LOVE and the Planet

All Copped Out

2011-11-16T15:36:00.001Z

I sidemindedly found on Google an article that so wowed me that I have been inspired to return here.All Copped Out's posting http://allcoppedout.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/the-worst-is-yet-to-come-and-bring-it-on/ so amazed me over a week ago, that I have had to return to blogging.Look at this ....

No jobs are being created (beyond churning) and the old attitudes pervade – we talk of education and training – but seriously go to your local job centre and look what turns up on their machines – take a serious look at how limited many jobs are, requiring few skills and a decent attitude to hygiene and punctuality. There is no structural analysis and yet there is scary talk about making sackings easier – scary not because some shirkers might get the push but because it reeks of indenture to ‘work correctness’. Most of us know to say we are hard workers, relish challenge and so on – but the reality is something else entirely – we’re waiting to win the lottery and escape.

Is that utterly superb, or not? I have never seen anybody express this point of view so well that I am humbled. When you've spent the last decade learning the usefulness of humility, being humbled is not an unpleasant shock - it is a joyous surprise.

We have created non-job after non-job whilst degrading the rewards of real hard graft, instead of organising worthwhile work around vast improvements in technology and productivity. And we are about to ‘discover’ this as surely as any of the ‘economic bubbles’ that have been pricked from dotcon to ghost city building. This is being left out of ‘analysis’ and is what will eventually spill onto our streets. Our problem is efficiency in production and waste in neurosis all around it. My students are always visibly shocked by real work seen and heard in factory and mine visits – and look at what happens when the BBC takes our callow youth to do work in the far east. I feel I teach little more than how to idle in bureaucracies in my classrooms..

Breathtaking. Why have so few people spoken out on this truth, you wonder? They are busy going along with the system, to keep collecting their salary, to protect their pension, to wait in hope that there is still a dream worth living for when they retire.

We are close now to the shock promised in the last days of my youth – that of computerised expert knowledge catching up with other embodied knowledge in production that has robots doing what was once skilled work. My lectures have long been obsolete, but ‘death by Powerpoint’ continues for now. Accountants continue even though software does a better job – the ‘reason’ in both cases is fraud and being able to sign off (pass) what our VCs or CEOs want. This is OK as long as ‘good times’ eventually roll but they look to have stopped. There is no real market for university graduates and the times in which the off-balance-sheet could be lost in a good year are catching up on us as the ‘holes’ brim over.

Here is somebody whom also has seen the Global Human Economic Machine, but never gave it this name. Here is somebody whom independently has seen with their own eyes the world around them. The real world, not a world made up by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, or The Guardian, or The Mail, or even The Sun.Never again do I expect to see such a brilliant blog post, for the likelihood is I will live in disappointment. It is better to live in hope, and the best way to do that is to expect very little.

Going Viral

2011-11-03T22:15:00.002Z

These young people today all have attention spans of 5 seconds and have eGadgets that make them send and read lots of messages that mean very little.

With all this twitter and facebook nonsense, going viral means that a particular info blob has spread through the web like a virus. This phrase annoys me now. Firstly, because it is getting old. Secondly, because it refers to viruses, and not any other type of life. Finally, because it disturbs me that in this world of buzzing nonsense communication, there are meaningless snippets that undeservedly get instant global distribution.

Going viral is never an accident. What goes viral is entirely determined by those whom know how to spread these things, like the gossipy old women that used to do the job before electronic communications.

To think, perhaps to resolve

2011-10-31T11:06:00.002Z

A blog is a blackboard
the world is your classroom
You are the teacher
And you are the main pupil.

There may be other pupils in the classroom.
And unless they put up their hand to ask a question,
Your teacher will never know what they don't know.

Luddites to the Rescue Against the Global Human Economic Machine

2011-06-10T23:13:00.002+01:00

The BBC has a new documentary series, written and directed by Adam Curtis, called All watched over By Machines of Loving Grace/

This series is so brilliant, I feel sorry for people in the USA or anywhere else, whom haven't got to see it yet.

I was so amazed by the first film. The second film has made me realize that I am not the only person in the world protesting against the Global Human Economic Machine, and I am not the only Luddite.

Indeed, David Mitchell, the comedian, is making positive light of Luddite values, which considering that only 5 years ago, Luddites were scorned and laughed out of any discussion, is sensational.

I detect that the world is catching up with reality at last.I suspect that the Global Human Economic Machine will be broken up and sold for scrap metal. What will take its place? It is tempting to think that it would be just Local Human Economic Systems, but this cannot be the absolute case. More likely, various competing Local systems of various sizes will overlap and unpredictably grow and shrink depending on all sorts of factors. In the sense that they will overlap and depend on each other for some of their needs, there will still be a Global Human Economy, but it will be not one machine as it has become - it will be multi-cellular.

What a horrible year

2011-06-10T16:15:00.003+01:00

It seems like it's been such a horrible year, but on reflection, other years have been more truly horrible. Perhaps it seems so horrible because it was intended to be a good year, a much needed good year after so many not-so-good years. Instead of being good, it has been disappointing, with no pleasant surprises.

The weather. I am quite sick of people who think they have to tell you that the weather is not the climate. Whatever. After the coldest winter in over 30 years, (and believe me it was one of the earliest as well), the seasons skipped spring, so that March and April were the hottest and driest in Southern Britain on records. In Eastern England, the hot and dry weather continued all May, so that today they have finally officially announced a drought.

What is the point of living in a northern climate, one that is wet and dark and grey at the least all winter, to arrive into a year without SPRING? There have been a very precious few hours on the few occasional days where it felt like Spring in Britain. The birds and the bees and the bugs all seem to be struggling on, but have not displayed their usual order of appearance or abundance. Nor the weeds or the plant diseases.

Never mind that. It is nearly Mid-Summer, and I feel like I have been cheated of a whole year, because I have been denied a proper Spring. So my own cycle means nothing any more, and not surprisingly, the stinking cold I caught almost two weeks ago confirmed my misery.

All I would like is to have some happy time. The country has been so depressing - if anything, the so-called lefties and socialists have made things worse because of their inability to survive without the ghastly Labour governments that this country has. They seem to forget that the values of life that make them socialist depend on making joy, not misery, and sending jolts of love throughout all the life that they encounter. Because values do not need political parties, there are today Conservatives whom are better socialists than the Labour supporters whom moan and protest their lot.

See the irony in this? Here I am moaning and protesting at my lot, but I am not blaming the Government - I am blaming the people whom are blaming the government. That's too complicated for most people. I could be blaming the current Government, but they still haven't yet earned stern judgement... the last Government still hasn't paid for all the pain that they caused, in the name of staying in power. I still want to vomit at the thought of that horrible ex Prime Minister in the last Government. Not that the Labour Party has yet got a leader that will excuse all its previous sins.

Just think, if you were playing nations like puppets on strings, how important it would have been to have someone as stupid as Gordon Brown running the finances of Britain all those years, and what could have been better to cap it off than to have him as Prime Minister when it was time to change the rules of the game?

It's pointless being clever unless you can gain from it. The majority of people are stupid, and sadly I have placed my bets on them, so my misery is theirs. I only wish moral peace were sufficient consolation for a miserable year.

My heart

2011-05-22T19:20:00.002+01:00

My heart seeks the solace
of an oak wood.
Essex with its lands of history
Life held in the hands of her trees,
Calls to me from my deepest veins.

Why is here not good enough?
It is empty, cold and grey
The trees have little to say,
And I will not be of it.
Stubbornly as an ancient oak,
I will not be uprooted, or cut down
And so I would not be moved,
One way or another.
Leave me to love in my oak wood,
And take away if you must only my acorns.
I long for you, oh forests of Epping.

To be inspired by those about me

2011-04-27T13:39:00.002+01:00

I wish for inspiration
From those about me
Not by seeking others electronically.

For what is localism, if not this?

Yet it is so much easier to look about me
and find weirdoes
and not those whom are inspirational.
As clouds block the sun, so this seems true.

People who Fear Greens and Environmentalists

2011-04-20T09:30:00.002+01:00

You are about to get one of my cutting analyses.

In the last few years, all we've heard about is the clash between, for example, climate change believers and climate change deniers. I've always thought that this clash was a complete waste of time.

So why am I turning my brain onto analysing this today? I have noticed in the general street population over the last few years something that has gone unmentioned. There are a lot of people who have developed a fear and even hatred of all people who express green and environmental sensibilities. Unbelievable? How can a bunch of hippies, day-dreamers, and sad little scientists be feared and hated? Why have the George Monbiot's been drawn into quarrelling endlessly with the Green-Haters?

Well whom does a drug addict fear and hate the most? Priests, imams, rabbis etc. Drug addicts fear them even more than they fear the police and judges.

So the drug we are talking about is resource (be it oil, habitat, coal, nuclear fuel, mining extraction) extravagance. Yes, RESOURCE EXTRAVAGANCE is the DRUG. The priests and the apostles have been the environmentalists and scientists and nature-lovers.

There has been inculcated down into the bottom levels of Western and Westernized (including Japan,China and India) economies THIS. RESOURCE EXTRAVAGANCE IS YOUR RIGHT. RESOURCE EXTRAVAGANCE IS YOUR PLEASURE. RESOURCE EXTRAVAGANCE DEFINES YOUR STATUS. RESOURCE EXTRAVAGANCE IS MORE IMPORTANT TO YOU THAN LOVE, WATER, AND FOOD.

The only group of people who challenge the addiction to Resource Extravagance have been environmentalists, nature-lovers and ecological scientists. Indeed, even many of these people have been guilty of using THE DRUG.

What amazes me is that this drug addiction has pervaded into society so deeply, that even twelve year old CHILDREN are expressing the fear of having their drug withdrawn. I suppose if you have children, you are not amazed at all, but as I don't have children, this horrible fact has only just hit home to me.

Drug addiction by one third of the planet's population, being fought by a only few of those more enlightened drug addicts.

This is the challenge of 2011. It is not dispelling ignorance of climate change or ecosystem issues. It is dealing with addiction.

What is a Chav, Part 2

2011-04-16T12:08:00.002+01:00

Gosh, after the last post I can't stop. There is a volcano inside me ready to spew about the United Chavdom of Britain.

- a Chav is somebody whom gave up on religion one or more generations ago, yet has not replaced it with anything other than going shopping, seeing gigs and sports games, watching TV etc.
- a Chav is somebody whom doesn't understand atheism or religion in the evolution of Mankind, yet abides by the first and spurns the second.
- a Chav is somebody whom eats his or her way through the glut of food that is delivered to the Western Economies.
- a Chav is somebody whom starts doing things because of peer pressure, and will not stop doing these things until peer pressure stops them.
- a Chav is somebody whom cannot eat food that has not been wrapped in plastic and put on a supermarket shelf.
- a Chav is somebody whom will buy a can or plastic bottle of Coke or Someother Shit instead of drinking tap water or eating a cucumber or watermelon.
- a Chav is somebody whom thinks they are classy because they get their hair dressed, yet their brain is gungy and grimy with mud and rags.
- a Chav will happily pay £3.00 for a pint of crap tasteless lager, but refuse to pay £0.80 for a pint of fresh organic milk.
- a Chav will cover his front garden with concrete just so that he can park his or her car as close to his testicles or her vagina.
- a Chav will go to a fitness centre and work out to have big muscles and firm tits, but refuse to be seen using a spade for anything other than weaponry.
- a Chav will buy a newspaper and look at the pictures and read the words slowly, and then think that there is nothing else that he or she has to learn.
-

The Soup of British Chav

2011-04-16T11:26:00.003+01:00

Look at them. Driving their cars in their bathrobes. Yes, those towelling robes that are also called dressing gowns. They wear them all day long, then venture out in the garden and then into their cars to run down to the shops to buy milk or fags.

Unbelievable? No, this is Britain today. I wonder what people in what used to be the British empire would think of this.

You see, the British Chav only really became widely described from 2003. Now in 2011, Chav culture is endemic and mainstream. What is a Chav? It was and still is, a person who has perverse notions of what is social aspiration. A Chav is somebody who would say "fuck" a lot, but seldom has good sex, let alone aspires to divine love-making. A Chav can come from any class, whereas the socialists think it is only used to label people of working-class descent.

A Chav believes that you are nobody unless you own lots of cars, and drive them as much as you can. A Chav does not know where his bread comes from - he or she drives to the Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Iceland or Co-Op supermarket and buys bread, but does not understand or care how the bread got there. A Chav admires sports celebrities, and dreams of being just like one. Chavs watch games and get excited and distraught about their successes and failures, but have not actually played any of those games for years. Indeed, the Chav has not walked more than 200 yards at any time in the last ten years, simply because the Chav has a CAR.

You see the Chavs driving in 4x4s, parking in the disabled bays at supermarkets, talking on their mobile phones while driving with one hand (this is ILLEGAL in Britain). Chavs throw away good, still-useable things as if they believe that more new things will arrive on a container ship from China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and India. Chavs moan about the price of petrol for their cars, and claim that they NEED their cars to go to work, but they NEVER think about (let alone try) moving closer to their job. Chavs throw their rubbish (sometimes toxic) on the roads, out of their cars, into their gardens, into the public parks and wilderness areas.

Why do I go on? I can't. They dominate in a democracy, and that is that. Chavdom has had its momentary attraction (which is sexual, because it pretends to be exclusive of love or care) to all walks of life, but its persistence in British culture is a pervasive vulgarity that cannot be disguised by a royal family's pomp and splendour, currently being hyped to North America and everywhere else because of the queen's grandson's dreary wedding.

Watching the Disillusionment of Loved Ones

2011-03-23T09:48:00.003Z

There is something profoundly sad about watching the disillusionment of one that we love. The sadness is perhaps proof that we still love them. Disillusionment is nowadays called "Reality check", thanks to the Seventies hippie generation.

That we may have been partly responsible for sustaining their deluded state;
that we may have loved them because we wished to share their deluded state;
that we were unable to find for them a gentler let-down when the disillusionment finally came;
that we have to SHARE the let-down itself.

These are facts known to any intelligent mother, whom has had to grapple with the "Is there really a Santa Claus, Mum?" So Child would never have enjoyed the illusion that Santa Claus existed, but for Mum. Mum would never have loved the Child so much if they never believed what did not exist. Mum later tries to tell Child that Santa Claus does not exist, but cannot find an easy way. Mum feels pain when Child eventually discovers that Santa Claus does not exist, and both their whole frames of being are knocked down.

So it is sad. That's life. An endless string of illusions clutched, each followed by grasping at the harsh brutal truth. As I believe I have always tried to seek the truth, I feel particularly qualified to say that the truth is like the multiverse of universes. When you have uncovered one, so you find you are buried deep within another one that you yet do not understand. So too do I feel qualified to say that there is no pride to be gained, from understanding more universes than the next man.

Yet I want to be sad.
For spring here, faltering,
does not smell the same
As where I left.
I am homesick for a place that I lived in and loved for so long, but whose ruin I could no longer bear to watch.

Funny that, as if I hadn't seen most of it ruined, that I should have been so bothered. Perhaps disillusionment sometimes is the wrong diagnosis.
Perhaps realities change, and we are belittled by our powerlessness to halt the change.

So here in Britain, we wait for spring. There are daffodils out now, and crocuses, but none of the trees are springing into leaf. Nights are still cold, and nothing much is growing fast, even when we have a sunny warmish day.

Today is Budget Day. As if I care. All the farting economists in the world could be piled into a gas oven and it set alight, and I would not be any happier.

I call the world the Planet.
The Planet is too big for me to hold.
Its billions of people are too many for me to scold.
Its development is too much a horror for me to behold.

Thank God we die when we grow old.

Questioning the Philosophy of Self-Doubt

2011-03-09T13:37:00.004Z

A few days ago I questioned the Philosophy of Self-Belief. With the following conclusion ..

I therefore suggest that it is a lie that we must believe in ourselves, or that we are helped by others whom believe in us. This lie is purely to sustain lies upon which our lives are built

Well, to be fair, and to be rational, I must treat its opposite : the Philosophy of Self-Doubt.

{Why do we need to doubt ourselves?}
or {Why do we need to be doubted by others?}
=> Why do we Need to be Doubted?

(The symbol => is the mathematical one for "implies")

Why indeed. We all know people who only rise up to a task when everybody doubts that they can. It's the challenge of proving people wrong that gives them extra impetus.

For ourselves, when we doubt ourselves, and then we master our doubts and rise up to the challenge, we feel even better for ourselves, don't we?

But is this just playing games? If you have a task, why should it be necessary to play the following game...
I doubt myself.
I refuse to accept that I can't do it.
I shall prove myself right that I can do it, while proving myself wrong that I can't do it.
What a waste of energy all this game playing is. Like playing football instead of farming.

And there, in the last line, there is a big hint of more...
"I shall prove myself."

Self-Belief, Self-Doubt, Self-Proof.

Are these good games to play as motivations to do a task? There should be enough motivation from the need or desire to do a task, without having to throw in motivational games of Self-Belief, Self-Doubt, and Self-Proof. I am probably mistaken, but this is what I think the Methodists did. Get rid of the game-playing, and get on with the work, either because you need to do it, or because you WANT to do it.

Pushing Away the Zeitgeist

2011-03-08T13:53:00.002Z

There are Sheep and there are Wolves. There is Black and White but also every shade of gray.
So human beings can be found whom belong on every spot of the Sheep to Wolf spectrum.

I know I shift between the polarities of sheep and wolf depending on the world, my life, and me.

But what is this Zeitgeist? I have always been very sensitive to it and even gone out looking for it, but if you think about IT, what is IT?

Is the Zeitgeist a single miasma? I think not. Different levels of Zeitgeist exist for Sheep and Wolves and all in between.

