#vaccination #MeganandHarry #PrincePhilip #theQueen

Our new guest, writer and editor Ehi E Ekhator joins Rodney and Leigh…

#Nigeria #corruption

Jeff Slate is a New York City musician and writer. He has kindly shared part of a recent interview with Tom Jones with us:

JEFF SLATE: In my mind, as a singer, it sounds as though you’re saying you hear music differently. It sounds to me as though, if you can do those on a first take, that they’re already in your DNA. You’re not interpreting them. They’re part of you already. It sounds as though it’s more heart and soul than it is thought.

TOM JONES: Yes. You’ve got to learn it. You’ve got to get it in you. You don’t even necessarily have to sing it, but you’ve got to know it. That’s it. And sometimes, I’ll say, “Let me just hear the chord changes,” and I know where the song is going. Like the Bob Dylan song. If you listen to his version, he’s doing it very Spanish, because he’s talking about when he went to a gypsy camp. He just wrote down what he saw, this beautiful girl with a sweet breath and the long hair. He’s painting a picture of this girl, and her father, who was the boss of the gypsy camp. He takes in all this stuff. Well, once I heard it, I got the picture. But I’m not going to copy what he’s done. I just need to know where the chords are going. Because, to me, the song is really having a cup of coffee.

Now, he might have given this girl one – he might have had sex with her before – and there could have been a valley below. And he might have been up on a mountaintop or something. But for me, it was having a big cognac, because I love cognac, with a cup of coffee and a Cuban cigar.

That’s the combination. Because, as you know, if you’re a drinker, when someone says, “We’ll have another one.” “Oh, I don’t know whether I should have another one, because I’m going to get a fucking hangover tomorrow,” that’s the valley below to me. So, the picture I got in my head, of course, is this beautiful girl, and I’m looking at all this shit taking place, but I’m also sort of thinking about it and having this big cognac with a cigar and the cup of coffee, so let me just have another one of those before I got to go to sleep and wake up with a fucking head.

You know what I mean? That’s the valley below. That’s what I see. So, I’m always seeing something when I’m singing the song.”

European writer and photographer Mary Fagioli investigates the story of a Bologna student who is facing 25 years over his views on Facebook

More than a year has passed since the detention of the Egyptian student from the University of Bologna, but it appears nothing is happening to free him.

There appears to be no way out for Patrick George Zaki, a master’s student in gender studies, who is known for his views on human rights.

And, it appears, he was arrested over social media posts.

When he got off the plane at Cairo airport in February last year he was expecting to see his family again.

But he was arrested on charges ranging from threatening national security to terrorism propaganda.

Since then, it is claimed by his lawyer, he has been tortured and court hearings have been cancelled one after the other.

Patrick was first held in Talkha, then in Mansure and finally in Tora.

According to Amnesty International, Egyptian law could wait for up to two years without sentencing. And he could face up to 25 years in prison.

The mobilization of the world of politics

After a series of petitions, including Change.org and Amnesty, questions also reached the European Parliament.

The granting of Italian citizenship  – which would give consular protection to Patrick, aged 29 – was passed to the Senate , with 208 ‘yes’ votes and 33 abstentions. 

Among the abstainers were the senators of the Brothers of Italy. Life senator Liliana Segre,  a Holocaust survivor, from Milan, defending freedom and sympathizing with him as an innocent detainee.

Two days later however, Prime Minister Mario Draghihe placed the decision-making responsibility on Parliament .

The analogies with the Regeni case

The lawyer reports that the activist was tortured by electric shock and beaten.

They recalled the case of Giulio Regeni , which ended with his death. T

he Cambridge researcher was in Egypt for his doctorate, and following his kidnapping a body was found near a secret service prison, tortured to the point of being unrecognizable even to his mother. 

There is a sharp surge in violence and systematic disappearances under the al-Sisi regime.

He came to power after the 2013 coup d’état, with denials of human rights, although the Coptic minority considers it a barrier against fundamentalism.

