BE CHOOSY ABOUT LOVE

I know what love is. I’ve felt it – continue to feel it. It is a deep feeling that grips every part of the body as well as the mind. It cannot be adequately explained in words – they are too inefficient. Even the poets ramble on.
It is not part of a person’s life. It IS their life. It is all-consuming, and I’m not just talking about the heady love at the beginning of a relationship. I’m talking about long lasting love that survives the years, even the decades.
There are two types of real love. The one is the love you have for your partner. The other is the love you have for your children. They are so different in many ways, but in terms of sacrifice they are similar and reach another level of commitment.
Love is life. Love is the reason for life. Love is the most important thing in life. So I can only express dismay at the modern attitude of using the word too liberally and pretending to heap love on friends.
Friends can be close – very close. But if you really loved them, they would be more than friends. The very concept of a friend is that they are not loved, but needed, respected, accepted in another form.
That form may be very close, but it is not love. And in saying you love your friends – sometimes saying it about people you’ve only recently met – then you degrade love. For if it is so diluted that it can spread so thinly, I’m afraid you’ve never loved.

© Anthony North, Jan 2007

This is a post from Anthony North’s ‘alternative network.’ Current affairs posts almost daily on North’s Review and Eye on the World (this includes politics). North’s Review also has fiction, writers’ resources and TV reviews. For deeper issues, including paranormal, crime, environment and much more, Beyond the Blog is for you.

WHAT AN INSULT

The Nanny State encroaches on and on. Slowly – apathetically – we are abandoning our right to be individuals, family members and thinking human beings. We used to say that the personal is the political. We never dreamt that it would become a reality, with politicians doing the thinking for us. And if such thinking should be done by anyone, it certainly shouldn’t be politicians.
Nowhere is this problem more obvious than in the moves towards new laws on insult. Taking viable standards that insist we don’t insult racial or sexual groups to the extreme, we will soon be unable to express an opinion. Already we are attuned to the idea that a criticism of any sort is a personal insult. And when this becomes the norm, free speech will have become a thing of the past.
Following on from an inability to insult will come an onward march towards curbing insulting behaviour. Take the beloved cleavage put on display by so many today. This will insult a whole host of religions. Elderly people kissing tends to be frowned upon by the young. Sayings such as Hocus Pocus and Mumbo Jumbo are insults to Catholicism and African religions respectively. The westernised Halloween party is an insult to paganism. Even left and right wing politics can be seen as insulting to the other.
The time could well come when all these valid acts and behaviour could be classed as unlawful through insult. In Britain alone we could be dealing with a hundred million thought crimes a day. We will all be criminals then.
Of course, that is the ultimate. But unless we make it clear that forms of insult are a natural consequence of people having a particular lifestyle, our supposed freedoms from insult will result in an inability to do anything at all.
Two strains of thought seem to be pervading such laws of insult. The first is a creeping politicisation of commonsense. In the past, people have instinctively known what is, or is not, an acceptable insult. This divide no longer seems clear. Such a problem is becoming endemic to society. But the second train of thought is even more worrying. More and more the authorities are attempting to place a sense of guilt upon our actions and thoughts.
Making us all feel guilty about everything is an important political tool, conditioning us to certain degrees of compliance. Medieval Europe perfected the behavioural model in proscribing certain behaviour as against the Will of God. Such empowerment of the political over the personal is the road to totalitarianism, with the State as parent, and the population a new form of mental serf. There is no greater insult to freedom than that.

