At the End of the Day

An American friend was telling me today how his Dad used to say, “Jesus, it’s enough to piss off a midget”. I’ve been collecting Daft Dad Sayings for years now, and I’m fascinated to find that they seem to transcend both nationality and culture. My chum in the US still doesn’t have a clue why his Dad thought it should take a lot to annoy a midget, and this is the hallmark of every great DDS: they have to be almost impenetrable.

One of my Dad’s favourite ripostes when – as a teenager – I’d whine “But I thought you said….” was, “Well lad, yer know what Thought did don’t yer?” And I’d say no, I don’t know what Mr Thought did, and Pop would say, “He fell in a shitcart and thought it was a wedding”. Apart from not having the foggiest idea what a shitcart was, I couldn’t begin to imagine what possible role any such mythical shitcart might play in a matrimonial service. But all Dads said stuff like that in those days.

I had a colleague for years in advertising whose Dad would adopt the voice of a corny Music Hall comic, and say – apropos of very little – “I shall be in condition tonight!” Once again, it remained a mystery that died with my friend’s father.

It’s just possible that this father-to-son epidemiology lay behind the at times hysterical practice among admen from about 1975 onwards to try and slip meaningless aphorisms and fortune-cookie bollocks into new business presentations – purely to see if and how the clients might react. It was astonishing how often the potential prospects nodded gravely in agreement with the most ridiculous drivel.

My chum Adam had a favourite one, “Remember, it’s always darkest under the lighthouse”. A copywriter now sadly no longer with us had a belter, “He who plays with the typewriter pays for the tune”. I had one – never detected as horseshit in the fifteen years during which I used it – “The long and short of every case history is bitter-sweet”. And so on, and so on.

Today in business, banking and politics you can come out with any old Aunt Fanny, and not only will the hacks take it down judiciously – the folks watching at home will nod, saying to others present, “You know, I like this bloke – he’s a safe pair of hands”. It is truly terrifying to watch. Two or more years ago, I watched as George Osborne came out with “We’re all in this together”, and a 32 year-old chap I had hitherto thought quite bright nodded in a manner suggesting well-deserved respect.

In fact, it seems to me that a Cameron/Miliband joust at PMQs today could quite happily proceed as follows without attracting much ribaldry:

Mr Edward Miliband: Last week, the Prime Minister told this House that the G8 would be a waterbed in the history of ensuring sleeping dogs don’t lie. Would he now agree with me that those who lie down with the lamb are sauce for the gander?

Murmurs of “Quite so”, “Hear, hear” etc.

Mr David Cameron: Well hahaw, what can I say other than if you make your bed, you must lie in it, and be hung for a sheep as for a lamb?

Loud laughter, shouts of “Resign!”, “Brilliant!” and “Order! Order!”

Mr Edward Miliband: The Prime Minister may laugh Mr Speaker, but we who laughed at him last will be the first to laugh longest.

Cheers and waving of order-papers, shouts of “That’s got him!” and “Bravo Ed!”

Mr David Cameron: I think it entirely possible that the Opposition leader is laughing up the wrong tree, from which he may one day soon be foisted upon his own facade.

Pandemonium as the Speaker yells “Order! Order!”

Mr Edward Miliband: That’s as maybe, but he who makes his bed in the tree-house may get the birds eye view, yet still wake up too late to catch the worm.

More shouts of “Order! Order! ORDER!”

Mr David Cameron: You turn if you want to, but the worm that turns is worth less than a sleeping dog left sniffing at the mint sauce for the lamb.

Hysterical laughter from the Conservative Benches. BBC Parliament viewing figures plummet from 57 to minus 6.

At the End of the Day

We have had the plague of toads and field rats drowning in the pool, but now it’s getting warmer, we have the Flies that Like Mouths and Noses. This species appear in massive swarms every June, and their sole purpose in life seems to be the close examination of human breathing tracts. I have also decided over the years that they’re deaf, because no matter how many times one rather pointlessly shouts “F**k off!” at them, they keep coming back for more. In a couple of weeks time, it’ll be the turn of the Flies that Like Biting Ankles.  It gets positively biblical here at times.

One heart-rending sight I’ve experienced twice now in the last three days is that of a bird with an injured wing hopping and flopping about on the floor, running in panic to the safety of the hedge whenever one approaches. What twists the knife in the human heart is the knowledge that for them, this is a certain death sentence – and will probably in turn mean the death of their nested brood. I always want to interfere, but for years now I haven’t: there is no point in trying to anthropomorphise wild nature. I loved Kenneth Grahame’s books as a kid, but find yourself face to face with a cornered badger and they are bad-tempered mothers with big claws. My opposition to badger-culling is based not on urban fluffy drivel, but rather my own assessment of the veterinarian facts about bovines, and the certain knowledge that farmers kill badgers anyway – often disguising the cull as road-kill. Owen Paterson is, I think, a good egg on the whole – but he is wrong about bovine TB.

That said, I have a couple of brood-raising sparrow hawks on my land at the moment, and it is very tempting to see them as the archetypal married couple. The missus is a 24-carat harridan, who – you may remember from a previous post – saw off a preying buzzard ten days ago. Given that the buzzards here would seriously consider carrying off a quad bike, she is obviously some lady. Hubby, meanwhile, is your classic Andy Capp figure, and so she has to literally chase him from the nest five times a day. One can almost hear the Geordie accent as Mum says, “Get oot theeyah and catch some wurms, yer littul wastah!”

