Trees are Good for our Health

A short blog entry today. Sorry it has been a while since my last one. I haven’t been feeling well lately.

I wanted to quickly write about something I heard on the radio yesterday: basically in a nutshell, trees are good for our health, we need to stop cutting them down, and we should be planting more of them.

If you have a tree next to your house or in your garden, or in an area next to your flat, it will make you healthier.

Trees can soak up to 60% of the pollutants and carcinogenic compounds in the air. They also can soak up a lot of water and are a good line of defence against flooding.

Some planning and town developers plant silver birch along roadsides, because silver birch can apparently absorb more pollutants than other species of tree. That’s why you might often see a lot of silver birch trees on roadways.

So it makes sense for people to stop cutting down trees and instead plant them everywhere, especially in towns and cities, not only do they clean the air we breathe & protect us against flooding; but they also help increase the rapidly decreasing oxygen levels in our atmosphere & help to combat climate change.

If everyone who was able and had permission, planted a tree next to their house, they would be helping to make them and their neighbours healthier; and if enough folk did it, it could add a million plus trees to the ecosystem to help offset climate change.

If councils planted trees in areas prone to flooding, they would help to soak up the excess water and aid in flood defence.

If we planted as many as we could in town and city centres, it would help soak up the traffic pollution & make them healthier places to be.

Some people cut down trees without really thinking or understanding how important they are. If you have a tree next to you, instead of seeing it as a nuisance, see it as a blessing, and look after it.

Trees are great (:

.keep.it.real..

The Truth about Islam

I have been studying Islam, I’m not converting to the religion, I am a neutral party. My personal views are neither theist or atheist, they are somewhere inbetween, and I’m not affiliated to any particular religion.

I wanted to find out more about the Muslim faith, and to gauge the truth of it. I have read and heard so many unpleasant biased opinions & reports of this religion, I wanted to get to the heart of Islam.

I think Mohammad would have been horrified by the Islamic extremists & terrorism we see today, as well as the oppressive way some Islamic states are run. These people in my opinion have completely missed the point of what Mohammed was striving to achieve in Arabia.

His final message was one of peace not war, he said that everyone, whoever they are, is equal. His vision was one of a society where people lived together in peace & equality, Muslims & Non-Muslims alike.

In his community in Medina there were different tribes who followed different faiths, and he accepted them as they were. There were Jews, Christians & Pagans. He never forced them to become Muslims, & even said that nobody should force anyone to convert to Islam. To become a Muslim had to be a conscientious choice, an act of free will. His only requirement in Medina was that people live in peace together, respect one another, see one another as equals & strive to do good and follow the common laws of the community. His mosque was open to everyone, and it didn’t matter who you were, you could go and talk to him and he would listen.

Yes, in his lifetime he did partake in wars, always through self-defence, and I get the impression he fought reluctantly, not liking war. He lived in a brutal and bloody society at the time & life in Arabia was very different back in 570 – 632 A.D.

His final victory in the end did not come about through war, but through peace, & this was part of his message- that war & conflict was wrong. He forgave his enemies & made peace with them. He was trying to show that the old tribal blood feuds of the past were not the way forward. That the way forward, was to put their differences behind them & work together in a community.

These Muslim extremists, terrorists & so called Jihadists have totally misunderstood his message.

Even the word Jihad is used out of context. In the Islamic religion it actually means to strive to do good, & the spiritual struggle in oneself against sin. It does not mean to go to war against unbelievers, that is a complete misunderstanding. The lesser Jihad, as the prophet called it, was the struggle in the outward world against persecution, & war was used solely as a means of self defence & only if there was no other option, if an opportunity to make peace presented itself then that took priority over fighting.

These terrorist acts targeting civilians, are completely abhorrent & an inversion of the Muslim religion.

Through what I’ve learnt, I would say, do not judge the Muslim religion based on the actions of Islamic terrorists and some of the oppressive states in the Middle East. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet or in newspapers. Muslim extremists do not reflect Muhammad and his teachings at all, and it seems many have sadly missed the essence of what he was trying to convey in his lifetime. At it’s heart the Muslim religion is beautiful & shares many of the values about social equality I believe in.

Another point to note is, Mohammad treated women as equals and he was the first person to give women the right to divorce their husbands if they wanted to, especially if their husband treated her badly. He never made it law they had to wear a veil or any of the other things. Many Muslim women like wearing the veil, but those that don’t like wearing it should not be under any obligation to do so. Mohammad also never said anything about FGM, this practise seems to have started centuries later in some Arab countries. In his final sermon he told men to treat women as equals and with respect and be kind to them.

I think Muhammad would be deeply saddened to see what has become of Islam today.

The same could be said of most religions actually. It is sad their real meanings often get twisted and misinterpreted to suit political agendas.

Peace & Keep it Real.

Benefit Sanctions

A whistleblower from a jobcentre describes how inhumane & twisted things are getting in Britain, the cruel reality of how a corporate target culture is causing vulnerable people to get tricked into benefit sanctions.

If you’re one of these right wing jobsworths who think being unemployed is a lifestyle choice, & you moan about the insignificant tax you pay towards unemployment benefit, (which also serves as a safety net for yourself,) watch this:

Vote for change, vote Reality Party.

Two Days Left To Email Government & Speak Out Against Fracking

(click this link to send an email to the government, there’s only two days left to do it. Try & write something in your own words if you can or have the time, this is important.)

This is a copy of the email I sent to the government:

Shale gas and oil won’t solve the UK’s energy crisis and it won’t solve the climate crisis.

