My Sexual Abuse.

Before I start did you hear of the US woman getting allergic to her husband in the same room? Tobacco smoke half a mile, pizza a 100 yds etc. The poor woman came up in life threatening hives if he touched her. It’s a rare oodly doodly disease. No it’s not, it’s a psychosomatic allergic reaction. An expert NLPer would cure it in an hour. I hope she finds one. Anyway I was fourteen in a skiffle band. We won a competition and appeared on TV briefly but due to me our blues number had a vaguely Chinese intro. Nevertheless I’m proud if of it. A guy around forty offered to be our manager and the use of his empty factory in the evenings to practice. Once there he invited us one at a time, I think three of us, to join him in a small room where he had thoughtfully spread newspaper on the floor. After a brief chat about not telling anyone he wanked us off. Takes all sorts. Maybe he was Reichian. Wanking was not unknown to us fourteen year olds and coming was its usual pleasure. Nevertheless it didn’t feel right so as there were three of us we compared notes and told him to shove it after two or three times. So what exactly was the sexual abuse? I presume it would be seen as such. Coercion by an adult but no force and coming was its usual pleasure. But it was secret and outside that transparent wall of secrecy he had created it would be transformed into something distasteful. That was the abuse, a form of bonding behind closed doors. He had lured us into holding a shameful secret that’s taken near sixty years to tell. Basically I just want to be on trend. But seriously it was that transition from secrecy that was the abuse by creating a sort of either/or discontinuity with my ordinary life. The wanking was neither here nor there. Since then I won’t be coerced into anything secret I can’t proudly share with anyone. Luckily the lasting effects are minimal; just don’t spread newspapers on the floor. 

The Divine Doesn’t Care.

Don’t worry it’s really not as bad as it sounds. If like me you have or had parents you know the relationship. At best they support you, give you advice and want you to do well. At worst they chastise you for your faults, what you’ve done badly or not at all. They care. So it’s likely we’ll conceive of our chosen God as a deity that cares about us, especially if we refer to it as ‘he’ and ‘father.’ If we do we're back seeking parental support, love and direction. But what if the divine is even better than that? What if the divine says, “You have been given the earth, a veritable Garden of Eden, and you are free to do as you wish. But there are laws that make life better or worse. Do as you wish and I hope you live well”? No guidance, no protective care, no preferential treatment, no direct line, simply do as you wish. This is the wisest divinity, for without the freedom to make mistakes there is no learning and without learning we will not come to know the laws or our choices to follow them. When we do we will come to know the nature of the divine. Until then we will create our own godly messages; how he hates gay marriage and non-Muslims (or Muslims), how he provokes us kill and fight in his name, how he has a long list of right and wrong. Truth be told the divine doesn’t care, but hopes we learn to experience it. 

The Divine Doesn’t Care.

Don’t worry it’s really not as bad as it sounds. If like me you have or had parents you know the relationship. At best they support you, give you advice and want you to do well. At worst they chastise you for your faults, what you’ve done badly or not at all. They care. So it’s likely we’ll conceive of our chosen God as a deity that cares about us, especially if we refer to it as ‘he’ and ‘father.’ If we do we're back seeking parental support, love and direction. But what if the divine is even better than that? What if the divine says, “You have been given the earth, a veritable Garden of Eden, and you are free to do as you wish. But there are laws that make life better or worse. Do as you wish and I hope you live well”? No guidance, no protective care, no preferential treatment, no direct line, simply do as you wish. This is the wisest divinity, for without the freedom to make mistakes there is no learning and without learning we will not come to know the laws or our choices to follow them. When we do we will come to know the nature of the divine. Until then we will create our own godly messages; how he hates gay marriage and non-Muslims (or Muslims), how he provokes us kill and fight in his name, how he has a long list of right and wrong. Truth be told the divine doesn’t care, but hopes we learn to experience it. 

Just saying America.

Melissa Dohme was a Tampa Bay twenty year old with a boyfriend. He was cute, funny, attentive. Over time he began to lie, cheat and bully her so she refused to see him anymore. One night he lured her out on a false pretext and stabbed her 30 times. Paramedics fought for her life but doubted her survival. In hospital she needed 12 pints of blood, her heart stopped several times, the boyfriend was arrested. Over two years she made a full recovery. She became friends with Cameron Hill one of the paramedics that saved her. He proposed on the pitchers mound of major league baseball match and she accepted. They are now very happy and Melissa is active in raising awareness of domestic violence. The boyfriend is serving life with no parole. Just saying America.

United Under Trump.

There appears a deepening divide over the Trump presidency, but is there? People voted for him as a bringer of change and against him because they too wanted change but not in his direction. Underneath the divide is a huge common desire. But something as innocuous as a Face Book algorithm that delivers only what you want to hear has divided and reinforced opinions till the only colour is black and white. Dirt collar works want hope, blue want jobs and white don’t want to be the only ones paying for it. Only the gold collars are happy with the status quo, and by no means are they the majority. The acrimonious debate over Trump is a facile division. But other than Sanders and Corbyn’s rather downbeat pronouncements the change-wanters see no way forward. There is no solidifying shape of this mythical change that the majority want. And it’s no way a Trumpian vision or any vision derivable in Washington or Wall Street. It begins way outside those holey walls. It begins with decimalised voting where 10 vote for the best amongst them who go on to vote for the best of the next 10 and so on till the best of the best becomes the candidate with no allegiance other than to those who chose him or her. Then the unheard of policies. Speak only from the heart. Pay true service to the quality and equality of all lives. Taxation to reduce social divisions. Shorter working week. Revise the fundamentals of need. Limit advertising. Revise the fundamentals of education. Introduce an American NHS .And so on. Americans have lived in fear for at least three generations and Trump is the culmination, the line in the sand that selects reverse. God bless America. And its people will breath a sigh of relief strong enough to blow the dust off the moon. 

A Welcome Trump.

In this reprise of Dick Whittington we’re in the final scene. Two giant oak doors open to the approach of a small boy made good. Well not good exactly, more viciously veracious from a distorted childhood. We glimpse the assembled faces within the ajar turn from hatred to smiles, his turn from disdain to an equally false face shape. As he treads closer on a blood red carpet of broken commoners all are eager for the doors to close behind him. Like some Masonic Bohemian Grove ceremony he with the tallest hat takes his place at the head of the pentagram. What was in doubt is made whole again: the commoners are safe without. Boris Johnson who once called him a buffoon, a serious accolade from one so well qualified in that arena, sees new opportunities in their brotherly bond. Vanessa May is keen to do business via ‘our special relationship’ with the boy who has bullied and screwed every business partner he’s ever had. But all is well; the gates are closed. The circle of power is secure again. 

Trump Does Brexit.

7.00am Wednesday 9/11/2016. OMG 9/11 all over again! Hadn’t noticed that. Anyway the quietly confident establishment has been thwarted again. After years of trying to sell innovative toys one thing is clear. People may profess to want new, different game changing ideas but when push comes to shove they plump for slight variants of what they already know. Clinton’s stale My Little Pony line couldn’t compete with Trump’s Mutant Ninja Turtle. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the world takes it. I’d imagine back home both Democrats and Republicans are in shock. One’s lost and the other might have a President they’d rather be rid of. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump left 2017 either in jail or, after an unfortunate accident, in a box. But Trump, like the rest of the American population, doesn’t know what he’s in for. Where they might find Trump’s billions were made from screwing little people, business partners and government grants he will find a figure head without friends is an exercise in futile frustration and fiscal failure. OK a nice house but a salary of $400k won’t even cover costs. But and it’s a big but, we will all either learn to be honest and act well or move closer to the disastrous denouement that appears to be marching steadfastly towards us. But what’s to worry about? Apparently the Inuit elders have noticed the Earth is beginning to wobble on its axis and in less than a year Planet X or Nibiru will fly by and cause mass extinctions. So Trump’s got nothing to worry about, so long as he doesn’t stop Jews entering America along with Muslims. 

Stand up to Cancer.

Friday night’s program collecting for cancer was truly shocking. Having in the family a young dad with an aggressive haematoma and three friends already dead it’s close to home but in that reality the program’s overblown sadness, the pouting stiff upper lips and the dwelling on death and stolen opportunities isn’t present. It’s just human fragility, understanding and support. It was shocking because it reminded me of 1984. In the book there is a perpetual war with some far off enemy that we must be afraid of and protected from by Big Brother. Is cancer being framed as our ubiquitous enemy? The program could have been called, “You might as well give up now.”  Make a bucket list of futile pleasures and fade away. With 50% of us likely to get cancer according to the program, that’s ~ 35 million, what chance do you have? With roughly 200,000 hospital beds available that’s 150 per bed. In the face of this huge epidemic and an equally huge effort to find a cure I see very little work on what in our modern lifestyle causes it. Sure it’s not one single pathogen but doesn’t it call for an equally huge effort to find the causes rather than a cure? The program for all its appropriately expressed emotionality I found utterly distasteful, especially as I suspect living untruthfully an unfulfilled and stressed life has a lot to do with it. Might for example buying a DFS sofa to watch TV on rather than having a wild expressive dance and shouting how you truly feel put you on the waiting list? 