Egypt in 2020, according to Reporters Without Borders’ annual monitoring, is the third country in the world for detention of journalists . China is in first place, followed by Saudi Arabia. What remains of the Regeni case is an embarrassing cover-up and the uncooperative attitude of the Egyptian government.

The effects of Italian citizenship

Recognizing Patrick Zaki as a citizen of the Italian community is a gesture imbued with a strong humanitarian sense , although one wonders what real effects it could have, whether in the course of work the new legal status can prevail or will there be a diplomatic action from the weight specific limited, as in the Regeni case, which could be ineffective in the short term. In any case, the only solution that currently lies ahead is to resist .

Mary describes herself in this way: I take delight in writing that which flows slowly into the essence. Graduated in Italy and later in the UK, the world is my home. I passionately observe, read, type, and take photographs. A good piece begins on tiptoe and shapes words through a magic surgical pen

#cairo #patrickzaki #torture #sociamedia #jail

Lock-down blues … We’ve been having a long chat on Zoom – and on this site – with friends and fellow Dylan fans. Some of us were drinking beer, others whisky and rum … and one couple were drinking coffee. They are coffee aficionados and good on them. They are a quite animated pair, smiley and full of beans, if I may be so bold.

But better to be a coffee-head than a couch potato, eh!

Anyway, we got to analysing Tom Jone’s version of One More Cup of Coffee … I said Tom failed abysmally to interpret the song. But of course others like it … so it got me thinking about what is One More Cup of Coffee actually conveying…

I know he wrote it without Jacques Levy who was working with him on songs like Isis at the time.

Dylan had just visited a ‘gypsy king’ in France.

The man was on the peripheries of his own society and was being shunned by his people because of age and frailty …

Bob was also breaking up with Sara … and isn’t that what the songs about?

Abandonment, loss, how love can become cold? How you enter another and mysterious world in the valley below? Depression and a wandering in the unknown, made all the more harsh and cold by the banality, the politeness, the perfunctoriness of the phrase… ‘one more cup of coffee’ (a very city-fied allusion amongst the wildness of the whole setting)… with the finality and deadly certainty of ‘before you go’?

Share what you think the song is about, I’d be really interested – did Tom, a singer I admire, just miss the point?

HEAR BOTH VERSIONS BELOW

ONE MORE CUP OF COFFEE

Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
I don’t sense affection
Nor no gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me but to the stars above

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee before I go
To the valley below

Your daddy, he’s an outlaw
And a wanderer by trade
He’ll teach you how to pick an’ choose
And how to throw the blade

He oversees his kingdom
Where no stranger does intrude
His voice it trembles as he calls out
For another plate of food

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee before I go
To the valley below

Your sister sees the future
Like your momma and yourself
She never learned to read or write
There’s no books upon her shelf

And her pleasure knows no limits
Her voice is like a meadow lark
But her heart is like an ocean
So mysterious and dark

One more cup of coffee for the road
One more cup of coffee before I go
To the valley below

#bobdylan #tomjones #jacqueslevy #gypsyking #france #onemorecupofcoffee #valleybelow #sara #divorce

Britain is getting better. And Covid is a burst balloon against our summery blue skies!

And that seems to be official, if you believe officialdom…

… and many people don’t.

Indeed, it has always been my job to doubt and investigate anything put out by governments, councils, officials and those whose decisions make a difference in all our lives.

So, here we go … a quarter of registered Covid deaths in the UK were NOT caused by the virus.

The Preservation Society actually revealed this more than a year ago.

But wait!

Before we all get our Covid Conspiracy hats on and dash down the pub shouting ‘Boris lied! Covid’s a con! It’s world control! Another pint please pal!‘, these not-unexpected figures, if you believe them as a confirmation of the planet’s biggest con, also show three quarters of people WERE killed by that little bug.

The Office for National Statistics reveals that 23 per cent of coronavirus fatalities are actually people who have died while having the virus rather than from it.

This means the disease was not the primary cause of death recorded on death certificates, despite the person who died testing positive for Covid.

