Yes, we were right all along. The whole Thatcherite thang - cutting taxes on the rich, allowing banks to do what the hell they bloody well liked, pretending the government had no legitimate role in the economy - it was all bollocks. Those of us who voted Callaghan in 1979 and Foot in 1983, who have been leant on for decades to admit we'd got it all wrong - well, as we now know, WE HADN'T. The 40% top tax rate was a disaster from the start, bringing in the massive boom/bust cycle which kept the Tories out of power for more than a decade - though sadly not convincing NotLabour governments to reverse it. Given enough rope to hang themselves the banks duly did - though of course those who were really responsible never paid the price, which is being paid as always by ordinary working people. Given that these guys have fucked up our economy while still remaining filthy rich themselves, what are we going to do? They should either give up their ill-gotten gains, or DIE. As they're clearly not going to do the former, how about the latter?
Class War demonstration outside the Stock Exchange, Monday 22nd, 12 noon, Paternoster Square EC4, nearest tube St. Pauls - don't precisely know what this will achieve, but may just prove a starting point and we'll take it from there. But the physical security of the rich now has to be threatened, as they've threatened ours. Let's see some DEAD BANKERS! The forthcoming Winter of Discontent is going to eclipse anything that happened thirty years ago.
Thursday 18 September 2008
Monday 8 September 2008
The invisible hand gets the shakes....
We're told that government doesn't need to interfere in matters economic. The market is great and will prevail (or something like that). That is, of course, until it might mean important people losing money.
The US government has found it necessary to take over the two big mortgage guarantors, which bear the cute, homely names "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac", which are normally not glossed even in the British press. Now, it could be argued that this doesn't make much difference; in both unlovely acronyms (FNMA and FHMC, since you don't ask) the F stands for "Federal". But, apparently, they weren't Federal until yesterday. What does this mean? That the people who run them were paying themselves enormous salaries on the grounds that they were commercial enterprises while not actually bearing any of the risk, perhaps? Perish the thought. And of course now they are government-run the bosses will go back to public-sector salaries? Well, of course they will.
Sounds rather like our own dear Northern Rock. Its bosses were lending stupidly, knowing that everybody else was risking their neck but that they themselves were risking bugger all, but they knew that the government couldn't let them swing in the wind as an electorally significant number of people would otherwise suffer. Well, any justification capitalism could possibly have rests on the risk-taking of entrepreneurs. This must mean that if things go tits up these people are on their bikes and living in a two-up-two-down terrace. Otherwise we'd be better off having everybody working for the State, drawing shit wages but doing sod all work for them. Less opportunity for disaster, and less hassle all round.
And no-one should ever forget; everyone on a high salary has got it by blagging and status-mongering, rather than by any conceivable version of market forces. And so no harm could ever be done to the wider economy by taxing them to buggery and beyond.
The US government has found it necessary to take over the two big mortgage guarantors, which bear the cute, homely names "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac", which are normally not glossed even in the British press. Now, it could be argued that this doesn't make much difference; in both unlovely acronyms (FNMA and FHMC, since you don't ask) the F stands for "Federal". But, apparently, they weren't Federal until yesterday. What does this mean? That the people who run them were paying themselves enormous salaries on the grounds that they were commercial enterprises while not actually bearing any of the risk, perhaps? Perish the thought. And of course now they are government-run the bosses will go back to public-sector salaries? Well, of course they will.
Sounds rather like our own dear Northern Rock. Its bosses were lending stupidly, knowing that everybody else was risking their neck but that they themselves were risking bugger all, but they knew that the government couldn't let them swing in the wind as an electorally significant number of people would otherwise suffer. Well, any justification capitalism could possibly have rests on the risk-taking of entrepreneurs. This must mean that if things go tits up these people are on their bikes and living in a two-up-two-down terrace. Otherwise we'd be better off having everybody working for the State, drawing shit wages but doing sod all work for them. Less opportunity for disaster, and less hassle all round.
And no-one should ever forget; everyone on a high salary has got it by blagging and status-mongering, rather than by any conceivable version of market forces. And so no harm could ever be done to the wider economy by taxing them to buggery and beyond.
Apologies to the blogosphere for absence
Another long hiatus, in this case caused by the CELTA English-teaching course I’ve just completed.
They warned us at the beginning that the course we were taking was pretty intensive. I took this with a pinch of salt, but discovered soon enough that they weren’t bloody kidding. Haven’t worked so hard for quite a while; it ain’t an easy option, and for people without experience of academic study it may be a bridge too far. One guy dropped out after three days, and I damn nearly dropped out halfway through, but was persuaded back on board. The main problem for me was that, there being no CELTA course in my home town despite its two universities, I had to travel 120 miles every day, and due to unforeseen engineering works (aren’t they all unforeseen?) this meant five hours’ commuting on top of the eight-hour day. Alarm set for 5.45 a.m., and by the time I got home and had had a bite to eat it was getting on for 9. Now some people may be able to get on with written work and lesson planning at that sort of time, but I sure ain’t one of them; too much of a piss-artist for a start. So it was scraping by from start to finish.
Interesting lot of people on the course. I expected them (on the evidence of a mate who’s been in the biz 20 years) to be largely female; in fact blokes had a 10-8 majority. I wasn’t even the oldest on the course – there was a splendidly barmy woman who was pushing sixty. As a seasoned Islamophobe, it was probably salutary for me to be paired with one hijab-wearing Muslim lady for class work, and with another one as my teaching partner. (Both of them were training to teach English to women in the Greater Manchester Muslim community, and one can’t have any objection to that.) In fact one of them I fancied the jilbab off, but it wouldn’t do to mention any such thing.
The students were delightful. As they can’t charge people for practice lessons given by the likes of Muggins, these lessons were offered free, and quite a mixed bag they attracted. Not as many Asians as I’d expected and rather hoped; just a few orientals, and rather more strong silent North Africans, with the odd Hispanic. There was also an ancient Russian woman – God only knows what she was doing there; the first time she attended our class she sat on her own giving off the occasional impassioned diatribe in Russian and frightening the daylights out of the young students sitting around her. But both we and the tutors were jolly kind to her – personally I’m prepared to cut a lot of slack for someone who grew up in Russia in the early days of Stalin – and she settled down and became quite amenable.
The organisation of the course was a bit chaotic, but after enough of us had complained they got their act together and made sure we all got through. On balance I’m glad I did it, but wouldn’t want to do it again. Nor have I the first idea where I’m going to use it.
Islamophobia reasserted itself at the end, reassuringly. After the last day of the course the Christian and secular majority wanted to go out on the piss, but we thoughtfully changed this into a Chinese meal to try to be nice and inclusive for our Muslim colleagues. Even so we only managed to bring one of them along, and only after we’d repeatedly assured him that we were going to a restaurant and not a pub. It was one of those buffet restaurants, and once he’d got his plate filled he went to sit down at another table, presumably because it was not on to share a table with people consuming pork and beer. We wouldn’t have even minded that if he hadn’t then scarpered without contributing anything to the bill….Sod ‘em, sod ‘em, SOD ’EM! I’ve no objection to people who don’t eat and drink certain things; but I know dozens of people who don’t drink and will still come to the pub and have an orange juice. If you have to make such a bloody arse of yourself then you shouldn’t complain if we start getting prejudiced against you.
They warned us at the beginning that the course we were taking was pretty intensive. I took this with a pinch of salt, but discovered soon enough that they weren’t bloody kidding. Haven’t worked so hard for quite a while; it ain’t an easy option, and for people without experience of academic study it may be a bridge too far. One guy dropped out after three days, and I damn nearly dropped out halfway through, but was persuaded back on board. The main problem for me was that, there being no CELTA course in my home town despite its two universities, I had to travel 120 miles every day, and due to unforeseen engineering works (aren’t they all unforeseen?) this meant five hours’ commuting on top of the eight-hour day. Alarm set for 5.45 a.m., and by the time I got home and had had a bite to eat it was getting on for 9. Now some people may be able to get on with written work and lesson planning at that sort of time, but I sure ain’t one of them; too much of a piss-artist for a start. So it was scraping by from start to finish.
Interesting lot of people on the course. I expected them (on the evidence of a mate who’s been in the biz 20 years) to be largely female; in fact blokes had a 10-8 majority. I wasn’t even the oldest on the course – there was a splendidly barmy woman who was pushing sixty. As a seasoned Islamophobe, it was probably salutary for me to be paired with one hijab-wearing Muslim lady for class work, and with another one as my teaching partner. (Both of them were training to teach English to women in the Greater Manchester Muslim community, and one can’t have any objection to that.) In fact one of them I fancied the jilbab off, but it wouldn’t do to mention any such thing.
The students were delightful. As they can’t charge people for practice lessons given by the likes of Muggins, these lessons were offered free, and quite a mixed bag they attracted. Not as many Asians as I’d expected and rather hoped; just a few orientals, and rather more strong silent North Africans, with the odd Hispanic. There was also an ancient Russian woman – God only knows what she was doing there; the first time she attended our class she sat on her own giving off the occasional impassioned diatribe in Russian and frightening the daylights out of the young students sitting around her. But both we and the tutors were jolly kind to her – personally I’m prepared to cut a lot of slack for someone who grew up in Russia in the early days of Stalin – and she settled down and became quite amenable.
The organisation of the course was a bit chaotic, but after enough of us had complained they got their act together and made sure we all got through. On balance I’m glad I did it, but wouldn’t want to do it again. Nor have I the first idea where I’m going to use it.
Islamophobia reasserted itself at the end, reassuringly. After the last day of the course the Christian and secular majority wanted to go out on the piss, but we thoughtfully changed this into a Chinese meal to try to be nice and inclusive for our Muslim colleagues. Even so we only managed to bring one of them along, and only after we’d repeatedly assured him that we were going to a restaurant and not a pub. It was one of those buffet restaurants, and once he’d got his plate filled he went to sit down at another table, presumably because it was not on to share a table with people consuming pork and beer. We wouldn’t have even minded that if he hadn’t then scarpered without contributing anything to the bill….Sod ‘em, sod ‘em, SOD ’EM! I’ve no objection to people who don’t eat and drink certain things; but I know dozens of people who don’t drink and will still come to the pub and have an orange juice. If you have to make such a bloody arse of yourself then you shouldn’t complain if we start getting prejudiced against you.
Saturday 2 August 2008
Those who can, do; those who can't, teach
A while back I gave high praise to the late Ian Dury for discarding that glib phrase in favour of "If you can, teach; if you can't, FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Quite right, too.
But now I've been doing a CELTA course in teaching English to foreigners. It's a damn good thing to do; there are lots of TEFL courses, but not all of them are recognised anywhere. CELTA is a seriously good one, and will get you a job more or less anywhere. You can do it part-time over several months, if you've got that long; alternatively you can do it intensively, in a month. It costs about a thousand quid.
It's bloody hard work though. Especially if you're doing it in Britain in the summer when none of the transport works; it's taking me 5 hours a day to do the commute, on top of the very intensive 8 hours' coursework. The trainers are real slave-drivers, in the best sense; switch off for five minutes, and you'll find yourself utterly clueless half an hour later. Now we've started teaching practice, anyone who asks a question is told "Well, we did that last Thursday - weren't you listening?"
Still, it has a real flavour of being worthwhile. I'd recommend it to anyone; what you need is not a job or a career - those just convey you into the hands of some management arsehole - but a skillset, and this is a good part of one.
But now I've been doing a CELTA course in teaching English to foreigners. It's a damn good thing to do; there are lots of TEFL courses, but not all of them are recognised anywhere. CELTA is a seriously good one, and will get you a job more or less anywhere. You can do it part-time over several months, if you've got that long; alternatively you can do it intensively, in a month. It costs about a thousand quid.
It's bloody hard work though. Especially if you're doing it in Britain in the summer when none of the transport works; it's taking me 5 hours a day to do the commute, on top of the very intensive 8 hours' coursework. The trainers are real slave-drivers, in the best sense; switch off for five minutes, and you'll find yourself utterly clueless half an hour later. Now we've started teaching practice, anyone who asks a question is told "Well, we did that last Thursday - weren't you listening?"
Still, it has a real flavour of being worthwhile. I'd recommend it to anyone; what you need is not a job or a career - those just convey you into the hands of some management arsehole - but a skillset, and this is a good part of one.
Crete
Spent a week in a part of the world where a bit of sun could be relied on.
I will always remember the most paradoxical verse of the New Testament, probably put in there to show witless evangelicals that you can’t just treat it all as the literal truth. St Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that “all Cretans are liars”, and claims the Cretan is telling the truth. Well, given that most of them are now in the business of fleecing tourists, I suppose the principle of biblical inerrancy has been given a bit of a boost.
In any case, don’t listen to any of these wise saws. On the second evening I went to a beach restaurant offering fresh whitebait. When the sea is about 50 yards away one tends to assume this is all right. But somehow a large part of the next morning was spent hughing my guts up.
On only one morning I went out without my sun cream - ten days later the skin is still peeling off my sunburnt forearm.
Also took with me Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which contains a fictionalisation of Waugh’s own experiences in the Battle of Crete in May 1941. I hired a car to drive over the mountains from Chania to Sphakia in the tracks of Waugh and Guy Crouchback, whose transport had been less reliable, though not, as it turned out, much less. As it happened, on the way back from Sphakia a tyre burst on us while in the mountains miles from anywhere. I couldn’t reliably find my way much further, so tried to get back down the mountain road to Sphakia. Fortunately I managed to flag down a car full of practical Bulgarians who changed our tyre for us. I should add that by this time it was 7.30 p.m. or so and it gets dark early in those parts. And I’d almost rather be stuck in a hair-raising transport crisis with Corporal-Major Ludovic than with the Iron Buddha.
But you can’t deny that an inhabitant of the North of England needs the odd Vitamin D boost every now and then. And I certainly got that.
I will always remember the most paradoxical verse of the New Testament, probably put in there to show witless evangelicals that you can’t just treat it all as the literal truth. St Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that “all Cretans are liars”, and claims the Cretan is telling the truth. Well, given that most of them are now in the business of fleecing tourists, I suppose the principle of biblical inerrancy has been given a bit of a boost.
In any case, don’t listen to any of these wise saws. On the second evening I went to a beach restaurant offering fresh whitebait. When the sea is about 50 yards away one tends to assume this is all right. But somehow a large part of the next morning was spent hughing my guts up.
On only one morning I went out without my sun cream - ten days later the skin is still peeling off my sunburnt forearm.
Also took with me Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, which contains a fictionalisation of Waugh’s own experiences in the Battle of Crete in May 1941. I hired a car to drive over the mountains from Chania to Sphakia in the tracks of Waugh and Guy Crouchback, whose transport had been less reliable, though not, as it turned out, much less. As it happened, on the way back from Sphakia a tyre burst on us while in the mountains miles from anywhere. I couldn’t reliably find my way much further, so tried to get back down the mountain road to Sphakia. Fortunately I managed to flag down a car full of practical Bulgarians who changed our tyre for us. I should add that by this time it was 7.30 p.m. or so and it gets dark early in those parts. And I’d almost rather be stuck in a hair-raising transport crisis with Corporal-Major Ludovic than with the Iron Buddha.
But you can’t deny that an inhabitant of the North of England needs the odd Vitamin D boost every now and then. And I certainly got that.
Monday 21 July 2008
Musings on the cricket
Having just moved house and not got my satellite up yet, I have had to go back to the old warhorse of Test Match Special to wallow in cricket as is my wont.
It is in the opening moments of TMS that one realises what Old Etonians are for. As cricket commentators they rule the world. What would English cricket be without Brian Johnston and Henry Blofeld? (Although it must be conceded that Southampton policeman John Arlott was the daddy of them all.)
It has to be said that “Sir” Geoffrey Boycott is also a delight, if only for depth of self-absorption and utter lack of self-awareness. It’s great when one of the other commentators winds him up to an outburst of quite incredible pomposity; once the mechanism is set in motion it will rattle on with eye-popping absurdities, which are lovably rather than irritatingly amusing as one realises there is no malice behind them. (My father met him once and found him absolutely charming.)
A grossly predictable defeat at the hands of South Africa. I don’t think our players are any worse, especially as their star all-rounder Jacques Kallis didn’t do very much, but we have no idea of tactics or strategy.
Start with the selection. No complaints in principle about Darren Pattinson, although he may turn out to be one of those bowlers we always seemed to have in the Nineties, who would roar in full of sound and fury and never even look like taking a wicket. The idea that there were other people ahead of him in the queue is ridiculous; a place in the team is nobody’s right – next thing you know they’ll be taking it to an industrial tribunal when they get dropped. The silliest thing was saying he shouldn’t have been picked because he grew up in Australia – where do they think Kevin Pietersen grew up? We’re going to have to rely more and more on English-qualified players who grew up somewhere else; how can you develop cricketers in a country where every green space has been sold off to developers and it rains all bloody summer?
Tim Ambrose battled gamely this afternoon, but he isn’t a Test No. 6. Surely the wicketkeeper issue should relate to the bowling strategy. If you play four bowlers, then you play six batsmen and the best wicketkeeper you can find; if you need five bowlers then you need a No. 6 batsman who can keep wicket competently, i.e. the nearest you can get to Alec Stewart. Right now that means Matt Prior or just possibly Colonel Mustard.
