Philosophy of the rational mind

1. Faith in God requires a distinct lack of willingness to think.

A science textbook is out of date the moment it is printed.

The bible was written more than mere moments after Jesus walked the earth,
and mostly through a series of "Chinese whispers" with which we all became familiar at primary school.

2.  Money is a make-believe concept.

The only things that should drive you are your heart and your morals,
which are two things rarely subtended by wealth.

3.  Care for all animals and all plants.  All microbes, archaea to algae.

We have shared this earth for 4.5 billion years,
We are not special.
We are no better than the sum of Gaia's parts -
A living biosphere.

4.  Don't make enemies - harbour rivalry.

Hatred can only cloud rationality.

5.  There is no finer exploration of knowledge than through the endeavour of reading with skepticism.

A brain exercised
Is eventually wise
To the fine things in life
And to see through the lies.

6.  Learn to cook.

Food, water, and love,
Are the three common denominators
For all of us.

Learn to cook,
With love,
And suddenly you may reveal a half-full cup.

7.  Do good things, for good people, and good things will follow.

Don't waste time trying to impress
Those who are fickle, and shallow.
Life is short, and sweet,
So long as the friendships you seek
Are true, and never hollow.

8.  Smile, though your heart is aching.

No wiser words have ever been stated,
The lyrics of Nat King Cole should never be understated.

9.  Always be pleasant, even with those who to you seem aberrant.

How are we to know what has happened during anyone's existance?
Be it years in the past,
or here in the present.

10.  Make millions of memories, with those you cherish.

Death, more often than not, makes a mockery of the miser.

When asked,
With each and every final gasp,
The dying cite time with loved ones, friends, and family,
As those things which really matter at the last.

Islam in Britain

Some harrowing news today,
28% of English say nay;
That Muslims should stay among us
For fear they'll be sheared by bomb blast.

It's ridiculous, and causes me dismay
That a quarter of our populus thinks this way.
What happened to education?
It's our brains that require some salvation.

There are arseholes, cunts, and wankers everywhere,
Not constricted to those who wear
A headscarf, turban, or native dress;
Don't listen to the tripe in the racist press.

Make up your own mind, don't fill it with air,
Read the Independent, not the Mail and Farage.
Most Muslims are good, have some common sense,

I'd rather deport the 28%.

Thought for Food, Berlin 2013 - a poetic tribute

Thought for Food convenes in Berlin,
Hundreds of changemakers network within
The old coinery, at zwei Molkenmarkt
To seed ideas from neuron to farm.

A cartload of cardboard from the talented Oupas!
Bedecks the interior of the teeming Alte Muntze.
Teeming! With thought, and those who care,
To drive solutions, make the world aware;

There's a crisis faced by one and all of us,
Billions of people are starving asunder...
As climate change rips through like thunder,
The net effect is ever more hunger.

But hungry we are to fix this abhorrence,
From India to Holland ideas flow in torrents.
We're all well aware of food in abundance
But cry in despair that we're drowning in waste.

A change to this stasis is now taking place,
A global community who'll bust a gut to make
A food secure future, nutritious, full plates,
That'll leave, for all of us, a joyous, sweet taste.

Independence Day

A year to go,
to go, to go,
To Referendum,
say no, say no.

Scotland is only as great
As the first in the title of this Great state.

The Syrian Dead

One hundred thousand Syrian dead,
A rifle, bomb blast, shrapnel to head.
 There are no good guys,
Lunatics on either side.

Assad looks to Russia,
The Rebels to the USA.
 Aha! Chemical warfare,
There must be foul play.

Let's go to war, blindly
Fire missiles into this desperate pit.
 The USA decides,
Whether chemical warfare is legit.

Apparently, napalm over Vietnam,
And nuclear fury over Japan,
 Does not fill the criteria,
No mass hysteria.

One rule for one,
Another for the others.
 The USA should have no say,
After years of rampant slaughter.