Remember? the Preservation Society quoted a coroner’s officer who revealed that ALL deaths were being registered as coronavirus deaths in March 2020.

Other data also shows a positive picture of pandemic Britain.

Daily death figures by “date of death” reveal that Britain has suffered less than 28 deaths a day since the beginning of April.

The revelations – and the nation’s impressive jab roll-out –  should put pressure on the government to open up the country far more quickly.

40,107,877 doses of the Covid vaccine have now been administered in the UK.

The UK government will be able to explain these shock death figures away by feeding them through its normal pulp-making propaganda machine and European leaders will continue to run around like headless chickens – to jab or not to jab – but it is time for the inquiries to begin.

And the first at the doors of power will be real journalists, not YouTube ‘great pretenders’ and social media keyboard warriors.

#socialmedia #journalism #journalists #covid #figures #deathsdown #conspiracy

You could say Bob is back on everything – including a roll!

Yep, at almost 80 Bob is still rolling out a new catalogue of hits.

After the shock release on the internet of Murder Most Foul, the enigmatic rock hero of two centuries then dropped I Contain Multitudes on a world in lock-down.

And I’ve just been listening to it again… I love it, it is another ruminative beautiful gravely clock-ticking mixture of hip memories, a trip through Americana and a sad love song.

He rumbles … Today, tomorrow and yesterday too

The flowers are dying

Like all things do

And he refers to a quaint element of his live performances … I fuss with my hair

And I fight blood feuds

I contain multitudes

He also recognises Edgar Allan Poe … Got a tell-tale heart

like Mr Poe

Got skeletons in the wall

of people you know

But obviously, the main debt is to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself which is an eponymous work of power and beauty – and made in the folk tradition of ‘the borrowers’. But isn’t that what all writers, artists, performers, athletes and humans generally do? Borrow something, a word, a thought, an ambition, a decision, something that moves you?

And here Dylan does is brilliantly.

Here is the full lyric:

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES

Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, too
The flowers are dyin’ like all things do
Follow me close, I’m going to Balian Bali
I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me
I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds
I contain multitudes

Got a tell-tale heart, like Mr. Poe
Got skeletons in the walls of people you know
I’ll drink to the truth and the things we said
I’ll drink to the man that shares your bed
I paint landscapes, and I paint nudes
I contain multitudes

Red Cadillac and a black moustache
Rings on my fingers that sparkle and flash
Tell me, what’s next? What shall we do?
Half my soul, baby, belongs to you
I relic and I frolic with all the young dudes
I contain multitudes

I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones
And them British bad boys, The Rolling Stones
I go right to the edge, I go right to the end
I go right where all things lost are made good again
I sing the songs of experience like William Blake
I have no apologies to make
Everything’s flowing all at the same time
I live on the boulevard of crime
I drive fast cars, and I eat fast foods
I contain multitudes
Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans
All the pretty maids, and all the old queens
All the old queens from all my past lives
I carry four pistols and two large knives
I’m a man of contradictions, I’m a man of many moods
I contain multitudes

You greedy old wolf, I’ll show you my heart
But not all of it, only the hateful part
I’ll sell you down the river, I’ll put a price on your head
What more can I tell you? I sleep with life and death in the same bed
Get lost, madame, get up off my knee
Keep your mouth away from me
I’ll keep the path open, the path in my mind
I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind
I’ll play Beethoven’s sonatas, and Chopin’s preludes
I contain multitudes

#bobdylan #hisroyalboness #multitudes #80 #roughandrowdy

It’s the way of the Brits! Beer we go, beer we go, beer we go! The UK kicked off ‘the Glorious Twelfth’ with drinkers rushing to sub-zero pub gardens at midnight for a pint. 

Good on ya lads and lasses!

Temperatures dropped to -3C overnight and there was heavy snow in some areas but that didn’t put off the hardy who cheered ‘freedom’ across the UK.

