A Single to Basle and a Return for the Missus please!
Over the past few days or so, the media has been busy focusing on individuals who’ve been pooping – well that too, sorry, popping off to clinics in Switzerland, where they are able to kill themselves, albeit, with the assistance of the clinic’s personnel. These ‘clinicians’ administer various injections and barbiturates and wow, you’re a gonna. Proponents of euthanasia always seems so nice and reasonable and yet are utterly unable to seriously comprehend how any nice and reasonable person could possibly object to someone in the last stages of an agonizing terminal illness wanting to die. Well my darlings, I object and so do many others, why, because people aren’t nice and reasonable.
The guillotine isn’t nice and reasonable either but in many ways, the French Revolution is responsible for much of the present situation. You see my dears, apart from giving birth to the twins of nationalism and liberalism, there was Madame Défarge et al and they i.e. Comte and all that nonsense about Positivism, Logical Positives blah, blah, blah via Mrs. Webb saying “we must have facts, facts, facts”, oh yes Marx too, social Darwinists, H G Wells, collectivists of the right and left varieties, the whole canoodle, they all flirted with eugenics and are quietly flirting still.
Most of them secretly go along with Lenin when he said you have to break eggs to make omelets but appear oh so reasonable and nice in the public domain. Let me explain some more dear reader. A lot of people from the liberal elite for instance, don’t really believe that all human life is sacrosanct or of equal worth. At heart, they’re basically unreconstructed eugenicists from the 1930s who’d still like to stop poor people breeding because they think they’re stupid, judge people solely by what job they do, are obsessed with academic success, totally obsessed with intelligence and so on and on. They also believe that only they can decide when a life is worth ending. Only they are intelligent enough to do this and would really like an elite - which naturally includes themselves - to decide what constitutes a life worth living.
Being elitist, they naturally have no idea of how ordinary people think and operate but believe that in time, everybody will become nice and reasonable, like what they are [sic]. Believe me; they are clueless as to how the world really operates which is really a series of selfish individual actions; Sidney Carters they are not. Their silly ideas feed into society at large and the man in the street picks them up and in a muddled sort of way, believes that unless he can enjoy a life of unbridled comfort and good health, life is just not, well, living.
I can see that if a guy is suffering from motor neuron disease, the idea of later being unable to swallow or even breath must be frightening. If Granny has been told she is starting to suffer from Alzheimer’s, then it must be tempting to end it all before she looses her marbles. Now suddenly, if you can rake up three thousand quid, you can make your way to the Davros [sic] clinic and get exterminated, so to speak.
If ever the customs and law of that particular Canton are adopted internationally, the results could be the ruin of us all, I mean, where do you draw the line. Already, a kid of 24 who was paralyzed neck down, has died in Basle and he wasn’t even terminally ill. Let’s imagine that what’s taking place in Switzerland comes to London, the possibilities are endless. You could have suicide clinics attached to Tescos or Boots; discreet of course, they could offer discounts for cash payments and even hand out evaluation forms before um…pot plants a plenty with a nice leggy blond, soothing music, even coffee too and an in-house solicitor ready to sort out Mum’s little legacy.
Let’s imagine what the clients would be like. Dad pressurized into doing the decent thing because his kids are heavily in debt. The boy next door fed up because his girlfriend no longer loves him. How about the man next door who suddenly discovers that he’s no longer attractive to the opposite sex because he’s either lost his well-paid job or just become old and grisly. Soldiers who, well, just think it was a shame that his or her mates got killed and not them. The list is endless really from people who are bonkers to somebody who just feels a bit under the weather. Oh, hears one, a patient from the local hospital who’s been persuaded that he or she is taking up a valuable bed space; a kind of involuntary euthanasia if you like.
I know I’m having a bit of a rant but I’m quite serious; let’s take abortion for instance. In many ways, laws to allow women to control their bodies are eminently sensible in a liberal society but, and the but is this, you are destroying a life form and you’re claiming that an unconscious life has no rights. In the United States they used to sanction partial birth abortions. This was used for late abortions whereby the doctor or nurse used forceps or whatever they’re called to suck out the brain. If the foetus was say six months old, five month old foetuses/babies were being born up stairs in maternity. I don’t think such a position is sustainable in the longer term. The same thing will happen when euthanasia becomes more obviously involuntary; just as with these jaunts to Basle, we’ve crossed the Rubicon. I respect people more who jump off cliffs or bridges, there’s a sort of honesty about them, not like the guy who the day before the visit to the ‘clinic’, went around looking at museums.