Anyway, the South Africans have far worse problems. Makhaya Ntini bowled OK in this game, but he wasn’t much cop at Lord’s. Boycott, looking for trouble, tried to put Shaun Pollock on the spot on whether Ntini should have been dropped; Pollock, to his credit, made no evasions. The dropping of Ntini would have precipitated an official enquiry, and would have taken a lot of justifying, as he is the only real black guy in the team. (Actually I think Makhaya should be investigated for discrimination himself: left-handers, like myself, are a persecuted minority when he is bowling. He bunnified Trescothick on his last visit and got Strauss with a real bastard yesterday.)
Anyway, we were rubbish. A Test captain batting at 3 should not get himself out in the penultimate over of the day. James Anderson played brilliantly as night-watchman, and then got hit on the head. Often medical and tactical imperatives clash, but in this case they pointed in the same direction; he should have gone off and got his head together. He’d done his job, holding out for nearly two hours, and should have come back in his real No 9 position to bat with the sublime Stuart Broad. Anyone could have predicted that Anderson would be out in no time if he stayed on the field. Full marks for courage, but discretion is the better part of valour.
Pietersen was a disgrace. There are times (Twenty20 springs to mind) when a five-ball 13 is just the ticket. When the task is to bat for two days to save the match it’s just silly. No doubt it felt good to get to 13 in four balls. But Fred Flintoff, who’s also not normally one to hang about, did more good by taking 68 balls to reach the same score. KP ought to get dropped for that, like Boycott once was for scoring 246 in about six months. Except we don’t have the depth of batting to make that feasible...
Maybe Broad will make a No. 6 one day – after all he now averages 41 in Tests, and that was only his second not out. The only problem is that his recent bowling has been nothing to write home about.
The one glimmer of light it that I was expecting to miss the last day of the match as I’m flying to Crete tomorrow, and now I won’t.
It is in the opening moments of TMS that one realises what Old Etonians are for. As cricket commentators they rule the world. What would English cricket be without Brian Johnston and Henry Blofeld? (Although it must be conceded that Southampton policeman John Arlott was the daddy of them all.)
It has to be said that “Sir” Geoffrey Boycott is also a delight, if only for depth of self-absorption and utter lack of self-awareness. It’s great when one of the other commentators winds him up to an outburst of quite incredible pomposity; once the mechanism is set in motion it will rattle on with eye-popping absurdities, which are lovably rather than irritatingly amusing as one realises there is no malice behind them. (My father met him once and found him absolutely charming.)
A grossly predictable defeat at the hands of South Africa. I don’t think our players are any worse, especially as their star all-rounder Jacques Kallis didn’t do very much, but we have no idea of tactics or strategy.
Start with the selection. No complaints in principle about Darren Pattinson, although he may turn out to be one of those bowlers we always seemed to have in the Nineties, who would roar in full of sound and fury and never even look like taking a wicket. The idea that there were other people ahead of him in the queue is ridiculous; a place in the team is nobody’s right – next thing you know they’ll be taking it to an industrial tribunal when they get dropped. The silliest thing was saying he shouldn’t have been picked because he grew up in Australia – where do they think Kevin Pietersen grew up? We’re going to have to rely more and more on English-qualified players who grew up somewhere else; how can you develop cricketers in a country where every green space has been sold off to developers and it rains all bloody summer?
Tim Ambrose battled gamely this afternoon, but he isn’t a Test No. 6. Surely the wicketkeeper issue should relate to the bowling strategy. If you play four bowlers, then you play six batsmen and the best wicketkeeper you can find; if you need five bowlers then you need a No. 6 batsman who can keep wicket competently, i.e. the nearest you can get to Alec Stewart. Right now that means Matt Prior or just possibly Colonel Mustard.
Anyway, the South Africans have far worse problems. Makhaya Ntini bowled OK in this game, but he wasn’t much cop at Lord’s. Boycott, looking for trouble, tried to put Shaun Pollock on the spot on whether Ntini should have been dropped; Pollock, to his credit, made no evasions. The dropping of Ntini would have precipitated an official enquiry, and would have taken a lot of justifying, as he is the only real black guy in the team. (Actually I think Makhaya should be investigated for discrimination himself: left-handers, like myself, are a persecuted minority when he is bowling. He bunnified Trescothick on his last visit and got Strauss with a real bastard yesterday.)
Anyway, we were rubbish. A Test captain batting at 3 should not get himself out in the penultimate over of the day. James Anderson played brilliantly as night-watchman, and then got hit on the head. Often medical and tactical imperatives clash, but in this case they pointed in the same direction; he should have gone off and got his head together. He’d done his job, holding out for nearly two hours, and should have come back in his real No 9 position to bat with the sublime Stuart Broad. Anyone could have predicted that Anderson would be out in no time if he stayed on the field. Full marks for courage, but discretion is the better part of valour.
Pietersen was a disgrace. There are times (Twenty20 springs to mind) when a five-ball 13 is just the ticket. When the task is to bat for two days to save the match it’s just silly. No doubt it felt good to get to 13 in four balls. But Fred Flintoff, who’s also not normally one to hang about, did more good by taking 68 balls to reach the same score. KP ought to get dropped for that, like Boycott once was for scoring 246 in about six months. Except we don’t have the depth of batting to make that feasible...
Maybe Broad will make a No. 6 one day – after all he now averages 41 in Tests, and that was only his second not out. The only problem is that his recent bowling has been nothing to write home about.
The one glimmer of light it that I was expecting to miss the last day of the match as I’m flying to Crete tomorrow, and now I won’t.
Saturday 19 July 2008
Faith in Humanity?
I have devoted more time than I’m really happy with to the subject of utter bastards – occasionally one needs to remind oneself that there is another sort of human being and one meets them now and then – but it can’t be denied that bastards do tend to thrust themselves on one’s attention.
We’ve all had horrible disappointments in love, and there’s no point in telling your children to expect anything else – but I have to say that Enormous Oaf 2’s first great fuck-up broke some sort of record (unless it’s always like that for the younger generation – in which case God help them).
EO2 is nineteen, and got into his first proper relationship four months ago. He was very happy, but also sensible and realistic; he knew, and had discussed it with his partner, that it might be better to cool things when he goes to university in October, as who knew what might happen after that. So that the relationship might end did not come as a shock; what did come as a shock was that, after his boyfriend rang to tell him he’d found someone else, the “someone else” was then given the phone to tell EO2 that he could fuck off. Asking to talk to his hitherto boyfriend to ask why, he was told by the new bloke that he ever got in touch again he’d get battered, the guy knew where he lived etc. etc.
Now EO2 is getting phone calls from his ex’s number, but isn’t answering them, partly because he doesn’t know whether it’s the ex or the ex’s new bloke, partly because even if it is the ex he’s got nothing to say to the cowardly bastard.
We all know relationships break up, but if that’s how the younger generation are splitting up, God help them, as I said before.
We’ve all had horrible disappointments in love, and there’s no point in telling your children to expect anything else – but I have to say that Enormous Oaf 2’s first great fuck-up broke some sort of record (unless it’s always like that for the younger generation – in which case God help them).
EO2 is nineteen, and got into his first proper relationship four months ago. He was very happy, but also sensible and realistic; he knew, and had discussed it with his partner, that it might be better to cool things when he goes to university in October, as who knew what might happen after that. So that the relationship might end did not come as a shock; what did come as a shock was that, after his boyfriend rang to tell him he’d found someone else, the “someone else” was then given the phone to tell EO2 that he could fuck off. Asking to talk to his hitherto boyfriend to ask why, he was told by the new bloke that he ever got in touch again he’d get battered, the guy knew where he lived etc. etc.
Now EO2 is getting phone calls from his ex’s number, but isn’t answering them, partly because he doesn’t know whether it’s the ex or the ex’s new bloke, partly because even if it is the ex he’s got nothing to say to the cowardly bastard.
We all know relationships break up, but if that’s how the younger generation are splitting up, God help them, as I said before.
A new word for a new concept
Though new words are being thrust on us all the time, by though who fancy seeming cool, it isn't every day that you get a genuinely new concept which requires one.
Here I must, with some reluctance, give a hat tip to Mark Leonard. I was always a bit disdainful of him, as an early New Labour spin-doctor. I was even more so when opening this week's Spectator and seeing him described as "Britain's pre-eminent analyst of modern China", whereas that title belongs rightfully to none other than - well that is neither here nor there. Be that as it may, Mark referred to a couple of American academics who have pointed out that the Beijing Olympics might provide an opportunity to turn the surveillance state against itself, simply because so many people will be there with digital cameras. Monroe Price and Daniel Dayan (in Leonard's words) "use the phrase "Sousveillance" to capture a new phenomenon where the powerful can be filmed and held to account for their actions in the court of public opinion". Sousveillance - what a word. We use the technology at our disposal to put on record anything that the bastards don't want to see put on record. What other people choose to do about it is not our responsibility. I'm not a great photo and video expert, so I'll probably limit it to names and addresses.
Well, I happen to be listening to "Götterdämmerung" at the moment, and I swear a Wagnerian oath to dedicate myself to "sousveillance" at all times. Members of the ruling class that want their foul deeds covered up had better cover them up pretty damn well.
Here I must, with some reluctance, give a hat tip to Mark Leonard. I was always a bit disdainful of him, as an early New Labour spin-doctor. I was even more so when opening this week's Spectator and seeing him described as "Britain's pre-eminent analyst of modern China", whereas that title belongs rightfully to none other than - well that is neither here nor there. Be that as it may, Mark referred to a couple of American academics who have pointed out that the Beijing Olympics might provide an opportunity to turn the surveillance state against itself, simply because so many people will be there with digital cameras. Monroe Price and Daniel Dayan (in Leonard's words) "use the phrase "Sousveillance" to capture a new phenomenon where the powerful can be filmed and held to account for their actions in the court of public opinion". Sousveillance - what a word. We use the technology at our disposal to put on record anything that the bastards don't want to see put on record. What other people choose to do about it is not our responsibility. I'm not a great photo and video expert, so I'll probably limit it to names and addresses.
Well, I happen to be listening to "Götterdämmerung" at the moment, and I swear a Wagnerian oath to dedicate myself to "sousveillance" at all times. Members of the ruling class that want their foul deeds covered up had better cover them up pretty damn well.
Surrender retracted
I have received various requests for information on what my posting on child-rapist Roger Took and his haut bourgeois friends actually said. Given that it has now been suggested that its excesses might simply have involved the law of the land rather than certain dark forces, I will repost it, suitably amended (Cipriano does not openly advocate breaches of the law, but simply invites people to draw their own conclusions).
Nonce of the Year?
This week’s Spectator contained a real eye-opener of an article. It reported a really horrible case of child abuse which no-one had ever reported before. The article, by Charlotte Metcalf, stated (not alleged; there had been a conviction and sentence) that Roger Took, apparently a well-known art historian and curator, had been found guilty of serious sexual abuse of his step-granddaughters, and had boasted of far worse things online, including helping to gang-rape a five-year-old girl to death, though he was to claim that this was just a fantasy. The line the article took was that, both before and after his arrest and conviction, he had been protected by his high-society connections, living as he did in Chelsea, on money originally belonging to his wife, the grandmother of the proven victims. Bear in mind that this is the Spectator, not Dave Spart. Here’s the piece: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/826056/the-establishment-paedophile-how-a-monster-hid-in-high-society.thtml. Do read it, in case you think I’m talking about mere bagatelles.
One’s first reaction to reading something unexpected in a British paper is that it must be bullshit. But names – i.e. those who helped in the cover-up - are firmly named, and we are looking at seven-figure libel if this is not true. Either way, it hasn’t got into the rest of the press, as it didn’t at the time of the trial. So either the press know the case is bullshit, in which case why hasn’t somebody sued? Or the Chelsea mafia cover-up has its tentacles all over what used to be Fleet Street. It can’t be that no-one sees a story in it.
Anyway, it’s reported that the nonce Took gets the Speccie in his cell. Let’s hope that the whole prison reads it, screws and inmates. The silly, over-law-abiding Speccie didn’t tell us which nick he was in, but there are ways of finding these things out. He’s only got three and a half years to serve, so even if he survives those he’ll be on the outside soon.
Meanwhile, what of the “establishment cover-up”? Nobody’s sued yet, and it’s nearly a week, so let’s assume it’s gen up. It took me 15 minutes on Google to place two of Took’s friends:
“Ute Chatterjee, a woman who had been helping Took with research, was the Membership and Meeting Secretary of the Great Britain–Russia Society. When Took failed to arrive in Russia as planned to begin his expedition [because ‘d been arrested], she took it upon herself to lie on his behalf, even phoning the other people involved to tell them he had had an accident. Later she began asking Pat’s [i.e. Mrs Took’s] friends in England and Ireland if they would receive letters or calls from Took. Pat wrote to the president of the Society in an attempt to stop her. Like others, Chatterjee found Took’s charm and academic reputation so plausible that she was happy to continue helping him.” (Speccie)
Ute Chatterjee lives at 43 Kenilworth Court, Lower Richmond Road, London SW15 1EN. Phone: 0788 4464 461 – and works at the Department for Education and Science, though hopefully not for much longer. ute.chatterjee@dfes.gsi.gov.uk., telephone + 44 207 340 4488.
Another nasty piece of work is Mischa Naimark, a Russian academic of some sort:
“Judge Blacksell deemed Took to be enough of a danger to the public to give him an indeterminate sentence but, because the case was hardly reported, it was up to Pat to tell many of Took’s acquaintances and friends about what had happened. Mischa Naimark, a former colleague in Russia, who was collaborating on Took’s next expedition, told Pat she should not go round publicising his arrest. Instead she should be a ‘good, tactful wife’ and suggested she was ‘jealous’ of her ‘younger rivals’. It was as if Naimark was ticking her off for exaggerating while Took’s impeccable social credentials and high-flying academic career served to cushion him from condemnation.”
Mischa hangs out at Miklukho-Maklaya str., 57 - 1 - 115 , 117279 Moscow, Russia. Phone number: (095) 334 83 20 (in Moscow). E-mail: mikanaimark@onego.ru. No doubt Russians will also draw their own conclusions.
In the meantime, having taken note of the total silence of the rest of the press on this subject, I was eagerly awaiting the new Spectator, replete as I imagined it would be with readers' letters on the subject. Not a sausage. I find it diffiult to believe that they hadn't received any. Lost your bottle, Mr Editor d'Ancona?
Nonce of the Year?
This week’s Spectator contained a real eye-opener of an article. It reported a really horrible case of child abuse which no-one had ever reported before. The article, by Charlotte Metcalf, stated (not alleged; there had been a conviction and sentence) that Roger Took, apparently a well-known art historian and curator, had been found guilty of serious sexual abuse of his step-granddaughters, and had boasted of far worse things online, including helping to gang-rape a five-year-old girl to death, though he was to claim that this was just a fantasy. The line the article took was that, both before and after his arrest and conviction, he had been protected by his high-society connections, living as he did in Chelsea, on money originally belonging to his wife, the grandmother of the proven victims. Bear in mind that this is the Spectator, not Dave Spart. Here’s the piece: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/826056/the-establishment-paedophile-how-a-monster-hid-in-high-society.thtml. Do read it, in case you think I’m talking about mere bagatelles.
One’s first reaction to reading something unexpected in a British paper is that it must be bullshit. But names – i.e. those who helped in the cover-up - are firmly named, and we are looking at seven-figure libel if this is not true. Either way, it hasn’t got into the rest of the press, as it didn’t at the time of the trial. So either the press know the case is bullshit, in which case why hasn’t somebody sued? Or the Chelsea mafia cover-up has its tentacles all over what used to be Fleet Street. It can’t be that no-one sees a story in it.
Anyway, it’s reported that the nonce Took gets the Speccie in his cell. Let’s hope that the whole prison reads it, screws and inmates. The silly, over-law-abiding Speccie didn’t tell us which nick he was in, but there are ways of finding these things out. He’s only got three and a half years to serve, so even if he survives those he’ll be on the outside soon.
Meanwhile, what of the “establishment cover-up”? Nobody’s sued yet, and it’s nearly a week, so let’s assume it’s gen up. It took me 15 minutes on Google to place two of Took’s friends:
“Ute Chatterjee, a woman who had been helping Took with research, was the Membership and Meeting Secretary of the Great Britain–Russia Society. When Took failed to arrive in Russia as planned to begin his expedition [because ‘d been arrested], she took it upon herself to lie on his behalf, even phoning the other people involved to tell them he had had an accident. Later she began asking Pat’s [i.e. Mrs Took’s] friends in England and Ireland if they would receive letters or calls from Took. Pat wrote to the president of the Society in an attempt to stop her. Like others, Chatterjee found Took’s charm and academic reputation so plausible that she was happy to continue helping him.” (Speccie)
Ute Chatterjee lives at 43 Kenilworth Court, Lower Richmond Road, London SW15 1EN. Phone: 0788 4464 461 – and works at the Department for Education and Science, though hopefully not for much longer. ute.chatterjee@dfes.gsi.gov.uk., telephone + 44 207 340 4488.
Another nasty piece of work is Mischa Naimark, a Russian academic of some sort:
“Judge Blacksell deemed Took to be enough of a danger to the public to give him an indeterminate sentence but, because the case was hardly reported, it was up to Pat to tell many of Took’s acquaintances and friends about what had happened. Mischa Naimark, a former colleague in Russia, who was collaborating on Took’s next expedition, told Pat she should not go round publicising his arrest. Instead she should be a ‘good, tactful wife’ and suggested she was ‘jealous’ of her ‘younger rivals’. It was as if Naimark was ticking her off for exaggerating while Took’s impeccable social credentials and high-flying academic career served to cushion him from condemnation.”
