Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Squash Diversity


Well, isn't it the obvious title to this artistic Still Life of the autumn harvest? Contentious titles are the foundations of overblown art.

Still, this life has arisen from a few varieties of self-selected seed, and as squashes are notoriously promiscuous and do not breed true, what else would be expected? At least I have something to eat, and each experience will be a surprise. I dare you to find its like in TescoAsdaSainsburyMorrisons.

The Global Human Economic Machine: lives daily in the London Underground. The morons that ride it daily are once again within my mental grasp.

You, too,
Can be part of the
Global Human Economic Machine:
Believe in its supremacy;
Bow to its Size;
Indicate your Eagerness
To be one of its cogs
Or integrated semiconductor transistors
And you will be endowed
With a contract of sustenance
A program of self-worth
That funds your consumption.

But let me not fool you that you can live without it.
You cannot, for your ancestors have long left the wilderness
From which they evolved
And now there is no more wilderness
In Earth's whole revolve.

Busy, busy, busy, hither,thither, slog, work, volunteer, apply, attend, get around.

I almost wish for my past leisurely life.

Only almost. I might loathe materialism, but I don't enjoy starvation.

Be part of the Global Human Economic Machine
Determined to be specialized
Forever just a neuron, a blood cell,
or a crystal in a finger nail
of its Cyberborg personification.

The alternative is the alternative culture,
no, I don't like the name dropout.
Looking at it, yet feeding off it.
Is this any less perverse?
Or does morality not come into the question.
For the Global Human Economic Machine
Needs its peripheral parasites
Just as much
as its Soul-defining synapses.
It is still all just One.
One super-organism.
Unstoppable even in the throes of Global Financial Maelstrom.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Greed, Waste, and the rise of Luddite Banking

The man who came to collect the skip from the site yesterday deserves a medal. A metal medal? The first thing he did was to free the unused, new bits of stainless steel and angle iron from being buried under the other "rubbish".

I can recognize a stallion with character in less than 2 seconds, and voiced my admiration of what he was doing, "Oh, you're going to recycle it, good!".

"Otherwise it ends up in the land. I hate waste.", he said. Further conversation revealed that the stuff he has to pick up that sometimes can't be recycled, but must be sent to landfill, so assaults his abhorrence of waste that it brings a tear to his eyes.

He is a hero of our times. His principles and values have landed him in a job that intellectuals and office bound beancurds scorn. They have never seen a dump, or a landfill site, and they wouldn't even stand the smell from half a mile away, yet they dare to scorn those who deal with their waste.
In a capitalist economy, it is those who buy goods and services who are ultimately responsible for the waste arising. This is salient in a year when financial and economic waste has finally been exposed to be the planet's grim reaper, after nearly a decade of human economic development which nobody except Al Qa'aeda succeeded in stalling temporarily.

The abhorrence of waste is deep and hidden by so many of those whom have it. The Global Human Economic Machine has ruthlessly been sucking in independent individuality and assimilating only its bodies into its Borg. The war against waste so often seemed futile, yet many individuals during those years adhered steadfastly to their value of wastelessness.

Again, lone individual moral effort is heroic and sometimes the only thing that stops humanity from killing the planet overnight. The finger in the dyke. The shame is that individual moral effort seems never to be harnessed and aggregated adequately. In a largely secular society, the priests ultimately serve the God of Money. So at the BBC, much though they occasionally try to garner moral action in society, ultimately they fail, because they all are financially dependent on their jobs. Even in a religious society, priests who serve the God of their Religion are forced to be slaves to the God of Money, which they do by pandering to the whims of the rich for their living patronage, wills and legacies.

Finance and Economics this week has been laid further to waste. Luddite Banking and Investment is in steep ascendance. Hold Cash, Gold, or Government Bonds, they all think. The Derivatives market has been destroyed, and now the Equities markets are crumbling. What has not hit Britain yet has been the destruction of the Insurance business. Lloyds of London has been keeping its head down and staying quiet, but I only last year spoke to an insurance industry retiree who acknowledged that there too, the industry had become incomprehensibly complex and difficult to control.