Yet without a doubt the Zeitgeist I pick up through my antennae is the Official Cultural Zeitgeist of Britain, as sanctioned by the artists, the newspapers, the businesses, and the citizens. (Hmmm, interesting what I haven't included in that list...)

Is the Zeitgeist a set of activities, or feelings? Is it a set of attitudes? Is it a mood? Yes, I definitely think it is a mood.

The Zeitgeist of Britain is more oppressive than usual. The mood is not recessive, but a kind of prozacked depressive. As mentioned before, the nation is hot happy with what it has become or achieved. You can have the shiniest cars, the shiniest jewels, and the shiniest furs, but what good are they when you have just learned that you have to sell them because you can't pay for them? At the same time you have also been diagnosed with a malignant, slow-acting cancer and you are looking through all the quack remedies that promise you a cure.

I can't stand it any more. The Zeitgeist mood weighs me down so much that there is only one thing to do.

Push away the Zeitgeist. What use is the Zeitgeist when it does more harm than good?

I shouldn't even bother trying to re-shape the Zeitgeist - I haven't the strength at this stage.

Push it away. Sometimes, a man has got to be an island.

Yeo Valley Rap

2011-03-05T21:57:00.003Z

When I saw this, I just thought Wow!

Aren't they all beautiful?

If you live in a city or a town, you've probably noticed that none of the young men and women look this good - and even if they did, they wouldn't last long before they were sucked into lives of cocaine, heroin, alcohol or just plain sex addiction.

Well Done Yeo Valley and BBH. It's marketing, but hey, when it's like this, sock it to 'em

Question the Philosophy of Belief in Your Self

2011-03-04T22:24:00.005Z

Google "Believe in Yourself" and you will be told that you have to, and why you need to. Look at the reasons from a philosophical standpoint.

(Why do we need to believe in ourselves?) OR (Why do we need others to believe in us?) =

Why do we need to be believed?

Isn't it strange that we are told that we need to be believed?

Are our lives built on such tenuous lies that without that belief we would DIE?

Isn't it appallingly feeble if this is true?

A) Assume that our lives are built on real foundations. Would we need to be believed? What purpose would it serve ourselves to be believed? I can see that it would be useful to others if THEY believed US, so that they may choose to copy how we build our lives on real foundations.

B) Assume that our lives are built on a fragile pyramid of lies. Can we sustain ourselves without being believed? Are we held up only by belief, whether that is coming from others or ourselves?

I therefore suggest that it is a lie that we must believe in ourselves, or that we are helped by others whom believe in us. This lie is purely to sustain lies upon which our lives are built.

I feel much happier knowing this truth! Is this philosophy?

2011 in Britain

2011-03-04T20:48:00.002Z

It is 2011. Look at that frightening number.

Welcome back to Britain. I never left it, but I left you, dear Reader, this long.

My God, I thought Britain was bad in the Noughties. Now three years after we've had the 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis, things seem to be sufficiently worse that I really wish I weren't here.

This country has been floundering in a cultural depression for 3 years now. People are coping, but not happy, and not hopeful, and not even interesting. They drive to the supermarket, they shop, they eat, they watch TV. They live through life's struggles, and they go to work if they still have a job, but they all know that the country hasn't done well, and can't afford to go on living beyond its means. Yet imports still keep rising, and exports barely are holding.

It feels as if one cannot dare to dream any more in Britain, yet in theory, that is all the British can now afford to do. I say in theory, because in practice, they still drive around in cars that are too big, and they still use them constantly while they themselves get fat and useless. Cars are empty, trains are running empty, planes still fly everywhere. The cutbacks on waste have yet to become ubiquitous, yet cutbacks in the public sector are all you hear about on the news, or when chatting.

THIS COUNTRY HAS BECOME BORING AND USELESS? Yes, it really feels that way.

It was of course the fault of the three Labour Governments, that presided over the shift to Banking and the wholesale submission to Global Economics, which finally created a credit and property and finance boom that collapsed in 2008. Yet only in 2010 did that government finally get thrown out.

Since then, the new Government has barely made a mark, yet every move they make is loudly protested and entirely opposed.

How can things improve, and how can things get better, when we have a people who have been spoilt by wasteful Labour Governments, and a new government who can no longer afford to spoil them?

I despair, and it's no fun being here. And we've had another cold winter (so much for global warming) so I wish I were on a beach far away from here.

I want to dream. Love is like a shrunken dried up apple in my soul, because there never was much love in Britain, and now there is nowhere to dream.

What can I do?

Emerging from Radio Shadow

2011-02-25T11:32:00.002Z

As though a satellite gone behind a planet
all these months with days unseen
while atomic clocks kept time.
Now emergent from the radio shadow
I attempt contact.

UK Government Programme for Energy and Climate Change

2010-05-20T12:16:00.003+01:00

The Government believes that climate change is one of the gravest threats we face, and that urgent action at home and abroad is required. We need to use a wide range of levers to cut carbon emissions, decarbonise the economy and support the creation of new green jobs and technologies. We will implement a full programme of measures to fulfil our joint ambitions for a low carbon and eco-friendly economy.

* We will push for the EU to demonstrate leadership in tackling international climate change, including by supporting an increase in the EU emission reduction target to 30% by 2020.
* We will seek to increase the target for energy from renewable sources, subject to the advice of the Climate Change Committee.
* We will continue public sector investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology for four coal-fired power stations.
* We will establish a smart grid and roll out smart meters.
* We will establish a full system of feed-in tariffs in electricity – as well as the maintenance of banded Renewables Obligation Certificates.
* We will introduce measures to promote a huge increase in energy from waste through anaerobic digestion.
* We will create a green investment bank.
* We will retain energy performance certificates while scrapping HIPs.
* We will introduce measures to encourage marine energy.
* We will establish an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient carbon capture and storage to meet the emissions performance standard.
* We will cancel the third runway at Heathrow.
* We will refuse permission for additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted.
* We will replace Air Passenger Duty with a per-flight duty.
* We will introduce a floor price for carbon, and make efforts to persuade the EU to move towards full auctioning of ETS permits.
* Through our ‘Green Deal’, we will encourage home energy efficiency improvements paid for by savings from energy bills. We will also take measures to improve energy efficiency in businesses and public sector buildings. We will reduce central government carbon emissions by 10% within 12 months.
* We will reform energy markets to deliver security of supply and investment in low carbon energy, and ensure fair competition including a review of the role of Ofgem.
* We will instruct Ofgem to establish a security guarantee of energy supplies.
* We will give an Annual Energy Statement to Parliament to set strategic energy policy and guide investment.
* We will deliver an offshore electricity grid in order to support the development of a new generation of offshore wind power.
* We will encourage community-owned renewable energy schemes where local people benefit from the power produced. We will also allow communities that host renewable energy projects to keep the additional business rates they generate.
* As part of the creation of a green investment bank, we will create green financial products to provide individuals with opportunities to invest in the infrastructure needed to support the new green economy.
* We will work towards an ambitious global climate deal that will limit emissions and explore the creation of new international sources of funding for the purpose of climate change adaptation and mitigation.
* Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided that they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new National Planning Statement), and also provided that they receive no public subsidy.
* We will implement a process allowing the Liberal Democrats to maintain their opposition to nuclear power while permitting the Government to bring forward the National Planning Statement for ratification by Parliament so that new nuclear construction becomes possible. This process will involve: – the Government completing the drafting of a national planning statement and putting it before Parliament; – specific agreement that a Liberal Democrat spokesperson will speak against the Planning Statement, but that Liberal Democrat MPs will abstain; and – clarity that this will not be regarded as an issue of confidence.

Not a lot there on Cutting Energy Waste and Encouraging Reduced Energy Consumption. It does say Through our ‘Green Deal’, we will encourage home energy efficiency improvements paid for by savings from energy bills. We will also take measures to improve energy efficiency in businesses and public sector buildings. Home Energy Efficiency Improvements? You mean Mercury-containing Fluorescent light bulbs and rock fibre loft insulation and double-glazing for people who have houses that are too big for them? Energy Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency?

Have you not noticed that the problem left untackled here is that the Enviromental Movement has been trapped into a cul-de-sac for years by having to request Efficiency improvements, instead of Energy Consumption Reductions, because nobody has yet challenged the prerogative of Economic Consumerism (if the public gets what the public wants, that isn't usually what the planet wants, so you have to change what the public wants)?

How do you measure Efficiency? The efficient use of Energy is where it is used to create the most vital forms of wealth. What are the most vital forms of wealth? FOOD, not diamonds/gold, or throw away consumer purchases, or huge office towers that run on airconditioning in the summer, or empty houses and buildings entirely heated to 22 degrees centigrade just because their occupants think it is THEIR RIGHT TO KEEP WARM BY BURNING FOSSIL FUELS OR BY WASTING GREEN TECHNOLOGY RARE EARTH METALS ON OVERSIZED HOMES.

Consumption of Energy, if it is outright wasteful, cannot be made efficient unless the waste is ruthlessly eliminated.

The UK Coalition Government's Programme for the Environment - Human Population

2010-05-20T11:47:00.005+01:00

Nick Clegg's and David Cameron's detailed programme has been released today. Below is the page from their Environment, Food and Rural Affairs page. Other areas of their programme will be discussed in other posts.

The Government believes that we need to protect the environment for future generations, make our economy more environmentally sustainable, and improve our quality of life and well-being. We also believe that much more needs to be done to support the farming industry, protect biodiversity and encourage sustainable food production.

* We will introduce measures to make the import or possession of illegal timber a criminal offence.
* We will introduce measures to protect wildlife and promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitats and restore biodiversity.
* We will launch a national tree planting campaign.
* We will review the governance arrangements of National Parks in order to increase local accountability.
* We will work towards full compliance with European Air Quality standards.
* We will take forward the findings of the Pitt Review to improve our flood defences, and prevent unnecessary building in areas of high flood risk.
* We will examine the conclusions of the Cave and Walker Reviews, and reform the water industry to ensure more efficient use of water and the protection of poorer households.
* We will work towards a ‘zero waste’ economy, encourage councils to pay people to recycle, and work to reduce littering.
* We will reduce the regulatory burden on farmers by moving to a risk-based system of regulation, and will develop a system of extra support for hill farmers.
* We will investigate ways to share with livestock keepers the responsibility for preparing for and dealing with outbreaks of disease.
* We will take forward the Marine and Coastal Access Act and ensure that its conservation measures are implemented effectively.
* As part of a package of measures, we will introduce a carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control in areas with high and persistent levels of bovine tuberculosis.
* We will promote high standards of farm animal welfare. We will end the testing of household products on animals and work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research. We will promote responsible pet ownership by introducing effective codes of practice under the Animal Welfare Act, and will ensure that enforcement agencies target irresponsible owners of dangerous dogs.
* We will ensure that food procured by government departments, and eventually the whole public sector, meets British standards of production wherever this can be achieved without increasing overall cost.
* We will investigate measures to help with fuel costs in remote rural areas, starting with pilot schemes.
* We will create a presumption in favour of sustainable development in the planning system.
* We oppose the resumption of commercial whaling, will press for a ban on ivory sales, and will tackle the smuggling and illegal trade on wildlife through our new Border Police Force.
* We will bring forward a motion on a free vote enabling the House of Commons to express its view on the repeal of the Hunting Act.

It all sounds good, but what is missing?

Man. The number of people. The one thing that is most obvious on this planet Earth, is being completely ignored by this government. The government has not indicated any policy towards population levels in its own country, so why would it be able to lead politically on this issue on a global level? It won't.

For the Green Party and Caroline Lucas, here's your key. It is no longer adequate to be green and mean and mind your own reproductive practices, because even with equitable politics (complete fairness) it is the total human population in the world that will cause stress on the environment.

China and its Communist Party are far more thinking and honest about this issue.

Fear and Arrogance

2010-04-27T16:49:00.002+01:00

Arrogance is nothing but a method of overcoming fear. Arrogance works to some degree, but is generally not very successful. Fear is fear, and masking fear with devices such as Ignorance, Arrogance and Anger (amongst others), is never going to be the best solution.

The trouble is, that Fear is an animal instinct that has evolved because it is so successful. Yet in the modern world, it has to be used in situations very different from how it evolved. For example, fear is useful when you're driving a car and you see a patch of slippery oil or ice way ahead. But it isn't useful if you see it and don't do the right things (slow down and engage anti-lock brakes if necessary). The modern world, you understand, is not what we evolved in.

Doing the right things when experiencing fear is without a doubt the most difficult part of life itself. Ignoring, being arrogant, and getting angry are seldom the best things, even though they sometimes get lucky. What is the best thing?

Feel the fear and challenge it? How?

- I am afraid.
- What are you afraid of? So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to just sit there and be afraid? Not very clever. Are you going to get angry? Not very clever. Are you going to believe that you will conquer your fear just by the force of your will? Not very clever.
- No, Mr Spock, you're absolutely right. What do I need you to tell me that for.
- Because you're a stupid animal.
- You're not as good as a Vulcan, you know, but you're amusing...

Building Roads Evan Davies Today RAC Productive Driving.

2010-04-24T08:43:00.006+01:00

Why not build more roads?, Evan said. Terrifying, and it probably will happen. Because it was a lobbying cry from the RAC. The RAC will do anything to give itself more business, but that can be said about any business from heroin dealing to flogging Mars bars.

BBC Radio 4.

Yet it is still terrifying. Once we were afraid of wars, nuclear holocausts, enviromental catastrophe, but now we are most afraid of shit economists. Evan Davies is unfortunately a shit economist, because of his generation. He mentioned on the Today programme something like we drive 100% more, yet have only built 20% more roads in the past X years. You would think that an economist would ask the question, why are we driving 100% more, and is all this driving productive? Would that the next time he drowns his sorrows in some gay club, that somebody should slap some intelligence into him, but that isn't going to happen, is it? The blind will sooner lead the blind.

What is non-productive driving?

People who are driving miles and miles who don't increase theirs or anybody else's happiness. There are loads of these people. Driving is like doing heroin, crack cocaine, and stuffing yourself with junk food.

This article on Today, on the same day that Open Country had Helen Marks doing a truthful episode in West Dorset chronicling a musician and a farmer who were expressing the death of rural life in Britain! Killed because homes and houses in rural areas are hardly ever occupied, because they are second homes, or owned by wealthy people who are away on holiday, and even when they are at home, they DRIVE FAR AWAY to TESCO to do their shopping, so that there is no local shopping or local rural economy. Gone are the smallholdings, and local businesses.

This is the economics of Today. The people in the BBC live in London, or the hipper parts of Britain, and are full of denialists who can't even travel from their own Radio Programme to their neighbours. Yet they completely expect to jump on a plane, or a train, or into a car, and be as far away from where they work within 12 hours. In so doing, they have turned the whole world into a boring but dangerous place, full of McDonalds, and Pizza Hut and Starbucks and Tesco and Asda. Why dangerous? Because what happens when you take heroin away from a junkie?

Frustration

2010-04-23T09:47:00.002+01:00

Tried that, and couldn't get through, tried something else, and still couldn't. Tried everything, and still unsuccessful, so what do you get? Frustration.

Frustration, the transitory state of mind that occurs when reason fails, and anger takes over. Frustration itself becomes an extension of that failure, so usually produces failure.

At the sign of frustration, it is better to rest, withdraw, or retreat, and then to tactically invite recreation, advice, or new thinking.

No Airplanes in the Sky since 5 Days Ago

2010-04-20T17:14:00.003+01:00

Because of the volcano in Iceland spouting a cloud of ash, all jet plane traffic was shut down over Britain and much of Europe since Thursday 15 April.
For the first time in my life, like so many people, I have been able to live under a sky withouth any airplanes in it. It is a source of wonder. I have never seen such blue and clear skies in London or in England, and while we have had marvellous weather at that. And it has been also wondrously peaceful, especially for the people who are damned by living near Heathrow, Stansted, Gatwick, etc.

The endless moans of people who have been stranded abroad or whose travel plans have been wrecked! What happens when these types of people end up sick in a hospital bed? They are the ones who never know what hit them, and are stunned and scared. In other words, should these people not be grateful just to be alive, and to have food to eat, and water to drink? Yes they should be just grateful, but they complain because these are the modern people created by Global Economics. The common muck who have been created, and pandered to, by Global Economics.

Matthew Greenburgh Adviser to RBS Takeover of AMRO

2010-03-27T18:27:00.002Z

Gosh, why is Matthew Greenburgh allowed to live free? Why is he not imprisoned and all his financial assets confiscated, for helping to put this country into hundreds of billions of pounds into debt?

There are probably a hundred people, including Gordon Brown, Mervyn King, Fred Goodwin, James Crosby and John Tiner (of the FSA) who are responsible for the economic disasters of the Noughties that made a national debt that will take ten years to repay.

What is the point of morality, if for every six hundred thousand people, the care and consideration of 599,999 people can be undone by one?

It could be worse, of course, but moralists cannot claim the high ground, when the morality they preach sustains the Global Human Economic Machine on such a scale that it takes ever fewer individuals to jeopardize the entire System.

The importance of Self-intelligence as opposed to General Intelligence

2010-03-20T15:12:00.003Z

It has been cloudy and wet for two days now, and it has been no longer cold since Tuesday. Indeed, Wednesday was sunny and nearly too warm, and the first daffodil in my garden came into flower the day after.

I have been very tired. Tired of everything, and most of all very tired of London, as I have been for nearly a decade. I listen to BBC Radio 4, and listen for intelligence, but I hear very little that has anything to do with the world I am in here in this part of London. You can thus assume that nobody who works in the BBC or the media lives here. Why? Because they live in their ghetto world, and their jobs have become to maintain the ghettoes of the British Empire, an empire which fell over 70 years ago but which many people fantasize to be still existing through the BBC.