What I find both awful and awesome at the same time is how cruel and yet charming nature can be. We’re starting to get those evenings now where every time one goes out through the door, the scent of honeysuckle almost makes your head swim – and the smell of mown grass is a sensory announcement that, now and then, bending nature to one’s aesthetic will is not such a bad thing. But then a sudden, vicious flurry of movement reveals a grass snake grabbing a dormouse. Kill or be killed alongside luscious odours is nevertheless the same nature at work: the snake has to eat, and the honseysuckle has to attract bees. Without bees with a keen sense of smell, there would be no honey; and without hungry snakes we’d all be knee-deep in mouse poo.

It is this connection between all things natural that continues to convince me that the theory of a random Universe is unmitigated bollocks. I do not believe in deity, but I do believe in intelligence. There can be no connective plan without intelligence. Something at work in the Universe has an IQ of roughly 476 quadrillion squared. You may not believe in God, but denying the method strikes me as classically human hubris. So there.

At the End of the Day

It’s a double-header tonight.

I was zapping through all that TV choice people go on about the other night, and feeling vaguely depressed about the complete lack of anything beyond gardens, property, cooking, wine and Homes in the Sun.

But then for some reason my mind went back to the early to mid 1950s, and all those ghastly, vapid songs like ‘How much is that doggy in the window’, ‘I’m a pink toothbrush you’re a blue toothbrush’ and ‘I saw Mama kissing Santa Claus’. Well, in 1956 Bill Haley brought all that to an end with ‘Rock around the Clock’, swiftly followed by ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley. In UK radio and television, we were soon to get The Goon Show, Hancock’s Half Hour and That was the Week that Was. A West End Theatre scene dominated by tedious revivals and limp comedies gave way to Room at the Top and Beyond the Fringe. A decade of derivative mush had given way to an ejaculation of intense creativity.

Those young folks now wanting to write something fresh for television (and frozen out by formulaic fear) should not give up hope. Your time will come soon enough. The reign of those who wish only to give people more of the same is rarely more than an interregnum – a Regency. Keep writing what you believe in, and soon the era of the terrified terrible will be over. A strong sitcom idea based on the mismatch between pols and real people might be a good start.

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There seems to be more than the usual quotient of What a Shit Earthdweller Man Is around at the moment. While I am myself guilty of slamming the species Homo sapiens, my version is largely based on evidence of our ability to be crap to each other. But when it comes to those who think we are uniquely destructive, I beg to differ.

The elephant, for example, is infinitely more selfishly destructive than Man. An elephant spotting some tender leaves at the top of a tree won’t think twice about uprooting it with his trunk in order to indulge his epicurean fancy. Sharks will eat anything they can swallow without regard to whether that species is in some way threatened. And the highly intelligent blue whale will happily eat all the plancton in his ocean, and never feel the remotest twinge of conscience.

Every keen gardener knows the truth of this. Given a tree with tender bark to nibble upon, the deer will kill every leafed species on one’s land. Sharing territory with the struggling red-brown sparrow-hawk, your average buzzard will devour its young. Moss will ruin every emerald green lawn. Couch grass will kill any other living plant in its path. And so on and so on.

However, although we aren’t uniquely destructive, there is a sad feature we own that makes us one of a kind. That is the intelligence to know we are doing something silly…..but to do it anyway. None of the other species I’ve singled out for criticism have that. They blunder about the place uncaringly damaging natural balance, but only the Human Race has awareness without guilt.

At the End of the Day

Is it me, or didn’t ‘oversight’ used to mean something you’d missed…of which you hadn’t taken account?

If so, how odd that in 2013 it means ‘regulatory monitoring’. Is this usage Freudian, or merely muddle? I’m not entirely sure. But what I notice more and more nowadays is that word usage is getting sloppy – especially in the area of society, economics, and politics. Perhaps more accurately, it’s being obfuscatory – sometimes, on purpose.

The ‘ist’ suffix is a classic example. Putting this at the end of a word meant somebody was of a certain bent, holding certain views to do with expertise in, and favourability towards/belief in, an activity or ideology. Hence, ventriloquist, feminist, columnist, anarchist etc.

Not any more. A feminist is a person who supports equal rights for women, but a racist is a person negative towards other races. An Islamist is a person who supports the beheading of anyone being rude about Islam, but an ageist is someone who thinks braindeath occurs at 50. A nationalist is someone generally tarred with the brush of xenophobia, but a sexist is anyone (always a man) who doesn’t like the opposite gender.

You see my point? Ageists should admire the old for their wisdom, and sexists should be keen on sex, but the words mean almost the opposite of that. I do think here that we are dealing with muddle, largely because almost all ‘ists’ were invented by, er, Leftists. Who on many of their own bases, if Leftist, should be anti-Left, but aren’t. If you follow.

A rapist is a person who prefers to skip the formalities of asking if it’s OK to have sex now, but perhaps it should be someone who abhors rape. What we’re lacking here is liberal consistency, and that’s nothing new.

‘Oversight’ on the other hand comes almost entirely from the American Right, and may well be Freudian, in that most of them (and their camp-followers in Europe) would just love to overlook every flaw in the human species and abolish every last rule up to and including Don’t Be Naughty. This gets us into the area of euphemism, which is not, by the way, uttered by euphemists as far as I know.

