Total Pageviews

Tuesday, 29 September 2020

365. What we could achieve if the decent sensible people worked together…

…or Casey & the Surfmen!

It’s worth remembering that the decimation of our environment will not kill us in 100s or 1000s it will wipe us out. And yes, that is a heavy message to keep pushing when everything else is pretty awful and Johnson’s cabal of incompetents is trying to shift the blame for their disastrous handling of a predictable pandemic onto young people – as if they haven’t suffered enough.

However, this week I’m reminding readers of my audio story poem about ordinary people – us - repairing and saving the world. It’s a gentle piece, easy to listen to and - while I won’t give away the ending – positive. Do check it out on bandcamp. You can listen for free OR buy and download a copy if you feel like supporting an artist you know - MOI. Also, if you purchase on Friday October 2nd – this Friday – bandcamp are again waving their commission to support artists like me who have seen little or no work since February.

And for those who balk at the notion of having to think about the ongoing threat to human existence amid an immediate threat, please try and remember these are not two separate issues. Eco-scientists have long been warning that damage to ecosystems could be a major trigger for new pathogens jumping species and as this mad government pushes ahead with HS2 and relaxing planning laws, Britain remains one of the least wooded countries in Europe where towns and cities regularly have poor air quality


'A lyrical, whimsical uplifting story in verse - easy listening for all ages' 

Do check it out by clicking the link here -

Casey & the Surfmen -audio version. 


Cheers

Friday, 25 September 2020

Is Covid-19 a self-inoculating virus? (weekend extra)

Ok – it’s been a rough night – and like a lot of folk there's not much sleep going on in my life. However, this occured to me and seemed almost lucid (at 4am GMT)

Is Covid-19 a self-inoculating virus?

Folk don’t – as we know – always make logical decisions or they make horrible decisions for terrible reasons – especially in politics. However, you’d need to have been buried under bedrock for the last 8 months not to have worked out one very simple truth about this pandemic.

Countries with terrible leaders – right wing, populist, corrupt, racist, vain sociopaths -  in particular, have been relatively far more deadly places to live than comparable countries.

Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro have a lot in common (apart from faithless marriages and multiple wives) which I've posted about before. The list includes corruption, populism, idiocy, right wing spite and bigotry, I could go on. The other thing they have in common is exceptionally poor handling of this pandemic.

IF people put 2 and 2 together (which I know is out of fashion in the world of 2020) this might inoculate the world – for a while – against electing morons… 

Tuesday, 22 September 2020

364. Armageddon Will Not Be Televised (replay)

A good friend directed me to a (now) chilling snippet of Benjamin Zephaniah on Question Time outlining the clear and present danger of a Boris Johnson leadership back in 2012. BZ points out that Johnson is a. racist b. not fit to be in charge of the lives of others.

I bring this up only because I’m sick of the now tired line – usually trotted out about the pandemic – ‘yes its bad but no one could have known’ when in fact lots of folk did know and tried to prepare (a. President Obama b. anyone else with a brain cell) but which is also often spewed out about Johnson – like people are surprised what a total disaster HE is personally and politically. We knew.

It inspired me to look back at some of my early posts and in honour of BZ and any number of other folk who pay attention, I dug this one up for this week. If something can be truer now than when it was first true – this is… so here from Tuesday, 30 October 2012 a scenario we are now simply 8 years closer to…

12. Armageddon will not be televised

 

I enjoy a pacey paranoid action movie as much as the next person.  Give me Bruce Willis saving the world at the last second with a self-satisfied smile any day over another Jane Austen adaptation. Show me silver screen worlds exploding in Technicolor, tidal waves engulfing everyone apart from the main character plus love interest, asteroids missing the earth with only meters to spare, sudden freezes that only the good-looking survive. Dish up alien invasions from creatures able to cross galaxies but unable to anticipate a sucker punch from Will Smith. Tremendous. In reality the four horsemen of the apocalypse aren’t galloping out of the gates of hell on their white, red, black and pale green stallions, they are plodding about even now on knackered old nags in a dull, bored way because frankly they’ve nothing to do.

 

Is it too extreme to suggest that the woman parading down the high street with the $1,000+ designer handbag may as well be walking round with a sick child under her arm? Might the guy driving the sports car fuelled from products that could have fed people, just as well line up twenty sub-Saharan villagers and run them over? Ok, maybe that’s a bit dramatic for this blog space especially when theorising that Armageddon could be a surprisingly limp affair. All I’m suggesting is that like a Hollywood blockbuster, the event in all probability will not live up to the testosterone-charged trailers. It may just be a metaphorical dismal couple of hours in the dark where nothing significant happens and then it’s over.

