Love Locks By The Docks

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Liverpool Tall Ships: Mersey River Festival

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Muhammad Ali

Any lingering vestige of the 20^th century has ended with the passing of Muhammad Ali.  Thus it can be said he defined an era; the space race, civil rights struggles, mass media, Vietnam, and the Cold War. Ali is bound up with that time like  a name running through a stick of rock. With all the TV over his death, it gave me a bit of time to reflect on a couple of things.

Firstly, you would think getting thumped round the head repeatedly would be bad for brain health. Its just a kind of intuition most people have; that the prolonged boxing career Ali emarked on would make you punchy and trigger Parkinson’s (7 years as a journeyman boxer even after the onslaught of the Rumble In The Jungle). But there is no scientific evidence for that. I put this down to the small sample sizes and may be the methodology/ experimental design; you know how narrow the scientific community can be sometimes. But you would expect dementia to be a much more likely outcome from a long boxing career; with Parkinson’s it is the basal cells of the cerebellum (hindbrain) which degenerate.

Observing early footage of Ali, he is the exact opposite of a Parkinson’s patient; look at the table below.

Ali with Parkies	Ali in early years
Slow speech Slow Movement Shuffling Gait Mechanical movement	Motor mouth, Florid spontaneous poetry Mohammed Ali Shuffle Graceful movements, Hyperkinesis

I got round to thinking, maybe Ali had a congenital problem with dopamine secretion; in the early years expressing too much to the extent of being fidgety, and later on in a stage of disintegration. Of course, this could be a problem of unbalanced neurotransmitter secretion, or of receptor cells.

The stress curve of Hans Selye (1936; General Adaptation Syndrome) could be used to show a long period of hyper- arousal/ resistance phase/ eustress where the basal cells are responding to a pathology as yet undetected. He was certainly a force of nature at that time, prone also to fits of depression, nonsensical rambling and occasional outbursts of anger. This reminds me of an ADHD picture.

The other thing I thought (which I lament on his behalf) is that after that epic fight, Ali didn’t resign as he intended, but as mentioned went on to undertake a gruelling 7 year parade of head blows and knock outs. Had he resigned, perhaps he would have arrested his Parkinson’s sufficiently to maybe run as a Senator like Jesse Jackson, run a charity, or a community boxing project. I realise this blows somewhat in the face of my original idea (that his Parkinsons was a kind of teleological or genetic outgrowth) but maybe his pathological need for fighting was also part of the condition. Of course, both the endogenous (genetic) and the environmental (boxing) explanations could be simultaneously true. Whichever was true, we will never know, and sometimes its worth reminding ourselves that obscure neurological or endocrine illnesses can be wonderfully associated with genius as part of a whole package. Whether it is advantageous or disadvantageous is ultimately a value call which is subject to fashion. Ali shall remain as an icon of persevering against all odds.

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One Man Photoshop Protests (2011)

After the obscene birthing of the bastard child 2010 Lib- Con Tory government, and during the apoplectic convulsions of the 2011 London riots, I embarked on my own One Man Photoshop protest. In that bockety ferment, stories of the Bullingdon Club and Cameron’s moral piety piled up uncomfortably against unending health & environmental injustices resulting from unabated globalisaed corporatism. The Greece crisis, Occupy Movement and Anti austerity student protests were fuel to the fire. For a few months at least, it seemed to me, to quote Jim Morrison the “whole shit house could go up in flames.” Well it didn’t, and things returned to their shapeless trammelled drudgery, kicking the can further down the road. The media did a good job for their masters in portraying a narrative of moral savagery being the cause of the riots; the shooting of Mark Duggan was just an inconvenient fact. Some of these photoshops are better than others, but they’re all borne out of the same anger and outrage. One day the Lion will wake up and roar. Until then, you’ve got some crap photoshops to entertain you.

2011 English Riots: Maps and Timeline
2011 England Riots
2011 Anti Austerity Protests
Guardian 2011 London Riots

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London Riots

 Nick Clegg Cactus Penis

 Fireman Sam- Hero of the Cartoon Revolution

 BullingdonClub

Eton Wall Game

As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, Nick Clegg and a friend drunkenly set fire to what he called "the leading collection of cacti in Germany". When news of the incident was reported during his time as Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Clegg said he had behaved "appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally" and that he was "not proud" of it. He was not formally charged, but performed a kind of community service. Its still a bit of a prickly issue for him when it comes to punishment of the London rioters.

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Coalition Moral Piety

The Road To Parliamentary Democracy

 George Osborne: Obey

 St. Cameron's Moral Crusade

Deliver Us From Slow- Motion Moral Collapse

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Food Industry Corruption

 What's The Worst That Can Happen?

Breastfeeding Advocacy Boycott Poster 

 Haribo- Sponsoring Diabetic Ulcers Since 1920

McAcne

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The Environment Industry

AstraZeneca- F@cking up animals and shit since 1999

WWF SustainableForestry new poster

 Marlboro's preferred health warnings

McSlash & McBurn

McDonalds Green Logo

BP- raping the Earth since 1909

Godzilla in Fukushima

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Starving Africa

These are probably the crappest of my One Man Photoshop Protests. What I don't like about them is they convey the (somewhat trite) idea that "Africa" is a weak, passive, exploited, ubiquitously poor continent without the wit or ability to resist globalisation, following on from my Poison Fire blog. Of course thats at best (or worst) part of a complex picture which I have no credentials to comment upon. That said, I think as Photoshop creations they are at least stark and certainly thought provoking, so I have included them below.

Half & half 

Let Them Eat Cake I

Let Them Eat Cake II 

Let Them Eat Cake III

Logo

Big Pharma

Poison Fire

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