“Aliens are real. There really was an alien crash landing in 1947 near the Roswell Army Air Field, and the United States Government really did cover it up.”
These are the claims that were recently being made by a former CIA operative named Chase Brandon; claims which are of course, entirely fictional. He asserted that he came across secret documents and photographs in a oddly placed cardboard box during a visit to a public CIA library. The infamous Roswell Incident that he is speaking off has long ago been debunked as the recovery of a Mogul balloon, and putting aside the menagerie of pop-culture traditions; sci-fi movies, conspiracy theories, and other such nonsense, the case is relatively closed.
So what on Earth (and I assure you, it is on Earth), made him come forward with these outlandish claims?
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breath free.”
This is an extract from the poem that lies at the proud feet of America’s Statue of Liberty that, when first built, served as a beacon to travellers and immigrants as they neared their soon-to-be home. It served as a symbolic gateway to a new life; a free life, where a person was able to pursue his or her dreams, with honesty and integrity, and above all, without fear of persecution or undue judgement.
In this new era however, a unseen country has arisen in the wake of the digital age; a new domain for men and women, children and adults, to express themselves, to open themselves, to find themselves; and like Narnia or Hogwarts or countless other realms of fantasy and imagination, this parallel universe is accessed via a magical portal.
Well, I still think iPads and android phones are pretty magical, anyway.
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… And on a totally, absolutely, obviously unrelated note; he’s currently plugging and promoting his new book, which happens to be about an alien landing, buried in a government conspiracy. I find it astronomical the audacity, and the soulless desperation, of some people who try to take advantage of other, naive and gullible, people. Then […]
This is a story about a boy named Alexander Green.
Alexander really wanted to be a goth. Lots of boys at his school were goth kids and he thought they were very cool. He would often try to hang out with them, but they told him to go away because of his apparent love of conformity and rules. They told him that he didn’t understand. Ironically, Alexander didn’t understand what it was that he was being accused of not understanding.
One day, Alexander decided to become a goth.
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Unlike where I grew up, which had a decent(ish) mixture of races and cultures, the place I currently live is quite segregated; and as such, a lot of the people here have quite a myopic view on the subject of middle-eastern immigration.
“They should go back where they came from.”
There’s a famous, but often mis-quoted, phrase, that states that being born an Englishman is like winning the greatest lottery in the world. We have freedoms here, and in all of the western world, that so many could scarcely imagine. In this instance, I’m not talking about the right to eat food and drink clean water that people in so many starving third world countries don’t have. I speak of the many areas of the middle-east, where families have to worry about their children being blown apart on the way to school, where they have to worry about their livelihood, be it a shop or a farm or a restaurant or whatever, being destroyed or looted by thugs and armed terrorists. The ideal that a country exists where they can go, and not have to worry about their loved ones being forcibly drafted into extremist militia, being blown apart by stray bombings or terrorist attacks, must be as near a vision of heaven on earth as they may find, and a lucky few may earn enough or fight hard enough to earn safe passage to England or America or anywhere else where such liberties are granted. Telling them to go ‘home‘ is effectively sentencing them to a life or hardship and danger, simply because they weren’t fortunate enough to be born where you were.
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There are a lot of misunderstandings regarding self-harm, many of which have lead to ostracising behaviour and unkind prejudices. I try not to write too often about anything personal on this blog, but I was confronted with a reminder of this topic at work today, when a young girl came and spoke to me, and I could see the old, familiar white lines across her wrists and forearms.
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There’s a little rant that I’d like to get off my chest, but I certainly don’t want it to misunderstood, or misinterpreted.
I hate religion.
Now, this is a very bold statement of course, and any initial presumptions you might have for my meaning need to be set aside for a moment. I don’t hate religious people; I don’t hate people who believe in god, or worship him, or put their faith in Jesus, or believe in a higher power or a creation theory. I don’t hate any of these people much in the same way as I don’t hate an owl for eating a mouse, a cloud for blocking the sunshine, or my girlfriend for using a Mac instead of a Windows. Every life form on Earth operates in the way they believe to be in optimum equilibrium with what they want, what they need, and what they perceive of the world around them. If a person wants to find their strength and faith in something supernatural or religious, then I’ll gladly march for their right to do so. No, I don’t hate any religious person, even to the level of zealots and extremists taking lives and terrorising people. They too are simply trying to live in accordance with what they have been taught to, or chosen to, believe.
Religion itself however, as a singular entity, is something I can hate.
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People are making such a fuss over the phone tapping scandal in Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers. The News of The World had to close down (although it was immediately and quite transparently replaced with a Sunday Edition of The Sun anyway), and The Sun is still being investigated; all the while the whole thing is plastered on the BBC News all day. It all just leaves me with one question…
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What has happened to her face? That’s the front page headline I saw when a co-worker handed me the newspaper yesterday. It’s no secret how much I loath the British tabloids (as posts like ‘Why I can’t look at The Sun‘ and ‘The Anatomy of The Brain (of a Tabloid Reader)‘ will tell you), but this particular case seems to be extremely low on the integrity scale, even by their warped, money-grubbing, sensationalising standards.
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As a rule, I tend to avoid newspapers. I occasionally watch the news in the background at work, and I keep up to date with worldwide affairs via twitter postings from the major news channels; but when it comes to flicking through the detritus of the British media, I try to stay well away. I don’t care which footballer slept with which other footballer’s wife, nor do I care which reality television ‘celebrity’ is in rehab; crying over their recent breakup with some equally vacuous television personality. However, as you can guess from my demeanour and opinions; the headline shown above did grab my attention today, and I decided to give it a quick glance, to see if it was as ignorant and insulting as I had already assumed it would be.
I was wrong. It was worse.
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