I’ll tell you one thing, if this ever catches on; they’ll be a mint of money to be made once value for money savings click in. Personally, I’d go for ‘bash over head with mallet’ ‘cos it’s cheap and then pass on the corpses as dog meat; hey, I might even open a chain of restaurants.
God bless
Andrew
Ola, camaradas! Comos estas?
Now the smoke’s blown away from the political battle for America’s top job, depriving yours truly of the satisfaction I was getting writing harsh things about the (now outward bound) Encumbrance in the White House, I need new targets. The outgoing encumbrance in the big house on the Potomac’s lost his target-ability. Who wants to hack twigs off a defeated Shrub? The ludicrous spectacle of governments giving tax money to incompetent capitalists has a nice look to it. Especially as financial corruption rears its head in the American and British news, leading Republicans and Conservatives getting arrested and investigated. Damien the Omen, and the Governor of Illinois…
Old Karl Marx was on about the great banks owning the politicians over 100 years ago. Let’s see… What did I learn at school? In history? Oh yes, monopolies (giant corporations who act together to control the whole marketplace) forcing price too high; and then price crash, and big recession often pre a war, the sloppy politico’s quick and dirty fix for all credit crises; the run on the Paris banks after 1848 then the launching of aggressive war against Prussia, Algeria, Mali, Ghana, Songhai, Mexico, Italy and Guinea, Vietnam and Cambodia, by Louis Napoleon, Emperor Napoleon III, 20-odd years later rescuing “his sovereignty” i.e. his banks’ solvency by robbing other countries and selling his own countrymen weapons and kit for war. A worldwide war for territory began as he and Leopold the Belgian Emperor hired mercenaries to do what they dared not arm and pay their own citizens for; to conquer civilians and face sniping guerilla resistance forever off the armed natives of Western Africa and Southeast Asia.
Then World War as the other desperate thieves following his success started carving quick dirty shallow Empires out of the defenseless flesh of the Congo, Armenia, Africa, China, and Asia. The renewed persecution of the Hebrews among pseudo-Christian Europeans. The extinction of 90% of the original Americans. The Treaty of Berlin and the equal barbarous cruel idiot Treaty of Versailles… The ascendancy over Britain’s African Empires of the bloody murdering racists and warmonger gangs led by the son of a vicar who started the Anglo-South African Wars (Matabele, Zulu, 2nd Boer, Shona…) and his warlord sidekick who invented concentration camps. And finally, the Nazis, the depth of human evil, just a dozen years before my time.
On the way here today I saw a Kensal Rise local paper headlined: Jewish students attacked. Sad bastard racists, I’ve met a few, who hasn’t in a 7-million-people city? They pick on school and college kids, like young Stephen Lawrence over the river 15 years ago. It’s the symptoms of society being ill. And so far every thing in America has spread east across the Atlantic in my 5 decades alive; I would love to find the links (doubtless buried by the CIA) between the various racist groups (Ku Klux Klan, al-Qaeda etc.) from the mid-West to the mid-East and identify the virus involved. Attacking minorities, giving tax money to bankers… Maybe Capitalism’s ill, as the SWP say. But capitalism’s the way Western society, and worldwide society since ’92, works. Right?
Just a coincidence? In Europe 100 years ago the slippery slope to World War was marked by such anti-Semitic incidents as the Dreyfus case for example in France…
And sick societies throw wars the way sick animals throw fevers. So, can the brand new Black President/Female Secretary of State check America’s relapse into fever dragging the rest of the Western World with it…? The other night in President-elect Obama’s home state of Illinois, the (Republican) State Governor was busted by the FBI over the blatant auctioning for $2 million of the Senate seat Barack Hussein Obama’s vacated to enter 100 Pennsylvania Avenue. A construction worker from New Jersey, an American expat here in London, said, “Yeah, see, that’s the great thing about America. Nobody’s above corruption. See here, you Brits, you let a guy go ‘cos he was at school with Prince Charlie or he f***ed the Queen’s corgi or some sh*t. But in the States, you’re corrupt, your ass is grass, the FBI march right in your own mansion in your State capital Springfield and hauls your ass outa there…” Whether or not the formula “new broom = clean sweep” works for the USA or turns out The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Pt.2, we’re all in for a few very interesting years.