Hyper Normalisation Response.

It’s hard after watching HN to know what to do. Governments are beholden to the banks, corporations etc and they in turn are beholden to shareholders. Shareholders are the financial equivalent of a nameless factory fishing fleet dredging up the last morsel of marine life. Their portfolios are amoral and a-human numbers meaningless but for their size. The population at large in this scheme of things has no leverage. A metaphor might be a gigantic chocolate wheel where millions of hamsters drive its rotation fed with coco and milk. They eat a little and their little feet make chocolate to grow the wheel. On the outside hundreds of knives skim off the excess. This excess isn’t used it simply accumulates in huge vaults of chocolate bars. The hamsters daren’t stop for fear of going hungry. So back to what to do. It’s easy to blame the shareholders as chocolate skimming charlatans but what if they’re just a product of the wheel spinning too fast? What if the problem is caused by the hamsters, in the hope of a little extra food, are over pedalling? Is there a speed between zero and too fast that feeds the hamsters but doesn’t create excess? What if the hamsters slowed down? And what does this mean outside the metaphor? Being a war baby and growing up post war I naturally have minimal desires. It’s easy for me to make do and mend, to buy in charity shops, to maintain and make what I have last and wear extra cloths rather than have the wall-to-wall heating on. Buying is a rare delicacy for me. In bankers parlance I’m a ‘deadbeat’, a person they make no profit from. The film suggests the main ‘work’ of the population is to spend and be in debt because it’s these two areas where we create profit for shareholders. So what if we all adopted my post-war ethos? Adopted as a freeing fulfilling pleasure not a dour penny-pinching austerity. Other than the most poor we could cut our spending by 20% to 40% by ignoring the constant clamour of advertising dictating what we aught to need. This as I see it is the only lever left to us to cause change. By simply ignoring the demands put on us by the current system profits and share prices will drop, it will become a buyers market so prices will drop and we will begin to hold the money and the power that goes with it rather than bankers and shareholders. But will we or won’t we be able to resist the induced lure of a new kitchen, TV or payday loan? 

Hyper Normalisation Response.

It’s hard after watching HN to know what to do. Governments are beholden to the banks, corporations etc and they in turn are beholden to shareholders. Shareholders are the financial equivalent of a nameless factory fishing fleet dredging up the last morsel of marine life. Their portfolios are amoral and a-human numbers meaningless but for their size. The population at large in this scheme of things has no leverage. A metaphor might be a gigantic chocolate wheel where millions of hamsters drive its rotation fed with coco and milk. They eat a little and their little feet make chocolate to grow the wheel. On the outside hundreds of knives skim off the excess. This excess isn’t used it simply accumulates in huge vaults of chocolate bars. The hamsters daren’t stop for fear of going hungry. So back to what to do. It’s easy to blame the shareholders as chocolate skimming charlatans but what if they’re just a product of the wheel spinning too fast? What if the problem is caused by the hamsters, in the hope of a little extra food, are over pedalling? Is there a speed between zero and too fast that feeds the hamsters but doesn’t create excess? What if the hamsters slowed down? And what does this mean outside the metaphor? Being a war baby and growing up post war I naturally have minimal desires. It’s easy for me to make do and mend, to buy in charity shops, to maintain and make what I have last and wear extra cloths rather than have the wall-to-wall heating on. Buying is a rare delicacy for me. In bankers parlance I’m a ‘deadbeat’, a person they make no profit from. The film suggests the main ‘work’ of the population is to spend and be in debt because it’s these two areas where we create profit for shareholders. So what if we all adopted my post-war ethos? Adopted as a freeing fulfilling pleasure not a dour penny-pinching austerity. Other than the most poor we could cut our spending by 20% to 40% by ignoring the constant clamour of advertising dictating what we aught to need. This as I see it is the only lever left to us to cause change. By simply ignoring the demands put on us by the current system profits and share prices will drop, it will become a buyers market so prices will drop and we will begin to hold the money and the power that goes with it rather than bankers and shareholders. But will we or won’t we be able to resist the induced lure of a new kitchen, TV or payday loan? 

Hyper Normalisation Response.

It’s hard after watching HN to know what to do. Governments are beholden to the banks, corporations etc and they in turn are beholden to shareholders. Shareholders are the financial equivalent of a nameless factory fishing fleet dredging up the last morsel of marine life. Their portfolios are amoral and a-human numbers meaningless but for their size. The population at large in this scheme of things has no leverage. A metaphor might be a gigantic chocolate wheel where millions of hamsters drive its rotation fed with coco and milk. They eat a little and their little feet make chocolate to grow the wheel. On the outside hundreds of knives skim off the excess. This excess isn’t used it simply accumulates in huge vaults of chocolate bars. The hamsters daren’t stop for fear of going hungry. So back to what to do. It’s easy to blame the shareholders as chocolate skimming charlatans but what if they’re just a product of the wheel spinning too fast? What if the problem is caused by the hamsters, in the hope of a little extra food, are over pedalling? Is there a speed between zero and too fast that feeds the hamsters but doesn’t create excess? What if the hamsters slowed down? And what does this mean outside the metaphor? Being a war baby and growing up post war I naturally have minimal desires. It’s easy for me to make do and mend, to buy in charity shops, to maintain and make what I have last and wear extra cloths rather than have the wall-to-wall heating on. Buying is a rare delicacy for me. In bankers parlance I’m a ‘deadbeat’, a person they make no profit from. The film suggests the main ‘work’ of the population is to spend and be in debt because it’s these two areas where we create profit for shareholders. So what if we all adopted my post-war ethos? Adopted as a freeing fulfilling pleasure not a dour penny-pinching austerity. Other than the most poor we could cut our spending by 20% to 40% by ignoring the constant clamour of advertising dictating what we aught to need. This as I see it is the only lever left to us to cause change. By simply ignoring the demands put on us by the current system profits and share prices will drop, it will become a buyers market so prices will drop and we will begin to hold the money and the power that goes with it rather than bankers and shareholders. But will we or won’t we be able to resist the induced lure of a new kitchen, TV or payday loan? 

Hyper Normalisation Response.

It’s hard after watching HN to know what to do. Governments are beholden to the banks, corporations etc and they in turn are beholden to shareholders. Shareholders are the financial equivalent of a nameless factory fishing fleet dredging up the last morsel of marine life. Their portfolios are amoral and a-human numbers meaningless but for their size. The population at large in this scheme of things has no leverage. A metaphor might be a gigantic chocolate wheel where millions of hamsters drive its rotation fed with coco and milk. They eat a little and their little feet make chocolate to grow the wheel. On the outside hundreds of knives skim off the excess. This excess isn’t used it simply accumulates in huge vaults of chocolate bars. The hamsters daren’t stop for fear of going hungry. So back to what to do. It’s easy to blame the shareholders as chocolate skimming charlatans but what if they’re just a product of the wheel spinning too fast? What if the problem is caused by the hamster, in the hope of a little extra food, are over pedalling? Is there a speed between zero and too fast that feeds the hamsters but doesn’t create excess? What if the hamsters slowed down? And what does this mean outside the metaphor? Being a war baby and growing up post war I naturally have minimal desires. It’s easy for me to make do and mend, to buy in charity shops, to maintain and make what I have last and wear extra cloths rather than have the wall-to-wall heating on. Buying is a rare delicacy for me. In bankers parlance I’m a ‘deadbeat’, a person they make no profit from. The film suggests the main ‘work’ of the population is to spend and be in debt because it’s these two areas where we create profit for shareholders. So what if we all adopted my post-war ethos? Adopted as a freeing fulfilling pleasure not a dour penny-pinching austerity. Other than the most poor we could cut our spending by 20% to 40% by ignoring the constant clamour of advertising dictating what we aught to need. This as I see it is the only lever left to us to cause change. By simply ignoring the demands put on us by the current system profits and share prices will drop, it will become a buyers market so prices will drop and we will begin to hold the money and the power that goes with it rather than bankers and shareholders. But will we or won’t we be able to resist the induced lure of a new kitchen, TV or payday loan? 