And then it got sunny with average midday temperatures ranging from 6C (42.8F) in the Scottish isles to 12C (53.6F) in Cornwall and 10C (50F) in London…

We wish we were there!

#rain #beer #uk #lockdown #freedom

Picture this … it’s 1984 and you are inside the towering plastic walls of your laptop. All you can see are the walls and the billowing cyber clouds above them.

Yes, we have taken an ‘Orwellian’ lemming’s leap down into the electronic desert deep inside The Machine.

Big Tech has harvested and monetised us all… Facebook, Google and all those other thieves are stealing away our memories and hopes.

Big Tech is also wilfully allowing us to destroy our world’s languages, to abandon the art of expression and obliterate our common articulacy. Today we are locked up in a dystopian prison of processors, silicon chips, RAM, circuits, mice and motherboards.

And yet so many of us don’t care or even understand what is happening inside these little 15 inches by 9 inch glowing, humming plastic coffins of intellect and invention.

Instead, billions of us pound the keyboards and streets waving cardboard banners and childlike emojis, screaming that Covid-19 is the true conspiracy leading us like blind horses into tyrannous dystopia.

And we never see what is flashing constantly but dully in front of our faces.

Oh, it seems so long ago, when we were lulled into such a false sense of security, believing we were simply sharing photos with old school friends on ‘My Space’.

Now social media is a propaganda machine more determined to robotically destroy our civil liberties than any fascist state.

And Orwell warned us about it way back in 1984.

He postulated that whoever controls language, (Big Brother in his time) (Big Tech in ours) controls the way people think.

And he was right, look at the limited vocabulary of modern text speak!

Orwell wrote: “The whole aim of New-speak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Big Tech (just like Big Brother) is able to do this by destroying literature and controlling what people read. Look at the shambolic language of self-publishers on Amazon and Kindle – the biggest book shops in the New World.

The first real target Big Tech turned on was the relatively low-tech traditional media, the Fourth Estate of trained investigators, truth-seekers, pundits, performers, writers, sub-editors, editors, photographers, designers and broadcasters.

Social media gleefully allowed Trump to bang on about Fake News while it also filled its ever-watchful pages with spiders, crawlers, robots and lies.

Now social media, internet search engines, data brokers and tech companies are all using our personal data to trade in our interests and behaviour.

Surely, this is a far more sinister threat than pub passports, face masks and the Daily Mail. Let’s face it, you can always drink at home, take off your masks and read a different newspaper.

And that is the fundamental freedom we humans have always had. The freedom of choice, the freedom to decide.

But where is the choice when you decide to allow Big Tech to take over your data and lives?

And then we go to war on a bug rather than a conglomerate.

A new report from Amnesty International paints a dismal picture of global leaders whose handling of the pandemic has been marked by total contempt for human rights.

Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, says: “We’ve seen a spectrum of responses from our leaders; from the mediocre to mendacious, selfish to the fraudulent. They have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to entrench their own power. Instead of supporting and protecting people, they have simply weaponized the pandemic to wreak havoc on people’s rights.”

And we are allowing them to do it while so many scoff at face masks, vaccine passports and Bill Gates supposed little chips of control.

We are missing the point.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

The first 14 words of 1984 – written in 1947 – and it spell out a world gone wrong.

There is no doubt that today we are living in Orwellian times – look around you, America is Orwellian, Britain is Orwellian, Europe is Orwellian, TV is Orwellian, Amazon is Orwellian. And so is the internet.

In his other masterpiece, Animal Farm, Orwell says that all animals are equal. But some are more equal than others.

You see, if you can convince the world that you are the one saving it from Covid-19, then you can rise far beyond ‘equality’ and join the privileged. The privileged are those who command the attention of the masses. And change thinking.

Their are two basic flaws in human nature – the desire for power and the need to deceive when you are in power. This why there are no honest politicians.

So, we need to ask a simple question, is there really a pandemic out there, Covid or otherwise?

Let’s go back twenty years when the ‘war on terror’ began. We didn’t really know much about the enemy, it was made up of comic book baddies with hook noses, flowing beards and bloody robes.

