Today's topic is something which has provided clarity of vision, is called upon in troubled times and works tirelessly and thanklessly, sweeping aside that which threatens us with disaster: The windscreen wiper. Sometimes we forget the importance of the little bits of rubber that protect us from fluids that can mean the difference between life and death.

The windscreen wiper was invented by Mary Anderson in 1903. Well, all she really did was come up with the idea and then get somebody else to design it, then take all the credit. She was told by the company she asked to market the idea for her that "we do not consider it to be of such commercial value as would warant our undertaking of its sale". Serves her right I say. I bet those guys would feel like idiots if they knew that a hundred years later the Bosch corporation in Belgium alone churns out 300 000 of the things every day.

A windscreen wiper blade is held in place by a structure known as a whippletree, the kind of ridiculous name reserved for very important things that nobody thinks about, like uvulas (that thing that dangles from the back of our mouths) and aglets (those bits that keep the ends of shoelaces together). The whippletree is connected to the car by a long arm, and since windscreen wipers are a legal requirement in most countries, every time you go for a drive in the rain you have the long arm of the law in front of you. Waving a blade in your face. On a whippletree.

Don't ask.

Presence

Things have changed pretty drastically over the past few years; within our own lives and in the outside world. The Earth rumbles and shudders just as you would with your skin teeming with so many parasites sucking from your being. Upheaval is everywhere.
I'm sure you have your own story to tell, of how you or those you know have been affected by the inevitable global recession, crime, war or disaster. Mine goes like this: Almost a year ago, I walked away from a very comfortable life. An easy job, a beautiful relationship, a house in the country, a nifty car and an enviable schedule. I had reached the event horizon of an unsustainable situation. Within a few days I was sleeping on a friend's couch, single, bewlidered and on the other side of the world.
But in a matter of months, everything has changed again. I have been a researcher, set builder, production assistant, student, editor and a pizza delivery guy. Now I am back in Japan, busier, riding my bicycle between challenging appointments in the city. I am learning to accept that my partner of five years now lives with another man in another country. We will likely never see each other again. On Monday I was in London. Tuesday, Kuala Lumpur. Wednesday, Osaka. Yesterday morning I gave a speech to a hundred children. In Japanese. That evening I was in a classroom with people from Indonesia, America, the UK, Australia and China. I had supper at a Nepalese restaurant with people from Canada, Ireland and Jamaica. To say that life is a blur would not do justice. It feels more like a fruit salad.
Surprisingly, I feel fine. I have stumbled across a mental faculty that helps me still my noisy brain, my monkey-mind filled with the chatter of conditioned responses and if-then scenarios. It is Presence, and we all have it, to some degree. Another name for it is Awareness, something which exists neither in the past nor the future, but in the all-encompassing now. I have heard it said that there is nothing to prove that we haven't arrived at the present moment preformed with ready-made memories, that the past never happened in the way we presume. I don't give this idea much credit, but I am in no position to discount it. Because all we can really know is right here right now, and our proof for this is in our direct conscious experience of it, whatever it may be: an arrangement of atoms, a computer generated matrix, an idea in the mind of God, all or none of the above. Descartes thought, therefore he thought. He made an assumption that existence could be derived from thinking. But thinking is an inevitable consequence of being alive and having a brain. I am, therefore I think. I Am/To Be requires nothing but awareness. Not even thought. Much less a cartesian a distinction between mind and body, for these are functions of each other. Awareness is that which observes thought. And I have a suspicion that it pervades the universe. Rather than flail around labouring the point trying to tie this up, I will call upon the eloquence of R Buckminster Fuller: "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe."

The Secret SOTU

John Effer, Foreign Policy in Focus contribtor, recently composed the State of The Union Address as what would be going through Obama's head, rather than what he would be reading off the teleprompter. I had to repost!

