2016 Year of The Brump

You can tell that my heart's not really in this blog because I hate complaining and whining but feel that I have to do this one about stuff that annoys the hell out of me.

Brump is my word for the car crash that is Brexit and Donald Trump.

The two big intertwined snakes of Brexit and Donald Trump's Victory have left me open to accusations that I don't know what democracy is and I should shut the f**k up and accept the "will of the people".

My counter argument is that the people who voted were blatantly lied to. When I point this out I'm told that people "should have known" that they were lies.  Well if you go and buy a Ferrari that is advertised as having a top speed of 300 mph, it gets delivered , and it wont top 30 mph because it only has a 500cc engine , what would you do? Should you have known?

Brexit promised immigration control, money for the NHS , more control and none of those are going to happen and in fact our government are selling off everything to foreign governments while still plunging the county into further debt. It's funny how austerity only hits the poor.

Trump promised to take on big business , bring manufacturing jobs back to the USA, build a wall, to keep out Mexicans but the electorate were wary that Hilary Clinton would just get into bed with bug business and the rich would get richer and the poor will get poorer.

I remember Margaret Thatcher once saying she wanted a "return to Victorian values" and for years I thought she meant no sex, no nudity, no swearing, but then I realise that what she really meant was that she wanted a slave underclass who didn't need paying because they would just kow-tow to their betters. That's what the Tory "Austerity" program is aimed at.

These two events (Brexit / Trump) have validated racist and homophobic opinions resulting in people being attacked and killed, the fall out from these events have proved that they are wrong.

And back to democracy. A vote should be based on truths and not the opinions of the best con men. Here's Wikipedia's definition.

Check out Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation here which gives a good insight into why we are in this situation

OK That's it out of my system but we are in a bad place and I hope that the good and sensible ones among us can mobilize and do something about it.

Have a great day my friends.

Musically we'll go with Dick Gaughan's "World Turned Upside Down" and provide some amusing political insights from PJ O'Rourke.

Dark As The Dungeon

This morning I got up and it was still dark, at 6:20 it was still dark, and the Johnny Cash song "Dark As The Dungeon" came to mind, and I thought of the chorus:

"And it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,

 Where danger is double and pleasures are few,

 Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines 

And it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines."

And while the analogy of mining is there, this is a perfect analogy for the state of the low paid, unemployed, sick and disabled in most western societies. In the sixties and seventies people could aspire to buy their own own house , now with the destruction of social housing by the introduction of the "right to buy"  program , that is now beyond the reach of most people.

People with what are considered reasonable jobs struggle to make ends meet and are constantly spending time filing in forms in order to get help. When I was last unemployed, I was instructed to spend seven and a half hours a day looking for a job. How soul destroying, I didn't do that but did volunteer work and some work with a start up company, but not everyone can do the latter, especially if there a bills to pay and mouths to feed.

The proliferation of food banks and charities like Help For Heroes disgusts me, not because I don't think that these charities do great work but because governments allow companies to pay starvation wages, cut back benefits, send people to war to protect financial interests (anywhere with oil needs democracy) and then when they come back from war the government wash their hands and leave it to charities like Help For Heroes to look after them.

Corporation tax is much lower than income tax I believe , "entrepreneurs" like Richard Branson make money off government handouts via tax breaks and the like.

The Basic Income concept is an excellent concept. Everyone would have it, people who work would have significantly more. If the people at the bottom end of the income scale hade disposable income, the economy would have a huge boost. It doesn't matter that they spend money on beer, cigarettes , Sky TV, Crisps and chocolate, that would boost all those markets who would then have to employ more people to cope with the demand. A lot of people would go out for mor meals , the cinema , have more holidays.

Instead governments expect them to work for nothing, (their benefits if they are lucky) and spend time filling in countless forms, waiting for someone to look and decide whether they are a deserving case.

Right that's today's thoughts out of the way.

Taking Back Control

They Did It ... The took Back Control

I'm not saying anything about the situation, but I heard a great allegory for the "Taking Back Control" situation yesterday which I have adapted because it was made by someone far more intelligent and eloquent that I (or should it be me).

The Taking Back Control bit of Brexit and be analogised thus:

You can't drive so you take the taxi.

But you think how much this is costing you and your not happy.

Some unelected body (the taxi driver) is taking you home (because you gave him a mandate to by getting in his taxi) and you are getting madder and madder

You have no idea what you are going to do, no ability to actually drive, but the voices in your head tell you this is YOUR opportunity to take back control

So you shove him out the way , grab the wheel and you, the driver and the taxi veer off the road into the river.

Then you blame the driver and the people laughing on the river bank.

I think that's accurate.

Feeling Ripped Off and Some Right Wingers I Can Definitely Live With

Over the last couple of weeks I've felt slightly ripped off , well I was definitely ripped off in one instance. For a change I thought I'd pay by cash for a Metro ticket. The Metro is an excellent service but I put a coin in the slot and it didn't drop, so I thought I'll be a bit more forceful with the second. It just jammed, but there was £3 jammed in that machine. While I was trying to sort my ticket I missed the trait , next one in 15 minutes, so I'd lost 15 minutes of my time already. I paid with a card and caught the next train, but no one answered the Help Intercom and there was no answer on the phone line. It was 9 O Clock at night but help and inspectors were absent, but you can bet if I hadn't bought a ticket there would have been someone to catch me.

Now it's OK for me , £3 is nothing , but imagine that was my last £3 and was somewhere like Brockley Whins, I would have been very stuck with no way home but a very long walk. The thing is the time it takes to get sorted to deal with these things far outweigh what the thing is worth. I reckon it would take a couple of hours of my time plus the Metro people's times, and this is a major problem for the poor in this country. In order to get things that may be rightfully theirs they have to spend a lot of time waiting. A couple of hours of my time is worth a lot more than three ponds to me.

Next I bought a few things from Tesco. I thought it was a bit more expensive than I expected and checked my receipt and noticed a single item that I thought was a pound came out at £1.58 . 58p really isn't worth any of my time , but to someone counting the pennies that could be a lot of money. The thing is if companies like Tesco do this a lot there will be a lot of people with less money in their pockets than they should.

Very True

My politics are Socialist / Left Wing though I was brought up to vote Tory but if the right wing were led by people like Nick Hanauer and PJ O'Rourke then the world would be a better place. Nick Hanauer is sensible and caring and a capitalist. PJ O'Rourke is also a capitalist  but well aware of the idiocies of excess. I am currently reading "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages The Bastards" and he manages to argue that socialism is unworkable using the analogy of an extended family and within his analogy he is right, but the reality is that his analogy to too small to reflect the real situation, however wherever you are on the political spectrum he is worth reading and he has Donald Trump nailed,

Anyway that's some gripes out of my system, enjoy the sense spoken by Nick Hanauer and the wit of PJ O'Rourke , and have a great weekend.

First Post

Boris Confident HE will be OK

This is going to be my blog for political and annoying rants and statements. There's nothing here at the moments and really to be quite honest I would love it if I never posted on here because the world and my life would be perfect , but while the redtops , the tories , fox "news" , the GOP and the like exist , I think there will be pleant.

This mornings headline againts Jeremy Corbyn using "slave labour" to make campaign T-Shirts in the Sunday Mail saying "How Low Can He Go?" ... well he has a long way to go to reach the depths of the Mail and The Sun

The The Sunday Express has Boris Johnson promising that the EU will capitaulate and give us what we want. Less thean a month after the guy led a campaign based on lies they believe his promises ?

Anyway this is my Hello.