When I am out I see few British people, hear few British people, and even though it has been like this for the last decade, I still find it taxing, more so because it is never discussed. Even when people here speak English, they seem to lack the power of speech, expression and erudition. The whole difficulty is never discussed, because in the light of the dangers of inflammatory political racism, it has never been allowed to be publicly discussed, yet those of us who have to carry on have to carry on.

In these circumstances, self-intelligence, namely your intelligence about yourself and your dependence on your own (not other people's) intelligence, are essential survival traits. As I turned to my blog I read back on my posting from two weeks ago, and not surprisingly, it is the only intelligence that invigorates me.

Now that I have been reminded of the importance of a self-limiting sense of failure, I suspect that it is more important than the intelligence that I can glean from those people out there.

What are those people doing out there in London? They are eating, sleeping, and shitting, in the liberal democratic section of the Global Human Economic Machine, and they are busy playing at religion and having families. You would think the human race were in danger of de-population, the way these people are busying themselves with bringing their children into this overcrowded world that doesn't even have many fish left in the sea.

Luddites Arise - Robots and Computers replace People in the Global Human Economic Machine

2010-03-18T10:33:00.002Z

Avtar Rahl, 58, is the human face of those statistics.
He had been working in electronics for 32 years when he was made redundant over a year ago. He was referred to the job club by Jobcentre Plus.

"Over the last few years I watched the staff numbers on the shop floor dwindle from over 100 to a handful as the firm became fully automated," he says.

Automation and Computers have been replacing people progressively in all areas of the economy.

Yet the thick-as-shit liberals and day-dreaming socialists have carried on regardless, without any thought about where it will all end up. Probably because theirs are the only jobs that have not been replaced by computers and automation.

It is time to replace the social workers, the menopausal salarywomen, the tenured humanitarian workers, the judges etc, with computers and automation. Let them see how much they like it, and when they've experienced the pain, they will understand that to be Luddite is essential and intelligent, whereas to be Progressive is ignorant and blundering. If the Global Human Economic Machine were a car, then the Luddite knows he must control the car or dump it and walk. Whereas the Progressive races onward, carelessly believing that there is no cliff or crash ahead.

Failure, Success, the Esteem of Self and Others

2010-03-06T19:18:00.004Z

Reference : Self-Destructiveness as an Intended Feature of Liberalism

I am no good
They are all better
I am the best
They are all rubbish
Am, is, are
A Failure
A Success
A Winner,
A Loser.

They are winners,
So then must I be.
They are losers
So then must I be.

What is Failure or Success and how is it estimated in the Self and Others?

It is obvious that an individual prefers the self-esteem of success to the feeling of being a failure. Yet the design of a liberal civilization, as mentioned back in August 2008, depends on individuals self-estimating as failures and engaging in self-destruction or withdrawal from the Global Human Economic Machine. This is necessarily true by definition of liberalism, since individuals are free to continue without removal by their peers.

True liberalism does not, has never, and can never exist in any civilization, but its aspirations, such as Benign liberalism, do exist, and have transpired to produce some people, myself included, who are prone to self-estimate as failures. How? Because self-estimation as failure allows the machine of civilization to replace the failing individual's function, hence ensuring that the machine of civilization keeps running, while benign liberalism protects the failing individual (rather than discarding it), so allowing the failing individual to fulfil its reproductive cycle or be re-used in some other part of the machine.

This is all very well from the point of view from the machine, but what of the individual? Benign liberalism is a vague intention, with no guidebook, no cookbook, and barely anybody bothering to discuss it in this detail.

The failing individual, in order to be most useful, has of course to have opportunities for re-use in other parts of the Economic Machine. Just as importantly, the failing individual has to have limits of self-estimation of failure.

What is the use of a self-esteem of failure once you have been replaced and your failure does not jeopardize the rest of civilization's machine? For example, there is no use to "retired" people feeling like failures. By feeling neutral, they might even embark eventually on useful endeavours.

The self-esteem of Failure, after it is no longer needed, must be dampened by limits, which in a liberal civilization must be self-limiting.

Self-limiting self-estimations of Failure are corresponded with self-limiting self-estimations of Success.

I am a Success.
Use Me.
I am used
I am no longer either a Success or a Failure.
I continue to be used while knowing that I am free to fail.

I am a Failure
Replace Me
I am replaced.
I am no longer used
I am no longer either a Success or a Failure.
I am Free to Move On.

Success or failure in self-estimation relative to others is made in two ways -
the Transference of Success or Failure between the Self and the Others, and the Opposition of Success or Failure between the Self and the Others. For example, suppose there are two teams, Team A and Team B. I am on Team A, then Team A's Success or Failure transfers to me. Team B's Success or Failure does not transfer to Team A , but is opposed to Team A and its members.

These fundamental perceptions by our evolution in tribes (A We versus They Success/Failure estimation) does not meld well in a single Globalized civilization.
Why can't the Globalists understand this, or do they deliberately ignore and dupe us into accepting silly tribal substitutes like Global Football (Soccer) Teams to entertain our evolutionary nature?

I think some Globalists might not know what they do not understand, for they are missing this evolutionary inherent nature of tribalism that exists in most of us.

Global Indians

2010-03-01T11:29:00.003Z

OH my goodness, have you ever heard so much patting on the back, and "Aren't We Wonderful?". The terrifying reality that India has been taken over by people who want to be like US Americans comes home. You can see that Bollywood hasn't just imitated Hollywood, but soon there will be imitations of the Oscars, and everything else.

What I discern is that the people who have been successful, and have money, no longer are content with the status that money will buy, but want the status that comes intrinsically with class divides. And having gotten to the levels of Global Control that they have, they are going to want a Global Caste System. After all, India, with its traditional caste system was a very stratified class society before the British got there, and it had no history of social equality.

Around London you will see very many Indian people, who like so many other people from around the world in London, are struggling, and despite being talented, might never gain in their lifetimes the type of success paraded and flaunted around in this self-indulgent broadcast.

The desperate demands for social status and social recognition from various ex-colonies and Emerging Economic Powers in the world is going to be a feature for decades to come. We have had "Japan!", we have been getting "China!" and we are getting developing flourishes of "India!".

What a terrifying world we live in. Once upon a time all you had to worry about was a Cold War between the West and the East. Now it's so much more complicated.

That's it, I'm not going to worry any more. Just dumped this worry on my blog.

Smile and Cry

2010-02-28T11:08:00.003Z

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

2010-02-28T11:01:00.002Z

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.

Faith in Oneself

2010-02-27T12:35:00.002Z

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

2010-02-27T10:44:00.002Z

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!

The Remains of the Hunter

2010-02-26T16:47:00.002Z

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.

Frank Field Against Neo Keynesian Views

2010-02-24T11:49:00.002Z

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.

Procrastination

2010-02-23T11:50:00.002Z

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.

Faith The Emotion

2010-02-22T07:22:00.004Z

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.

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

2010-02-10T16:57:00.005Z

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.

Project Prevention - Drug Addict Sterilization

2010-02-09T09:22:00.003Z

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.

To criticise the judge Sir Mota Singh

2010-02-08T13:53:00.004Z

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.

Greenpeace Population Contraception on First Day of Spring

2010-02-06T07:49:00.004Z

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.

Cars, Cars, Damned Cars

2010-02-04T20:16:00.004Z

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.

Found A Poem Written Long Ago.

2010-01-26T17:39:00.002Z

The copyright for this belongs to me, the owner of this blog, as it is Original Material. I came across it today, having completely forgotten that I had written it, probably around 1998-1999. It represents a past that is so forgotten, so distant, and most of all so irrelevant today, that it is interesting for that reason alone.

I am not a piece of glass
Another for your collection
But I am a dark wall
Like some of those within you.

You would smash out a hole
brick by brick
Until you could see right through me
You would widen my whole
kick by kick
Until I become your window.

Then you will take your pane,
Fit it to me and fill me with it,
So I keep out the cold and rain,
While still our daze is brightly lit.

You may choose to break me from time to time
But only if you stand by your shattered window
To feel the sky's breath fling its tears
Against your skin and soul,
And then to find a new pane
to fit me and fill me with.

Our loving will be this

Powerful stuff, the feelings of which are today extinct and cremated, not just buried. I think I remember why I was moved to write it, and I pity the person that I once was.

Did You Know that Bicycles Can be Ridden in Street Clothes

2010-01-19T10:14:00.003Z

First time back to my blog since March last year, I see. Brought back by this Bicycle-loving Blogger.

What's happened since? Britain is still run by a cowardly dishonest tyrant whose name is Gordon Brown. Britain expects an election by May. The country is bored to death with its government and the establishment it has created over 12 years. Will anything change at the election? Who cares? Eat, Sleep, shit. Winter, spring, summer and autumn. After 12 years of torture, the government is ignored to death by the country that has been bored to death.

Humanity has nothing to do but evoke humanitarianism: Haiti is all over the news, yet most people here wouldn't know if their next door neighbour had been dead for a few days until the smell became offensive. Organised Religions still try to take advantage of the vacuum, yet Commerce and Economics are incapable of even accounting for it.

On an overcast day after the "coldest" winter in England for 30 years, what is there in a blog that gives relief?

A blog is your voice, and when everybody else's voice drowns you out, here at least and at last you can hear yourself.

Down with Brown

2009-03-25T17:17:00.003Z

I became wary of the Labour Government ever since Gordon Brown removed the Dividend Tax Credit from Pension holdings of equities.

When Stephen Byers and Railtrack happened, I blatantly distrusted the Labour Government financially.

The Iraq war came, and Tony Blair went, yet still the sun was shining out of Gordon Brown's arse.

You see, it has always been young and fashionable, to support socialist ideals.

But nobody stays young for long, and these days we spend more of our lives being old than being young.

Once upon a time we had to hate Thatcher because Thatcherism wasn't the young thing to do.

Now Margaret Thatcher is struggling with senile dementia, and Britain has been struggling with the results of 11 years of Gordon Brown.

Down with Gordon Brown.

I hate Labour and its pseudo-Socialism. Its people whom cannot count, nor care about money, nor know what constitutes real wealth. Its champagne socialists who hammed up the sham pain of archaic working class affiliations.

In a few years, when Gordon Brown is history, we can all look back at the clouds of lies and untruths that were sold to us under the banner of Socialism. Lies and untruths on a scale that was not achieved even under the banner of Thatcherism.

For the difference between Thatcher and Brown? You knew what Margaret Thatcher stood for because she did what it said on her tin, even if you didn't like the colour. Gordon Brown, on the other hand, is famous for not saying anything at all, like a Value Brand, No-name, generic tin. Today everybody knows that the stuff out of his tin has already faded, turned flaky, and is peeling away to leave behind nothing but a pile of rust.

It's okay to hate Gordon Brown. What shame is there in it? There's no need to be violent about it. Just feel it, and say what you feel. We're supposed to have free speech, after all...

The US Dollar savings of China and others

2009-03-13T11:13:00.004Z

The Chinese Premier said

he was worried about the safety of the huge amount of China's foreign-exchange reserves invested in US government bonds.

"I'd like to take this opportunity here to implore the United States... to honour its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets," he said.

Almost half of China's $2tn in currency reserves is thought to be invested in US treasury bills and other government-affiliated notes.

This is amazing.

It has been known to me from spontaneous news surveying for over 3 years that the Savings of the Far Eastern nations has been financing the wasteful economic consumption of the USA and Western Europe, simply because there is no reliable Bond Market in the Far East.

What is amazing is that in the last 6 months, in the collapse of the Global Financial system, this awareness has not only permeated at last into the minds of ten-a-penny economists, political pundits, and journalists. It has also at last permeated into the official speeches of National politicians.

This is an official appeal to question the role of the US dollar as the basis of global trade. The time lag here is nearly 4 years after the facts were out in the magazines and the internet.

So why has the US dollar become so strong since autumn? The usual glib explanation is that this is because it is THE Global Reserve Currency. Yet here we have China making a public announcement that it is time to question this folly. The message will go out to the Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Malaysian governments and investors. The message is clear. They will now have to develop their own bond markets, and not depend too heavily on US Treasury paper. The Global Banking crisis has proven that their trust in each other should not be any less than their faith in the US dollar. Their trust in each other is the foundation of a bond market.

The recovery in the US dollar since last summer was recently explained by economists as this: Corporations and Institutions based in foreign nations (eg. from Britain and Korea) have in the main been issuing their Corporate debt in US dollars, not in local currencies, eg. Sterling or Korean Won. The money they raised was not kept in US dollars, and so there has been a scramble to cover their long term US dollar debts on their balance sheets. Say Globocorp in Britain raised 500 million US dollars on 5 year paper. Globocorp bought Sterling with its US dollar debt, to use as operating cash, and to spend on capital outlays. This made sense when the US dollar was declining everywhere. As soon as the US dollar became short on the money markets due to the credit crunch, Globocorp had to rush to cover their US dollars, because they would look expensive. They had to buy back US dollar positions, which can be done on the forex markets. Therein lies the recovery of the US dollar.

So the questions to ask yourselves if you are corporate financiers, economists, or politicians are these:

1. In the future, why bother raising debt in US dollars, when even China publicly throws doubt on the US dollar? Those US dollars were not even regulated by the USA Federal Reserve: they were money that was created through creative securitisation in now-defunct global Investment Banks. Even the Bank of England can invent sterling money with more substance behind it.

2. Although the US Dollar recovered as everybody scrambled to cover their long-term debts, why should it rise any more? Why should it stay up, when the money that it represented was as worthless as Dutch Tulips? Why should the US dollar stay up, when it is to the advantage of Globocorp, to raise new debt in the local currency?

The recycling of US dollars around the globe has been a joke since the Seventies game of Spot the Petrodollars. Why should anybody around the globe choose the US dollar as a global reserve currency, when it is no better than their own currency, or another neighbour's currency, or indeed of going back to gold? Why should the Saudis accept US dollars for their oil, when they can easily prefer Japanese Yen, Euros, and will now seriously even consider Chinese Yuan? Why should China hold US dollars, if the Saudis allow them to hold reserves of the Riyal?

Why should the USA provide the basis of international trust, when in fact it is no longer in a position to provide for itself?

Unlinking Oil prices from the US dollar will guarantee reduced global oil consumption. It will permit China to shift away from burning coal, which is much more climate-damaging than burning oil (there are more kilowatts per atom of Carbon in oil than there is in coal). It will permit the world to shift away from the American Dream, which even to lesser minds has at last become more obviously the American Nightmare.

A global shift away from the American Dream would help to save the Planet as much as the Global Financial Collapse. And it will help Americans learn once again how to be thrifty.

Wealth, Money and Planetary Ecosystem Economics

2009-03-12T09:27:00.007Z

The recent Global Economic Hiccups of Financial Armageddon gave environmentalists their first real feeling of clawback in decades. Official human economic activity and consumption actually fell since last summer. A machete taken to the Global Financial System had more effect on mankind's carbon footprint than all the moralizing campaigns beseeching suburban housewives to use low-energy light-bulbs.

But oil prices collapsed last summer, and have stayed down. Nobody can be fooled into believing that the Global Human Economic Machine is defeated. The GHEM only choked on the ill-conceived biofuel mixture in its fuel lines. The GHEM is intact, still thriving, and without any designed alternatives.

Yes, in the continuing Age of Stupid, with the intellectual failure of academic economists now widely exposed and publicised, I notice the media are once again reminding us that the planet is staring into an environmental abyss. Today it is that the Amazon will become a local positive feedback process of ecosystem dieback from global temperature rises. (If you don't know what a "positive feedback process" is, count yourself lucky that you have lived in a bland and very controlled era, so go away and wake up before a Tim Kretschmer clone goes berserk in your neighbourhood! The Amazon is a very fragile ecosystem, and that's all you have to know.) Any number of scientists and academics are dancing around naked, waving their credentials, their scientific models, and their careful research, to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of the Amazon ecosystem. All these scientists are no more effective than the media that publicise their findings, aren't they? They are learned, intelligent, but they do not applythese two words: Carpe Diem.

Carpe Diem: Seize the Day. What use is a scientist if he/she predicts catastrophe, then stands by to analyse its progress without making any effort to halt it? What use are scientists, collectively, if they cannot seize control and prevent catastrophe?

So oil prices are low again. Too low. Carbon Economics is as yet the only notion so far driven into the thick skulls of our political Talking Heads. What to do?

Firstly, it is essential that oil prices should be driven sky high again. Secondly, scientists all over the world should be inserting Planetary Ecosystem Economics in place of either Finance, Politics, and Economics. Planetary Ecosystem Economics does not just get stuck on the gases of the element of Carbon. It takes into account all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, eg. water, light, space, habitat, air, salinity, alkalinity, species rarity. It accounts for the impact of humanity, and it costs all the effects of human economic activity. P.E.E. places a value on all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, not just those which are tritely recognized as essential for human consumption, comfort, or multiplication. Money is an essential currency for accounting in P.E.E, but unlike in ordinary Economics, values and wealth are not left to be established by markets of delusional people catering to their mass selfish wants. Values and wealth are established by specialists trained to view mankind as short-term guests of the planetary biological and physical resources. How are these values set? Now you're thinking.... They don't teach this at the London School of Economics, do they? Of course not... They who teach, cannot think original thoughts? Just see how long they were stuck on the ideas of communism!

The Age of Stupid

2009-03-08T08:48:00.010Z

Nice banner on this website for this EcoGreen Movie...you can fly in a metal machine from the CN Tower, over smoking powerstations to the Petronas Towers. Through all the Globalist City towers, can you identify the others?