And we were being led into a war that has never gone away by the constant dishonesty of warmongering politicians like Tony Blair and George Bush.

Today, in similar circumstances of unanswered questions and ambiguous realities underpinned by systematic deception, I am beginning to think the unthinkable.

Once the existence of the pandemic was assumed, measures were justified to fight it including a major reduction in health care for heart disease, cancer and many other problems we all could face within our lives.

If the pandemic had not been assumed to exist, and the dystopian interventions against it had not happened, how would have know there was one?

And do you know where most people got their information about Covid-19 and its variants? From the dishonest robot-controlled Trumpian disaster of social media, that’s where.

To validate YouTube, twitter and Facebook as the go-to-platform for truth and honesty, the ordinary man on the street had to be seen to expose traditional media as the true cauldron of dishonesty and propaganda.

And this is when the incomprehensible ambition of control got its metallic talons in to us all. The nightmare in a thin plastic box began here.

So, is there a secret plan – adopted by every government across the world – which demands upgrading repression in a way that could have only been dreamt of by Hitler?

It is real that now, because of social media and the pandemic, we have the foundations of global surveillance able to monitor everything we do?

Social media was needed to change our way of thinking and the pandemic was needed to create a new form of radical world slavery.

Then think about the vaccinated population of the world and those who refuse to be vaccinated – two tribes already at war on the internet. And there are of course ‘privileges’ for the vaccinated, like seeing your family, going to work, going to the pub and on holiday. The privilege of returning to some kind of normal life.

Society is today totally divided there is no doubt, and if you wanted to take it to its Orwellian Best, the powers that be now have the ways and means of culling the population and can make it look like natural selection.

They’ve pumped all the old people full of experimental drugs, they have caused despair and poverty in families which leads to suicide and they have a good part of the population under house arrest.

And they have anarchy on the streets where violent action can be taken by the police to control things – and emoji anarchy inside our thin plastic boxes where every move you make is watched and therefore controlled.

In this pandemic there is one thing we know for sure and that is the identity of the culprit, a virus called SARS-CoV-2. There is no connection between it and influenza viruses.

And those are facts.

Our lives have been uprooted and our future looks uncertain. Many of our inherent freedoms have been lost at least temporarily. So we need clarification on what is actually happening.

In the past – before s0cial media – people struggled to find information. Now people struggle to understand because there is just too much and so much of it is just wrong.

It is another fact that on Twitter at least, false information spreads further than true information and six times as fast.

But who is responsible for that? Not the Fourth Estate and not Democracy for certain.

***

In the final second of December 31, 1999, clocks ticked in the new millennium, and we waited for another virus… the Y2K bug, a computer code predicted to cause global chaos.

Nothing happened.

But the Coronavirus pandemic isn’t nothing. Something has happened.

And the real proof is as simple as the bodies of my friends killed by Covid-19 metaphorically piling up outside my front door.

Many of them are traditional journalists who, died in the last flush of youth despite leading fairly healthy lifestyles. And they all had articulate partners and families who would have asked the right questions if there was a doubt about the narrative of their deaths.

They would have stood up and have been counted.

And there is the rub.

In this Covid conspiracy world promoted by social media there are just too many intelligent people who would have to be drawn into the chicanery of an all-out reset of our lives, like the 59 million health care workers in the world and 15 million doctors.

And what about kings, queens, governments, presidents, prime ministers, civil servants, registrars, coroners, world health officials? What about so many rights organisations and the churches. What about workers in the vaccine industry?

Where are the whistleblowers?

So, as we stare up the plastic walls of social media into the infinity of the billowing cyber clouds where our lives are stored like sardines of data and lied to – and about – second by second…

Why do we see what we hope are temporary little white masks, pub passports and thin needles of hope as the real enemy of the world when the loss of honesty and privacy on the internet are gone forever?

#coronavirus #honesty #privacy #whistelblowers #socialmedia #internet