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Tuesday 12 December 2017
Tuesday 28 November 2017
257. BrEXIT (Brown girl Exit)
I’m winding up for 2017 so here’s to 2018 focusing
on people who really need our help. Hopefully, we’ll see Trump’s impeachment and
more effort to stem ecological damage. Sadly for the UK, it seems there is no
undoing BREXIT and you can’t impeach xenophobia, self-interest and stupidity…
But, it’s the season of Good Will and Bad Debt – so check
out my favourite old Christmas post – Drink
Driving with my Dad & other Happy Memories. http://browngirloutsidethering.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/blog-22-drink-driving-with-my-dad-other.html
A x
Tuesday 21 November 2017
256. BLACK FRIDAY & THE CURSE OF THE CHRISTMAS SCENTED CANDLE
I CAN SAVE YOU.
Yes. Nothing says I bought this because - you bought
me something last year / we’re distantly related / we once worked together / I
don’t really know you well enough to buy something you’d actually like / I had
to buy something and I know there is nothing you need/want/haven’t already got
that I’d be willing to spend my hard earned money on and my credit card is
glowing red so I thought of flames while I was shopping and THEY ARE IN EVERY
STORE in the section marked ‘DESPERATION’ and it has a Christmas logo on it and
it was either this or gloves because it's REALLY important
that I buy you some shit – so here’s a Christmas scented candle…
As Brits across the nation quake with dread at the
approach of the debilitating, highly contagious and often deadly US disease BF
I have good news for you. Not the bible sort of Good News obviously.
Yes – the highs streets (or cyber-highways) will be
dark indeed with the swarms of desperate humans burning more credit onto their nearly-dead
this-isn’t-real-money cards. Even the gaping holes, where large stores such as
BHS used to operate before the owner asset-stripped them and their pension
schemes to fund another couple of yachts, will probably be tinselled-up like
seasonal prostitutes.
Yes. The ridiculously large, often vanilla scented CHRISTMAS CANDLE.
It will probably be in a glass jar with a ye olde label and some silver lettering.
It may have more than one wick! It will be so big that lighting it will pose a
fire hazard for houses in a 200m radius and the chemical fumes will dissolve
the lining of your lungs and keep wildlife away from your home for the next
decade. But SOMEONE out there is probably going to get you one and they are
probably going to do it this Friday. Or – in your desperation to get SOMETHING
for SOMEONE on your list you may be tempted. Black Friday. The Friday that may henceforth
forever be Vanilla Scented Catastrophe Friday.
So just tell them you’d like a book instead. Or you
get them a book.
Yes books too are a bit flammable but generally
speaking you don’t deliberately set fire to them and they aren’t full of
horrible chemicals that will give you a migraine and they don’t reek of Black
Friday desperation and debt.
And yes – this is a pitch. If you don’t buy my books
how will I be able to afford to buy scented candles?
check them out here -
check them out here -
NB All new 2017 editions are significantly cheaper than the old editions. YOU
COULD BUY BOTH ADULT NOVELS AND THE ENTIRE ADVENTURE TRILOGY FOR LESS THAN ONE M&S CHRISTMAS CANDLE… though
the candle in question does feature x3 wicks!!!
Tuesday 14 November 2017
255. BREXIT makes sense - with my brand new parlour game...
My brand new parlour game is called OPPOSITES -
STUPID and it will save your sanity. If only I’d thought of this before. How easy. How
obvious.
I have bemoaned a sense of living in a parallel
universe before on this blog. You look around you and your eyes, ears and
common sense tell you one thing but the government and elements of the pop
press tell you the opposite. It’s like standing in your living room looking out
of the window at an ice storm while a firm, jolly, slightly condescending but
insistent voice right behind you is booming out that THE SUN IS SHINING AND
IT’s A BEAUTIFUL DAY. The voice is so unrelenting that you begin to doubt
yourself.
The oft repeated and up-beat statement, there are
more people in work than ever before, should no longer fry your brain. You no
longer need to feel dizzy as you contemplate the number of adults you know who
can’t get a proper job or are on a dead-end zero hours contract or are working
at many many levels below their ability because even though they have £60k of
student debt having obtained (for example) a good science degree, they can only
find work as a part time pool attendant (like the son of a friend of mine). You
no longer even need to consider the millions in employment who, nevertheless,
rely on benefits to live.
Don’t worry if, contrary to the government
declaiming that the economy is in good shape, you are now paying £1.40 for an
item in the supermarket that 14 months ago cost you 98p.
The
Brexit vote was the result of the democratic will of the people
is a mesmeric mantra for both The Government and The Opposition (I don’t
think I need bother putting in the ‘so-called’ prefix there). So, if you squirm
every time you hear that phrase because you can see with your human eyes and
your developed Homo-sapiens brain that Brexit was the result of xenophobia,
stupidity, blatant racism, lies, an opposition vacuum and a lot of people not
paying attention – worry no more. Just play OPPOSITES - STUPID.
It works with government.
Heading up our 3-day-old road kill of an
administration is the self-proclaimed Strong and Stable leader Theresa May. She
is the weakest wobbliest most ineffectual premier besides whom a bowl of
blancmange would look prim-ministerial. But in our new O-S game even she is a
logical manifestation.
Boris Johnson is a racist buffoon whose mouth is the
gateway to such a bottomless pit of stupidity and vile, privileged rot one can
only imagine that what lies within bears some resemblance to the swamp that
gave us The Creature from the Black Lagoon. But when you are playing OPPOSITES-
STUPID it entirely makes sense to have a tactless, idiotic clown representing us around the globe.