(c) Anthony North, February 2005

RT One

UNI-CULT

No one is more boring than an intellectual. By the millions we ignore them, advising they get a life, or take up something less dangerous such as stamp collecting. Usually single-minded, they can spend their life on the accumulation of data for a specific hypothesis, or pore over the works of a particular previous intellectual who is invariably brighter than they will ever be. Certainly they are needed, but we should really put guards on those ivory towers.
Before being accused of glorifying the idea of dumbing-down, I must put a proviso. Intellectualism should be followed by as many people as possible – exercise for the mind does wonders. But are today’s intellectuals really bright, or are they just playing? Further, is modern intellectualism a valid use of free-thinking, or has something sinister been creeping into our universities.
In previous times, few people reached the heady heights of intellectualism. As such, those who did had a brain that was up to the task. In today’s world of shoving everyone in a university who has ever opened a book, we can argue that their intellectual capacity to think independently of their lecturers must be diminished. And this could well be leading to a disturbing phenomenon in wider society.
Every now and again a cult will hit the headlines because they’ve committed mass suicide or shot-up a bunch of US agents. The secret of cultism is that a charismatic guru hooks a number of middleclass, reasonably intelligent kids who are searching for something in life. Bombarded by ideas of a world how the guru sees it, a form of subservience grows, with the guru feeding off their adoration, and the kids feeding off his purpose.
The above description of cultism shares many similarities to the modern lecturer/student relationship. Intelligent, but without the capacity for free-thinking, the student can, today, suffer a form of brainwashing, taking a specific mentality out into the professional world he will later inhabit. Wrapped up in the academic process, this mentality will have little in the way of understanding of normal life. Hence, when this new professional middleclass begins to impose their standards on the rest, it will be of a different order to what most people understand.
The result is that a gulf grows wider and wider between those who govern and the governed. Whereas in the past the intellectuals were few in number, and usually stereotyped as eccentric, the new intellectualism wears a suit and ingrains itself in every area of life. With an essentially liberal credo, the uni-cult disciples then go on to wreak havoc with society, imposing such abominations as rampant political correctness, and, as with the cult disciple, unable to see the damage because they cannot conceive that they, or their lecturers, are wrong.

(c) Anthony North, March 2005

ISLAM

Islam, meaning submission, is the faith of the Muslim as revealed through their prophet, Muhammad. The same God as Jews and Christians, He is Allah, Muhammad being seen as the seal of the prophets, the final messenger of God. Their holy book is the Koran, revealed to Muhammad about 616AD by the Angel Gabriel. Muslims live by the Five Pillars of Islam, the Hadith and the Sharia. The Five Pillars are acceptance of the creed – to testify that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah – to pray 5 times a day, to pay a charitable levy or alms, to fast during daylight through Ramadan, and to make a once in a lifetime pilgrimage to the Kaaba in Mecca, an oblong building in the quadrangle of the Great Mosque which contains the Black Stone given to Abraham by Gabriel.
The Hadith is the canon of belief and social regulation, a collection of teachings of Muhammad and stories about his life, second only to the Koran. The Sharia is the moral and religious law of Muslims, including the concept of retribution, reminding all individuals of their rights and responsibilities in the conflicting world of individuality, community and state.
One other major element of Islam is Jihad, sometimes interpreted as holy war, but meaning ‘directed struggle’. In the world it is a system of self-defence against oppression only; to the person it is the fight against his own greed, desires and ego.
Islam itself is one of the purest religions balancing rights and duties and based on absolute tolerance of other religions. Much has been said about the incitement to violence in the Koran. What must be taken into account is that, like most ancient religious texts, it was written in a violent time. It is reasonable to accept that reasonable people will understand this, and refrain from this part of scripture.
There are two main sects of Islam. Sunnis are the largest, believing the first three caliphs after Muhammad’s death were his true successors. Denying any human spiritual authority, they live by the guidance of the Koran, Hadith and Sharia only.
The Shiites rejected the first three caliphs, the fourth, Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali being the first true successor – he was murdered at Kufa in 661. Shiites empower ‘imams’ to intervene between God and humans, thus Sunnis interact with Allah personally, Shiites do so through clergy, their influence centred on Iran.
Muhammad was born to the Quraish tribe in Mecca about 570AD. Orphaned, he became contemplative and married the elder Khadija, a wealthy widow. Beginning to hate the idolatry around him, in 610 he had a vision of the Angel Gabriel, dictated the Koran, began preaching about the One God and spoke of the inevitability of moral judgement. Facing hostility from the Meccans, he left in 622, his flight known as the Hegira, beginning the Muhammadan Era. In Medira he set up the first Islamic community but in 624 the Meccans went to destroy him. Muhammad won the Battle of Badr and Mecca capitulated in 630, much of the Arabian peninsula taking up Islam. Muhammad died two years later.