Hyper Normalisation.

By constructing his narratives from a thousand historical clips Adam Curtis’s films always ring true. Hyper Normalisation follows the meta-realities leading to our current situation. Meta as in how the mind-constructions of its protagonists have created a wholly unnatural reality.

In 1975 the banks foreclosed on New York City. They refused to buy the bonds that funded its borrowing. Near collapse NYC agreed for the banks to run its finances, which meant from then on austerity would fund bank profits. This one transaction ruptured the collective agreement between government and its population. Both became puppets of the hidden hand of finance. Government would henceforth simply pretend to govern while the population had no redress over the hand they couldn’t see. The tale moves to the Middle East where Kissinger is duplicitous with Asad the elder who, taken for a fool, hates America. After terrorist bombings America blames Libya because Gaddafi has no Arab friends even though proof points to Asad who is friends with Iran. They vilify Gaddafi and apply sanctions. Gaddafi admits to crimes he hasn’t committed (Lockerby), gives up his WMDs, which he hasn’t got and is proclaimed heroic but then left to die in the Libyan revolution. Asad is emboldened, dies and is succeeded by Asad the younger. The Islamic world ferments. If  ‘inshalla’ (if God permits) is to be believed he really doesn’t like Arabic countries. Meanwhile back in the western world governments continue to pretend governance and the populous is subsumed in its own unrealities, both controlled into an unnatural reality imposed by what one can’t see and the other can’t admit to. Individuals bask in algorithms designed to reflect their every desire. If you’re pro Trump your searches will deliver affirmative articles, as will those selected for you if you’re anti Trump. Mesmerised by your own reflection you will never see past it in a process of ultimate fragmentation. Thus Brexit’s fractious 50/50 followed by a similar result in the US election. We have become stuck in an unreal stasis where the traditional levers of government, unions and even finance no longer work. But 350 words can’t do this film justice. Best watch it for yourself. 

Stop Lying.

I was brought up by my Methodist parents in the 50’s and 60’s to not lie. I’m grateful because the benefits have been many, but these days I feel out of place. All TV ads are lies of one sort or another, salesmen lie, journalist and the media lie, all arms of our governments lie. Persuasive language is even taught in schools as a necessary part of English. This pandemic of untruths and unrealities is causing an epidemic of stress, depression and demoralisation. Every denial of some underlying truth further separates us from reality, the reality that we instinctively know is there somewhere. But as many psychological experiments have proved one person in a group who have all been told to lie soon accommodates to that lie and accepts it with, “it doesn’t feel right but I guess I must be wrong.” Once accepted that person will add his/her own intellectual powers, like a node in a cognitive Internet, to justify it further. Many mores within finance, the media and government have grown to be so universally accepted in this way that any objections appear overtly pernicious and purposefully made to cause trouble. Branded as such they become righteously ostracised as conspiracy theorists or paranoid extremists. And all by the intelligent, diligent experts in the field. Maybe, just maybe we should thank Donald Trump for appearing at the head of this insidious pestilence. A narcissist so grand he believes he creates the truth by his own willpower alone. Can he show the rest of us the iniquity and ultimately the destruction caused by denying the reality we instinctively know? Will he enter 2017 as President or in prison for sexual abuse? 

9/11 Health & Safety.

The death of truth. Now having an elephant in the room seems insignificant when the twin towers are ever present as a reminder that lies and denial do work. Whoever one believes one can’t deny the incredible divergence of theories, evidence and conclusions around 9/11. Was it Islamic terrorists, Mossad, the Saudi state or the owner himself, or the CIA? Who is lying, expert pilots, structural engineers, demolition professionals or NIST? It not only left a gaping hole in the Pentagon it left a gaping rupture in truth itself. It’s not quite what it was before. But there is one undeniable truth we can all agree on; the twin towers and building 7 did fall down. And there’s no disagreement on the resulting repercussions, the US intervention in the Middle East, the billion dollar insurance payout to the owner etc. but there is one important repercussion that is strangely absent. So strangely absent it’s gone completely unnoticed. The buildings fell down but there is no prior evidence of steel skyscrapers falling down due to fire. Of course explanations have been supposedly found but. In all three but particularly building 7 a minor office fire in no more than 5% of the building caused the whole fifteen stories to collapse in less than 10 seconds. When millions of Americans work daily in similar buildings where are the health and safety repercussions of this massive ever-present danger? As far as I’m aware there have been none. In the US in particular one would expect an immediate safety investigation leading to wholesale changes to building regs and fire prevention in particular, but nothing. It’s as if the US zeitgeist knows, even if the government won’t admit it, that fire on 9/11 isn’t the convenient explanation it’s supposed to be. 

The Appeal of Nought.

It’s strange to think that nought or zero isn’t really a number. Numbering systems go back many thousands of years but as late as the seventh century the existence of zero was argued over. The Hindu-Arabic number system brought to Europe in the thirteenth century by Fibonacci had only the nine numerals 1 to 9 but used a placeholder symbol ‘o’ that as he excitedly put it, “any number may be written.” It’s thought the Olmecs in S America also used a placeholder symbol as early as 50BC and appears in the Mayan calendar, but neither considered it a number. To consider the enormity of this concept consider an empty table and being asked, “There are zero things on the table, what are they?” It’s of course absurd; there could be zero of anything on the table, apples, spaceships or people. In terms of counting quantity, which is why we invented numbers, zero is not an integer or even the smallest fraction of one. As a placeholder symbol it simply allows unlimited counting. The same can be said of negative numbers. “How many negative amounts of things on the table?” Once zero is conceived of negative numbers can also be conceived. What has been built using these concepts is not a quantitative counting system but the whole numerical edifice of mathematics, hugely useful and powerful but not in some basic sense counting. Yet today we count using zero and negative numbers as equally real as the Arabic numerals 1 to 9. We no longer differentiate between quantitative numbers and conceptual numbers. This is no small matter. It’s the difference between reality and illusion. I might even suggest ‘enough’ is a more quantitative number even though it’s not defined numerically. My question is how are we being misled by conceptual numbers? As a simple example we might buy a computer or a car on their impressive stats whilst having little use for the power they provide. A man may strive to acquire wealth a thousand times greater than he could ever spend or become fat from eating twice as much as his body needs. Increasingly our use of conceptual numbers has made numeracy emotive, and apparent quantities dictated by power. How can it be a financial wiz can acquire more in a minute than a bus driver in a year? Because he is at the heart of the economic power that dictates the value of numbers, conceptual numbers that have become real quantities. It’s impossible to argue against because the whole human race has now embedded in its counting system what was introduced as a conceptual placeholder symbol as a real numeral. Try for example this simple mathematical proof.

Let x = y. 
Then x² = xy. 
Take y² from both sides: 
x² - y² = xy - y² that can be written as

(x – y)(x + y) = y(x – y). 
Divide by (x - y) gives 
x + y = y. 
As x = y, this gives 
2 y = y. 
Thus 2=1 or 
1 = 0.

By dividing by (x – y), ie zero as x=y and zero is only a placeholder symbol one gets a spurious result. Such spurious results are our undoing.

Corbyn.

I suspect it’s simplistic to cast those violently opposed to Corbyn as a Blairite rump, and Corbyn himself as a wishie washie lefty. For me the key is Owen Smith. He’s been chosen for his ability to sling combative rhetoric at the party opposite like for like. I guess the theory is there’s no way a lamb can compete with the slaughterer but this Labour schism is far too heated to be about mere style, it has to be something far more visceral: survival. Avowed socialists want their party to be a viable opposition behind a fierce general, which Corbyn appears not to be. But what if Corbyn is a first shoot of a different spring? What if the old ways of our adversarial democracy have become archaic, decrepit and that cloistered highly politicised MPs are no longer good decision makers? Then again what if the messianic following of Corbyn might in itself destabilise our whole politics? Is the Westminster establishment too big to fail? Are we too blinded by animosity to see the reality behind it, that Corbyn has touched a visceral nerve of an un-represented decent honesty majority fast becoming another indigenous population being crushed by global neo-liberalism? Habituality is the cholesterol of the mind; it thickens the arteries of thinking. The more it takes hold the more the vital necessary action to renew health becomes frightening and inconceivable. This is the essence of Labour’s conflict, its first heart attack. It’s the survival of the social politic.

More of the Same.