Mischa hangs out at Miklukho-Maklaya str., 57 - 1 - 115 , 117279 Moscow, Russia. Phone number: (095) 334 83 20 (in Moscow). E-mail: mikanaimark@onego.ru. No doubt Russians will also draw their own conclusions.
In the meantime, having taken note of the total silence of the rest of the press on this subject, I was eagerly awaiting the new Spectator, replete as I imagined it would be with readers' letters on the subject. Not a sausage. I find it diffiult to believe that they hadn't received any. Lost your bottle, Mr Editor d'Ancona?
Thursday 17 July 2008
"1960 No Surrender" surrenders
This is rather sad. But good may come of it.
A couple of days ago I posted a piece on a Chelsea-domiciled convicted kiddie-fiddler (and I'm talking serious rape, torture and abuse of very small children) who had been covered for by various elements of the arty-farty London establishment, and whose case had very mysteriously been kept out of the press. Friends of mine who are maybe less naive than I am about the sort of country we are living in got on to me and suggested that I ought to take the posting down for my own safety. With great regret I have done so, this not being my style at all. But it would be most inconvenient just at the moment to get myself taken out; dependent children, clueless Chinese wife, aged mother etc. Once I get the six-months-to-live chitty from the medico, then there'll be fireworks.
But interesting to know that the sort of offences which get your throat slit with a blunt knife by the kind of guys who occupy H.M. Prisons still elicit limitless support and solidarity from the London bourgeoisie (hereinafter to be known in this blog exclusively as "the kiddie-fiddler's friends"). But stupid of me - I've got a sodding history degree. Do not the names Mussolini, Hitler and Franco demonstrate just how far the rich will go to guard each other's arses? Were not the same things that happened to these poor little girls at the hands of a Chelsea scumbag done by Franco's Moors in 1936 with the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church? (The answer, if you're a benighted Papist idiot, is "Yes".)
Anyway, from now on no more fairness. I will admit at a pinch that there may be a few people in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea who have not actually raped a five-year-old to death. But I regard them all as basically complicit. (In fact my sons will probably reprimand me for the language used in this posting. I have used the word "Chelsea" three times (now four) despite a firm agreement between us that the word must always be pronounced and spelt "Scum". This is a football rather than a political issue, but I think the point stands. Sorry, lads.)
In future I will confine what knowledge I have concerning the kiddie-fiddlers' friends, their names, addresses and weaknesses, to a confined circle (the activists of Class War) and simply point out that if it is not safe for me to tell the truth about rich bastards, then the level of their own security should fall just a tad. Fair's fair. And given the present state of the financial markets, it is clear that a) if it was all right for bankers to be owning mansions in Belgravia in the good times, they now ought to be in two-bed flats in Peckham and going to work on the bus, and b) that isn't happening. Well, if there aren't any legal ways to reduce these people to the penury they deserve, we'll have to go for the illegal ones.
Kiddie-fiddlers' friends, your time will come!
A couple of days ago I posted a piece on a Chelsea-domiciled convicted kiddie-fiddler (and I'm talking serious rape, torture and abuse of very small children) who had been covered for by various elements of the arty-farty London establishment, and whose case had very mysteriously been kept out of the press. Friends of mine who are maybe less naive than I am about the sort of country we are living in got on to me and suggested that I ought to take the posting down for my own safety. With great regret I have done so, this not being my style at all. But it would be most inconvenient just at the moment to get myself taken out; dependent children, clueless Chinese wife, aged mother etc. Once I get the six-months-to-live chitty from the medico, then there'll be fireworks.
But interesting to know that the sort of offences which get your throat slit with a blunt knife by the kind of guys who occupy H.M. Prisons still elicit limitless support and solidarity from the London bourgeoisie (hereinafter to be known in this blog exclusively as "the kiddie-fiddler's friends"). But stupid of me - I've got a sodding history degree. Do not the names Mussolini, Hitler and Franco demonstrate just how far the rich will go to guard each other's arses? Were not the same things that happened to these poor little girls at the hands of a Chelsea scumbag done by Franco's Moors in 1936 with the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church? (The answer, if you're a benighted Papist idiot, is "Yes".)
Anyway, from now on no more fairness. I will admit at a pinch that there may be a few people in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea who have not actually raped a five-year-old to death. But I regard them all as basically complicit. (In fact my sons will probably reprimand me for the language used in this posting. I have used the word "Chelsea" three times (now four) despite a firm agreement between us that the word must always be pronounced and spelt "Scum". This is a football rather than a political issue, but I think the point stands. Sorry, lads.)
In future I will confine what knowledge I have concerning the kiddie-fiddlers' friends, their names, addresses and weaknesses, to a confined circle (the activists of Class War) and simply point out that if it is not safe for me to tell the truth about rich bastards, then the level of their own security should fall just a tad. Fair's fair. And given the present state of the financial markets, it is clear that a) if it was all right for bankers to be owning mansions in Belgravia in the good times, they now ought to be in two-bed flats in Peckham and going to work on the bus, and b) that isn't happening. Well, if there aren't any legal ways to reduce these people to the penury they deserve, we'll have to go for the illegal ones.
Kiddie-fiddlers' friends, your time will come!
Japanese Condoms
Good story on the BBC today, about Korean commuters insisting that advertisements for Japanese condoms are removed from the Seoul underground. This is of course all to do with one of these bouts of pointless nationalism that bedevil East Asia, over territorial claims to a couple of guano-covered islands, and ultimately comes down to the fact that East Asia hates the Japanese like poison because of World War II, and always will. (I sympathise: I always have a drink to celebrate Hiroshima Day - but then I have a drink to celebrate something or other every day of my life.)
The Koreans are missing a trick here. What they should be saying is that they won’t buy Japanese condoms because they don’t fit. I wouldn’t know first-hand, but apparently the Japs are well adrift at the bottom of the table in the international cock-size league. (No prizes for guessing who’s top.) According to my more promiscuous female and gay friends, we’re talking first-joint-of-your-pinky-finger here. Banzai!
The Koreans are missing a trick here. What they should be saying is that they won’t buy Japanese condoms because they don’t fit. I wouldn’t know first-hand, but apparently the Japs are well adrift at the bottom of the table in the international cock-size league. (No prizes for guessing who’s top.) According to my more promiscuous female and gay friends, we’re talking first-joint-of-your-pinky-finger here. Banzai!
Wednesday 16 July 2008
Not an Effing Thickie
Greatest English lyricist of modern times? Anybody who says anything other than Ian Dury is full of shit. No contest.
It’s not just the well-known rollicking ones – Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Blockheads or Billericay Dickie, bloody good though those are. It’s the more thoughtful ones, which make a point without getting preachy.
Just reintroduced myself to this one, which says more or less everything that can sensibly be said about the present educational malaise:
What did you learn in school today?
- Jack shit
The minute the teacher turns away -
- That's it
How many times were you truly intrigued?
- Not any
Is boredom a symptom of mental fatigue?
- Not many
When have you ever been top of the class?
- Not once
What will you be when you're out on your arse?
- A dunce
What are your prospects of doing quite well?
- Too small
And what will you have at the very last bell?
- Fuck all
You can't bear another's beauty, you can't emulate a grace
You can't filch another's mystery, occupy another's space
You can't do another's duty, or take a special place
In another person's history when they've sunk without a trace
What's the reward for being a berk?
- A blank
Thick as a plank and looking for work?
- What a wank
What do you think of the Welfare State?
- It's a fake
What have they handed you on a plate?
- The ache
Have you considered how lucky you are?
- Well shucks
What do you think of the system so far?
- It sucks
Aren't you endowed with the patience of Job?
- I wish
And don't you feel ready to conquer the globe?
- I’ll fish
You can't steal another's thunder, you can't fill the great divide
You can't steer another's fancy, you can't change another's side
Not undo another's blunder nor pretend another's pride
You can't offer necromancy till the final hope has died
I'm a second-class person citizen-wise,
This is something I must recognise.
It's not my place to make complaint,
But am I happy? No, I ain't.
I missed my chance when I was young,
Now I live below the bottom rung.
I was put on earth to discover my niche;
Oh Lord, won't you make me Nouveau Riche?
Dury’s line was always that it’s perfectly all right for the ordinary bloke to despise outward sophistication, what he’d probably call ponciness; but not to despise education, knowledge and ability. He spoke for a working class that wasn’t interested in being upwardly mobile, but was not satisfied to sit on its arse mindlessly consuming Murdoch prolefeed. His “reasons to be cheerful” included “something nice to study”; Billericay Dickie placed importance on not being thought of as an “effing thickie”, and a selection of artists, scientists and musicians are praised in “Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards”. Not for him the modern celebration of pig ignorance. Confronted once with the glib dismissal of teachers “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach”, he is quoted as replying. “No, it should be ‘Those that can, teach; those that can’t, FUCK OFF!’” He’d have been well brassed off at today’s portrayal of the working class as knifing each other at worst and shouting mindlessly and taking their clothes off on “reality television” at best: now it’s only the despairing last line of “Jack Shit George” that has any resonance at all.
Ian Dury 1942-2000 RIP: not to be forgotten (even my son’s girlfriend knows all the lyrics).
It’s not just the well-known rollicking ones – Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Blockheads or Billericay Dickie, bloody good though those are. It’s the more thoughtful ones, which make a point without getting preachy.
Just reintroduced myself to this one, which says more or less everything that can sensibly be said about the present educational malaise:
What did you learn in school today?
- Jack shit
The minute the teacher turns away -
- That's it
How many times were you truly intrigued?
- Not any
Is boredom a symptom of mental fatigue?
- Not many
When have you ever been top of the class?
- Not once
What will you be when you're out on your arse?
- A dunce
What are your prospects of doing quite well?
- Too small
And what will you have at the very last bell?
- Fuck all
You can't bear another's beauty, you can't emulate a grace
You can't filch another's mystery, occupy another's space
You can't do another's duty, or take a special place
In another person's history when they've sunk without a trace
What's the reward for being a berk?
- A blank
Thick as a plank and looking for work?
- What a wank
What do you think of the Welfare State?
- It's a fake
What have they handed you on a plate?
- The ache
Have you considered how lucky you are?
- Well shucks
What do you think of the system so far?
- It sucks
Aren't you endowed with the patience of Job?
- I wish
And don't you feel ready to conquer the globe?
- I’ll fish
You can't steal another's thunder, you can't fill the great divide
You can't steer another's fancy, you can't change another's side
Not undo another's blunder nor pretend another's pride
You can't offer necromancy till the final hope has died
I'm a second-class person citizen-wise,
This is something I must recognise.
It's not my place to make complaint,
But am I happy? No, I ain't.
I missed my chance when I was young,
Now I live below the bottom rung.
I was put on earth to discover my niche;
Oh Lord, won't you make me Nouveau Riche?
Dury’s line was always that it’s perfectly all right for the ordinary bloke to despise outward sophistication, what he’d probably call ponciness; but not to despise education, knowledge and ability. He spoke for a working class that wasn’t interested in being upwardly mobile, but was not satisfied to sit on its arse mindlessly consuming Murdoch prolefeed. His “reasons to be cheerful” included “something nice to study”; Billericay Dickie placed importance on not being thought of as an “effing thickie”, and a selection of artists, scientists and musicians are praised in “Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards”. Not for him the modern celebration of pig ignorance. Confronted once with the glib dismissal of teachers “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach”, he is quoted as replying. “No, it should be ‘Those that can, teach; those that can’t, FUCK OFF!’” He’d have been well brassed off at today’s portrayal of the working class as knifing each other at worst and shouting mindlessly and taking their clothes off on “reality television” at best: now it’s only the despairing last line of “Jack Shit George” that has any resonance at all.
Ian Dury 1942-2000 RIP: not to be forgotten (even my son’s girlfriend knows all the lyrics).
Friday 11 July 2008
Sanctions
So Tyranny International - or, as some people call it, the United Nations - has refused to place sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies.
Good news. What the hell is the point on travel bans on these people? Particularly when it comes to a ban on travel to the US.
What we really want to see is dictators travelling to countries where the right to bear arms is not infringed. And where is UN headquarters? Well, New York, as it happens. They all want to go somewhere where the shopping is decent. Let 'em go there! And let everyone else keep their sniper rifles loaded....
Good news. What the hell is the point on travel bans on these people? Particularly when it comes to a ban on travel to the US.
What we really want to see is dictators travelling to countries where the right to bear arms is not infringed. And where is UN headquarters? Well, New York, as it happens. They all want to go somewhere where the shopping is decent. Let 'em go there! And let everyone else keep their sniper rifles loaded....
Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle
I’m a fan of obituaries. Obituaries often provide a lot of food for thought, or at least tell you something about people who, let’s face it, are sometimes decent if flawed, and sometimes scumbags for whom there is no possible excuse.
Ruth Greenglass died recently. Who? The wife of David Greenglass, brother of Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband Julius in the electric chair in 1953. That just shows how young they all were.
David G. dictated the notes on the US nuclear programme for Julius Rosenberg to pass them on to the Soviet Union. That much is unchallenged. But who had typed up the notes at Greenglass’s dictation for them to be handed on to Rosenberg? His sister, or his wife? The prosecution’s case against Ethel Rosenberg, who had been repeatedly interviewed, was a flimsy one. Far more likely that Greenglass, who had already confessed to spying and agreed to testify against the Rosenbergs, would have employed his wife for the task. Indeed, he had consistently asserted his sister’s innocence under questioning.
But before the trial the prosecutors interviewed Mrs Greenglass again, reminding her that her husband had yet to be sentenced. At that point she “remembered” that in the autumn of 1945 it had been Ethel Rosenberg who had typed up the notes. Greenglass agreed that his wife had a very good memory and that her version of events that had taken place almost six years before was almost certainly the right one. The admission was to send his sister to the electric chair along with her husband. Ruth Greenglass agreed with this testimony, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were both executed on June 19, 1953.
Ruth Greenglass died recently, and her husband David is still alive. A New York Times reporter, Sam Roberts, conducted numerous interviews with Greenglass for his book The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, which appeared in 2003. Greenglass acknowledged to Roberts that he was no longer sure of the truth of what he had said on the witness stand: “I frankly think that my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember. You know, I seldom use the word ‘sister’ any more. I’ve just wiped it out of my mind.”
How jolly convenient. You murdered your sister, and then you “seldom use the word any more”. Well, your wife’s now burning in hell, and you’ll join her soon, you scabby bastard.
Ruth Greenglass died recently. Who? The wife of David Greenglass, brother of Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband Julius in the electric chair in 1953. That just shows how young they all were.
David G. dictated the notes on the US nuclear programme for Julius Rosenberg to pass them on to the Soviet Union. That much is unchallenged. But who had typed up the notes at Greenglass’s dictation for them to be handed on to Rosenberg? His sister, or his wife? The prosecution’s case against Ethel Rosenberg, who had been repeatedly interviewed, was a flimsy one. Far more likely that Greenglass, who had already confessed to spying and agreed to testify against the Rosenbergs, would have employed his wife for the task. Indeed, he had consistently asserted his sister’s innocence under questioning.
But before the trial the prosecutors interviewed Mrs Greenglass again, reminding her that her husband had yet to be sentenced. At that point she “remembered” that in the autumn of 1945 it had been Ethel Rosenberg who had typed up the notes. Greenglass agreed that his wife had a very good memory and that her version of events that had taken place almost six years before was almost certainly the right one. The admission was to send his sister to the electric chair along with her husband. Ruth Greenglass agreed with this testimony, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were both executed on June 19, 1953.
Ruth Greenglass died recently, and her husband David is still alive. A New York Times reporter, Sam Roberts, conducted numerous interviews with Greenglass for his book The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, which appeared in 2003. Greenglass acknowledged to Roberts that he was no longer sure of the truth of what he had said on the witness stand: “I frankly think that my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember. You know, I seldom use the word ‘sister’ any more. I’ve just wiped it out of my mind.”
How jolly convenient. You murdered your sister, and then you “seldom use the word any more”. Well, your wife’s now burning in hell, and you’ll join her soon, you scabby bastard.
Moving House...
...one of the most stressful activities known to man, they say, just as bad as getting divorced, though having moved twenty-four times and got divorced once I have to say that the latter was worse than all the former put together. And cost more, too.
But it was duly horrible all the same. And somehow two of my best tweed jackets disappeared in the middle of it.
Most Amusing Moving Anecdote: the Iron Buddha somehow deciding to put a tube of superglue in the back pocket of her jeans and forgetting about it. Several hours later the fact of her arse getting stuck inextricably to her clothing was very funny indeed, provided one was wearing a cricket box.
But it was duly horrible all the same. And somehow two of my best tweed jackets disappeared in the middle of it.
Most Amusing Moving Anecdote: the Iron Buddha somehow deciding to put a tube of superglue in the back pocket of her jeans and forgetting about it. Several hours later the fact of her arse getting stuck inextricably to her clothing was very funny indeed, provided one was wearing a cricket box.
Not-so-hard Labour
Well, the Government's in the brown stuff (hardly a hyper-perceptive or original observation). That they're strapped for cash is something I could work out entirely from the state of my e-mail inbox, as I'm still (and will remain) a member of the party, and they're even more assiduous about trying to tap me for cash than the Enormous Oafs.
