david griffith - saucepanbach

It’s early Winter here, cold overnight, cool during the day. I’m a bit restricted in movement at present which gives me more time to ‘continue the education.’ 

As a child of the fifties, not long after the Second World War, the images of the barbarity of concentration camps are still clear in my mind. Huge sympathy for the plight of the Jewish people followed. 

The Palestinians and their plight was and has always been eclipsed by the louder voices and far greater power, influence and resources of those who claim to represent the Jewish people – the Zionist State of Israel. 

Anything – any thought I may have and express about this situation and its imbalance will be dismissed as anti-semitic. 

The same cannot be said regarding the voice of Dr. Gabor Maté, a holocaust survivor. 

China receives criticism or rather the bully boy tactics of the Communist Party receives criticism but North Korea is as dark when seen from space as it is from ground level. A hideous version of Orwell’s 1984 plays out. The conversation between Jordan Peterson and Yeonmi Park is as remarkable as it is moving. 

Disclosure regarding UFO activity is in the news as if it actually WERE ‘news’. It’s not, hasn’t been for decades and if the grainy images thus far released are any indication of what is to come then any disclosure is partial at best. We’ll see soon enough.

The lines are getting longer 

For the poor and the dispossessed 

As the men about the kitchen 

juggle sauce for more is less 

And it’s nowhere near better 

As the vultures hold and swoop 

On the nearest hapless fellow 

drinking cruelty  soup ‑ cruelty soup 

Hi ho ‑ here we go 

Another cup of soup you beknighted blighter 

Hi ho ‑ here we go 

No bread roll ‑ draw your belt in tighter 

Hi ho ‑ here we go 

Have you got the strength left to be a fighter 

Toodle ‑oodle ooo ‑ ‑ Toodle ‑oodle ooo 

The beat is getting stronger 

As the war drums coalesce 

And the call goes out for heroes 

Nothing more and nothing less 

And they’ll say the fight is sacred 

And they’ll say that we are right 

And they’ll want to shock and awe you 

 Into...... “ Darkness is Light” ‑ “Darkness IS Light.” 

Hi ho ‑ here we go 

It’s not just happening in a far off country 

Hi ho ‑ here we go 

Take a look around we’re the hundreth monkey 

Hi ho ‑ here we go 

How long .............. how long ....  How long ....... how long 

Will this go on......... The lines are getting longer and they’re getting out of line.  

The ‘how and the why’ of the existing world financial system, the miracle of the freefall collapse of Building 7 on the day of 9/11,  the ‘isms’ of this world and – are we alone? 

“Investigate the Federal Reserve” said Ezra Pound to Eustace Mullins and so he did. The Federal Reserve is privately owned. It’s not in dispute, it’s on the public record although it’s not widely known. What to make of that? 

Does it matter, does it make sense that a government give over to a private concern the ability to issue money and to charge interest to that government for the printing of that money out of – what is now – thin air? Not just one government but all governments are now beholden to a system of Central Banks. Quantitative Easing – it sounds like a financial laxative. 

9/11 – two planes, three towers – I did the maths. More to the point it was late night here when the first plane struck. I’d turned on the news after a late shift at work and watched everything unfold – for perhaps ten hours.  The Pentagon struck by a ‘something’ – we never got a photo. The plane that went down in Shanksville. Much of the world was sleeping, the rest, perhaps, in ‘shock and awe’. 

And the third tower, the forty seven story high tower, the one not hit by a plane, the one that the University of Alaska’s four year study illustrates and concludes that controlled demolition rather than office fires brought it down yet this startling news doesn’t make world headlines. 

Does it matter, doesn’t it make sense to investigate the event which has destroyed and displaced whole societies, has changed the course of humanity. 

And the ‘isms’ which generally appear to lead to totalitarianism. Fascism, Zionism, Nazism and Communism, Imperialism and the notion of national exceptionalism. The bastardisation of Capitalism. 

Does it matter that I have some understanding of ‘isms’ of this world. ‘Extremism’ and where it comes from comes to mind. 

Somehow, in the world of human affairs as I understand it, man’s inhumanity to man is most starkly expressed in our times by Israel’s actions towards the ever diminishing puddles of land which now make up Palestine. This cruelty is driven by a religious extremism which has nothing to do with any God that I would recognise. 

‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ and ‘Do unto others as you’d have done to yourself’ have no place here. 

This isn't a recent depiction of the ongoing theft of Palestinian land but illustrates the nonsense of 70 years and more of peace talks.

I have an old school map of Palestine - had to shine a light on it to get a decent picture. There's symbolism if I needed it.

The Warsaw ghetto is replaced with the Gaza Strip and the mindset of the one oppressor is no different, in essence, to the other.

The Master race and the Chosen people. Debased concepts both.

'climate warming' is replaced by 'climate change' - both are fairly meaningless slogans so I continued my research.

Suspicious Observers present the following:

covid continues as do the plans of men and a new world order in which to place those plans. No

'theory'  about it, it's there.

We have no initiations to speak of in modern day society as opposed to the real variety within tribal cultures.

There's a story behind 'white men have no Dreaming' too long to place here.

'fall of an Empire'

'cruelty soup'

and, of course, the mysterious disappearance of Building 7 from public consciousness

I got my first acoustic guitar in my twenties, got shown a few chords and realised that I don’t need more than that to write songs. 

I don’t consider myself a musician and the gift of a good voice is probably due to being born in Wales where singing is seen as natural. A sense of rhythm is a gift as is the ability to find a melody and, thus, I had the basics to work with and to express some creativity. 

