it's good to burn bridges when they're built by bastards who occupy cozy offices in central london office blocks
it's good to burn bridges when they're built by agencies who occupy anything but spaces of self-reflection
and who are incapable of respecting the enemies we face to such an extent that they then see ... ... they always see themselves
as better than anyone else and thus will remain inferior forever to everyone out there far or near who ever you'll find out here at all
because british intelligence is anything but ... and british intelligence is stuck in that rut ... well it is ...
... of empire and suchlike and then it's the pleasant island and verdant and stuff and so well ... they say and oh they may
but actually not at all at all and so then again as eyesight dulled and vision quite blinded and sullied and hidden and quite blinkered and suffering
as if the tree of oak itself is rotting from the core and nothing more is to be done when all is sung and said
and just the well-read remain as saviours who actually can't any more anyways in a country where the rule of law is no longer treasured by the enforcers of the same
never mind the citizens they once said they served and so it's as if it's a stain on the country's disdain in respect of anything that might truly lead to life and its wily interventions
greater now it's true than the declensions of the idiots who run this country through influence not politics like the strata of medieval wastes grossly uncovered
as they make haste oh they do to run the lives of me and you as badly as one might wish to conceive
because they have no idea at all and they really have none worth talking of whilst instead of chasing the real criminality they prefer to focus on you and me
saying our desire for privacy makes us just as dangerous as those they let slip in cities of the north and others of balding and silly nick
and as they did so terribly that day and as they claimed to rue the horror anyhow and every way they let the bad they lost sight of at such cost
bomb to awful bits the innocents of terror whilst all this time they've feathered their own closets and offices into things quite truly grand and fine
as if the most important thing today in all our democracy of hey and wow is to show how good their taste in interior decoration
enables their decidedly stylish and cool creatively fabulous comforts of label rule over the safety of the ordinary citizens who find themselves utterly unable any more
dying hopelessly in the gutters as they are of the homeless and the buggered that end up left all to one side by the men of british intelligence
who knowing all they have all these years of strife actually and truly and forcefully and cruelly really really don't give a fuck
What MI5 assured us in 2020What the UK and US authorities now argue just this weekWhat I argued in 2023What I have experienced since 2002How they do itThe final outcome
I am minded to write this poem because of a small and discreet event I attended at Liverpool John Moores University, one evening some years ago.
The event was given by a chief constable of a nearby north of England police force.* The standout stat I remember he offered us was when he wanted to contextualise what differentiates the average experience of a police officer with the average experience of a democratic citizen — and perhaps, in so doing, making it easier for both sides to be less opposing and more conciliatory.
Most citizens, he said, experienced 10 to 11 “life events”: what he meant was serious incidents such as witnessing the horrible injuries of others, maybe their violent passing, one’s own experiences of near-death, and/or perhaps the death of a family member or close friend.
Then he asked the collected audience what they thought the stat was for the average police officer. Not even the attending officers themselves knew how to hazard a guess.
The figure was 400.
It sank in. He let it sink in slowly and quietly, too.
It will never be forgotten.
That is how much the average police officer suffers. And wherever they individually choose to remain servants of the citizenry, not enforcers of the same, is when we have the very best of our societies standing rightfully to attention in front of us.
Just this.
Have a safe day.
(And just that.)
* I also recall the fact that I was once very firmly informed by a community police officer in a suburb of Chester, UK, that whilst the public liked to see the British police as a service, the British police never see themselves as anything but a force.
“the 400: a poem about service”
i was told one evening
by a chief constable near where i lived
amongst an audience of people good and free
that 400 was the number
which for the rest of us was 10 or 11
being life events
that break our souls
and make us weep with heaps of tears
like babbling brooks
when nothing’s then right
and all is then took
and life is then no longer worth living at all
*
and this chief of big team
was the kindest of souls
and he knew how to roll with the times and the goals
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.
I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.
I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.
I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.
I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:
Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.
I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.
So.
All good thus far.
The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.
In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.
Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.
From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.
A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.
That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.
What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.
From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.
Yeah?
And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.
How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.
Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.
Just this.
Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.