I feel entirely qualified to look into the president's eyes to get a sense of his soul. Here's what I believe President Obama will be thinking as he reads off the teleprompter:

I stand before you tonight to say that in my next two years in office I will focus like a laser beam on the economy, to make sure that America is competitive, that we are growing, and that we will create jobs not just for today but for the future.

Well, I had to say that, didn't I? Frankly, I wish the unemployment rate was not at 9.1 percent, that Congress had passed a larger stimulus package followed by a job creation bill, and I didn't have to stand before the American people and pretend that I can change the economy during the rest of my term. The Republicans don't want the economy to improve over the next two years because that would kill them at the polls. The more people suffer, the more they vote tea party. So the next two years, on the congressional side, will be all about deficit reduction rather than preventing the economy from going into a deflationary spiral. Don't look to Congress for help with jobs, people! Trying to create jobs with no federal money is like fighting a gun battle with a knife.

Honestly, I'd rather talk to you all tonight about foreign policy. That's where I can excel. I don't have to deal with crazy Republicans or back-stabbing Democrats. I can just behave like an executive should behave – decisively. Look how I handled the recent state visit with Chinese leader Hu Jintao. Sure, there was lots of blah-blah-blah, but in the end I extracted $45 billion in Chinese investments, which translates into 235,000 jobs. It's a sad comment on American politics that it's easier to enlist Beijing's help for job creation than to get Congress to pony up the funds.

What I really like doing is going abroad, meeting with foreign dignitaries, and making landmark speeches. People in other countries don't ask me about jobs, don't treat me like I'm some glorified employment counselor. As soon as I leave the country, I can talk about the big picture. I can talk about the abolition of nuclear weapons. I can talk about new engagement with the Muslim world. It's a shame I can't do that in a State of the Union address. I have to stick to the economic numbers, like I'm the Accountant-in-Chief.

What really gets my goat is that when I do go abroad, the U.S. press can only focus on the little things – did I bow correctly, whose hand did I shake. I scored a deal with Medvedev on arms control. I managed to improve relations with India without upsetting Pakistan. We were able to put together a government in Iraq. I won the Nobel Peace Prize, for crying out loud! And the press goes after Michelle for touching the Queen of England's shoulder? Tell me: if we were white, would they pull that nonsense?

The world's people are hungry for a new kind of American leader. But back home, a quarter of all tea party sympathizers think I'm the anti-Christ, literally! I've continued almost all the major elements of the Bush counter-terrorism policy. We increased drone attacks in Pakistan. We surged in Afghanistan. We kept in place extraordinary rendition and endorsed military tribunals. And somehow, all of this translates in the minds of an appalling number of Americans into my being…Muslim.

Then there are the progressives. I never promised to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. They greeted my surge plan as if it were some great betrayal. I said all along that we were fighting the wrong war in Iraq and we should shift our attention to the right war in Afghanistan. Sure, I prefer diplomacy to war. For one thing, it's cheaper. But I'm no pacifist. We'll start pulling out troops from Afghanistan in July, and I'm emphasizing that in this speech. But as any strategist knows, you have to put down cover fire before withdrawal, and that's what the surge is all about.

Meanwhile, we haven't gone to war with Iran or North Korea. True, relations with those countries haven't exactly improved. But I haven't given any easy ammunition to the right by "appeasing" those countries or risked overextending our military capabilities by attempting more aggressive measures.

I'd love to talk about climate change and renewable energy and trade policy. I'm a wonk at heart. But I learned during the campaign that Americans are not interested in the details. They're like consumers who buy complicated electronics, don't bother to read the instruction manuals, and then complain that things don’t work. They want me to fix the economy like they want the plumber to fix the leaky faucet or the electrician to repair the porch light. At our December press conference after the tax deal, I let Bill Clinton handle all the details of the package with the press. Bill's better at that, anyway. People don't feel he’s lecturing. Maybe it's his accent.