Well, let 'em whistle for it, one might say. What the hell have New Labour ever done for me or anyone I care about? But then I saw the leader in today's Times, begging the rich bastards who utterly corrupted Tony Blair to carry on financing the party, so they can utterly corrupt the next few leaders too. After all, the alternative would be to leave the party in the hands of the trade unions (who already provide, er, 88% of its income, and we don't want it any more heavily influenced than that). Heaven forbid that the Labour Party should be overly influenced by working class organisations - much better to keep it as a lackey of bankers and non-doms, so that at each election the main parties can try to outbid each other as to which can get its tongue further up the Russian mafia's arse?
(Incidentally, that's why I don't buy the line of many left-wingers whom I otherwise respect and agree with, that we should regard Nu-Labor like Dracula regards a crucifix. If another movement rises up and gets the unions behind it, then it has my full support. Until then, whatever the ideological objections, we have to stay with what we've got. Hence my continuing receptivity for Labour blagging initiatives.)
If the rich decide they're better off with the Tories (and if they don't, it's a disgrace) we should pull out of the competition, and adapt our manifesto to however much of the union agenda we can win an election on. But we won't win anything on a platform of saying yah-boo, watered-down Islamism, and agreeing that people sitting in offices all day are doing a proper job of work and shouldn't be taxed.
Well, let 'em whistle for it, one might say. What the hell have New Labour ever done for me or anyone I care about? But then I saw the leader in today's Times, begging the rich bastards who utterly corrupted Tony Blair to carry on financing the party, so they can utterly corrupt the next few leaders too. After all, the alternative would be to leave the party in the hands of the trade unions (who already provide, er, 88% of its income, and we don't want it any more heavily influenced than that). Heaven forbid that the Labour Party should be overly influenced by working class organisations - much better to keep it as a lackey of bankers and non-doms, so that at each election the main parties can try to outbid each other as to which can get its tongue further up the Russian mafia's arse?
(Incidentally, that's why I don't buy the line of many left-wingers whom I otherwise respect and agree with, that we should regard Nu-Labor like Dracula regards a crucifix. If another movement rises up and gets the unions behind it, then it has my full support. Until then, whatever the ideological objections, we have to stay with what we've got. Hence my continuing receptivity for Labour blagging initiatives.)
If the rich decide they're better off with the Tories (and if they don't, it's a disgrace) we should pull out of the competition, and adapt our manifesto to however much of the union agenda we can win an election on. But we won't win anything on a platform of saying yah-boo, watered-down Islamism, and agreeing that people sitting in offices all day are doing a proper job of work and shouldn't be taxed.
Monday 7 July 2008
Resumption of wartime situation
Enormously sorry, but the truce with my ex-wife has not held. Out of sheer exhaustion with all the crap, total distrust in the family courts, and the hope of relieving the pressure on my sons, I agreed in March to a totally inequitable dispute resolution in which I paid out a large amount of money when I didn't believe I owed her a bent farthing.
For the third or fourth time in this saga, a show of friendliness by me has resulted in my getting kicked in the wotsits. I got a real one-two this week; firstly, I discovered that she was not prepared to put a penny towards the Enormous Oafs' university expenses, and secondly I discovered that she had set the Inland Revenue on me (see earlier post). One or the other might have been acceptable, but both together....I have the choice of letting the Oafs starve (or at least go short of beer) or running fast out of cash myself, with the help of the taxman. I shall of course choose the latter course, even though I can't expect either of them to recognise the truth of the situation - it would be too painful. Nor will I extend myself in imaginative invective about the woman - the Oafs wouldn't like it. All I can say - and I'll only say it once - is that if anyone calls either of them a son-of-a-bitch, they won't really be able to deny it.
For the third or fourth time in this saga, a show of friendliness by me has resulted in my getting kicked in the wotsits. I got a real one-two this week; firstly, I discovered that she was not prepared to put a penny towards the Enormous Oafs' university expenses, and secondly I discovered that she had set the Inland Revenue on me (see earlier post). One or the other might have been acceptable, but both together....I have the choice of letting the Oafs starve (or at least go short of beer) or running fast out of cash myself, with the help of the taxman. I shall of course choose the latter course, even though I can't expect either of them to recognise the truth of the situation - it would be too painful. Nor will I extend myself in imaginative invective about the woman - the Oafs wouldn't like it. All I can say - and I'll only say it once - is that if anyone calls either of them a son-of-a-bitch, they won't really be able to deny it.
Been watching a Channel 4 Dispatches programme called "It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim" about unjustified attacks on harmless Moslems after 7th July 2005. Fair enough, I thought; and when all the manufactured stories in papers like the Daily Express, showing completely bogus headlines aimed at working up anti-Moslem prejudice, I quite agreed that all the prejudice should be directed towards the complete ostracism of everyone who reads the Daily Express (and any other crap paper).
But then I thought; Yes, the vast majority of Moslems are quite OK, and should be protected from ill-directed prejudice. There are, however, a smallish minority of Moslems who are trying to pull the others into the pro-Al Qa'eda line. And a lot of moderate Moslems, who are the main targets of these people, must know who they are. And we want their heads on a plate, or at the very least their names on a list. I'm sorry, but moderate Moslems who won't grass the bastards up should not complain if they get targeted too. After all, we kill them without hesitation in Afghanistan; why do we let them get away with it in Accrington?
But then I thought; Yes, the vast majority of Moslems are quite OK, and should be protected from ill-directed prejudice. There are, however, a smallish minority of Moslems who are trying to pull the others into the pro-Al Qa'eda line. And a lot of moderate Moslems, who are the main targets of these people, must know who they are. And we want their heads on a plate, or at the very least their names on a list. I'm sorry, but moderate Moslems who won't grass the bastards up should not complain if they get targeted too. After all, we kill them without hesitation in Afghanistan; why do we let them get away with it in Accrington?
Saturday 5 July 2008
It smells of.....victory
Some of the papers - those who are allowed by their readers to do so - are indulging in bouts of unbridled optimism concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It might all be rubbish, but it's quite exhilarating, and either way it involves an awful lot of dead Islamists - the best kind. It could be that the Taliban and al-Qa'eda may be pushed back to their last redoubts. But will the Paras and the 101st Airborne be allowed to launch the final assault in Lancashire?
Ex Africa semper aliquid crappy
When are we going to be allowed to say what we really think of African so-called “leaders”? We know damn well what we all thought of last weeks “African Union Summit”, starring “President” Robert Mugabe. What a revolting bunch of twats, preening around in suits that were certainly not made in the continent which competence forgot, any more than the cars they swank around in were. The whole summit reminded me of an old Foreign Office joke:
Q. Could a summit of African leaders possibly solve the problems of the continent?
A. Depends how big a bomb you planted under it.
"President" Omar Bongo of Gabon (a name no novelist would have got away with making up) then said that Mugabe had become rather a "hero" to the other wankers present for defying the white man. This is so clearly a fourteen-year-old's response. Why should we respect it just because Mr Bongo is black?
African "leaders" are slightly worse news for the continent than the HIV virus, and it is time both were eradicated.
We saw a photographer trying to get a shot of the Mugger being pushed away by an accompanying goon, who said “He’s a head of state! You can’t do that to him! Is it just ‘cos you’re a white man? I mean, you’re mad!” Of course anyone casting the slightest slight on a black mass murderer is purely motivated by racism.
The people who really are purely motivated by racism are those like the International Cricket Council, who aren’t even prepared to suspend Zim from international cricket, saying that sport should not be influenced by politics. I mean, how long are these people’s memories? Or rather, is there any limit to the racism these people are allowed to get away with you because a lot of them aren‘t white? The world of cricket actually achieved something by closing ranks against South African cricket purely on the grounds of its politics; the referendum on change in 1992 was decisively influenced by the fact that SA were then in the semi-final of the World Cup and would have been slung out if they’d rejected the changes. But Mugabe’s black, even if his victims are too, and so he’s all right. Racist scum.
And then you get the Anglican Churches of Africa, who perhaps aren’t racist but just hate homosexuals. This, of course, has nothing to do with the Bible, though some of the obscurer bits of the Good Book are cited as an excuse. African sexual culture’s rejection of gays is the flip side of a dumb macho celebration of fantastically promiscuous unprotected heterosexual screwing around, which has left the whole continent awash with AIDS. For me the leading light of the Church of Jesus Christ, Queerbasher, the Archbishop of Nigeria, will always be Bishop “AIDS” Akinola.
No doubt African culture has several good things to teach us (though just at the moment they fail to occur to me) but attitudes to sexual morality are certainly not among them.
Q. Could a summit of African leaders possibly solve the problems of the continent?
A. Depends how big a bomb you planted under it.
"President" Omar Bongo of Gabon (a name no novelist would have got away with making up) then said that Mugabe had become rather a "hero" to the other wankers present for defying the white man. This is so clearly a fourteen-year-old's response. Why should we respect it just because Mr Bongo is black?
African "leaders" are slightly worse news for the continent than the HIV virus, and it is time both were eradicated.
We saw a photographer trying to get a shot of the Mugger being pushed away by an accompanying goon, who said “He’s a head of state! You can’t do that to him! Is it just ‘cos you’re a white man? I mean, you’re mad!” Of course anyone casting the slightest slight on a black mass murderer is purely motivated by racism.
The people who really are purely motivated by racism are those like the International Cricket Council, who aren’t even prepared to suspend Zim from international cricket, saying that sport should not be influenced by politics. I mean, how long are these people’s memories? Or rather, is there any limit to the racism these people are allowed to get away with you because a lot of them aren‘t white? The world of cricket actually achieved something by closing ranks against South African cricket purely on the grounds of its politics; the referendum on change in 1992 was decisively influenced by the fact that SA were then in the semi-final of the World Cup and would have been slung out if they’d rejected the changes. But Mugabe’s black, even if his victims are too, and so he’s all right. Racist scum.
And then you get the Anglican Churches of Africa, who perhaps aren’t racist but just hate homosexuals. This, of course, has nothing to do with the Bible, though some of the obscurer bits of the Good Book are cited as an excuse. African sexual culture’s rejection of gays is the flip side of a dumb macho celebration of fantastically promiscuous unprotected heterosexual screwing around, which has left the whole continent awash with AIDS. For me the leading light of the Church of Jesus Christ, Queerbasher, the Archbishop of Nigeria, will always be Bishop “AIDS” Akinola.
No doubt African culture has several good things to teach us (though just at the moment they fail to occur to me) but attitudes to sexual morality are certainly not among them.
Thursday 3 July 2008
Someone has shopped me to the tax...
And I've a pretty good idea who it is - and now all bets are off.
Monday 30 June 2008
For here on earth we have no abiding city....
Have now found a new place to live...this time it was necessitated by our landlords selling the house over our heads...so different from last year when we had to move because the Iron Buddha had thrown all the glassware at my head, and next day had invited the landlord's son in to view the damage. Anyway there is a new domicile in sight. The only prob now is shifting far too much furniture, bought at rock-bottom prices from my former palatial residence at the British Consulate-General in Hamburg and conveyed more than once at sky-high prices to my subsequent domains...help!
Sunday 29 June 2008
Olympics! Let's go! China!
Wonderful piece on the BBC website about some Chinese ministry having dreamed up an approved way of cheering on the Chinese athletes in the Beijing Olympics.
Officials are now being sent around the country to teach the approved cheer to schoolchildren. Apparently it is a combination of waving one’s arms about, clapping, and chanting “Olympics! Let’s go! China!” in a pre-approved rhythm.
A spokesman said that the official cheer was “in accordance with international principles on cheering”. Bet you didn’t know there were any of those.
The Iron Buddha couldn’t quite see the funny side. She insisted that we must have all this sort of thing too. Football chants, for example. Surely the Kop or the Stretford End couldn’t all sing the same song at the same time unless someone had sat them down and taught them?
I had to explain, making the point that I wasn’t saying that the Olympics would make her country look like a complete bunch of bastards (we all know that anyway, but can put it out of our minds if we so wish) but that it would make the most populous country on earth look like one enormous collective horse’s arse. And that we won’t forget.
Officials are now being sent around the country to teach the approved cheer to schoolchildren. Apparently it is a combination of waving one’s arms about, clapping, and chanting “Olympics! Let’s go! China!” in a pre-approved rhythm.
A spokesman said that the official cheer was “in accordance with international principles on cheering”. Bet you didn’t know there were any of those.
The Iron Buddha couldn’t quite see the funny side. She insisted that we must have all this sort of thing too. Football chants, for example. Surely the Kop or the Stretford End couldn’t all sing the same song at the same time unless someone had sat them down and taught them?
I had to explain, making the point that I wasn’t saying that the Olympics would make her country look like a complete bunch of bastards (we all know that anyway, but can put it out of our minds if we so wish) but that it would make the most populous country on earth look like one enormous collective horse’s arse. And that we won’t forget.
And a warm welcome back to Tory Sleaze...
MEPs on the take! (Pope Catholic!) MPs fiddling expenses and enabling their sons to hold “Fuck Off I’m Rich” parties on the taxpayer’s tab! Lord Ashcroft of Belize buying up marginal seats! Half the Shadow Cabinet deriving unearned income from propping up Mugabe! Couldn’t be better, one might have thought. OK, the present lot may be nothing to write home about, but just because the others haven’t had their bums on the seats for 11 years, we’ve no need to forget that they’re all wannabe fat-cats with a boundless sense of entitlement.
Only trouble is, it’s pretty hard to bring that argument to bear. Ever since the horrible Mandelson said that “New Labour are fairly relaxed about people getting filthy rich” prior to being a bit less relaxed about the filthy rich pricing him and his boyfriend out of chi-chi houses in Notting Hill, it’s been pretty clear that New Labour are every bit as bad. What I’d rather hoped is that, on his accession to power, the dour son of the Presbyterian manse had gathered the Parliamentary Labour Party around him and said:
“Right, lads and lasses, this is where the party stops. An MP earns around £60k a year. Bear in mind that that’s at least double what most of those you represent are earning, but don’t forget either that it doesn’t go very far here in the Smoke. Yes, there’s a glamorous world out there that you may feel you want to be part of. Sorry, but it’s not going to happen. That’s the deal. From now on you eat in greasy spoons, or the odd Indian or Chinese. Generally speaking, you don’t set foot in the Congestion Charge Zone unless you’re on parliamentary business. Anyone seen in a place of entertainment where the drinks cost more than £5 a time will receive a good kicking from the Whips. Tell your significant others they can forget about the existence of Harrods and Harvey Nicks. And if you don’t like that, don’t like the idea that the people’s elected representatives should be debarred from the fun bits of their own capital city, then perhaps you might give a thought to how the rest of the electorate feels about it.”
And then we'd be able to pick the greedy, sleazy Tories off, one by one, to great electoral advantage, as no-one likes corrupt, complacent fat-cats. Chance wasted, all for a few directorships and the odd night at Annabel's.
Only trouble is, it’s pretty hard to bring that argument to bear. Ever since the horrible Mandelson said that “New Labour are fairly relaxed about people getting filthy rich” prior to being a bit less relaxed about the filthy rich pricing him and his boyfriend out of chi-chi houses in Notting Hill, it’s been pretty clear that New Labour are every bit as bad. What I’d rather hoped is that, on his accession to power, the dour son of the Presbyterian manse had gathered the Parliamentary Labour Party around him and said:
“Right, lads and lasses, this is where the party stops. An MP earns around £60k a year. Bear in mind that that’s at least double what most of those you represent are earning, but don’t forget either that it doesn’t go very far here in the Smoke. Yes, there’s a glamorous world out there that you may feel you want to be part of. Sorry, but it’s not going to happen. That’s the deal. From now on you eat in greasy spoons, or the odd Indian or Chinese. Generally speaking, you don’t set foot in the Congestion Charge Zone unless you’re on parliamentary business. Anyone seen in a place of entertainment where the drinks cost more than £5 a time will receive a good kicking from the Whips. Tell your significant others they can forget about the existence of Harrods and Harvey Nicks. And if you don’t like that, don’t like the idea that the people’s elected representatives should be debarred from the fun bits of their own capital city, then perhaps you might give a thought to how the rest of the electorate feels about it.”
And then we'd be able to pick the greedy, sleazy Tories off, one by one, to great electoral advantage, as no-one likes corrupt, complacent fat-cats. Chance wasted, all for a few directorships and the odd night at Annabel's.
Saturday 28 June 2008
Anything happened this last week?
Well, not a lot, in the wider scheme of things.
Mugabe seems to have won his hotly-contested election. Clever. Lots of dictators have held on to power by holding bogus elections with 99% turnouts and 100% majorities. Uncle Bob was smart; just like Chairman Mao (his mentor in so many ways) with the "let a hundred flowers bloom" campaign in 1957, where he encouraged people to come clean about opposing him so he could kick their heads in very shortly afterwards, Uncle Bob put on an election so that he could see who the opposition were and squash them; and then had the brilliant idea of staging a run-off so he could do it again. And it worked. When will we get it into our heads that, faced with nasty governments, we have only two choices: a) let them carry on and hope that is all turns into something different in the end or b) terminate them with extreme prejudice? I thought we'd gone through all these arguments in 1938-39.
And then there was a thing called Euro 2008. No, it wasn't boring because England weren't in it - England would have been out for some time in any case. It was boring because it was boring. The only saviours have been the Turks and Spaniards. I was just dreading a Germany v. Italy final. As things are - VIVA ESPAÑA, with brass knobs on.
