News From Nowhere

a bill from sky

has arrived with a bright pink ‘exclusively for you’ sticker on it. After punching someone round the face, do you stand back, holding your fist, and say ‘you should be grateful, that was an exclusive punch, and not available to anyone else’

Was Steve Jobs really that important?

Most people’s conception of Jobs was that he was ‘some guy in charge of Apple’, and like me, saw him as merely the bringer of the ipod, a sort of santa clause that came every year but asked for lots of money. To the more dogmatic amongst us he was an evil capitalist lording over an an empire he had built over many years that exploited workers in the third world to maximize revenues. But to those inside the technology industry, he was a genius of massive proportions, someone who had made himself from nothing - and changed the very way we all communicated. But why? Jobs did not revolutionise technology. Sonys video-MP3 came out at the same time as the ipod - but had far better features. Samsung had already made touch screen phones before the iphone had begun to walk. And Hp made ipad style laptops, with better gb and ram, many years before the ipad even came out. But I think this is the point - people don’t buy Apple products because of their features, they buy them because they are buying a way of life. This was the genius of Jobs. He saw products not just for their technology but for their design and beauty. He even said ‘we spend more on advertising then any other company, but you wouldn’t know it.’ The advertising is the product - and its simplicity and beauty is what captivated the masses. A Great man, with great ideas, who made himself from nothing. Apple’s operations in the third world may indeed be morally abhorrent, but it’s worth remembering that they spent the least on lobbying compared to those demons at microsoft. Having said that, I still find mac users extremely irritating, but I haven’t figured out whether they actually are irritating, or I’m just jealous I don’t own one.

Some thoughts on slavery in the american south

People often say that the worst part of slavery was how brutally Africans were treated. They were subjected to horrific conditions - families of up to 20 people cramped into tiny rooms, a meager loaf of bread for a whole weeks work, routine beatings for disobedience - a concentration camp in all but name. However, the most detestable and disgusting part of slavery was not their barbaric treatment, nor the racism that persisted, but the slave owners who took pity on their slaves and looked after them, and therefore prevented the horrors of the institution of slavery being realized. Over the years, slaves and their owners developed close relationships, which were often complex and strange forms of friendship. In places like Arizona, for example, which was made up predominantly of white working class Americans, more blacks could speak English and write fluently then they could. Some slaves had living standards and education that rivaled and sometimes beat free white Americans. Thomas Jefferson educated all his slaves to an extremely high standard. These people with good intentions prevented the blacks from realizing that they were fundamentally enslaved. This is what kept slavery going for so long. Perhaps if the slaves were routinely killed and abused it would of made them to rise up much sooner they did and free themselves as in hegel’s dialectic quote ‘better to die on your feet then to live on your knee’s’.

I think this raises some interesting points about society and where we are at today. People think they are free because they get a wage every month that gives them a roof over their head, clothes on their back, an education, and some leftovers to buy the latest blackberry contract. But all these things, no matter how good they may seem, do not change the fact that like in the slave camps, a small group of people control everything you can say and do, ‘you are free to do as we say’ and all you are doing is living on your knees. Perhaps modern dictators have realized this - that the way to maintain your power is to be nice to the slave populace to prevent them from taking your power. An interesting thought that I will leave with you. Messages welcome. 

George Orwell: Teatalitarianism

British author and all round hero George Orwell gives us his take on Britains classic staple. From the Evening Standard 12th January 1946.

He is looking at you like that because you put four sugars in.

‘A nice cup of tea’

By George Orwell

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

• First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea. 

drinking tea the true way.

• Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad. 
• Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water. 
• Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners. 
• Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly. 
• Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference. 
• Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle. 
• Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it. 
• Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste. 
• Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round. 
• Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water. 

a visual example of drinking a nice cup of tea

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Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

The History of the orgasm (according to Wilhelm Reich)

In the 1930s a psychoanalyst called Wilhelm Reich came up with a less-than-modest theory. He proposed that there was a universal life force called orgone energy at play in the world between all human relations. Sound quite mad? Not at all… This orgone energy was apparently present in all human orgasms, could be reached by group sessions - aka massive sex orgies - and could cure almost any ailment that you could suffer from. 

reich sporting the docs look

Like Freud, Reich saw nascent sexuality as the primary energetic force of life, however, Reich took Frued’s theories of Libido in a slightly different direction. He claimed that the right amount of this life force - orgone energy - or to put it bluntly, orgasms, could rid people of cancer, brain damage and even determine the weather. Now dismissed by the scientific community - and most of the human race - as compeltely f****** batshit insane, it was, for some time, taken seriously by many scholars and academics. It gave meaning in the post-depression era where community spirits were low and people didn’t have much food to live by.

(Source: newsfromnowhere.posterous.com)