I have just bought a garden shredder from Screwfix. I will now be inundated with adverts for them on Facebook, Amazon, ebay etc, and get emails from shredder manufacturers of their full range of shredders for all my requirements. Sophisticated algorithms and lucrative backdoor information sharing doesn’t really amount to much when I’ve either bought one or decided not to. It’d be far better to insert a five-year time delay for when this one’s worn out and I need a new one. And every click on Youtube elicits a sidebar of variations of what I’ve just chosen. Remember ‘Pop will Eat Itself’ from the eighties, a rare future glimpse of our present where everything is a re-hash of everything smeared into oblivion by electronic machines, where a pop career is fifteen minutes of fame? Eating one’s own excrement may seem like a jolly good perpetual motion idea but it’s hardly a healthy life style. It may be getting faster and busier but only, like a diet of salt and vinegar crisps, because it has minimal sustenance. My guess is when we get to iPhone17 with 3D graphics, everything you might ever want to know and its own friendly personality we’ll have forgotten what its primary use is. Music will be self-generated by trend analysis and we’ll all be buying garden shredders weekly. Don’t laugh, I’ve already bought three cordless electric drills. So there you have it, we’re all going to get more of the same, because it appears that’s what we want. 

Football Emotionally.

A player for Salford FC kicked a goal from near the centre line that won them the match causing huge emotion. When interviewed he said, “I could have done it a hundred times and missed but today it went in.” Equally there are a hundred small mistakes per match that cause supporters much negative emotion over a player’s ‘stupidity.’ Add to that dubious ref decisions and the result is a 90 minutes chaotic emotional journey that over a million fans pay for a ticket to every week. And basically the winners, like Salford FC, are just the ones with more lucky moments. Being brought up on motorcycle sports this emotional roller coaster passes me by. I enjoy football for the skill, bravery and physical fitness just as I would a race. So there seems something about the structure of football that plays out like a procedural crime drama with numerous unforeseen plot twists leading to a simple win or lose. The ones that went in are remembered and revered, the ones that just missed soon forgotten though the difference in skill is minimal. When the goal difference is rarely more than two, though highly skilful and athletic, it’s basically a game of chance hinging on a few throws of a dice. So it seems its appeal is the emotional ride hence the highs and lows of being a fan. One might describe it as a form of surrogate gambling. Nevertheless it’s the greatest of games.

Trump.

Read a long article on the rise of depression in 1^st world countries and that most of it is more accurately described as demoralisation. Demoralisation is a logical response to insurmountable odds, to where the battle is lost and there’s nothing one can do. It was attempted by both sides in WWll by bombing civilians but to little effect. It’s strange then that it should be happening in the richest countries without any organised intention to cause it. So what is this battle that so many people believe they have lost? What can be more intimidating than many tons of high explosives? In a word, reality. In the long lineage from Freud or more accurately the abuse of his work the unconscious of our societies have been mined to manipulate us. What began as marketing levers has become internalised. I might rationalise a need for an iPone6 but why I want one is from an inner sense of self that has been surgically inserted, or a pristine car when that quality is unnecessary in getting from A to B. This surgery of self like a face-lift doesn’t alter the underlying state of being. It’s a deflecting manipulative imposition only perceivable by the cardboard sustenance it provides. As this mind infection spreads through society people find themselves clucking like chickens at a hypnotist’s show. ‘Sure it’s stupid but I can’t seem to stop doing it.’ But now it’s not just an individual thing. Management, politicians, the media all subscribe to a mass communal un-truth impossible to avoid. We want out but can’t find the door. And in this state of demoralisation we lose our mind to shellshock. We choose Brexit, xenophobia and so possibly Trump. ‘Maybe Trump will get us a bigger TV, he says he can.’ But why do you want one? ‘I don’t know I just do.’

IQ.

Prof James Flynn has studied IQ and found in every recent ten-year period our IQ is increasing by some five points: We’re getting smarter. A hundred years ago an earlier scientist found ordinary people couldn’t think in abstractions, in logic and the hypothetical. They thought entirely practically. In terms of today’s IQ they were close to imbecilic, which of course they weren’t, they just thought practically. In the succeeding hundred years we have become comfortable with abstraction, logic and the hypothetical hence the increase in IQ, but before we feel superior this might have unforeseen consequences. By greater use of these higher functions of the brain we might well be neglecting the practical, experiential, emotional and empathic uses of our brain. For sure they’re still there but maybe subservient to logic and the like. And for sure we lord this particular intelligence and structure our society in its direction. The smart people get to the top because the top is created in those terms. And for sure it’s useful in certain areas but it’s beginning to have a negative effect. By fostering abstraction we’re literally abstracting ourselves from reality from nature the planet and hence neglect them in favour of our own constructs. By fostering logic we subdue feelings. By fostering hypotheses we invent often unreal alternatives. By subduing the practical, emotional and empathic we becoming cold and disconnected with an increasingly narrow skill set. This move to smart was very useful in the industrial revolution but the trend has continued until today we are suffering from it. I suggest most of our self-inflicted hardships are due to a growing sociopathic state of mind that our increasing IQ is leading us into with the smartest sociopaths leading the way.

And as my IQ (135) is classified as ‘Very superior’ don’t fucking argue with me OK. 

The Best is Past.

This morning MOT. Sailed through after I’d wiped off the telltale signs of a worn out oil seal from the fork leg on the way. So following on from yesterday: The best pasted twenty years ago. Not just bikes, everything. The second millennium will be known as the Bloated Age. We’ve had the Stone Age the Iron Age the Bronze Age and probably the Fish age and Roots and berries age before that. Sometime in the 80’s or 90’s and having everything we began to want more. It was a transition strangely unnoticed by historians. The mathematics of perception altered. A series based on the term 1/n, i.e. 1+½+1/3 +1/4 converges to a finite value where the term n, i.e. 1+2+3+4 etc sums to infinity. If we equate each additional value in a serie to some day-to-day imperative it will over weeks and months continue to sum one way or the other. If perception is the basic term of this series then whether it’s convergent to a finite value or divergent to an infinite value is majorly important. That’s the transition. If our desire is finite it has the chance of being met; if it’s infinite it hasn’t. It appears in this Bloated Age we simply want more irrespective of practicality. My motorcycle needs more power, my computer more memory, my software more features, my camera more pixels and so on. Things need to be faster, bigger, cleaner, happier and more exotic, all just more. Our perceptual series has become divergent. XP was fine, Windows 7 great, Windows 10 is so irrelevant Microsoft are beginning to be sued by many US states for their blatantly dishonest promotion of it. They even re-purposed the top right ‘X’ not as ‘close’ but ‘I accept.’ And even the top 1% while having more than they could ever need are hell bent on acquiring more. And, and even every kid’s spaceman chum, Buzz Lightyear is teaching our children to go, “To infinity and beyond!” A good joke but lost on a five year old’. No, bring back the blitz I want to join Dad’s Army. 

Bikes.

This morning at motorcycle shop for a new tire. We talk about bikes. We agree they’ve gone mad. Too over weight, over sized and over powerful to be enjoyable to ride. Given the restrictions of speed limits, roads and other road users and normal skill levels they’re useless but marketing has tricked bikers into imagery rather than reality. So what’s an ideal bike? Slim because it’s controllable, compact so it’s nimble, powerful enough to do a 100mph (around 50hp not 150), light so it’s easy to handle (150kg not 220), a robust simple motor you can rely on and that’s easy to work on so you can sort it if need be. I’ve motocrossed, trialed and done several 3,000 mile road trips all on suitable machinery quite unlike the monsters they’re selling today. Realistically adventure bikes need to do 40mph max off road and 100 on and around 150kg, i.e. a Jap 600 single. The Dakar, a 450. Touring bikes need 100mph and reliability, and all need easily available spares. And all need to be fun to ride. Track bikes OK need power but even then it’s about enjoying it and you can enjoy it on a sorted bike any size. Personally for me it’s a Yamaha SZR660 single. Had mine for 19 years and there’s still nothing better. 

The BBC

Just tuned in to BBC Breakfast. Must be short for, ‘Break fast and run away’, which I did. It was frightening. Pinky and Perky, presumably in some real existence known as Dan Walker and Sally Nugent, were in this incarnation truly Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth. They ran an interview with a top golfer who’d chosen not to go to the Olympics. After it they joined in mutual disdain that he’d given his honest opinion, that it would have been better if he’d made up some twaddle about his cat being ill or expecting an urgent Amazon parcel. It was as if spin has become the new truth, at least within our pre-eminent broadcaster. It’s no wonder Jeremy Corbyn is appreciated by the public yet has a hard time with the media and his own party. They literally can’t cope with honest factual opinion. They belittle it as un-real-worldly like an amateur playing in the professional game. The conservatives have always done it and Blair dragged the labour party to join them. The Lib Dems got screwed in the coalition so there’s no major force left in British politics that believes in speaking honesty. And after years of coping with spinning politicians the BBC is now in its own spin. In the following interview with a spinning politician the interviewer adopted her own interviewer spin supposedly to counteract it. It didn’t, it simply removed us even further from honest reality. This truly is the widespread adoption of double-speak and double-think as the norm in politics and the media. Poor old Jeremy. And this evening a doc following a refugee to almost England. He remembered fondly his youth in Damascus up until Syrian government security guards beat him gruesomely for protesting, how he was ripped off numerous times by the businessmen of the asylum transport trade. There’s a cautionary tale here, that if you let things get bad they’ll get worse. Asad, his government, police and those businessmen have double-thought themselves into a grotesque unreality of frenzied rabid dogs tearing into common flesh. With double think it’s possible. And it begins with spin. 