Insurance is the primary industry that sustains socialist values, so Brits are deluded if they scorn the USA for having to bail out AIG, and care less whether Britain might stay free of this blight. I cannot imagine living in a Luddite Economy where there is no insurance industry, but for a nation that is so heavily dependent on institutionalized socialism in the State, Britain will move faster to bail out an insurance business than it will a bank.

Of greed, on the individual level, I come to my blog to remind myself of this: life has been good to me these last few weeks, but I must not overreach. While I am free from paying obeisance to someone else's god once a week, the value of regularly stopping in one's path and appreciating contentment, and even acknowledging the inevitability of future loss (age and death if nothing else), is perhaps the surest way of killing greed. Those financiers and economists that allowed monetary greed to flourish to such extremes, should be subjected to conventional religious constrictions, something Christian or Islamic for example: secularism will never be able to control mass population emotions. The mass population is more than 6,000,000,000 times your individual self.

Friday, October 10, 2008

A Summer Evening in October at the End of a Week of Work

The last few days have been an Indian summer, clear sunny, warm days which we had only one of in August. This evening, while cruising through the delusional fantasies of West London, I only needed a T-shirt, while other more feeble vegetables ponced along in too many clothes of a sharp cut that made them look so obviously like foreigners.

For the areas around Gloucester Road and South Kensington are heavily inhabited now by affluent and pretentious European continentals. As I wandered along, with the 2/3 waxed moon to look at, in addition to them there were very obviously a few art lifestyle victims, and a smattering of ageing eccentrics (probably gay, because they all settled there when Earlscourt and the Coleherne were nothing but gay with a bit of Aussie).

What an amazing and educational week. I did more than a full week, and alternated between working outdoors, and working in an office job. The pay in both was crap, although the latter was slightly better. Yet what did I manage to learn from the contrast? For me, yesterday started with zest in the office, yet by the end of the day, I felt ill, and got home feeling sickly and soulless. Today, on the other hand, was all outdoors, and a bit dirty and of officially lower status. Yet I started off late, and ended the day on a blazing high. Both days were beautiful weather.

Why have I had to waste so much of my life in an office before I could learn this difference? How many fat pasty shapeless bores I have endured in offices; and they were the fun ones compared to the pretentious, gym-fit, physically constipated good-lookers.

Oh well, I am so thankful to have had these last few weeks of excitement in what has been years of drought.

In the economy this week, the stockmarket fell, and fell, and fell. Despite the fact that the Government launched its bank rescue plan, and the Sun illustrated it beautifully with Alistair Darling as a Thunderbird Puppet doing 5-4-3-2-1. According to Sterling's currency movements, the Government is not liked by overseas investors, yet they persistently seem to think that they only need to target their electorate of "ordinary families".

Gordon Brown is falling down,
Falling Down,
Falling Down.

Gordon Brown is falling down,
My fair lady.

"Ooh Parker, I do wish you wouldn't try to sing while driving FAB 1", said Lady Penelope.


It is so hilarious to hear the news commentators talk about economics and globalism as though they finally understood the Theory of Relativity. I do wish people were not so thick, so that they would not have to bore me. Curiously, the cleverest people I find to be those who are in jobs that are supposed to be for thickos. And in a year when it has become obvious that economists, including Mervyn King, deserve to be paid less than "officially unskilled labour", it reminds me that we still have to demystify the "knowledge workers" and put them in their rightful place: as parasites of a Global Human Economic Machine that is wearing out the resources of this planet.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Depeche Mode - stories of Love

Depeche Mode, afloat
Young people, who could be my children,
Cosy on a canal
So young, so in love,
from a land where
Depeche and Heavy Metal
was their Mods and Rockers
Newly Romantic, yet casting me back 25 years
I can remember the meaning of love.
The stories coming from all over the world,
of coincidences, conflict, flights and tragic ends
Of life, and shadow puppetry
Then Overground,
Life on a Sunday Night.
London is most alive
When in recession.
There is a designer thug with his chunky chic Chinese playgirl;
There is an unbelievably beautiful child,
full of bright joy,
and playful light,
and spontaneous life,
the son of unlikely parents,
Unlikely yet so deserving of respect
For the miracle that they are creating.
Eastern European.
They come from all over.
This is London today.
Where did life suddenly come from,
and why did I have to hide from what was there before?