Sayonara! See yaw later,
Marty
EE-by-Gum
The media is cock-a-hoop about the conviction of Sharon/Shannon Matthews for kidnapping. No, that’s not right, surely some mistake here, right, ah; wasn’t it Shannon Airport where the transatlantic flights used to refuel on their way to North America in black and white? I’m definitely correct about that one; I can see it now, the BOAC flight to La Guardia carrying Elizabeth Taylor and her husbands…and I’m starting to stray way of track here, so let’s begin all over again
That’s it, I’ve got it now, it was Khan, nope, Karen Matthews, yep, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Ms Matthews took part in kidnapping her own daughter with an ‘Uncle’ of sorts by drugging and tying her up, in order to collect the reward money. As I understand, it was ‘Uncle’s’ flat where poor Shannon was kept. Under a strict regime of house rules - like not going near the window - - this poor little waif was kept under lock and key for a number of days until the police rescued her, after a tip-off from a neighbour.
How do you get to Dewsbury? Isn’t it somewhere near Halifax or Bradford and do you mainline it from King’s Cross. I have a feeling that in order to capture the essential flavour of the place, you best go by National Express Coach. You could of course drive and stop at one of those motorway service station thingies and, and ask in a middle-class accent for a cup of coffee, hmm, that sounds rather dangerous.
Sticking in that vein - well that too - when this terrible story first broke, I was all of a tis because I kept getting the place mixed up with other LOCALS like Portsmouth and Oxford; no I’m not thinking of former Polytechnics and the Russell group of universities. What I was thinking of was the neighbourhood in Portsmouth where the local population cried tally-ho and went a hunting for pedophiles - courtesy of a redtop which name and shamed ‘em. There was also a rundown estate on the outskirts of Oxford, where the kids would nick cars and after few hand-break turns, the joy ride would reach a spectacular climax with the vehicles being torched – in Technicolor. I think there was a certain amount of beating people up and whatnot but no matter, the estate called either Black Leys or Berkeley[s] - I forget now - resembled in my mind the place where Karen Matthews lived. The Portsmouth job came into view because her current partner turned out to be a real live pedophile and moreover, the celebration in the street - after poor Shannon was found - resembled the crowds in Portsmouth too. Oh yes, one more thing, for some strange reason, the crowd and the houses reminded me of a BNP convention – at night – attacking the dark moral degeneracy of single mums and pedophilia; all courtesy of the liberal state/1960s, I suppose they’d say.
The police said that ‘Uncle’ had a low IQ, you can say that again. Poor ‘Uncle’ presumably hadn’t factored in how Shannon could possible stay silent for all eternity. In addition, he also didn’t count on his ex Missus blabbing to her girlfriends. The estate where Shannon grew up is really the classic under-class ghetto where the nuclear family has completely broken down and one more thing, there is NO work.
Presumably, about 40 years ago, everybody would be working – more or less – and there’d be an air of fake prosperity – you know the thing, the early 60s black and white kitchen-sink drama. Fathers too would probably be more common but I’ll tell you one thing, these areas were still a sea of child abuse, if not, more so.
See yer
Andrew
Evictions of the world unit!
One of our esteemed members of the Fabulous Writing Group has, how I can put this, um, let’s start again. Marcus Aurelius the clever Roman emperor has written that loss is change or as the froggies would say: “tout va changer maintenant”. Tout va changer mainenant, you can say that again and if you are evicted, everything changes immediately, tout sweet [sic] so immediate that all the old problems like owing money, leaking pipes, inadequate heating etc just vanish in a puff-puff of smoke. I cannot describe the utter relief of being booted out of flats and discovering that dear old Marcus was right all along. Call me Mr. Irresponsibility but I love ‘moving on’, for me it’s far better than arriving.