My own pet word for contemporary bromides is usefulisms, because for the inventors, that’s exactly what they are. Open bank reconciliation is a convenient alternative to grand larceny, as indeed Quantitative Easing is a seemingly benign description of taking our money and giving it to people who have more than enough already. The result is the same as the ‘ist’ thing: you’re left expecting one thing, and you get another (far less appealing) thing instead.

Nowhere is this more interminably confusing than in the discussion of ethnicity. It’s almost as if the downtrodden race was determined to make whitey feel awkward by perpetually moving the goalposts. Nigger is a word found offensive by black people, but used by American blacks among themselves all the time. There is a terrific stand-up (Dave Chapelle) you can catch on YouTube showing with enormous feeling and humour, however, why the word is offensive. But earlier this year, an older British entertainer was vilified for referring to ‘coloured people’…which in my youth was the word universally employed by politicians to demonstrate their liberal credentials.

Ali G was a boorishly crass black character invented by a Jew which, to all intents and purposes, was a racist depiction of young male West Indians. On the other hand, it was very funny, and extremely popular among young West Indian women because the crude sexism, they felt, was spot-on. Similarly, I still feel people flinch when I say the word “Jew” rather than use the ‘ish’ description. It’s very much about the tone in which one utters the word.

‘Ish’ itself is of course another of those confusing suffixes. In fact on the whole I think you could say I was ishist. ‘Ish’ comes from the German ‘isch’, and in that language means, very clearly, someone or something with a clearly defined charcteristic: ausländisch (foreign), mathematisch (mathematical), regnerisch (rainy) and so forth. But over time it has in English come to mean ‘a tendency towards’ or ‘that way’: fattish, tallish, and fiftyish are good examples.

But then you get Scottish, rakish, and fetish where there is no doubt at all. And come to think about it, saying I’m ishist might be taken to mean I hate ‘ish’, which isn’t true. I’m really ishistish.

Jonathan Miller hilariously played up the confusion by referring to himself in a 1960 sketch as “not really a Jew- more sort of Jewish”. There is indeed in English this never-ending desire not to offend – and it lies behind some of these word developments, suffixes and so on. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true: ‘fascist’ when I was at University came to mean “You disagree with me’. ‘Mysogynist’ is a word used by women when faced with outspoken men.

The suffix ‘phobe’ has in particular become the chosen suffix of the politically correct, and in being so has replaced ‘fascist’ as a sound demonstrating inccurate, generalised contempt for people who dare to speak out against pc. Islamaphobe is an idiotic term (there’s a lot to be frightened about in Islam today) and homophobe is just silly. I chap called me homophobic last week when I expressed opposition to gay marriage. I do not have a phobia about homosexuality, and I don’t know anyone who does.

Why having grave doubts about gay marriage represents an irrational fear eludes me. Serious phobia represents a mental illness, and here again there is a clue about the Left’s mindset: just as in Soviet Russia, dissidents were placed in mental institutions, so too anyone in the West not ‘progressive’ must be unhinged. The very use of the word ‘correct’ kind of gives the game away.

But that takes us straight back to the start again: language is used more and more now in a variously sloppy, dictatorial and deliberately misleading manner. It is the way the world is going, and while all languages must be allowed to develop organically, that process should also happen unconsciously….not because some harebrained Tory strategist thinks it might be a smart way to privatise the NHS.

Even The Slog’s signature word ‘bollocks’ has evolved over the last two decades. ‘The dog’s bollocks’ used to mean ‘obvious’ as in ‘like a sore thumb’; now it often means ‘terrific, the business’ – even being shortened to “It’s the bollocks”.

But fear not: I am a traditionalist, and I shall not have my bollocks interfered with, as it were. As my friend Jon is fond of saying, “It’s all bollocks and that’s official”.

Earlier at The Slog:

At the End of the Day

As we head towards Monday morning, here are three very simple financial market facts from last Friday.

On hearing the US payroll results, Sterling strengthened by nearly 2% against the Dollar. That is sort of logical, except that (a) the numbers weren’t that bad and (b) the rise took place throughout the day.

The minute the New York Exchange opened, gold fell $30 and pretty much retained that position throughout the day. That’s the opposite of what you’d expect from disappointing payroll numbers. But given it began long before the numbers were known officially, the two things are technically unrelated. Allegedly.

The oil price spiked up. There was not one single sign from around the world that would suggest to anyone but a lunatic that oil’s price should rise – but it did.

Now as we’ve become all too aware over the last year, these three sectors – currency, gold and commodities – are being directionalised all the time. Only central banks and major hedge funds have the clout to pull off this kind of stuff. What interests me in this instance is whether the two might be working in concert.

That’s the kind of thought I’d have dismissed as whacknut conspiracy drivel five years ago. But in the light of QE, Zirp, Libor, gold, and covert EU money-printing scandals, today I’m willing to consider almost anything.

Sovereign banks and their satellites are desperate to sh0re themselves up against the inevitable bad bets and bad debts that will emerge once the bourse-pumping can no longer be maintained. I remain convinced that the main and most direct means of doing this is first the purchase of gold at an artificially low price….and then its arbitrary revaluation to a far higher price once they have the stocks they need. As the French and Indian bans on gold sales showed last week, they will pull any stunt necessary to ace out anyone and anything getting in the way of this.