The BBC

Just tuned in to BBC Breakfast. Must be short for, ‘Break fast and run away’, which I did. It was frightening. Pinky and Perky, presumably in some real existence known as Dan Walker and Sally Nugent, were in this incarnation truly Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth. They ran an interview with a top golfer who’d chosen not to go to the Olympics. After it they joined in mutual surprise that he’d given his honest opinion, that it would have been better if he’d made up some twaddle about his cat being ill or expecting an urgent Amazon parcel. It was as if spin has become the new truth, at least within our pre-eminent broadcaster. It’s no wonder Jeremy Corbyn is appreciated by the public yet has a hard time with the media and his own party. They literally can’t cope with honest factual opinion. They belittle it as un-real-worldly like an amateur playing in the professional game. The conservatives have always done it and Blair dragged the labour party to join them. The Lib Dems got screwed in the coalition so there’s no major force left in British politics that believes in speaking honesty. And after years of coping with spinning politicians the BBC is now in its own spin. In the following interview with a spinning politician the interviewer adopted her own interviewer spin supposedly to counteract it. It didn’t, it simply removed us even further from honest reality. This truly is the widespread adoption of double-speak and double-think as the norm in politics and the media. Poor old Jeremy. And this evening a doc following a refugee to almost England. He remembered fondly his youth in Damascus up until Syrian government security guards beat him gruesomely for protesting, how he was ripped off numerous times by the businessmen of the asylum transport trade. There’s a cautionary tale here, that if you let things get bad they’ll get worse. Asad, his government, police and those businessmen have double-thought themselves into a grotesque unreality of frenzied rabid dogs tearing into common flesh. With double think it’s possible. And it begins with spin. 

Referendum. The Truth.

Three years ago Cameron decided, in a fit of peek after the UK’s abysmal faring in the Eurovision Song Contest, on a ‘Screw You EU’ contest of his own. If the ESC can be much ado about, well something else entirely, apologies to the bard, he can have a referendum on similar lines. Ostensibly aimed at garnering the public’s once and for all decision on in or out, in ESC terms the songs, he had two very different motives. I mean when was the last time you heard a politician interested in what we think? One was to message the anti EU section of his own party to, “Shut the fuck up!” and the other to put the fear of God into other EU member states to reform the out of touch central committee, i.e. re the ESC the politics. And it may be working. Already Michael Gove has muted he might quit politics to raise his own family of snails in Shropshire and in this morning’s news France are thinking of having a ‘Screw You EU’ Frexit of its own. It’s all very therapy. It’s not enough to talk about wanting to change, it’s about getting off one’s arse and making change happen. So it’s all very difficult And just like Australia is now for some unknown reason in the ESC I suspect the EU’s enlargement plans are more about empire building than any rational beneficial expansion. The real and obvious truth is the moral of the English public has been broken by lies and corrupted truths on all sides. It’s not that we can’t see light at either end of the tunnel, it’s that we’re in the tunnel in a sort of old age demensure. The mother of all parliaments has become senile. A referendum about a youthful reinvigoration of our own parliament, now that would be worth voting for.

Free Radicals.

A Muslim man kills 49 because the internet said so. ISIS propaganda gave him permission and the local gun store sold him the equipment. It’s all worryingly similar to my recent purchase of a Hitachi cordless drill from Screwfix. The only difference being marketing good, propaganda bad, but they’re pretty well the same side of the same coin. I begin to wonder, am I giving up my decision making to Google’s algorithms of what’s right for me? But then Google is far more benign than Islamic terrorists- because we live in a western democracy don’t we: Sorry, don’t we? Try Googling ‘California election fraud.’ Apparently California uses electronic voting machines. You press your voting button and it adds them all up and provides a result. They are guarded by men who understand this complex mathematical process. But when candidate Susan Bernecker asked to see them in the ‘90s she was amazed to find that on every machine 4 out of every 5 votes for her were being registered to her opponent. It appears the mathematics was more complex than simple addition on what might well be re-purposed one-arm-bandits. One can imagine the good old fashioned sales pitch, “So how much would you like to win the election by?” It appears allegedly that this and other ruses have been used by the Clinton camp to ‘adjust’ Bernie Saunders substantial poll lead into a substantial election win for Clinton. It appears ISIS aren’t the only radicals around, but at least no one died. Well apart from the democratic process.

My Silly Quiz.

My last music quiz is now Ale House folklore for being both a shocking waste of 50p and/or a wee-inducing comedy. As I find music facts, even the few I know, terminally boring my basic aim is mayhem because presiding over chaos is an absolute joy. Chaotic fun may seem trivial but it has great significance. It’s the reason for several thousand years of alcohol consumption and its ubiquitous cure for woes. So for me presiding over chaotic fun is providing possibly the greatest human lesson, how to experience carefree delight whilst still being able to pass a breathalyser test. It’s a much overlooked and underrated therapeutic modality. In my mind it’s like conducting a disorderly orchestra whilst providing silly melodies for them all to improvise on. And with provocation and permission each instrument finds its voice. It’s a skill that would greatly improve any political leader. A couple, long time absent after being banned, looked on bemused as if deeply rearranging their concepts of permissible behaviour. But it’s simply opening up the farcicality of our mutual existence. We’re all Bottoms in our own midsummer night’s dream having donned an ass’s head for a brain that happily takes life too seriously. It’s not that chaotic fun is a denial of important seriousness but rather important seriousness is the denial of life’s true nature. Of course life is of great consequence requiring bravery, focus, honesty and imagination but nowhere in these is it implicit to be serious. So though my quiz may appear buffoonery, it’s not.  

Daughters & Mothers.

Being male I can only off a different purely experiential perspective. The mother is the relationship hub of the family. Fathers and sons relate indirectly via the mother. They may have a good loving relationship but it somehow feels indirect, at arms length, and mostly via shared interests. Because of this it’s rare males emotionally compete. Mothers pass this relational hub role to daughters but while the daughter/s still at home there’s two hubs when there can only really be one and because women relate directly the result in whatever form is intense. It’s not a simplistic vying for the mother role but to a greater or lesser extent a suffocating tension. Daughters rarely fledge like sons do. There’s always a mother role comparison hidden deep. I find it quite hard to imagine a mother saying, “I’m completely fulfilled with your father sweetheart, I love you but do what the hell you like.” It seems to me this suffocation can rob women, who were all once daughters, of fully-fledged confidence. Men by comparison usually have, whether well founded or not, a certain confidence in themselves as a person. Most parental relationships aren’t perfect mostly because the husband does not fulfil his wife but that’s not the same as blaming patriarchy in general but individual masculine development failing to acquire enough feminine energy just as feminine development can fail to acquire masculine energy. I suspect a lack of the arms length masculine relational energy is the fundamental cause of mother/daughter suffocation. 

UK Corruption.

After hours of struggling to define corruption I think it is, ‘a fish swimming backwards.’ Obviously fish are too smart to attempt this but if they did they’d find all their scales that help them swim forwards would flay out and make a thousand little brakes, like teazels that go in but won’t come out. In corruption the thousand facets of effective human interaction become points of jagged resistance. Using this analogy the UK is a hot bed of corruption and its futile activity of coercion. Cameron may comment about Nigeria and Afghanistan corruption but at home he’s presiding over an unprecedented expansion of a more sinister form. In every aspect of education for example every participant, students, teachers, lecturers, parents and future employers are bristling with stress and anger from record levels of coercion. And coercion in academia just as in Nigeria is the active ingredient of corruption. It forces stress down the power structure and rewards, i.e. money, up it, and like the teasel it only goes one way. But more importantly coercion corrupts effectiveness hugely as in the fish swimming, or in this case being pulled, backwards, and once this paradigm sets in ineffectiveness obviously requires more pulling, which in turn leads to even less effectiveness. It must be very confusing to the likes of Nicky Morgan that whatever she does things get worse. It’s simple dear, just consider a fish swimming backwards.