(c) Anthony North, January 2003

THOSE DARK SATANIC FACTORIES

Multi-nationals are one of the worst polluters, but what is the nature of the power held by the multi-national? After all, power is no longer sought in the western world – we are told. Ideology is dead – we are told. But do these popular messages hold a more sinister truth? For instance, could commerce itself be an ideology?
It is a con of modern life that commerce is not an ideology. Trade, we are told, is beyond politics, and simply a matter of blind markets making us richer and richer. But ever since modern trade, and the technologies that supported it came into being, it has had a most obvious ideology behind it.
Throughout history, trade has been the lifeblood of empire, spurring whole peoples to conquer and make profit from it. The British Empire itself was formed more by trading companies than armies. Such a reality makes it clear that trade may be blind market forces, but they are only allowed to operate in a political environment that sees advantage in its existence.
This was particularly so with the Industrial Revolution. It began, ideologically speaking, with the Reformation. With the birth of Protestantism, the Catholic grip on Europe was broken, with the new religious denominations such as Puritanism and later Methodism, being an expression of local, or national, aspirations. Further, the new non-conformist minister was from a new emerging class – the middleclass. Beginning a process that snatched authority from bishop and aristocracy, the 18th century saw the middleclass flower with moves into the courts (the middleclass jury taking power from the aristocratic judge) and Parliament (the middleclass House of Commons replacing the Lords).
However, for the middleclass to really thrive, they needed a real power hold in society. Hence, non-conformist middleclass entrepreneurs and engineers moved into trade, forging the Industrial Revolution and causing demographic change with the poor crowding into cities to become the workforce for this new middleclass wealth and power.
We can see here how trade became an ideological tool, with technology the mainstay of the revolution. Fair enough, it eventually led to liberal democracy and the freedoms we enjoy today. But it was ideology nonetheless – it was social engineering on a grand scale. And as the 20th century dawned, the idea of industry and technology as a political tool was confirmed in the two systems of western capitalism and communist collectivised industry. The ideological war that grew from this led to World War Two and the Cold War, with the western model of industry proving Supreme.
Whilst most theorists would accept the above process, they would, however, claim that once collectivism was smashed, then the ideological purpose of industry, trade and technology became redundant. But is this really the case? Two processes seem to have gone hand in hand over recent years. First of all, multi-nationals have grown large, producing economies that no country can control. And second, industry has turned to providing comfort for us through the absolute use of leisure. With the former, we can see a clear process of usurping national politics to give total power to the industrialist. In the latter, we can see a bribe to keep us sweet, allowing them to continue with their eco-damaging ways. The term, pact with the devil, comes to mind.

© Anthony North, November 2005

CHARLES DARWIN

Born in 1809 at Shrewsbury, Charles Darwin was to go on to reluctantly rock the world. Grandson of Erasmus Darwin, his mother died when he was eight, and to his father’s chagrin seemed to care nothing but for bugs and plants. Sent to study medicine at Edinburgh, Darwin hated it, and went to study Theology at Cambridge, which he also had little time for.Encouraged by botanist John Henslow, it was the natural world that fascinated him. Hence, when he had the chance to join the ‘Beagle’ as naturalist on a five year voyage around South America and the Galapagos Islands, he jumped at it.
The study of various environments on the voyage led him close to the theory of evolution through natural selection for which he became famous for. He married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood in 1839, going on to have eight children, and in 1842 he moved to Down House in Kent, where he remained the rest of his life. By 1844, he had written up notes on his theory, but did not publish, sitting on it for years while he wrote a study of barnacles.
The obvious reason for this is that he realised the damage his theory would do to religion. However, when Alfred Russell Wallace wrote to him in 1858 with virtually the same theory, Darwin decided to publish. In 1859 his epoch making ‘Origin of Species’ appeared, selling out on the first day, and provoking the violent reaction he expected.
Darwin himself took little part in the debate, happy to stay at home working on other books, most quite bland, but including his 1871 ‘Descent of Man’, where he argued man came from a hairy anthropoid. By this time, he was quite ill, being wheel­chair bound. One explanation for this is that he contracted Chaga’s disease from an insect bite, but what we now know of psychology, the mysterious element of his ill health could suggest psychosomatic ailments, such was the pressure of his findings.
Darwin was, infact, an amateur, with no scientific training, and this was to lead to a hard fight for acceptance of his ideas. But when they WERE accepted, he guaranteed his place
as one of the greats of history. He eventually died in 1882, a man who truly changed the world, his ideas often perverted into the ’survival of the fittest’, the notion behind everything from Hitler’s Super Race to modern capitalism.