But what I’m beginning to wonder is whether Government agencies and hedge funds are joining forces to mutual advantage, with the aim of creating a treasure chest of short-term investment monies. The motives would obviously be, respectively, funding gold purchase, and enhancing client profit: the point of acting together is to create bigger (and thus more convincing) market movements that sucker in bigger and bigger amounts of money.

This isn’t quite as fanciful as you’d think: almost every central bank in the world now outside China is packed with former senior fund managers and bank executives in general, and Goldman Sachs illuminati in particular. And the arrangement is mutually beneficial: the Sovereigns drive down the cost of gold, while the funds get to profit from mega-scale bets that are all racing certainties. All such a conglomerate would have to do is skip around the globe to variously ‘salt’ buying of the Yen, selling of gold, buying of oil, selling of Dollars and buying of Sterling in sufficient volumes….and then do the opposite when the saps jump in or out.

The immediate goal of all gains made by Sovereign bankers is to buy gold and Dollars at their low points, and sell oil at the peak. All the hedge funds ask is to be told when to pile in or get out. The win-win nature of this for both partners is blindingly obvious. Certainly, it makes far more sense of the bizarre movements we saw in the markets last Friday than any traditional analysis could.

It will be interesting this coming week to observe whether gold is driven down any further: I think it will be. What might be very instructive is to keep a close eye on the gold positions taken by the major hedge fund players in readiness for that.

At the End of the Day

Scientists at the Lucerne Institute of Ongoing Forward Evolutionary Studies have produced this mock-up of how Conservative Party whips may evolve once David Cameron has been replaced. Avid followers of such things will have spotted that Lord Arseshaft has produced yet more research to show that King Dave of Camerlot is a liability. I would imagine that anyone whose sole flaw involves being a harmlessly unprincipled Toff is going to be a liability if one is trying to establish Government by Gargoyles. The Lucerne boffins have also modelled what a post-Cameron Prime Minister might resemble, but the image was deemed too frightening for The Slog’s family audience.

 

GCHQ tonight appealed for privacy while it investigates whether ISP and other internet stakeholders have been privately invading the secrecy of dangerous citizens.

Google Oberstürmbannführer Erik von Schittfürbrains told shareholders that he would “vigorously defend Google’s inalienable right to reveal secrecy wherever it might exist”, and insisted on the right to privacy while doing so.

“Obviously,” he observed, “We must be able to rely on complete privacy while investigating the covert existence of secret terrorists inside Yahoo and Apple”.

In the light of yesterday’s Santa Monica rampage that left five dead, America’s National Rifle Association (NRA) spokesperson Emily Enfield told reporters, “Once more the NRA’s arguments in favour of the right to bear arms have been shown to be bare-arsed excuses for our members to achieve all their marketing objectives”.

Ms Enfield added, “Only by having the right to bear arms were the Santa Monica police able to shoot this lowlife looney dead, and thus help to cleanse society of live lowlife looneys. The only answer to a bad guy with a gun once he’s killed four innocent people is lots of good guys with guns, so that means we sell five guns rather than just one waydergo”.

Earlier at The Slog: It’s not systemic guns that kill people, it’s gun-owning people

At the End of the Day

Pottering around here tonight with hose, watering can, transplanting fork and secateurs, it is hard to imagine that powerful idiots are gaily subverting elected Prime Ministers, perverting care systems, inverting truth, converting unwilling heathens, and diverting money into their already bursting pockets around the globe.

Among the many things enabling one to forget that false reality are the deliciously acid fragrance of elderflower on the night air, that greenhousy smell of flowering tomato plants, the beginnings of moelleux ceanothus scent wafting across the courtyard, and the deliriously sickly sweetness of honeysuckle flowers as the sun goes down.

It was a delightful end to a day bisected by lunch with two important friends – whose Left-wing views I hardly share at all, but whose grounded decency will always justly earn my complete respect. Together over a marathon meal that put me in mind of Fitzrovia circa 1978, we talked of the rape of Cyprus, the hypocrisy of Obama, the crass naivety of Friedman, the brilliance of student graffiti, the spinelessness of Ed Miliband, and a thousand other things so engaging that five hours passed in what felt like five minutes.

It is a sad truism in our contemporary world that decent folks of practical brain and good heart are such a tiny minority of humanity. Rather than being the silent majority, they are the noisy minority. But their bruit de vivre is drowned out by the media noise of the equally tiny clique setting the agenda for can-kicking today and meltdown tomorrow. Of course, being arrogant in my own uniquely humble way, I use the personal pronoun ‘they’ when what I really mean is the infinitely more personal pronoun ‘we’.

I do not, however, place myself in this exalted category out of any false sense of perfection: on the contrary, I do so because an essential ingredient of decency is the acceptance of one’s ability to be, on occasions, a complete prat, a pompous prick, a boorish didact, and a person with so much sagesse to offer others, in the end there is nowhere near enough left for oneself.

What puts decency firmly apart from zealotry is the ability to be self-deprecating: the ability to apply a grasp of humanity’s incurable silliness to oneself. As somebody once wrote with uncanny insight, “Most humour is generated by the difference between human aspiration and human achievement”.