A Children's Fire rain cover.

During dance ceremonies with a Children’s Fire it can rain. Many years as a DS has brought this fact to my attention. So here’s a cheap and pretty easy to make rain cover for the Children’s Fire  designed to go up and down quickly and fold to the size of a large umbrella for storage. You’ll need 6 hazel branches, a 1.1m square fire blanket (~$12), ~8m guy rope, 50cm of cloth tape, 4 nails, 4 eyelets and 4 tent pegs, and a cup of tea if you’re English.

If it looks like rain lay it out on the ground as in the diagram. Do a dry run to find the best position for the pegs and leave them in the ground. Unhook the near two guys and fold it back down. You’ll find it’s a bit wibbly-wobbly in the erection phase but when pegged down it’s quite stable. Best to hold the guys as wide as possible to stabilise it. The blanket will turn slightly brown in the centre but that’s fine.

To make Child’s fire rain cover.

  

1- cut 2 pairs of stout hazel poles  95 cm and 125 cm long by 2-3 cm diameter.

2- drill holes 2 cm from both ends to take string.

3- buy a 1.2 m square fibreglass fire blanket (~$12) and 4+ tent pegs.

4- fold over two opposite edges 5 cm and sew along to make a tube. (pref with a zigzag stitch) Fibre glass fabric frays very easily!

5- insert two thin hazel poles 1 cm dia by 1m long into tubes. These will become front and back edges.

6- on the outside ends of these poles wrap cloth tape around the ends and sew onto fibreglass to make a sandwich  and make a button hole or use an eyelet through.

7- tie together the thick ends of each long and short pair of poles to make a hinge.

8- nail (big headed) through each corner button hole into the thinner ends, front edge to the two long poles and back edge to two short ones. Use a large washer to stop cover coming off if necessary.

9- tie a length of guy rope round the nails of one side to match the length of the extended blanket plus 2 m at either end.

10- measure approx 1.5 m along the front guys and 1 m along the back ones and form loops for pegs.

11- That’s the cover completed, but as it is it won’t fold up, so look at where the back edge pole must be broken for it to fold and snap it there. The whole thing should then fold into a roll for storage. 

12- test it out and practice putting it up and down. There’s a bit of a knack to it but it comes easily.

Palestine in Lancs.

Imagine the history of Palestine played out in Lancashire. Seventy years ago there’s an influx of migrants into Lancashire fleeing Russian and European repression. After several years they become a significant minority. They organise and simply declare themselves an independent migrant state within England. The US president recognises it and US dollars provide it with arms when the English retaliate. There’s fighting until the UN recognises the new state and boarders are drawn. More migrants come and the new legitimate state expands into Cheshire and parts of Yorkshire. The English are incensed by this intrusion into our country but our economy is poor and we can only afford inferior weapons. The migrants build a wall to keep us out and ‘legally’ persecute the English ‘rebels’ in other counties killing many innocent children and civilians. This is what it feels like to be a Palestinian. 

Leicester-Austerity.

This morning where I volunteer we had a morning reading and sang a hymn. Steven read us the virtues of Jesus and asked how we might live up to his example and the hymn followed in a similar vein. I was suddenly struck by the thought that this aspect of religion is a form of repression. I mean we might attempt supporting the homeless and stuff, but he saved the world! How are we supposed to do that? Now I think well actually he didn’t, he travelled around being good to people and talking beautifully about life, and we can all try to do that. And the repression was from someone along the line bigging him up so much that we normals just feel terminally inadequate and that’s a bit of a downer. But then feeling terminally inadequate means we’re unlikely to get big ideas that we can change things. No, when we’re all insignificant failures we’d best just keep our heads down and follow whoever’s leading. That’s why it’s so brilliant Leicester winning the league. They didn’t have Man City’s cash or Chelsea’s star players they started the season as the terminally inadequate. Then slowly Claudio Raniari taught them they weren’t. They found they could be fierce, focused, play freely and win matches. It’s become a miracle that nobody can quite believe has happened. And all because of attitude, no mega bucks, no PR spin, no star egos, no double speak platitudes just permission to play wonderfully. In the face of our burden of austerity under the repression of the all mighty (Conservatives) Leicester showed us how to be wonderful. And that my friend is the true message of Jesus, before the establishment got its hands on it. Just be amazing and enjoy it. Simples, chiqk.

Naz Shah’s Point.

Labour MP Naz Shah made a flippant comment on social media suggesting Israel be transported to America and which led to her humbling apology in the House of Commons. Her only mistake was to not make her suggestion as a reasoned argument. In the 1920’s many Jews fled Russian persecution. Around that time America banned Jewish immigration into the country so deflecting it to Palestine. Over the years British policy was to limit this flow into Palestine. Before and after WWll Jewish immigration continued until there was a sizable population in Palestine and suggestions of partition began leading to Arab conflict. American sympathisers funded the purchase of Jewish weapons from Russia. In 1948 the ‘Jewish Council of Palestine’ proclaimed The Jewish State of Israel which was immediately backed by US President Harry Truman. Further conflict resulted in the international recognition of the Israeli state. It is quite possible European Jews would have far rather migrated to the US and that the Jewish state in Palestine would not have succeeded without US funds and the recognition given to it by the US President. Since then American money has continued to pour into Israel to such an extent that Israel could be rightfully called ‘Little America in the Middle East.’ It is against this background that Naz Shah’s made her flippant comment. It is also likely the strong Jewish lobby in the US would welcome their kin and that Israelis would likewise feel at home there. It’s also likely the widely felt xenophobic fear within Israel would feel at home with the similar fear permeating the US. Naz Shah’s comment is not deserving of an apology even though it was flippantly made. 

The Price Corporation. (cont.)

The Price Corporation is a multinational public company. Our shares are priced at £1 and we currently have over six million shareholders in different countries. Our business is in the reduction of consumer prices for our shareholders. Currently producers and retailers fix a price for a product and the consumer’s only choice is whether or not to buy. As such there is no pressure the consumer can exert against profiteering which leads to corporate profligacy especially with regard to executive pay and lavish buildings. The business of the Price Corporation is to reduce this excessive profit taking by re-balancing the power of the consumer and companies and corporations, and in so doing make a fairer economic system. By becoming a shareholder in the Price Corporation one makes the commitment to follow its trading policies. These policies are created by our team of dedicated researchers who analyse companies for signs of profiteering. If a company is found to be spending their income wastefully on CEO pay, lavish offices, lobbying etc that don’t directly contribute to their consumers interests our researchers are able to calculate a reasonable price for their products and inform shareholders of our corporate policy to not pay more. If refused the corporation and all its shareholders reserve the right to refuse to do business with such companies until such time they agree with our terms of payment. 

The Price Corporation.

Arising from cold war game theory that underpinned our nuclear survival during the cold war a view of human function evolved. We are all, they believed, self-serving individuals. That then mutated into current political theory whereby the market place is essentially seen as a more democratic process than any governmental democracy because politicians are themselves self-serving individuals however much they profess to be serving the public good: Hence small government, the selling off of public amenities the NHS and the BBC leaving politicians to serve themselves with inflated expenses. The Conservatives and Blair’s Labour Party were directed by their (American) advisors to adopt these theories as a conscious policy to ‘improve’ our democratic process. ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ and Game Theory suggested if we all compete as self-serving individuals then society and consequently we all will benefit. But these theories make one mistaken assumption, that we all have equal standing. A game equalises the players standing and The Prisoner’s Dilemma assumes equal standing but in real life there is a huge variation, and that variation skews the consequences grotesquely. This policy, adopted to improve democracy, becomes an instrument to destroy it. Powerful voices dominate and grow stronger whilst the lesser voices of the majority go unheard. This is where we’re currently at. So here’s the challenge. How does the majority create one powerful voice to exert our presence? For example imagine going into a shop and when asked to pay saying, “I’m a shareholder of the Price Corporation and our corporate policy is to reduce prices wherever possible. We deem that the price of your cappuccino is not £2.45 but £1.50 and as such here is £1.50. Not accepting this price will cause our one point five million share holders to cease using your services.” Obviously this idea requires refinement but please suggest your own.

Dear Parent or Guardian

Dear Parent or Guardian of   Gordon   mouse,

            As Head Mouse I have a duty of care to both staff and students in this school. To this end it is vital we instil a high level of both moral and social behaviour in our young mice as to not do so would cause stress to staff and fail our students in their passage to adulthood. With this in mind I am revising our disciplinary rules as follows.

1-     Your mouse may be verbally chastised at times when he or she fails to achieve acceptable behavioural standards. If at home they express distress at this treatment it is important to confirm the teachers judgment as appropriate.