In the last five years I’ve been kicked out - I’m sorry, I’ll try and use more temperate language – what I meant to say is that my ‘moving on’ didn’t always correspond with my intention to um, not ‘move on’. The last time my ‘moving on’ conflicted with my desire to stay put, I managed to handle the whole thing so competently that I ended up having to “vacate the premises” in M&S or legal speak at 6.30pm in January. It was cold and I had nowhere to go.
For old hands, when ‘moving on’ conflicts with preferring to remain, the real problem is that you lose everything, accept for stiffs, sorry stuff you can’t carry. I actually have an old John Lewis bathroom radio which has incredibly survived two ‘moving ons’. Stiff in a way, the first time I forgot it and actually went back and got it [sic], after a kind soul had a spare set of keys. I picked up some other things too but none of them actually survived the second coming.
Forget about smelly feet, the real problem with having to relocate is that it generates a certain amount of stinky fear and foreboding, a bit like death. Once the ‘thing’ has happened, there’s a certain spring in your step, life will never be the same again, and you’re embarking on a new journey. Sometimes – but you have to be quite energetic and fit – the prospect of ‘moving on’ can be quite exciting. Eventually, you forget all about it; the warning letters, notices to quit, court hearings and finally, the dreaded knock, knock on the door, all are just distant memories. I have to confess that I’ve never actually read any of this stuff because it all goes straight into the bin unopened but I’ve heard about it from others. Once, when they had to let me go, the pervy, sorry, previous landlord had the cheek to try and get me to pay up the rent arrears. While she kept writing and ringing, I had to move on yet again and then, well, the landlord kind of lost interest but fair dues for trying.
Cheers
Andrew
Bloggers
I understand from her in the cemetery that we’ve been receiving comments about our blog that are not, how can I put this, entirely without foundation, let me explain some more my darlings. It is true that I have a morbid fascination with death and cemeteries, in fact, I revel in the whole business but for some reason, the various undertakers I apply to, seem unable to offer me any firm undertakings. I think this is totally unfair and I intend to write to my MP and ask for his forgiveness.
Therefore I’m delighted to take this opportunity to ask all good folks reading this little old blog to comment to their heart’s content. We particularly enjoy receiving comments from those people whose English is peppered with those gorgeous double negatives and much subject/object pronoun confusion that so amuses the Americans. Please get writing and we’ll ensure that you get a speedy reply before one of us dies. If you are one of those popes, sorry, people, who like to make highly critical comments about various individuals i.e. our pickles, please, please send them - as sicily as they are - to our new centre in Naples at SNAV : Stazione Marittima Molo Angioino , I - 80133 Napoli, Italy.
Years
Dr Death Vader
A doctor calls
Confused and can’t remember who the Prime Minister is; keep coughing up blood, what’s a guy to do. First, he practices holistic therapy so his wife tries various remedies and later, much later, a doctor calls and the bloke is whisked off in an ambulance to St. Thomas’s. In fact it’s very iffy; open heart surgery and all that after the bacterium invaded the heart valves and kidneys, oh yes, dialysis too.
Coming from a family of medics, when I heard this story last week, it reminded me that most people are utterly clueless when it comes to seeking treatment in a medical emergency. Rule no 1; never, ever go to a GP or rely on the doctor on-call system when the surgery is closed. Call an ambulance immediately but better still, go to one of the main central London teaching hospitals by car and you’ll probably live. These are the only people who really know what they are doing,
If you want to commit suicide, Rule no 2, book in to a private hospital where with any luck, they’ll muck up the anaesthetic and you’ll soon be a goner in no time. Much better, try and jump up after brain surgery during the night and walk out to an NHS hospital.
With luck, you’ll expire in the plush reception area and there won’t be any crash team to revive you. The bad luck is that they’ll already have taken your credit card details and you’ll get charged for dying; with a modest reduction of course.
