Who gives a toss? I do!

As you might have guessed from the last post, I'm doing a bit of thinking about why I'm writing this blog, which began by accident in January 2009. This is how it started:

I joined the process described below about a week after it had begun, so my knowledge of the very first part is sketchy. What would be really great is if the fine people who got it going approached me so I could interview them and fill the gaps. I think it's important we get a better picture of how the (absolutely amazing) Red Brick Building campaign started. You guys were really, really great.

The South West Regional Development Agency tried a grubby little trick in order to demolish a building on the Morlands site - The Red Brick Building - which had been, firmly but indirectly, promised to the community. A few days before Christmas 2008, they put a fence around it. The Central Somerset Gazette ran an innocuous-sounding story - which I read - about SWRDA's plans. It was to come down on the 8th of January.

The timing seemed a bit off to me. It's a way of wriggling out of a promise to a community. It's done during a holiday period because there are large numbers of people who either have dysfunctional families driving them half mad, successful consumer-types busy as fuck with all the crap they're gonna buy, and happy families really only wanting one thing: to be together. Everyone - rich, poor, happy, miserable, from wherever, I mean everyone! - knows deep within themselves how important our families are. Who really wants to lose the time to be with them, because of a broken promise made by someone you don't know?

The only people who use a trick like that are politicians or apparatchiks whose sense of honour is about equal to that of a pickpocket.

[Aside: Yes, happy families do exist - Glastonbury is blessed with a large number where their happiness is obvious, because everything about them is just so naturally and easily beautiful. They're really great to have around.]

I've seen this sort of thing done before, in Copenhagen. A 12-acre area of high-quality disused factory buildings was levelled in 3 days while everyone was on summer holiday. The mayor called an extraordinary meeting, rammed the plan through in Thursday afternoon, the bulldozers moved in Monday and that was that. Those buildings were really damn good buildings and the project to restore and develop them would have totally revitalised that part of town. Everyone I knew was gutted. By the way: the cleanup took 6 months, but it only took them 3 days to smash them up.

The 'trigger' for me to get involved was when I learned that the SWRDA employee responsible was on holiday until - surprise! - the 8th of January. Sneaky buggers - that was no coincidence. But we saved The Red Brick Building! That name must really irritate some of the Nasty Party round here. (I almost wrote 'lol' at the end of that sentence, lol)

What SWRDA didn't know was that a group of fine young people had formed a relationship with it. About a dozen students from Strode College, and a few others, all about 15 to maybe 19 years old, had been using the space to get together for more than a year. They hadn't done much to it but they had tidied up and made a really good space, albeit cold and draughty in winter. That was because the roofs leaked and most of the windows were broken.

They squatted it in protest and I went to visit them. I was homeless, sleeping in a tent in a barn at the time, but I did have an office (which I shared with 'dynamic duo' Linda Hull and Caroline Lewis, both of Somerset Community Food) from which I did a bit of web design, pc maintenance, and programming. I didn't tell anyone I was homeless until the protest was over: I didn't want anyone to think I was just looking for a place to sleep, and I never stayed there overnight. I'm actually very good at being homeless. It's a real skill and teaches you a lot about yourself and the people around you. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but for me it was tremendously cleansing.

From my office, I began to blog about the protest at the address makemorelandsbetter.blogspot.com. I did my best to help the protestors and ask questions of the politicians and others. I know for a fact that they were reading what I wrote, and it makes me very happy to have played a small part in helping our community. It's been a privilege.

After a while, I moved the blog to this address. When the protest was successful and the flow of news dried up, it became a personal project. You can read it all again here.

This, however, is the beginning of a very different story, one with a vision. It's a very personal story and all the facts are true. Some of it's about me, because it contains my thoughts and a bit of not altogether non-cathartic personal history. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't write and publish it.

I was born in 1959 as the youngest of seven children. My father had his 60th birthday four days after I was born, and my mother was about 42 or so. My father wasn't a good provider and my elder siblings, the eldest 17 years older than myself, grew up in post-war austerity in a poor area of south-east London which had seen a fair bit of bombing during the war because of a large army garrison and a munitions factory nearby.

My father wasn't very supportive of my mother. He saw women as possessions. He saw boys as competitors. In many ways he was an intelligent man who'd lived through hard times and didn't do that well. One thing that stands out to me now is that he had no friends, and no social life whatsoever, outside the 4-bedroomed ground floor pressure cooker of a flat all 9 of us lived in when I was born.

I bet you're thinking of the Monty Pythons 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch right now...but it wasn't like that. My early life wasn't really all that bad on a material level. We weren't rich but we didn't go hungry, I was kept clean, I went to school every day, I certainly didn't have nervous adults stopping me from climbing trees and taking risks and I had friends.