The Age of Stupid has nothing to do with Plane Stupid, which was recently famous again for smudging the Champagne Socialism on Peter Mandelson's face. It appears to be a populist film. An Inconvenient Truth, which I never bothered to see because I knew it all was not populist enough, and because of Al Gore, it was hardly apartisan. Maybe this film is intended to plug the gap, the way films about Nuclear Holocaust succeeded in motivating the decline of the Cold War?

It is of course well known that the Age of Stupidity had its beginnings in the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1700s, although it quickly spread thorughout Europe, the Americas, and the rest of the world. The measure of stupidity has been graphed by historians, and the Peak of this graph is arbitrarily somewhere between 1950 to 2008. Peaks don't matter if you're on a high-up plateau that has a few molehills! Stupidity, I expect, has been quantified as an aggregation of several parameters, primarily of course : 1) Quantity of devastation to Planetary Ecosystem Habitats. 2) Deliberate ignorance of available knowledge and failure. 3) Failure to identify and address the deleterious ecosystem effects of new forms of human economic activity. What other measure would be properly scientific? The Nobel Prize is no measure of scientific quality, and my qualitative science is as good as any current social science.

Well, for the price of a British Bank, especialy the part-Scottish banks, how many carrots and peas could you buy? Oh yes, Lloyds Halifax Bank of Scotland has become the second Royal Bank of Scotland Natwest Algemene Bank Nederland. It is owned by the British Government. For the price of a British bank, how many peanuts could you buy? If the price of a British bank is beyond your imagination, why not think about the price of an education in a "Developed Nation". Wonder how many carrots and peas can the average person in a developed nation grow by themeselves?

The British Government now owns majority shareholdings in half of its commercial banks. Mervyn King and the Bank of England has taken so long to explain Quantitative Easing, you would think it was nuclear physics, and at last it will be introduced. (Although in nuclear physics, nuclear bombs were tested in a controlled conditions, even if they never took into consideration Environmental effects). So UK Gilt prices have risen, and interest rates are tending to zero. Whoopee, for the wasteful Labour Government economic policy?

Meanwhile all this time, the European Central Bank has already been providing unlimited liquidity to its Member Nations, (as if we didn't guess), so has effectively been doing a sort of quantitative easing. Indeed, since the ECB has to play politics between supporting the Government Bonds of more than a dozen nations, it doesn't even have the simple economic system that the UK monetary system presents. (You can see why people will pay to read the Financial Times, whereas the Economist magazine is nothing but a propagandist tool used to destroy alternative economies that already existed all around the planet. Globalist Hegemony has of course been over-shadowed by Global Hedge Money.)

I can't decide. Is it worth saving some Economists, and retraining them to PEE (Planetary Ecosystem Economics)? Or should all pre-2009 economists be sent to landfill? New Ecosystem Economists can be designed, and a large factory can be set up somewhere on the planet, where they will be manufactured more cheaply due to economies of scale, and rapidly shipped around the planet and dumped cheaply on existing Human Ecosystems. It would be the quickest way of ensuring that the Global Human Economic Machine will never again arise. Oh Asimov would be laughing!

Big Parsnip

2008-11-15T20:58:00.003Z

Oh there are no limits to Art. The juxtaposition of a huge Parsnip, a freak, against a fatuous media headliner.

Well the Parsnip weighs 950 grams! Its diameter has a maximum of 14.4 cm, and a maximum circumference of 41cm.

It was a freak! It was hiding under the soil, looking like a modest example of its neighbours, none of which were nearly as big. It would be a showpiece except that you can see by its bruise that I have pulled it a bit late.

Global Financial Crisis? Bah, Humbug! Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim! 'Ere, have yourslef a Parsnip, if there's no goose this Xmas.

Squash Diversity

2008-10-28T20:55:00.003Z

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.

Greed, Waste, and the rise of Luddite Banking

2008-10-11T08:37:00.005+01:00

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.

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

2008-10-10T22:55:00.002+01:00

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.

Depeche Mode - stories of Love

2008-10-05T22:40:00.002+01:00

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

2008-10-05T11:59:00.003+01:00

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.

Geastrum Triplex and Around the Wealthy Ghettoes of London

2008-10-01T18:17:00.006+01:00

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.

The failure of Central Banks to do central banking

2008-09-30T13:22:00.003+01:00

Throughout the current turmoil over the last year in World Banking, there has been a constant reference towards the phenomenon of Banks being Afraid to Lend to Each Other.

What I fail to understand, and forgive me if I happen to have too much common sense, is:

Why weren't Central Banks borrowing money from the Banks who had surplus cash, and were hoarding it, so that they could re-lend it to the banks that lost access to direct wholesale funding?

That way, a Central Bank should have provided as much liquidity as existed before the Credit Crunch, but by acting as an intermediary between banks whom have cash, and banks whom wish to borrow it, they serve as guarantors as well as National risk managers.

As a national risk manager, the Bank of England could then have demanded tighter operation from the commercial banks, such as Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley, which would have provided the most stabilizing method of downsizing the Banking and Mortgaging industry.

Or is this Mervyn King hiding behind his piggy glasses, saying that his only job is to sit at a meeting once a month and get an interest rate decision that stopped mattering over a year ago?

¿Looking down at Pork Sossiges?

2008-09-28T07:48:00.003+01:00

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.

E On F Off, Down with Brown, Up with Green

2008-09-12T10:29:00.002+01:00

The trouble with getting excited about the recent jury trial court victory is precisely what I blogged about 6 weeks ago.

If you're the Gordon Brown Labour government, a bunch of anarchists winning this precedent-setting case can one way or another be turned instantly to your advantage. Politics is chess, and some people can look 10 moves ahead and have a strategy. Winning a pawn is not proof you are winning the game.

Already, the media, the intellectuals, and I are all bowed towards the inevitability of nuclear power stations, simply because Britain out of national security needs to maintain its Nuclear technological base, even if it does not pursue a massive program of nuclear power generation.

Meanwhile, this week the Brown government announced a "fuel-poverty" policy that has the correct intent, but is nothing different than what existed before. Lag your loft, pump your cavity walls with insulation, but keep your Central Heating on at 21 degrees, while you sit there in front of the telly like a battery human, being fed the food produced by machines, and barely ever producing energy out of it.

Nobody in politics is re-designing cities or social groupings, let alone the national economy. 12 years of a pseudo-socialist government, and all we have is a bunch of politicians who want to carry on driving to Tesco on a wretched motorway, and sitting at home alone in 21 degrees centigrade through summer and winter, until the time comes to rot in a nursing home at £800 per week.

Christian Socialists? Are they really that stupid?

Production of a Piece of Paper

2008-09-11T10:43:00.002+01:00

For some decades, maybe at least since the invention of the typewriter, so for 80 years, the production of a piece of paper has been the sole enterprise and ability of a huge portion of the population.

So it is today, although whether it is more so or whether it has begun to decline is debatable. The "piece of paper" is often in electronic form and never gets near the pulp of a tree.

Astounding as it seems, the rebellion in me extends even to here. Why should we have an economy that nurtures a sector of the population (piece-of-paper creators) so secluded and ignorant and uninvolved in the source of the essentials of their day to day survival, and yet so unduly proud and commanding of their share of that natural wealth?

So I face a piece of paper, and do I want to play this silly game? Or do I have to play it? Why should I have to play football if I don't like the rules, when I can make up my own?

Prove Yourself

2008-09-11T09:34:00.002+01:00

Pioneer. Frontiersman. Adventurer.

Brave Warrior. Independent Wild Man.

Soldier who can take the shit in Iraq.

Construction Worker who can effortlessly jump girders 60 storeys high in the sky.

Marathon runner.

World Record breaker of records.

King of the Hill, Man of the Hour, Boxer with Guts of Steel.

Cyclist who can cross the continent with one pair of tires and a tireless pair of legs.

Ultimate Blog Cynic.

What is the difference between any of these?

When you have done it, and you prove to yourself that you have done it, what difference does it make on your deathbed?

Is it nobler to die with the celebrations of your peers, than without, and why is the death any more or less noble?

Is it nobler to live pursuing the celebrations of your peers? If not, why is the life any lesser?

We live in a culture where "proving yourself" is so pervasive and endemic that many people waste their lives proving themselves, and even more shockingly they pity others for wasting their lives because they rebel against this peer-pressure.

Chavs? Perhaps their quintessential feature is that they refuse to waste their lives "proving themselves". Are they any better or worse? Even those who claim they will not judge a chav on their lack of abilities and ambitions, nonetheless pity them as though they are sinners against the perpetual need that Thou Must Prove Thyself.

When did this commandment enter what was once a Christian culture?

Life does not have to prove itself. It either survives and reproduces, or it does not.

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
Yet Man must Prove Himself?

So CERN. So Space Exploration. So Electronic Miniaturization. So Genetic Engineering. So Civil Engineering. So Architecture. So Opera.

Man is not superior to other men, or other forms of life by virtue of being able to "prove himself".

London Today has no English People

2008-09-09T17:57:00.004+01:00

It was nearly 10pm.

Sitting on the bench outside the train station were two men in their late twenties, fit, healthy, having a beer and probably East European.

Standing over them, apparently trying to converse with them, was another man, notably different because he was wearing a full-length leather coat, in the style popularized by Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. He was about their age, and sufficiently tall and attractive to not have ever suffered deprivation in his adulthood.

He stood up, and appeared frustrated as he walked away. As he passed me, with his mobile phone to his ear , I heard him saying into the phone, "Fucking hell, where do these fucking foreigners come from". His accent was from London. He could have been the last English London-born Londoner left in London.

The foreigners were back to loudly chatting between themselves. Their language was undoubtedly East European.

***

People who visit London today for the first time, expecting to meet English people, might be shocked to discover none at all across vast swathes of the city. Even where they can be found, they are seldom in majority.

So riding the trains and buses of London, you will not encounter any of the stereotypes that you have in your mind, that you might have learned from a film, television, or books.

That's the way it is, today.

What turned London into this? Globalization. Who allowed Globalization to go this far? The State. Who have been the State? The Labour Party have been the State for nearly 12 years. The Conservatives were the State for 18 years before that. Who advised them in this regard? The globalist economists. What was the primary focus of the Economists? Wealth of the most material kind.

Is London alone in this? No, but it is one of the most globalized cities in the world. Perhaps Los Angeles and New York City are at the same level.

Open Source Food versus Genetically Modified Rapeseed of Monsanto

2008-09-05T14:03:00.006+01:00

So Percy Schmeiser was the man who had to stand up alone against a Globalist Corporation.

In Britain, Rape is commonly grown as an oilseed crop. In Canada, because of prudish reactions to the other meanings of the word rape, the plant was given the name Canola long ago.

Monsanto developed a GM version of rape/canola that was resistant to their Roundup herbicide:

1. Buy the herbicide made by Monsanto
2. Buy the seed resistant to that herbicide grown by Monsanto
3. Spray the herbicide on the field several times a year to superficially keep down the other weeds and non-GM seed.
4. Pay a license for it year after year, because you never own the seed or its descendents, not unless Monsanto dies.

It sounds like Monopoly, because it is. There is one player, called Monsanto, and it owns the whole board. As if that isn't bad enough:

5. Get sued by Monsanto if their seed lands on your fields, and you don't want to grow their crap as a crop.

Quite apart from this obvious abuse of corporate power, there is a fundamental insult here to all people who believe in Open Source. The definition of a seed, or any genetic material, as intellectual property goes entirely against everything that Open Source advocates believe in.

GM = Genetically Modified = Globalist Monopoly

How many Open Source computer heads who defend GM Science ever think about this, every time they eat something? That the food they eat, which today often contains GM soya, goes against their political beliefs?

Well a Google on Open Source GM reveals that the concept of Open Source Genomics is a few years old, and the article points out that Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) biotechnology should be favoured over Transgenic GM creations.

So why, when Prince Charles spoke up last month against GM, did I not hear any of his opponents mention MAS biotechnology?

Silence is Golden for those who are protecting the Golden Eggs laid by the Transgenic GM Geese.

Open Source versus GM. I like it. I wonder where all that GM Canola Rapeseed oil goes to. How can we avoid it? Stuff it down the throats of stupid Labour Governments, maybe?

Lex - Financial Times and The Economist

2008-09-04T20:25:00.003+01:00

I used to be impressed with the Lex column in the Financial Times, which is so well respected that their website actually charges for it. Looking at today's in the paper has incited me to launch my nuclear missiles at economists again.

Lex was literally taking quotes from Adam Smith to interpret today's global economic situation. This is akin to meteorologists who quote passages from the Bible to interpret why Hurricane Katrina would have hit New Orleans! It would also be similar to physicists who delve into Isaac Newton's tomes to interpret results when the CERN Large Hadron Collider starts up on 10 September

It shows how completely addled by Adam Smith the entire field of Economics has become. I wonder if economics was ever heading for anything more? Here we are in 2008, at a point when the Global Economy is the largest human economy that has ever existed in history, and the people who should understand it and plot its future are mired in a Flat Earth Universe.

To confirm my assessment of the stupidity of economists, I was leafing through this week's copy of The Economist, and I swear it was one of the weakest issues I have ever seen. It completely lacked any new intelligence, and in the back they still quote tables of basic, vacuous and fundamentally dubious national economic monthly statistics, which are as useful as Woolworths quoting weekly Singles Charts for pop music.

The whole scene of Economics brings to mind once again Asimov's Foundation Series. It is as though the real economists, the clever psychohistorians, have long since been secreted in a hiding place, to plot and plan the course of the Global Human Economic Machine. Meanwhile, they have left a bunch of idiots and clowns in charge of the Economist, The Financial Times, The Bank of England, The London School of Economics etcetera, so that we are distracted from discovering the real economists.

If Asimov were going to hide some clever economists today, where would he hide them? In a hedge fund company? Maybe. In the Bank of England? Maybe. In Goldman Sachs? Oh that's so obvious...... So obvious that they could really be there! Guarded by a fortress of security, untouched by the Credit Crunch, and protected by cities (London, New York, Hong Kong) of cynical spoilt-brat know-it-all wasted liberals whom crush conspiracy theories more quickly than cockroaches. But the probabilistic calculation and prediction of mass human economic behaviour is well within the reach of modern technology, and anyone incapable of appreciating that might as well keep their sunglasses on and leave their Ipod earphones switched on.

The Hopes and Fears of All The Years

2008-09-03T08:32:00.003+01:00

... Are Met in You Today.

Notion: "stilling the soothing internal voice that tells us everything will be okay" to "embrace hopelessness"

Compare with: "stilling the panicky internal voice that tells us everything is going wrong" to "embrace fearlessness".

Are these silly notions, and if they are not, could they stand improvement?

The internal voices of each individual vary not only with time, but in the frequency of occurrence. Some might have panicky voices all the time, and never the soothing voice, for example. I do not believe that many people have any awareness of their internal voices, and I propose that this is more so in our modern communication age than ever in history. Our population today is constantly surrounded by the voices from Pop songs, Radio, Television and Movies, never mind the endless buzz of the mobile phones, internet and urban crowds.

Where does an individual today get encouraged to listen to their internal voices? It used to be easier, and it used to be encouraged through religious guidance, but we all know how much of a setback religion took in Christian countries in the Sixties.

Embracing hopelessness and fearlessness? I don't think I quite agree with the choice of the word "embrace". It is not possible to embrace abstractions, let alone emotionless abstractions, except in an abstract sense. The word "embrace" invokes enquiry, but is not the most useful description of the action.

Adoption? Welcoming? Inviting?

These words point out that there is a staged process in the adoption of hopelessness and fearlessness:

1. Seeing;
2. Greeting;
3. Welcoming, embracing;
4. Inviting;
5. Entertaining;
6. Adopting

In other words, imagine Hopelessness and Fearlessness were travellers whom wandered into your neigbourhood. You would have to go through these stages of communicating with them before they became active members of your rational toolbox.

Alternatively, let us consider hopelessness and fearlessness to be nothing more than points on a line that runs from Hope to Fear. (Hope and Fear are essential tools in all living things upon which their survival and success depend). To move easily back and forth along the spectrum requires that you should be able to adopt any point on that line quickly and responsively, with rational control.

This means that you must be able to "bid goodbye" to hopelessness and fearlessness just as easily as you must embrace it.

The problem then is how to manage a world of Procrastinators (those who live in Hope and Fear without making effective actions) and Activists (those who seek change because they live in hopelessness and fearlessness).

I think that's the lot. I think I will award myself Today's Doctorate for that.

Chicken Licken ate Global is Good

2008-09-02T08:23:00.005+01:00

"The Pound is Falling"
"The Pound is Falling!", Chicken Licken cries!

Surely not? London is the financial capital of a globalist world economy. If the pound is falling, then the Sky is Falling for global economics?

Oh no, don't be ridiculous. Every old person over the age of 40 still bleats to the beat of "Global is Good". Every day some professor, intellectual, politician or businessman still throws their hands up in the air, and says, "we live in a global economy, and we have to wait until it sorts itself out".

I have not heard one person, not one voice shouting against the mantras of Globalism. When I heard 8 years ago a small businessman shouting the Mantra "We must go global", I remember being dumbstruck by the significance of its pervasiveness.

Then for the last 8 years, all we have been hearing is "Global is Good. See how wealthy we are."

Now the Pound is Falling, the Pound is Falling, and Chicken Licken now says "Global is All There Is. We must sit under the Clouds and be rained on by worthless Falling Pounds."

It is fitting that Britain has endured officially the gloomiest (least sunshine) August since 1942. This is like being in World War 2. It IS World War 3. Instead of bombs and armies and submarines and destroyers, we have words, threats, gestures hissy fits, and Financial Market attacks. Just look at David Milliband and Russia. That whole Ossetia and Georgia affair has seen the Russian stockmarket collapse. I'm with Vladimir Putin on this. I admire a man with brains, and who has some shrewdness. Russia couldn't care less, and why should it? Its people will still be better off today with a collapsed stock market than 20 years ago with the rudderless Gorbachev in a collapsed Communist dream.

