458. Word Laundering – by the mainstream media has to stop…

As we limp towards the end of 2022 there are many things we might wish were different or had not happened or were long gone.

Putin and Trump are rotten and ragged but still extremely dangerous, like cheap fireworks that have spent their main force but are far from extinguished.

Bolsonaro is gone but the amazon rainforest destruction he accelerated along with his vile right-wing hate and lies, wrought permanent damage.

Brexit is now an acknowledged blight as opposed to something politicians and the mainstream media dare not mention.

 But we still have a government of the craven and the hopeless. We still have a Prime Minister (our 3^rd unelected) who was building a £400,000 swimming pool at one of his domestic residences while beachgoers in England, over the summer, could not go into the sea due to raw sewage dumped by the profiteering water companies his party privatised. Out-of-touch hardly covers it.

Crypto and Twitter are exposed as the big pile of bollocks most sensible folk knew they were (see last post). But, like Trump/Putin, continue to harm.

Afghanistan seems to have further to slide after being abandoned by the countries that have played war games there for decades. In one of the most hideous displays of lack of organisation and appalling mess and chaos anyone in the military has possibly seen, Afghanistan was abandoned in the most callous way. I include the action of our then PM Boris de-Brexit Johnson – we presume on the say so of his ridiculous wife – greenlighting the rescue of pets before people and the current deputy PM Dominic Raab, currently under investigation for bullying but who was then – as Foreign Secretary - AWOL on a beach holiday when the horrors were unfolding.

The world still burns and saving the planet is way down on anyone’s priority list especially in a world where many millions of folk seem entirely comfortable with celebrating the big pile of corrupt, oppressive shite which is the Qatar world cup.

As usual – I could go on

But for me, what I’d like to see for 2023 is Word Laundering by the mainstream media end. To turn around the famous Nike slogan Just DON’T do it.

By Word Laundering I mean the careless, lazy way that mainstream broadcasters in particular (and especially the publically funded BBC) smush out second-hand shite from social media guff. So and so on Twitter said blah blah blah. So and so on Fb claims rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb. This is no different to money laundering. You take something with no credibility or value and elevate it simply by including it in the mainstream where it comes out shiny.

It’s lazy. It’s dangerous. It serves no purpose and it is commercially completely idiotic. How much would these platforms have to pay to have their nonsense legitimised if it were properly analysed and examined and authenticated? None of that happens. It’s just - Tada – from gutter spew to glittering factoid. Word Laundering. More powerful that money laundering.

It has to stop.

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As usual do check out my novels, children’s books and anthologies by clicking this link My BOOKS or on your own favourite online book stores.

Also – bandcamp have another bandcamp Friday December 2nd in support of artists where their fees are waved so do check out my environmental audio story Casey & the Surfmen (you can sample for free).

 

457. So many emperors, so few clothes...

... so much exposed, shrivelled inadequacy!

Has my big 2022 ‘comeuppance’ wish come true?

In blog 418 I pleaded with Fate to let 2022 be THE YEAR OF COMEUPPANCE.

I know it may not seem it as the world sinks and conflicts and human suffering remain somewhere below reality TV in people's reckoning. It may not seem it with the cost of living crisis in the UK while the rich get richer and the wealth divide continues to widen exponentially.

However, many astonishing things have happened even in the last couple of weeks that suggest the year was just waiting for us all to be lulled more deeply into a false sense of cold, grey ennui.

Who knew that the US Democrats would overturn all political precedent and maintain vital Senate control in the US midterms?

Who knew Trump would be the architect of the implosion of the rabid right (well I did but hey…)

Who thought we’d see the rot of what remains of the UK Conservative party so nakedly on view to anyone with more than x3 brain cells.

And despite his occasional presence in Parliament, (presumably in-between the holidays paid for by willing richer mates) Johnson has become his own worst nightmare – a bit player in the catastrophic drama he constructed. But, for what he has perpetrated on the UK public, this is way too light a reckoning for Boris de-Brexit Johnson so – as the end of the year looms – watch this space.

Who knew Brexit would finally be acknowledged – even by a limp media – as the terrible self-harm sensible folk (incl this blog) always predicted.

Who knew that a country the world had previously paid little attention to – Ukraine – would begin to bring Putin to heel.

Could we have predicted that creepy crawly Elon Musk, the world’s richest man would be properly exposed as an unstable racist, misogynist ego and even thinner skinned than Donald Trump? Well – yes – again – many of us have been rolling our eyes at those proclaiming his genius for many years. However, to have so totally miscalculated that in an entity like Twitter the employees ARE the company – oh boy. Seriously WTF did he think was going to happen when he sacked all those geeks?