Only when the human turns to hubris in preference to humour do things start to fall apart bigtime. This is the disease from which all our elites suffer in 2013: but awareness of it – coupled with the burning desire to eradicate it – is what unites all those who would resist.

In my garden this evening, I sat and appreciated the dark red of roses, the unnatural blue of Nigella, the sound of crickets and toads, the smell of nature, the taste of cold water, and the gently fading heat of a late-Spring day. What on earth would be the point of resisting all that harmless sensory reality? Far better surely to accept it -and use its restorative qualities to steel oneself to the task of resisting the obscene unreality created by zealots.

Earlier at The Slog: Another day of the unbelievable, predictable and intolerable Establishment attitude to paedophilia

At the End of the Day

You may think I live in a rural idyll of peace and tranquility, but actually I live in a jungle war-zone worse than anything a Vietnam vet could have nightmares about. Let me recount the events of the last three days.

Yesterday morning I walked down to the barn where I keep the tractor-mower, and on the way discovered the remains of a large, water-landing bird. I could identify it as such because of skeletal wings and the webbed feet. Everything else had been devoured. Mind you, the four million feathers scattered in all directions were a bit of a clue as to its avian origin. The victim had landed quite close to the noisette tree, and failed to notice Mr Fox waiting for him (or her). Such trees are bushy down to the ground, and thus a perfect place from which to pounce without warning.

For two weeks now, a battle has been raging between a sparrow-hawk couple raising chicks near the top of an ash tree here, and a buzzard who’d obviously like to eat said chicks. As Dad hawk goes out to hover above, dive upon and then kill small rodents, hawk indoors stands guard. When the buzzard decides to swoop in, she lets out this 1980s electronic erk-orr-erk-erk-zaw-erk, and Dad returns to buzz the invader. The two then chase him off, and he in turn tries to double back to the nest before they can. So far, the sparrow hawks are winning ….or at least, last time I stood below the tree I could hear the insistent squeaks of chicks just gagging to eat poor unsuspecting voles with broken necks pecked to death by their father on his way back to feed them.

In the next door field, M. Houdousse’s hound sniffs about in the fallow tangle, regularly digging out moles and then thrashing them this way and that. The endless feral cats in the neighbourhood also crouch in the long grass, ready to devour any hoopou or house martin foolish enough to make groundfall for longer than three seconds. At the far end of the property, the so far foiled buzzard circles gracefully above the rabbit burrows – knowing well enough that light and naive young kits will go hoppity about when their parents aren’t looking….and wind up in a pair of claws prior to the dinner pot.

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Seen in this context, the life of contemporary Western Man looks pretty tame. But as recently as 10,000 years ago, this was exactly the life we had too: “nasty, brutish and short” as Thomas Hobbes had it. It was kill or be killed, stand together or die, and think yourself lucky to reach forty.

Now don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to return to anything like that. On the whole I’m quite glad that there are no more sabre-tooth tigers lurking around every corner, and to be fair to Man just this once, we have managed to achieve a quality of life and longevity that is exponentially better than it was even a thousand years ago. But I think over the last fifty years, we’ve gone backwards again.

One reason for this is hubris: Man’s overweening belief that he is more than just another intelligent species. We think today that we can do anything: even eternal life, we believe, will soon be in our grasp. Another (related) reason is that we have ditched belief in elements more powerfully divine than ourselves. We used to control one of our most unpleasantly unique features in the animal kingdom – the ability to kill and be cruel for the fun of it. Now we indulge it….and the indulgence becomes more unrestrained with every year. Having done so, a further factor is our fascination with all things material: boys’ toys, shop til you drop, talking over mobile devices, constantly reading magazines about the latest thing, buying stuff shiny things for lovers….contentment with one’s lot has all but disappeared.

An understanding that this is our problem as a species is nothing new. 120 years ago, Wilde wrote that the two tragedies in the world were not getting what we want, and getting it. 1500 years before that, St Augustine opined, “Man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible”. 600 years earlier Epicurus wrote, ‘Poverty, when measured by the natural poverty of life, is great wealth; but unlimited wealth is great poverty.’

Money and power give people the ability to protect themselves from real life. This is why all Western political Überklassen have lost the plot about what really matters. Old lessons must, it seems, be learned over and over again by each generation. In 2013, we have the same old lessons going unlearned – and nothing more than new idiots ignoring them.

Related: Why we may well be a dead-end species

At the End of the Day

Honeysuckle, Chilean potato vine, Nigella, hosters, Cotoneasta and umpteen other varieties working together. This is how all gardens should look.

Don’t hold your breath, but summer may have arrived down here. The Meteo says there will be minimal cloud and temperatures creeping up to…wow, 25 degrees! So there will be a summer and people will swim in the pool, Cinderella. Just make sure you have a defibrillator handy.

Today was one of those really satisfying days when quite a few things went right. I took the tractor mower’s carburettor apart, cleaned it…and the machine worked. As this rarely happens when I collide with engineering, that’s the kind of result that has me putting out more flags. Then I rearranged my bedroom, and after fifteen years finally got it exactly how I’d always seen it in my head. And last but not least, I made a tajine chicken with apricots that filled me up without the use of fat….and tasted terrific.

