253. Souls for sale?

State capture is the 21^st century equivalent of 19^th 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.

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 21^st 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.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

https://www.amazon.com/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

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 (47^th 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 21^st 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?

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.

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Both Casey & the Surfmen and Zero One, Zero Two can be found on my author page

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

https://www.amazon.com/Amanda-Baker/e/B0181KEN9E

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.

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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