 

It’s not that designer stuff is intrinsically bad nor is the fast car or any number of things that we don’t need; it’s just that life has a very simple equation to offer us, one we are constantly told is more complicated than it is. If some folk have too much others get too little. Let me say that again – if some folk have too much other folk have too little. There is no getting round it or under it. There is a connection between some people owning three cars and living in mansions and other people living on less than a dollar a day. Why does saying that feel like claiming moon is made of cheese? Perhaps because vast amounts of energy and money go into maintaining the more comfortable collective falsehood that there is no direct connection. We believe the world somehow got so complicated that 2+2 no longer = 4. But is it an unfathomable mystery that desperate farmers grow cash crops such as tobacco and coffee instead of food for their families?          

 

During the Blair affair with Britain we got used to the phrase “difficult decisions” which was euphemism for ‘the wrong decisions made in the face of the absolutely bloody obvious’. Though he was not the first to employ this euphemism it settled, through persistent use, as a staple of political rhetoric. In the same way that Cameron’s “I’m absolutely clear on this” as double speak for ‘this may sound like bollocks but I’m saying it anyway’ is bedding in. The idea that things are way more complicated than logic or common sense suggest is a notion we are force fed to steer us away from seeing that the emperor is wearing no clothes. The brother in arms of this falsehood is that someone who makes ‘difficult decisions’ is off the moral hook.  Sister to these two bastards is the notion that ‘there isn’t anything we can do’.

 

Let us deal with the first tired old horseman representing conquest and social inequality. Has there ever been an era where inequality has, in the light of our knowledge and technical skills, been more inexcusable? What I’m saying is that if our Victorian forebears could see that it was wrong, it’s got to be more wrong now. Close to home, how many of us have considered, when choosing a bank or law firm, checking what proportion of senior employees are state educated before giving them our business? I’m state educated and I haven’t.

 

As for war – there are more conflicts raging round the world than you could shake a stick at – using more sophisticated technology and on-going for reasons that defy not just ethical considerations but basic common sense. Death and disease are bestial bedfellows and never more so because we know so much about preventing and avoiding much of the disease that leads to premature death. Do you need to say more than that we have Viagra but no cure for Aids? The new strains of deadly malaria were upon us without adequate medicines when we’d known for years that they were heading our way or at least their way. Now that aesthetic (cosmetic) surgery is spoken of as if it’s as normal as going to the dentist, it seems outlandish to ask why personal or public resources are being spent in this direction when children die in obscene numbers for want of a diarrhoea tablet costing pence. When I was last asked my opinion on animal testing I had to say I might be more positive about it if the medicines and knowledge we already have were being used to their full effect and for everyone.

 

Stuff Botox and ‘shopping therapy’, if you want to feel better about the life you have, spend a week in a refugee camp and it’s likely you will have a very rosy view of your existence when you return. You may even have younger looking skin; certainly you might lose some weight. Meanwhile the bees are not pollinating properly, the ice caps are reducing, the coral reefs are dying and a huge percentage of preventable western disease is the result of affluence. The system we idolatrise is based on shoring up this monstrosity. It is ultimate pyramid selling and the pyramid is one of humanity. The world will not go out with a bang but a whimper. The four horsemen of the apocalypse returned to their hellish caverns a long time ago and are playing scrabble to pass the time. We have unemployed them.  The world is already the cancer patient in denial still puffing away on that cigarette. Armageddon will not be televised because it will not happen in a sudden identifiable place or time, it will not be dramatic and it will not star Bruce Willis. It is happening now in a bland, slow, miserable way. If you stand still you can sometimes smell it in the air, sense the paradigm shift, feel it like a depression.  At some point we will become aware that we recognise the plot and the narrative is near the end but there will be no one around to see the credits roll.

Tuesday, 15 September 2020

363. Debt is compulsory & reality is redundant.

I have had a bank account since I was a teenager back in the mists of time.

Initially I was with Barclays but dropped them in the 80s over South Africa. Lloyds came next until they joined with TSB then consciously uncoupled as I was planning to move to Scotland. There was not a Lloyds on any high street up here so ended up with TSB. They’ve been ok and, as I’ve never done online banking I didn’t get caught up in their 2019 online banking fiasco. I was also briefly with Bank of Scotland (to access an old Lloyds account – don’t’ ask) but the only branch near me became so down at heel it was obvious it would not be around for long so I closed that.

As more and more high-street branches close and TSB have been crap over my business banking problems since covid (despite the blether on their advertising) I thought I’d look for another basic ordinary account with a bank I still see on the high street.

Simple. Or so you would think.