After the attack in Tucson, some Democrats and Republicans are sitting side by side tonight in the chamber. Don't be fooled by this show of temporary affection. The next two years are going to be ugly. So, even though I'm not getting into the weeds with foreign policy in this speech, look for me to focus on international relations in the second half of my term. Like I said, I like to travel. And frankly, Afghanistan and Pakistan are looking a lot safer these days than Washington.

Thank you. I'd better add that God bless stuff or else even more Americans will think I'm Muslim. And good night.

Hippie Killing Machine

I recently found out that President Obama has announced the release of the new F/A 18 Hornet strike fighter that runs on a blend of conventional jet fuel and biofuel. The first flight, scheduled for Earth Day, will burn several thousand pounds of biofuel derived from the Camelina Sativa plant, a close cousin of Cannabis Sativa, an illegal plant in the USA and much of the world. The aircraft has been dubbed the "Green Hornet", even though it is the most prodigious fuel burner of all US naval aircraft.

I trawled the web to find some fuel consumption stats to compare them with, say, a fleet of hundreds of humvees tearing down the road at full throttle, but alas, such information appears to be classified. Needless to say, this thing's engines are thirsty. It is therefore hardly surprising that Mr. Obama, in his prudence, has paid lip service to the benefits derived from making this thing burn plants that are a few weeks, rather than a few million years, old.

That said, hasn't anyone noticed the blatant subversion of the ecological movement by labelling this thing 'green' and launching it on Earth Day (when it will fly around and add several tons of CO2 to the atmosphere)? It is a killing machine. If it was plugged frontways into your house it would drain it of air in less than a second, and backwards, in just as much time, fill it with more than enough noxious gas to kill your entire family. And yes, even when it's running on biofuel.

This is part of a pattern that George Orwell first brought to our attention. In the same speech, Obama actually said the words "clean" and "coal technology" in sequence. He also said "We will not be guided by political ideology but by scientific evidence" when referring to expanding offshore oil drilling. Last time I checked, ramping up fossil fuel production meant bringing ecological collapse that much closer and an obvious nod to the oil cartels which actively squash (by means of coersion and murder) real clean technologies (the pefectly viable kinds that run on water, geokinetics and sunlight and produce no pollution).

The teabaggers (bless their misguided souls) are right on one thing. Obama is a liar (it comes with the job). But remember, he is just a mouth. A puppet. He does the bidding of others, hidden behind his charisma.

We, as people who would like to leave a healthyish planet for our children to inherit, can subvert these hidden monsters dressed as men by refusing to buy their bullshit. We create our own truth thank you. We create our own intentions. We are insulted by such oxymorons as 'a greener military' and 'fighting for freedom'. What a load of crap. We envision a future in which these monsters and the machinations of their war factory are exposed for all to see. Manufactured enemies and conflicts will then have no sustenance, and war itself will die.

How to Recognize a Globalist Agenda When it Slaps You in the Face

The nomination and awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama has been met around the world with expressions of disbelief, confusion and incredulity. Rightly so. After all, how can the figurehead (I hesitate to say leader) of the world's biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons, world's largest and most complex military, world's most beliggerent country which not only overtly invades sovereign nations on flimsy pretexts, but covertly supports bloody coups and insurgencies elsewhere, be even mentioned in the same sentence as the word 'peace'?

The Nobel Peace Prize, as most of you know, originated from the last will and testament of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite. Although dynamite was not used on battlefields during his lifetime, he knew that it would be, and was so appalled by this that in mitigation he called for the establishment of a prize that should go to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses."

Despite the fact that Obama was nominated for this prize less than two weeks into his term, there is one glaring point that should have disqualified him immediately. He has increased the amount of troops in Afghanistan, and has authorised the use of drones to fire rockets into villages in nuclear armed Pakistan, killing people who had no idea of what is even going on. This creep into Pakistan is a spreading of the fiery part of America's global war on terror (WW3). There goes "reduction of standing armies" and "fraternity between nations".