Michael Gove is currently Environment Secretary but
was formerly Brexit flag-waver and would-be leader. He is the guy who sneered
at the over-reliance on ‘experts’. Well, Britain is most assuredly cured of
anything that looks like expertise now.
Last weekend Gove happily and
moronically joined Boris Johnson in their favourite game of foot-in-mouth thus
causing dangerous diplomatic difficulties for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British
citizen whose life hangs in the balance in an Iranian jail.
Our new Defence Secretary knows nothing about the
military and nothing about ministerial representation in The House. But (see
last week’s post) it’s ok now to learn on the job even if that job is head of the nation’s defence. Yes, with O-S it starts to seem less and less odd
that these incompetent morons who you would not normally leave in charge of the
cat are running (ruining!) our lives.
Our Brexit Secretary David Davis (and let’s face it
if you come from a family that can’t even come up with more than one name for
their offspring – what hope is there) is a gurning mediocrity. And when playing
OPOSITES - STUPID it makes sense that a gurning mediocrity with an apparently
limited vocabulary is in charge of the most important negotiation Britain has
seen since Chamberlain arrived back from visiting Hitler claiming “peace in our
time”
Liam Fox – darling of the right – was embroiled in a
money+favours-for-a-chum-while-abroad scandal. So, why shouldn’t he be
Secretary of State for International Trade? Why should we be incredulous when
he says that a trade deal with the EU should be “the easiest in history”
Then set against this three-wheel supermarket
trolley of incompetents we have the so-called opposition in the form of (oh
God) Jeremy Corbyn.
Yes – Corbyn - the man who failed to unequivocally campaign for Remain
– or anything else comprehensible for that matter - because he didn’t really
know if he was for or against the EU. He had a vague idea from his (seemingly
never ending) student politics days that he thought the EU was a capitalist
conspiracy damaging the good old British workers’ jobs. Now he just stands up
and goes neh neh nene neh to anything the government says and he’s in a bind
because – for example – as anyone with three brain cells could have told him –
the NHS – Labour’s touchstone when all else fails to rally the troops – is totally
fucked without EU workers. He is, as Opposition Leader what King Canute was to the
rising tide. But yes – when playing OPPOSITES - STUPID even Jeremy Corbyn makes
sense.
Thank goodness that’s sorted…
*
Re: the latest tax dodging revelations of the rich,
famous and morally grubby The Herald published another short letter of mine on
that subject
*
And remember – if you are already
looking for stocking fillers that aren’t vanilla scented candles or ‘novelty’
jumpers/socks/ties or even more things that need plugging in or things they’ll
never wear or shouldn’t eat or don’t have room for – do check out my adult
novels, kids adventure trilogy, sci-fi novella, environmental poetry story,
picture book or even my sort-of-autobiography in new/cheaper 2016/17 editions
Tuesday 7 November 2017
254. Sex sleaze at Westminster + Gavin Williamson + Brexit = proof that Britain is now in the dementia wing of the la la land hospital for incontinent, delusional ex-empires.
Grubby scandals, overreach, ineffectual leadership,
unnecessary wars, poor judgement, economic Armageddon, the rise and rise of
mediocrity. Not necessarily in that order. It’s all there as it was with the
Greek, Roman, Ottoman etc empires.
We had the overreach internationally with
the illegal invasion of Iraq - the direct consequences are far from played out.
We had the financial overreach, the consequences peaking in the financial crash
of 2008 – far from played out. As a preliminary to the current governmental
grimy sexual scandal we had the MPs expenses scandal. Then on June 23rd
2016 the UK leaned heavily on the big red self-destruct button and now it’s stuck
in the ON position.
Yes, with Brexit full steam ahead to the cliff edge
we have Westminster embroiled in a seedy who-touched-whom soap opera. MPs are
fiddling – in a different way this time - while Rome (excuse the very accurate
pun) burns.
Neither have we missed out on the rise of the
ambitious but limp. Gavin Williamson appears to have made himself head of
Britain’s Defence with a mixture of crawling toadyism, chameleon abilities to
switch from one administration to another and having, as chief Tory whip,
access to the list of his MP’s sexual misconduct and therefore prior knowledge
of who would be resigning any time soon. To make up for whatever he is lacking, it is reported that he keeps a pet tarantula on his desk – called Kronos for
heaven’s sake. Because what we really need is to be reminded that we are going
down the same sink hole as another once admired and powerful civilistaion.
This was the letter published in the press (you know
what a mania I have for letters to editors – see blog 244)
Dear
Editor,
Goofy
Gavin Williamson is exactly what UK politics needs right now. Another
inexperienced but crawlingly ambitions, intellectually mediocre white bloke who
knows how to suck up to whichever non-entity is in power while having no
comprehension of his own limitations and careless of his aptitude for the job.
It’s
not the tarantula on the new Defence Secretary’s desk MPs need to worry about
(there, I presume, for the same reason runty men buy dangerous dogs)- it’s the
blank behind the eyes…
This is how empires end. Not from external pressure
but from the rot within.
OK – no one is arguing that Britain is an empire now
or since WWII but we certainly remained at the top table, the first class
carriage, the 5 star hotel – long after ‘letting the servants go’ long after
the shine had worn off, long after the
bank vaults were emptied and the tatty jewellery sold off. But now we have
entered that era of self-destruct which is where all the energy seems to be
going. In this we are not original. Look at every empire from the Ottoman
Empire to Charlemagne to the good ol’ Romans we loved to read about at school
with their straight roads, togas and Russel Crowe.
