now, the response as usual is that:

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, condemned the video. He said: “People across Britain will be sickened by this video. Nothing can justify the murder of innocent people”.

David, shut the fuck-up you ignorant fuck, we justified the deaths of the innocent people killed in Iraq without any problems. Look back at British foreign policy over the last 50 years, count the millions of innocent people dead as a result, now we have justified and even glorified this.

So don’t you dare say that terrorism cannot be justified, when Britain as a nation justifies it every single day. It cannot be one rule for ‘them’ and one rule for us, even-up, or shut-up.

Here In Reality have produced an ‘Axis of Corporate Evil’, connecting 6 large corporations and a few rich men in ‘what appears to be an attempted corporate takeover of America’. To view the chart, and learn about the connections visit the Axis here. Whilst on the subject or corporate evil i’ll give a mention to Halliburton Watch, a news feed on everyones favourite greed-fuelled destroyer of humanity.

Which then leads nicely to the next story: the cost of war in Iraq, a war in which Halliburton have profiteered from at the expense of Iraqi contractors to the tune of over $10 billion - of which ‘Pentagon auditors found that Halliburton failed to account adequately for $1.8 billion in charges for feeding and housing troops.’ A Study by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus has released a report titled: ‘The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops’ has been released on the 31/08/05. The study details some staggering figures including:

- According to current estimates, the cost of the Iraq War could exceed $700 billion. In current dollars, the Vietnam War cost U.S. taxpayers $600 billion.
- Operations costs in Iraq are estimated at $5.6 billion per month in 2005. By comparison, the average cost of U.S. operations in Vietnam over the eight-year war was $5.1 billion per month, adjusting for inflation.
- Staying in Iraq and Afghanistan at current levels would nearly double the projected federal budget deficit over the next decade.
- Since 2001, the U.S. has deployed more than 1 million troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Broken down per person in the United States, the cost so far is $727, making the Iraq War the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years.

It also details social costs:

U.S. Budget and Social Programs: The Administration’s FY 2006 budget, which does not include any funding for the Iraq War, takes a hard line with domestic spending— slashing or eliminating more than 150 federal programs. The $204.4 billion appropriated thus far for the war in Iraq could have purchased any of the following desperately needed services in our country: 46,458,805 uninsured people receiving health care or 3,545,016 elementary school teachers or 27,093,473 Head Start places for children or 1,841,833 affordable housing units or 24,072 new elementary schools or 39,665,748 scholarships for university students or 3,204,265 port container inspectors.

The full report is well worth a read, and the report was found via the article: ‘Iraq War Costs Now Exceed Vietnam’s’ by Jim Lobe over on Antiwar.com.

Lawrence M. Ludlow has written an extensive essay on ‘Machiavelli and U.S. Politics’ which intentions are thus:

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, and he held a number of legal-diplomatic posts in the Florentine chancery before his death in 1527. He wrote The Prince in 1513, dedicating it to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent. It is not surprising that The Prince both reflects and reinforces the Florentine trend toward despotism. It is an essay on how to maintain political power at all costs. It is considered infamous because in it Machiavelli argued that politics writes its own rules and must not be limited by other standards of behavior or morality.

The infamous reputation of The Prince is puzzling, however, because it appears to be a source of perpetual inspiration in Washington, D.C. It defines the actions, if not the rhetoric, of that city’s politicians and their army of supporters, dependents, and fawning sycophants. To illustrate the widespread influence of The Prince, we shall explore a few of the topics that Machiavelli addressed in his treatise. In each case, we shall also observe the following three-part pattern. In the very core, nestling at the root of our current policies, we shall find an unsavory lie. In turn, this will be shrouded by embarrassing hypocrisy as politicians shamelessly evade the implications of their lies so that they can achieve their goals. Finally, acting as an outer hard-candy shell that never seems to melt away under the heat of close scrutiny, the hypocrisy itself will be cloaked in a plausible half-truth. This last element is trotted out for public consumption and promptly absorbed in preparation for the next series of lies, hypocrisies, and half-truths. Together we shall discover that — much more than God, country, and apple pie — the unsavory trinity of lie, hypocrisy, and half-truth has become synonymous with the American Way, at least as far as politics is concerned.