And Wendy Alexander's got sacked from the leadership of the Scottish NotLabour party. My heart bleeds. NotLab has been asking for this ever since the greasy shiteater Mandelson said "We are extremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich". Rimming paedophile Jersey tax exiles for illegal donations! You couldn't make it up.
Wimbledung. Some American has been clattered by the harpies for making sexist comments about women players. Sorry, ladies, but most people aren't much interested in tennis per se, and are rather keen on totty, male or female. That, I'm sorry to say, is why we watch it. Yes, we welcome the new influx of Eastern European women, but almost entirely because they are fit as fuck and look as if they go like TGVs. Don't be silly.
Mugabe seems to have won his hotly-contested election. Clever. Lots of dictators have held on to power by holding bogus elections with 99% turnouts and 100% majorities. Uncle Bob was smart; just like Chairman Mao (his mentor in so many ways) with the "let a hundred flowers bloom" campaign in 1957, where he encouraged people to come clean about opposing him so he could kick their heads in very shortly afterwards, Uncle Bob put on an election so that he could see who the opposition were and squash them; and then had the brilliant idea of staging a run-off so he could do it again. And it worked. When will we get it into our heads that, faced with nasty governments, we have only two choices: a) let them carry on and hope that is all turns into something different in the end or b) terminate them with extreme prejudice? I thought we'd gone through all these arguments in 1938-39.
And then there was a thing called Euro 2008. No, it wasn't boring because England weren't in it - England would have been out for some time in any case. It was boring because it was boring. The only saviours have been the Turks and Spaniards. I was just dreading a Germany v. Italy final. As things are - VIVA ESPAÑA, with brass knobs on.
And Wendy Alexander's got sacked from the leadership of the Scottish NotLabour party. My heart bleeds. NotLab has been asking for this ever since the greasy shiteater Mandelson said "We are extremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich". Rimming paedophile Jersey tax exiles for illegal donations! You couldn't make it up.
Wimbledung. Some American has been clattered by the harpies for making sexist comments about women players. Sorry, ladies, but most people aren't much interested in tennis per se, and are rather keen on totty, male or female. That, I'm sorry to say, is why we watch it. Yes, we welcome the new influx of Eastern European women, but almost entirely because they are fit as fuck and look as if they go like TGVs. Don't be silly.
Sunday 22 June 2008
Good old Rod Liddle
One of the few habits of mine which I would whole-heartedly recommend to others is devoting the first sentient few minutes of one's Sunday morning to reading Rod Liddle's columns in the Sunday Times. There are two of them; one general and one on sport, and a guaranteed laugh-out-loud on a Sunday morning is not to be sneezed at.
Today, after some good stuff on the vile Peter Mandelson, he gives a big-up to Naomi Campbell for swearing and spitting at wankers at Heathrow Airport after they lost her baggage, and started to tell her what her "options" were, as if the whole thing were her responsibility. Rod adds: "I always say you can judge how ghastly a place is by the number of signs telling you not to lamp the staff. At Heathrow there’s one every few yards. Campbell, to her credit, ignored them."
Yes, I've recently been travelling by rail a fair bit, and I've noticed too that there are signs everywhere telling you not to kick shit out of railway employees, as if in recognition of the fact that that would be the normal impulse of any rail traveller. But I wouldn't go as far as Rod or Naomi. I'm looking into the cost of producing sheets of stickers, to be sold to commuters and plastered onto these signs, saying "ATTACK THE BOSSES INSTEAD!" Just a thought. In the same way as all these bank advertisements asking "Are you worried about poverty in old age?" and suchlike. They just cry out for stickers proclaiming "HA-HA! WE AREN'T!"
Today, after some good stuff on the vile Peter Mandelson, he gives a big-up to Naomi Campbell for swearing and spitting at wankers at Heathrow Airport after they lost her baggage, and started to tell her what her "options" were, as if the whole thing were her responsibility. Rod adds: "I always say you can judge how ghastly a place is by the number of signs telling you not to lamp the staff. At Heathrow there’s one every few yards. Campbell, to her credit, ignored them."
Yes, I've recently been travelling by rail a fair bit, and I've noticed too that there are signs everywhere telling you not to kick shit out of railway employees, as if in recognition of the fact that that would be the normal impulse of any rail traveller. But I wouldn't go as far as Rod or Naomi. I'm looking into the cost of producing sheets of stickers, to be sold to commuters and plastered onto these signs, saying "ATTACK THE BOSSES INSTEAD!" Just a thought. In the same way as all these bank advertisements asking "Are you worried about poverty in old age?" and suchlike. They just cry out for stickers proclaiming "HA-HA! WE AREN'T!"
Saturday 21 June 2008
Why are we all corporate slaves?
Because you more or less have to be, otherwise you face so many problems you’re going to feel bludgeoned into going back into the corporate slammer.
We all sorta kind need to live somewhere. Now, my sister is a professional musician. As tends to happen, she married a fellow-musician she’d met on the circuit. For a while they lived on the outskirts of London, because that’s where a lot of the work is, freelancing (which amounts to living by one’s own efforts, not like a battery chicken). As rents rocketed, they tried to buy a flat. Of course that wouldn’t have been cheap either, but the point was they couldn’t get a mortgage. Supported yourself freelance for three years? Doesn’t count. Haven’t got a “steady” job with a proper employer? Sorry, no mortgage. In the end my brother-in-law felt forced to jack in the double-bass and go and train as a computer bod, and has been a proper wage slave ever since. Abracadabra, here’s the money. He’s changed jobs three or four times since then, and could of course have been sacked at any moment, but he’d showed willing, and thus is allowed a roof over his head by the banking dictatorship.
I have been up against the same sort of thing. (To recapitulate: I live on regular drawdowns from a redundo payment I landed eighteen months ago, and have thus neither salary, pension or benefits. That’s freedom, and nice non-work if you can get it.) I don’t even think about getting a mortgage, as it’s a foregone conclusion that no-one will lend me a bent penny. So I have to rent. This process is slowed by the need to take a joint decision with someone who couldn’t take a decision if you stuck lighted matches between her toes, but we got there, at least I thought we had until I discovered that she’d pulled out of it while I was in London last week. So we found another place, and I went along to do the paperwork.
“Who is your employer?”
“Don’t have one. I’m retired.”
“Do you have a letter detailing your pension entitlements?”
“No. My income is paid regularly from a bank in Germany.” (In order to fool my bank into thinking I have a regular income, I pay a regular monthly amount in.) “Here are three months of bank statements, as requested, showing the regular monthly payments.”
“Can you produce a letter saying where this money is coming from?”
“No. I transfer it myself. But if you like I can show a bank statement proving I have enough money to pay the rent for ten years.”
“That’s no good. You might spend all that money on something else.”
“Well, yes. But if I had a regular income I could spend all that on beer as well, couldn’t I? And if I had a regular job I could get sacked tomorrow.”
Blah, blah, blah.
“So do you mean that if you don’t have a regular income from some corporate entity you cannot rent a house? My present rental contract runs out in three weeks. Should I go to the council and proclaim myself homeless?”
More jobsworth blah. So I simply went across the road to the other agent whose house the Iron Buddha had decided against on flimsy grounds, checked that they weren’t going to be so bloody silly, and signed up with them again.
In the meantime, I remember deciding in 1981, to the horror of various acquaintances, that a regular job is a pointless waste of life and is for arseholes only, and I wasn’t wrong, not in the slightest. Three cheers for job insecurity, and in the meantime tax the buggers to fuck.
We all sorta kind need to live somewhere. Now, my sister is a professional musician. As tends to happen, she married a fellow-musician she’d met on the circuit. For a while they lived on the outskirts of London, because that’s where a lot of the work is, freelancing (which amounts to living by one’s own efforts, not like a battery chicken). As rents rocketed, they tried to buy a flat. Of course that wouldn’t have been cheap either, but the point was they couldn’t get a mortgage. Supported yourself freelance for three years? Doesn’t count. Haven’t got a “steady” job with a proper employer? Sorry, no mortgage. In the end my brother-in-law felt forced to jack in the double-bass and go and train as a computer bod, and has been a proper wage slave ever since. Abracadabra, here’s the money. He’s changed jobs three or four times since then, and could of course have been sacked at any moment, but he’d showed willing, and thus is allowed a roof over his head by the banking dictatorship.
I have been up against the same sort of thing. (To recapitulate: I live on regular drawdowns from a redundo payment I landed eighteen months ago, and have thus neither salary, pension or benefits. That’s freedom, and nice non-work if you can get it.) I don’t even think about getting a mortgage, as it’s a foregone conclusion that no-one will lend me a bent penny. So I have to rent. This process is slowed by the need to take a joint decision with someone who couldn’t take a decision if you stuck lighted matches between her toes, but we got there, at least I thought we had until I discovered that she’d pulled out of it while I was in London last week. So we found another place, and I went along to do the paperwork.
“Who is your employer?”
“Don’t have one. I’m retired.”
“Do you have a letter detailing your pension entitlements?”
“No. My income is paid regularly from a bank in Germany.” (In order to fool my bank into thinking I have a regular income, I pay a regular monthly amount in.) “Here are three months of bank statements, as requested, showing the regular monthly payments.”
“Can you produce a letter saying where this money is coming from?”
“No. I transfer it myself. But if you like I can show a bank statement proving I have enough money to pay the rent for ten years.”
“That’s no good. You might spend all that money on something else.”
“Well, yes. But if I had a regular income I could spend all that on beer as well, couldn’t I? And if I had a regular job I could get sacked tomorrow.”
Blah, blah, blah.
“So do you mean that if you don’t have a regular income from some corporate entity you cannot rent a house? My present rental contract runs out in three weeks. Should I go to the council and proclaim myself homeless?”
More jobsworth blah. So I simply went across the road to the other agent whose house the Iron Buddha had decided against on flimsy grounds, checked that they weren’t going to be so bloody silly, and signed up with them again.
In the meantime, I remember deciding in 1981, to the horror of various acquaintances, that a regular job is a pointless waste of life and is for arseholes only, and I wasn’t wrong, not in the slightest. Three cheers for job insecurity, and in the meantime tax the buggers to fuck.
We can find out where you live, Abu Qatada
So Abu Qatada is out of jail, purely because we won’t send him back to Jordan where he comes from. Because he’d be tortured there? No, because he’d be put on trial there and the possibility can’t be ruled out that some of the evidence in that trial might have been obtained through torture. Aah. We disapprove. But to the extent of letting him go free to live in an £800,000 house in Acton? Well, that’s a free society for you.
But his neighbours have already been quoted as saying they don’t want him there. And where’s the money come from anyway? We know, don’t we, just as we know he’s guilty as hell in Jordan wherever the evidence comes from. But if it’s really a free society, why aren’t we told his exact address? Aah. It’s not as free as that. But maybe we can find it out, and plaster it all over the web. Sorry, Abu; you’re not going to live in peace in this country, old son. It won’t take too much effort.
The general principle of setting up a left-wing private investigation service to put the addresses of proven but legally immune bastards into the public domain is worth a bit of thought.
But his neighbours have already been quoted as saying they don’t want him there. And where’s the money come from anyway? We know, don’t we, just as we know he’s guilty as hell in Jordan wherever the evidence comes from. But if it’s really a free society, why aren’t we told his exact address? Aah. It’s not as free as that. But maybe we can find it out, and plaster it all over the web. Sorry, Abu; you’re not going to live in peace in this country, old son. It won’t take too much effort.
The general principle of setting up a left-wing private investigation service to put the addresses of proven but legally immune bastards into the public domain is worth a bit of thought.
Back to the LTV?
I am determined to revive this acronym, which all sorts of people don’t seem to have heard of, though it was current around the time of Thatcher’s first election. You don’t know what it means? Think Aneurin Bevan, think “lower than....” Goddit? Right.
Despite the horrors of New Labour and the smarmy grin of Cameron, LTV is no less appropriate an acronym than it was then. No, I don’t believe that open espousal of the cause of scabby rich bastards is better than pretending to care about other people while in fact being in love with s.r.b. Under a Tory government we’ll be dicked over quite shamelessly with a smug “That’s what the people wanted, old chap” rather than after a genuine fight. And a) remember what sort of government we got last time the Labour movement couldn’t be arsed to defend its own government, and b) what a sodding long time (and what a lot of fatal compromises) it takes to get them out once they’re entrenched. No, even if it takes a whole basketful of Polly Toynbee’s clothes-pegs, we can’t let the bastards back in.
Despite the horrors of New Labour and the smarmy grin of Cameron, LTV is no less appropriate an acronym than it was then. No, I don’t believe that open espousal of the cause of scabby rich bastards is better than pretending to care about other people while in fact being in love with s.r.b. Under a Tory government we’ll be dicked over quite shamelessly with a smug “That’s what the people wanted, old chap” rather than after a genuine fight. And a) remember what sort of government we got last time the Labour movement couldn’t be arsed to defend its own government, and b) what a sodding long time (and what a lot of fatal compromises) it takes to get them out once they’re entrenched. No, even if it takes a whole basketful of Polly Toynbee’s clothes-pegs, we can’t let the bastards back in.
Tuesday 17 June 2008
Conclusion
Whoops! I forgot the conclusion to the last posting. Here it is:
Why don't we just simplify matters? It's impossible to earn more than £100,000 a year (perhaps we might just about extend this to £150,000) on the open market; you need a cartel or a scam to earn more than that. Let's bring the class war down to a straight fight between those under £150,000 a year and those over. If we win we'll tax them to extinction and win our capital city back. And there are a lot more of us.
Why don't we just simplify matters? It's impossible to earn more than £100,000 a year (perhaps we might just about extend this to £150,000) on the open market; you need a cartel or a scam to earn more than that. Let's bring the class war down to a straight fight between those under £150,000 a year and those over. If we win we'll tax them to extinction and win our capital city back. And there are a lot more of us.
Class - what does it mean?
Class isn't easy to define these days. "Middle class" has always been a term of insult, whether from the proper working class or the Evelyn Waugh/Alan Clark tendency. And yet, in most generally understood contexts, the great majority of us are middle class. Is the definition: own your own house, albeit mortgaged to the hilt? (If so, Thatcher played that brilliantly with the council house sell-off.) Work in some sort of management function? (More or less, perhaps, but lots of people get promoted into something like that without their economic position being seriously altered at all.) Don't smoke or put sugar in your tea? Take a bit of an arsey approach to colleagues or neighbours? (Again, difficult to define.) Give a shit about your children's education? (Balls - many indisputably working-class people do that.) Ever switch the telly off? (No Chinese person of any class ever does that.)
My friend The Exile has a good definition of working class: regarding work (or, as he rightly describes it, "bastard work") as something one does purely for the money. A real worker does not involve him/herself in the central problems of the organisation: employer's profits, employer's problems. The real worker will not do an extra stroke without being paid: if close of play is 5 o'clock, you are in the pub at 5.01 washing the taste of work out of your gob with a foaming pint. That is looking more appropriate than ever these days; so many people are expected to put in loads of extra unpaid hours out of fear that someone might think them "lacking in commitment", and are quite prepared to betray their friends, partners and children in order to appease their bosses. That, I suppose, is a good enough definition of "middle class" these days. But I took the "working-class" approach even when I was a senior manager in the public sector. No-one got any unpaid overtime out of me. And now I am living off my invested redundo payment and don't do a bloody stroke of work, I still maintain I'm one of Keir Hardie's paladins.
But I won't forget meeting an IWCA (Independent Working Class Association) man at a gig in London, and offering him a place to crash as he didn't have one. We went to my place in a black cab, and he was a bit taken aback to find it was a five-bedroom detached, where I was able to offer him a couple of glasses of decent malt, and even more so to accidentally wake up my Slovak au-pair while looking for the loo. But don't worry, Mark; I lost the whole bang shoot in a divorce.
My friend The Exile has a good definition of working class: regarding work (or, as he rightly describes it, "bastard work") as something one does purely for the money. A real worker does not involve him/herself in the central problems of the organisation: employer's profits, employer's problems. The real worker will not do an extra stroke without being paid: if close of play is 5 o'clock, you are in the pub at 5.01 washing the taste of work out of your gob with a foaming pint. That is looking more appropriate than ever these days; so many people are expected to put in loads of extra unpaid hours out of fear that someone might think them "lacking in commitment", and are quite prepared to betray their friends, partners and children in order to appease their bosses. That, I suppose, is a good enough definition of "middle class" these days. But I took the "working-class" approach even when I was a senior manager in the public sector. No-one got any unpaid overtime out of me. And now I am living off my invested redundo payment and don't do a bloody stroke of work, I still maintain I'm one of Keir Hardie's paladins.
But I won't forget meeting an IWCA (Independent Working Class Association) man at a gig in London, and offering him a place to crash as he didn't have one. We went to my place in a black cab, and he was a bit taken aback to find it was a five-bedroom detached, where I was able to offer him a couple of glasses of decent malt, and even more so to accidentally wake up my Slovak au-pair while looking for the loo. But don't worry, Mark; I lost the whole bang shoot in a divorce.
David Davis: national hero or total tosser?
(Incidentally, wouldn’t people called Davis normally choose another name than David for their son? Sounds like a bit of a piss-take, like Major Major in Catch-22. Actually, I’ve just remembered he was adopted, so the name David had possibly stuck to him before anyone realised that he would be adopted by people called Davis. Sorry.)