My appointment made – details taken and all my documents in hand I went into the new bank last week and spent 40 minutes with a nice young woman who clicked away at her computer screen and chatted pleasantly and copied documents. She explained how the account would open and when I‘d receive my debit card and pin etc. Then she went to press the final button (I presume) and everything changed. NO! said the bank computer. Apparently, as I’ve never been in debt and do not have store cards or credit cards, am not on Facebook or any other social media – in other words I only exist in the real world – the computer said NO. I would have to be referred. Checked out. Higher up…

Fumbling and stumbling, the nice young woman said she’d get back to me. Clearly this doesn’t happen often with such basic accounts. I told her not to fret. It has happened to me once before where not having an easily traceable online history of debt / credit (CREDIT IS DEBT) caused problems for the mega-companies that exist in the backgrounds of our lives cannot easily pigeon-hole a real person. A few days later someone somewhere clearly decided I wasn’t an international criminal and I can have my new little no-overdraft, debit account. Wehey…

Boris Johnson may not be able to do track and trace but everyone else can and everyone else wants to do it and is doing it all the time about every aspect of your life.

This will be an increasing problem for a decreasing number of us. We actively train our kids to live in debt. Thanks to the Blair government and its introduction of tuition fees, it is now normal for young folk to be in heavy debt long before they have had time to work the world out. A significant number will live under the dark shadow of that leaden liability for most of their working lives – if they are lucky enough to get work. They will put off having families because of the debt and they will probably not be able to afford starter homes. They will, however, probably own cars – when I say own I mean they will pay a credit company to use an item that will depreciate in value faster than almost anything else they will ever buy.

We now bring children up to believe that being in debt is a natural state; essential, even a desirable one. I listened horrified to a financial programme on the BBC where one of the ‘experts’ they wheel on regularly – the mate of the producer or someone they went to school with who lives handy – advised an 18 yr old just starting out on her independence to GET A CREDIT CARD AS SOON AS POSSIBLE – start building up a ‘credit history’. Get plugged into The Matrix at the earliest opportunity and before you have enough experience to question if it’s the right decision for you. Before you know it you’ll be getting into debt for random holidays, shite you buy at the weekend and use once, meals out, leisure items you never use and memberships that lapse.

‘Get a credit history’ means – get into debt asap and then you will always be allowed to get into more debt whenever you want to.The real irony is that with banking (and with much else of commerce) as we retreat further and further behind algorithms and mass data, given up freely and i-knowledge replaces the real knowledge of a real person by another real person – the financial world has become a criminals’ playground where fraud increases exponentially day by day.

In a country obsessed with reality TV, real reality really is a fading phenomenon.

And - thanks to Johnson’s cabal of incompetent lunatics and the cluster-fuck of Brexit and a horribly mismanaged covid crisis – even those who manage not to end up as Pavlov’s Debt Dogs will exist in a debt-blighted country til the lights go out.

I understand that folk laugh when they see my not-a-smart-phone. I note the eye rolls if they find I don’t own a car or microwave. I’m used to the indulgent chuckle at not being on social media or ever owning a dishwasher (both equally pointless and time wasting and toxic) ditto the bemusement that I haven’t had TV since last century, long before there was the online world to go to instead but I tell you – it’s getting very strange just being a real person living out here in what is left of the ‘real’ world…

Tuesday, 8 September 2020

362. “La Vengeance est un met que l’ont doit manger froid”

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1800s)

Others claim this idiom, ‘vengeance is a dish best served cold’ originates in the French novel Les Liasons Dangereuses  1782

Star Trek fans attribute it as a Klingon adage!

In the 4th century BC, the famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu reportedly said ‘if you wait by the river long enough the bodies of your enemies float by’

Old Testament Biblical scholars will point out that God reserves the act of vengeance for himself.

“Vengeance is mine… saith the lord” Romans 12;19

I’m more New Testament in the love-&-forgiveness bracket. However, I’m posting an old doodle this week because it makes the idea of vengeance kind of interesting and cosmic – if you are prepared to go off the scale a little. Take a long enough view, it seems, and in more modern vernacular – ‘what goes around comes around’.

And – yes – it’s unfair that everyone suffers. It’s the same in war, geological disasters, famine, plague and pestilence.

A while ago I put up the doodle below and a few friends were a little confused. Why 2016 (you crazy woman)?

My view is simple (I’m a simple person) I see that in any act of extreme cruelty, unfairness, deliberate wrong the essence of its undoing seems to be in-built. This is why – rather than being destroyed – bad people/things – often implode – empires especially. I know this is one of my zanier theories but if you can’t have crazy theories in a world where Trump and Johnson are regarded as leadership material – when can you?