Emotionally, it was a different picture. I don't remember any events involving my mother, so this is patchy. She'd had a rough time. One of the reasons she moved in with my father was stark and simple: survival. She was in her 20s in the early years of WWII and was married to a man who was away from home in the military. When he came back, she had a young baby, and simple arithmetic convinced him he wasn't the father. He shunned her and in those times, to be a single woman with a child, for whatever reason, was to be despised and excluded.

She met my father, who was 20 years older, in the NAAFI at Blackheath where he was in the Home Guard on some sort of anti-aircraft duty. He took her in, but refused to let her bring her child with her. What kind of a man does that?

The reason I'm telling you this is to explain the stress my mother had to live with, and how it must have snapped what was undoubtedly a fragile, loving mind. I am now sure, in my own feelings and sense-memories, that she loved us as best she could, and on a good day, could be a lot of fun. She hurt many of her other children - my brothers and sisters. That's what very wounded people often do. She must have suffered terribly. She had stolen and been to prison for it, more than once, I believe.

She left the family 8 days before my first birthday and I have never seen her, not even in a photograph, since then. The pain, anger and fear of a small, frightened, unloved child has been at the core of my existence for 49 years, until recently. That sort of thing doesn't exactly make you a successful human being and the way I have dealt with the numerous challenges that have come my way has often cemented my false self-image and made me, and others, suffer.

The pain has now gone and my heart has opened. I've been trying for years to get over the top of that sad old hill and now I'm on the other side. For the first time in almost 50 years, I am happy, and able to give and receive love without feeling that old pain. Most of the time, I gave none and received none, because it hurt too much. That's gone, it's past, I can finally bring love to that memory and start healing.

There are many wonderful, loving people in this town, and I have received so much help from their caring attention. However, one in particular stands out, head and shoulders above the rest, and it is her love, inspiration and sheer beauty that has inspired me and healed me. I don't want to start analysing how she does what she does, but she's very easy to love. She has opened my heart to love and that is the greatest gift of all. I love her without reserve or limitation and her ability to wake and inspire the 'loving me' has enabled me to drop my own barriers to healing, which, unhealed, would have most certainly led me to destroy what promises to be a beautiful relationship. But, as she wisely says, 'it's still like an egg with a soft shell' so no more about that. Thank you - you know who you are - so much for being you. I love you.

No matter what happens, I will always feel her in my heart. 49 years is a long time.

Towards a Spiritual Politics

It has long been clear to me that, beyond a certain point, material goods do not make us happy. I believe that most people instinctively know this to be true. And yet we are living in a society where the vast majority of us are driven to acquire more, better, cheaper, and faster. Better is OK and cheaper is too - maybe - but the 'more' bit has reached a point where it's causing us all sorts of problems. Worst of all is the individualistic urge to acquire which has been shaped and exploited very cleverly to the point where most of us have chosen debt as a form of voluntary slavery.

Having said that, not all debt is bad. If I have the skill to fix a bicycle and take pleasure in the doing, and I can borrow my way to a workshop, I have gained employment and an income, my family's material needs are met, the community has reliable, cheap and healthy transport, and I am happier. The debt was a burden but wealth - economic and social, for the community and the individual - has been created. Paying the debt back releases those funds into the community again where they can be of benefit. If I need to learn a skill, a debt can also be self-cancelling, but more about that later.

We have four basic needs. These are, in order of priority, survival, security, independence and a fourth which some might call self-actualisation. It's no accident that some things are crop up in all societies and cultures at all times, and everywhere. One of them is music. The other is what we we might call Spirituality. I'm writing this with a capital S so you know I'm not using it as a general term and will expand upon that subject later.

Once our material needs are met, in such was that we can count on them being met in the future, and the cost does not involve any form of slavery or 'voluntary coercion,' it is my firm belief that our finest purpose as human beings is to live a spiritual life. I don't mean in a monastery or even involving organised religion, but as something we can both study and express as part of our everyday lives.

I will attempt to describe how we can realise this.

To Be Continued

So who gives a toss?

I'm going to kill this blog. Who gives a toss about anything these days? They're all munching burgers and tv dinners in front of 42" plasma screens that feed them crap that turns their brains to mush. Fuck it

Tesno, Newport Pagnell

Here's a good site:

Tesno

FOE Campaign

What a silly comment

Someone left a comment - in Chinese - which consisted of a load of links. Google Translate said:

Erotic adult sex stories erotic sex erotic self-timer patch area erotic videos erotic sex orgasm erotic videos download erotic videos download erotic videos share erotic theater district erotic video erotic video clips erotic video of the Kingdom CD-ROM video erotica erotic video-sharing networks to download erotic video erotic video erotic Center Studios to the erotic harem erotic network adult erotic sex erotic erotic massage erotic list erotic send Xiao-game situation Color of the most erotic home videos forum erotic sharp appreciation of erotic literature and martial arts studios erotic download erotic download erotic games erotic star erotic incest stories erotic Mayday exchange zone erotic erotic erotic friends who love his wife Color comic erotic comic free erotic Japanese

I wonder what he was up to? :)

The Trap - Adam Curtis documentary series

I've been a fan of Adam Curtis for a few years now. I believe he's the best - or the only? - documentary filmmaker we've got in these times.