And isn't China finally getting revenge on Britain, more than a century after the Scots launched the Opium Wars and brought down millenia of Imperial society? When is it more fitting than when we have a Prime Minister, one Gordon Brown, who is Scottish, and the son of a sing-song preaching Minister of the Church? It is almost as though the ghosts of the mandarins of China have finally engineered the ultimate slap in the face: bringing down the British economy. Strange isn't it, that the British, whom prided themselves on being immune to occupation and revolutions ("We have never been invaded since 1066, and have a continuous monarchic and parliamentary history"), went so carelessly around the world to occupy other countries and seditiously incite revolutions.

I wonder how many Chinese people today understand where the Communists came from, and how their thinking was directed (dare I say toyed with) by European intellectuals. A whole century of occupations, revolutions and upheavals, instead of some continuity of adjustment, and now nothing but an environmental mess to clear up.

And Thaksin Shinawatra is selling Manchester City football club, even while the Thai government is trying to recover his assets. Will Britain be very popular if they give protection to rich globalists like him?

Meanwhile, in India, the floods in Bihar this past week have displaced 3 million people, and have been hugely overshadowed by the ddrama of the New Orleans hurricane panic attack. Oh yes, wasn't India part of the British Empire once? Obviously did it a lot of good, and the fact that it has a democracy is doing it just as much good. Everybody in India must surely understand by now that nobody is going to look after them in the world, but they have to look after themselves.

So "The Pound is Falling, The Pound is Falling". Why should China, India, Russia or any of the Asian countries rush to rescue "the Pound"? Britain drove Globalism and still wallows in Globalism as if it were Catholic Iconography. Gordon Brown has never bothered to understand history or Global Economics, but merely dreams of being like the U.S.A. So once again, Britain will have to be rescued by America. And nobody will ever understand any better what a mistake Globalist Economics have been.

There is only me here, writing, free of charge, unpaid, thankless. Soon I shall stop protesting against Human Globalism and start designing salvage plans for the Global Human Economic Machine... while machines are still worth a lot of money as scrap metal. So while everybody else is sitting on their bums, I shall be sitting on their faces for time immemorial?

One would think I was descended from a people who have spent thousands of years adapted to globalism. A people whom had to develop a culture that was adapted to having no homeland. Diasporas, gypsies and nomads come to mind. Maybe I am. Maybe the horrors of World War 2 are no longer able to blind people to the horrors of a future of Globalism.

No, I'm just not a brainless sheep. I might have a sheep's soul, but my brain is half wolf.

London Greenbelt - The Ingrebourne Valley

2008-08-31T11:16:00.013+01:00

Hello There! My name is Mr E Ed, the silent horse! Welcome to Dagenham. Thank goodness we have a glorious summer's day today, Saturday, the second last day of August. I was getting tired of chomping around out here looking at skies that were greyer than my coat.

Oh yes, of course we're still in London. Nope, you aren't in the Green Belt yet, but this is the last valley, the Beam River, before you get there. Oh I know, my parents told me that there used to be loads of other horses about, all the way into London, because even poor people used to be able to keep horses on waste land. And I won't be here for long, but here I am for now. My mane and tail might be full of burrs because I haven't had a brushing for days, but what do you think I am, some sort of spoilt rich kid's silly obese pet horse? Nope, you know the folk around here don't have money, but they still love animals and nature, even though most of them used to work at that horrible car factory founded by that damned American, what's his name? ... Something to do with river crossings. Oh yes, Ford! My great, great grandparents called him Satan, because he might as well have been eating horses, so evil was he, making all those nasty monster metal machines, that put us out of jobs, and setting the 20th Century on an irreversible course so that now YOU are just a bit of rust in the Global Human Economic Machine.

So you came along the Wantz Stream, I see? Nice bit of work they did there, didn't they? And what did you think of those gravel pit ponds and lakes in Mayesbrook and Parsloes Parks? Those ponds are the only things decent in those parks, eh? Did you see that heron drying its wings in the sun on that little island? Oh yes, that heron comes over here sometimes to visit me. I can't get over this fence, so he has to fly to me.

Well you better carry on your journey. You want to go to Hornchurch Country Park, which is in the Ingrebourne River valley. Oh they aren't big rivers, because they flow into the Thames, but they're nice. Bye! And if you see any of that Ford fella's children, kick them for me, would you?

Hornchurch Country Park - lake.

Coprinus Comatus, the Shaggy Inkcap, not uncommon, but I've never seen them in a wide open grassy field of a park before.

These mushrooms were growing amongst the needles under a young Scots Pine. The ring on the stem was very prominent, and notably was not continuous all the way around (did not join, but overlapped). The larger specimens, like this one, had 11cm diameter caps. Gills were chocolate brown,closely spaced/crowded. Agaricus Silvicola or Agaricus Abruptibulbus? I'm no expert! It probably is something totally different.

Also did the Ingrebourne Valley, Thames Chase, Dagnam Park, and then I ended up sleeping outside in a cornfield. Not very well, because it got cold and foggy, and I wasn't well prepared. (Meanwhile just imagine all those spoilt fat humans sleeping comfortably in huge suburban houses, or even small flats, whom have never experienced English condensation under the stars.) Nice to know that when the time comes, one only has to go out to a cornfield, even in August, and be killed by the elements, instead of rotting away under some pseudo-Christian palliative care regime.

I also can comment from personal experience now on the lack of invertebrate life in the soil of what must be a chemically farmed cornfield. To its credit, it did at least have a few broadleaf weeds that were a few weeks old, so the farmer was either being stingy with the herbicide, or careful about not using more than necessary.

And that was all the summer we had in August, because the fog and cloud was Sunday's weather. To Hainault Forest, where one had to thank the people in history for saving a few old trees in England (although their countrymen then had to go and chop down all the old trees everywhere else in the world where they claimed Empire). I wondered if in 50, 100, 150 years time, there will be people standing there giving thanks. Unfortunately it is a tiny woodland, and you cannot help but hear the endless jet traffic flying into Stansted Airport, (the Macrophages feeding pathogens into the lymph nodes of the Global Human Economic Machine?).

But the last thing I have is one of those symbols of hope, an example of a sustainable fusion of Man and Planetary Ecosystem. Yes, it is a picnic table, and note amongst other things how it uses natural sections of the tree trunk instead of planks.

Double Fig - Siamese Syconiums

2008-08-26T16:09:00.002+01:00

What we have here is a freak fig that was developing on my dwarf fig tree Ficus Carica that produces edible seedless figs. One fig is growing out of another fig, Or according to the website Wayne's Word, linked, one syconium is growing out of another the ostiole of another syconium.
This is intended to be a rude post, but self-penetrating figs? The things they get up to when there aren't any wasps to get up their ostioles! Nature finds its own Perversity.

Love and the Planet - the Innaturate

2008-08-25T10:00:00.004+01:00

It is so easy for me to blog. It is easier to blog than to cook breakfast. When first I started blogging, it was a retaliation against a lifetime of one-way media.

Like everyone else I was born, went to school and was fed information from mouths, blackboards and books. Outside school, we were fed information from more books, magazines, television, newspapers, film, concerts and the stage, radio, audio and video recordings, outdoor advertisements, and then computers.

When the Internet came along, and blogging appeared, it gave people of my generation a chance to retailiate against the plethora of media that has been used since before we were born, to oppress us. Even when those media are used in helpful constructive educational ways, they oppress us through their ubiquity, omnipresence, saturation and most of all because they are uni-directional flows of information.

Yet once upon a time, not even 500 years ago, there were few blackboards or books, so there was only the sand and a Bible that you weren't allowed to even touch. Back then, there was plenty of Nature about, so it was impossible to be ignorant or innocent of nature.

A few months ago I created the word innaturate to define the ignorance and innocence of Nature and Natural History. Compare the word, innaturate, with words like illiterate and innumerate. Today there is less Nature than 500 years ago, but there are infinite Media. The percentage population who are innaturate today is as much as those who were once illiterate or innumerate. Innaturacy has replaced illiteracy and innumeracy. Nature has been replaced by all media, from books to computers.

My blog started out as Love and the City, as a challenge to the then popular television series Sex and the City, which even I enjoyed. To me it was obvious that the Western World had suffered from the demise of Love, which since the Sixties had been smothered by Sex.

Having been cultivated (I might as well have been battery farmed) in a globalist city during its period of greatest rate of increase of innaturacy, it had been obvious to me since the infantile dawnings of consciousness that there was something vital missing. By the time I started this blog, the history of humanity had obviously arrived at the stage where it was threatening the future of The Planet and all its living things.

Love and the Planet became the obvious title for my small, David versus Goliath attempt to combat this phenomenon in the history of Mankind on the planet Earth. Unfortunately, unlike in fairy tales, this David will never defeat Goliath, and knows it.

A review of postings on this blog will reveal that they have increasingly strayed from the mission of Love and the Planet. I cannot bring back Love into a civilization when I can barely survive of my own sustenance, let alone survive the onslaught of the civilization that I call the Global Human Economic Machine. I cannot protect the Planet when I am just only able to protect myself. I cannot care for the Planet when I am barely able to care for myself. I cannot nurture the Planet when I cannot nurture myself at all. For I cannot love the planet if I cannot love myself, and I cannot love myself without the love of others.

If one can resign from a blog, then this is a resignation. It is of course, a resignation from my overly noble ambitions. Like the finality of death, all resignations are a sort of failure, but they are also a release. I will probably continue to blog, but this is my formal resignation from the original mission of Love and the Planet.

Doubt

2008-08-22T09:53:00.004+01:00

Doubt. A 5-letter emotion word, hence less significant than love, but as significant as anger. What is doubt?

The assessment of unlikelihood.
The calculation of improbability.

Or from the pocket Oxford: Consciousness of uncertainty; to disbelieve in or feel doubt or distrust

In Christianity, the emotion is criticised entirely through the parable of Doubting Thomas. It is doubtful that Doubt has any moral defenders in societies evolved from Christianity. To believe and to go about believing with a shining look in your eyes is to be committed to the social group, one more sheep in the flock who together affirm each others' belief of unerring certainty. Hence in Christian societies, doubt is anti-social, and can only arise randomly in individuals, or else enter from the assimilation of an indigenous non-Christian culture.

Tony Blair, as a leader, was a notorious example of the Believer, whose self-belief and lack of self-doubt made him the ideal leader for a nation of lost sheep who had abandoned its Christian ancestry and not even obthered to understand its legacy and influece. The fact that it was only after he left office that he could voice the strength of his belief is proof how blind the secularized British nation were to their evolved Christian need to have communal Belief.

What does this mean for the doubter in a nation of sheep who do not understand the substantial degree of influence of Christianity in their makeup?

Rationally, in a society of believers, the doubter, being the assessor of improbability, provides an essential service. In such a society, the doubter would necessarily be made a lonely person and would be compelled to overcompensate for being surrounded by unquestioning believers.

The service provided by the doubter would inevitably go unrewarded by the masses of sheep, and consequently any reward would have to be either by a gratuity from another individual , or through individual gain.

Instead of believing any of this, it is normal just to listen to Marcus Brigstock and laugh while he gets paid for doing everybody's doubting. Then revel in secularity while denying any inherited need for communal beliefs.

Finally, let the Hedge Funds develop and apply the mathematics of human market behaviour. Their mathematics, together with certain branches of economics, have the closest analogy to Asimov's science of psychohistory. They do not provide the free services of the Doubting Thomas, but prefer to play God, by calculating the likelihood of sheep-like behaviour, the likelihood of predators and weather, and securing their own rewards and wealth long before a winsome innocent boy and a sheepdog is sent as a messenger to cry "Wolf!".

Dow Agro Herbicide in Contaminated Horse Manure

2008-08-21T23:43:00.004+01:00

Forefront, the name for Aminopyralid has caused Dow Agrosciences a lot of trouble this year.

The amazing thing is, if it weren't for organic farmers and allotment growers, the whole thing would have not come to light as quickly as it did.

Agroscience. The name is enough to bring on an attack of Global Human Economic Machinitis. What faith can one have in science, when global companies who market herbicides hide behind the name of science in their job of making a profit? Even scientists can rarely hide behind science. The true scientist must always doubt his findings and leave them open to active scrutiny. The true scientist must also alert everyone to the limitations of his findings and his knowledge.

Common sense dictates that new science is untried, untested, and hence should be the most untrustworthy, and subjected to ruthless trials. Here was just one example this year of the limitations of trialling in the agricultural environment. And there are examples every year, and there will be more examples, every year. For such is the role of the scientist in the Global Human Economic Machine (GHEM). The scientist is just a particularly insular and ignorant form of cog in the GHEM. One who performs his job without asking embarrassing questions, then conveniently dies without ever venturing beyond his field (the field in which he is only a serf, not even a tenant).

There are other cogs, who go about sabotaging websites that advertise the embarrassing truth that the scientists didn't reveal.

The walking dead

2008-08-21T21:41:00.002+01:00

Without love
I am just another one of them
The walking dead

I've heard we're born alone
and we die alone.
I suggest it is a plain truth that we are more alone when we die than when we are born, if only because you cannot be born if your mother isn't there!

In between, to live alone is like being dead.

Hell of an Air Crash

2008-08-21T11:05:00.002+01:00

“It’s horrible. Everything is burnt,” a rescue worker said. “It is the closest thing to Hell that I have ever seen. The bodies were boiling. They burnt our hands when we touched them.”

Dante's Inferno being updated to the 21st Century experience of the Global Human Economic Machine. A metal machine aeroplane failed, and the horror affects the local people around it, but not the whole machine of humanity.

Stuck in England in the cloudiest and wettest summer in my memory, with no consolation but the moral ecological position of having for so long avoided all wasteful or indulgent air travel, even I cannot help but be touched by the horror of "boiling bodies". For the local people there is horror, but it was like a paint scratch on the Global Human Economic Machine, and I would be amazed if anybody cancelled their holiday or business flights because of this.

I am so bored. Grey clouds parted for 10 minutes of sunshine this morning, and the heat of the sunshine on my skin was as strange as a Martian invasion. There is no local news, for news has long gone global. Why should the news of an air crash serve to console me? Things could be worse, true. Such is damage limitation. Yet the temptation to dream is the knowledge that things could be so much better. To be for so long a part of the GHEM, always dreaming of the wilderness and freedom, and then to be part of nothing, always fearing things could be worse: this isn't really a sign of cleverness, is it? Living in reality isn't by itself more clever than living in fantasy. So cleverness must have nothing to do with living in either fantasy or reality.

Some silly global event in Beijing

2008-08-20T20:57:00.002+01:00

There is some silly event going on in Beijing which is one of the most global communions of Masturbation known to Mankind.

Curiously, the Three Nations at the top of the gold medals table are each the owners of the acknowledged centres of Globalization, namely New York, London, Hong Kong (NYLonKong).

Also curiously, the IOC and Seb Coe have stated that they know it will be the very last extravaganza of its kind. The 2012 version will be "sustainable".

Some people will say that they are chasing the fashion of being green. But to me it seems that the people at the top have had their fill of globalization, and know the party is over. They are pulling back, even as I am at last fully aware of what they have been doing. They will change the rules now. What will they be next, do you think?

That Global Human Economic Machine

2008-08-19T21:00:00.003+01:00

It is a juggernaut.
It is the largest thing ever to exist.
It is just one living thing.
All over the Globe
Those Humans connected
Working, producing, consuming
In a Single Economy,
A single Organism
A super-organism greater than any ever seen
Upon this Earth.

Its advocates are clear.
Its advocates are confident.
Its advocates are wealthy.
Its advocates are the high-priests
That maintain and repair the machine.

Its prey are scattered.
Its prey are confused
Its prey are poor
Its prey are consumed
To feed its growth

That Global Human Economic Machine.
The biggest thing ever made that now makes itself.
Grows inexorably to consume all before it
All the Earth before it,
While its high-priests indulge in its tawdry boudoirs,
enticed by its lurid perfumes,
Convinced that they and all before them
Are richer for it,
And there are no other types of riches,
that they have overlooked.

That Global Human Economic Machine,
Sucks you in
With a Contract
You will be fed
You will be watered
You will have the cars,
the luxury dwelling,
the bright lights,
the ease of never having to lift a finger,
not even off your mouse
the trips abroad,
the laughing of those who have plenty
about you,
the misery and confusion of all the others,
hidden away,
here on the internet.

The Global Human Economic Machine
Will run and run and run,
And they will oil it and add to it
And it will grow ever bigger,
For they learned to make machines,
And with machines they could make the biggest machine of all
The Global Human Machine.

If you can't beat them
Join them,
But then it grows bigger
If you won't join them
Avoid them
But then it swallows you up.
You can try to hide,
But even the birds have less places to hide
And so too will you,
And all the time from your hiding place
You will watch fearfully
As it the Juggernaut comes ever closer.

You can take up a Faith
And protect yourself with some Words
And believe that you are only here on Earth
To be tested
And the test will be
how easily you are assimilated
Into the One
The Only,
The Single Global Human Economic Machine.

Book Review: Survival of the Sickest by Dr Sharon Moalem

2008-08-19T00:15:00.003+01:00

Survival of the Sickest is one of the most engaging educational books I have come across for a long time. The reason for this is that its scientific content has been woven into narrative by co-writer Jonathan Prince (a Clinton speechwriter who should know a few things about the emotional power of narrative).

First of all, the ingeniously accurate title challenges the simple-mindedness of the phrase "Survival of the Fittest". That notorious trite summary was wrongly attributed to Darwin, then over time misleadingly foisted on the masses through poor teaching and poor journalism, as an explanation of the process of evolution.