It really is worth serious reading, and serious thought, as it addresses a fundemental truth we are all, at some level, aware of: that we are merely pawns in a game being played by unscrupolous leaders. However, to an extent as ’simple’ people we are part of the problem:

There is more truth… in Machiavelli’s appraisal of the “true believers” and sycophants who surround every power-hungry politician. Judging by the performance, not the promise, of today’s welfare-warfare state and its failed social programs and costly military ventures, the category of “simple” must include the following groups: citizens who believe governments can keep them safe from terrorists by stirring up hatred with interventionist foreign policies; parents who rely on public schools to educate children and on the insane war on drugs to keep them sober; citizens who believe that dependency on government handouts is a steppingstone to self-reliance; churchgoers who confuse political poses and outward shows of piety with genuine religious devotion; and, of course, soldiers who believe they are “fighting for freedom” as they destroy cities, dismiss innocent victims as “collateral damage,” and bankrupt their own country for a disgraceful bunch of politicians playing a bloody game of global hegemony with other people’s lives and treasure.

Quite. It is our belief in the validity of a fundementally corrupt system that allows it to continue, against the reality of which even the most ardent flag-waver must surely gain a fleeting glimpse of once in a while. A proving point for the reality of how and for whom the state operates, and how the belief of it’s citizens remains is surely the situation in Iraq - a conflict openly built on lies and hypocrisy, funded by the taxes of the poor and the dramatic reduction of social welfare. Yet, whilst some ’simple’ people have taken up active opposition to Bush and Co., a solid proportion still seem to believe in the validity of his presidency allowing the corrupt regime to continue.

A recent poll put Bush’s approval rating on Iraq at 40 percent, indicating that in spite of everything 40% of America’s population - meaning 118,293,654 people - still approve of the president’s war in Iraq, which in turn supports Machiavelli’s assertion that ‘people’ can be classed as ’simple’. For if this many people can maintain belief in a war as corrupt as the system itself, then they really do deserve the people they elect, and the consequences of any decisions made by the elected. It is just a shame that the 60% who do not approve of Bush and Co. have no power to get rid of him, for the time being at least.

Ludlow, however, does shift some blame from the common person by explaining gullibility:

Even more important than the willingness of the press to play “follow the leader,” the uncritical populace — “educated” in government-controlled schools — eats up a steady stream of propaganda. The willingness to believe lies (even after they have been exploded) and to trust government authorities is a testimony to the true product of government-controlled schooling: blind obedience.

Indeed, how can we fight the society, when we are explicitly schooled by it and within it?

Anyway, that can be left for another post. Moving on Justin Mckeating has announced an end to summer apathy with a welcome return describing Britain as having a ‘Home Secretary with a moral compass so wayward you could use it as a ceiling fan’. Read the full post here. He has also drawn attention to the situation in Uzbekistan, on behalf of the Blog for Uzbekistan pledge, again, read the full post here.

The US is defending the shooting of a Reuters journalist claiming:

“That particular car looked like cars that we have seen in the past used as suicide bombs. It wasn’t a new car, it was an older model car … And there were two local nationals inside the car.

“Our soldiers took appropriate measures. We mourn the loss of life of all humans … But our soldiers are trained to respond in those situations.”

So i guess the message to all the Iraqi’s out there is don’t drive an old car, or look like a local, you could be shot because of it. Perhaps to drive safely you should paint the car with the Stars and Stripes, and hang larrge flags out of the windows, although safety is not guarenteed, as friendly fire in Iraq is an American speciality.

And finally of course some news on the hurricane from Mark Hancock, read his plea for aid here. AlterNet address Why The Levee Broke:

Washington knew exactly what needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans from disasters like Katrina. Yet federal funding for Louisiana flood control projects was diverted to pay for the war in Iraq.

At least Bush is consistant in his response to any event, with his first instinct being to send in the national guard to shoot looters, I guess once the area is secure from such terrorists then he’ll contract out a reconstruction contract to Halliburton.

Britain has offered substantial aid, but it is conditional, in order to receive aid America must:

1, Contract all reconstruction work to large British corporations - and be prepared to pay billions in unidentifiable ‘expenses’.
2, Pay back said loan over next 50 years with extortionate interest.
3, Allow privatisation to British firms of everything in America.
4, Must become a democracy, beginning with an immediate regime change bringing in a Pro-UK president (preferably a puppet regime run from Westminster), giving big trade favours to the UK.
5, Must prove themselves willing to aid the UK in the War on Terror.
6, Must allow British ‘forward operation posts’ to be built around the country.

Then, perhaps one day, America can be free…