Sunday, February 28, 2010

Smile and Cry

Little baby so looked after,
Learned to smile to be looked after.
Some days found itself alone,
And thought it was going to die.
But little baby could not cry,
for it had learned to smile
and not to cry.

So little baby trapped within
Smiled and smiled and smiled again.
The smiles could never be heard from afar
And seen up close they looked morose.
So still baby found itself alone,
Afraid it would die
And wanting to cry.


Oh little baby,
cry, cry, cry,
Free yourself!
Try, try, try!
I will hear you,
I will behold you,
I will show you.
You will hear me,
You will be held by me,
You will learn from me,
To listen and look
And wonder why you cried.
Wonder at the fear
That welled up from inside.
Wonder at what you can do
When I am not with you.

For you may be alone
But you are now grown.
For those who have died
You have already cried.
Use all that you know
And more you will grow.
When to smile
When to cry
And when to get up and go.

Twitter is Dog Shit

Twitter is such a load of rubbish. Having been on there, I can't really understand why anybody stays on it. How sad these people must be, clutching their little gadgets, walking around, and then suddenly feeling lonely and thinking they must tweet.

Tweet? For fuck sakes! Birds tweet. Go out and listen to the birds. Go out and stop companies from importing soy beans for animal feeds and palm oil for biscuits and soap, and maybe you will get a chance some day to listen to the birds tweeting in the rainforest.

Twitter is garbage. Twitter is the exploitation of the child's mind that still exists in every adult, by holding it in a state of suspension of immaturity. Okay, this exploitation has existed since the dawn of civilization, and has been perpetrated by magicians, Bible-sellers, and doll-house makers alike, but what's different?

Twitter is new, so even though its users have started seeing through it, nobody has yet really dumped on it. Suckers for something new sometimes go onto something else new and never stop being suckers.

The next post will be an ode to growing up.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Faith in Oneself

Having found some understanding of Faith, the Emotion it occurs to me that faith in oneself is probably more important than the faith in all sorts of gods that religions and secular commerce are always selling us.

Faith in oneself will like all types of faith suffer disappointment, but it is better to have faith in oneself, suffer disappointment, and recover with a revised faith in oneself, than to never at all have faith in oneself.

Intelligent use of faith that accepts disappointment and revises its emotional foundation when applied to the self is the essential starting point for similar good practice of faith in groups of people, communities and religions.

There is no use hearing that you must have faith in yourself unless you hear how you must do that. Have faith, keep faith, lose faith, understand loss, modify faith, have faith, keep faith, lose faith, analyse loss, refine faith and so on and so on all one's life.

I have utter faith in my ability to procrastinate.

Mark Cawardine Loves the Wildlife

Mark Cawardine reminds us all that campaigners are merely holding back the tide of habitat destruction by humanity, and without them it would be even worse.

How, oh how there must be a way to turn the tide back forever! Go find it or make it!

Friday, February 26, 2010

The Remains of the Hunter

The muse is with me today, so here is a fresh new poem on the fly, copyright to me, owner of this blog at Loveandtheplanet.

Deeply within the vessel out of the light
the surface of the liquid faintly shimmers.
The Hunter alone is stalking his prey,
Foot-weary from tracking mile upon mile
Through Copses, glades and hilly scrub.
Hunting since the birth of dawn in the eye of his mind
So many taken, so many meals won.
The death of dusk never feared for the well-deserved dreams
The day just one more after yet one other.
Alone the Hunter grasps his bow,
looks to the sky as a flush of spirit flows
Upward,
While on the path his foot too close to the edge
Slips and the rocks slide underneath
And too slowly he glances
downward
to see but he is already tumbling down the cliff
The rocks with him and landing at the bottom,
shocked yet knowing that he is injured.
He cannot move.

The vapours rise out of the vessel into the light
escaping into the obscure mist enveloping.
The Hunter lies there and closes his eyes while night
Passes over. In its darkest hours pangs of consciousness
stab at his dreams but already the new day has come.
He cannot rise but crawls to a bush with berries.
Chewing these he lies another day until he spies
what may be a hole in the hill.
The pulling of his arms despite the dragging of his legs
takes him into what is not quite a cave,
And he waits.