But the arrival of warmth (assuming it’s not yet another false alarm) took me back to wondering just how far behind schedule Europe’s crop production is. Normally by this time, the cherries are turning pink and the maize is four feet tall: today, they are green bullets and seedlings respectively. The problem isn’t going to be one of starvation or anything like it. Rather, it’s the price of stuff until it’s available in season, the cost to the State of importing it from warmer climes, and the hugely raised fuel bills that now face both farmers and households alike in France. On top of the country’s budgetary and banking instability problems, it doesn’t feel good. But to read the newspapers and sites both here and abroad, you’d think everything to do with food was perfectly normal.

Cruising the usual sites – and searching further afield – I’ve seen little or nothing in the way of reasoned concern about this temporary gap in the home-grown food supply chain. The Irish Farmer’s Journal noted the March British milk supply running 8% behind last year, with Europe’s largest producers, France and Germany, also lagging far behind 2012. But I’m talking more in terms of wheat and fruit…and what all this might be doing to the all-important French wine crop. Or whether British maize will ripen at all.

Type ‘European food contingency plans 2013′ into Google, and to be honest the lack of substance in there isn’t terribly reassuring. The EC’s Food & Veterinary Office (FVO) is predictably concerned with ensuring that requirements in the areas of food safety, animal health and welfare, plant health and public health are being rigorously enforced by Member States. Research shows that most starving folks prefer some food that’s edible to no food that’s perfect in every way, but as usual the Sprout inspectors are displaying precious little in the way of common sense.

Among farmers in my region, there is much shrugging, and whispering of “Que faire?”, but no sense that there is A Plan, and little hope at all of a B Plan. This year the FVO will carry out 249 audits, but guess what: not one of them will be concerned with shortages and how to cope with them. That would, presumably, mess up the colour scheme on somebody’s wall-based, flow charted critical path analysis in a Brussels Ministry. Better a clean sweep of famine than untidy scribbles in Belgium, eh?

Some new courses for contingency planning came on stream on 19th March this year. On September 12th last year new legal requirements for contingency planning were approved. And twelve days ago, a new paper on how to gauge what cyclone contingencies should be came out. But there has been no flesh put on the bones of, as it were, actually having contingency plans. The reason for this is primarily that as yet there are no bones either, and one thing we don’t want to do is get ahead of ourselves here. So to summarise, we have ways to learn how to do it legally and then apply it to cyclones. Beyond that, the doing part seems to be negatively operative going forward.

In the EU climate change space however, the emphasis remains very much on excessive warmth, and water running out. The fact it’s been pissing cold rain from Cornwall to Corfu for the last three months has not, as yet, been fed into the computer model. “Data and models are subject to a certain degree of uncertainty”, the latest climate adaptation paper says. For those reading in 1973, it adds helpfully that long words will be used, and outcomes will be “influenced by various factors like behaviour, social determinants, demographics, policy decisions, etc. The stresses created by climatic fluctuations add another layer of complexity to this already very intricate matter”. Damn those pesky climatic fluctuations which, by the way, we are experiencing right now.

Look, we’re laying complexity on intricacy here without a policy decision in sight, so this could get pretty hairy. You have been warned. Nobody but me seems to be worried in any way though, so I’m going to end it there. I just hate being out of step on this shit: if you’re wrong, everyone remembers – and if you’re right, hardly anyone remembers except the odd anally auditing troll who stops by only to tell you that you were bound to be right about something sooner or later.

Earlier at The Slog: More reassurance about the safety of our kids

At the End of the Day

Here’s a couple of thoughts to take to bed, if you so desire.

There are two major influences on the degree/speed of evolutionary change in species: isolation, and dramatic environmental change. Although this is a gross oversimplification, the more a species is isolated – and the more dramatically the species environment affects its ability to function and reproduce – the more fundamental and fast the evolution will be. It’s all about the drive to survive……necessity as the mother of invention and so forth.

I believe it is perfectly possible that Homo sapiens’ technical development has set the species up to become a dead-end in evolutionary terms. But before explaining why that is, let me first of all recount why and how this thought occurred to me.

My sense for over a decade now has been that the human race is facing a crisis far broader than merely ‘financial’ or ‘economic’. Regular Sloggers will recognise that obsession well enough. Up until around 2010, I was mainly of the view that this crisis had its roots in cultural decline alone. It’s only over the last three years that I have begun to wonder whether our species might be experiencing something which – in the absence of any other term of which I’m aware – I would call ‘reversion’: that is, the opposite of evolution.

Although I could cite any number of trends, growing attitudes and odd behaviours as examples of this, ultimately the question here is one of the oldest of all time: which is chicken and which egg?  But bear with me anyway while I enumerate some of them.

The rise and rise of derivation and copycatism in the Arts.

The complete absence of any truly qualitative medical, chemical, physics, biological or artistic breakthrough since the 1960s. By this, I mean nothing on the scale of fire, electricity, relativity, the novel, abstractism, or DNA.

The serfdom to market and military demands of technological achievements in computing and communications.

The survival of the internal combustion engine as the basis of transport into the 21st century.

The withdrawal from Space exploration.

The complete stagnation of socio-political thought: indeed, the unwillingness to accept any and all data contradicting existing ideology…aka theology.

The inability of market and fiscal economists to get beyond the ideas of dead theorists to somewhere new.