And do take care.
now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL
i spent my life as eldest of my family being the glue that meant i wasn't as i could've been
i had to be for every sibling and cousin i had the very best sounding-board they ever could have EVER had
understanding in all respects accepting all their holes of dark seeing as absolutely and utterly fair the roles i was assigned so stark
like lairs and dens of the dragons and monsters some of them have been to me and you really wouldn't ever believe
what i have actually seen and what i have actually witnessed and suffered to the extent they intentionally drove me mad
and so all this time i found it hard to do more than rhyme in order to survive the cruelty of my 61 years
visited on me and imposed on me and painted on me as if into a corner around my every boundary and residual sound
as never could i set my limits and find in time the core i needed and just be me for me at all and avoid the funeral pall
of man and son and father and brother and lover and done nailed brutally and abusively to the cross of quite another
and so after all that it came to 2015 and all i could do was scream silently to myself
and everyone thought again he's going mad or maybe he's just bad and maybe that was it
when really what it was this thing i began to do was realise that their VACUOUS holes like gruyère cheese
had prevented my mentioned core of apple-like pleas ever forming contentedly so that all i knew how to do
all this time for 53 years of foolishness too was to impale myself like stake to a soul in such a way
that their very real madnesses appeared mine all that time
and maybe to this day most would still find it easy to say that what they did to me in 2003 as my whole family stood aside
and let me suppurate as incarcerated foully by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty and how it did so
and how it was so neither good for them nor good for me as no one ever let me be neither in 2003 nor EVER since then
and as my monstrous lover of 2004 then took me to her web of evil spidery claw and the horrible things she then did and said
as she treated me badly and without remission and did all those things to me with zero permissions
i am reminded also of the techie folk who in 2002 in virtual sense and right to this day in quite parallel way
attacked me and my reputation it's true as they played their games with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation for it's only the clever who ever wonder why
and only the foolish who can't find it in themselves to ever care more than a minimum expression for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion
and so then it's a fast-forward right to today and christmas 2023 does approach in its way and so now my son is adhd and then a sibling that other thing they say
and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true and my younger relations both clearly that and good and even two others who claim to be hyper-sensitive
when really all they acted out was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish for all their multiple decades and years ... and so we do come finally to the VERY first
being me two decades before the worst when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for and one of utterly beastly yore as i was assigned a violent assessment
of a ridiculously inexact psychosis when if all the above had come fairly to light first of all then first i wouldn't have been without my core
and second the family both sibling and parental and so wider and much more wouldn't have fucked me about
as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet drugged to the eyeballs by a country caring only to treat a clever man like myself
as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside like evil mischief far and wide because dear cousins
and siblings and children and wife and my life that's what you did to the man i should've been
whilst once i defended you all as i tried desperately to be that thing you all needed me to be when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me
but people JUST LIKE YOU who needed far more support than i ever would being far more support than a crutch to a cripple
and so as we come close to 2024 i realise with joy in no way a trickle that i need care for none of you any more at all because what was broken
and splintered and hurt was not my job you see to make complete in the end even then
because i was far less damaged all that time than you and yours and those you claimed were mine and i was far LESS incomplete and far less unseated
and far less nailed to that cross i mentioned before
when talking of awful loss and the cost of not talking to each other as we might've done and the idiocy of hiding
behind the unassessed and never embracing what actually you all were in respect of something that could have been
a completely beautiful diversity to treasure and measure against all other benchmarks where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity
and so this is where i now found myself at last with no right at all to cast any stones
yet equally no duty remaining to ever help out anyone insane enough to want to stay
as a member of this sad sad tribe incapable of realising any of you in time that the very reasons you refused to defend me
were precisely the reasons why you should've protected me and precisely why no longer there's any point in my trying
to work with and for absolutely any of you in health and sickness or any condition left to me
nor in any kind of frame where being together could've been a worthy test of a humanity hugged close
to a seafaring bosun of chests of mysterious pieces of infinity where once upon a time
it was me that was seen to be the really crazed guy when it truth it's me who finds himself now catapulted
into a place of truthfully righteous change because family for me now irreversibly wanes as we all become
as diverse as each other thus meaning right on i am finally released from ever being again your necessary brother
i was born without asking to the country i grew up to love as a britain which deserved the adjective of great because it strove to do good across the political spectrum for every citizen and so i felt proud of being british i did
but now the tawdry and brexit-ridden have renamed my nation-state and i can no longer call myself the nationality i was born to: for i am now officially uk-ish
but what prideful claim can that deliver when -ish becomes a "sort of" instead of a proclamation of historical courage and grit and of the terrible determinations forged in times of awful warfare where everyone of us cared for everyone of us and no one was ever less for owning less
for this is the patriot's lament: how the savagely thoughtless political class we now have upon us brutally operate on us as they do from the boardrooms of foul directorships and sailing-ships run with the dirty monies of foreign largesse embedded and encrusted in a society of the most debilitated
and as it witnesses the illegitimate invasions of not-so-distant lands we must remember that whilst hitler and that other russia (being the same russia after all) were enemies easy to espy and define as such today's dictators of equally abusive bent wear suits of the nicest and tread stages of the finest and rub shoulders with the tech monsters of the cruellest
and so as the patriot i am does lament the falling away of what it once was to be british and proud of the fact with tact too that in a hard world being such was a foundation stone of democracy still as that patriot of kindly encouragement i hold out hope that there may resurge good forces in the land i refuse to rename the uk because myself i never will be uk-ish in that ambiguity of reclusive criminality that i now bear witness to
because being british born and british bred my head tells me i shall always remain conscious of the FOUR nations that SHOULD make up freely our federation of beautiful and collective future-present wisdoms
where the past may no longer need to hang heavily over what we show to the rest of the world and our own heads all may equally be held higher than the recent past allows
for what has been and what we've seen can just as easily be a manual of instructions of what NOT to do as it currently serves those who serve themselves abusively of the rest of us in respect of how better to constrict our aspirations to do good in a world which desperately needs our would: being where we find again the bravery that being british once meant ...