To be fair, Obama himself said that he did not think he had done enough to deserve the award, or to be in the company of the transformative figures who had won it before him, though he did not have the conscience to decline the prize, as Le Duc Tho did in 1973. His Cairo address marked a shift in America's attitude to the Arab world, at least rhetorically. The same can be said of the disapproving murmurings about Israel's Apartheid style treatment of Palestinians and Nazi Liebensraum style expansionism. Talk. And talk is cheap. Iraq is still hell, Guantanamo is still open, the atmosphere is still the USA's gaseous garbage dump, poor people in America are still denied healthcare. More proof that campaign promises are the poorest kind of promise. Symbols say more than talk. Take a look at the presidential seal of the United States. The star of David made up of thirteen stars hovers above an eagle grasping a thirteen leaved olive branch in one claw and thirteen arrows in the other. The Cairo address may have appeased some Arabs and Muslims, but most of them know which star this bird is following and that its not going to let go of those arrows any time soon.

So who decided to award this warlord the world's heretofore most respected peace prize? Nominations are only accepted from previous prize winners, a very small section of the world's intellectual elite, and the world's political elite. The committee is comprised of five people, all of them members of the Norwegian parliament. The chairperson is Thorbjørn Jagland, also secretary general of the Council of Europe. Although not a member of the EU, Norway is a member of the European Economic Area and complies with many EU policies and stipulations for this reason.

This is just a rough sketch of the visible power structure of who decides where the prize goes, but take a step back , and try to describe this whole idea of war-spreader-gets-peace-maker-prize in one word...

... That's right. Orwellian. And Orwell's famous maxim from 1984 immediately springs to mind:

"WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

And you are watching Big Brother. Do we need a bigger wake up call than this to show us that there is a globalist agenda at work here, conflating archetypes and attempting to subvert our very ideas of what peace, freedom and strength mean? That the war of terror is a war on Terra, the very consciousness of our planet and the basis of our remaining sense of human unity? That these would-be world controllers not only control our parliaments, media, industry and 'healthcare', but also seek to control our minds?

I think they've dropped the ball on this one though. Awarding Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace is a step too far. They've jumped the gun. Too many people are standing up and saying "WHAT!?" and the hits on David Icke, Michael Tsarion, Drunvalo Melchizedek and Credo Mutwa's websites just keep soaring.

Are you buying the lie?

Fire in Peacetime

A fire burns off dry reeds in a wetland near Praia do Tofo. This fire lasted for three days and though the flames reached the height of a three storey building at times, no one seemed too perturbed by it, least of all the people living in grass huts right next to the wetland. A mild onshore wind kept it going but also stopped it from getting too close to any buildings. No attempts at firefighting were made at all.

Mozambique

This past year has been a tough one, especially for my partner Megan, who had to deal with the culture shock of the diminished freedom of inner city Cape Town after the freedom and safety of two years in Japan. We lived, and she worked and studied, in Woodstock, South Africa's oldest suburb and one of its most notorious for gangs and associated crime. After eleven months of living in high security contexts and street life reminiscent of downtown Detroit, the dirt and depravity of the area had put an unnecessary strain on our relationship. We needed a holiday, and with a bit of gentle persuasion from Megan, I arranged for us to spend three weeks in Mozambique. I had been there before in 2004 and piqued her curiosity with my stories.