But what a tosser! If he wanted to throw down the gauntlet to the Government, surely he didn’t believe that holding an unnecessary by-election in a strongly Tory constituency would prove anything? That Labour would admit defeat on the 42-day issue if they lost the vote in a seat they couldn’t even win in 1997? And didn’t he see that all Labour would have to do was refuse to field a candidate to leave him standing there like a spare prick in a brothel?
Of course he realised that there would be a personal succès d’éstime for him, with loads of Lib Dem types and others who wouldn’t vote Tory in a thousand years praising him to the skies. Even some of the far Left blogs, the ones who hate NuLabor more than Hitler, necrotising fasciitis and the British packaging industry combined, have been having orgasms over his craggy visage.
Let’s look at this supposed hero of liberty. A principle he felt so strongly about that he was prepared to put his whole career on the line for it? Nah. He’d obviously been working bloody hard day and night on the issue, as was right and proper for a Shadow Home Secretary, and it’s given him tunnel vision, causing him to think that it’s the only game in town, despite the fact that a) whether an exception to normal procedures be granted for 28 or 42 days is hardly an issue of principle and b) the Government will have all hell getting it through the Lords anyway. Also, as David Aaronovitch has pointed out in today’s Times, Davis’ principled record on libertarian issues doesn’t really bear examination. Staunch defender of Clause 28, opponent of equality in age of consent; what have Moslem extremists got that gay people haven’t?
Anyway, I wish him a resounding victory over the windmills of Haltemprice and Howden, full of sound and fury, signifying – nothing.
But what a tosser! If he wanted to throw down the gauntlet to the Government, surely he didn’t believe that holding an unnecessary by-election in a strongly Tory constituency would prove anything? That Labour would admit defeat on the 42-day issue if they lost the vote in a seat they couldn’t even win in 1997? And didn’t he see that all Labour would have to do was refuse to field a candidate to leave him standing there like a spare prick in a brothel?
Of course he realised that there would be a personal succès d’éstime for him, with loads of Lib Dem types and others who wouldn’t vote Tory in a thousand years praising him to the skies. Even some of the far Left blogs, the ones who hate NuLabor more than Hitler, necrotising fasciitis and the British packaging industry combined, have been having orgasms over his craggy visage.
Let’s look at this supposed hero of liberty. A principle he felt so strongly about that he was prepared to put his whole career on the line for it? Nah. He’d obviously been working bloody hard day and night on the issue, as was right and proper for a Shadow Home Secretary, and it’s given him tunnel vision, causing him to think that it’s the only game in town, despite the fact that a) whether an exception to normal procedures be granted for 28 or 42 days is hardly an issue of principle and b) the Government will have all hell getting it through the Lords anyway. Also, as David Aaronovitch has pointed out in today’s Times, Davis’ principled record on libertarian issues doesn’t really bear examination. Staunch defender of Clause 28, opponent of equality in age of consent; what have Moslem extremists got that gay people haven’t?
Anyway, I wish him a resounding victory over the windmills of Haltemprice and Howden, full of sound and fury, signifying – nothing.
Wen Again
Break from blogging for a few days; in the Smoke, where getting internet access was far from straightforward. But the carnival of wooftery mentioned in the last post duly occurred, and was a lot of fun. In particular, two of my best friends now have Thai boyfriends over here (let in by some sudden inexplicable weakness in the Home Office’s iron front) and we were able to have many alcoholic seminars on the theme of oriental partners – how much we love them and how fucking difficult they are to manage – to an accompaniment of slammed doors, loud arguments, locked rooms and cancelled parties; all recounted with great glee to Enormous Oaf 2, who is still on his first boyfriend and in need of a warning of what may lie ahead, having already had an extended introduction to the horrors of marriage breakdown, courtesy of his parents. Still he seems actually to have involved listening to hours of clapped out drunks thirty or forty years older than himself arguing the toss about religion, science, ethics, history and the Rt. Hon. David Davis.
Tuesday 10 June 2008
Capital Punishment
...which is how Dylan Thomas described his occasional necessary trips to London. I hate the Wen as a place to live in, as my ex-wife does in my house on my tab, but it's nice to visit occasionally. I'm principally going down to see Enormous Oaf 1 do some thesping, in the major production at Royal Holloway, as he is believed (principally, though by no means exclusively, by himself) to be shit-hot. Apart from him (he has an utterly adorable petite blonde girlfriend, as bright as a laser beam and entirely capable of keeping him in some sort of order) I don't suppose I'll meet another heterosexual all the time I'm there. London for me is a carnival of wooftery - after all straight blokes my age tend to have families and thus have to work too hard to be available for wack. Even Enormous Oaf 2 is a woofter, and we shall all enjoy several evenings where the tout ensemble is as camp as the Gulag Archipelago. As appeared on a banner in Derek Jarman's film Edward II:
Liberté, Egalité, Homosexualité
Amen to that, at least temporarily.
Liberté, Egalité, Homosexualité
Amen to that, at least temporarily.
Monday 9 June 2008
Practical Islam
Today's Independent (yes, I know, but I'll leave my criticism of the Indefensible for the time being) has a piece on a 14-year-old wannabe suicide bomber explaining how he got that way. "All I know is what the mullahs told me and kept telling me, that the British and the Americans were against God," he said with his head bowed down, his hands twisting a handkerchief.
How does this differ from what young men in Birmingham and Lancashire are being told?
"I wanted to see my mother and father but I was told that was not possible for security reasons. That upset me but I thought I will be seeing them again as soon as I got back.(Oh yes? So the poor kid clearly hadn't grasped what he was in for.) They said my family would get well paid for what I was doing."
Tolerance, always tolerance. And understanding of the reality of Islam. Well, thanks - you can't get much nearer to understanding of the reality of Islam than that. Sorry, but this is what it is about.
No Islam In Britain!
How does this differ from what young men in Birmingham and Lancashire are being told?
"I wanted to see my mother and father but I was told that was not possible for security reasons. That upset me but I thought I will be seeing them again as soon as I got back.(Oh yes? So the poor kid clearly hadn't grasped what he was in for.) They said my family would get well paid for what I was doing."
Tolerance, always tolerance. And understanding of the reality of Islam. Well, thanks - you can't get much nearer to understanding of the reality of Islam than that. Sorry, but this is what it is about.
No Islam In Britain!
Technobollocks
Have been remiss in my contributions to the blogosphere today. The fact is I have had my password rejected all over Blogger. Particular apologies are due to my friend The Exile; not only was I rendered unable to piss on his arguments (in the nicest possible way!) on his own blog, but couldn't even reply to his comment on my own! Anyway, to put it succinctly: anti-imperialism is a steaming heap of crap.
42 days.....
Sounds like a film title, doesn't it? But we all know what it means and what it's a symbol of.
I ought to be amazed, though of course I'm not, that this has become such a cause celebre for the wet liberals. Yes, let's listen to all the expert advice etc., but let's not introduce any wet-lipped "moral" wabbling and vacillation into the issue. There's only a practical case here, not a moral one. Neither Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus or the Bill of Rights were ever intended to protect the rights of people who want to impose a foreign religion on Britain by terrorist violence. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth they wouldn't have held anyone for 42 days without solid evidence. Sir Francis Walsingham would have cooked some up, and they'd all have been hung by the neck unil half-dead, had their intestines drawn out and their bollocks chopped off, and subsequently had quarters of their bodies nailed up at city gates around the kingdom. Not that Cipriano would go that far - just that the bastards should feel lucky to stay alive, as the ones at Guantanamo Bay should. (Believe me, the Americans won't take any prisoners next time.)
And the idea, floated by Sam Leith in the Telegraph (!) last week, that the 42-day lock-up threatens all of us. No, Sam, it won't happen to you and it won't happen to me. And the wet policemen who claim it will "alienate the Moslem community". Well, it won't affect any normal peaceable Moslems either. Anyone who gets het up about it shows themselves to be at least ambivalent about the jihadis. Let's get this straight: I COULDN'T GIVE A MONKEY'S WHAT HAPPENS TO JIHADI MOSLEMS, AND ANYONE WHO COULD IS A BIT SUSPECT! Now, what part of that did you not understand?
I ought to be amazed, though of course I'm not, that this has become such a cause celebre for the wet liberals. Yes, let's listen to all the expert advice etc., but let's not introduce any wet-lipped "moral" wabbling and vacillation into the issue. There's only a practical case here, not a moral one. Neither Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus or the Bill of Rights were ever intended to protect the rights of people who want to impose a foreign religion on Britain by terrorist violence. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth they wouldn't have held anyone for 42 days without solid evidence. Sir Francis Walsingham would have cooked some up, and they'd all have been hung by the neck unil half-dead, had their intestines drawn out and their bollocks chopped off, and subsequently had quarters of their bodies nailed up at city gates around the kingdom. Not that Cipriano would go that far - just that the bastards should feel lucky to stay alive, as the ones at Guantanamo Bay should. (Believe me, the Americans won't take any prisoners next time.)
And the idea, floated by Sam Leith in the Telegraph (!) last week, that the 42-day lock-up threatens all of us. No, Sam, it won't happen to you and it won't happen to me. And the wet policemen who claim it will "alienate the Moslem community". Well, it won't affect any normal peaceable Moslems either. Anyone who gets het up about it shows themselves to be at least ambivalent about the jihadis. Let's get this straight: I COULDN'T GIVE A MONKEY'S WHAT HAPPENS TO JIHADI MOSLEMS, AND ANYONE WHO COULD IS A BIT SUSPECT! Now, what part of that did you not understand?
Sunday 8 June 2008
Ouch!
I don’t usually take much notice of the BBC when they warn me that what they are about to show me may be a bit distressing. Am I a man or a mouse? And how much of the news isn’t rather distressing, if one thinks about it? But I’ve just found myself almost wishing I’d heeded the warning.
On the BBC website there is a first-person account of a former torturer employed by the Zimbabwe secret police. “A first aid box was opened - and inside were pliers and screwdrivers. We asked the man to choose between the two. The captain then took the pliers and called us near. He got near his genitals, then got one of his balls, pressed it with the pliers, and popped it. There was a lot of blood.”
This has had me crossing my legs ever since. Good for the bloke, though – he got out of it, and has fled the country. But how did he come to get into it? “If you're me, and you don't know about the secret service, all you know is that it protects the sovereignty of your country - it's not a difficult job to do.” The sovereignty of your country. Of course. And now we know what that means: the right to have your balls “popped” by someone of the same skin colour as yourself.
Let’s Make Sovereignty History, folks. What did Mugabe call his recent political cleansing effort against the poor living in shanty towns? Operation Murambatsvina – “clear out the rubbish”. Yes – let’s clear out all the trash and vermin in the souped-up Mercs. Let Assassination Thrive.
On the BBC website there is a first-person account of a former torturer employed by the Zimbabwe secret police. “A first aid box was opened - and inside were pliers and screwdrivers. We asked the man to choose between the two. The captain then took the pliers and called us near. He got near his genitals, then got one of his balls, pressed it with the pliers, and popped it. There was a lot of blood.”
This has had me crossing my legs ever since. Good for the bloke, though – he got out of it, and has fled the country. But how did he come to get into it? “If you're me, and you don't know about the secret service, all you know is that it protects the sovereignty of your country - it's not a difficult job to do.” The sovereignty of your country. Of course. And now we know what that means: the right to have your balls “popped” by someone of the same skin colour as yourself.
Let’s Make Sovereignty History, folks. What did Mugabe call his recent political cleansing effort against the poor living in shanty towns? Operation Murambatsvina – “clear out the rubbish”. Yes – let’s clear out all the trash and vermin in the souped-up Mercs. Let Assassination Thrive.
Cruckut, Lovely Cruckut
The delights of the cricket season. A couple of times I’ve had a yen to pop over and see a live Test Match, something I haven’t done for years due to living abroad. But I always end up thinking of the horribly early starts (I thought of going to Nottingham for the fourth day today; it would have been a two-and-a-half hour drive in each direction, and as things fell out there was only an hour’s play.) And you can’t see what’s happening on the close lbw shouts, it costs thirty-five quid, and you can’t even bring any booze in, only buy it at a tenner a glug.
So it’s the armchair and the remote control and the direct debit to Rupert Murdoch. Also the ancient English custom of having the radio on (in the kitchen) while the TV’s on in the living room. The reason for this is that one is always supposed to be doing domestic things while watching the cricket, to appease one’s conscience and one’s wife, assuming for the purposes of argument that the two can be distinguished. For some reason the radio commentary runs about one second ahead of the TV, which means that, if you leave the door open, you can hear of a stirring occurrence in the kitchen and be in the living room in time to see it happen. Alternatively, you can see a bowler running up to bowl while hearing that the outside edge has already been snapped up by second slip.
This being an England-New Zealand series, one is always delighted by the Kiwi commentators. New Zealanders only seem to use one vowel sound, the sort of flat “u” found in “uh-huh” and represented in Korean by a horizontal line; linguists call it a “schwa”. So people are described as taking wuckuts, getting caught in the slups and occasionally huttung the ball for sucks.
So it’s the armchair and the remote control and the direct debit to Rupert Murdoch. Also the ancient English custom of having the radio on (in the kitchen) while the TV’s on in the living room. The reason for this is that one is always supposed to be doing domestic things while watching the cricket, to appease one’s conscience and one’s wife, assuming for the purposes of argument that the two can be distinguished. For some reason the radio commentary runs about one second ahead of the TV, which means that, if you leave the door open, you can hear of a stirring occurrence in the kitchen and be in the living room in time to see it happen. Alternatively, you can see a bowler running up to bowl while hearing that the outside edge has already been snapped up by second slip.
This being an England-New Zealand series, one is always delighted by the Kiwi commentators. New Zealanders only seem to use one vowel sound, the sort of flat “u” found in “uh-huh” and represented in Korean by a horizontal line; linguists call it a “schwa”. So people are described as taking wuckuts, getting caught in the slups and occasionally huttung the ball for sucks.
Saturday 7 June 2008
Nation of Slaves
Rather distasteful news from China, that they’re now taking a leaf out of the Soviet book and bunging dissidents in the nuthouse. As usual the logic is impeccable, as I heard from a spokesman on the telly (thanks to the Iron Buddha I now have Chinese official television as a sort of 24-hour streaming media, a high price to pay for my occasional access to Sky Sports); “these people who are always protesting are obvious political maniacs – their political views are completely out of line with reality”. Well, yes. Complete domination of the Party is the reality – if you can’t accept that you must be stark staring bonkers.
And of course they all accept that – at least 99.9% of them do. Chinese apologists claim that the dissidents are only a minute fraction of the population, and this is perfectly true. The vast majority have the mentality of slaves, trembling at the frown of their employers when not kow-towing to the government. Chinese industrial relations are pre-Tolpuddle Martyrs.
Which is fair enough, I suppose, if that’s what they want. But we don’t want them bringing that attitude over here. My good lady has been chambermaiding in a hotel recently, to fill in while she gets her business set up. As the newest member of the team she of course got landed with all the shitwork, mainly cleaning the bogs with a strong chemical which gave her a persistent headache. (What price elf ‘n’ safety?) The supervisor being on holiday, she had no recourse and the senior woman on the team refused to budge. Finally having reached the stage where she had to get things changed or give up the job, she appealed to the general manager. After this she fielded a 45-minute panic phone call from a Chinese colleague in the hotel; the latter was utterly terrified that the IB’s complaint would somehow reflect on her, put her in bad with management or other colleagues, just because she was a fellow-Chinese and had recommended the IB for the job in the first place. So she is now either having to withdraw her complaint to pacify her friend, or just give up the job. And the IB still hasn’t been paid for two days work she did in Blackburn three months ago, and is showing no inclination to demand it. I shall have to go down there myself with my boots blacked.
I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion, after 20 years of fairly enjoyable involvement with them, that the Chinese won’t do. They just don’t understand the first thing about living in a free country, and so probably shouldn’t be here, at least not if they’re going to undermine 200 years of workers’ struggle.
And of course they all accept that – at least 99.9% of them do. Chinese apologists claim that the dissidents are only a minute fraction of the population, and this is perfectly true. The vast majority have the mentality of slaves, trembling at the frown of their employers when not kow-towing to the government. Chinese industrial relations are pre-Tolpuddle Martyrs.
Which is fair enough, I suppose, if that’s what they want. But we don’t want them bringing that attitude over here. My good lady has been chambermaiding in a hotel recently, to fill in while she gets her business set up. As the newest member of the team she of course got landed with all the shitwork, mainly cleaning the bogs with a strong chemical which gave her a persistent headache. (What price elf ‘n’ safety?) The supervisor being on holiday, she had no recourse and the senior woman on the team refused to budge. Finally having reached the stage where she had to get things changed or give up the job, she appealed to the general manager. After this she fielded a 45-minute panic phone call from a Chinese colleague in the hotel; the latter was utterly terrified that the IB’s complaint would somehow reflect on her, put her in bad with management or other colleagues, just because she was a fellow-Chinese and had recommended the IB for the job in the first place. So she is now either having to withdraw her complaint to pacify her friend, or just give up the job. And the IB still hasn’t been paid for two days work she did in Blackburn three months ago, and is showing no inclination to demand it. I shall have to go down there myself with my boots blacked.
