This is my art. If you would like more, don't bother going to Sotheby's. Just contact me and I will create art in your life, and let your Russian Roubles go a lot further. Furthermore, because this is Love and the Planet, you get something of much longer lasting value that will make your life worth living. My mind!
Dear blog, how glorious it is to come to you in good times. This WAS the best week I have had so far this year. (Getting my bike stolen in mid-July was the lowest point of the year.)
Going back to work, to something I haven't done for years, getting up at 5:45 for four days last week. Meeting lots of new people who were intelligent, even though many couldn't speak English very well. Doing physical, quite arduous work outdoors even in damp dirty damp weather, and surviving it all. Getting to bed exhausted and waking up at 2.30 in the morning just because my muscles were so tired that I couldn't get back to sleep. I have averaged less than 5 hours sleep a night for the last 6 days.
Surviving it all! I feel like king of me, if not king of the planet. Even exhausted and in a state when most normal men feel as if they have been economically abused, I decided on the second day that I felt something again; I felt happy. A vital kind of happiness if not the whole package. That feeling of knowing you've done an honest day's work. Pride in yourself.
Even the sun came out. On Friday afternoon, we had one of those beautiful English afternoons when even I admitted that London was looking beautiful.
Pork Sausages were accompanied by my wonderful own-grown Sweetcorn (what little I have), which has been the most delicious thing I have grown this year. Unfortunately I ate them before I remembered to take a photo! Never mind, my stomach has a better memory than a digital camera! That sweetcorn is going to get at least 5 times the planting space next year.
Something Understood on Radio 4, which is a beacon of wise intellectual secular spirituality, has a superb program this week on Freely Giving, which investigates the tradition of the Gift Economy in civilizations (not the modern consumerist version of Christmas), as compared with the Market Economy that has continued to reel all around the world these last few weeks. That they have researched this topic from such a genius angle indicates that the Economy is on the minds of everyone who has one.
Nearly all the Investment Banks are gone, started by Bear Stearns in March, and then Lehman Brothers just two weeks ago. The last two will probably survive after serious rationalization. The USA still struggles to keep its banking system afloat by trying to get Congress to approve its £700 billion nationalization of Questionable Debt. Lloyds TSB is going to merge with HBOS. Libor Rates were 1.5% above the Bank of England rate, so the BANK of ENGLAND is lying! The Bank of England still says
The interest rate at which the Bank supplies these funds is quickly passed throughout the financial system, influencing interest rates for the whole economy.
Daydreaming monetarists will have to own up to being more ignorant than Psychologists in regard to having any tools of control, let alone tools of science! Stop lying and get out of your paid jobs. Mervyn King, you are a cad.
Today Bradford and Bingley has been nationalized by the government. Journalists are saying that Asia seems unaffected, but even economists are correcting them. Meanwhile, people like me, who take a world view, know this is not just about money. This is the modern version of a World War. One where none of the various sides, either those who own the Capital, nor those who owe it, dare to allow Armageddon, because the Global Human Economic Machine would implode and there would indeed be genuine poverty (the lack of food) experienced even in White America and Britain.
How far would I want this game to go, if I were running it? Judging from my current survey of London, one of the recent centres of globalization, the GHEM is clearly in trouble, but many of its various component cogs and transistors are still carrying on regardless, still expecting to be unaffected...a bit like a car whose engine is still running even though its gear box is broken. By my experience of psychohistory, this means our economic recession has just begun. It should indeed not bottom out for at least another year, or else it would have been ineffective. By my experience of my reckoning, as I believe in damped control systems (whereas economists seem to know nothing about damping) we are in for a long period of much deeper trouble, and the bottom is at least 3 years away.
Living in a crisis is not too bad. It is food and water that matters. Those of us who lived in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties GHEM recessions know we survived, and there was some wonderful music to remind us of it all, yet we never once starved.
The GHEM, for all its faults, must be de-commissioned gradually, and gracefully, a bit like an outdated nuclear power plant. We do not want a Chernobyl end to the life of the GHEM, for human psychohistory must grant it a noble end.
Forget my pompous fantasy. In fact, I don't believe the GHEM is dead, or dying. I think it is moulting, and it is inexorably growing, as it has done for centuries.
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