|
|
|
Welcome to Outside the Gates
Why 'Outside the Gates'? There are many gates isolating people from each other. 'Gated communities' being the most obvious, where the affluent try to segregate themselves from the poor.
The most insidious though are the gates within our minds which separate us from, make us
think we are different to, even better than the 'other'.
Yet we all experience the same emotions, feelings, wants and needs irrespective of gender, colour, race or creed.
|
|
|
The Last Posting To This Site |
|
Wednesday, 10 September 2008 |
|
Now that my mourning is over it is time to write the last piece for 'Outside the Gates'. Around about March 2007 my mother, Jessie Skeates was rushed into hospital with a severe chest infection. She was in her eightieth year and nobody thought she was going to survive very long. Her health had been getting progressively worse for the last twenty years and she was in constant pain; oesteporosis, diabetes, chronic asthma. All diseases on the increase as the population in Britain ages. Well she did survive and was discharged nine months later. The main reason for the stay in hospital lasting nine months was being infected in hospital by the MRSA bug. She was out of hospital for a few months before being rushed in again with a severe chest infection - the flu - and again she came through and was strong enough to be discharged. But she had been severely weakened and within weeks she was back in again. By this time the hospital was getting a bit fed up with my Mum and only kept her in for a few weeks before discharging her to a nursing home where she was for a week before suffering a massive heart attack and from which she finally died. I posted a notice of her death to this site on 01.07.08 and which came down the next day. It certainly attracted some attention in that short time. A comment was sent to a piece I had written over 18 months before about a friend of mine whose 20 year commemoration of his death I had attended. The piece was very critical of Mark's mother who I met at his hospital bedside. The comment was from someone claiming to be Mark's brother, though he never mentioned to me that he had a brother. I have no argument with the description of Mark's mother in the comment. She may very well be like that in other circumstances, but the description I gave is accurate for the one time I met her. The timing of the comment though confirms the vindictiveness which Mark was trying to leave behind when he moved to London. As I intimated in the opening line of this short article, this is the last posting to this site. It will now wither on the vine, as they say.  Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more...
|
|
|
Jessie Mary Skeates 20.10.1927 - 26.06.2008 |
|
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 |
|
On Tuesday 24th June my mother suffered a severe heart attack following a long illness. She had been in hospital for 11 of the previous 12 months and died in the Weston Super Mare General Hospital on Thursday 26th June. Her funeral will beheld at the Ebden Road Crematorium on Monday 07.07.2008 at 11am. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
My Local MP, Roma, Zionism and Iran |
|
Wednesday, 13 February 2008 |
|
Last June I posted a piece about my disabled car parking woes. In it I pointed out the action of the local Tory MP Anthony Steen in leaving his car for 2 days in a disabled parking bay at Newton Abbot railway station and complaining about the level of provision of disabled parking spaces. There being to many as opposed to there being not enough. Well, he has made the news again, this time by spreading falsity about Romanians living in Britain and trafficking children. The story starts on the 24th January this year when the Metropolitan Police and Thames Valley Police carried out a joint operation in Slough called Operation Caddy. They raided 17 homes at dawn and took 10 children into care. The press and TV were invited along to witness the smashing down of doors as the police heroically save children who had been sold into slavery with criminal gangs by their Romanian parents and were, according to the Daily Mail front page the next day, "Fagin's Heirs". ITN filmed the raid and the report with its sensationalised language is something to behold. The story also made headlines in other tabloid papers like the Daily Star. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
Wednesday, 09 January 2008 |
|
I haven't written or posted anything to the site for at least a couple of months, having been asked to put up some photographs on a wall at the Red Wizard cafe in Totnes. They are on the wall until the end of January. The fact I have been working on it is my excuse for the lack of writing and which will be rectified in the not to distant future. It seems appropriate that the photographs also be put up on the site. They all follow 'after the fold' as they say, and are fully captioned for a change.
Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
Geopolitics, Opposition to War and Cuba |
|
Friday, 16 November 2007 |
|
In the late 1990s early 2000s, there was a period in which the medias - film, TV, press etc - produced fictions and documentaries about extraterrestial mass extinction being visited on the Earth by asteriods, comets or gigantic meteors. Serious, comedic, sometimes scientific and sometimes frightening, they, in the most part, played on the bipolar expectations of hope and dread in a superstition for the number 2000. In Christian countries at least. And there the Jesus Army marched in lockstep to the drumbeat of an elitist End Times theology, Armageddon for most and Rapture for the few. A cataclysmic millennialism. Whose computer burnt, the hard disc fried as the clock struck 00.00hrs 01.01.2000? Did any die with a "phtt" like a strangled, tired fart?
I had a right giggle about apocalypse with the person I was house sharing with at the time. "I would prefer to be around if it happened than not", was his sanguine take on the possibility of an asteroid strike.
It's a state of mind, a perspective, an attitude I have tried to adopt in the eventuality of a nuclear war being unleashed, at the same time struggling, trying in my own limited way, to see that it doesn't. Preferring to be around to find out if the likes of metronomic liar Dick Cheney get to action the next level of their insanity, and that I act as witness, while I can, to the sheer malevolence of a misanthropic ideology trying to outlive its sell by date.
Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
Elections, Iran and the Tasmanian Devil |
|
Thursday, 18 October 2007 |
Monday 08.10.07 and Gordon Brown came in for a lot of flak for not calling a snap general election early November. A lot of the criticism centred around him being a 'coward' who 'dithered' due to not so good poll results following the Tory Party conference getting favourable media coverage. The decision not to go to the country was announced on Sunday morning 07.10.07 in a pre-recorded television interview for 'The Andrew Marr Show' broadcast at 9am. The interview had been recorded at Chequers, the PM's country house. It was only in the Guardian on Monday the 8th that any mention was made of Gordon Brown having Rupert Murdoch with him at Chequers over the weekend, and then it was just one sentence, third from the end of a 1,000 word comment piece by Jackie Ashley . Nothing in the Times, Telegraph, Independent or Observer. The most important bit of information relating to the calling of an election and it was buried. More about the Antipodean marsupial - the Tasmanian devil, aka Sarcophilus harrisii - later, along with my pre-no-election announcement suspicions without the knowledge of his meeting with Brown. It is worth considering before that some other events which occured over the summer when people were more interested in their annual holidays or scandal distractions in the USA.
Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
The Bourne Ultimatum, Other Spooks and Counter-intelligence |
|
Monday, 24 September 2007 |
|
I had to close down everything
I had to close down my mind
Too many things to cover me
Too much can make me blind
I've seen so much in so many places
So many heartaches, so many faces
So many dirty things
You couldn't even believe
(From 'Extreme Ways' written by Richard Hall and performed by Moby as played over the end credits of the Bourne trilogy.) I'd just finished watching The Bourne Ultimatum, directed by Paul Greengrass and wasn't going to write anything about it but fell across a review by David Walsh published by WSWS.org which I have some disagreement with, so thought why not and it may prove a useful introduction to something else I've been thinking of addressing for awhile. The central thrust of the Walsh review and criticism of The Bourne Ultimatum is that it is to fast and furious to contain anything to reflect on. That one's suspension of disbelief has to be so extreme all thoughtful interaction of the viewer with the screen is lost; that because of the speed of action, the only emotional relationship between characters is a cold anger capable of being translated into killing each other; that the technology of espionage has been elevated to the central character in the film. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
The Legacies of the Macaque Monkey, Stonehenge and Pelagius. Part 1 |
|
Wednesday, 05 September 2007 |
"If I ought, I can."Funny old world. It's really odd from where research for new history and new ideas can be generated, even stranger when they bring with them an insight. New and insightful for me at least. Freaky when buried deep inside a Bruckheimer produced attempt at an epic film. Now that is something. Think production values for 'Top Gun', 'Pearl Harbor', 'Pirates of the Caribbean' applied to the mythology surrounding King Arthur . Enough! I can hear your groans already! It's alright, you're not going to get a long and extremely weird analysis of a weird film - director Antoine Fuqua has directed much better films with Training Day and Shooter. It wasn't a character in the film, just a name that passed through the dialogue in 3 or 4 short scenes. It had never been in front of me before, and on a quick 'wiki' I found the name to have actually existed, inhabited human form. Not a cypher like Arthur that can be interpreted to fit a sensibility way out of his time, but someone who was literate in both Latin and Greek and left actual, written words. A theologian from the British Isles born c.354AD and died c.420AD, who travelled the late, decaying Roman Empire gaining a following where ever he went. He visited Rome and Jerusalem where he successfully defended himself against accusations of heresy. His name was Pelagius. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
More on the Build-up to War on Iran |
|
Saturday, 25 August 2007 |
It has been often reported over the last few years that the likes of Cheney consider going to Baghdad is for wimps but real men go to Tehran - or some such macho posturing. But the way the propaganda is building lately it is clearly pointing to a US led war on Iran happening sooner rather than later and real men will then be strutting their thing as irradiated skeletons. Unfortunately so will everybody else. In a recent article, carried by TomDispatch , Dilip Hiro argues that the USA's unipolar moment following the collapse of the Soviet Union has ended and a multipolar world is being re-entered. If right, and I think he is having previously written similarly, then we are at a most dangerous time with the imperialist beast injured, cornered and desperate for a way to re-assert its authority. That way is looking more and more likely as being an attack on Iran. The attempts by American military commanders in Iraq to blame Iran for attacks on the invading/occupying forces has been stepped up and which are, to put it bluntly, just propaganda. And as Dylan has sung; 'Propaganda, all is phoney'. Be first to comment this article | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
|
Some Thoughts on Writers, Politics and Criticism |
|
Monday, 06 August 2007 |
Been away from the keyboard for awhile. Had a slight relapse of the multiple sclerosis. It seems you can't write anything that compromises the defenders of capitalism without them trying their worst to stress and hence destroy you bit by bit. Should have expected it really, especially when posting an essay that makes clear to those who know me, though not naming those whom I consider by their actions be spooks. More later. One thing that has come out of being away from writing is the time to reflect on some writers whose work I've been following. Reassess their style and the content within their words and find the courage to put some political criticism forward. Recently Gilad Atzmon was interviewed by Mary Rizzo at PeacePalestine , reprinted at Dissident Voice . I was invited by Mary to participate in an off-site discussion about this interview but felt that that was not the place to put any criticisms of Gilad's views which I have, though I was sympathetic to the request as some of the language being used against both Gilad and Mary by those claiming to be of the left was quite disgraceful.
Comments (1) | Quote this article on your site | Print | E-mail | Read more... |
|
| << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next > End >>
| | Results 1 - 10 of 84 |
|
|
|
|
