The Mental Load.

Imagine you’re Theresa May surrounded by the Conservative front bench twits. While they’re having pyjama fights in whatever private school dorm they went to you alone must save the country from Brexit mayhem. That on a domestic level is the Mental Load. You alone ‘see’ the thousand things that have, might, are or will go wrong if your grasp falters even for a moment. I have witnessed women complaining yet proudly vying for who has the heaviest, usually in the form of my husband is more incompetent, less aware or less communicative than your husband. It’s the same old sporting territory as mother-in-law jokes. But there’s this new phrase, ‘Mental Load’ that vindicates it like a diagnosis, “You’re fine, you’ve just got autism.” Well it’s not fine; it’s the highest form of arrogance, a throw back to the days when your six-month-old would die without your constant intervention. It’s become a way of life, of capturing power and holding the rest of the family in almost perpetual infancy, a phoney way of bolstering one’s own self-worth, which one has neglected due to the constant task of shouldering the afore-mentioned mental load. Yes you have to make all the decisions but only because you’re so busy deciding what everyone should do next. Once you realise this mental load is inappropriate for anyone past their third birthday you can begin to make adjustments. Begin by giving away the responsibility for Sunday lunch to your partner or oldest child. This is not a following orders exercise it’s a glass of wine whilst reading the Sunday glossies exercise. If they ask for help fine but otherwise content yourself preparing for rubber chicken, lumpy mash and degraded sprouts. Remember this is your learning exercise and people may have different ways of doing things that may even on occasion be successful. Your quantity surveyor hubby may make a copious timings list or your brain surgeon eldest consider the coefficient of heat penetration for various animal and vegetable varieties. In a short time they will prove easily capable of laundry, dressing, bed making, even cooking and cleaning while you’re well on the way of becoming an alcoholic. And if they do fall short of your exacting standards don’t chastise them, that’s just a cheap ego boost. Smile and suggest it just proves they need a little more practice. With a little practice on your part you will happily relinquish the title of ‘Queen of Fucking Everything’ and become a simple gay princess amongst equals and the equals will be happier too. 

Feeling Politically Manipulated.

Back in 2016 DC called in the ref of public opinion to settle the EU dispute within the Con Party once and for all. While DC led Remain effortlessly (i.e. without effort) the Leave Machine in its many guises rose like a rampant PR giant. Sexily branded Brexit it bought in Cambridge Analytica to use Facebook profiling to target manipulable voters with dubious promises, and painted them on red buses, well one bus that moved about. According to numerous polls in the three weeks before the referendum this high-energy campaign increased the Leave vote from 47% to 52%. In the weeks and months that followed it fell back again. It even outfoxed the bookies who had Leave at ~4:1, not bad for a two horse race. And DC bailed to a cupboard somewhere. The Con Leavers, be careful what you wish for, began back stabbing each other leaving only TM (for Remain) to progress the deal to leave. After two depressing years we’re no nearer a solution as good as we had in the first place, and with no deal, far worse. All that’s left is for the Cons to cobble together something they will brand as a success. So why didn’t DC ‘note the (advisory) referendum result’ and call for an analysis of the likely outcomes before proceeding? Why are the dubious money, false claims, false accounting and social media manipulations of the Leave campaign not being pursued or the possibility of them swaying the result being considered?

And where is JC in all this? He might as well be in that cupboard with DC.

Best result:  1/ lock the cupboard, 2/ disband the Conservative Party as ‘unelectable’ in perpetuity and 3/ scrap Article 50, “Sorry guys we had a sort of mental breakdown from being on social media too much.” Oh and 4/ insist on political meritocracy rather than wealthy mediocrity. 

The Great Depression Crime.

We all know mazes. You start at the outside and find your way to the middle. Now imagine being teleported into the middle and having to find your way out. It’s not a simple reversal, for one you’ve no idea how big the maze is or where on the periphery the exit is. The old wife’s wisdom of living within her meagre means is the inward maze where the simple central success is staying out of debt, balancing the books. Once you’re there there’s nowhere to go, it’s the very definition of austerity, ‘the trait of great self-denial.’ The government’s policy of austerity is the obligatory denial of hope and opportunity. No wonder we’re all depressed, it’s government policy. And that comes at a price. The ongoing costs of an ill informed, angry, confused and directionless generation from social media, drugs, crime, vandalism, mental and physical health and welfare, and the lack of skills and motivation to create income far outweigh the savings from denial.

The outward maze is the very opposite. Seeded at its centre with hope, education and optimism we happily acquire skills, confidently seize opportunities and naturally maintain our health and well-being. That was my experience in the sixties. But old Maggie Conservatism closes libraries, impoverishes schools, under funds the NHS and mental health, taxes higher education and reduces social services etc. These are the policies of decadence, and they’re working.

Thank you Racism.

