Closing the BBC local radio stations and replacing it with Five Live is like replacing a bar of soap with a fresh turd.

BRITAIN AND THE USA CANNOT WAIT TO SEND THE MILITARY INTO LIBYA

No one can really deny that Gadafi is fairly obviously off his trolly. "my people love me" he told the BBC on TV. I heard him say it. I also heard him raving on about how the people in the streets were not protesting against him and any that were did so because Al Kaida (sic) had paid them to riot and had even supplied people psychedelic drugs. Somehow i dont think this is true.

Having said this i also heard people in the streets saying that not only did they want to rid themselves of Gadafi and his regime but that they wanted to do this themselves and did not want the West to intervene. A brief look at the mess the west made in Iraq and are currently making in Afghanistan, this should not surprise us. Ghandi once said "its the right of India to misrule itself as it sees fit" and this applies to most other sovereign nations.

Another good reason for not getting involved is that we really dont have the militarly hardware or manpower to get involved in yet another ill advise expedition into oblivion and shame. We have more than enough of such conflicts over the last twenty years and for all these reasons we should keep our big noses out of it. If people need aid or protection then fine but it must be genuinely requested and not made up by stupid lying dickheads like Tony Blair or the Bush Baby. and especially we should avoid the gutter press and the warmongering scum that live there like the Dirty Digger and the Red Top press who will say anything at the behest of their puppet masters to foment widespread violence as an excuse for foolish intervention with inadeuate forces.

BIG SOCIETY OR LITTLE ISLAND ?

It seems sad to me that we now have to destroy our air force by now sacking hundreds of pilots which cost more than a £1M each just to train. Of course we wont be sacking any pilots who might be required for their work in Afghanistan which for some reason must continue at all costs. Surely it must be time to get out of Afghanistan. Its just another unwinnable war which costs billions to persue yet at the same time we leave ourselves open to lots of attacks and danger elsewhere. So the future looks like a 3rd or 4th rate country on a tiny, defenceless, overcrowded island with no friends and no role in the world. Well done coilition government.

Now we have three Tory parties for the price of one do we. All of them determined it seeems to close down the country and hit out at soft targets such as the disabled and unemployed, all of them bullied and frightened into going after jobs they cannot really perform at a time when there are ever fewer jobs.

BBC -- HOW DRUGS DONT WORK - CANNABIS

I could hardly believe my ears when i watched the above program on the I Player. I had not heard such an out of date bunch of shite about cannabis for at least 15 years. It seemed to be fixatated on THC and Skunkweed and how dangerous this stuff could be. Well Really. All drugs, and for that matter, all repettive behaviour carries with it dangers both physical and psychological but to single out THC in this infantile way does not do the BBC any credit and paints a sorry picture of drugs research into the bargain.

At the last count ther3e were supposedly 421 chemcials in cannabis, 420 of which are not THC. several of which were found to be useful or potentially useful in the treatment of a number of physical and mental ailments. Surely the BBC program could have found a little time for some of these. And before you way, what do you know about all this i must point out that i worked with my Local MP in the 90s on the issues of cannabis pharmaceuticals and decriminilisation. In the course of this i prepared evidence for the House of Lords Select Committee and even discussed it with the Police Foundation.

Another issue which i find genuinely offensive is the failure of this type of programming to differentiate between use and abuse. There is a long distance which seperates the person who smokes a joint from the person of smokes cannabis in joints, pipes, bongs, etc etc from dawn till dusk. If we apply this kind of misguided logic to much of human activity we find we are surrounded by comparatively few abusers of cannabis but these are certainly well exceeded by sugar addicts and abusers, chocaholics, alcoholics, nicotine addicts, and i havent even begun to consider all those who regularly use and abuse prescription drugs such as aspirin, paracetamol, etc etc.

Captain Beefheart Dies.

The BBC World Service just told me of the sad death of Mr Don Van Vliet alias Captain Beefheart. He was one of those wonderful musicians who was introduced to me by the equally very wonderful DJ John Peel. I have to hold my hands up and admit that the first few times i heard Beefheart and the Magic Band, i didn't really know what the hell was going on but suddenly one sunny afternoon in my bedroom at my mothers house with an old friend and the aid of a small joint of rather nice Mexican Marijuana, everything fell into place. The seeming cacophony resolved itself into a series of tour des force journeys into the unknown, or at least unknown to me and the majority of the members of the world of Rock and Roll which was already getting bogged down into12 bar heavy metal repettition and seemingly headed for early oblivion.

The Good Captain, aided by one of the most skillful and inventive stage or studio bands i have ever heard even to this day prevented this however. Mixing Blues and African melodies and rhythms, Strange meandering melodies and polyrhythms to die for, many of them worked out on two fingers by the Captain at an old piano and interspersed by concrete and free form verse he saved me from death by mainstream obscurity and awakened me to new possibilities. The result was that i learned an entirely new way of listening and was thus ready to absorb Reggae, Folk, Dub and all kinds of World and classical Music when they eventually evolved.

