This is good

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This sums up what America has become – a playground for the ultra-rich. They are gleefully robbing the poor and laughing at the way the fools continue to support the very people who are robbing them blind.

Trump made $3 billion in his first six months and it passing bills to give himself and his buddies a hell of a lot more.

His whole family are raking it in.

Ever seen a poor senator? Snouts in the same trough.

Talk about draining the swamp!!

America is being run for a wealthy elite. It’s a giant con-trick!

Desperate people with automatic guns are deflected on to blaming immigrants and take it out on schoolchildren.

What a sickbed of racism, misogyny, hypocritical religious fanaticism and cold-blooded exploitation.

The truth about socialism!

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Why do you think the wealthy use everything in their power to convince you that socialism is bad?? They don’t want fairness and equality. They are run by greed.

Inconvenient

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Inconvenient

The truth is inconvenient for most.

                The universe began by accident.

None of us are cursed.

No wonderful omnipresent host.

The truth is inconvenient or worse.

                There is no underlying reason

                                No wonderful afterlife.

Just endless oblivion – unrehearsed.

The truth is inconvenient for some.

                The planet is busy warming,

                                Nature is threatened;

                                                The worst is yet to come.

The truth is inconvenient for many.

                Greed is killing everything.

                                The lust for more is rampant.

Of hope – there isn’t any.

The truth is inconvenient for us all.

                A flawed species rampant

                                Full of lust for power

Vicious beyond recall.

The truth is inconvenient for the blind.

                Our history is littered

                                With the blood of the innocent.

It’s all we leave behind.

The truth needs to be learnt from

                If we are to build a future

                                And intelligently grow

Without the bullet or the bomb.

Opher – 14.8.2024

We all believe what we want to believe based on our upbringing, our education and our experience.

We rarely learn from the past and blithely go on making the same mistakes.

We gullibly swallow what we are fed.

Our whole world is an algorithm.

Our history is one of great violence, wars, senseless slaughter of wildlife, destruction and torture.

While there is much to admire it is overshadowed by the horrors we have exacted on each other and other living things.

We enjoy pain. We enjoy suffering. We love inflicting agony.

We are tribal, exhibiting insane group-think and adrenaline fuelled madness.

We love to believe conspiracies and close our minds to reality.

We see violence as the answer.

We always see violence as an answer.

The whole world is run by a handful of men who can never have enough. They leave misery in their wake.

We never learn from the past. Despite the demise of thousands of gods who have all come and gone we still believe ‘ours’ is real.

We still think the earth is flat and is the centre of the universe. We nonsensically believe in arks, veils and angels. Satan is real for many. We never learn.

We never see the way misogyny, racism and hatred is being used to gain power. We fail to see religion as a tribal tool for a minority to gain power and wealth.

The truth is inconvenient.

George Carlin on Religion

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The Truth Too – another poem

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The Truth Too.

We glean our truth from a source we trust

But the best of sites are rarely just.

Too many spoons prodding the pie

Taking more than their share from both you and I.

They twist the truth to fit their lust

And usually believed and rarely sussed.

I wrote this for all those people who take their news from all those fake sites out there on the web, busy pushing their propaganda:  for those who take the mainstream news as gospel; for those who really believe that they have the only handle on what is really going on.

This is tribal.

This is all lies.

Cynicism is the only defence.

The Truth – a poem

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The Truth

The truth is usually grey.

It doesn’t stand up to the light of day.

What appears to be absolute

Rapidly falls into fierce dispute,

As the truth falls prey

To political decay.

Opher 19.8.2018

I wrote this for all those people who take their news from all those fake sites out there on the web, busy pushing their propaganda:  for those who take the mainstream news as gospel; for those who really believe that they have the only handle on what is really going on.

This is tribal.

This is all lies.

The Antitheist’s Bible – A novel – Extract from the beginning.

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Prologue

We’d all come back from a walk through England’s glorious countryside, over the green rolling hills of the Southern Downs, trailing along a river bank swathed in a mass of wildflowers through which the butterflies danced and bees busily droned from blossom to blossom. We’d wandered lazily through a hot morning with the sun scorching our faces under an unremitting blue sky – four old friends together.

Nothing could be more delightful than the perfect English summer day when it happened. You could not count on it to happen too often in this unpredictable climate. We’d found a picnic bench outside a pub overlooking the old weathered rock walls of a mediaeval castle and basked in the weather and company, swigging a cool beer, idly talking, laughing lots and picking at a pub meal.

Throughout the entire walk we’d been catching up on news, reminiscing and sharing views. That’s what old friends did. I’d outlined my thoughts on my book. Writing was one of my passions. It infuriated Liz. She saw it as one of my obsessions. Something else I wasted endless hours on. She despaired over the way I could not relax and live in the moment. Even on a beautiful day, walking through the most beautiful scenery, my mind was flitting through the interior of my head while the world slipped by. I only had to have an audience and I could not help but let fly, to allow all that storm of pent-up ideas to gush out. Kathy and Tobes had made the mistake of appearing to listen. It seemed to me that they liked the idea but saw nothing original about it. In their view, it had been done to death. Nobody would be interested. But it had caught their imagination to an extent, more than most of my fanciful literary concoctions.

Kathy and I were sitting in the front room, on the floor, our backs against the sofa, a glass of Merlot in one hand. We were passing a spliff back and forth, contemplating infinity and arguing about religion. Standard fayre for a Sunday afternoon.

‘So what would you say to some evangelical redneck who believed the world was formed by god four thousand years ago?’ She peered at me with a cheeky, quizzical look, daring me to rise to it. ‘You know Oph, some brainwashed American, brought up in the Deep South who was taught that every word of the bible was the absolute word of god, huh Oph?’

Now available as paperback, hardback and digital kindle:

My version of the truth.

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Now, as an atheist, do you swear on this bible that you will tell the truth this time?

There’s a War

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There’s a War

There’s a war.

                Every time you turn on the set

Read your paper

                Or listen to the radio.

There’s a war

                As those in power seek

To fool us

                Telling us black is white – hi-de-ho.

There’s a war.

                For the substance of our minds

For the way we think

                For the way we feel.

There’s a war.

                To brainwash the masses,

Turn them against themselves

                To make our nightmares real.

There is a war.

                And we lose it every day.

Opher 1.3.2023

The battle of the airwaves, of the newsprint, of the environment we swim in, is a war of words, of attitudes and innuendo – a war to control our minds.

The advertising is bad enough – telling us what to buy and how to live – but the political control is worse. It’s a torrent of lies and spin from those with vested interests. It swamps our senses.

The Tories opposed one man one vote (and then voting for women) because they believed that if the plebs had a vote the Tories would never, ever, get elected again. They represented the top five percent. They knew that the ninety five percent that they had exploited would vote them out.

They developed a strategy to ensure they had a chance – they spun themselves as the face of capable, one-nation, government and bought up the media. They presented us with our daily bite, reinforcing the message that only they were competent, spreading fear, working on the lack of self-confidence of workers who felt themselves inferior, on aspirations of the lowly who wanted to be rich and saw the rich Tories as role models. They spun the truth. The presented themselves as the party that would create wealth and make the country strong. They omitted to tell us where that wealth would all go.

It worked. Over the course of the decades they have been forced to make minimal concessions; to give working people a minimum standard of living, to care for the basic needs of the needy – just enough to keep them quiet.

When the opposition got in they used their financial power to undermine them so that their policies of equality and fairness floundered.

They prospered against all logic, against the odds. The wealthy rule us.

Every day there is a war – a war for our minds – a war of spin and lies – a war to control us.

Most, do not even know it’s going on.

Tony Benn – Wisdom and Hope

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