Planetary Ecosystem Economics

I have not had one grape off my vine this year; what little crop was coming after the awful summer, has been denuded by birds in the last three weeks. The evidence of blue/purple bird shit underneath the vine is damning.

I had been wondering which birds were doing this. In past years I've seen the blackbirds go for it, but not so assiduously. So today, when in the deluge of rain we are having, my local robin popped in to perch on the grapevine, to survey the food, I was faced with the human quandary.

The robin has been a constant visitor this year, you see, and has been my confirmation that my organic garden feeds nature and wildlife, naturally.

The human quandary is based on this: how can humanity feed itself, without taking food away from other living things?

If I had to depend on that grapevine for my food, that robin would have been soup months ago. As with many nature lovers, I would rather delude myself that I am making a difference: somewhere else, a farmer is growing food chemically and mechanically on my behalf and denying it from the robins, yet I am trying to grow food and letting the robins eat my food.

Perverse? Perhaps. But then, I can console myself that most people in London are not nature lovers, and so I am creating diversity of opportunity for robins: just as some farmers will still protect their strips of nature now that set-aside payments have been withdrawn.

Nonetheless, I am peeved that I have not been left with one grape! And the lesson is this: despite the stubborn ignorance of anti-Malthusians, the fact is that a planetary ecosystem will never support an unlimited population of human beings, without substantial eradication, near-extinction, and absolute extinction of most other forms of life.

Food for humans takes away food for something else, and to allow humanity to proceed in deliberate ignorance of the value of other living things, is to be accessory to speciocide. For example, who are we to decide that a slug is an unnecesary and undesirable form of life compared to a lettuce, when in fact the slug is a juicy meal to a hedgehog, a bird, and even a fox?

Which brings me back once again to the Global Human Economic Machine, which is the Juggernaut composite of global human civilization and globalized human technology. It grows with inexorable, deliberate ignorance, and even in this era of Global Financial Collapse, there are NO economists who give any space to Planetary Ecosystem Economics.

The futulity of my endeavour to expand consideration of Planetary Ecosystem Economics, or at least to evaluate and question the Global Human Economic Machine, has landed me in despair many times this year. Despair will always be available. Let this be my record of persistence despite despair.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Geastrum Triplex and Around the Wealthy Ghettoes of London

This Geastrum was the largest of a troop and was nearly 10cm across, in a Hampstead garden. How exciting it was to see it. My Fungi book by Stefan Buczacki suggests it is a Geastrum triplex, because of the bowl, rather than a Geastrum Sessile.

Without a doubt, the wealthy ghettoes of West London are as far removed as can be from the over-globalized mish-mash that has developed elsewhere in London. I don't know which is worse: an insular ghetto resembling an expatriate compound in a despotic Arab Oil state, or the mob reality outside the compound!

Indeed, these ghettoised rich people saunter along their shopping streets, such as the slug trail that is the King's Road, apparently oblivious to what happens in the rest of London, let alone the rest of Britain. Or else they drive around in huge 4x4s, their Chelsea Tractors, and despite the size of their vehicles, their scrawny bland ugly blondness screams through the windows of their Sloane Ranger Rovers. And they aren't even menopausal yet. Perhaps they should have a few more babies, so that they might actually let the glow of motherhood fill the void of their meaningless lives.

Last week, you see, I was in Ladbroke Grove and Chelsea. Then on Monday I was in Chelsea twice and Wimbledon.

The gardens of the rich West Londoners are rather wasteful places, that still seem to pay little consideration to sustainability or organics. They bear too heavily on over-tidiness, with no space given to nature and wild-life, and either they are over-stylized sterile creations, or they are instant "I want it now" gardens that are as artificial as a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. Yes, the Chelsea Flower Show. Bastion of Anally-Rich Women.

Quite frankly it is incredible that people pay nonsense money for a pokey house in Chelsea: why don't they buy an estate in the country for the same amount of money? Urbanity must be a globalist disease.

At least today in Hampstead and St John's Wood there was some tradition of English tastefulness and an emphasis on having space. And the clients have proper class, unlike the crassly rich bourgeouisie.