I saw him play three times, twice with his magic band and once when he paired up with the equally disturbing Frank Zappa. Three of the most stimulating evenings of musicl culture i ever experienced. After ,my first taste of the live sound of the Magic Band, my musicl blood brother Joseph Seaberg turned to me, his eyes shining and said, "now do you see why they are called the Magic Band. ?" Indeed i did, Joeseph,, and indeed i still do.

I first heard a couple of tracks on John Peels legendary Perfumed Garden Show in the late sixties when Peel said, there goes a man who knows how to walk the fine line between Genius and Madness. Surely an essential skill in the late 20th Century. My faveorite moment happened in his first gig in Manchester at the Free Trade Hall, a fine classical venue but not blessed with accoustics suitable for strongly amplified music. Because of this and the strongly folky audience which attended virtually any famous act who ventured into Cottonopolis, the FTH could be a tough room as the comics say. At the end of two barely recognisable tunes, distorted by white noise and standing waves from the PA system, the Captain paused looked around and up into the high vaulted ceiling and said. I would like to apologise for the sound quality, everything seems to be going right up there, as he gestured a large arc over head. Bob Dylan should have learned this lesson from the Captain and he would have avoided being called Judas. He was right of course but so was the other old time freak at the back of the hall who shouted an immediate response " In that case, take us all up there Captain. Cued only by the fall of the drummers monocle, the ensemble launched into a truly rousing rendition of Big Eyed Beans From Venus.

Dont let anything come between us Captain, not even Death!

AMAZON COWARDS AND HIPOCRITS

The News that Amazon is refusing to carry Wikileaks is very disappointing but probably not that surprising. Wikileams has even been referred to as a Terrorist Organisation by a total nut case in the the US Government but so far no missiles have been fired by Al Wiki and no planes have been flown into buildings.

It may be a bit of an embarassment to the US Gov and indeed any other Government including the UK who have been telling Porkies as a matter of course over maany years. Clearly if they dont want to be exposed as liars or hipocrits, they need to stop telling lies.

I have always hated laws like our Official Secrets Act because its usually used like a sledghammer to crack a nut. It stifles the so called Free Press which is only an illusion anyway. I know from personal experience that our oh so brave news papers will not print factual news if their bosses in the Government tell them not to.

So all i can say is, Well Done Wikileaks. Keep up the excellent work in telling us what we had already either guessed or at least strongly suspected. The only thing really at risk in all this is the reputations of the cronies, exaggerators, liars and hipocrits. If they told the truth and did not spend so much time covering up for their puppet masters, they and us, would probably have much less to fear. In the meantime i suggest that Amazon just goes and fucks off.

PENNINE TOURS

My friend Jonathan and I spent a pleasant afternoon in the hills yesterday (Sunday)
Years ago in the 70s, I happened on a place in South Yorkshire called Slaithwait. Local prounounciation is of course Slowitt and there hangs a tail.

Many years ago i had a silly job between gigs delivering not coal to Newcastle but rather, Steel to Sheffield also Barnsley, Doncaster, Hull, Lancaster and even Carlisle. I had one delivery to make in this place called Slaithwaite which was somewhere between Stocksbridge and Barnsley but could i find it? could I buggery. I narrowed it down to somewhere near Goldthorpe but no matter how often i drove back and forth there was no sign of the place.

I stopped people two or three times and asked them for Slaithwaite but all I got was head shakes and shrugs. No one it appears had heard of the place. Finally I gave it one last shot and stopped again to ask a retired miner sat on a bench, sucking his pipe and watching the world go by. He was in fact the only person for miles around or so it seems. He was just about to repeat the never heard of it mantra when he grabbed the delivery note and scanned the address. Suddenly he laughed and said, "Oh you mean Slowitt, your here now, its just down that lane at the big mill by the canal." I followed his gaze and spotted a stone build mill at the bottom of a valley. Of course he was right it was slowitt. but who would have thought that a lancashire lad who regularly met up with people from all across the UK and who had friends in France, Germany etc etc could have been caught out so thoroughly by a local Yorkshire dialect prounounciation.

I quickly found the old mill but Already running late I had little time to explore the delights of Slowitt but swore that one day I would complete my admittedly hazy knowledge of South Yorkshire and add Slowwitt to my tour guide. and yesterday, i did just that. Jonathan my friend from Leeds, supplied the wheels and fortunately shared my intrest in far away places with strange sounding names.

After a wet or even very wet week we were blessed with a dry and calm day on Sunday so we had a pleasant walk round the town. And, i have to say it was well worth the effort. Plenty of walkers were taking advantage of the day and the four cafes i found, were well used and welcoming. and after a nice cup of tea and a piece of banana cake, we took in the impressive delights of the Globe Worsted Mill, the old canal, re excavated in the 50s, the Free School and the very pleasant setting. It appears that the folks thereabouts, had taken more care of their home than had the burgers of Pendle for example, who had covered or ripped up all their cobblestones, bulldozed the ancient shops, built really tacky 60s and 70s ugliness in their place and allowed road planning and one way systems to run riot to the benefit of cars and trucks and little else.

The 17th,18th and 19th century architecture formed an attractive mix and there was much evidence that old trees had been spared the axe and softened the pennine stone.