I listen with increasing incredulity (and you know
my incredulity levels are already at bursting point) to the binary chit chat on
the radio about trade opportunities post-Brexit. Even the Remainers are
struggling to find something positive to say while the Brexiters continue
happily in their parallel universe where shutting yourself out of the £240billion
of exports to the EU will be replaced by selling Haggis to Canada and whisky to
China.
Self-destruction,
unnecessary conflict, corrosive corruption, endemic incompetence, obsessive
focus on self and almost unstoppable sexual scandal and predatory sexual
behaviour, financial over-extension, falling standards, failing institutions,
moral and social decay, failure of leadership, excessive military spending
coupled with lack of investment, a wealthy elite exploiting cheap labour
hampering general development and prosperity, internal bickering. Need I go on?
Once the mediocre and self-serving have risen all the way to the top a
single sound rises above the cacophony and you can hear the fat lady singing.
All empires end this way…
*
How about a free book for light relief?
The one that got away in the last giveaway is
finally clear of techno-gremlins so click on the link to my author page below
and grab yourself a free kindle copy of Eating
the Vinyl (from this Thursday 9th Nov to Monday 13th)
If you don’t want light relief then buy Zero One Zero Two – same link
Or choose from the smorgasbord of paperback books
for Christmas presents
Tuesday 31 October 2017
253. Souls for sale?
State capture is the 21st century equivalent
of 19th century exploitation of natural national resources for
private gain. Art – however – remains the preferred acquisition for money
grubbing moguls, wealth plundering dictators and nation-exploiting oligarchs who’d
like to pretend they have a soul.
Trump is proof that attendance at an Ivy league college
doesn’t make you intelligent. Our own racist foreign secretary Boris Johnson is
proof that being able to speak pop latin doesn’t make you cultured. Equally, it
is true that purchasing the most expensive art on the market will not buy you a
soul.
There's a tired and oft repeated scene in tedious copycat
Hollywood disaster movies. It shows a 'priceless’ piece of art being loaded into a crate or onto a helicopter to be hidden away in a bunker during the plague /alien /
environmental / asteroid / zombie apocalypse. What this is supposed to tell us other than a few people
got their priorities wrong is unclear. Why would cockroaches that give
a damn about The Mona Lisa after we've wiped ourselves out (see last week's happy post).
Many social commentators believe we are entering a new
‘Gilded Age’. This term was coined by Mark Twain in 1873 and described the gap (especially in the US) between obscenely wealthy families and – well –
everyone else - the glimmer of gold on the surface and the corruption and degradation beneath.
Just like the Rokerfellers and Vanderbilts, the new wave of
grabbers of nations’ wealth are outstripping the term itself by quite a distance.
Being a billionaire is no longer a rarity. However, being dirt poor or the
victim of unsanitary conditions, human traffiking or disastrous environmental damage or pollution
is no further from being a thing of the past than it was in the 1800s and early1900s.
Just like then – modern day billionaires love nothing
better than to buy expensive art. Maybe they are trying to purchase the souls
or creativity or humanity they know they lack. Then some build large expensive
private galleries and museums to show the work of artists who probably never made a decent living from their inspiration and creativity while alive.
Many do not do the display thing. They simply buy
and hoard to show that they can. It's not second rate stuff. Private collections contain works by truly great and globally famous artists. Check out The Art Wolf http://www.theartwolf.com/articles/most-valuable-private-art.htm Works of art by
geniuses such as Caravaggio and Holbein the Younger, Titian and even Leonardo
da Vinci – are denigrated to a collector’s hobby – like collecting bottle caps.
Another great trick of faux philanthropy is when those riddled with wealth ‘loan’ their collections to galleries and museums. In case you hadn’t
noticed this is standard euphemism for –
I don’t really want to share my expensive stuff but neither do I want to pay
the insurance.
And all they prove is that you can accrue eye watering
wealth and still lack understanding. You can be so rich you don’t know how rich
you are and yet lack basic humanity and insight. If these (predominantly) men
think they are displaying their excellent good taste or refinement, indulging rarefied
exhibitionism bought with money obtained from murky sources, while children starve and the world goes to hell in a hand cart, they are no better than the blocks of granite and concrete
used to construct their art mausoleums.
Tuesday 24 October 2017
252 A real horror story for this Halloween…
An actual horror story is reaching its zenith around
us right now. It is a fearful, shocking, blood-curdling saga of environmental
cataclysm, species collapse and millions of agonizing human deaths from
pollution. The nightmare scenario which should give us all sleepless nights
this Halloween makes The Walking Dead
look like a fairy tale.
Unfortunately with the entirely unnecessary chaos of Brexit this side of the Atlantic and the fatal distraction of Trump on the other, two previously leading nations that should be playing for team planet right now are not.
An author question popped into my in-box on Goodreads
the other day. ‘Can you tell us a horror story in two lines?’ Micro horror has
been fashionable for a while and I am impressed to see that there is a plethora
of well written and inventive writing boiled down to this even more minute scale.
However, when I tried to think of something
genuinely frightening – what came to mind was the German scientists’ report
last week of a 75% decrease in the winged insect population over the last two
and half decades. Apparently they were
initially alerted by motorists reporting the lack of dead insects on car
windscreens (yuk).
If you were a driver before the turn of the 21st
century, you will recall disgusting splattered windscreens when driving in the summer. Often, at the height of the summer, wipers
would become useless as the windscreen became a mess of insect gore. This
spawned jokes such as -
Q - “what is
the last thing that goes through a fly’s mind as he hits your windscreen?”
A – “his arse”.
Who has not noticed the absence of butterflies and bees in their gardens
or open spaces over the last decade? But apparently common sense and observation is not enough. I
remember the old tobacco industry arguments - there is no PROOF that cigarettes
cause lung cancer! No – just families with prematurely dead relatives.