The popular misrepresentation of evolution, is that living things progress from generation to generation with randomly created mutations, but only the fittest specimens with the best mutations survive. Even with a cursory understanding of genetics, the mathematics of this made no sense to me. The chance seemed very small that a random mutation could occur in one generation that could KEEP all the best of its ancestor, while ADDING a new superior genetic feature.

For a long time I have only known one example that challenged this view of evolution as a continuous and ever-increasing upward drive toward Genetic Superiority. It was sickle-cell anaemia, where a misshapen red-blood cell that loses a lot of its oxygen-transport capacity, is nonetheless an excellent natural advantage against malaria.

Survival of the Sickest gives new genetic medical examples in Man to show how random mutations often occur causing the LOSS of one useful genetic feature, which accidentally turn out to be an advantage under certain enviromental conditions. Evolution is a constant process of change, and the loss of useful features often comes first and becomes the foundation for further additions and losses.

The first example covers haemochromatosis, a hereditary disorder whose sufferers cannot regulate their blood iron levels, which can build up and damage their organs and can cause death. The preferred treatment is periodic bloodletting (phlebotomy).
One in 200 people of Western European descent have full haemochromatosis, yet as many as one in 3 carry at least one copy of the haemochromatosis gene. How did such a genetic disorder become so widespread in the population?

Iron-locking is usually part of the immune system's acute phase response. It starves invading pathogens of iron. People with haemochromatosis have a form of iron-locking that operates continuously. Particularly their macrophages (one of the types of white blood cell) are so iron-deficient that pathogens engulfed by the macrophages are starved of iron and so prevented from multiplying into the lymphatic system. This probably was a huge advantage when the bubonic plague (yersina pestis) attacked Western Europe.

So haemochromatosis is a superb example of recent human evolution. Initially, normal iron-regulating behaviour would have been lost in a few random individuals. Before Yersina Pestis these individuals would have moaned about aches and pains and died young, while their fellow men lived long and lusty reproductive lives. When Yersina Pestis came along the tables were turned. The ones with the haemochromatosis mutation suddenly became the healthiest and fittest people left alive. They got all the women, or had all the children. Since then continuing evolution has meant that the advantages of haemochromatosis have further varied with other features and been further selected, while the disadvantages have been further dying out. To this extent one third of the population have the genetic advantage of at least one haemochromatosis gene, but only one in two hundred people (not one ninth, as you would expect) actually have it in a combination where it is by itself a disease.

The book also examines the evolutionary roles of Diabetes, high cholesterol, favism (an enzyme deficiency that makes the consumption of fava/broad beans fatal). It looks at how parasites and pathogens continually evolve with their hosts. It explores genetic redundancy and ventures also into epigenetics and has an eloquent indomitable assault on the educators who have ritually ridiculed Lamarck in the teaching of evolution. Finally it explores the evolution of ageing and age-related diseases such as cancer. I will summarize those in a second installment, when time permits.

****
Away from the book, let us revisit the scenario of how Sickle-cell anaemia's evolution may have started and how it might continue to unfold:

Sickle-cell arises randomly in one individual in the sub-Sahara. It is the loss of normal function in haemoglobin and red-blood cells. Without malaria, that individual would be disadvantaged and die out. With malaria, instead of being a disability, the sickle-cell feature actually makes the individual fitter and healthier than his neighbours. He breeds and his offspring have the same advantage. Eventually the incidence of sickle-cell rises to a level in the population where its growth levels off, say at 10%. This is because the advantage of malaria resistance does not sufficiently outweigh the disadvantage of a shorter and attack-filled lifespan, for this population to compete with the non-sickle-cell population.

The sickle-cell presence in the population stabilizes, say, for a thousand years, as being only a disabling condition that confers advantage against malaria. During this time, other random genetic mutations (for other genes, not sickle-cell) in the population continue to occur at each generation, in all sorts of combinations. None of these turn out to be particularly useful, but neither are they a disadvantage, so most changes and mixes of changes survive and are passed on at every generation.

Eventually, some mixture of lost and added genes and mixing within the population spawns a new individual who still has sickle-cell, but who has also at last gotten some genetically working form of compensation for its disadvantage. This individual and its descendants thrives in the population, in malarial conditions, displacing all other people with no sickle-cell feature.

Finally a future scientist comes along to marvel at sickle cell and prononounces these people to be superior with their malarial resistance, ignoring the fact that for a thousand years, the feature was considered a sickness and disability.

So now do you understand how survival of the sickest works in evolution, and how it is more likely than survival of the fittest? The genes of the future fittest lurk amongst those who do not appear today to be the fittest.

The Labour Party Oversteps the Mark on GM

2008-08-17T18:44:00.004+01:00

This week saw Prince Charles doing his job by speaking up about the dangers of GM crop production and what do we get?

The Labour Government, full of little boys and girls who get fed fat in the House of Commons on food grown by machines and a few lonely farmers, has overstepped the mark by suffocating the debate with a feeble call for science.

Scientists whose jobs depend on Genetic Modification obviously only have one motive: the need to keep their jobs, get rich, and puff themselves up by making themselves famous.

The Labour Government, whose jobs depend on espousing humanitarianism, obviously only has one motive: appear to be directly helping human beings all over the world to live.

Both Scientists and the Labour Government will delude themselves and us with all sorts of lies to achieve these motives. Who is supposed to keep a check on them? Friends of the Earth? Greenpeace? The Press?

Obviously Prince Charles recognized that his help was needed. He has a background of wealth and privilege, and now considerable maturity, that has given him an overview of the world, and its planetary ecosystem, far above the usual self-serving ambitions of a few specialists (scientists and politicians) in the Global Human Economic Machine.

A bunch of democratically elected children prancing around the House of Commons, none of whom will every bother to look for an earthworm in an industrially farmed field of Genetically modified crops, are putting not only the planet, but democracy itself, in danger. These twits think that because they have a moral case, that they have the overview of the moral case. They will not bother to count the pitfalls of GM:

- Breeds and varieties of crops that have been developed over centuries and continue to be developed to suit local conditions, will be driven into extinction in favour of the adoption of the quick fix of a globally marketed GM variety.

- Local economies and hence cultures destroyed as they are moved from local market farming to international industrialized agriculture.

- And the worst: Vulnerability to catastrophic crop failure by using monoculture varieties of GM, which in the face of a changing climate, will be challenged by new varieties of fungi, viruses and pests. New diseases arise more quickly and in a globalized world, new diseases spread like wildfire, so there is no way that new GM varieties could be developed in sufficient time to avert unforeseen disease catastrophes.

Consider the scenario of when half the world's wheat production is grown from the same single variety of GM wheat. Suddenly a new strain of wheat rust arises and spreads within a year to half the crops in the world. There you lose instantly 25% of the crop.

On top of all this, in a changing climate, there is no ability of Genetic Modification to adapt a crop to a climate that varies wildly from one year to the next.

Even if GM food production turns out to be successful for the first ten years, there lies the danger that the global food economy will become complacent and the global human population will be allowed to multiply to yet higher levels, at which even GM food production no longer can provide any solutions.

There is only one sustainable solution to world hunger: putting a limit on the number of human beings on Earth.

China has a one-child policy, and the rest of the world should have the courage to implement its example all over the world. The one-child policy is the most moral and sustainable of humanitarian solutions.

The External World demolished to serve Global Greed

2008-08-17T17:49:00.004+01:00

Here you see a picture from Leicester Square looking towards the North East. Notice what is missing? The Swiss Centre, in Soho, London is gone for ever. This building once had a Swiss clock with glockenspiel that amused even the most jaded of tourists in Leicester Square.

It is uncommon in England for 40 year old commercial buildings to be so unceremoniously demolished for re-development, so I was surprised. Normally buildings requiring re-development are older and have a facade worth preserving.

No they don't need terrorist attackers to demolish buildings in London. The greed of Global Economics does the work. The demise of the Swiss centre begs symbolic comparison to the Swiss banks that have also been demolished by Global Economic Greed.

London was dead today. It is becoming like Paris in August. Deserted except by those who cannot afford to go away on holiday, and with the poor weather, even they cannot be bothered to get off the sofa. Today was more than 95% cloudy.

Fortunately my favourite cheap Chinese restaurant in Chinatown has not yet been demolished, and I had a super Crispy Belly Pork and Roast Duck on Rice, which sated a very deep spiritual need, quite apart from filling my stomach.

Soho was also deserted and dead. Not even worth mentioning. A parody of its former self.

The Internal world in the External World of the Globalized Economy

2008-08-17T16:40:00.003+01:00

Spirituality is as much of a need as sex, food, mental exercise, work and socializing. Today I caught on Radio 4 a repeat Catholic service by one John O'Donohue that was recorded in March 2001. Note that this was still at the height of the Millenium Economic Boom, just when the Dot Com crash had begun, and before the New York 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.

There is something lost in the transcript which is conveyed in the service, but it is possible to Listen Again for up to a week on Sunday Worship

There is a sublime wildness in God that calls us to risk becoming who we dream and have long been dreamed to be. .... More often that not, the language of religion falsifies the subtlety of Divine Presence and Imagination, and labels and names mislead us into the bland territories of the obvious. Often, when you wake in the middle of the night, unprotected, uncertainty finds you. The role and name you wear during the day, the things you do, what you have achieved, who others hold you to be, all of that seems so far away now. You feel alone, a stranger in the world. Though disturbing, such moments of dangerous knowing draw us deeper into who we really are and why it is that we are here.
..

We can have everything else, friends, achievements, possessions and success, but if we have closed off contact with God, something gnaws at us and the heart can find no contentment. Deep in every heart, this longing is alive. It seems that Hegel and Nietzsche were right. In our times, God has died. Churches are emptying and the public talk about God as clichéd, dead and deadening. There is no excitement in that kind of deity, and deftly the psychology of consumerism has stolen the garments of deity, to present products that awaken, even if only temporarily, the call of desire. We need to find a new concept of God in order to awaken our lives and impassion us again with eternal desire. We need to unearth our submerged longing for the Divine. We have allowed our desire to become cheapened through false satisfactions. We seem to have lost the practice and patience of true desire. Our surface minds are saturated with invitations that lack direction and depth. For too long, we have lingered on the chromatic surfaces, where nothing can root and where experience is reduced to a momentary gleaming. We need to reach deeper and begin to excavate our eternal desire. Without the passion of God, all the proofs and arguments of theology become dry and forced. Perhaps belief, after all, is but a helpless attraction go God, and the saints and mystics are people who simply fall head over heels in love with the divine. We have become weary of Religion telling us how to think and what to do. In a time when culture is trading soul for image, we need to retrieve again a sense of what Keats called ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections’. The deepest thing, after all, in each heart, is the imprint of the divine. The loneliness in us is a loneliness for the tenderness of God, and we should never allow any system or voice to evict us from the embrace of that tenderness.
..

One of the great mysteries of the world is the mystery of difference. No two pains are ever the same. In a landscape, each stone, tree and field are different, but difference doesn’t seem to trouble nature. Each stone dwells in its own shape of stillness. Outside, millions of years pass, but can never enter or intrude on it. For humans, though, difference is always intense. No two faces are ever the same and behind each face there is a hidden world that no one else can see. Each life is a narrative that remains mostly hidden.

This is why it’s so difficult to be human. You live in two worlds, the outer world of name, family, address and role, and the inner world which is profoundly nameless, where no one else can enter, and which remains intimate, though unknown, largely to you, yet so much depends on how you see and understand this amazing, concealed world that you carry around every moment. If you live only in the outside world, your heart will wither in the famine fields of image, information and noise. You will become so weary and worn, struggling on the treadmills of competition, impression and pretence, and you will never learn to be yourself. One of the most noble duties of the human being is to learn the art of individuality.

The Irish word ‘ushla’ [?] captures this. It evokes the coherence, dignity and rhythm of being at one with your own nature. This finds classical expression, for instance, in the confessions of St. Patrick, where we see his ‘ushla anima’, his nobility of soul, a life of critical and creative presence always at the threshold of risk.

Each one of us is completely individual. No one else sees the world like you do. No one else feels pains like you do. No one else has the view from where you stand, and no other carries the memories and gifts and wounds that you do. You were sent to the Earth to learn to be yourself, to see and recognise the miracle of your own individuality. Something is coming alive in you that can be found nowhere else, and the Divine Artist exercised huge care in creating you. For thousands of years before you came here, you were prepared, you were dreamed and imagined, who you would be, when you would come here, where you would arrive, to whom, and all the drama and depth of narrative that would emerge as your life.

Immense care went into shaping all the events and experiences that unfold naturally as your daily life. Nothing is accidental and when you forget yourself, neglect or deny who you are, or desperately try to ignore your soul, you disrespect the gift that was so tenderly and lovingly prepared for you. When you negate yourself, you diminish the divine, and when you awaken your life and inhabit the sacrament of your own individuality, you enter divine presence. The mystery of your individuality was given to you not merely for yourself, but as a gift to awaken divine presence wherever you go. To be the individual that you were dreamed to be is often a hard and lonely path to travel. Though there is shelter in sameness and predictability, there is no growth or peace in a denied life.

There is a bit of genius here that rises above the mundane doctrines and machinations of the Christian Churches. Nonetheless, although he recognizes that we have to find a new concept of God, he is forced to use the word God endlessly to express his criticism of a soulless materialist life.

Note also that he also resorts to implying that an individual is on this earth by DESIGN, which is one of the ingenious psychological devices used by human beings, and taught by the Catholic Church, to insulate the internal spiritual world from the external real world. To believe that you arrived and exist by design automatically bestows upon you:

- a sense of purpose and direction
- an omnipresent sense of supervised guidance.

There is no doubt in my soul that we all need spirituality, but if we are to be individuals, then we should not want to be sheep with the wool pulled over our eyes. Specialists at the Internal World, in a Global Economy, should beware how they are used to serve the Global Human Machine.

There is at least one new concept of God, mine, or this blog would never have come into existence. It is harder to get words shorter than three letters in English, but the shortest word of all is one with no letters. When I say that there is Love and the Planet, then there is my internal world, and my external world both in the very title of this blog.

He said to His disciples: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or about your body, what you will wear, for life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens. They neither sew nor reap. They have neither storehouse nor barn and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds, and can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

You see that Christianity dwells on teachings from a time when Nature was so abundant that there was no prospect of Man ever dominating it as completely as today. God does not feed the ravens very much any more, for Man has been killing the Planet while also killing God. Anyone who cannot see that the Planet must be protected, must foolishly believe in Divine Providence. Divine Providence did not build the Ark that saved all living things. Divine Providence made floods, and famines. Divine Providence is an extravagant belief that can only be indulged in by well-fed poets. Spirituality does not need to be associated with such extravagance.

Nonetheless, there is a deep need for spirituality such as John O'Donohue expresses. The Churches and those who think they are Christian, should begin to update themselves so that they can address the world that exists today. They should not rely on applying their speciality for the internal world on those people who arrive at infirmity, old age, and death's door. There is a need in the vast population, and that need must be served, or its perversion will continue to destroy the whole Planet.

Swimming Outdoors

2008-08-15T21:54:00.002+01:00

At last, a day that started off with a fully clear sky. There was mist, which was strange for August, when grass fires are the norm. But then it warmed up in the sun and the rest of the day was at least 70% blue skies.

I went swimming, and I had the company of a friend, and I had a much deserved enjoyable afternoon. How difficult it is to get just a little bit of contentment like this. One day to savour over for the next 364, so it may be, or if I'm lucky, a day like this I might get again before October? Who knows? Supposedly we live in a wealthy society, yet if contentment could be counted by Economists, I probably have been living in severe poverty for years.

The Primary Produce of Economists is Shit

2008-08-12T10:03:00.003+01:00

"This is why most analysts are now suggesting that the economy will at best only manage to stagnate in the coming few quarters, and that the growth prospects through 2009 and into 2010 look no better than anaemic," Mr Lambert said.

The CBI earlier cut its forecast for growth in 2009 from 1% to 0.4%.

And last week the International Monetary Fund again revised down its forecast for UK economic growth this year and next year.

It now expects growth of 1.4% this year and 1.1% in 2009, although the government still expects the figures for both years to be 2% or above.

How many times do you see the word "growth" in the above? Well done. So if you are able to construct three sentences, each using the word "growth" and throw in a couple of unscientific and mathematically worthless percentages:

YOU TOO can be an economist! You can walk around in a suit, get paid £40000 a year, and the rest of the time you can sit around producing shit. You will be superior to "consumers", because instead of having to go to the toilet and wasting your shit into a costly sewage system, your shit will be spread all over idiots and politicians who cannot count, think logically, or have any vision.

We as a nation have allowed our government (Labour, at that too) to willfully submit our lives into the flawed model of a Global Economy. Then we believed that we were growing, when the economists were actually shitting on us. Of course, lots of us knew something was not quite right, but were completely powerless to do anything about it, other than to withdraw from that unsustainable delusion called the Economy. Such is the power of Democracy. The power to change all men to sheep, and to make believe that they are free.

Squashes

2008-08-11T20:50:00.004+01:00

Two Carnival Squash plants, in a cloudy but warm summer. Fruit on one is 2 inches long.

I can't remember the name of this squash, but it still has a long way to go!

Self-Destructiveness as an Intended Feature of Liberalism

2008-08-11T09:51:00.003+01:00

This is the first day since having my bike stolen where it has occurred to me that I am not being self-destructive. Well obviously that's good, and that's a relief. But as mentioned before, on Love and the Planet, we examine these things because nobody else does.

I propose that it is almost by design that in a liberal civilization, an individual is given the freedom and sometimes encouraged to engage in self-destruction. I will question why this has arisen, its benefits and costs to both the group and the individual. I will address the responsiblity of the group and the risk management that must be exercised. Most importantly I will define for the individual the needs: to be aware of this feature of living in a liberal civilization and; to know how to use it and to protect (and hence love) oneself from its dangers.