We took the train from Cape Town to Durban and only found out on the first morning that it was a two day trip, rather than overnight as we had expected. We hunkered down for another 24 hours, grateful that we had access to a dining car. We stayed with my parents in Durban for a few days and then took the Panthera Azul coach to Maputo via Swaziland, where a customs official on the Mozambican side was bribed to abandon the search he had embarked upon for that very purpose. Despite our best efforts to avoid it, we were swindled by the taxi operator who took us to our first point of call, Fatima's Rest Backpackers in Maputo. It was election day on our arrival, so nothing was open, meaning we had no chance of changing money. We went for a walk in town and came across an agitated group of people. Two policemen had stopped three South African travellers who had just arrived and demanded to see their passports, which they didn't have. They refused to accompany them on the short walk to the backpackers to fetch them and threatened them with arrest. After showing the cops our passports, we said we would fetch the travellers' ones for them. I went to Fatima's and told the receptionist what had happened. "Those bloody cops!" he exclaimed and marched out to give them an earful. They duly abandoned their harrassment of the travellers. From Fatima's we had to get up at dawn the next morning to take the chapas (minibus) taxi to Tofo. We had to wait for several hours in a throng of people and vehicles for it to fill up with passengers before we could depart. One of the things I was happy to see on the arduous and uncomfortable journey was the field before the bridge over the Limpopo on the way into Xai-Xai had been cleared of landmines and was now under cultivation. After several hours of bone-jarring journeying, we were dropped off at Fatima's in Tofo, relieved to be done with all the driving and happy to complete the last kilometre of the journey on foot. We finally made it to Bamboozi, the lodge I had booked at and were shown to our hut. It was made almost entirely out of natural materials and was better than I expected, with electricity, beds and mosquito nets. We made our way up to the bar to be shocked by the prices. They were about double South African prices, close to quadruple the prices I paid the last time I was in Mozambique, four years ago. This may have something to do with the fact that this country has experienced an incredibly high growth rate since it was a bit of a Zimbabwe case in the nineties, having suffered two long debilitating wars which only ended with the collapse of Apartheid and the drying up of South African funding for the right wing terrorist organiztion, RENAMO. Several zeros have been knocked off the Metacais which also seems to have propelled the currency to its present value.

Mozambique has been run by FRELIMO, a socialist party, since independence from the Portuguese. The colonialists' language is still the official language, a unifying factor for the many different tribal and language groups which inhabit the country. The ruling party is a kind of benign kleptocracy, if you'll excuse the oxymoron. Mozambique has a functioning democracy and FRELIMO is always voted back into power, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the style of government is distinctly African, running on favours, gifts and commissions, a system known to hoodwinked westerners as "corruption". The lodges had to pay a kind of tithe to the government through a convoluted process of compulsory donations.


Tofo itself is a small seaside village which derives most of its income from, and even owes its existence to, tourism. The centre of the village is the marketplace, close to the main beach, usually a quiet tropical idyll, but come mid December, a noisy playground for drunk Gautengers on jetskis and quadbikes. Luckily we escaped the worst of it by going home before most of them arrived.

Our typical day was waking up with the sun at around 6am then walking into the village for coffee and to buy food for breakfast at the market. We'd then take it back and prepare it in the most rudimentary kithen I've ever used. There were two pots and a broken plate... that was about all the cookware. A blackened gas stove, a dodgy sink and a fridge we christened the 'Black Hole' for its inability to store food, were the only amenities. We bought a knife at the market which we had for a while but then that was stolen too. I blame backpackers for this rampant kleptomania, since the locals would have had a hard time hiding all the stuff.

Unfortunately, due to the ridiculous prices and the impotence of American Express travellers cheques, we were unable to experience any of the ocean tours or scuba diving on offer, so the only sealife I saw was a gamefish that streaked underneath me when I was surfing one day. The area is famous for whalesharks, which I saw last time I went, and turtles, manta rays and dolphins. The wildlife tasted good tough. Our favourute dish was grilled barracuda.

Altogether, we stayed just under three weeks at Tofo and in that time found out which were the best beers and how much one should pay for them without getting ripped off. We learned how to get rid of the legions of little boys who tried persistently to sell bracelets made out of seashells and beads (Mimicking their sales lines and saying we weren't from Gauteng usually worked). We found the best place for coffee and breakfast when we were doing well with our budgeting (The Waterworks surf and coffee shop), made a few friends and received an offer for a job in Japan over the internet at the village's only internet cafe. It was a happy ending to the Southern African chapter of our international journey together and a great place to rest before we started the next chapter; in Shikoku, Japan, where I am writing this from!