Author: R J Adams

The British government convenes a scientific committee to advise them on illegal drugs, and then sacks the head man for not telling them what they want to hear.

That seems to be par for the course with governments these days.

It was the former Labour Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, who sacked Professor David Nutt from his position as the UK government’s chief drugs adviser back in 2009.^[1]

Professor Nutt didn’t take the rebuke lying down. He formed the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, determined to research drug problems without interference from politicians with preconceived ideas.

The committee’s report has just been published. It says just about the opposite of what government’s have been telling their citizens for years. It makes a mockery of the so-called “drugs war”.^[2]

It’s proof, if any were needed, that politicians brainwash people into believing untruths. Not that that is anything new. Like governments, organized religion has been doing it for years.

Just listen to the incredulity on the BBC’s female anchor, when Professor Nutt explains that alcohol is a worse drug than heroin.

The question here is not whether one drug is more harmful than another. It is the deceit of politicians that needs to be highlighted.

We elect these people to represent us, not to deceive us, a fact that appears to have been conveniently forgotten by those in government in Capitalist countries. They have chosen instead to represent the corporations, to assist them in making fat profits. It’s the corporations that want to continue the “drugs-war”, just as they ‘lobby’ (it’s a more acceptable word than ‘bribe’) politicians to make wars and perpetuate them.

The US Supreme Court has recently designated corporations as ‘individuals’, thus making the political representation process appear even more acceptable.

The sacking of Professor Nutt is symbolic of corruption endemic in Western political circles. Governments no longer appoint experts to advise them what to do, but to tell them what they want to hear.

^{[1] “Government drug adviser David Nutt sacked” Guardian, October 30th 2009}

^{[2] “Alcohol ‘more harmful than heroin’ says Prof David Nutt” BBC, November 1st 2010}

Filed under: Political deceit

It wasn’t exactly a romantic dinner, though Friday evening’s meal has become something of a specialty. After all, we hardly see each other all week. She works long hours, we’re up at five each weekday morning, and there’s scarcely time in the evenings to rush down a freezer meal, watch half an hour of television, before she’s off to shower and do all those things a woman needs to do before bed by nine and grabbing eight hours or so if we’re lucky.

Friday evening is for relaxation, a bottle of Riesling, and what my old mother called a ‘proper meal, cooked from scratch with good ingredients, not one of those iced up plastic trays of chemicals, with processed meat left over from the war.’

My mother thought everything ‘processed’ originated as army rations during ‘the war’.

The meal was prepared, the wine chilled; a favorite TV show recorded and ready to go. We sit down, toast the coming weekend, begin to enjoy the first tentative forkfuls of a delicious chicken dish. The show is fun. We’ve waited all week to watch it. Life, after five long, punishing days, is finally good.

Without warning, a fork of chicken halfway to my lips, the TV blacks out, we’re plunged into Stygian blackness. AmerenIP, our one and only Illinois power supplier has yet again pulled the plug. Responding to our frantic cellphone call, the long familiar computer voice informs us she’s aware of an outage in our area. It’s effecting 608 households. The engineers hope to restore our light and sanity within one and a half hours.

Sure enough, in one hour and twenty-five minutes the lights burst back to life, the smoke detector emits a single tweet of alarm as 120 volts suddenly surge up its jacksy, and the Tivo video recorder begins an interminably long reboot to the accompaniment of a screen proclaiming, “Just a few more minutes” and a silly cartoon character with an aerial stuck out its head that makes you want to hurl bricks at the screen.

And none of this would matter if it all hadn’t happened before, with monotonous regularity. It was barely two weeks since the last power outage left us devoid of entertainment for a whole evening. All that varies is the length of time before they switch things on again.

I lived in numerous different parts of Britain for fifty-three years. In all that time, I could count the number of power outages on the fingers of one hand. Then, it was due to an unusually severe storm, or flooding, or even on one occasion a local IRA sympathizer attempting to blow up a substation.

In Illinois, the power goes out on balmy evenings, on lovely sunny autumn days without a wisp of wind or a single spot of rain. You just blink once and – poof! – it’s gone. AND THERE’S BUGGER ALL YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!

That’s the most frustrating part. There’s no-one to rail at. Human beings don’t exist at AmerenIP. It’s impossible to get past the computerized woman. And when the lights finally come back on, the same bloody digitized female has the nerve to ring you up and tell you the power’s back.

I KNOW THE POWER’S BACK! THE FUCKING LIGHTS HAVE COME ON, HAVEN’T THEY. AND THE BLEEDING TIVO CHARACTER’S DANCING A JIG AND TELLING ME, “JUST A FEW MINUTES MORE.”

Filed under: Power crazed

I’m not Mister Keith Olbermann’s number one fan by any means, but the American people are facing a choice on November 2nd like they’ve never faced a choice before.

This time it’s not just about voting Democrat or Republican. Once, it didn’t make that much difference to the way this country is governed. Next Tuesday, it undoubtedly will.

Political extremists – those of the nutty extreme left, or more dangerously fanatical far-right, have always been around on the fringes of the political scene. Every country has its Bob Barr, but only in America are such extremes allowed to develop into serious challenges to democracy, and no more so than today.

The rise of the Tea Party brigade in this nation has been swift, but shallow. Organized and backed by corporate power, it’s a rag-tag conglomerate of right-wing extremism. Normally, such transient political eruptions have all the power of a fart in a tempest, but coming at a time of harsh economic uncertainty, coupled with millions of dollars of corporate money used to spread their half-baked message through the media, the impact of the Tea Party on US politics could prove a greater and longer-lasting catastrophe for this country than 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Depression, all rolled into one.

Voting any of these fanatics into the halls of political power in Washington will not only play into the grasping hands of a corporate menace hell-bent on enslaving you, but could result in this nation finding itself experiencing the true meaning of living in a Theocracy.

If it does, the American people will only have themselves to blame.

Filed under: To hell in a handbasket