Living in a liberal civilization

The majority of people living in liberal societies have not knowingly chosen to do so. Some were born into the circumstance. Others were attracted to it without knowing what they would get into.

Amongst the many freedoms, including the freedom to leave their liberal society, is the freedom to engage in self-destructive activities. The more trite examples of these are excessive alcohol consumption, drug-taking, sexual indulgence and gluttony. Equal to these, although less acknowledged, are depression, self-harming, danger thrill chasing, over-work, emotional alienation and isolation.

In a liberal society, freedoms which are destructive but not self-directed would result in the rapid death of everyone, so it is impossible in theory for any liberal society to last long with such freedoms. Hence if everyone were allowed to use their guns to kill whomever they didn't like, everyone would soon be dead. So even in the USA, the freedom to own a gun only gives you the freedom to use it in self-defence with provocation.

Freedoms which are self-destructive, on the other hand, are allowed so that an individual can "get their kicks". (As such these freedoms are already effectively encouraged. In fact in irresponsible liberal civilizations, they are actively encouraged.) This is because in order to maintain the delusion of freedom, as many freedoms as possible must be left available. At such time when an individual wishes to exercise the right to one of the more destructive freedoms, then it is naturally imperative that it should be exercised in a self-destructive fashion.

The ideal individual in a liberal civilization is one who enjoys knowing that the destructive freedoms are available, without ever partaking of them. Conversely, the failing individual is one who so persistently indulges in the self-destructive freedoms that they begin to be destructive to others.

Next consider the economic whole of a liberal society as a large single complex Machine. The components of the Machine are individuals, each of which under the delusion of freedom, willingly conducts his/her essential function. The components that never indulge in self-destructive freedoms will need less frequent repair or replacement. The components that are persistently self-destructive are eventually not worth repairing but are removed and permanently replaced.

This seems paradoxical. A liberal society allows self-destructive freedoms, but then has no use for its self-destructive components in its economic Machine. Is there any use for a liberal society? The secret truth is that the role of self-destructive freedoms is as an evolutionary pressure on the components of its Machine. As the Machine evolves, its components are selected on suitability for the increasing size, complexity and sophistication of the Machine. Permitting self-destructive freedoms allows the Machine to evolve into being ever larger, more complex, and sophisticated, with ever more perfect ideal components.

The ultimate purpose of a liberal human society then , is to develop into a single global economic super-organism, the Machine. In the super-organism, the individuals think they can be free, and can willfully self-destruct, therefore inviting replacement with more ideal components. This is like a constantly evolving Borg, perhaps?

The Failing Individual Component

The individual who has to indulge in self-destructive freedoms is considered to be failing. Without these freedoms, the identification of components of the Machine needing improvement would be impossible, and components of the Machine could spontaneously and abruptly cause catastrophic failure of the whole Machine.

Art to Choke on

2008-08-09T23:06:00.002+01:00

No not Tracey Emin's infantilism. This is an Artichoke in flower. In a cloudy summer.
But the Beijing Olympics have started and been a success; Georgia and Russia have started fighting over a few mountains called Ossetia, so at last there will be no more of that "Free Tibet" stuff, yippee!

Human Rights in Ossetia? Most people in Britain will never be able to spell it, so it will never take off. But Russia? Most people in Britain know just as little about Russia as they do about China, India, France or even Scotland. So everybody will be able to hate it just as much as they hate China, India, France or even Scotland.

I am having to eat cucumbers because I have grown my first ever ones successfully. But the tomatoes this year are disastrous. Lots of blight, few tomatoes. Of course, because it is a wet summer, runner beans are doing well, and because it is quite warm, cucumbers and squashes are thriving.

An Individual in an Advanced Economy

2008-08-07T16:39:00.004+01:00

Here I am, struggling as ever, to find how I can fit into this insane modern advanced economy, where every job is so specialized that it is unnatural.

What is so terrible about economic specialization? The fact that people enter into occupations and progress deeper and deeper into specialties, as if they are cavers going ever deeper into an endless cave system. Never will they ever again get to see daylight, until they are finally retired.

When in Marxist times there were oppressed workers who effectively were enslaved in industrialized factories, it was easy for intellectuals to observe how unnatural it all was, and thereby concoct all sorts of dreamy alternatives.

Now technology has moved on, so that much of the more manifest slavery has been replaced by more sophisticated machinery, electronical controls, and robotics. Or else the factory form of slavery has been exported to countries like China and India, or even less developed countries.

Hence today the unnatural condition of being part of such a specialized advanced economy is less obvious to the naked eye. Intellectuals themselves have become so specialized that they cannot comment on what is outside the caverns that they have gotten stuck in. The few people who are still on the surface in the daylight are generally not in any capacity to influence change.

Humans are having to evolve with their specialties, and unite occasionally under the Gods of Money, Music, Church, Sport, Television and other escapist communions. There can be no spontaneous uprising against this. The human super-organism will eventually grow to a size whereby it has exhausted all the resources the planet can afford, or else it will be so big and complex that it will become susceptible to catastrophic failures whenever various minute components have aged, worn out, or died out.

The many, such as myself, who do not fit in with the human super-organism, are laid to evolutionary waste and left to subsist under the rules of humanitarianism until we one day conveniently die. The malignancy of the unnatural condition of our over-specialized, advanced, global economy is disguised by the humanitarian contract: that we are until we die to have an uninterrupted supply of water, food, law and order, and healthcare.

Marx predicted all the wrong things. How can there be natural uprisings and revolutions, when the humanitarian contract guarantees that like our farm animals (e.g. in the film BABE) , our carefully maintained welfare will prevent us from ever seeing that we humans are not free. Once again, I have to conclude that we are already in The Matrix.

Multiculturalism in Britain

2008-08-06T09:44:00.004+01:00

I must admit this calendar is quite cute, but I cannot help but comment on how blatantly it attempts to be multi-cultural, and how from several points of view it does not achieve this fairly.

I can't even be bothered to comment on multi-culturalism any more. Anybody who thinks it is wonderful can come to live in London to test it out. Of course, some of the most vocal proponents of multi-culturalism loathe what they believe to be their own culture. And then there are those who have gotten into a first generation inter-cultural marriage, and even though this is 2008, they still think they are pioneers at the frontiers of global intercourse. Oh Dog, I can't Bear these backward people any more.

Another End of Summer

2008-08-06T08:35:00.003+01:00

Dear Blog,

Do I only come to you when I am depressed? I thought today was the end of summer, but according to my older analysis, it was probably yesterday (especially since this was a leap year).

Nonetheless, it is solidly grey, and has been dull or drizzly for days and is forecast to be so for a few more weeks. It already grows dark at a quarter to nine at night, and dawn only begins to break at a quarter to five in the morning.

Another summer is over. I will not be afraid of winter this year. It will come, so I will let it come. There are many things to do before winter sets in, and being afraid of winter is not as good as getting those things done.

What a crappy summer it has been though. Quite apart from the weather being drab, there were few moments of joy. It will be remembered as the summer of a visit to Canada, struggling with the allotment, doing a canal camp, and having my bicycle stolen. Indeed, to be fair the summer would have been tolerable if July had never happened.

I got taken out to lunch on Friday, and the food was so good that I was reminded how important food is to me. Then I went to Brighton, which has become a squalid affair. I stayed at friends' and got to see their new hobby, a pair of chickens, and got a bang up Sunday dinner and was given an unwanted mountain bike on top of that.

I should be grateful for all of it: particularly the relief of getting out of London even just for one night, but since being back I am even more aimless than before. I do feel utterly worthless. The austerity of my diet and my lifestyle is more starkly exposed, for having had a break. My pauperish existence is not one that I wish to endure forever. While I only got to dream of keeping chickens last year, friends with the money and the space just went out and bought the dream from Omlet and have fresh eggs every day. The mountain bike is a good bike, but it is not designed for touring/trekking. I am unfamiliar with its mechanics. Its rack is a feeble affair compared to the one that was on the stolen bike. There are no mudguard stays (or mudguards, or even mudguard lugs) to protect huge panniers from the wheel.

So dear blog, where next? Summer is over, and all the summer dreams have to be retired, even though I achieved only one of them. This is autumn, the season of preparation for winter. This is 2008, the year I wanted to leave London for good. It looks like it isn't going to happen.

Perhaps I should join the masses, and dream of winning the Lottery. No, Dog forbid that I should ever be so common. I could keep dreaming of getting my bike back, but police success at recovering stolen bicycles seems to be less than 10%, so I would be wasting my dreams there.

No, there is only one thing for it, and that is to find Joy. Joy in Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Living without Joy is a means of survival, but why should we Humans develop a globalized technological industrial economy if we aspire to nothing more than survival? Birds can survive and make joyful song, yet they have no machines, no electricity, nothing, so long as they are left enough natural space.

Joy. How many other things are important enough so that in English they have been given a three-letter word?

Protest against Coal Fired Power Stations in Britain

2008-07-31T08:30:00.007+01:00

Yesterday, I saw some of the Climate Campers cycling through London with their trailers, down to the protest camp in Kingsnorth.

For a while, some people thought that you could release useful energy from coal without releasing Carbon gases into the atmosphere. Sustainability, entropy, organics, or even chemistry, please?

Britain is still going ahead with building a new coal-fired power plant in Kent. When EON, the world's largest investor-owned power and gas company is the contractor, you have to automatically ask who is supposed to control Humanity in a globalized economy?

It makes a lovely (laugh) example for how democracy in Britain should be questioned for its faults, and not made complacent just because it is supposed to be superior to the evolving political systems in places like China and Pakistan.

Protest is supposed to be an essential feature of democratic freedom. The protesters of Western democracy today seem to be sweet young things, not the angry young men of yestercentury.

How successful will their protest be? Will they be ignored completely? Will they be given a "win", just as coal prices are soaring because even China has to shut down its power plants because of a coal shortage?

Will political strategists plot a democratic show with the lovely young green dreamers swaying the shrivelled hearts of the government into changing their minds? With gas bills rising, the fat slobs in cars going to shop at Tesco can moan at green moralists. The lovely green protesters will go away feeling unloved, hungry and impoverished for the thankless task. Six months later, we could see the British Government commissioning a nuclear power plant at Kingsnorth instead.

Either way, EON will have high-technology engineering contracts for German companies, that will hone even more power plants to sell into the Global Economy.

So Germans, under the cover of the European Union, despite having lost two World Wars and losing all desire to have babies will nonetheless be perpetuating the soulless technological industrialization that gave us Marx and Communism, except that the technology is now so advanced it depends on machines more than men.

Will our spiritual leaders ever consider the fundamental features of European Protestant heritage that have put Humanity on this soulless road? Could they slow it down, let alone stop and reverse it? Or will they sit in their day dreams of moral holiness, fed fat on the wealth of Tractors, Fertilisers and Pesticides, consoling their weakness with their belief in God?

All the while, the sexless Economists will be steadfast in their globalist economic mission, by earning fat salaries for merely marketing Growth and Wealth, but not for a minute considering where it must all end.

Join the dance, Stay in the trance, or Love the Planet?

British Monetary Economy and Mortgage Market

2008-07-30T07:56:00.005+01:00

James Crosby was probably paid for this report, and that's what makes it shocking. If he hasn't found anything new or surprising about why Britain has landed in this mess, it means that we might as well have had Orangutans running the Bank of England and the Treasury.

Well here's my simple explanation for people who cannot count, let alone care about money:

Britain exposed its monetary economic control to global financial markets. It was borrowing money from global supplies, for example to sell mortgages. It thought it was keeping control of its money supply, through the Bank of England, but it didn't count how these inflows of global money were affecting its money supply.

Oh yes, could an anti-globalist wish for anything better? The global financial system failed in one part of its machine, and the whole damn machine broke down. Britain was so proud of being part of a global machine. Well globalists don't tell you the downside of globalism, do they? The bigger the machine, the bigger the breakdown when just one thing goes wrong in the machine. A bit like a whole Space Shuttle blowing up because one person used the wrong type of washer when they were fitting a bolt.

So now Britain's monetary economy has been left to recover on its own, and all they can manage to say is that:

The global system broke. There are no quick fixes. We will have to live without the global machine and learn to be self-sufficient again. This will take at least two years.

To which I add:

Stop eating mortgages. In fact, stop eating and wasting so much food, otherwise the global food system will break down too!

I hope the wide-eyed kids who studied politics in university who work at Westminster for our busy, simple-minded, Members of Parliament can explain these simple facts of Globalization to their bosses:

Global isn't always Good. Global always is dangerous. Take the collapse in World Trade Organisation Doha round talks for example.

De-Globalization is best managed, and not left to chance, or worse, to War. Everybody needs to have a Plan B, and people who walk around saying Globalism is Good never seem to give us a Plan B.

David Cameron gets his bike back

2008-07-27T08:22:00.003+01:00

Is life fair? He loses it for only 4 days, and then he gets it back. With his helmet.

Supposedly the Mirror got it back for him.

I daresay all newspapers will be joining the game of having celebrity bikes stolen and then having them returned.

I'm not a celebrity, get me out of here. Where's my bike so I can get out of here?

Isn't She Lovely

2008-07-25T19:13:00.005+01:00

I had to go into Central London today. It was the hottest day of the year so far, but the temperature barely crawled up to 26 degrees, and I never once broke into sweat. This eventual arrival of summer was obvious from the number of tattoos visible on rough labourers who, surprisingly, still have jobs in this lame recession.

Enfeebled on the way home by the Lurgy I suffered mid-week, brought on by the trauma of losing my bike last week, I walked with heavy feet, and looked at the London Wall. The City gardening contractors are still obeying Chelsea Flower Show practices: using rubber rakes, wasting water on the grass in this dry weather, and teasing the flower beds to look as crisp and clean as china flower vases. There is a healthy fig tree, heavy with fruit, and a herb garden in honour of the herbalist John Gerard, in front of the Worshipful Company of Barbers (they were the original surgeons and medicine men, because they had knives). The garden bends into one of the Barbican's modernist rectangular ponds, softened with lovely water lilies to catch the splashing water of its plain fountain. Already I was seeing here people who had the saintly beatification of being "lovely" about their person.

What is "lovely"?

It must have been sometime before the millenium that Britain got fed up with "nice". Then we had nasty. It must have been at some time after the 2004 London terrorist attacks, that "lovely" became de rigueur. Corporations had to demonstrate social responsibility, including caring about humanitarian and green issues, and their human resources assets.

When I arrived in Finsbury Circus, the largest green oasis in the City of London, all my dread was hardened. There they were, all being "lovely", as the lunch hour was beginning on a summer Friday, on the grass, on the benches, in the sunshine. The internal melodies of R.E.M. Shiny Happy People kept their loveliness at bay from the pain I feel so easily when I am unwell. Indeed, to wander through London whenever you are not feeling well is the opposite of all medicine, even the crudely effective sort that John Gerard practised 450 years ago.

All of these Lovely People in Finsbury Circus were young, fit, healthy and good-looking. If they had not been born onto the Conveyor Belt of Success, then their youth and looks meant that they were quickly put onto it. Here we are, in a darkening recession, where even the people of Glasgow East, despite being the most sheepish form of Labour supporter, have finally thrown eggs into the unlovely face of Gordon Brown, our Scottish prime minister. Here we are, in another global food crisis, where over a million people in Ethiopia are waiting for a grain shipment from South Africa, or they will starve in the next month. Here we are, in London, where there are plenty of people whose pain needs to be shared.

And there I was, seeing the lunchtime workers in Finsbury Circus, being "lovely". Before Lovely, people in the City had to be thrusting and sexy, so this is a new social phenomenon.

When I saw the shop, The White Stuff, advertising "Lovely Clothes for Lovely People", I knew it was time to blog about "lovely". Attack!

"Lovely" has nothing to do with Love. In the English language, there is only one word for Love, which is a stunning reflection of the naive level of understanding of love in English culture and history. Sorry, I have to tell it like it is. As I have said before, in English, Love is just another four-letter word.

So what is "lovely"? To be Lovely is:

1. to appear absolutely harmless and non-threatening, and
2. to portray an aura of compassionate intelligence,
3. to appear to be able to extend kindness to anyone in the vicinity who should need it.
4. to appear to have an easy laughing heart
5. to know you must hide all your pain underneath lest it might violate the fragile fantasy of happiness of those around you.

Yes, "lovely", is superficial as it gets, even if it is the nicest form of superficial you can get. This is because Lovely is the old Nice.

The most "Lovely" people seem to live in North London, for miles around Crouch End, but they are not alone. They are just green enough so that they feel worthy. They are just humanist enough that nobody can say they don't care. They are all so terribly lovely, and live in such gilded lovely worlds.

"Lovely" is also endemic in the workplace. To see it in the City is a recent social phenomenon, but it has been brewing in the public sector for years. Particularly in the NHS, it has been adopted as the perfect camouflage by those staff who know that they are overpaid in relation to what they produce.

At least Lovely People are not bicycle thieves, knive stabbing murderers, or coke-snorting greedy City Traders, but their problem is this:

Lovely people are not part of the solution, so they are nonetheless part of the problem. "Lovely" does not solve any problems, let alone pressing ones. "Lovely" is a form of mutual social masturbation, akin to sitting around making cups of tea while bombs are falling on your neighbours.