No matter gunshot, missile or nerve gas,
The crisis in Syria will long be nervous.
 The western powers may well inferfere,
But history suggests we'll just deepen the mere.

Bale out

The world is split in two.

There are some who
Give generously without
And others, who
Take and give nowt.

To Spain, moved Bale
For a Real fee,
While the Spanish purse
Still owes plenty.

Imagine what that money could do...

The Western Goldfish

Like a goldfish, the West
Glistens with beauty
But travels in circles,
Trapped in a glassy net.

Hindsight is something
beyond a goldfish,
Who's memory lasts
not much longer than the last.

This earth we inhabit

Earth we inhabit,
And in resources we're rich,
Yet they are finite.
Let's look after what we've got,
and let us please pollute not.

A day in the lab

Buzzing, whirring, clicking, stirring,
Bottles chinking, bunsens burning.
A laminar breeze flows soft over face,
Hands float in a sweaty sea of latex.

The putrid stench of Agrobacterium
Does for the nostrils that of spice to rectum.
A callous row of mutants in line,
Nutrient jelly under cabinet lights.

A constant tremor from vibrating rubber,
Liquids mixing like whirlpools in tubes.
A mortar and pestle chinks and grinds,
Powdering leaves in clouds of steaming nitrogen.

SDS, Virkon and dry ice sit whistling,
Bubbles burst into a cacophony of twittering.
Whitney Houston blares on the stereo,
White coats splay to How Will I Know.

An appropriate phrase for research in science,
Unsure and sure are concepts intertwined.
The sounds, sights and smells make a hazy environment,
Each day a race against the onrush of time.

Thought for Food

Thought for food, that's right... really think about it.

For years, people have been telling me
"You're so lucky you are skinny,
you must have such a high metabolic rate."

No - I just put less on my plate,
there's a reason you are overweight.
You're eating too much red meat, fat and sugar.
How about you run a little, and shovel
less into your mouth?
Lo and behold, you've lost a few pounds.

And hey, the world might lose a few cows,
which truly, weight for weight, consume more
and take up more room than even the humans
this world can hardly house.

We have no excuse not to change this lousy situation,
Uproot the status quo for all our salvation.

I wrote these lines in the world's fattest nation,
where the average man is unfased by his expanding waist
due to inhaling four and a half thousand calories a day.

Compare that to the DRC,
where the average man gets by on scavenging less than half that amount to eat.
It's pretty hard to compete,
when three quarters of that man's salary
is spent on food with half the calories.
While,
the fat cat in America
spends but a quarter of that figure
on twice the fast food crap
and making his expanding figure bigger.

Go figure.

We need a revolution,
'cause at the moment the Chinese
are planting palm oil in the DRC -
so how are these people
supposed to grow enough food crops to eat?

There's not one solution,
but we've got to do something to stop mass toxic pollution
on our bodies, fields and forests.

We're almost looking at agricultural absolution.

At the moment, we chop down trees
to grow more soybean,
which we then feed to cattle
so they put on more mass -
but waste most of that
through excreting methane gas
and egesting tons of festering crap.

For fuck's sake, let them eat grass.

If we run out of space for that the so be it.
We'll eat something far more appropriate
like
asparagus, cabbage, avacado...
or something really sensible like locusts, crickets and ants.

There's already seven billion people on this earth
and already there's a dearth of good, nutritious food
for one seventh of the human world.

They have every right to complain
because their pain
is unnecessarily compounded
by the one billion overweight
who eat the cows
which eat one third of our total grain.

To add to that,
methane gas causes climate change
and ammonia from cows
is the single greatest contributor to acid rain.

This needs to change.

If you can't see it, then so be it.
But you're either a prick,
or too thick to realise
we're heading quickly toward needless demise.

So please, heed these words
and don't entertain the lies
of those deniers
who conspire
to mislead you otherwise.

It's easy to cover your eyes and close your ears,
but in one hundred years,
if you're still alive,
you might just be here
to see the whole wide world
drowning in tears.