The druggy delinquents who were scamming folks for years in the whole crypto crap craze are also recently exposed thanks to super brat Sam Bankman-Fried (nominative determinism if ever there was…) who headed up the FTX crypto currency exchange.

Bonkers Bolsonaro is gone.

Qatar’s clearly corrupt acquisition of the football world cup –  how’s that panning out? I’m sure they must be concluding that the bags of cash handed to then prince now king tampon-Charlie in supermarket bags, was money much better spent than the eye-watering amounts they used to bribe super-corrupt FIFA to get the World Cup - check out my letter in today’s The Guardian

 

The list goes on but I’d simply remind everyone – there are still one and a half months to go of 2022.

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456. Zelensky with blood, Biden with Malarky… holding the line.

In 2020 there was every chance that the corrupt, creepy, racist, traitorous, self-serving orange menace who praised white supremacists, locked babies in cages on the Mexican border and hosted the actors of a rogue nation in the Oval Office (among other things) would win a second term.

Biden was far from the darling of the left, or even left of centre but I struggled then to imagine another candidate who could secure Democratic votes and also garner sufficient wiggle room with moderate Republicans to prevail in autumn 2020 and even then it was horribly tight.

Far away in Ukraine and despite Boris de-Brexit Johnson sneering at warnings of the threat of Russian tanks crossing into Ukraine – they did. Boris de-Brexit Johnson did an about turn from partying with Russian Oligarchs, taking their money, meeting with them against the advice of British Secret Services and even gifting a peerage to Lebedev and was subsequently never out of Ukraine taking photo opportunities. As Putin wreaked havoc it was just another ego trip for our Brexit wrecking ball.

In Ukraine – though you wouldn’t know it from the level of media and public attention – Zelensky and his armies have not only held but repelled the might of Russia. Unthinkably, on Armistice Day came the news that the strategically significant port city of Kherson, recently declared by Putin to be “Russian forever” had been freed. Though the cost in human suffering has been truly appalling.

I sincerely hope President Joe Biden does not run for president in 2024. I sincerely hope that Zelensky’s days as leader of an army will end soon and he can return to being a peace-time leader and begin, with the world’s help, rebuilding Ukraine. I sincerely hope we can turn out attention to other long running conflicts that must be resolved and most of all pay attention to the number one priority – the climate.

But make no mistake – while millions of eyes are trained on dirty sport in Qatar paying less than lip service to human rights, while the media overflows with celebrity nonsense, royal guff and the lunatic actions of billionaires – these two extraordinary men in their very different ways – held and hold the line for the rest of us.

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455. Tesla top twat tweeting twaddle…

… and my belated ten-year blog birthday.

I forgot to celebrate my 10 yr. anniversary of blogging. So – happy belated decade blogging and doodling to me.

I’d go into an extended piece here about the changes I’ve observed over the last decade  which encompasses my blog but that can be summed up simply as DOWNHILL all the way for the UK.

The last decade has seen global catastrophes link and merge in an as yet barely realistically acknowledged looming climate and environment catastrophe.

Here in Brexit Britain – the privatisations begun last century by Conservative icon and nemesis of the caring – Margaret Thatcher - have come home to roost in truly dreadful ways. A defunct railway system, failing energy provision at a time of energy crises and water unfit for humans around the coast of Britain as the privatised water companies sold off reservoirs and – like their counterparts in other privatised utilities – siphoned off billions of public money to their shareholders. That has always been the point of privatisation.

Many systems are hanging by a thread. The NHS –and many others are in a fight for their lives. Schools. The care system. Mental health services. Public infrastructure. And so on.

And yet still, still – we idolise and follow those born to wealth and privilege with vast personal fortunes either inherited or married into or gained – as per the Russian Oligarchs and those who profiteered more recently from the pandemic - by literally selling their countries down the river.

Then there are others like Trump and Musk pedalling a fake version of themselves so successfully that what we’d revile or ridicule in those without their platforms is idolatrised and made godlike.

Like Trump and Boris Johnson, Musk has made misstep after misstep. He, like Trump and Johnson, is a personal disaster, fathering random children he appears to have little fatherly feeling for. For all the adulation he invokes, Musk like Trump and Johnson is also incredibly thin skinned – taking on arguments more suited to a 7 year-old in a playground but using the mega platforms of our era to amplify his infantilism.

On this blog years ago, I stated that Brexit would bring Britain down to Greece 2.0 and it is. I pointed out that Labour’s Miliband would not win the general election he was predicted to win – not because he wasn’t the best candidate but because I looked at things those in the Westminster bubble did not factor in – the soap-opera loving nation that would not forgive him for stabbing his brother in the back. Also the bacon sandwich fiasco! Looks are everything if you’re not a right wing lunatic in which case you get away with literally having blood on your hands. And so on and so forth.