Not just racism: homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia and terrorists, and opening it out a bit, drug dealers. I’m lucky enough, living in sunny Yorkshire, to not know any terrorists or any of the above personally. This allows me to judge or at least view people in totally different terms. Terms like honesty, humility, empathy, intelligence, awareness and curiosity. Score on these and you’ve got a friend for as long as you want one. But racism and all of the above are divisive. They set ordinary people against ordinary people, and then other ordinary people react against them and become anti- racism, anti-homophobia etc. All well and good but it creates further division. So where in all this division are my terms, terms that ameliorate division, that promote acceptance and understanding? More importantly, as the public debate becomes ever more divisive, people who score lowly in my terms are getting away with murder. People who are arrogant, sociopathic, unintelligent, mean spirited and dogmatic are hording wealth, destroying the environment and gaining power. Surely they would say ‘thank you racism’ for distracting the public to fight amongst themselves while they force their merry way to personal gain and universal disaster. It’s not for nothing that Russia seeded public division in our UK referendum and the US presidential election. Because division always weakens even though it has a certain base appeal to the unthinking ego. Better to be honest, humble, empathic, intelligent, aware and curios. Then you can be my friend. 

If You’re Lying You’re Dying.

Maybe, ‘God, the father, son and Holy Ghost’ equates to “the experiment, its outcomes and the underlying ‘direction that is’.” Put simply the experiment plays about, things happen that are possible. Nothing impossible ever happens. That maybe obvious but it’s important to realise we are restrained in the domain of the possible, which is quite small compared with all the things that are impossible. The ‘direction that is’ also defines what, within the possible, will survive. Things either flourish or fall back into the body of substance that fuels the ongoing experiment. So the ‘direction that is’ holds two levels of truth, 1/ what’s possible, and 2/ what follows this ‘direction that is.’ If it’s impossible it’s obviously not true, and if it isn’t in the ‘direction that is’ it won’t survive long enough to become true either. These two levels of truth are way above our daily debates on truth. In fact it’s likely we humans are unique in our capacity to conceive of untruths and that we might gain some long-term advantage from them. Not just conscious lies but beliefs, theories, manipulations and assertions that constitute the majority of our thinking even the hypothesis of self. So in this ‘post-truth’ age we’re supposedly entering what if anything will survive? When the natural world that has stood the test of time and proved itself to be ‘true’ we are imposing our untruths in chemicals and pollution, spin, politics, wars and now fake news believing them to be our successes. Only when we begin to perceive, think, act and speak with true honesty and see no advantage in living otherwise will we avoid oblivion. This isn’t religion, it’s survival. 

Laugh, He’s Offended.

Lesney drawing office was a wondrously enjoyable learning experience for me. Fifteen or so guys making often caustic fun of each other. One thing you couldn’t get was offended. Getting someone offended was deemed a success and that person would rue the day he snapped back. He had shown weakness that would be ruthlessly exploited until he got over it. Short, black, fat, thick, short sighted, buck toothed, if you couldn’t see the funny side, well you had to in the end, it was a right of passage. So I’m amused by so many people being offended these days. In fact just ‘offended’ isn’t enough, they have to be ‘grossly offended.’ In the Lesney drawing office they would be like Christmas stomping around in high dudgeon being wound up to spring-breaking point till something snapped, usually the personal pretension that formed their castle ramparts. Why do people take being offended so seriously? Are they attempting to weaponise it? “You’re being grossly offensive, take that! And now I have the moral high ground take that and that too. I am indignantly insulted and affronted.” I’m wondering why on Earth these people actually decide to lay themselves open to so much ridicule? OK a softly muttered; “Twat”, “Wanker” or worse doesn’t constitute a viable counter argument but it’s not about argument it’s about being what you’re being. These weapons of sanctimosity constitute the armoury of Divisionists, those too weak to come forth from their own handmade castle, who see the world in fiefdoms. That’s such a pity. I’ve been searching for a pithy closing sentence but I don’t have one. 

One Day Everyone will Live in Manhattan.

Feedback loops typically take a bit of the output signal and feed it back into the input. They have their uses so long as they’re under control. In a broader context you could say Darwin’s theories of evolution are based on feedback loops and even the old adage, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ As wealth accumulates power the wealthy use it to skew the system to their advantage. It’s a feedback loop we’re all aware of, but like the microphone howl at a concert it can destroy the performance not to mention the sound system itself. So the question arises, when does the wealth/power feedback loop go critical and begin to destroy our whole economic system? Recently Facebook lost $120 billion in one day’s trading. That’s 3.5 million years of average UK pay. We are nearing that point. A man, they’re usually men, with a yearly income of say £15 million might spend, i.e. put back into the economy, £1 million. The rest he must spend in the completely separate economy of world finance. With the top 1% owning say 80% of wealth it’s likely 60% to 70% is being siphoned off real economies into global finance. That leaves our working economy surviving on half of what it generates. This constitutes a ‘negative’ feedback loop where the output is used to suppress the input. It’s like giving a horse 50% of the food it needs to do the work required of it. It won’t immediately starve to death but year on year it will become weaker and weaker until it finally collapses. This is where we’re at. Venezuela is a basket case only because world finance won’t go there and there are other countries on the brink. It’s a kind of economic climate change where life-giving rain is being directed only to the safest places for a return. With no money for basic services, health, education, policing etc and no sign of the horse getting more food anytime soon Venezuela is dieing. Unimaginable amounts of currency are blowing around the globe boosting stock markets under the direction of one seemingly rational, almost laudable imperative, a return on investment. And in their wake economic wastelands. But people don’t die they walk. Immigrants are forming human winds of their own under this economic jet stream moving to wherever it rains. There are two human wills in contradiction, the will to live and the will to become even more wealthy. The latter would do well to recognise, and quickly, which will is the stronger.