2-     Teachers are permitted to instil a modicum of fear in their students where necessary. Throwing non-harming items such as rulers, wellingtons and blackboard rubbers etc are all parts of a teacher’s managerial ‘toolkit’ in the classroom.

3-     Likewise a teacher’s screaming and shouting is appropriate when it has the beneficial effect of instilling a moral lesson and releasing stress. It is an important life lesson for all pupils to experience the release of justified anger.

4-     The option of corporal punishment is considered necessary in order to reflect the judicial system of adult life. Failure to provide an early awareness of these harsher sanctions could be seen as neglect.

5-     Though a last resort and in extreme cases capital punishment is deemed a necessary alternative to expulsion, as the latter reflects badly on the school.

Your assistance in these disciplinary measures will be greatly appreciated.

The F1 Computer Game.

IBM’s Watson Analytics apparently makes sense of all our nefarious data. Pump it full of binary steroids and it will tell you what to think. Notice in F1 for every driver there is a whole bank of digital operatives only marginally less than required for a moon landing. Back at the factory only the cleaner wields mechanical aids, so between the cleaner and Hamilton few wrestle directly with physical reality. Maybe this is why F1 is struggling to be a spectacle of human interest. I mean however high tech an Amazon distribution centre might be it will never make a spectator sport. So the only thing that might make this weekend’s Chinese GP anything like interesting is the unforeseen glitch in Hamilton’s engine that’s put him last on the grid. The winner is a given, ‘but how far will H get in his reckless drive through the field?’ That’s the human content that’s somehow been lost between regulations and computers. The plucky Spitfire pilot that flies home with only one wing is a thing of the past, it’s all been reduced to zap or not zap thanks to software like Watson. And Bernie’s attempts to throw a spanner in the works with a new qualifying system look like whacking a Mercedes with his teddy bear to slow it down. But computers are amazing, I love them, they can do the donkeywork in the wink of an eye. Then again we’re not donkeys but we might be if IBM’s Watson Analytics tells us what to think. 

Poor Mr Cameron.

Unaccustomed as I am to any conciliatory feeling towards this Conservative government I’m feeling a slight pity for Cameron. Anyone with a six figure taxable asset or earnings will via their accountant be introduced to a keen tax advisor who will open up a market stall of commodities to meet your every tax saving need rather like a door-to-door salesman shows loo brushes and dishcloths. Both accountant and advisor will assume you are an intelligent man of the world who will wish to minimise your tax bill by any means possible. In the face of this paradigm that paying tax is more immoral and plain stupid than avoiding paying tax, all legal of course, one chooses a nailbrush and two ironing board covers. A case in point. Said advisor suggests assigning said asset to a third party that resides in a foreign land unaccustomed to the ways of income tax because it only has three residents and a dog. You no longer own the asset but you do own the third party that does own it, and as no one knows this connection because it was written on a piece of paper subsequently eaten by the dog it all moves into the realms of the intangible. Nowhere in this whole process is there any thought for morality. It’s as if paying tax would be akin to putting your money on a bonfire and everyone knows that’s just silly. This is the environment Cameron, Osborne and the rest of the Bullingdon Club were brought up in but since the furore about corporations ‘legally’ avoiding UK tax the condemnation has moved to morality, an aspect of tax avoidance previously considered unimportant. So now the Panamanian pandemonium has the morals of wealthy individuals in its headlights and poor Mr Cameron has his own familial immorality to consider. 

Inside Out-ed.

Watched the new Pixar film, ‘Inside out’ last night. It purports to show the inner workings of a typical young girl’s mind but in fact demonstrates the extent to which the Disney-esc gestalt has penetrated the American psyche, which makes it unnerving. In its sixty minutes it could easily undo several years of personal therapy, though as a therapist it’s likely to lay bare the difficulties of cross-cultural counselling far more than any text on the subject. They’re just weird. I’m guessing through psychoanalysis they’ve glimpsed some sort of cognitive perfection by putting one’s brain on a jogging machine on the assumption it can achieve a perfect physique. In truth, well my truth at least, tempting one to consider how the brain works via a set of frenzied cartoon figures is confusing at best. I for one would gladly strangle Ms Joy, the hysterical one, for her blind hyperactive optimism alone. But then I’ve never had a pink elephant invisible friend dressed in candyfloss. No in England we’re made of sterner stuff, depression. Somehow when you’re born depressed you’re very culture inoculates you against it. We don’t have happy memories to rescue us, we’re motivated by the ones we’d rather forget. We can’t conceptualise joy because when we’re joyful we’re too busy enjoying it. When I see a couple viewing a perfect Miami condo for the price of a dishevelled English terrace on ‘Place in the Sun’ I want to say, “Run, run away now you’ll go crazy!”

Extreme Anger.

Recent documentaries on the Russian Tzars told a powerful tale of disconnect. They combined well with the BBC’s War and Peace. But here it’s the disconnect I’m interested in. Recently I’ve watched a video of George Osborne on the Conservative front bench ‘in parliament’ reeling under the influence of a class A drug. I couldn’t do a drug test but I’d put money on it. Then Jeremy Hunt denying the reality of what he’s doing to the NHS. Also the egregious TTIP secret treaty making it legal for corporations to hold democratic governments to ransom. There’s also the supposed sex scandals involving members of Parliament. And lastly, though I’m sure there are others, an ITV documentary exposing the Conservative Party’s blatant flouting of the law over expenditure on by-elections. The program showed three by-elections where expenses over the legal limit were assigned to an individual and did not appear in the accounts even though they clearly should have been. These are all examples of a governing elite that appears to not be accountable to the law of the land or common decency. Of course there are convenient explanations. George had a tummy upset, a simple oversight, inconclusive proof etc but there’s one underlying truth, they have become disconnected. We have spent centuries evolving a moral, law abiding hard working society that I and the many people I know take pride in. Like a marriage undermined by duplicity our incredulity has turned to anger at being betrayed. I don’t know what’s going to happen but it’s reminding me of the downfall of the Tzars. 

The Coke Snorting Chancellor.

Normally if you lend me money I pay you interest, right? Anything other would be insanity. Currently interest rates are less than 1% and the usual recourse of lowering them to bolster the economy has nowhere to go. I mean how can it go negative and you pay me for using your cash? It seems strange for a commodity to so change its dynamics as it passes through zero. I’m finding it hard to imagine what might provoke breaking this economic taboo or its consequences, but as I’m not coke-snorting Osborne I’ll give it a go. So you have loads of money and I have less fortunate circumstances. But you have had a right kicking from falling markets, (as we currently have) and even government bonds etc are giving negative returns. World growth is flat, (as we currently have) and there’s no home for your cash that won’t decrease its value. What to do? Pundits tell you 95% of the population simply can’t afford to fund (by buying products and services) future growth because the top 5% have amassed so much wealth they can’t/won’t spend it because they have all the toilet rolls they need and definitely not going to give it away. As the situation worsens you realise you’re losing say 3% and there seems no future in just keeping it in the bank. (which is close to collapse anyway) What to do? Something must be done to re-capitalise the world economy. You hit on an amazing idea. If enough people lend money at –1% all the hard-up people will go on a spending spree and cause a great surge in demand. Your guaranteed loss of 1% will quite quickly increase economic activity which will swing your invested residue into a positive return. Invest say 20% of your wealth in this loss making scheme will lose you £0.2 whereas 5% on the remaining 80% will net you £4. Even 2% would give you £1.6, a net gain of £1.40. Maybe a proviso that the recipient must repay the loan in five years, so ending the -1% interest payable. Essentially this is an investment in people’s purchasing power whereas coke-snorting Osborne’s austerity would have us all believe impoverishing the already poor makes economic sense. It just goes to show that following ridiculous ideas is worth considering, and why Chancellors shouldn’t use Class A drugs.