Last week I bemoaned the nonsense of hugely
expensive inquiries – which often achieve nothing and tell us a fraction of
what was evident in this or that disaster. Might we hope that abundant scientific
evidence of our rush to self-annihilation will work differently? I hope so. If we
cannot look around us and just accept that the diesel fumes we can smell and
taste day long are killing us – then let’s at least believe the scientists who
inform us that diesel fumes are killing 1000 people a year in the UK. If we
cannot look around and shiver at the absence of those species, without which
the food chain we rely on will collapse and which we took for granted so few
years ago, let’s at least believe the scientists and statisticians. But however
we come to the increasingly obvious conclusions let’s for God’s sake and the survival of humanity DO
SOMETHING NOW.
We know the ice-caps are melting and weather
weirding has been caused by rising sea temperatures. WE KNOW. Further
acidification of our oceans harming popular fish such as cod was also announced
last week. Globally, scientists estimate pollution kills 9 million humans a
year. In some areas pollution deaths outstrip road accidents, smoking related
deaths and AIDs.
The ‘two sentences’ I contributed to Goodreads’ call
for miniature Halloween horror were, in fact, extracted from part II of my recently published epic
environmental poetry story Casey &the
Surfmen
Burning wind scorched the earth
which was barren and grey,
no sun arose, no new day,
no moon of silver and shimmering
white
consecrated the velvet night.
No sound but the scream of the mutilated
earth
and the howl of The One who was
there at its birth,
no noise but the weeping of babes in
the womb,
no laughing but the chuckles from
the tomb.
If you like your pending apocalypse in the form
of a dystopian sci-fi novella – try Zero
One Zero Two. Judging by recent reports, my only mistake with this last
piece was setting it too far in the future.
Tuesday 17 October 2017
251. Politicians have unemployed themselves…
…so let’s all have a massive refund.
Yes – I had another of my blinding revelations –
huge cosmic insights and general headache-inducing flashes of brilliance (or
maybe it was something I ate?)
I was mulling over the rash of un-elected
‘government’ organisations, drain blocking number of public inquiries and the
wholesale outsourcing of government services and it hit me like a big, wet,
rotten fish.
We no longer need politicians. Government itself is
outsourced. From contractors doing cheap jobs on road maintenance to companies
found to be abusing vulnerable and elderly people in care homes – outsourcing
is a known disaster but continues to grow exponentially. The only possible
benefit to the public is a massive tax rebate – funded by eliminating clearly irrelevant
‘government’.
In the face of the horror of Grenfell tower – for
example - there was the initial deluge of information about what had not been
done – which local politicians had never in fact visited a high-rise – the crazy
catalogue of safety issues that had been blatantly ignored for years and so on.
Instead of an honest indictment of the whole bloody shower of local and
national politicians who allowed or helped create the environment for this to
happen, including ex-chancellor George Osborne – see my letter to the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/17/local-community-should-set-up-their-own-grenfell-fire-inquiry we got another inquiry at huge public
expense. An inquiry – to find out what
happened which has become the standard euphemism for kick the ball down the road to a time politicians hope public anger and
shock will have subsided. Because – for some reason – even though its
bloody obvious – it’s better not to reach conclusions and set about putting
things right – it is, politicians decided, much better to get a posh establishment
figure – who (see blog 240) may not be the most appropriate person for the job
– to spend months and millions of public money (that could have been spent on
public services) so that he can tell the public a fraction of what we already
knew. And do inquiries into disasters result in serious reformative action? Iraq inquiry anyone?
Companies such as G4S and SERCO are awarded huge and long-term
government contracts despite acknowledged crap service, dangerous practice and
poor value. They are the problem.
In June 2012 UNISON published a report showing that
bringing services back into local government control could improve quality and
lower cost. It is hard not to conclude that the only remaining reasons for
outsourcing is to slough off responsibility and have a third party to blame
when things go wrong while also channelling tidal waves of public money into
private hands.
Way back when I was a city councillor in Newcastle –
councillors did not get paid. An allowance of sorts could be applied for – though
for people like me – with children – when there was little or no childcare
provision – even claiming for the odd allowance left me out of pocket. Unlike
many, I would not just turn up to the first 5 mins of a meeting so that I could
collect multiple allowances as was common. I did get sent to Coventry by the
then leader Jeremy Beecham for publically complaining about the abuse of the allowance
system and the ludicrous expenditure of some senior or favoured councillors.
However – now councillors do get paid; in part – I suspect – the stop that kind
of abuse. Aint it odd that for people in power – when they do wrong they get
more. It works the other way round for everyone else. But now –huge swathes of
public goods and services are out to tender with private firms. Many not based
in the UK – so much for the Brexiteers re-claiming our borders...
In 2013-14 (47th report) the
Public Accounts Committee stated –
More
and more public services are being contracted out to private and voluntary
providers. Government spends £187 billion (estimated at
242 billion by January 2017) on goods and
services with third parties each year, around half of which is estimated to be
on contracting out services. Government retains responsibility for ensuring
value for money and we, on behalf of the taxpayer, need to be able to follow
the taxpayers’ pound, wherever it is spent.
This conjures up an image of some grey civil servant
wandering the corridors of power aimlessly whistling and shouting ‘here poundy
poundy – where are you?’ Is this what government is in 21st century Britain?
Do we simply let public money leak into
private hands with diminishing returns, less accountability and less value for
the taxpayer while employing people to tell us which sewer our money has been
flushed down? Meanwhile we are paying politicians and civil servants to GOVERN,
to MANAGE. When did it happen that we were paying them simply to pass the buck
and tell us where it went?