© Anthony North, February 2003

UFO-TASTIC

INTRODUCTION

Here are my thoughts on UFOs and aliens. They are written here to form a thesis for discussion. My views on the subject are influenced by an experience many years ago. I narrate it here to give you some idea where I’m going.
It was a windy night and it reflected my troubled mood. I looked out the bedroom window before going to bed, and in the next garden I saw a golden cascade of lights. I’ve since called it my UFO, and when I went to bed, I felt at peace and slept well.
The next morning I wondered what it was. I investigated. I laughed. Stuck on a pile of bricks was a crisp packet. The previous night it had blown in the wind and its shiny inside had reflected the glow of an orange street light.
Case closed. Or is it? What I saw changed my mood and gave me peace. The cause may be innocuous, but did the illusion have a form of reality at some level? If it didn’t, why did it affect me? Unfortunately, sceptics never look further than the mundane.
Enjoy the following, and if you think you can add to the debate, blog away.

(c) Anthony North, December 2006

If you came straight to this post click UFO-tastic category (left) for full page.

UFO SIGHTINGS

NOTE: If you came straight here, click UFO-tastic category (left) for full page.

UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, and, according to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, is a sighting of a space vessel piloted by visitors from another planet. Usually known as a flying saucer, the image has become iconic.
The modern UFO epoch began in 1947 when an American businessman, Kenneth Arnold, sighted a number of strange lights in the sky from his aircraft. Reporting it on landing, the next day flying saucers filled the front pages.
This media frenzy led to popular sightings that last until the present day. Many involve sightings from aircraft, including fighter jets. Military authorities have kept an eye on the phenomenon and sometimes they even appear on radar.
To some, the phenomenon is more fundamental. Beginning with George Adamski, certain people claim to have met and talked to aliens. Alien entities regularly ‘possess’ space age prophets – known as channellers – to impart their superior wisdom.
J Allan Hynek was so fascinated with the UFO that he devised three categories of ‘close encounter.’ The term became famous with the film ‘Close Encounters Of the Third Kind,’ where alien entities are said to be seen.
Much supposed evidence of UFOs comes from photographs, yet many of them have been shown to be fakes. In the mid-1990s, however, sightings in Mexico – known as the Mexican Wave – led to some 4,000 videos of strange lights in the sky.
Sky Watching became a hobby for many enthusiasts from the 1980s onwards, groups of people meeting at night to stare at the sky. Lights were often seen, but just as likely, the watchers ended up having a party under the moonlight.
Recently, the US authorities have suggested that much of the phenomenon was down to dis-information on their part. New aircraft had to be tested, and the military wanted a blanket crack-pot explanation for the phenomena they produced.
This aside, many reasons can be given for sightings. These include clouds, insect swarms, aircraft lights, planets and laser light displays. Even retinal images can appear ‘strange’ if you don’t know you’re experiencing them.
Another interesting phenomenon is known as the BOL, or ball of light. These are known to appear occasionally above geo-physical disturbances. Lights that seem to ape the antics of the UFO, they are increasingly seen as an explanation.
Looking deeper into this phenomenon, geo-physical and atmospheric disturbances cause electromagnetic, or EM, anomalies, possibly related to the BOL. It is now known that pulses of EM to the brain can cause hallucinatory effects.
The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis aside, research into UFOs usually discounts 95% of sightings as identified phenomena. BOLs and their hallucinatory effects could go a long way to answering much of the remaining 5%.

(c) Anthony North, December 2006