While he waits the world does not
so days pass and then are gone forever.
The flies land as the carrion birds find him.
The maggots and the rot take the rest
So soon the Hunter's bones have their final rest.

No more hunters ever came to be,
and the Farmers never had cause to go near the cave,
Remaining like the liquid in the vessel
that escaped into the air,
The remains of the Hunter are bones
that might as well not be there.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Frank Field Against Neo Keynesian Views

Frank Field actually has an amazing argument. Niall Ferguson should get into bed with him. Will Hutton should go jump into a tar-pitch lake. There is no Left or Right. There is BAD economics, which in addition to all its other faults, is economics without enough regard for good accounting. And there is GOOD economics, which requires as a minimum that honest, truthful and balanced accounting is essential for a healthy Economy.

Never mind the fight between Good and Evil. Today the fight is between the GOOD economics and the BAD economics, not Labour, Liberal or Tory, nor Left nor Right. Politicos are dinosaurs if they don't get on message.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Procrastination

Distraction is the key to procrastination, which is the coward's solution to facing challenges.

Procrastination has been mentioned but not actually dealt with. Here is a statement judging procrastination to be the coward's solution. Is it?

In the sense that to procrastinate is to avoid attending to a challenge, it involves cowering from the challenge, and hence is an act of cowardice. However, there is no reason to deduce that cowardice is a weak or worse option.

The living animals' brains that survive today have since the dawn of life been faced with choices in daily survival. Imagine being in a hot dry country, and deciding whether to go towards the hot sunshine, where there is a great challenge and no certainty of opportunity, or to stay in the shade, where there are known but limited resources of food or water. Procrastination in this example would be "staying in the shade". Here cowardice can be more sensible and successful than daring to head out into a hot desert, certainly if clouds and rain arrive before the food and water run out.

So procrastination can be rational, yet in most of us, it is in the main instinctive. If we subjected all the procrastination instincts in our lives to a conscious analysis of options available to them, we would not have time even to sleep, nor would we ever be allowed to rest. How then can we know which instincts of procrastination to analyze and curb? Some people must have clear systems for deciding this.

Consequently, the next consideration of this topic shall be on the lines of Decision Systems for allowing or curbing procrastination.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Faith The Emotion

On a blog like Love and the Planet, basic emotions that nobody else talks about are important.

This past decade, faith was used more and more as a substituted word for religion. "Do you have a faith?" has taken the place of "What religion do you belong to?"

Faith is not religion. Faith is an emotion. As an emotion, faith is necessary for religion, but religion is not necessary to have faith.

What is faith? Is it just belief? (A belief can be momentary, and short-lived. Faith implies a long-term belief, one that will last a long time. ) It helps to have other beliefs to keep faith, but faith can be kept by itself without any helping beliefs. For example, if you keep faith in your partner, it might help to believe that your partner will always be there for you. On the other hand, even if you did not believe that they would always be there, you could still keep faith in him/her.

Have faith.
Keep faith.

We all know people who have no faiths ever.
We know others who have no faiths sometimes.
And then the others who always have faiths yet never seem to keep the same ones.
Finally there are those who always have and keep the same faiths all their lives.

"Which is better?" This is not necessary to judge. "Which has it easier on themselves?" "Which does more for others and the planet?" These questions are more important.

Finally the most important propositions:

1. Faith in persons can inspire them to live up to your faith.
2. To have faith and be disappointed can logically be a more successful life/game strategy than to have no faith at all.

Is this good or bad? Some of both of course.

Clearly faith is a social emotion used by social animals to achieve group goals. So every wolf in a wolf pack has faith in their team when they go out on their hunt. So every sheep in the herd has faith in the herd when they idly graze.