Now one can out forward all kinds of rationale as to why these things have happened…or rather, not happened. Our obsession with short-term ROI, the increasing dominance of the military-security-globalist axis, the structurally self-perpetuating power of political Parties based on lobbyist influence, the dumbing-down of educational standards and media content, the decline of the spiritual in favour of the material…and onandonandonandon. But what all those features represent is evidence of the very reversion I’m hypothesising.

Man went from pure survivalism to a vague comprehension of Time, and that in turn produced the desire to record in visual and alphabetic expression. So we got art and literature….and then the abstraction from physical and consumptive brutalism to the religious, scientific and theoretical ideals of a higher aspiration. We went from the cooperative need to hunt, and on into the cerebral need to understand. From this in turn grew the concepts of broader social provision, love for one’s neighbour, and the preference for empirical observation over theology.

Do I see this process continuing? I do not. Rather, what I observe is a species shunting itself into a siding where the game becomes squeezing the most out of what is, and every man for himself as the horizons of expansion shrink. Our self-styled leaders dictate that only tactics matter, that there is no new vision, that risk should be avoided, that more and more for fewer and fewer is better than a little more for most, that monopoly status quo is safer than entrepreneurial adventure…and above all, that all who question the New Wisdom are heretics flying in the face of There is No Alternative.

We’re sort of back in the chicken/egg debate here, but think on this. Rapid evolution for our species via isolation is now impossible. Advances in wireless communication via satellite cells have ensured that, if ever a tribe finds itself cut off, it can be reached and ‘rescued’ within hours….not the 40,000 years it would take for an evolutionary leap to occur. Equally, our exposures to the effects of environmental change have become less and less life-threatening – thanks to improvements in air-conditioning, insulation against the cold, central heating, large cities, advanced building techniques and so on. Today – I’m sure – even a massive change in climate could be minimised by Man’s quantitatively inventive nature. The problem is that – as our species technical leaps become both smaller and increasingly irregular – we are able to cope with change….but not to evolve and thus defeat it.

It is, in my view, possible that Homo sapiens has reached a dead end.

Perhaps throughout the Universe, this always happens as a dominant intelligence evolves on the trillions of planets able to support life. Perhaps this is the real reason why we have never been contacted by aliens: that is to say, after a certain point, the very ingenuity of an intelligent life-form degrades into an acceptance of safe sufficiency, of coping. This in turn renders the species smug….it loses the voyager gene, gradually slips backwards – and then slumps into reversion rather than evolution.

Who knows? I don’t know, I just wonder and ponder. And then become depressed at the obvious inability of my fellow Man to do the same. Both neocons and socialists, Islamists and Christian fundamentalists evoke this disappointment in me. It feels increasingly like their very existence is an obvious symptom of The End. Almost, it seems, they are like a coming Dark Age after which there will be no Renaissance: only the descent into controlling belief in an ultimate certainty that no longer exists.

Earlier at The Slog: Never set a conformist the task of reform

At the End of the Day

Professor G. Rassyknoll of the Moscow School of Random Dot-Joining has accepted a post at the European Commission in Brussels as its Head of Steam. His task will be to present regularly occurring supercharged droplets of mass deception as economic data. In particular, he will endeavour to explain the methods being employed with the best of intentions by Signor Draghi of the European Central Bank in his quest to comply with up to and including none of the codicils of the Lisbon Treaty.

Professor Rassyknoll has a PhD in the study of sub-atomic Elysian Fields, and in 2009 received the Nobel Prize for his work in the construction of post-numerate bollock particles and the nature of their circumvention of horsesh*t.

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President Francois Hollande pledged today that he would carry out long overdue reforms of France’s pension system and labour markets, but only if Angela Merkel would stop looking like a wet Sunday in Bradford every f**king time they meet.

“While I realise she and Nico had a thing,” said the acting French President until someone better comes along, “This is beginning to get embarrassing for me with my wife. Not only does she have no fear of Frau Doktor Merkel as a rival, she watches Geli’s glum expression and begins to doubt my charisma”.

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Like they say, you wait 3,000 years for a bus, and then two come along at once. The good news for Italians is that Basilicata, a mountainous, sparsely populated province that sits on the foot-arch of Italy’s boot, holds more than 1 billion barrels of prime crude oil, offering the country a powerful energy  weapon with which to fight its deepening recession. The bad news is that the Texas Tea is underneath the very groves that make southern Italy the world’s second-largest olive oil producer. Pisser or what?

But things are not as bad as they might seem. The European Commission has been in touch to say that if Italy will dig up and transport its olive trees to Greece (whose olive oil is already the basis of most of the world’s best cooking and dipping oils) it should be possible within five years to produce 150% extra virgins for export to China. The further upside is that Italy will benefit from tourist income once new Kraft durch Freude holiday complexes have been built where the olive groves once stood….and yet another dimension of the Greek export economy will be destroyed forever.

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There are some new YouGov polling results out on Ed Miliband. The research company asked if people thought Ed Miliband was a better or worse leader than Gordon Brown, and a better or worse leader than Tony Blair. And it turns out that Ed is seen as better than Brown by 32% to 17%, and worse than Blair by 41% to 20%.

This is highly significant. It means that Ed is almost exactly halfway between the two, and thus could be either Brair Rabbit or Gordon Blown. But most psephological observers are seeing the result as clear evidence that Mr Miliband is most probably Gordon the Rabbit: that is to say, an indecisive pedant prone to being frozen in headlights.