I'd like to recommend this series to you: The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

Part 1: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-142285137762134414

Part 2: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-142285137762134414

Part 3: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7581348588228662817

It's not always easy going but it's worth it.

Max Keiser

He's the bloke on the right. Have a listen to what he says.



and again:

Someone else's Christmas Post

I read The Guardian. This post is from a commenter called TheThunkWorks who has spoken thus:

---

My Christmas Post (previously placed on a dead thread to Dean Baker's latest article on Cif America re Ben Bernanke, Time magazine's Man Of The Year)...

...and introducing a word new to me (and to the online Cambridge English Dictionary, but real for all that; at least, I found a definition on Wiktionary): Kakistocracy (with thanks to zoomtube, for making me aware of it)...

TheThunkWorks' CHRISTMAS POST:

What most citizens (both UK and US), and those (honest few?) policy-makers who are not bought-and-paid-for mouths of the financial services industry, cannot seem to bring themselves to grasp is that The Great Economic Collapse of 2008 resulted from endemic crime, not from exuberant carelessness...perhaps, because the enormity of it makes it too great a truth to admit without shaking to their very foundations our common beliefs about how our cultures/societies function.

It is too much. Too great a shock of betrayal...and of guilt at our failure to see.

From the deceitful sales pitches to sub-prime mortgage loan customers, through the forging of details on loan agreements by mortgage loan companies and the selling on up-the-line of the same; to the bundling-up of those sub-primes with other debt-obligation papers (CDOs) and the AAA-rating of same by ratings agencies; up to the selling on of those bundles as guaranteed profit-makers by the biggest-of-the-big, whose operations were audited and approved by accountancy companies reliant on fees from those biggest-of-the-big (too big to fail), which biggest-of-the-big were betting on the failure of those bundles by taking out insurance on them (CDSs) with companies without the reserves to meet the claim if called on (eg, AIG-FP), right on into the back-room deals and back-channel fundings that marked the bail-out transfer of trillions of public money into private coffers...all of it has been marked by systematic fraud and deceit.

It is too much. Too great a shock of betrayal...and of guilt at our failure to see.

And it is a shallow error to dismiss this with a snort of 'conspiracy, ha!'. There is no need to invoke an over-arching conspiracy. A consensus is all that is needed (within which conspiracies, in their true sense, amongst different groups of 'players' can coalesce and dissipate, as and when they succeed or fail).

The consensus within finance (and corporatism generally, too) was an approval and rewarding of deceit and fraud; an institutionalisation of racketeering; the internalisation of the values of organised crime (it is no coincidence that, long before the adoption of bowdlerisations of Sun Tzu's The Art Of War as a 'bible' of financial (corporate) 'power players' and 'wanna-be's', the must-read amongst executive climbers was Mario Puzo's The Godfather).

It is a product of the (much-dismissed by 'serious' politicians and political analysts, certainly in the UK) Culture War. And a culture of corruption (of anything and everything, for the prize of billions for any winning 'player') won dominance.

That dominance remains, as is shown by the continuing cynical abuse of public support (which I illustrate with...[link now below] re multi-million taxpayer funding of the new Goldman Sachs World Headquarters building in New York, whilst that bank slices up the shares to be taken by its 'players' from its $23billion bonus pool...derived from easy profits made possible only by the full-spectrum of the public bail-out of the private financial sector).

This is a crime story, as William K Black (a US Federal financial regulator who investigated the 1980s Savings-and-Loan scandal, and who might now be called a 'forensic economist') explains again in the interview I link to...[links now below]

In the US, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organisation) Act is finally being invoked ('though, not by any law enforcement agency with the necessary muscle). RICO was intended as a legal weapon against organised crime. That is how bad this all is.

zoomtube has it right. This is kakistocracy...'rule by the worst [of men]' (who thought that I or anyone here would need to know such a word?).

Happy Christmas and a safe New Year to all (even Guardian Cif Tech-nerds).

Links:

Goldman Sachs new headquarters:

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/taxpayers-goldmans-office-tower/

William K Black interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk2Yugp0ANQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1xo3xV2ypY

---

Excellent.

Not entertaining or funny at all

Just seen the film "Orwell Rolls in his Grave": here it is.



I wonder if we'll learn the truth after 2012? :)

Moonbat does it again

George Monbiot says it again

While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it's only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.

Invent your own currency

Ever wanted to have your own currency? Here's a (PDF) how-to guide.

Lewes Pound How to Guide