Cheers
Andrew
The Birthday Party
I was in Tesco’s in Soho’s Dean Street when the telephone rang. The number came up as unknown and I thought it must be a debt collector or something sinister. I couldn’t hear what the guy was saying and when me and the Mrs. [sic] got outside, I found I had a vice, sorry, voice message and it was Tony. Tony is a mate of my priest friend and we all met up once at one of Tony’s New Year’s Eve parties which consisted of me, the Mrs., the Priest, Tony of course, his ex wife, his new boyfriend, and his ex wife’s mum suffering from sporadic dementia and liable to tell anybody to fuck off for no apparent reason. The Mrs. was a little subdued after complementing Ethel or was it Enid, on her nice shiny red shoes and was then told to: “go fuck yourself” or words to that effect.
It transpired that I’d phoned Tony earlier in the week by mistake; I was actually phoning another Tony at work and forgot that Tony with the dot is my mate’s mate. After exchanging all the usual pleasantries, I said to the Mrs. that Tony had invited us both to the Canary Islands for Christmas and added as an afterthought that he also suspected that I hadn’t just phoned him by mistake. The Mrs. said: “Can we go for a coffee in that Italian place you know ‘cos you’re paying darling.”
It was great coffee and I explained to her indoors that Tony was still living with his ex boyfriend in the flat they rent together but that he’d found a new sort of him outdoors – I suppose a kind of outdoor relief really, sorry. I said that the Canary job sounded a little odd because Tony was going with his ex boyfriend cum flat mate plus boyfriend. I wasn’t too sure how we’d fit into all of this i.e. who’d be sleeping with whom and the Mrs. said: “Sweetheart, I’ll pay for the coffees if you like” and promptly ordered a cake and another pot of coffee.
I told her that Tony had updated me on the priest’s project to find a long term partner, a love of his life, if you like. Apparently, a huge birthday party had been arranged at his sister’s house in Surrey – it was a special one for his fiftyish – hey, why wasn’t I invited? Family was being flown in from abroad and that includes Australia. Others attending were church people, young Muslims, teachers from his school, various spiritualists/masseurs, catechumens, caterers and whatnot and this bash was scheduled to kick off in the green pastures at around eight. It was precisely at this time that Tony with the ex who wasn’t an ex then arrived at the house and the mobile went off. In fact, they were talking with the priest’s younger brother and couldn’t really hear what was being said.
In very sheepish tones, the priest explained that he couldn’t come because he’d finally met the man of his dreams, he really couldn’t believe it but it had finally happened. The point was that the priest still wanted the party to go ahead because he’d be coming on later with Mr. Right, right. In fact, the party would be a kind of reception minus wedding cake - so the priest said - and Tony imparted this information on to his somewhat startled parents who had flown over from Spain.
Yes, the priest never did turn up but his mum and dad were thrilled that finally the last of their five children were settling down. I said to Tony that I never knew about this affair at all, that Father X had never once mentioned it to me. Basically what happened was this. Father X had been on the chatlines and had invited a young Muslim guy around to his flat for ‘chats’ at twenty past ten in the morning. By lunchtime, they decided to get married but - so I’m told – couldn’t find a registry office that could undertake a civil partnership wedding on the spot, so to speak. At eight in the evening, they decided to arrive at the birthday party later to announce the glad tidings. The story gets a bit hazy but sometime around ten, the young Mr. Bin Laden wanted some money and they were um, divorced by midnight. I told the Mrs. this and she said: “ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha, ha ha.” I’ve never known her laugh so much. She even started again quite spontaneously on the bus going home. And then I started.