... before the patriot's lament rang out deeply and profoundly riven as it now is with the gravity and sadness of lives disposed of cheaply and carelessly by business and political leaders both who continue to choose the roads of personal enrichment over public service
and so it is and so it may be that all of us being you and me and we together might find that retribution for evil deeds need NOT contain the vengeance of the gods of old for we could remember that british bred and british born and having once been the mother of all parliaments and so fine with this aspiration as we furthered a step-by-step process of moving slowly but utterly sure we may return once again to being ... this GREAT BRITAIN!
My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.
And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.
Mil Willliams, 27th August 2023, Ellesmere Port UK
The difference between feeling secure and feeling safe. With gratitude to my eldest son, Guillermo, who narrates this short.
This is my position:
I will fight, always now, in favour of a state #surveillance and citizen #sousveillance that hand-in-hand serve to be each other’s keeper, where this becomes us and is at all possible.
That is to say, a process of permanent democratic observation — the million eyes of #opensource translated to societal re-engineering — which then exists to support and serve … never intrude and control.
Because this is why I have been condemned since 2017 at least — maybe before, too — to a life of vibrantly incessant failure. I realised then, in that year of Criminal Justice, that there was an alternative to #totalsurveillance and secular #originalsin. And what was more dangerous for the establishment in all of that was that I began to acquire the critical apparatus and appetite to deliver to the academic and technological satisfactions of the vast majority the alternative I had begun to shape:
But I realised this year I am not the only one any more. And actually I never was. After the past year’s events, I have been able to satisfactorily evidence, to myself at least, that I am not the only soul in the world who believes — not just in theory but in goddamn real-life practice — that #surveillance can serve to serve and enhance both the citizen experience and ENJOYMENT of life: not only re its securities, then; also, its deepest and kindliest safeties.
My most important experiences in my life, this year:
In the country I have been visiting since just before Christmas — Sweden — I found a society that had already legislated and implemented regulations in premises that ensured a certain distance between CCTV camera and the citizenry below; that already required private-sector street CCTV to watch only that square metre or so which ensures due and reasonable coverage of entry points; and that, above all, when travelling on public transport all footage thus gathered has public sell-by dates of tens of hours not tens of weeks, is only viewed by the police themselves, and is stationed so it FEELS, ffs, like something you can embrace wholeheartedly as part of a vigorous democracy, not something you must reject out-of-hand as signs of an all-too-evident encroaching authoritarianism.
And with all this, I am actually convinced, without knowing for sure, that they will have as much CCTV as we do in the UK. The difference there being that it’s designed to make citizens feel free and open in their sense of how these securities are intended to function, not imposed on by the overbearing and censorious guardians of the state as many here might feel.
Surveillance as an extension of the citizen then, not the state:
No. Sweden is not perfect. We are not perfect. We have virtues, it is true. So do they. What we can do perfectly, meantime, is learn the best of each other to integrate these things, encountered and assessed judiciously, into the best of our own.
Right now, the UK political system disables this purposeful approach to society-building and their sustaining. The current Swedish government is as right-wing as ours. But it’s not right-wing or left- that has to matter. It’s whether we choose to be questioning, querying, learning beings or not. Whatever are the politics we wish to espouse.
My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.
And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.
If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.
On why we need radically new secrecy-positive architectures | Mil Williams, 24th August 2023, Manchester UK
I think I’m being offered two directions to move forwards definitively on my projects. And I think in my mind it’s clarifying my view on what to do next, where, and how.
I think the two directions can both happen, too.