*******

Onward to Spitalfields market, where Loveliness acquires Grittiness, and what do I have to report, except that the devastation of Spitalfields Market is finally completed, since I first blogged about it 4 years ago. Indeed, even the Health Food Shop near where the Spitz used to be, was finally moved out two months ago, and is now across the road while this last bit of the market is given the same tacky makeover worthy of a BBC Television programme. Yes, London is now for sale to those who couldn't give a damn about authentic historical places: so long as it has been modernized with the bling of Millenium Oil-Powered Industrialization, someone will pay more for it. Russians and Kazakhstanis, I suppose? Or Malaysians and Middle-Easterners, maybe? Who knows. It is all Global Capital, and the Lovely People of London who gather in Finsbury Circus, are quite happy to take home their wages while fostering this globalization.

Can David Cameron bring back Capital Punishment for Bike Crime

2008-07-24T19:53:00.004+01:00

I am 8 days ahead of the fashion for having your bicycle stolen, because today, David Cameron also had his bicycle stolen, from in front of a supermarket.

Yes, to him, his bicycle was priceless. Mine was priceless too, and the priceless bit was counted in the tears, the grief, and is still being counted in the effort of finding its replacement. He is the future Prime Minister of Britain. He probably had insurance for it, and can afford to lose his bicycle more than I can, yet he feels upset about it. If there had been a camera filming me when I found out my bike was stolen, you would have seen how priceless a bicycle can be.

It should be discussed whether Capital Punishment should be re-introduced for Bicycle Theft. Since the Sixties the concept of having capital punishment has met resistance even for crimes of rape and murder. This has resulted in Western countries having prisons overflowing with drugs and obesity, even while indigenous tribes in Africa and Asia are dying of starvation and malnutrition.

I think it would be much easier to bring back capital punishment now, and especially for bicycle theft and crime. The mood is right. The failure to bring this subject into discussion in the Houses of Parliament will only result in yet more people being keen to adopt Sharia Law. Yes, even I could be converted to supporting Sharia Law, since I have had my bicycle stolen.

So there it is - we either spend the rest of our years suffering the social results of namby-pamby Sixties liberalism, while seeing more of society converting to Sharia law,

or we discuss bringing back Capital Punishment. After all, there are so many humane ways of execution nowadays - an overdose of Prozac, maybe? Or being given as much alcohol to drink as is necessary to become unconscious, before a quick capsule of cyanide is popped down the gullet of the heinous criminal.

Watch out, bicycle thieves. Give back your stolen bicycles, or be sentenced to death!

Oh Wail, oh wail, oh

2008-07-23T21:26:00.003+01:00

Ooow...Aarrhh Oh!
Wail
From the Bed to the Sofa.
Wail
From the Sofa to the Bed.
What have I done
Wail
It all went wrong
OwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggggggggHHHHHHH!
Whine
But not a sound's been made
the wail song has moaned silently
Sullenly for months
So deeply that it has been unseen
But wails do surface
For air.
It's been all my fault.
Wail, Waaahhhh!
It's all gone wrong.
Life's not worth living
Alone.
What have I done
To deserve the very life I despise?

The weekend of playing briefly with the old lovelessness
Yesterday came down with a heavy dull, dumb thud.
In mere hours I had shown here all there was to show
all that was green in my pleasant land
And even to me it was so obvious there is nothing here
That I want any more.

Today
Lying on the bed
Waiting for life to return to my drained will,
Love loomed again and again
Each time it was your face
Your hairy face,
Filling my field of view.

I yearned
And chastised myself for yearning
But I need to believe in love
Even if love will not believe in me.
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/offthepage
What have I done wrong,
but where was the glue
to help us to stick together?

The kiss
The perfect most loving kiss
I miss.

Social Network

2008-07-22T09:34:00.002+01:00

Road Network:
Mapped
With footpaths
To motorways.
Yet some still need TomTom
To get from A 2 B
Social Network:
Is there a TomTom
For people and connections?
Perhaps I don't even know where A is,
Let alone B.
Those who don't know their A,
Should take no shame in it,
But they could do with some help.
Those who don't know their B,
Need a Rough Guide to a Lonely Planet.

When my bike was stolen

2008-07-21T09:14:00.003+01:00

When my bike was stolen last week, I was truly heartbroken. I thought to myself then, that even when you think you are already a broken man, something can come along that breaks you down even more.

Today, I am getting on with things. It would be wonderful if the police could recover my bike, with all its bits, but the chances of that happening are less than that of the thief coming along and saying,

"Here mate, thanks for lending me your bike, I've brought it back for you and here's £5,000 for the bother. Can I buy you a drink?".

Such is the joy of fantasy. No, the reality is that not having had insurance for the bike, it will take me a few weeks of careful shopping to find one that was just as cheap and perfect for all my needs. It was a cheap bike, but it was perfect for my needs. A quick look around on the Internet was not greatly encouraging. The bicycle industry has been chopping and changing its bike models every year for the last decade, it seems, and they don't even make things that they sold off the shelf 3 years ago. I don't like new-fangled things unless they are elegantly simple and functional. Any accountant or economist would immediately deduce, that there needs to be an extra cost added to the actual Purchase Price: the Cost of Buying something Perfect for your Needs.

So the total cost of purchase should include not just the Purchase Price that you will hand over to the seller, but also the Cost of Buying something perfect for your needs.

Reality is no fun, is it? It's too much like the life of a proper accountant, not even the thieving Enron-type of accountant (Arthur Andersen were their accountants, and Accenture has also been in the news lately for their questionable practices?).

So here's the rest of the fantasy:

"Well mate, if I didn't get to borrow your bike, I wouldn't have been able to nip down to my boat in time to catch the tide and sail across to France. It was a lifesaver, because I managed to catch the horse show in Normandy, and I got to see some beauties there. You like horses? Well, one of the factories I own, you see, makes horse carriages and carts. You like that? Well tomorrow I will send a pony trap to collect you and take you down to the factory, and you can pick whatever job you fancy doing. Now let's get another pint down, and then go downtown and get some grub! Here we go! Cheers!".

Oh fantasy. Oh god. Oh get real.

A week of Voices from the Past

2008-07-18T17:03:00.003+01:00

What is it about this week? Is there some outrageous astrological influence? I get three phone calls in one week, from people I have not heard from in ages, and in one case, years.

There is something about voices from the past, when they ring you up. They seem to expect to pick up where they left off. But where have they been? Perhaps I needed them before now. Clearly they only think they need me now. I resent it.

A friend in need is a friend indeed. These distant friends are not available, and so they are not there when I need them. So they cannot be friends.

In our globalized world, this delusion that the telephone is a substitute for being nearby, is like a virus in the software of society. I would rather have one good friend at my side than to have 10 "friends" on the telephone, or 100 "friends" on Facebook. This has become difficult, because 90% of people are busy believing in their Facebook "friends", and the other 10% of people believe in their telephone "friends".

You don't have to be a Catholic priest to understand that this is a recipe for unhappiness and social disaster.

No, you just have to be starved and tortured by being dumped onto a desert island for a whole week with only just enough water, and absolutely no food, and no electricity, and hence no telephone or the internet. And no guarantee that someone will rescue you at the end of the week. Then you will understand.. You? Whomever I mean by YOU.

Oh, by the way, you don't even get to take any Desert Island Discs with you, because there is no wind-up or solar-powered record player. And no, you don't even get a copy of the Bible, but you can still write in the sand, and read what you write.

Walk softly and carry a big roll of carpet

2008-07-18T13:39:00.004+01:00

If I had not walked,

I would not have heard the grasshoppers and crickets, whirring away in the grass despite this hopelessly grey summer.

If I had not walked,

I would not have gone into the shop and found the best cheap padlock I could find.

If I had not walked,

I would not have picked up the roll of carpet and walked it home, much to the amusement of those I encountered.

If I had not walked,

I would have ridden my bicycle, but since the idiot that stole it has not returned it, and the police have not gotten around to looking at the report,

I could not ride my bicycle.

That bicycle is gone. Hope has a limited time offer. Despair's sale is over.

Forgetting is one of the most useful by-products of an un-inhibited emotional reaction series including depression. Depression should never be stopped or dragged out with stupid things like Prozac. Depression should be processed to its own comfortable conclusion.

That bike is gone. So are you, so you keep reminding me.

Forget, forget, forgotten.

Postscript

If I had not walked, I would not have a sore foot.

If I could forget, then I would have no wishful thoughts. Then at last, I could be just like these loveless, soulless people? If I cannot beat them, should I join them? If I cannot join them, should I not leave them?

They who cannot love, are they not machines? Should they be ridden like bicycles, until they are worn down, or should they be loved until they learn how to love?

When you remind me that we must move on, that angers me.
How much harder it is to move on when there is not even a decent bicycle to move with.
How hard it is to move without a bicycle.
All those people who refuse to move without their cars, or a bus, or a train, or a taxi, or even a horse. How lazy they are.
To move on, with only your two feet, is something that homo sapiens var. industrialis has lost the ability to do, and I am unsure that I can still do it.

Once, I too had a car, and sat in a glass workhouse, not a greenhouse,
being watered, nurtured, fertilized,
without ever having to use my own two feet.

The cars are gone, now the bike is gone, but I still have my two feet.

God help me when they are gone, for the people in London
whom to me have always seemed the bravest,
are the elderly infirm
who struggle on foot through the uncaring and pushy
who struggle on foot to cross the road against the traffic
who struggle on foot to drag their shopping.
And never does someone else of their own age,
or indeed of any age,
driving past in their car,
stop and offer them a lift.

For this is how London has been ever since the Eighties, and even now, even with all the wealth that China exports to us, and all the handouts that the government has thrown into the wind, it is the same, except that fewer of those elderly poor are English.

Stop. You have nothing to go with.

2008-07-17T09:09:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, I was getting ready to go off to the allotment. Warm day, though still cloudy and drab, I actually remembered that my water bottle for the bicycle needed filling.

So I went to get the bottle from the bicycle. I opened my front door

I looked.

I didn't see.

Shock. I quickly looked inside to see if I had kept my bicycle indoors for once.

No.

It was stolen.

I was unbelievably upset. I was shocked. Horrified. Then distraught. I don't think I cried this easily over my father's death. This was yesterday. I am still progressing through the emotional stages of anger, self-blame, denial, despair, and depression. People who don't have emotions, or who who belong to civilizations/cultures that repress many emotions cannot understand this, and cannot see the point of it.

They may as well be the loveless soulless criminals who stole the bicycle on which so much of my life has depended, and was depending upon. What loveless soulless people. I was ready to bid them goodbye forever. For there are many strains of humans that have survived, multiplied and prospered on a reproductive method of loveless rape and loveless child-bearing. Indeed, the barbarians that had the Tower of London, and an empire, then the First World War, and the Second World War, could hardly yet have been removed from the gene pool of the British population.

And I, like so many fools before me, having once been in awe of this barbarous animalism, like a moth to a flame, have now for so long been living in a civilization and a culture that knows no love, that I have had my fill of it.

Stop. You have nothing to go with.

In the English language, love is a four letter word, and even to the intellectuals and academics who chance upon this website, the mere mention of it invites as much contempt as a Flash sex video on "Doing it with your dog".

Stop. You have nothing to go with.

What have I, where do I have to go, and when did I start?

Guess Who is the new chair of the National Trust

2008-07-16T10:14:00.002+01:00

As if he needs any more publicity. This man has more opinions than references, was an editor of The Economist at the height of Thatcherism, and because all newspapers are just as bad as each other, is now a columnist at the Guardian, as well as the Murdoch.

Yes, I first noticed his writing back in the Eighties because he launched a pro-dioxin tirade which was clearly ignorant both about Nature, Science, and the selfishness of Humanity.

With age he has become more moderate, and has been most noted for his focus on the architectural heritage of English Churches. Nonetheless, he seems to know nothing about life, but is one of those people who spews out words endlessly, even more quickly than he consumes them. Is it not fitting then that he has taken such a shine to bricks and mortar conservation, which until now has been achieved in isolation from cultural conservation?

The National Trust is so desperate for publicity that they think he will be a boon? The National Trust doesn't need publicity. It needs reality. It has been run by a host of affluent molly-coddled retired people who live in fantasy. Their fantasy has been to an olde worlde time of architecture and landscape. To a tourist, this is wonderful, compared to some other countries in the world. Indeed so. But where is the economy and culture of the people who lived with this architecture and landscape? Do you see it at Tesco, or on the M4, or in your office? Does it exist in London or Ludlow?

Back in the Eighties, Britain was accused of being like a giant Disney World. Never more so than now, when all its local culture has died out and been replaced by people who drive everywhere, watch TV or Youtube, and can't listen to anybody because of their Ipod.

What is the National Trust to do? Well, has Simon Jenkins grown up enough that he sees the error of his ways? Like the archetypal Tory Boy, when he was young and didn't care, he had no heart, and now that he is old and cares too much, he hasn't got a brain. For he will care and rhapsodize about the architecture of masonry, and because of his background in economics, he cannot see that the architecture of modern economics has killed the architecture of civilization and culture that needs to go with the masonry.

IUCN Species Survival Group

2008-07-15T23:11:00.003+01:00

There is a United Nations for one species of 7 billion people, who show no sign of becoming extinct.

There is also an IUCN for all the other millions of species, many of which are becoming extinct because mankind drives them out by taking up most of the food, space and water, and leaving behind poisons, pollutions, and people.

The annual budget of the IUCN is very small. Less than half a billion dollars. Even London's annual budget controlled by the Mayor is 9 billion bounds.

That's how much humanity cares about Living Things. Human beings are common, and caring for humanity is so common that even people who love dogs and horses only love them because they project human personalities upon them.

For a laugh, from Why don't you Blog?

Obviously, for creationists it’s a simple matter to solve. Just pray loads to the big guy to create another few thousand species. That’s bound to work. And anyway, humans are above the animal kingdom aren’t they so we probably don’t depend on biodiversity to survive. Etc.

Boring Drab Weather and Entrenched Employment Protection

2008-07-13T18:28:00.003+01:00

Anybody who came to England for the first time in 2006, when the El Nino was on full, would have thought they had stumbled on the perfect paradise to hide away if Global Warming was becoming true.

Well this summer, the El Nino and La Nina effects are gone at last, and the cloudy, unpredictable, sometimes chilly, grey and wet weather have reminded me that this is much the typical English summer. If you get a sunny day, you grab it, because it might be the last one you see for a long, long time.

A small local Chinese Grocery supermarket that opened up only a year ago is closing down and they say they're going back to China. Quelle surprise, as Julian Clary would say! It doesn't take people long to figure out now that there's no point in hanging around in England, when things are so much better at home.

Walking down one of the nearby major High Streets last week, I counted at least 5 shops that were closing down. Nearly every shop had a sale on, even though summer sales do not usually start until end of July.

The recession is on everyone's minds and lips. It may have taken 6 months longer for it to happen than in the USA, but it has gotten through to the man in the street. This time round, the property market went down before the retail business, and before the job market. I suppose that should have been predictable, since the property market has been the main engine of the UK economy over the last 6 years.

Oh yes, the job market is disappearing, and of course, the private sector has gone first. The public sector is protected by unions and endless employment law, and with a Labour Government in power, there is no chance that they will have to absorb cutbacks. Nonetheless, the unions will still fight for above inflation pay increases, even though they are lucky to have jobs, when all the people outside the public sector are losing theirs and have no new jobs to go to.

Yes, if there were an election in 6 months time, the Conservatives would sweep into power, and things would be sufficiently bad that they could probably do the one thing that nobody has dared to do for 30 years:

Remove enough employment protection so that it is quick and easy to remove unproductive and no longer required employees.

You see, despite all the reform from Thatcherism, this was never actually achieved in legislation. No, the only way to get rid of employees was to make them redundant, and this required organisations to re-structure themselves, or be slyly driven into bankruptcy, just to get rid of dead wood. The other ruses by which dead wood could be removed were much more roundabout, but became so common that they defined corporate business practice from the late Eighties to the early Noughties. They were of course, firstly Privatisation, and then secondly, Outsourcing.

Privatisation was essential to revitalising the European and especially the UK economy. Anyone from overseas who saw in the early Eighties, the European PTT (post and telecoms) organisations, for example, used to laugh their heads off at their backwardness, incompetence, inefficiency and lack of productivity.

Outsourcing was a far more ridiculous and devious solution to the need for organisational restructuring while keeping Seventies employment protection. It was also far less effective, because TUPE was upgraded to protect the rights of employees who were part of the organisation that was sold to an outsourcing company. What resulted was that dead wood ended up being transferred to an external outsourcing company, and only by extensive attrition and sidelining and eventual redundancies were useless and ineffective employees eventually removed from being paid to do nothing, or worse, being paid to do harm to the rest of their organisation.

None of the outsourcing would have been possible if Britain had not welcomed with open arms every illegal immigrant who was willing to work without being able to answer back to their boss in English. Yes, they took their pay, and didn't complain, which made them far more desirable than local employees. Of course, this eventually pissed off everyone in the country, because guess what? We have had a Labour Government since 1997, and this was what they were encouraging.

The French might only now be catching up with the UK, but the UK still has employment protection that defies economic sense. In this recession, I think the Tories when they take over the government, might be given the democratic power to remove the last nonsensical employment protection from the rulebooks. Is this a good thing? Yes, but it is sadly much too late. All that employment protection was the reason why British manufacturing stayed so uncompetitive that today, none of it is owned and managed by themselves, and what there is left of manufacturing survives because of factory robotics.

Well, robotics use oil, and human beings need physical work, so this is a silly state of affairs. This is the time to ask for a democratic mandate to remove obstructive employment protection laws. This can be done now because all the industry is gone, and because the welfare and social security system can be kept operational without the need to keep employees in jobs where they are producing nothing, or even less than nothing.

Happy Birthday

2008-07-10T23:39:00.002+01:00

Happy Birthday to you
You're looking so well
Whatever bent your wheel
Seeing you makes me melt.
So even I cannot deny
I am still in love with you.
Happy Birthday to you.