See yer
Andrew
Sunny Day Girls Sunny days in London in Autumn are like honest politicians; exceedingly rare. After all, power tends to corrupt. As Lord Acton pointed out. Fresh from the shock of Gordon Brown, New Labour’s ex-chancellor and archdeacon of frugality, handing out a hundred billion to any impoverished wee f*** with a credit-strapped bank to his name, I’ve just learned courtesy of today’s Evening Standard that Our Wonderful Government’s earmarked one-and-a-half million for social housing. To house the homeless (largely made so by the credit con, oops, crunch.). wow, Our wonderful Government cares… So… Anyway I saw someone walking along looking pensive and asked her why and she said she was thinking about the American elections. This surprised me a bit because we’re in London , England and does it matter who rules the USA? Yes apparently because her brother’s mate’s a squaddy in Irghanistan and her mum’s got emphysema? I struggle with the logic. Suddenly I reach Epiphany. That’s it; I realize in a flash all I’ve suspected was true. Logic and politics are two different things ; it’s nothing to do with intelligence. The young woman’s sincere and bright and awake and yet she’s convinced her brother’s friends and her mum’s lives somehow depend on who becomes the 44th President of those United States. Sad to say, there’s even a bit of truth in that. After all if you’re sent out on Lend-Lease to guard Halliburton’s gas deals in Irghanistan you’re likelier to get killed if Dub The Shrub’s still the White House encumbrance. And while the U.K. economy’s still treaty-locked to America’s banks, the money available for our Health Service’s tied up in a chain of vulnerable foreign banks who write cheques in dollars for f**** sake. So you could be right on both counts. I’m a genius and I’m still puzzled why we’re ignoring our own army chief-of-staff’s judgment and established professional standards (see last week’s inquest verdict on RAF C-130 crash) to sacrifice soldiers and aircrew for a power who loaned the Nazis money, laundered their loot, and charged us compound interest on loans to defend ourselves against their escaped monster in world war 2…. My favourite American political commentator, a famous MIT professor, reckons it’s inevitable: " …if it is a well managed financial institution, say Goldman Sachs, it will take into account risks to itself, but the crucial phrase here is to itself. It does not take into account systemic risks, risks to the whole system if Goldman Sachs takes a substantial loss. And what that means is that risks are underpriced. There are more risks taken than should be taken in an efficiently working system that was accounting for all the implications. More, this mispricing is simply built into the market system and the liberalization of finance. The consequences of underpricing risks are that risks become more frequent, and, when there are failures the costs are higher than taken into account. Crises become more frequent and also rise in scale as the scope and range of financial transactions increases. Of course, all this is increased still further by the fanaticism of the market fundamentalists who dismantled the regulatory apparatus and permitted the creation of exotic and opaque financial instruments. It is a kind of irrational fundamentalism because it is clear that weakening regulatory mechanisms in a market system has a built-in risk of disastrous crisis. These are senseless acts except in that they are in the short-term interest of the masters of the economy and of the society. The financial corporations can and did make tremendous short term profits from pursuing extremely risky actions, including especially deregulation, which harm the general economy, but don't harm them, at least in the short term that guides planning. You couldn't predict the exact moment at which there would be a severe crisis, and you couldn't predict the exact scale of the crisis, but that one would come was obvious. In fact, there have been serious and repeated crises during this period of increasing deregulation. It is just that they hadn't yet hit so hard at the center of wealth and power before, but have instead hit mostly the third world. So, again, the crises are predictable and predicted. There was a book, for example, ten years ago, by two very well respected international economists, John Eatwell and Lance Taylor - Global Finance at Risk - in which they ran through the pretty elementary logic of how financial liberalization underprices risk and therefore leads to regular systemic risks and failures, sometimes serious. They also outline ways of dealing with the problem, but those were ignored because decision makers in the corporate and political systems, which are about the same, were making short term gains for themselves…" .[Prof. N. Chomsky interviewed by Simone Bruno for ZNet Oct.13th 2008] Pretty much Lord Acton’s verdict all those years ago. So yes, miss, I’m afraid the US elections probably affect everybody else too. Because their giant-sized economy affects everybody else’s. Perhaps it’s time Great Britain and other countries saw through the sham of the Perfect Democracy Over There and stood up for their own ideas, with a bit of pride in their own history... I notice French and German banks are still breasting the waves. Perhaps not being so gullible as to loan the Shrub their armies has something to do with that? Later, alligators! Marty
HATS
I was chatting this afternoon with one of our esteemed writers about hats. Basically, one of our number explained over a ciggy break how members of his family used to kill one another over a hat – during the rainy season of course. We then had further chats about service station towns, Afghanistan and whatnot and then, and then I suppose I ought to come to the main point of this blog which actually is, um, about hats.