Johnson was allowed – years later – to ‘let the bodies pile up’ during covid – lie and cheat and bluster and fail fail fail again in office and appoint dreadful people – but he’s a Tory.

Longer more all-encompassing predictions are painted in my novella Zero One Zero Two and also my audio story Casey & the Surfmen. Also coming to sad dark fruition.

Though as we approach that point of no return we thought was still far away at the turn of the century – these can hardly now be labelled predictions. It would be like someone alluding to Orwell’s 1984 in 1982…

After last week’s post I sent out a letter to editors on my usual list (my small number of regular readers will know my letters appear in a number of papers in the UK and some abroad) stating that despite his refusal, Sunak would indeed go to COP27. Not because I’m a seer but just because it was 100% obvious and again – I simply do not understand the surprise of media/Westminster commentators. From the point he said he wouldn’t go and gave his pathetic reason, it was obvious he’d U-turn.

But it’s not a huge mind stretch to predict that Chief Twat will cause more mayhem now he has control of Twitter. You do not need a crystal ball to see that his ego, unchecked by self-awareness or human decency or caring or maturity, will wreak mayhem on the weak-minded and gullible. Mark the lack of real condemnation when he undermined the efforts of Ukraine in its life or death struggle against Russia. A spoilt brat with a too big toy chucking a turd into an operating theatre where exhausted, bloodied surgeons fight to save life – is the image that comes to mind.

But there is lots of good stuff too in my last decade. In that time my family has grown by two sons-in-law and three grandchildren and more children to extended family. Not too many people I love have died. I’ve written more books and read many. I’ve renovated more houses in various states of dilapidation – which apart from my writing is something that gives me immense satisfaction.

I watch with interest as fascism in its reinvented forms again has its day – sadly scorching and burning – and leaving us with the tired old questions left over from last century – what will be left and can we rebuild?

So – I celebrate my little blog – albeit it’s more an outlet for my anguish and frustration at times. But it keeps me sane and it is sane. And Twitter is mad. And for all the folk who have told me over the years that I ought to be on social media and definitely on Twitter – I continue to say – thanks but no thanks…

As for what has happened in the decade since I began this blog – I think its best summed up in a couple of old doodles from 2013

In other words – things under the Tories and other right-wing administrations with their greed and short-termism and self-interest haven’t so much changed as got exponentially and unbelievably much worse…

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454. Am I in a crazy coma or did someone drug my cocoa or am I in a low budget made-for-TV zombie series with ‘d’ list actors?

This cannot be Britain 2022. Surely...

Do we really have a Home Secretary – Suella Braverman – who is happy to admit publically that her “dream” is abusing migrants? Just as the people-traffickers slaver over the money they’ll make putting desperate people in un-seaworthy boats, she drools at the idea of those same desperate people herded against their will, onto massively expensive planes to Rwanda - a country that has been bribed to make our not-fit-for-purpose asylum-seeker problem disappear.

Are we really keeping desperate migrants, including children, in dirty, disgusting, over-crowded, disease ridden, dangerous detention centres that would make a backwards dictatorship blush?

Do we really have a PM who was busy completing his £400,000 swimming pool, over a summer that saw record-breaking temperatures in the UK, global climate catastrophes on an unprecedented scale and raw sewage-ruined waters right here in a wealthy developed country? Rishi Sunak is a man who claims to want to give something back to Britain while in fact kept one foot in the US, ready to bolt if he hadn’t got what he wanted from his political ambitions and whose own wife avoided tax while he was chancellor 

Do we really have a public broadcaster – the BBC- where the two top jobs are held by Tory appointees – one – Richard Sharp - a former Conservative party donor and advisor to the previous disaster PM Boris Johnson and the current unelected PM Rishi Sunak?

Do we really have a Met police force in crisis, riddled with racism and misogyny?

Is child poverty on the rise and longevity declining in the poorest areas with drug deaths out of control and foodbanks and now warm banks part of our national landscape in a country that celebrated the birth of a comprehensive welfare state after WWII?

Are the bonkers Brexit bastards still getting away with blaming everything but Brexit for the very Brexit-shaped multiple crises Britain is facing over and above the fallout from Covid and years of Tory mismanagement and austerity?

Is the press lamer than ever – limp – ineffectual and toadying to the party in power at every turn? Is the journalistic race to the bottom – at least in domestic terms nearly over?

I could go on and on but is this not enough? The world’s oldest democracy has an unelected PM and a politically cowed ‘public’ broadcaster. Its banana-republic stuff.

 

Please someone – wake me up…

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Thank you for reading.