Sources close to the Labour leader told The Slog tonight, “On the whole we’re seeing this as a positive result. Had Ed emerged as Gordon Blair, then the electorate might have seen him as a war criminal who gave away the nation’s gold. As it is, the frightened rabbit option looks good by comparison, and we’ll be working to improve on that going forward”.

Earlier at The Slog: Geli & Wolfie go Eurocheating

At the End of the Day

I wonder: does becoming a subscriber mean being a rather second-rate and unreliable scribe – as in that wonderful euphemism from 2008, sub-prime? It’s just that, once you’re a subscriber to a site, you’re more likely to become a comment threader….and in the case of this site, perhaps leave behind a comment of subterranean lunacy. For example, this one posted by Exterta today about my essentially light-hearted look at Swedish pc:

‘FIRST, JEWS SHOULD BE TAKEN OUT OF SWEDEN. ONCE THIS PROBLEM IS SOLVED, OTHERS WILL BE. BUT OF COURSE IM TALKING ABOUT A VERY DISTANT FUTURE OR A PARALLEL REALITY. ANYWAY, THOSE 3RD WORLD SCUMS HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR WHAT THEY’VE DONE AND DEFINITELY DO NOT BELONG IN EUROPE. BUT AGAIN WE GOTTA THANK JEWS FOR THAT AND ESPECIALLY A TOTALLY BRAINWASHED MAJORITARY POPULACE….’

So you see, it was the Jews all along: those 3rd world scums from a very distant future busy brainwashing a majoritary populace, in readiness, right now. Well, fair enough – just so long as we’re clear about that.

 Or how about this crackerjack insight from Clever Trevor the other day:

‘Really, JW? Are you still barking up the tree that these people don’t know exactly what they are doing and the consequences of what they are saying? Every judge, top plod and politician is a Freemason, which is a Luciferian religion, which wants to bring about a global state where there are no personal liberties. Sometimes it seems to be one step forward and two steps back with you, Mr Ward.’

Yes, right on the money: that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years. And as if to redouble my shame at being outed as a total dupe, Full stop finally cracked the investigation with this belter:

‘I think JW is over sensitive about the ‘conspiracy’ angle, especially when a conspiracy is anything conducted by two or more persons in secret, but I guess we could put that down to the commonly held view of ‘conspiracy theorists’. He really can’t afford the connection to be made even if it is real, for reasons of credibility. But, his fuse does seem to be getting shorter of late. Probably entirely understandable, how long could you piss into the wind before deciding you’d had enough of getting your own back?’

Well quite. Later he adds:

‘….doesn’t the photo at the top of JW’s latest Blog look more than a little like McA[lpine] with a wig on?’

Hmm. Can’t say I’d ever noticed that I looked like a more hirsute Lord McAlpine while pissing in the wind. I really must work harder on my disguises.

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‘Dearest One’ – Madam Alimata Raja writes -

I am a widow being that I lost my husband, my husband Late Mr Raja Sule was a serving director of the Cocoa exporting board until his death. He was assassinated by the rebels following the political uprising, before his death he made a deposit of Six Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars ($6,500,000.00USD) here in Ouagadougou Burkina Faso in one of the Security Company, he intended to buy a Cocoa processing Machine with the fund.

I want you to help me for us to retreive this fund and transfer it to your account in your country or any safer place as you will be the beneficiary and recipient of the fund which we will use for joint investment in your country. I have plans to do investment in your country, like real estate and industrial production.

This is my reason for writing to you.

Do you know, call me an incorrigible matchmaker, but I’m thinking about putting her in close touch with either Exterta or Full Stop. What does anyone think?

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As a nice contrast to the foregoing garbage, it gives me great pleasure to reproduce this oasis of wisdom from Bruce Stokes about market research – quoted by influential Greek blogger Yanis Varoufakis in relation to European attitudes to austerity:

‘But first, a brief comment of the PEW survey’s main finding, presented by Bruce Stokes (of Global Economic Attitudes), that a large majority of Europeans favoured paying down debt to more stimulus:A brief comment on the Pew survey findings:

‘Had a poll been taken in the midst of Europe’s Black Death pandemic, a majority of Europeans would have blamed the plague on prior sinful living and would have, most likely, accepted the established view that deliverance from the disease demanded self-flagellation and collective punishment. While we should always be keenly interested in public perceptions, we should not allow polls to cloud our judgment.’

Even as a market researcher myself in a previous life, my entire advertising career was built on educating clients about the stark reality of that closing clause above: ‘we should not allow polls to cloud our judgment.’

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Another thought about linguistics in the politico-media context: what is the plural of bonker?

Given his exploits over the years, there can be little doubt that Boris Johnson is suffused with the genes of all alpha males everywhere, in that he seems incapable of keeping the Mayoral dick in the trousers. Indeed, rumours once more abound that London’s Mayor has sired yet another BoJette from the wrong side of the blanket ban on all reporting of this event.

In this unfortunate sexual illness, Mayor Jobswinkle is joined by many famous f**kers from history, including Henry VIII (who founded the Anglican church on an uncontrollable erection), Lloyd George (who endorsed Hitler) and Bob Boothby (another upmarket crook who shagged his way eclectically through PM’s wives, care home boys, and members of the Kray family).

One is thus forced to the conclusion that the plural of bonker must be bonkers. I couldn’t possibly comment.