And so I started writing songs but only as the spirit moved me which wasn’t often – perhaps four or five songs a year – after all, one has to have something to say. 

I never had a desire to be a performer, to become famous or to be in the spotlight but the one thing which, I think, is common to all songwriters is the desire to distill enough meaning in a song to connect. 

When it comes to passion, it was in the creative process that that passion was found. That is a true joy. 

So – what to do with the songs becomes the question. Years went by and my daughter and her friends were old enough to go to the ‘blues’ nights at local pubs. With the exuberance of youth they’d ask me along, to bring my guitar and ‘have a go.’ 

I’ve never been particularly sociable so this was a huge hurdle to overcome and took ‘ages’ before I managed to pluck up the courage but it eventually happened. It helped that they liked what I’d written and so I had a few gorgeous girls to serve as back-up singers and my daughter’s boyfriend to play his guitar. 

My thoughts at this time were to send the songs to established singers but this is easier said than done. Fate stepped in and Bob Spencer – well known in Australia – literally lived a street away and was setting up a studio. He put a small advertisement in the local paper which I saw and we met up. That was the start of the recording process and my thoughts were still along the lines of sending the songs to established singers but, at least, they’d be in a presentable form. 

Bob was excellent both as a musician and a producer. I’d put down the basic song, guitar and vocal, to a metronome and then he’d get rid of my guitar – it wasn’t good enough to be used and I’m not precious about needing my name on the credits as a musician – and that would be our starting point. 

I loved the process of recording and, more often than not, three ‘takes’ of the vocals were sufficient and then it was over to Bob who was able to call upon fine musicians to flesh out the finished song. 

Then the process of artwork and the manufacture followed. This has been the same process for the following cds with the last one being produced by Eliot Reynolds and, again, I didn’t use my own guitar for the same reason that I didn’t for the other cds. 

Over the years I did start playing more in public, enjoyed it and found other people happy to join me on stage. 

What to do with these songs led me to CDBaby and then to Hostbaby and now to Bandzoogle as a hosting platform. 

Basically nothing happened with the songs but, then again, I never promoted them and contented myself with not using social media and perhaps naively believing that if the songs were good enough that they’d connect along the way. 

Then the virus arrived and I made all the songs free as digital downloads because – I could. 

Got a new guitar a few weeks back – a beautiful, mahogany topped smallish Sigma acoustic complete with electrics. I dropped into the music shop in Katoomba a few days ago to give them some feedback on the guitar and to give them a few cds. Explaining that I had a cupboard full of cds and heads turned and a chorus of ‘… so have I’ echoed back to me. 

Life’s a funny creature. Has music been a success for me? Depends upon how one measures success. 

If that saying …’As above, so below’ is true then the intelligences operating though out the galaxies are just as prone to despotic or wonderful behaviour as is mankind. Perhaps our example on Earth ripples out across space and time and has real effect. 

And so – we live short lives and my allotted three score years and ten approaches. Not all my songs are cheerful but neither is life. 

I loved the songs when I wrote them, have made them freely available on the website and will leave it at that.

“Reincarnation of living Buddhas including the Dalai Lama must comply with Chinese laws.” ... so says an article put out by the Chinese embassy in the Republic of Iceland during 2020. 

Hmm … from a political party which disavows spirituality and raises its present leader to Emperor status … almost godlike but … the Emperor has no clothes. 

Perhaps the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ isn’t familiar within China. 

That ‘Party line’ approach to that which is divine, that which sustained Chinese culture through times of good and atrocious emperors alike is obscenely cynical. 

I don’t know whether there’s any real difference between the 1984 dystopian future offered by a Chinese system of total surveillance, social credit scores along with the obligatory ‘Big Brother’ sinister overtones and what is appearing before all of us as …. a combination of ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984’ approaches, one that few asked for and which gives us much the same as that which those novels indicated. 

 ‘Maximise profit’ is the mantra of all corporate entities which is why I instinctively turn away from that lust which knows few bounds. Globalism, to me, has come to mean a corporate capitalism where a world-wide Uber economy prevails. It’s what already exists. It provides no hope. 

The following quote has stuck in the back of my mind for .. ages. It’s a niggle made all the more pertinent because of the deeply divisive times in which we live. 

Did CIA Director William Casey really say, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”? 

According to Barbara Honegger, 

“I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration. The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President. Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the 'intelligence' that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines. As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public.” 

I watched a very informative documentary about the CIA – “Inside the CIA – On Company Business.” which dovetailed with the information given by John Perkins in his book ‘Confessions of an Economic hitman.’ 

It’s a lurid title for a book but its contents detail involvement in the ‘shaping’ of South American governments to suit U.S. purposes. 

I have these thoughts in my mind, how very little is ‘accidental’ in world affairs, how fragile all our societies have become. 

Point being that Empire is Empire where the same tools are used whether it’s dressed in the fine garments of the Republic or the Party. 

Meanwhile real effects cascade out from the virus, from societies through the Middle East already destroyed by … manipulated shenanigans. 

2021 is already a catastrophe for many. 

And yet and thankfully, I’m moved by a street busker who sings so beautifully that the hair stands up on my arms. 

Meanwhile diversity is embraced but only if one’s views agree with the prevailing narrative. ‘Political correctness’ is an abysmal mindset in which free speech is shut down rather than debated. That approach doesn’t solve anything and, ultimately, you can’t legislate to make people like or tolerate each other. 

What happened to ‘I have a dream … where people are judged by the content of their character …’ 

There is no differentiation made between personality and character – not that I’m sure that there ever was.

no offence intended.