118 Initiatives.

Question Time debated Cameron’s connect between 20% of English/Muslim women speaking English and terrorism. Argh the usual tennis. I hate it when people only think as far as how best to justify their own position. I begin to wonder how many of the English Raj learnt Punjabi or lost one iota of their own English culture. Not many. The elephant in the studio was the depth of our cultural roots; how we will, even after several generations, justify our position in those terms. There remains a deep cultural fault line that if stressed will fracture. The error is to deny it. There is an English culture and there is Muslim culture, we cannot pretend otherwise, each with its own way of being. Cameron’s connect both expresses an English fear but also exacerbated tensions by laying the blame elsewhere. Neither side finds itself capable of saying, ‘we’re human and these are our fears’, so the rally continued. On this mornings news Muslim Councillors were being criticised for bringing their Islamic culture into our English system by, of all people, Muslim women not wanting to be treated as second-class citizens. From there I happened on a Danish psychotherapist’s comparison between his Muslim and European clients. Muslims ‘Inshallah’, if God decrees it to happen, puts the locus of control externally where our Christian roots place it internally in self-responsibility. In essence Islam leans towards a co-dependent relationship with God. It fosters victim-hood as in easily offended, persecutor as in aggression, and rescuer as in ‘holder of the faith.’ He finds that integration in the minds of Muslim immigrants is the initiative of the host community where as the host community sees integration, because of our internal locus of control, as to also be our initiative. Hence in Denmark’s  "Diversity, and Safety in the City" conference in 2008 out of 118 initiatives hardly any were about what immigrants could do for themselves, and probably why only 20% of Muslim women have learnt to speak English, and why when asked they point to lack of Government funding for language tuition. By contrast if I moved to Greece I would consider it totally my own responsibility to learn Greek and see it as a necessity in order to partake in the Greek way of life. The external locus of control is completely alien to me but somehow in that blind spot there is vulnerability. Maybe as the host community we need to make it clear that we expect an internal locus of control where ‘Inshallah’ just isn’t good enough. 

This is What You Want to Hear.

My great friend Smolemouse, a Dell Boy draughtsman in the East End left to manage a building site. After our many years on the bottom rung I wondered how he’d taken to his new managerial role. To my surprise he’d found it easy, “I just tell them what they want to hear.” Not bad, an MBA in nine words. Currently in the holy grail of free energy there is an Indian scientist named Keshe who has developed a Coke can sized plasma generator with which we can all wave goodbye to fossil fuels. His story began several years ago with hour-long YouTube lectures on the science behind his discoveries. Based on confident presentation and ultra esoteric ‘science’ his labs have built what we dream of and it is now on sale. It fascinates me how this combination of total confidence and esoteric ideas work so well especially as I have neither the confidence to be sure of anything nor the capacity for esoteric knowledge. I am pledged by inclination and choice to remain on the bottom rung of curious playful observation. So it seems Smolemouse was right; give people a dream they can’t quite grasp with total confidence that they’ll find it if they try had enough and, to quote the South Park underpant gnomes, “Stage three, profit.” Perhaps that’s why Stage Two was, if I remember it correctly, unspecified. So for $499 plus $300 mandatory donation to the Keshe Foundation you too can, in 90 days of placing your order, receive a brown cardboard box. In the process you may well find the meaning of Stage Two, ‘ever hopeful gullibility.’ It’s the natural response to hearing what you want to hear. 

Wiggly Glee.

A big black cat, a young puma maybe, runs full tilt across a paddock, off a wall up onto a roof into the arms of a young woman and mauls her with all the wiggly glee of …. That’s where my description falters. I don’t know that wiggly glee, the how of it. Maybe I’ve come close once or twice but not that full body totality of joy expressed without thought for the expression of it, convoluted without thought for gravity or the constraints of constraints. I imagine an electricity to pure delight that fires muscles in a symphony of movement, a wild jazz of tumbling notes, an unwritten sonata of strength and gentleness, a firework of chaos. Perhaps I should have learnt less in my gravity lessons. Perhaps in each and every one there was a hidden message of constraint. So much was I caught in the mirror of reality I lost sight. I mean of the un-reflected real. Perhaps in reflection I learnt restraint, in tools, manipulation in these virtual images. And with it perhaps I lost electricity. Imagine every moment of your life you responded clean of reflection; jiggled, snapped, growled or purred, or slept as reality required. No higher ideal than breath, that but for the addition of an ‘L’ perfection is just an idea. Such a simple grandeur. And this is why I watched the puma time and time again. It reminded me of electricity. 

Another Necessary Story.

The statistician began his evidence to Parliament. “I imagine you’re all aware of the natural or Gaussian distribution, a bell shaped curve like this”, he showed an example. They all nodded sagely. “In the present unrest where a relatively small proportion of the populous are demonstrating on the streets one might well assume, in the distribution between approval and disapproval, the disapprovers would appear on the left at the beginning of the curve,” he showed a small section of a curve filled in red, “a small proportion of those prone to extreme dissatisfaction.” The PM was heard to say,  “Exactly. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.” The statistician continued. “If say 2% of the population riot then 98% must support your policies. Vigorous nodding and vociferous approval. “I’m glad you see the power of statistical analysis. I have though here another distribution curve that compares one’s opinion with one’s decision to take action.” He held up a new diagram similar to the previous one. “On the left are the individuals who, on issues that concerns them, always take action and the right those who never take action. Let’s say 0% and 100%. Notice for this distribution the median occurs at around 2% on that scale.” “Exactly as one might expect” added one helpful member. The PM joined in, “It seems to me you’re rather stating the obvious.” “On the contrary Prime Minister. This distribution indicates that for every individual that takes action on some concern there are forty to fifty people who do not; one presumes through laziness, illness, fear, inconvenience etc. Perhaps you can begin to see the implications. The one million that took to the streets against the Iraq war in fact represented some forty million that didn’t but had the same concern, that’s over 70% of the population.” “That’s a totally unfounded assumption, it’s preposterous” retorted the PM. “Please consider this. One million took action against and exactly how many took action for? Records show as many as fifty thousand. On that same basis, that they each represented 40 to 50 people, they accounted for around 3 million. In total 53 million plus 7 million don’t knows.” “In other words over half the population have an opinion but don’t act on it. Am I right?” interjected the PM. “Exactly.” “Then what are we worrying about?” “Our third distribution (to general groans) was with regard to this. One might consider it the first differential of the previous one, the rate of change of opinion. Because the median, the mass of the people, was at 2% it’s clear that any small change in that median will affect a huge number of people. A 1% change for example would put 2 million on the streets, with many thousand prepared for violent action. It represents great volatility, the nearness of a tipping point; the very reason you called me here today. According to this statistical analysis gentlemen there will shortly be a revolution.”

The Impossibility.

The children were the first. Often on farms or in gardens playing with animals they would glimpse them as if in a daydream. Or at least they were dismissed as such. But such was the frequency of this same ‘daydream’ by so many children many miles from each other it became newsworthy. What was this phenomenon, children seeing people, a little strange but recognisably people, doing ordinary things often around animals. It was investigated. In brief, a researcher aware of the daydream element and practiced in Ericsonian hypnosis induced a trance state in one of the children in his practice room but the child did not see any people. He persisted and did the same where the child had been seeing them. This time the people were there and not just glimpses but for the whole period of the trance state. The child would smile and talk to them as if they were real though the researcher saw nothing. Intrigued he asked a colleague to put himself in a trance in that same place. He too saw the people moving amongst the conscious people and going about their business as if they weren’t there. He found he could ask them questions that they were more than willing to answer. There was a whole population of them mostly in unpopulated areas because there were less ordinary people to avoid. They saw these ordinary people as blind, uncommunicative and somehow absorbed in their own conscious thoughts. Of course he found it incredible that there was a host of other people in a sense existing exclusively in this unconscious realm. How could it be there were two types of humans sharing this planet, one not aware of the other and the other unable to communicate? But, they would say, you are communicating with us in your trance state, and we with you, and he would miss them when he was brought back from the trance. There was something about their simple honesty, their lack of need, their playfulness that attracted him. In fact in a trance when he looked back at his own ‘ordinary people’ he too saw them as uncommunicative, almost robotic. Were these the elves of folk lore? His experiment was repeated by others and they too became entranced by that same simple beautiful honesty. As time passed much was made of the disappearances. The experiments were stopped. They were considered dangerous. Virtually all the people that underwent the experiment disappeared, just up and vanished, at least to ordinary people. 

Sheffield Lives.

Sheffieldlives FM, our local radio station, often has local people chatting about this and that. On my way to the plumbers there was an in depth conversation about the jelly in pork pies. Was it there to fill it out, or maybe glue it together; indeed was it necessary at all because small pork pies don’t have any? This pork pie conversation inevitably lead to the intricacies of cooking a pork joint. One chap posed a rhetorical question. What might the reason be that his wife always cuts the top off a leg of pork, as it seemed a waste of good meat? His wife said her mother always did it, possibly because it didn’t taste nice or it was too gristly, but she didn’t really know. Intrigued they asked her mother, the chap’s grandmother-in-law, why she did it. She said her mother had shown her when she was young and it might be because it makes the rest of the joint cook better. Luckily as the great-grandmother was still alive they all went round to hers and asked her why she always cut the top of a pork joint. She explained, “Well just so I could get it in the tin.” There must be a moral there somewhere.