I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion, after 20 years of fairly enjoyable involvement with them, that the Chinese won’t do. They just don’t understand the first thing about living in a free country, and so probably shouldn’t be here, at least not if they’re going to undermine 200 years of workers’ struggle.
Whittering about Mugabe
Loads of predictable outrage about Mugabe going to Rome to pontificate at a UN Food Summit while his people are starving. Why the f**k do people bother. We know Mugabe will carry on until he drops off the perch, naturally or otherwise. While we concede his right to starve and kick hell out of people, and that of the Burmese generals to let people die in the Irrawaddy Delta, and the “international community” does indeed concede these rights, we may as well save our breath to cool our coffee. The point about Mugabe coming to Europe is that his security arrangements cannot be anywhere near as tight as they are in Harare. There must be millions of potential sniper nests in Rome. And with all these outrage-inspiring five course meals – dozens of waiters etc. must have had a chance to slip something in his lobster thermidor. It’s the old Roman way, after all. Where’s the Empress Livia Augusta when we need her? The disgrace is not that Mugabe went to Rome, but that he got back safely. At least Peter Tatchell had a go at him in Brussels a few years ago, and got a kicking for his pains. It wouldn’t have involved much more planning to take the man out for good.
We on the Left ought to be moving round to the idea of assassination to push the world in the right direction. The mainstream media wouldn’t print anything of this sort, so go the blogosphere! Marx queered the pitch rather by rejecting individual assassinations, but he thought that economic forces would do the job for us, and – sorry Karl – they haven’t and they won’t. And the argument that if our side start splatting baddies the baddies will start splatting “us” shouldn’t worry us lefties much. Assassination is one of the only ways I can think of of making a real impact on the ruling class, and of more or less confining that impact to the ruling class.
We on the Left ought to be moving round to the idea of assassination to push the world in the right direction. The mainstream media wouldn’t print anything of this sort, so go the blogosphere! Marx queered the pitch rather by rejecting individual assassinations, but he thought that economic forces would do the job for us, and – sorry Karl – they haven’t and they won’t. And the argument that if our side start splatting baddies the baddies will start splatting “us” shouldn’t worry us lefties much. Assassination is one of the only ways I can think of of making a real impact on the ruling class, and of more or less confining that impact to the ruling class.
A new scam
One has become accustomed to generous-spirited West Africans offering one amounts of money in the tens of millions in return for a little help laundering it, and one knows what to do with their e-mails. Yesterday I received a more subtle version of the same thing. This came allegedly from an impeccable source, with whom almost no computer user has not had legitimate dealings – viz. Microsoft Himself. They tell me that, in a recent promotion involving internet users, my numbers (I was not, of course, aware that I had any) had come up, and that I was due a payment of £150,000 which I only had to claim.
To do this I have to write to a man with a Hong Kong e-mail address but a UK phone number, under the reassuring moniker of Barry Coleman-Williams, giving him my name, address, phone number, nationality and gender, but nothing further (at least at the moment). The subtlety of this scam lies not just in the seeming straight dealing of Barry and his friends; it lies also in the sum held out. We all know, at least in the economic regions I inhabit, that sums like ten or twenty million simply don’t exist; but a hundred and fifty K is the sort of sum one could just do with. So well done chaps, nice try, but I don’t think so.
(P.S. I googled friend Barry, and discovered that a chap called Ameer Saeed Al-Ghani received the same e-mail, and that Ameer seems to have drawn the same lottery numbers as I have.)
To do this I have to write to a man with a Hong Kong e-mail address but a UK phone number, under the reassuring moniker of Barry Coleman-Williams, giving him my name, address, phone number, nationality and gender, but nothing further (at least at the moment). The subtlety of this scam lies not just in the seeming straight dealing of Barry and his friends; it lies also in the sum held out. We all know, at least in the economic regions I inhabit, that sums like ten or twenty million simply don’t exist; but a hundred and fifty K is the sort of sum one could just do with. So well done chaps, nice try, but I don’t think so.
(P.S. I googled friend Barry, and discovered that a chap called Ameer Saeed Al-Ghani received the same e-mail, and that Ameer seems to have drawn the same lottery numbers as I have.)
Monday 2 June 2008
Bloody Moslems again
Well, actually not Moslems, but the West Midlands Police, insofar as the two groups can be meaningfully distinguished. Firstly the Channel 4 documentary, where they had to admit there wasn’t any real reason to hassle the programme for distorting what imams had been recorded as saying in the Green Lane Mosque and elsewhere. Yes, they did praise Osama bin Laden, yes, they did call for the murder of gay men, yes, they did describe the 98% of the population who are not Moslems as “filthy” and “unclean”. But in a sense it's fairly easy to follow the thought processes of the police. If these truths were to be admitted, it’s fairly clear that the police would be under pressure to close these mosques and arrest a few people. And they thought – possibly rightly – that this would lead to serious, and possibly violent, confrontation. So best, perhaps, to turn their fire on the programme-makers who had uncovered these inconvenient truths.
And then, more recently, a couple of American evangelists being told that they shouldn’t go evangelising in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham as it was a Moslem area and evangelising there counted as a “hate crime”. By a Police Community Support Officer, no less. And if the Americans came back, they were warned that they might be beaten up, with the strong implication that they should not expect any assistance from the police in that case.
Well, obviously this Keystone Kop had no authority to say anything of the sort, still less to submit the Americans to a harangue on US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he did. But he had clearly worked out which way the wind was blowing in our second city.
Firstly, where Moslems predominate in an area, they want complete control, and we would be well advised to grant this. As a result, anyone trying to exercise natural British freedoms is being unreasonable and provocative, as Moslems prefer to be unchallenged in their own areas.
Well, I suppose we can still choose whether we are prepared to accept this situation or not. I’m happy to go down to Alum Rock any time. Not that there isn't enough of this sort of work to be done right here in Lancaster.
And then, more recently, a couple of American evangelists being told that they shouldn’t go evangelising in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham as it was a Moslem area and evangelising there counted as a “hate crime”. By a Police Community Support Officer, no less. And if the Americans came back, they were warned that they might be beaten up, with the strong implication that they should not expect any assistance from the police in that case.
Well, obviously this Keystone Kop had no authority to say anything of the sort, still less to submit the Americans to a harangue on US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he did. But he had clearly worked out which way the wind was blowing in our second city.
Firstly, where Moslems predominate in an area, they want complete control, and we would be well advised to grant this. As a result, anyone trying to exercise natural British freedoms is being unreasonable and provocative, as Moslems prefer to be unchallenged in their own areas.
Well, I suppose we can still choose whether we are prepared to accept this situation or not. I’m happy to go down to Alum Rock any time. Not that there isn't enough of this sort of work to be done right here in Lancaster.
Sunday 1 June 2008
Once more unto the breachchchyechhhhyuurrgggggghhhhh....
Resuming after an extended break, sadly not spent having a wonderful time but in the depths of personal horror; bipolar depressive disorder can leave you up the shit end for months at a time. Still, nil desperandum....
Was in the relative paradise of East Asia some of the time. China and Thailand.
China
It’s building up nicely for the drug- and nationalism-fest in August. Moronic security-goons everywhere telling you you can’t go here and you can’t go there. I went for a walk in a residential area where I had conducted a romance of sorts some fifteen years ago, and was told by some uniformed turd that I couldn’t go down that street. Why not? I asked in perfectly good Chinese. The guy looked at me as if I were a Martian and summoned a female assistant standing a few yards away who put up her hand and told me “No Road!”. I said it was jolly interesting that no-one would tell me why there was no entrance to this area, and that my Embassy would be most intrigued to hear about it.
The kerfuffle over the Olympic Torch Relay showed me one thing that I shouldn’t have forgotten about – how supremely important it is to the Chinese to put on a show. I can remember thinking when the Chinese first got the slot that it was utter madness putting on the Olympics in August in Beijing – for the simple reason that it rains all the time in August in Beijing, and I lived there long enough to know. However, the Chinese think they can fix the weather. By a process known as “seeding the clouds” they can send aircraft up to cause the clouds to tip out all their rain so it doesn’t fall on the desired occasion. They did this in 1999 on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic and it worked (though who knows whether it might not have been fine anyway?). But, I thought, doing it for one day is one thing; do they really think they can do it for three weeks?
No, I discovered. They don't give a shit for what the weather will be like during the actual Olympics; what they really care about is the opening ceremony (8th August). As it happens my ex-girlfriend, whom I met out there, is the senior choreographer for this performance. For anyone outside the Chinese cultural circle (and probably for a lot of people within it, who just daren’t say so) these shows go on for about five hours and are quite staggeringly boring. For the Chinese, they are the centre of the whole thing. A good five months before the Olympics start, my ex and her fellow-choreographers have been confined in a hotel outside Beijing working 18-hour days and 7-day weeks till August. She got a day off at a traditional festival in April to see her 7-year old son but was called back in the late afternoon. I was bloody lucky to get three hours to have dinner with her. There are 10,000 people involved in this opening ceremony and about 8,000 in the closing job. You can see why they get worked up about who goes to attend the thing. But we can expect beautiful summer weather for the ceremonies and filthy pissing rain for the actual athletics.
Thailand
Thailand, of course, is full of whores. Whatever people tell you about why they go there, the real reason s that it is full of whores. I had some vague plans, and so did the (English) mate I went out there to meet, to do a bit more travelling round the country. It didn’t come off, as it never does, because it’s too bloody hot to move, but also because I realised that the main reason I wanted to see more of the disease-infested and God-forsaken interior of Thailand was so that I could tell people back home that I hadn’t just hung around Bangkok and Pattaya, so that they didn’t think “Ah, just another sex tourist”.
Especially as I wasn’t being a sex tourist. I am pushing fifty, and it takes more than it used to to light my fire these days. In fact I found the whole business a bit depressing this time. I still like hanging around in the sleazy parts of town, because you meet more fun people there, but I wasn’t buying. Over the years I have come to understand the background to the unpleasantly exploitative aspects of Thailand’s main industry (goes for most of the rest of South East Asia too).
It’s clear that there’s no point in blaming the girls for being promiscuous and money-grubbing. Nor, despite the universal witness of Western political correctness, it is right to blame the punters. Some of us don’t like to have to promise all our time and all our money for the rest of our lives in order to get our legs over; and nor do I believe men who want to pay for sex should do it in their own countries, as each country perverts the business by means of illogical laws, and most prostitution in Western countries is far too deeply mixed up with the drugs trade, which a lot of us would rather avoid. No, the problem in Thailand is the local men, far too many of whom want to swan around on motorbikes and swig Sang Som whiskey without doing a stroke of work. Half the young women in Thailand have been raped and abused by fathers and brothers who then effectively pimp them out. Then they find worthless boyfriends who want money without doing anything for it, and are stuck financing these shitheads for the best years of their lives. That’s why Thailand (and the Philippines, and as far as I know Cambodia and Vietnam) are heaving with whores. It’s not out fault.
Was in the relative paradise of East Asia some of the time. China and Thailand.
China
It’s building up nicely for the drug- and nationalism-fest in August. Moronic security-goons everywhere telling you you can’t go here and you can’t go there. I went for a walk in a residential area where I had conducted a romance of sorts some fifteen years ago, and was told by some uniformed turd that I couldn’t go down that street. Why not? I asked in perfectly good Chinese. The guy looked at me as if I were a Martian and summoned a female assistant standing a few yards away who put up her hand and told me “No Road!”. I said it was jolly interesting that no-one would tell me why there was no entrance to this area, and that my Embassy would be most intrigued to hear about it.
The kerfuffle over the Olympic Torch Relay showed me one thing that I shouldn’t have forgotten about – how supremely important it is to the Chinese to put on a show. I can remember thinking when the Chinese first got the slot that it was utter madness putting on the Olympics in August in Beijing – for the simple reason that it rains all the time in August in Beijing, and I lived there long enough to know. However, the Chinese think they can fix the weather. By a process known as “seeding the clouds” they can send aircraft up to cause the clouds to tip out all their rain so it doesn’t fall on the desired occasion. They did this in 1999 on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic and it worked (though who knows whether it might not have been fine anyway?). But, I thought, doing it for one day is one thing; do they really think they can do it for three weeks?
No, I discovered. They don't give a shit for what the weather will be like during the actual Olympics; what they really care about is the opening ceremony (8th August). As it happens my ex-girlfriend, whom I met out there, is the senior choreographer for this performance. For anyone outside the Chinese cultural circle (and probably for a lot of people within it, who just daren’t say so) these shows go on for about five hours and are quite staggeringly boring. For the Chinese, they are the centre of the whole thing. A good five months before the Olympics start, my ex and her fellow-choreographers have been confined in a hotel outside Beijing working 18-hour days and 7-day weeks till August. She got a day off at a traditional festival in April to see her 7-year old son but was called back in the late afternoon. I was bloody lucky to get three hours to have dinner with her. There are 10,000 people involved in this opening ceremony and about 8,000 in the closing job. You can see why they get worked up about who goes to attend the thing. But we can expect beautiful summer weather for the ceremonies and filthy pissing rain for the actual athletics.
Thailand
Thailand, of course, is full of whores. Whatever people tell you about why they go there, the real reason s that it is full of whores. I had some vague plans, and so did the (English) mate I went out there to meet, to do a bit more travelling round the country. It didn’t come off, as it never does, because it’s too bloody hot to move, but also because I realised that the main reason I wanted to see more of the disease-infested and God-forsaken interior of Thailand was so that I could tell people back home that I hadn’t just hung around Bangkok and Pattaya, so that they didn’t think “Ah, just another sex tourist”.
Especially as I wasn’t being a sex tourist. I am pushing fifty, and it takes more than it used to to light my fire these days. In fact I found the whole business a bit depressing this time. I still like hanging around in the sleazy parts of town, because you meet more fun people there, but I wasn’t buying. Over the years I have come to understand the background to the unpleasantly exploitative aspects of Thailand’s main industry (goes for most of the rest of South East Asia too).
It’s clear that there’s no point in blaming the girls for being promiscuous and money-grubbing. Nor, despite the universal witness of Western political correctness, it is right to blame the punters. Some of us don’t like to have to promise all our time and all our money for the rest of our lives in order to get our legs over; and nor do I believe men who want to pay for sex should do it in their own countries, as each country perverts the business by means of illogical laws, and most prostitution in Western countries is far too deeply mixed up with the drugs trade, which a lot of us would rather avoid. No, the problem in Thailand is the local men, far too many of whom want to swan around on motorbikes and swig Sang Som whiskey without doing a stroke of work. Half the young women in Thailand have been raped and abused by fathers and brothers who then effectively pimp them out. Then they find worthless boyfriends who want money without doing anything for it, and are stuck financing these shitheads for the best years of their lives. That’s why Thailand (and the Philippines, and as far as I know Cambodia and Vietnam) are heaving with whores. It’s not out fault.
Monday 17 March 2008
Bit of a hiatus
Haven't posted for a couple of weeks. Began with having nothing in particular to say, and then progressed via general idleness.
Principal events - making the out-of-court settlement stick with my ex-wife, giving raise to huge relief and jubilation. Going to London to see Enormous Oaf 1, the aspiring actor, star in a show - and bloody good he was too. Looking likely to get Enormous Oaf 2 to study up here in the North-West in September. All this involving a fun trip to the Great Wen, which is still horrible, but it's always nice to be reminded of the thousand ways in which it is.
Staying with friends in Sudbury, in the general direction of Harrow. My friend warned me that the Piccadilly Line was buggered for the weekend, and so was the District Line, and so I'd have to get the Bakerloo and a bus from Wembley Central. OK, an extra quid on my Oyster Card, but what the hell, life's too short. On the Sunday, however, an extra ingredient was added to the mix; the Bakerloo was closed as well, due to "a person on the line". First thought: people who are selfish enough to top themselves by diving onto a Tube line should be warned that their bodies will be desecrated by having their quarters hung up at the market cross as in medieval times; second thought: how long does it take to get a sodding corpse off the line? If they really wanted they could have normal service resumed within the hour, which would be an even better deterrent to suicidal glory-hunters. But it seems that the delights of fucking London transport up reign absolutely supreme.
Meanwhile Enormous Oaf 2, meeting me in the centre to see his brother's play, dutifully bought a train ticket to find that his train wasn't running. Great.
What seriously worries me is how Londoners put up with all this. Well, given that Londoners habitually do 10 or more hours of unpaid overtime a week to please their bosses, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. Why are we so fucking servile?
Part of the same question is, as I've asked before, why do we put up with bankers? It's clear that there's been another disaster, caused by people who have too much money to be properly regulated and still expect to be bailed out by government; are they going to come under proper control, or are we going to have to go and lynch them?
Principal events - making the out-of-court settlement stick with my ex-wife, giving raise to huge relief and jubilation. Going to London to see Enormous Oaf 1, the aspiring actor, star in a show - and bloody good he was too. Looking likely to get Enormous Oaf 2 to study up here in the North-West in September. All this involving a fun trip to the Great Wen, which is still horrible, but it's always nice to be reminded of the thousand ways in which it is.