Faith is also an individual emotion used by lone animals to determine specialised behaviour. A bird that sets out on a 5000 mile migration, has faith that it will arrive there alive, and that it will find food and nesting there. The faith can be disappointed, for example if man has already destroyed the habitat to build an airport, a container seaport, or to farm soya beans. Yet without the faith, such specialised behaviour can never develop, and is never put to the test.

Faith, then, is a fundamental emotion of life and living things and of the complexity of the ecosystem itself.

On Love and the Planet, you must have faith in emotions, just as you have faith in logic, and you must have faith in logic, just as you have faith in emotions. For emotional logic and logical emotions are the essence of organic intelligence as distinguished from artificial intelligence.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Overpaid Economists and Mervyn King whose jobs are protected by Employment Laws

Gosh, what a hard life has Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England. Four times a year he has to present a Quarterly Inflation Report.

A Report which nobody bothers to read anymore, because they have already gotten all the trends from plentiful other sources, and in any case, in the years up to the Global Credit Crunch Financial Crisis of 2007, the reports completely failed to take into account useful measures of inflation other than the Mickey Mouse versions that your average Ten year old son could concoct, and hence failed to notice that the whole Global Human Economic Machine was like a Corrupted Software Fault requiring a Seldon Crisis Resolution.

Mervyn King's job is protected by UK and European Employment Laws, and so too are the jobs of the many economists and bankers who still cling to their overpaid positions because unfortunately they haven't the decency to commit seppuku in Traditional Japanese Style for their miserable failures.

Trade Unions think that these Employment Laws are for the "working class", but these laws have protected jobs in Management and jobs of non-productive employees, while ruining everything for everybody, which is why Britain today has a Manufacturing Output today that makes it an embarrassment compared to France and Germany.

And which is why today Kraft announced that they were closing the Cadbury's factory in Bristol and getting rid of 400 jobs. Because they only way you can get rid of jobs under these employment laws, is to shut down the whole organisation and shift the production somewhere else, in this case to Poland.

What did Peter Mandelson do about this? Oh, he farted. After all, don't forget, that Peter Mandelson and New Labour were Intensely Relaxed about Some People Getting Filthy Rich. Those were his Champagne Socialist words when they were sailing on what they claimed to be a healthy economy, although it was funded and enabled by the blood, sweat and tears of one billion people in China whom they were building up debt against. I was living in London the whole time, and I could see all the problems around me, but they were sitting in West London, eating free food at the House of Commons, and drinking endless champagne and parties thrown for them by filthy rich people.

I hate Peter Mandelson, but what I really hate more are the people who voted for Peter Mandelson.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Project Prevention - Drug Addict Sterilization

Radio 4 on BBC features Barbara Harris of Project Prevention, an USAperson, who having seen that children of drug addicts suffer horribly (eg from drug withdrawal after birth), has taken a stand to encourage these people to use contraception.

Her arguments are brilliant. Fergal Keane sounds like a sickly ivory tower liberal academic because it's his job to put his interviewees to the test (Well, he does usually seem like quite a sickly liberal in general, like one of those journalists who had to stand in the middle of a warzone as a reporter before he could actually feel the difference between right and wrong).

Anybody who has worked in hospitals, social services, or with druggies, or come close to their havoc, will have to agree that she is doing the bravest thing possible. She is a liberal, who is coming back to put boundaries on liberalism. Since the Sixties, we have been waiting for people like this. No need for neo-cons anymore.

Monday, February 08, 2010

To criticise the judge Sir Mota Singh

This is why religious ceremonial daggers are banned by schools.

East London Manslaughter by Ceremonial Dagger in 2004



It's a bit shocking that judges in Britain can live in worlds so removed from the harsh realities on the streets, isn't it? Well, no change there then.