Obviously we’d keep a couple of spare politicians
for the obligatory photo opportunity. Last week – for example – dead woman
walking Theresa May and creepy polished git Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt turned
up unannounced (to staff at any rate – I wonder why) at the trust where my
middle daughter is an overworked doctor in an understaffed hospital. They were
there for a self-congratulatory photo shoot in an NHS building – proving that
there is no level of incompetence, shame, irony, no self-questioning, no
humility, no depths to which some politicians will not sink for self-aggrandisement.
Hunt can get his, I’m-alright-Jack self, photographed in an increasingly
privatised public service institution that probably hates his guts more than I
hate dog shit on my shoe. So ok – we’ll keep a couple of politicians in an old cardboard box in a musty cupboard somewhere for occasions like that. But otherwise – as I’ve said – why keep them?
Maybe our young people could use their refunds to
pay off their life-crushing student debts?
Tuesday 10 October 2017
250. “The Earth is Pissed Off” Neil De Grasse Tyson - sept 2017
This is what acclaimed US astrophysicist and author
Neil De Grasse Tyson said on MSNBC in response to questions about the record
breaking weather events around the globe and the global environmental crisis we
are happily ignoring. Obviously we’d be better off listening to shaved potato Scott Pruitt or a piece of floating lint – such is our current disregard for
the expert, the intelligent, the experienced, highly educated commentator.
Instead we elect moronic celebrities and elevate
charlatans and self-serving sociopaths to the highest offices. Certainly that
is the case in the US and the UK (see last week’s post). Our own head of environmental
matters – gargoyle Gove sneered and denigrated ‘experts’ during the EU
referendum as if one way to rid the world of its problems would be to round up
all the clever, articulate, concerned men and women who know their subject,
and get rid of the lot. Oh – yeah – I forgot – they actually did do that with
the US Environmental Protection Agency. Silly me.
It is difficult for some of us to comprehend that the
ecological destruction and planetary damage which could wipe out humanity is
not the top of every agenda. You cannot escape the obvious however, that people
in general are behaving like we have already colonised other worlds and are
just sorting out the travel arrangements – like students about to move to new
digs who cannot be bothered to flush the loo, clean their beer off the carpet,
wash up or remove the strange blueish orange fur from the back of the fridge.
When are people going to stop confusing tame Hollywood pop-corn accompaniments
with reality?
There was a small success for common sense here last
week when the Scottish Parliament finally decided to ban Fracking. In the ‘home
of the brave’ – a country that will have far more impact on the environment
than the wee ‘home of Braveheart’ the ex-governor of Oklahoma, a climate change
denier and mad keen fracker Scott Pruitt was put in charge of the US
Environmental Protection Agency. This is a man soaked in oil money as deeply as
Macbeth was seeped in blood (see blog 220 Trump
v Mexico and why the US is literally breaking). He is – right now – in the
process of cancelling President Obama’s clean air act. Because – who needs
clean air?
Whether on a global, national or local level the
behaviour of humans to their immediate or wider environment is tantamount to
setting fire to the bed you are lying in. In my own locale the tree-phobic morons and
concrete cretins are out in force – chopping down mature trees or paving over
previously grassed areas (see blog 236 Does
Edinburgh need a tree museum) Last Saturday morning played out to the drone
of a large buzz saw as more gaps appeared in the decades-old arboreal curtain that screens the gardens that back on to each other in my area. Yes – in Scotland folk
cut mature trees from their gardens to ‘improve’ their surroundings and let in
the light. That would be the light that shines between 12 noon and 3pm the
third Wednesday in June…
It is time – as I’ve said before – to speak to these
people on their own terms. Don’t talk about destroying the planet – or their children’s environment – they clearly don’t care. Talk to them about – for example – the
value of their homes. Stupid people value money above all other things (Donald
Trump) The daftest, TV addled idiot could understand that – in the not too
distant future – even on the basis of scarcity – being able to sell a
house with a ‘mature tree’ in the garden – a real live one – will be an added
value – a rarity – a bloody sensation.
At the risk of boring my lovely readers I’ll repeat
and repeat – can we start pointing out to those who don’t give a shit because
they don’t think it will affect them – the planet will be here long after we’re
gone (see my dystopian novella Zero One
Zero Two). We are not destroying it for good simply long enough to make it
uninhabitable for humans. For us. Once we’re gone it will recover. Thing is –
the day of reckoning is getting exponentially closer.
As Neil De Grasse Tyson also said, “Nature is giving
us a shot across the bows”. We need to take notice.
The recent decision of the Scottish Parliament is
heartening. On a personal level because I performed part of my environmental
epic story poem Casey & the Surfmen
in the Scottish Parliament for environment week earlier this year but also
because it seems someone is listening. Someone is taking note, and someone is
taking action in a world where the lunatics have overrun the asylum. It is a
tiny action and it will not help tackle the plasticisation of our oceans, the
warming that is ensuring record breaking hurricanes, the air pollution which is
damaging our children’s physical and mental development right now - today. It
will not stop the catastrophic and cumulative species extinctions, it will not
re-grow the forests we need to breathe, but it is a step and it is a good one.
Let’s take many, many more steps and strides, quicker
and faster and bigger and better, before it’s too late.
*
Both Casey
& the Surfmen and Zero One, Zero
Two can be found on my author page
https://www.amazon.com/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E
Tuesday 3 October 2017
249. Boris Johnson personifies laughing-stock Britain.
Some things are complicated and some things are not.
If you want to understand why the UK has become a nation to sneer at on the
world stage – look no further than Boris Johnson.