Staying with friends in Sudbury, in the general direction of Harrow. My friend warned me that the Piccadilly Line was buggered for the weekend, and so was the District Line, and so I'd have to get the Bakerloo and a bus from Wembley Central. OK, an extra quid on my Oyster Card, but what the hell, life's too short. On the Sunday, however, an extra ingredient was added to the mix; the Bakerloo was closed as well, due to "a person on the line". First thought: people who are selfish enough to top themselves by diving onto a Tube line should be warned that their bodies will be desecrated by having their quarters hung up at the market cross as in medieval times; second thought: how long does it take to get a sodding corpse off the line? If they really wanted they could have normal service resumed within the hour, which would be an even better deterrent to suicidal glory-hunters. But it seems that the delights of fucking London transport up reign absolutely supreme.
Meanwhile Enormous Oaf 2, meeting me in the centre to see his brother's play, dutifully bought a train ticket to find that his train wasn't running. Great.
What seriously worries me is how Londoners put up with all this. Well, given that Londoners habitually do 10 or more hours of unpaid overtime a week to please their bosses, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. Why are we so fucking servile?
Part of the same question is, as I've asked before, why do we put up with bankers? It's clear that there's been another disaster, caused by people who have too much money to be properly regulated and still expect to be bailed out by government; are they going to come under proper control, or are we going to have to go and lynch them?
Sunday 2 March 2008
Why I am not a Catholic....
Largely because of their obsession with temporal as opposed to spiritual power, complete unscrupulousness in maintaining their power and influence, as best shown by giving complete support to General Franco in 1936 with his policy of murdering everyone to the left of David Cameron, in order to secure complete control of education. Not to mention the other policies; whereas Christ on the Cross said that He could have summoned twelve legions of angels to protect Him, but didn’t, Franco brought in twelve legions of Moroccan rapists to ensure the Church’s side won. Also because of their half-baked doctrine of marriage, which serves no useful purpose except to give Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh a peg to hang plots on.
More recently, see the crap-hole a Brit in the Philippines has got himself into by fathering a child on a Filipina who was not yet free of her abusive husband: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517821&in_page_id=1879
The Church is falling over itself to protect the rights of the so-called husband. As Laurence Sterne wrote of a typical Catholic, “His priests have got the keeping of his conscience”, whereas the priests have a rule-book where their conscience ought to be.
More recently, see the crap-hole a Brit in the Philippines has got himself into by fathering a child on a Filipina who was not yet free of her abusive husband: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=517821&in_page_id=1879
The Church is falling over itself to protect the rights of the so-called husband. As Laurence Sterne wrote of a typical Catholic, “His priests have got the keeping of his conscience”, whereas the priests have a rule-book where their conscience ought to be.
Saturday 1 March 2008
Good old Iceland
On the whole I think it's a good idea that Northern Rock has been nationalised. Firstly because there obviously wasn't a private buyer who wouldn't have demanded so much unchallengeable money up front as to make the whole thing unmanageable. Secondly because something needs to happen to break the taboo about nationalisation - which was the main reason the establishment, including (or especially) NuLab, was so much against it. Sorry, chaps, the idea may be here to stay now.
Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?
George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."
Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"
It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.
In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.
Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?
George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."
Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"
It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.
In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.
Friday 29 February 2008
A Centenary
Today we have a surprisingly significant literary centenary. If I had prepared myself a little better for the heavier reviews, I would have cleaned up.
In Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", the hero Hans Castorp, who has originally gone up to the TB sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin for three weeks and has found himself stuck there, because he has fallen in love with a Russian female inmate, finally gets to go to bed with the latter for the first and only time. He is thus symbolically condemned to seven years in the sanatorium, with an illness he cannot get rid of and, it is suggested, wouldn't even if he could. He only gets out in order to fight in World War I, which it is suggested he does not survive. Apart from the fact that poor old Hans is described as having grown up in the very street in Hamburg in which I used to live, the central seduction is described as occurring on 29th February 1908, which happened coincidentally to be Shrove Tuesday.
Nor sure what the relevance of this is, but feel it ought to be mentioed somewhere. After all, it is almost certain that this very evening someone somewhere is being seduced, to his of her eternal salvation or perdition...
In Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", the hero Hans Castorp, who has originally gone up to the TB sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin for three weeks and has found himself stuck there, because he has fallen in love with a Russian female inmate, finally gets to go to bed with the latter for the first and only time. He is thus symbolically condemned to seven years in the sanatorium, with an illness he cannot get rid of and, it is suggested, wouldn't even if he could. He only gets out in order to fight in World War I, which it is suggested he does not survive. Apart from the fact that poor old Hans is described as having grown up in the very street in Hamburg in which I used to live, the central seduction is described as occurring on 29th February 1908, which happened coincidentally to be Shrove Tuesday.
Nor sure what the relevance of this is, but feel it ought to be mentioed somewhere. After all, it is almost certain that this very evening someone somewhere is being seduced, to his of her eternal salvation or perdition...
February the 29th...
And a very happy ninth birthday to my dear friend Cathy, a mother of two. In fact, if I had been born 13 days early instead of eight days late, I’d be celebrating my twelfth myself.
I noticed that the BBC website was promoting a harmlessly humorous debate of who owns the 29th of Feb. As an entirely gratuitous extra day, should we have the benefit of it or our employers? If the former, shouldn’t we get the day off? After all, we aren’t getting paid any more than last February, which only contained 28 days.
A BBC correspondent called “Claire” took the following view:
“Why is everyone always looking for something free? Those of us who get paid monthly get the same amount each month whether that month contains 30 or 31 days or in February just 28 days - I never hear anyone say oh aren't I lucky that I get extra pay every day in February and just one year in four this is slightly less than the others or one year in four I get slightly less pay for each day but three out of the four I could look at it as getting slightly more. It is about time people counted "their blessings" and stopped this constant moaning and joining the ME ME ME society we are developing into!”
Well, why are employers always looking for something free? And if those of us in work were to “count our blessings” might we not find them rather less than those of the bosses who get their enhanced “blessings” win, lose or draw? And is the so-called ME ME ME society any worse than the THEM THEM THEM society most of us are in fact living in?
I understand why people have to work, but why they have to be so fucking servile I will never grasp.
And, if we start thinking about who owns February 29th, perhaps we should start thinking about who owns the rest of our lives.
I noticed that the BBC website was promoting a harmlessly humorous debate of who owns the 29th of Feb. As an entirely gratuitous extra day, should we have the benefit of it or our employers? If the former, shouldn’t we get the day off? After all, we aren’t getting paid any more than last February, which only contained 28 days.
A BBC correspondent called “Claire” took the following view:
“Why is everyone always looking for something free? Those of us who get paid monthly get the same amount each month whether that month contains 30 or 31 days or in February just 28 days - I never hear anyone say oh aren't I lucky that I get extra pay every day in February and just one year in four this is slightly less than the others or one year in four I get slightly less pay for each day but three out of the four I could look at it as getting slightly more. It is about time people counted "their blessings" and stopped this constant moaning and joining the ME ME ME society we are developing into!”
Well, why are employers always looking for something free? And if those of us in work were to “count our blessings” might we not find them rather less than those of the bosses who get their enhanced “blessings” win, lose or draw? And is the so-called ME ME ME society any worse than the THEM THEM THEM society most of us are in fact living in?
I understand why people have to work, but why they have to be so fucking servile I will never grasp.
And, if we start thinking about who owns February 29th, perhaps we should start thinking about who owns the rest of our lives.
Thursday 28 February 2008
I always hated scrambled Egg...
About a month ago, I read with some concern that the Egg Bank was peremptorily cancelling the credit cards of 161,000 of its customers, on the grounds that they represented an unacceptable credit risk, or looked likely to become one in the future. Well, that’s me buggered, I said to myself, and braced myself for an ugly letter through the mailbox (well, to be precise, looked carefully through my large pile of post which I had not yet opened as it looked too frightening). Nothing. Sigh of relief, but native wariness caused me to get on with acquiring a back-up credit card without delay.
Then, of course, came the litany of complaints from aggrieved Egg customers; hundreds of them wrote to the papers and the BBC to say that they had been ideal customers, paragons of sensible financial behaviour never missing a payment. In many cases Egg had agreed that the customer’s behaviour could not be faulted, but refused to go back on their decision. The official explanation was that “while some customers in that group may be up to date with their payments and have a good record with credit reference agencies and so on, the probability of them becoming a higher-risk customer in the future is higher than we wish to accept."
Cynics, however, suspected that it was precisely the “good” customers Egg were trying to drive away, as they are not making enough money out of them. As it happens I am in a position to provide supporting evidence for this view. Not only have many “good” customers been targeted, but the “bad” ones have not. I have heard nothing from the customer-sacking branch of Egg, although I am a disastrously imprudent manager of personal finances. I have no regular income, miss payments, max out at inappropriate times and am generally rather a naughty boy. Egg have already refused me a loan once. I get regular correspondence from them, each time thinking that the axe will now fall, but it is always to remind me to set up a Direct Debit to pay their bills. I don’t like to inform them that my bank will no longer let me do Direct Debits, such is my delinquency. My brother-in-law is also an Egg customer, and also an extremely dilatory one in most of the same respects. Neither of us have had any trouble.
So I think it can be regarded as proven that Egg is only trying to get rid of the line-toeing, regular-paying brigade while giving the feckless and imprudent the run of the place. And, as has been often pointed out, a bank is allowed to choose its customers at whim if it wants. The poor people shut out have no legal grounds for complaint. Why the insulting hypocrisy, though? Why can’t Egg just stand up and advertise itself as the bank for the irresponsible swashbuckler, and change its name to Vanity Fair or something? I might respect that.
In the meantime, why are bankers still allowed to walk our streets unmolested, without even feeling compelled to don false moustaches, burqas etc. to conceal their identity? Why do they feel so safe? I saw a Class War slogan in London recently: “The rich only sleep at night because we let them”. Why do we do that? Why?
In the meantime, let us hope that the 161,000 customers so basely excluded by Egg all default on their outstanding balances. Thing is, they’re probably not the type.
Then, of course, came the litany of complaints from aggrieved Egg customers; hundreds of them wrote to the papers and the BBC to say that they had been ideal customers, paragons of sensible financial behaviour never missing a payment. In many cases Egg had agreed that the customer’s behaviour could not be faulted, but refused to go back on their decision. The official explanation was that “while some customers in that group may be up to date with their payments and have a good record with credit reference agencies and so on, the probability of them becoming a higher-risk customer in the future is higher than we wish to accept."
Cynics, however, suspected that it was precisely the “good” customers Egg were trying to drive away, as they are not making enough money out of them. As it happens I am in a position to provide supporting evidence for this view. Not only have many “good” customers been targeted, but the “bad” ones have not. I have heard nothing from the customer-sacking branch of Egg, although I am a disastrously imprudent manager of personal finances. I have no regular income, miss payments, max out at inappropriate times and am generally rather a naughty boy. Egg have already refused me a loan once. I get regular correspondence from them, each time thinking that the axe will now fall, but it is always to remind me to set up a Direct Debit to pay their bills. I don’t like to inform them that my bank will no longer let me do Direct Debits, such is my delinquency. My brother-in-law is also an Egg customer, and also an extremely dilatory one in most of the same respects. Neither of us have had any trouble.
So I think it can be regarded as proven that Egg is only trying to get rid of the line-toeing, regular-paying brigade while giving the feckless and imprudent the run of the place. And, as has been often pointed out, a bank is allowed to choose its customers at whim if it wants. The poor people shut out have no legal grounds for complaint. Why the insulting hypocrisy, though? Why can’t Egg just stand up and advertise itself as the bank for the irresponsible swashbuckler, and change its name to Vanity Fair or something? I might respect that.
In the meantime, why are bankers still allowed to walk our streets unmolested, without even feeling compelled to don false moustaches, burqas etc. to conceal their identity? Why do they feel so safe? I saw a Class War slogan in London recently: “The rich only sleep at night because we let them”. Why do we do that? Why?
In the meantime, let us hope that the 161,000 customers so basely excluded by Egg all default on their outstanding balances. Thing is, they’re probably not the type.
Wednesday 27 February 2008
So-called benefit reforms
I see the latest government initiative is all about forcing people on benefits to take jobs. I don't doubt that quite a few people have been utterly demoralised by unemployment and might be helped by being given a job to go to - trouble is it would probably be a rather pointless one. And if they try the same trick on the hundreds of thousands who find themselves in the penumbra of mental illness, what is going to happen? Most workplaces these days are totally devoted to the idea of high-pressure long-hours I've-done-more-than-you crap, and how is someone fragile going to survive in that? These vulnerable people are all going to run away or get sacked in weeks. If we had proper government and union monitoring of working hours and conditions people might survive. That means eight hours maximum (and seven for preference). If you want to keep the ultra-competitive workplace, you'll have to accept three million on benefits. And counting. A lot of us can't cope, and don't want to.
Tuesday 26 February 2008
Not exactly unexpected.....
We notice that the bodies of murdered children are being found, with probably more to come, in Jersey. One of their official representatives was being given a well-deserved grilling by Paxman last night for having said that the main issue was the maintenance of the international reputation of Jersey for the benefit of rich tax-evaders, implying that any murders of children had better be swept under the carpet for that reason.
Now, Jersey is all about rich bastards dodging their taxes. To keep taxes down you have to keep your costs down. Children in children's homes are a dead loss in economic terms. Getting rid of them makes obvious financial sense. Can anyone really expect anything else from the sort of people who run tax havens? After all, we're being told every day that making rich people obey the law will only drive them elsewhere....perhaps some new tax haven can provide an openly accessible child disposal service?
Equally unsurprisingly, I heard today from the friend who recently started work in a Chinese medicine shop. On her first day, she apparently mishandled the credit card processing machine, having received zero training in using it, and thus a customer's payment wasn't processed properly, costing the shop about £100. It wasn't spelt out, but it sounded like she will have this amount docked from her pay. Is this legal? Five will get you ten that it isn't. Do the non-unionised Chinese shops think it can be done? Five will get you ten they do.
Now, Jersey is all about rich bastards dodging their taxes. To keep taxes down you have to keep your costs down. Children in children's homes are a dead loss in economic terms. Getting rid of them makes obvious financial sense. Can anyone really expect anything else from the sort of people who run tax havens? After all, we're being told every day that making rich people obey the law will only drive them elsewhere....perhaps some new tax haven can provide an openly accessible child disposal service?
Equally unsurprisingly, I heard today from the friend who recently started work in a Chinese medicine shop. On her first day, she apparently mishandled the credit card processing machine, having received zero training in using it, and thus a customer's payment wasn't processed properly, costing the shop about £100. It wasn't spelt out, but it sounded like she will have this amount docked from her pay. Is this legal? Five will get you ten that it isn't. Do the non-unionised Chinese shops think it can be done? Five will get you ten they do.
Sunday 24 February 2008
Bring on the economic collapse!
When the hard Left and the hard Right find themselves in agreement it is usually not a pretty sight. But today I came across a piece by one of my favourite ultra-reactionary writers, the late Simon Raven, which I thoroughly agreed with. It came in a review of Anthony Sampson’s “Anatomy of Britain”, written in 1962, a long time before the dreary Blatcherism it prefigured:
“What it amounts to, then, is that the cure Mr Sampson proposes (more and more technical efficiency, professionalism at all levels, smart sales talk for our products) is far worse than the disease he diagnoses (complacency, nepotism, charm, the amateur spirit). But, says Mr Sampson resolutely, if we don’t take the cure we shall die, i.e. we shall go broke. Myself, I am beginning to think this might be a very good thing, if only because it would mean an end of those hatchet-faced middlemen guzzling up smoked salmon in Quaglino’s. What is wanted is less industry and more Horace, who points out that the surest way of being happy is to make the best of what you’ve got. All this talk of production and competition has gone on so long and so loudly that people have forgotten what they’re competing for. The answer is six feet of earth, and that pretty quickly; once you get that into your head, it is clear that Latin verses are every bit as relevant – or irrelevant – as money-grubbing or Sputniks, and make far less noise and smell.”
Yes, bring on the banking collapses, bring on the high taxes which might drive the rich out of London – make my fucking day – bring on the plunging house prices, which promise at least to make the Daily Mail an entertaining read for once, out with the horrible non-jobs in pointless sectors like consultancy and PR, which only exist because there’s too much money sloshing around, and let’s all get back to making a living out of things which have a bit of point to them. I wouldn’t even mind slogging away at Latin verses to achieve that.
“What it amounts to, then, is that the cure Mr Sampson proposes (more and more technical efficiency, professionalism at all levels, smart sales talk for our products) is far worse than the disease he diagnoses (complacency, nepotism, charm, the amateur spirit). But, says Mr Sampson resolutely, if we don’t take the cure we shall die, i.e. we shall go broke. Myself, I am beginning to think this might be a very good thing, if only because it would mean an end of those hatchet-faced middlemen guzzling up smoked salmon in Quaglino’s. What is wanted is less industry and more Horace, who points out that the surest way of being happy is to make the best of what you’ve got. All this talk of production and competition has gone on so long and so loudly that people have forgotten what they’re competing for. The answer is six feet of earth, and that pretty quickly; once you get that into your head, it is clear that Latin verses are every bit as relevant – or irrelevant – as money-grubbing or Sputniks, and make far less noise and smell.”
Yes, bring on the banking collapses, bring on the high taxes which might drive the rich out of London – make my fucking day – bring on the plunging house prices, which promise at least to make the Daily Mail an entertaining read for once, out with the horrible non-jobs in pointless sectors like consultancy and PR, which only exist because there’s too much money sloshing around, and let’s all get back to making a living out of things which have a bit of point to them. I wouldn’t even mind slogging away at Latin verses to achieve that.
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