Art to Choke on

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

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Now technology has moved on, so that much of the more manifest slavery has been replaced by more sophisticated machinery, electronical controls, and robotics.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Dance Powered Electricity and Welfare Powered Landlording

Mr Charalambous, a Greek-Cypriot who owns 1,000 properties in north London as well as land in Europe,

So now you can clean your conscience by turning green. To his credit, at least he is doing some good, and is doing it publicly, because there are many other wealthy landlords who keep a low profile and accumulate wealth for dynastic ambitions.

I remember in the Eighties when Landlording in Britain was something despised and condemned by all idealistic politicised youth.

Since then, we have had endless growth in landlording, effectively powered by the insatiable need for social housing. Tax is taken from some people, and the government has spent it on housing other people. For despite the growth in Housing Associations and new home development, the rental market for homes suitable for welfare-dependent mothers of many children has been fed by years of extreme left-wing idealism about the universality of human rights, particularly the right to housing, and this has mostly been focussed in the perpetually Labour boroughs of London, such as Hackney, Haringey, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Newham, etc.

New Labour was distinct from old Labour in that it spent years ridding itself of this base of alienated idealistic extremists. The borough first to benefit from this clean-out was Newham, partly because its MPs were part of or at least close to the religious group that formed the Blair government. Consequently Newham was one of the first boroughs to have its own elected Mayor. Since then, the placement of the 2012 Olympics in Newham has extended the changes to the extent that old Labour, in Newham, is effectively gone, and probably retired to Morecambe Bay.

The other Labour boroughs have also caught up, although they took a long time about it. Haringey, which is in North London had the benefit of wealthy middle-class neighbourhoods around Alexandra Park, the Ladder, and even near Turnpike Lane. Haringey is the undisputed centre of London's Turkish and Greek-Cypriot communities. That they chose to live next to each other is surprising but typical in London: in East London in the late 20th century, Tamils, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs chose to live as close to each other as is possible without having to actually admit to liking each other. Since the 21st century started the influx of East Europeans from Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, and Bulgaria has predominated in London, although there has also been a steady flow of immigrants from every class level in every place in the world.

Now they can all come here to dance up a storm, or have lots of babies and get social housing that will power a landlord's empire, which because of welfare idealism and social housing, is still more recession-proof than sleeping on a solid block of gold.