But for many reasons, only one can happen here in the UK, in Ireland and most other places we consider.
If my thinking isn’t mistaken, the security version must only happen in Sweden and countries which share the philosophy that is embedded firmly in a wider Scandinavian way of foregrounding the citizen and their rights when constructing and rebuilding democracies.
So.
What I think is being suggested:
IVP1
1. My #neurodiverse #complexproblem-solutioning proposals may sit in many and perhaps all cultures eventually. If you like, the B2C product and service, where the “C” of B2C equals “Culture”, and which the Swedish intuition corporation I am proposing we build as per The Guardian newspaper group’s Scott Trust would deliver, mostly, indirectly.
Here, in the wider field of using arts-based thinking for solving real-world problems, therefore, practically anything and anyone gets a hearing:
Meantime, the Swedish corporation I would like us to create would not, as alluded to, be involved directly in even a tenth of all the activities that might arise through this Intuition Validation Project 1 (IVP1), alongside its set of related workstreams.
We would only need to license the rights for using the core technologies and philosophies I’ve been thought-leading since 2016. That’s as far as we would go. No need, for example, to shape how any of this was to be implemented. No longer would there exist roadblocks on any side to arise.
It would, therefore, even be possible to make these platforms and architectures available from the starting-blocks for countries with whose security policies I, and a wider Swedish society quite separately and much before me, fundamentally find ourselves disagreeing on: for example, oppressive manifestations of total surveillance & CCTV, and the complete removal of public access to encryption and so forth, even in banking applications, being the approach the UK has been advocating and wishing to put into practice for decades.
Equally, the Swedish and similar, where total surveillance is employed, use it to enable the citizenry and make them feel safer and more empowered: never to make them sense, as we do get to suspect in the UK, that they are permanently being inspected and tracked in order to bulldoze voters and similar into good behaviours out of tools, primarily, aimed at inducing fear.
Seen in Vällingby tunnelbana station, Stockholm Sweden, 2023
And that’s a philosophical difference of import: in the UK, we trust that people will be bad: that is, secular Original Sin. In other countries, we trust that enabling the help of the citizenry is paramount; we trust that what we might call “good trust” needs to be promoted strategically. Here, then, it’s not enough to be secure at all; we need to be safe, too. We shouldn’t have to be looking over our shoulders all the time. And our policies should reflect this.
One Swedish example to underline: street CCTV on private and state buildings must look down only on the entrance itself to the building being surveilled. No dragnet across all passers-by.
So. If we think like this — IVP1 I mean — there’s no need to negotiate these matters any more, before we may begin, because IVP1 will be in the hands of creators of different kinds, even where what they create may deliver tangible and utilitarian real-world solutions.
And then again, just the one condition too: periodic licence fees, but ourselves, as an intuition-validation corporation, being utterly hands-off.
IVP2
2. Security — the project we might now call IVP2 — is a quite different matter, however.
My Criminal Justice Master dissertation (linked to here), from 2017, on the subject of secular Original Sin*, laid it out really clearly: in an ever more complex world there will be no edge obtained by law enforcement and security if we ensure citizens feel as pursued as the real criminals. The only way we can be collectively more than the bad guys and gals is if we get citizens deeply onside: enabling them to act out their proactive roles as joint defenders of the law. It’s not enough that they just nod their acquiescence to what we claim to be doing when faced by the horrors of modern criminality.
Until countries like the UK accept that our total surveillance-friendly software architectures (admins who see all; users who see nothing but even so are aware, all too aware, how they are being permanently surveilled) have fatally inhibited — impaled, even — our own capacity to think creatively in security, crimefighting and law-enforcement contexts, we cannot develop my ideas in respect of security where such acceptance is not forthcoming.
Because criminals like the Putins of this world do continue to enjoy their own deepest secrecy-positive spaces whilst they longitudinally plan our destruction, despite our own ongoing total surveillance strategies:
You get now, I hope, then, where my objections really lie; where they are firmly seated? If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.
Security for me, therefore, sits where the right philosophies existed prior to my own arrival. And my travails when writing the dissertation in question back in 2017, clearly caused me by British security, indicate, even post-Ukraine, that for quite a while they will not be enabled here in the UK.
To summarise:
IVP1 — just about everywhere
IVP2 — the kind of places and states where new swords may come into being from a prior and existent embedded instinct and impulse to openness and invention in the fields of tech philosophy and architectures
Yeah?
____________________
* Footnote: under total surveillance philosophies we are no longer innocent until proven guilty but incessantly, and permanently, considered guilty, whilst never to be proven innocent again.
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