It would be better if judges were paid less, and so actually had to live in the mess that they help perpetuate (although they pretend to themselves, and in this case, to others, that they are making the world a better place). No, most judges live in precious fine suburbs, and in their private time, relieve their stress with perverse vices that harm nobody else but are nonetheless a waste of tax money.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Greenpeace Population Contraception on First Day of Spring

Today is the first day of Spring. (The Winter Solstice is Midwinter's Day, and the Spring Equinox is the Middle of Spring. This was all explained years ago in The Definition of Summer. Seasons are rigorously defined by the length of day, whereas even the UK Met Office "arbitrarily" defines a season by choosing Julian calendar dates 1 December, 1 March, 1 July, and 1 October.)

It is grey. At least it is warm. Yesterday the temperature went up to 12 degrees here in London. I'm not freezing any more, and the dark winter days are resolutely longer. Yet here I am, blogging.

Distraction is the key to procrastination, which is the coward's solution to facing challenges.

So in praise of cowardice, Greenpeace as a gratuitous thought-link came up. Global Over-population has not been a priority for Environmentalists, because they choose their priorities in the same way as I do. When faced with a challenge, the coward's solution is to procrastinate by distracting itself with Easy Income Earners.

So Global Warming/Climate Change was an Easy Income Earner, but as this blog has long held, it is not the primary problem facing the planet. Humanity and the natural history of its evolution to ever higher populations, and the consequent effects on itself are the primary problem.

Introduce cheap effective contraceptives as was done in the Sixties, and what happens? The people who didn't want to have children, haven't had any children. The people who didn't mind having children, had children.

It does not logically follow that the people who don't mind having children are always the best people to have children. Similarly, some of the people who didn't want to have children, might have turned out to be better parents.

Nor does it follow logically that the introduction of contraceptives leads to a net decline in population.

The population will eventually ramp up again because the people who don't mind having children, have children who don't mind having children. They will just ignore the contraceptives.

Indeed, all this has happened before, because prior to the creation of chemical contraceptives in the Twentieth Century, Religions and Cultures were created as sociological contraceptives.

That is why Managed global population control, such as has been pioneered by China with their One-Child policy, is a necessary and desirable solution. Because even if every square inch of this planet were cultivated with GM crops and every pest had been eradicated from the planet (just as smallpox was eradicated), we would arrive at having tens of billions (say for example 40,000,000,000, 5 times what we have today) people subsisting at the standards of the Dalit in India and the work-slaves of China, and the starving in Africa.

At that stage, you would be better off being stuck in a life-suspension pod wired up to a computer just like in The Matrix.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Cars, Cars, Damned Cars

2010 and still the World is drowning in Cars, Cars, Damned cars. All over North America, Europe, East Asia they are like an infestation, an infection, a disease. Yet other countries are rushing blindly to copy this horrible mistake. Why?

Cars are Ugly.
Cars are Common.
Cars are Smelly.
Cars are Everywhere.
Cars are Dangerous.
Cars are Boring.
Cars are XXXXing Noisy.

Lots of Cars Need Lots of Parking Lots.
Lots of Cars Need Lots of Roads.

Parking Lots are Ugly.
Parking Lots are Common.
Parking Lots are Smelly.
Parking Lots are Everywhere.
Parking Lots are Dangerous.
Parking Lots are Boring.
Parking Lots are XXXXing Wasteful.

Lots of Roads mean Roads lead Nowhere
Lots of Roads mean Lots of Cars.

Roads are Ugly.
Roads are Common.
Roads are Smelly.
Roads are Everywhere.
Roads are Dangerous.
Roads are Boring.
Roads are XXXXing Obstructive.

When I see people in their cars, who cannot live without their cars, their parking for their cars, and their sitting their ugly bums in their cars, I despair for a world-changing idea.

Why do economists make People want This? New immigrants go to advanced economies and the first thing they want is a car. Then a bigger car. Then a more expensive car. Meanwhile, the locals already there think that they need a car for status, when it seems so obvious to me that only trash could like cars.

Today Britain is covered in ugly cars, big metal lumpy things with no style, in horrible metallic greys and colours.

Cars are Like Death Capsules,
Looking for Original Hell.
Poisoned Rivers of Cars Hurtling Together
Poison Drivers of Cars Hurting To get there.