On this blog I aim to criticise/satirise policy, not the
person. However, with Boris Johnson there is little division between who he is, what
he is, the damage he does and the wrongness he epitomises. Therefore, it’s fair
to say that he is a disgusting, disastrous man who should not be trusted to
sweep the streets never mind make the policies by which those who live on the
streets of Britain live.
As a racist, our Foreign Secretary has form – insulting President Barack Obama – using terms such as pickaninni –and
so on and so forth. He has publicly indulged his own racist ditties and more recently he had to be silenced when he
inappropriately began reciting colonial poetry in troubled Myanmar.
Ministerial code 7.12 apparently prevents minsters
from inappropriately using government resources. The code did not stop Johnson
hosting a right-leaning think tank meeting in the Foreign Office.
Johnson recently re-stated the acknowledged falsehood about £350 million of monies going weekly to the EU. And while being
lambasted for misusing statistics (what we in the real world call lying) this odious bladder sack of
amoral offal still fills one of the highest offices in the land.
But it didn’t start there. As Britain’s reputation drops
further, smeared in Johnson’s most recent political defecations, the stench of
some of his nonsense while Mayor of London still reeks. An estimated £40
million of public funds was wasted on his vanity project, the unnecessary and
ridiculous and never-likely-to-happen garden bridge.
Elitism, privilege and misuse of state wealth that
would make a Russian Oligarch blush has not dislodged Johnson, protected as he is
by his wealth and privilege and Eton pals. As his racism, buffoonery, moral
failings, repeated foot-in-mouth, insults to those less privileged than himself
has not shifted him, clearly his enablers and supporters must share the guilt.
It is a litany of personality defects so odious that if the UK had not spiralled
off into political la la land, this man would be persona non grata
anywhere but the gutter.
At the end of last week it was reported that Johnson
was belly aching about his ministerial salary. Clearly this is not his only income
but he seemed to think the tax payer had a duty to help support his offspring.
His legitimate brood and the one he had as a result of an affair that he tried
to keep secret with an injunction.
It is hard to know whether he is more or less
revolting than the other prospective leader of the Conservative party – Jacob
Rees-Mogg who, having celebrated the growth of food banks and stated his belief
that abortion is wrong in all cases even rape, admitted that he benefits
financially from a drug used to induce abortions.
And as his privately educated pals and handlers and
excusers crawl out yet again to say that – oh – it’s just Boris and he is a
‘bit of character’ – he likes to inject some “fizz” you have to wonder if they
think they are still in the common room at Eton (where the students get given
exam papers ahead of exams!!).
Many a time I’ve written on this blog about the carcinogenic British disease of elitism. In no human being is
that clearer than the pig-man in the blonde mop with the persona of a spoilt,
socially/morally/physically ugly delinquent 3-year old, Boris Johnson.
He is a flag waving monstrosity, a ‘jolly’ jingoist who,
while he haw haws his way round the globe does more than anyone to drag this
country’s reputation down the sewer. Following one recent planetary outing
there seemed to be a consensus among the sentient and sensible that he was a
‘clown’ a ‘buffoon’ How come others can see so clearly what the media and the establishment
at home refuse to see. And – it has to be said, bearing in mind he was London
Mayor (at the time he insulted Barack Obama in fact) Londoners. Londoners who
famously think of themselves as a cut above the rest of the country voted this
blob into one of the most important posts in Britain so that we could all enjoy
the site of this offal in a suit suspended from a high wire waving a Union Jack.
It was a sight that made most of us puke.
Boris Johnson personifies the promotion-of-privilege
culture that still eats away at Britain’s prospects in the 21st century. He
openly lies while spouting pop Latin. At every turn he shows such a lack of
real common sense, sense of duty and sense of occasion and in fact any sense at
all that even those who support him must get tense nervous headaches whenever
he opens his floppy foppish foolish mouth.
This is a man who is all personality and no
character. Personality in the sense of the gurning, aping for the camera we
expect from D-list celebrities and reality stars. That this government should
regard him as not just fit for office but to head the Foreign Office shows just what
deep deep deep shit Britain is in.
*
Why not check out some archived blogs-
Blog 10. My
One Night Stand with the Ghost of Bill Farrell (looking at the social
conscience we used to have)
Blog 22. Drink
Driving with my Dad
Blog 43. Killing
them softly
Blog 113. The
Crap Gap Club
Blog 165. The
Penisic Era
Tuesday 26 September 2017
248. A Rich Woman Died!
Yes – an extremely rich woman is
extremely dead and it made the news.
I know. You are shocked – even while distracted by
the two squabbling fat stupid spoilt brats with the really bad hair who want to
nuke the planet and the news that fascists are back in the German Bundestag. But
it’s true. Last week the amazing phenomenon that the rich die too, was proven,
yet again, by the death of the “world’s richest woman” – a strangely empty
epitaph all things considered.
Early in the life of this blog I penned a piece
called ‘Dinosaurs cured my performance angst’
(blog 4). It outlined how understanding one’s lack of
importance in the great scheme of things can be hugely liberating and, in fact,
could allow you to achieve much more.
This is not to be confused with the sense of entitlement, self-aggrandisement,
selfishness and arrogance imbued in the ranks of elite school boys who have
made a pretty good job of trashing Britain with their over-promotion and un-earned
privilege (see blog187. British boarding
schools breed posh psychopaths).
But Lilliane Bettencourt, described in The Guardian
on 21st Sept as “heir to the French L’Oréal hairspray empire” is
dead. The same paper also drops this wonderful little gem…
She
was the daughter of Eugène Schueller, a chemist and one-time Nazi sympathiser
who made a fortune as the inventor of modern hair dye and founder of L’Oréal.