If you take a service station town like Leicester – incidentally it has a quite decent rail service from St. Pancreas, sorry Pancras – which close to the M1 motorway; all the ‘chav’ lads in the 1950s through to the early ‘60s all wore hats. In fact, even ‘chav’ dad and grandpa wore a hat; like what they did [sic] when they were queuing up for the dole in the 1930s. On the other hand, when the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas Hume went to the palace in October 1964 to offer his resignation to Her Majesty the Queen - after he was booted out by Harold Wilson - he wore a rather stylish hat in the Prime Ministerial Rover. Harold of course being a bit of a lad wore ‘chav’ style hats but when Edward Heath took over, he’d completely given up on 'em ‘cos he weren’t a lad or a posh git like Sir Alec, in fact she was terribly parvenu you know.
Although Harold Wilson wore ‘chav’ type hats they weren’t so different from those worn by the Duke of Bedford but then I’m no expert in hats. Members of the Royal Family wear them when they go chav hunting across the moors of Britain but me, poor misguided soul, have never worn a hat in my entire life. Even the ever so cool cats like that boyfriend of Sterling Moss [sic] sport hats and yes, we're talking class because this is a British blog and we’re obsessed with money and status - not in that order though.
You see my dears, only the most appalling chavs and toffs wear hats these days but the great unwashed - the mugs about to be wiped out by Great Depression 11 – never ever wear them unless it’s for an affectation. In the good old days, Malcolm Sinex from Morden – you must pronounce the ‘d’ my darlings – would be booted and suited with driving gloves, trilbies and slippers, ducks descending everywhere and neighbours a twitching behind the and oh…come friendly bombs etc.
Andrew
After the Jailbreak
(Notes on the Transition from Inner to Outer Space)
Recently out of prison after 3 weeks on remand in the Scrubs. Back on the street ... Two whole days spent refamiliarising with Outer Space "reality" in the shape of streets, bikes, and cars. Occurs to me why prisons are so full. ... Except for 5 minutes a day there's no bloody traffic. And unlimited daytime TV… Loads of time as one cell-mate observed, to reflect on Life… In my case it hones the cynicism that’s never far from my pen.
Think about the over-complex and banal tedium of 21st-century Great Britain. Now check the insulting wages offered to anyone under 36 years old willing to join the Army. Yes, exactly. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a very profitable war for the oil industry. And payouts for crippled soldiers and bereaved families are as a polite cough to a cruise missile compared to the $700 billion President Shrub’s bunging his granddad’s old industry, the banks. While our own finance sector’s getting a more modest bailout, a mere £50 billion this year, it’s still tax money rewarding the filthy rich for fucking up their own declared system, Capitalism...
Question for the “neo-conservative” hypocrites in Westminster and Washinton: If debt’s immoral, why did banks for the last 20 years here encourage unrepayable debts?
Because interest on loans buys bankers and statesmen their luxuries… Now the homeowner in America and Europe may seem to live on a different planet from the starved raped peasant in Africa and Asia, but money talks one language. … It’s called compound interest.
…and the Dame of Vauxhall Cross recently pointed out the Terrorist Enemy's desperate attempt to recruit microbiology students screwed by the loans industry. (DG5, briefing to house of Commons, early 2007). Funny, I was trained in microbiology and biochemistry. Maybe the rich Wahabis who teach plastic jihad to British muslims would lend me a few million to set up a consultancy. They must realize the CIA’s not going to sell them CBW know-how; the Shrub Company was just using Al-Qaeda to kill those inconvenient Communist Afghans and Russians so Halliburton could build that Uzbegistan-to-Indian Ocean gas pipeline.
Predictably al-Qaeda resented being dumped by Langley after the fall of the USSR, hence their spate of suicide attacks on the Arleigh Burke and the Twin Towers. Leading in turn to the Bush League’s middle-east war and the present crisis in the American Economy. Banks depend on the perceived stability of conservative capitalist goverments. Bombing and invading the oilfields and pipeline-sites looks irresponsible, Georgie. D’uh???
You see, the trouble with using fascist psychos to fight Communism, if you’re a right-wing capitalist, is that those fanatic religious/racialist types get out of control. Funny Dubya and the good ol’ boys at Halliburton getting caught pants-down by bin Laden. Didn’t learn a lot from your grandpa Prescott and his Dixie oil-mafia buddies bankrolling Hitler and the NSDAP back in the 1920s didya Dubya?
War against terrorism? Bullshit!
It’s just business…. As usual!
Sayonara... Don't buy any Treasury bonds, kids!
All the best,
Marty
