Its all gone fermental!

I started back on the fermenting this weekend, with a session with Scotty G – one straight red cabbage and one mix of white cabbage, onion, carrot and garlic. Its got to be one of the easiest things in the world to do, and what with having a mate that likes doing the same sort of stuff, we've managed to make it into a bit of a social too (permaculture principle – each element has two or more functions). I like the aftermath. Listening to these mason jars whining and fizzing away as bacterial life begins to 'happen' – it's kind of immense in these days of sterile, homogenised food production that these little jars are bucking the trend. Shell keeps telling me I should do something about my guts – not sure if upping my intake of these bad boys is going to change things. I guess its a matter of eat it and see.....

So, while I aim to at least rebalance my food intake, my sights rest on another unhealthy consumption in my life. It can make me feel lethargic, hopeless, anxious and worried. It fucks with my mind, and renders me, often apoplectic with rage. Rolling news.

The aftermath of the Paris massacres have been strewn with opinion and debate – and what happened was of course horrendous, as are the stories from any terrorist activity anywhere at any time. I watch now, however, and shudder at how misinformed at best, how manipulative at worst the news machine is. Seeing Steve Emerson on Fox News say that the UK's 2^nd city is a Muslim only, no go area, would have been funny if it wasn't so serious. People are gonna take that 'information' seriously. This in turn forms public opinion, which politicians and media will pander to in order to be re-elected, and entrench their positions. Forget life imitating art, lets look at mass media forming public opinion. And before we go on by the way, the most likely thing to happen on a visit to Birmingham, UK is you'll get a great chicken Balti – it ain’t the new Fallujah.

The only thing that will come of these latest terrorist attacks will be the further erosion of civil liberties. If we look at the NSA, phone tapping scandals and identity card schemes, our great leaders are hardly without form. It is something that government is keen on as gives even more control, and power to the elites, which includes those at the top in the media. The inevitable horror that follows our misadventures in the Middle East simply solidifies and entrenches the belief that we need to carry on as we are. A bit of terrorism on mainland Europe suits government. We'll be begging for further security measures here, and further interaction over there, and it seems to me, the spiral of death and destruction will simply continue, along with the fringe benefits. Put simply, most Muslims aren't psychopaths, most politicians and media corporation owners are.

So fear, and the way the news spreads it through sensationalism and sheer volume will always push it's own agenda, what suits the elites, owners and stakeholders. We are given opinion everyday from a completely skewed angle, and it only reinforces a designed viewpoint. Unfortunately those that do the pushing of these agendas appear to be tyrants and lunatics themselves, the disenfranchised and weak suffer for their ambitions. The 'story' is written by those in power and gives the disenfranchised and the desperate a hymn sheet to sing from, a hopeless purpose and one that keeps this whole circus going.

So, I'll try not to ponder on this stuff too long, and instead I'll let you know how the ferments go. The purple one is really making a racket, and a mess as the life forming within pushes forth. In the meantime, I'll turn that news off, or at least select my news sources as carefully as possible. Who knows, maybe a diet of less nonsense and more joy will help my mind as much as these jars of kraut help my gut. I think Shell just wants me to stop farting so much...