Despite her estimated fortune of £29bn I’d never
heard of her but then I’ve not been to a hairdresser in over 15 years. Ms
Bettencourt was wealthy beyond imagining due to money made from cosmetics,
which makes mad sense in a world where we fete the shallow and image-obsessed.
Her family didn’t find a cure for cancer or invent the jet engine but they have
done everything to help keep hair in place. For that, this woman was lauded, indulged,
lived in opulence few can imagine and for that this woman
died among claims by her family that various hangers on and vultures were trying
to con her out of some large sums of dosh.
And I say again – if only the rich would get over
the idea that they are also immortal – they might behave better.
A new drug-resistant strain of Malaria is spreading
in Thailand, Vietnam and other parts of SE Asia but there is still no magical
human made wonder drug to deal with that potentially global disaster. While the
mainstream media are preoccupied with avoidable man-made horrors such as Trump’s
America and Brexit Britain, real issues with the ability to put a serious dent
in humanity’s time on the planet are way down the agenda.
If you want to know what is wrong with the world you
cannot do better than look at the strange anomaly laid out in the fact of
Lillian Bettencourt’s death (and life!). This woman – who may well have been
pleasant enough – did nothing of note with her existence other than be born to
an old Nazi who invented hair product. She died a modern day Ms Midas.
Several months
ago I posted, Viagra – Yes. Effective
Cure for Malaria – No! blog 97. It was an indictment of mankind’s
stupidity, vanity, wrongness in all ways. I thought nothing would top that.
But, in the face of the massive threat from this new form of Malaria, surely
news of a woman dying – the richest of her sex – not because of the invention
of something that would genuinely benefit all humanity but because of a
horrible, chemical vanity product, shows why we are, as a species, truly and
monumentally messed up.
As the avaricious and empty, squabble for cash over
Lillianne’s cadaver, her death delivers the same message as all the other
unread signs and portents around the planet – humans need to start spending
time, effort, money and intellect on caring for each other and the earth
because – surely ‘we’re worth it’.
*
This Thurs 28th Sept is NATIONAL POETRY DAY – Check out Casey & the Surfmen. Performed this
year in The Scottish Parliament as part of 2017 Environment week, this poetry
story was originally a spoken word piece. It is now in a brand new print
version.
Casey
& the Surfmen
is an environmental story for all ages, written in verse.
This
contemporary fable takes form somewhere between The Rime of Ancient Mariner and Avatar.
With
magic, menace and mystical creatures, the verses take the reader onto the expanse
of a child's imagination, on to a dreamscape apocalypse and back to the shore
of humanity's original promise.
*
NB – What happened in relation
to the BT nonsense? (See blog 233 – BT
ignoring your customer complaints – just do a doodle) I waited to see if
the new debt collecting firm engaged by BT would get tired of sending monthly threatening
letters. They did not, so a couple of weeks ago I sent them a cease and desist or I’ll sue you letter
and have received now a full written apology (19th Sept) and
confirmation that I will not be hearing from them again. To be fair – they also
say they bought the ‘debt’ in good faith from BT. Dealing with BT ‘in good
faith’ seems to be not a great idea…
Tuesday 19 September 2017
247. Trump / Thatcher MEGA POLICY is the answer…
… if the question is - How do we prevent political Armageddon
or even just Armageddon?
Yes, something occurred to me as I struggled in the
swamp of near insanity, paddled in the parallel universe of how-did-this-happen
and crawled through the dense dark forest of daily despair that is the current
news cycle. Then the clouds opened, the path sprouted flowers… Ok, that’s enough
of that nonsense.
Sometimes you get hit by that lightning bolt of
inspiration and I did.
Like many, I watch horrified and fascinated while
Trump undoes anything and everything good that Obama achieved – from
environmental policies and healthcare to protecting young migrants (see last
week’s blog) and on and on. Even his own people now seem to see that Trump is mesmerised
with being the anti-Obama president.
Here in the UK, as we flush ourselves down the
toilet of self-focus and global ridicule called BREXIT (see my letter in The National
yesterday http://www.thenational.scot/comment/15540790.Letters_II__Boris_is_trying_to_cover_himself_in_faux_glory
) I wonder what could bring society back to reason, back to caring, back to
functioning.
From the failure in social housing policy, brought
to our full attention with the Grenfell tower horror, (see my most recent
letter in The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/17/local-community-should-set-up-their-own-grenfell-fire-inquiry
) to the crumbling infrastructure evidenced by everything from poor road maintenance
and dysfunctional over-priced railways to school standards, the sense of
wrong-path-taken has never been stronger.
But, like those tangled cables that wind themselves
into an apparently untraceable mess behind your electrical items, it is possible to find where they lead and
where they started. Even the triple mountains of personal debt and even the
increase in the numbers being mauled by vicious dogs point, in my view, to an
identifiable root cause. What is the common denominator here? The answer, I
suggest, is incredibly simple. Margaret Thatcher. Even training our young to
normalise eye-watering debt – which I trace back to the introduction of tuition
fees in 1998 – was a policy of son-of-Thatcher Tony Blair (see my letter in The
Independent last week http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/magic-money-tree-theresa-may-conservatives-brexit-juncker-a7946921.html
).
(Actually The G and The I BOTH published two of my
letters last week. I think everyone else is too depressed to type.)
Both Thatcher and Blair preferred to spend on war
rather than social investment. As the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma states, the
trillions spent on war by affluent Western powers in the good times instead of
inward investment, plays a much more significant part in their current woes
than the ‘globalisation’ so hated by the jingoists.