There are more important things in life than money; like future generations who will inherit the world we leave behind. Do you want to be remembered in history as a government who didn’t care about the environment, people’s homes or water? Wouldn’t you rather history recorded you as a government that went all out for clean renewable eco friendly energy rather than shale?

Please scrap plans to drill under our homes, and scrap fracking in the UK. And at the very least, this consultation should be re-run as it is deeply flawed. The democratic process is non-existent, this is an important issue which has the potential to directly affect our homes and our countryside. There is so little of the wild left, please don’t pollute it anymore. The public are going to recieve very little in exchange for this drilling under their homes, that is really tight and unfair; in America people at least own the mineral rights on their land & can have a say whether they want fracking under their homes or not.

But fracking aside there is now no reason to keep using fossil fuels. If all the money that goes into subsidizing nuclear power went instead into building a renewable energy grid, you would save a lot of money in the long run and lead the way for others to follow your example around the world.

There are alternatives now, such as solar powered roads, high altitude wind turbines (which are more efficient than land based ones.) Biogas plants could create energy from our sewage and other waste. There are alternatives to shale which are cleaner and don’t have the potential to poison the water supply and leave toxic scars in the landscape, which don’t produce more carbon, which not only causes climate change, but is also reducing global oxygen levels.

Please reconsider this, be remembered as a government that was a visionary, that stopped using destructive polluting energy and created a whole new cleaner industry.

Wouldn’t you rather you were remembered in history books as people who helped to make the world beautiful and clean, that you created a whole new inspiring energy grid which sent shockwaves around the world, like a domino effect, and led a revolution on renewable energy.

Don’t be remembered in history as misers who cared only about money, and didn’t care who they trampled on to get it, or what damage they did to the land. Future people may look back in history and curse you, see you as villains, money isn’t everything.

Please change course, don’t go all out for shale, don’t pump that toxic cocktail underground and risk polluting our water, don’t risk a potentially serious environmental mess or seismic activity through repeated drilling weakening faultlines, and setting up the danger of a serious quake in the future. In America some places have experienced a tenfold increase in seismic activity and scientists have warned if they don’t stop fracking in these places, there could be more serious earthquakes with the potential to danage property and infrastructure. 

Don’t add to the climate change problem. Think ahead, one day the resources will run out; it isn’t too late to do the right thing. To be prepared for the dark age when there is no more oil or gas, if you start building a renewable energy grid now, that day won’t be so dark.

Self Sufficiency

The way that things are going & the changes that are coming, I feel the next generation is going to have it tough. It is looking more & more that in the future there won’t be welfare or free healthcare. With the huge gap between rich and poor continuing to grow, I feel in the future the majority of people are going to need to learn how to survive without money.

That’s why it is important everyone who is able should start learning now about producing food, how to build shelters, and even learn how to create homemade electric generators that run on renewable energy, independant of the central grid.

Communities will have to learn to get along and stick together if they are to survive. Find places to grow food: in gardens, on rooftops and balconies, indoors under flourescent lights, (make rooms in your house into places to grow crops.) in plantpots and troughs, on abandoned unused land.

People may even have to do this in secret one day, especially if companies like Monsanto become powerful & have a monopoly on the world’s food supply. In that scenario it’s not hard to envision a time when growing your own food becomes illegal. (It sounds far fetched, but could happen, there are currently some parts of America where growing your own food is against the law.) Hopefully that extreme situation isn’t going to be happening anytime soon in Britain, but now is a good time for people to get ready and be prepared to survive on little or no money; and whatever crazyness the world may throw at us.

If everyone uses whatever space they can to grow food, be creative in how we manage our space. If we learn how to generate our electricity independantly, we can survive & live comfortably.

Small communities working together should pool their resources, share the food they produce and distribute it equally. Neighbours/streets could share a homemade decentralized energy grid, that works on renewable energy. Vehicles can be adapted to run on vegetable oil.

If in extreme cases, like what has happened in Detroit, they cut off our water supply, we may have to learn about digging wells, cleaning the water to make it safe to drink and bathe in, even learn how to do our own plumbing.

I know this sounds far fetched and hard to imagine, it is an extreme scenario; but the world population is getting bigger, our resources are finite and becoming less. The money of the world is unfairly distributed, so that those who have a lot, get more, and those who have little, get nothing. The 85 richest people in the world just now have the same amount of wealth as half the world’s population.

It is looking increasingly like the majority of us will be forced to live in poverty; either that or we can choose another path, one that involves becoming decentralized independant communities living outside the system and becoming self sufficient.

We need to find inner strength and resilience and learn how to survive on our own. No longer dependant on their economic system.

This extreme scenario may not happen for another 10 – 20 years; so now would be a good time for people to start learning these skills and begin preparing ourselves and our children for what looks like a challenging future ahead.

We are lucky that right now, there’s tonnes of resources available online, were we can learn about just about anything we want to; all the information we need is at our finger tips. If you don’t own a computer or smartphone, you can use the internet for free in the library or at a friend’s house. The best kind of education is one where we learn how to teach ourselves; and all this information online can be used to our advantage.

If you learn independance and self sufficiency, nobody will have to fear things like benefit sanctions anymore, how they’re going to pay their bills & make ends meet.

It will be hard work at first; but if people work together as small teams and share what they produce equally, if communities share their knowledge, inventions and discoveries with one another; it will be a lot less daunting than trying to do it alone.

It will give people back power and freedom to control their destinies; no longer trapped in what feels like a cruel inhumane corporate tyranny. It would be a peaceful revolution, something that empowers the people, no violence would be necessary, just determination to learn how to be self sufficient, which if done with the right heart, will hopefully create communities of peace and equality.

Keep it real