So – to take the two most obvious and immediate examples – the UK and the US – both have historic wealth and prosperity and international clout and credibility built on the misery of slavery (see last week’s helpful composition towards the BBC prom [I wonder if they’ll be bringing the black and white minstrel show back any time soon?]) and either old style colonialism or neo-colonialism. What I observed in the joint political and social tragedies of 2016 – the election of Trump and the vote for the self-annihilation of Brexit, was a sort of payback of racism - racism that has been allowed to linger into the present day and fester in our institutions.

Many were astounded by the election of an overtly racist, misogynist criminal like Trump. Many this side of the pond were astounded that the decades of anti-foreigner rhetoric of the right-wing media and the anti-EU sentiment of populist politicians, served up results. The main result being that the serial failure Boris Johnson became the turd at the top of the overflowing sewer of British politics.

My simple analysis is that both have led to the wrecking of the reputations of these hitherto highly regarded nations. Albeit that – certainly in Britain’s case - it was already living on past ‘glories’ all the sadder that the advantages are being squandered.

Brexit fuelled by illogical jingoism (racism) – like winter – is coming and the social and economic carnage will make Covid look like a walk in the park.

Trump may be ousted from the White House in November – whether he leaves is another matter - but it will take the US far longer to recover from his scorched earth approach than it took him to ruin the country and it may not be possible to put the riffle-toting white supremacists back in their underground bunkers any time soon.

The US is possibly closer to the long slog of the turn-a-round than the UK but neither country will be the unassuaged power it was before 2016 – thanks to the racism inherent and inbuilt into both societies that was never fully exorcised.

How else can you lay this out other than universal payback?

 *

 


Thursday, 3 September 2020

Rule Britannia – alternative lyrics for the 2020 BBC proms

When Britain first went looting abroad

Taking death and disease

Taking, taking death and disease

This was the charter

The charter of the land

And Guardian Angels wept in pain

 

Rule Britannia

Britannia ruled the waves

Built its wealth and fortune

With the blood of slaves

 

Centuries of murder,

Rape and misery

So Englishmen could claim

Superiority

 

Still more avaricious with every decade

More dreadful with each foreign raid

More dreadful dreadful with each foreign raid

 

As the loud blasts

The blast that tears the skies

Serves but to wreck humanity

 

Rule Britannia

Britannia ruled the waves

Built its wealth and fortune

With the blood of slaves

 

Centuries of murder,

Rape and misery

So Englishmen could claim

Superiority

 

The muses became psychotic trolls

And needed locking up

And needed locking up

Blasted lives with countless lost and drowned

20 million souls

Ground into the dirt

 

Rule Britannia

Britannia ruled the waves

Built its wealth and fortune

With the blood of slaves

 

Centuries of murder,

Rape and misery

So Englishmen could claim

White supremacy


These hastily cobbled together lyrics do scan if you shoe-horn them in as you have to with the dreadful originals. Have a go yourself with that other favourite of the proms -  Land of Hopeless Tories...

  

Tuesday, 1 September 2020

361. Does Carrie Symonds give a rousing rendition of 'Rule Britannia' to get the PM going in bed? And…

… can I have a refund?

Boris Johnson became leader of the Conservative party (and hence Prime Minister) in July 2019 – shoe-horned in by a few old white blokes down south  who keep the Tory party going in-between golf and jingoism and being detached from reality.

Then it was summer recess. Then he illegally prorogued parliament. Then he called a December election which kind of stymied any real activity and then it was Christmas.

After Christmas he declared Brexit ‘done’ and we were all ordered to shut up about it. Then he was busy being cagey about the daughter-age girlfriend Carrie Symonds’s pregnancy while he sorted out divorcing his latest wife who gamely complied despite being in remission from recent cancer treatment.

Then we had the pandemic and Johnson’s response was NO RESPONSE but he did go around shaking hands and not wearing a mask with covid patients in some mistaken fantasy that he was a born-again Princess Diana at an AIDS benefit. And then – of course – he contracted covid and we were all supposed to feel sorry for him because he had the disease he was happy to let thousands of care home residents and NHS workers die of while he did sod all and because he’d become a father again for the ? time.

And now he’s just basically AWOL – always. Though he was suddenly very visible and able to do a bit of Boris into a microphone and bang on rather energetically, albeit for a very short burst of time, about the singing of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory at the Prom.

Does Carrie Symonds give a rousing, rendition of Rule Britannia to get the PM going in bed?

It’s a joke that isn’t a joke really.

If I got some piece of crap from amazon that didn’t work they would give me a refund.

Boris Johnson doesn’t work.

I want a refund…