T’was Thatcher who privatised the railways and
essential national utilities and much of British infrastructure. T’was ‘Thatcher, thatcher, milk snatcher’ who
handed a state-grab to the rich long before that was even a term. It was she
who vilified and maligned the public sector that now struggles with low wages,
under-staffing and poor morale. It was she who sold off social housing and
allowed a life-enhancing resource for the working class, which had been a jewel
in the crown of social policy since the 1950s, to be denigrated and turned into
just another ruse for the sharp elbowed and careless to make a fast buck. Thatcher
deregulated public transport and yes – she even did away with dog licencing.
So – in this instance – why don’t we take a leaf out
of Trump’s book (yes I know he doesn’t read and can barely string a lucid sentence
together, I am still being metaphorical). Yes – let us take that leaf. Let us
introduce a broad, blunt, brutal, over-arching Trump-esque policy which is
simply headed thus
Whatever SHE
did let’s undo it and whatever SHE
would do – let’s not…
*
And if you want a break from the political, slightly
sick-making seesaw of politics, go to my amazon author page and check out the free-kindle-book
grab. This week from 21st – 25th
Sept – all bar one of my books should be free in their e-book versions.
Remember – only where books are concerned is there
no such thing as greedy…
Tuesday 12 September 2017
246. Grim parallels show the US & UK as morally rotten, stagnating nations…
Many on this side of the Atlantic looked on aghast
as Trump threw sensible environmental policies and then humane policies such as
DACA out of the Oval Office window. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals) protected young people whose parents took them to America without
documentation but who have known no other home. The consensus among the
sentient is that it is simply because these policies were introduced
by President Obama that Trump is obsessed with ditching them. But what is the
explanation this side of the pond?
In April 2016 in Britain, The Dubs Amendment offered
sanctuary to thousands of migrant children at risk of starvation, exploitation,
rape, death. Earlier this year the lifeline was cut. In the heat of Brexit
xenophobia, that decision was overturned against the wishes of huge swathes of
the British public and there was not so much as a backwards glance from this
shoddy government.
But the unpleasant parallels go on. It’s as if
Britain and America caught the same moral standards-wasting disease. And it’s
virulent. It’s a super bug.
Turds floated to the top of both national cesspits at
the same time. We, for example, have a racist foreign secretary (Boris
Johnson). America has an idiot for head of Education (Betsy De Vos).
In both countries the current crop of top notch nutters aren’t
even pretending that the planet matters. In a fragile island the size of the UK
the government OK’d fracking (Kirby Misperton) and OK’d open cast mining in an
area of natural beauty (Druridge Bay). The US put oil whore and climate change denier,
Scott Pruitt, in charge of the Environment Agency (see blog 220).
Racism is rampant in both countries, ratcheted up by
unhinged right-wing bullies with little or no agenda other than their own
inadequacies, trouble-making tendencies and a poor knowledge of history. We had
the murder of MP Jo Cox by an unstable white supremacist and in the US at the Charlottesville
Nazi rally, Heather Heyer was murdered by a fascist.
Blatant and extreme double standards are the order
of the day both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain it’s long been the case that
those who enjoyed elite education and send their own children to exclusive and
expensive schools, are happy to preside over cuts and failure in state education.
Those who have private health care forcefully talk about ‘streamlining’ the NHS
which is forked-tongue speak for cuts while social care is in crisis and the
disabled are losing benefits and rights faster than you can say what happened to the 2012 Olympic legacy.
In the US Trump talks about his own spoilt brats - including the one who colluded
with Russia – as “kids”. However, the youngsters losing their DACA protection
are “young adults” even though, unlike his own oily, criminal, stupid
privileged brood, the DACA young people have low levels of criminality and a 90%
employment rate.
Fuelled by short-termism and racial intolerance -
both countries seem to be missing one thing. Neither, in their obsessive
self-regard, seems to have noticed that their country’s credibility – albeit
based on (often) brute force and the reputation of history – has gone down the
pan.
There is nothing more bizarre than
listening to some stupid xenophobic blob banging on about how he/she would be
happy to welcome accountants and doctors from other countries. They seem unaware of what intelligent
people abroad will have made, over the last few months, of Britain’s show of
nastiness, selfishness, meanness, lack of regard for others and unwillingness
to play for Team Planet.
It remains to be seen what will happen now that
Trump is playing his Republican enablers off against Democratic desperation as
he did recently over the budget cap. Here, Theresa
May’s party tolerate her because they know they cannot risk rocking the
un-seaworthy boat now. The man with no morals supported by the Christian right,
the climate change denier lapping up the attention in Hurricane obliterated
Houston, the illiterate idiot, liar, cheat, embezzler is running the land of
the brave and home of the free. In the UK, Mrs jolly-hockey-sticks-May competes
with the ludicrous its-2000-and what?-Jeremy Corbyn for the title of most
deluded out-of-touch political manikin.
Meanwhile here in the UK no one but NO ONE will
admit that Brexit is a disaster. Not will
be but is. Politicians on all
sides bang on about ‘respecting the will of the people’ conveniently papering
over the huge cracks and contradictions. The elephant in the room, which is the xenophobia that drove the decision, is just being ignored like a teenager
with 2-year-old sextuplets who no one will admit was ever pregnant. They brush
aside the ill-informed nature of much of the decision making, the open lies – admitted
the day after the referendum. They waffle on about how colossal EU trade will
be replaced with ‘other’ trade in ‘other’ parts of the world. I hope they are
not thinking of Africa. After Bell Pottinger’s hideous, widely publicised and
condemned shenanigans, I cannot see UK firms being welcome there any time this
side of the next financial collapse.
But for me – there is another even stranger angle.
*
To check out my author page click here -
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E
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