economics - Ina Disguise

The Best Madness Ever

February 4, 2018 No Comments

“Why don’t you try thinking about it another way?” Leon frowned at Kira. “You never seem to deviate from this position of not being good enough.”

“Look, there is no other way to think about it. I have a job to do. That has been the case ever since I met him. I am the problem.”

“Why do you feel you have to work so hard for his affection? He won’t even speak to you.” Leon screwed up his face. Your non-relationship makes no sense?”

“It makes perfect sense to us. I can’t bear to look at him, he can’t bear to look at me. Every time we go anywhere near each other one of us ends up extremely upset. It is much safer if we avoid each other.”

“But you said he seemed quite pleased to see you?”

“Yes, and I was pleased to see him, but it is in the nature of our awkward characters that it is always teetering on the edge of a huge fight. Negotiation is bound to be difficult.”

“He seems to be winning on that front.” Leon pursed his lips. Kira was different since she had met Sam. Less anxious, and yet still consumed by Sam. If anything, more than ever.

“Not at all. I still lack confidence, and I am too easily distracted. This is about head space, and life goals. It is not about ordinary things at all. If it was I would starve for a year and turn up in a bikini with some exceptionally good aphrodisiac, now wouldn’t I? What on earth would be the point in that? He has plenty of women. Even I wouldn’t be crazy enough to dissuade him from such a convenient and comfortable arrangement if that’s what he wants.”

“What about what you want?”

“I want him to be happy. I don’t want him to be unhappy. Neither of us will be happy until I do the damned work, regardless of how he arranges things with his genitalia.” Kira was growling now, impatiently twitching at the computer.

“But you said he didn’t know anything about what you were doing? Isn’t he just an asshole really? What do you get out of this?”

“Being difficult or unaware doesn’t make you an automatic asshole, I’d just like to point that out. You are right, of course, but if I remember correctly, I was being an actual asshole the last time we had any dealings with each other, because I was hurt. Sam doesn’t usually tolerate ‘feels,’ for all his chosen pithiness.” Kira looked blank. “Trust me, it is much easier if we make it a public only relationship. I don’t want to have to eat his cubs anyway. That is what lions do.” Kira got up and rubbed her sore back. “I just want to kick his ass with impunity, and nine years ago there was no question of my ever getting to do that. He can keep his bits to himself apart from that if he wants. I just love the idea of making him bloom, and for that he needs to be challenged now and again. Safely, by someone who cares. It is in the grand tradition of the super-Greeks.”

“I wish somebody loved me like that. Have you ever considered that maybe he loves you too?”

“God no. Trust me, you would not want an imaginary relationship this contorted.”

“Why not? Maybe he longs for a soft cuddly twin who doesn’t take any shit from him.”

“I think Sam’s love of control is well established. I don’t want to end up looking pinched and terrified. I want to be loved, not moulded, thank you. Besides, can you imagine how the Yanks would take a fat chick? America hates women, never mind women who don’t conform to the delusional rules of trophy-hunting success. I’m not in the business of ruining careers.”

“Is that why you’re hitting on the Foreign Secretary?” Leon was quite pleased with this development, especially as it meant a host of new opportunities emerging from Kira’s creative brain.

“No, I actually like the Foreign Secretary, and he is big and kind enough not to mind me creatively crying on his shoulder.” Kira looked up. “Besides which, he needs a good shake too. His health needs some attention. Nagging from crazy strangers is almost tolerable.”

“Everyone will assume you agree with his politics, however. They may not take it well.”

“They can take it however they want. He is the only one in the party that cares about the public or credits them with any brains at all. If the English will insist on continuing to vote for them, we might as well give the UK to the only decent one, assuming we can woo him away from his evil paymasters at some point.”

“Can we do that?” Leon stared at the wall. This was so bonkers, it actually might work.

“Of course we can.” Kira rethreaded her needle as she worked on her latest figurative work. “We can do whatever we like.”

“You used to say that to your mother.” Leon smiled.

“She is still here, so I am still saying it to her.” Kira nodded towards the large flowered tube on the table. “Poor mum. Why are people so stupid?”

“They do what the Reich tells them, and the Reich wants anyone disabled dead.”

“True. Let us not talk of it just now. We need to get another grant application in.”

“When is it due?”

“5am?”

“Are you crazy? People work on these things for months!” Leon was dumbfounded.

“I only found out this morning. I just need a few photographs. I will write it up tonight.” Kira seemed remarkably calm. “I’ve been writing business plans for years. It isn’t difficult.” Kira smiled. “I could even make an application for ‘beneficial to the community’ schemes and include the new project.”

“There is nothing beneficial to the community about the Conservative party.” Leon spluttered. “Especially not as you seem hell-bent on promoting the Foreign Secretary, of all people.”

“Everything will be fine. A national-scale project will help enormously with the scheme for Sam. I had better finish some of the old stuff though, just in case anybody ever actually buys any of it.” Kira’s work had not sold recently. She seemed blissfully unconcerned, as she did not rely on it for income. Kira’s life seemed to be a very long learning curve. Leon wondered if she realised how little time she had to perfect the over-arching work-of-art that was her endlessly expanding brain. “Don’t worry, Leon. I just need to get more work to fund it. Look what fun I had after Brexit, and it didn’t cost me anything at all!”

“So, basically the idea is we get the Foreign Secretary, who is just as crazy as you, into Number 10. Then what?”

“Then I will need a proper publisher to appear, as if by magic, and take the Conservative books I am working on. Once I have a publisher, it will then be time to return to the original book, which theoretically removes all politics as we know it and creates an entirely new landscape for debate. Sam has no idea how clever he is. I shall take great delight in presenting it to him.” A twinkle seemed to sparkle in Kira’s eye as she glanced at Leon.

“Are you sure he is the clever one?”

“He is the key to my lock. Why do you think I hold him in such precious esteem, even when he insists on being silly? There is nothing either of us can do about that. We shall just have to make it a rhetorical question.” Kira seemed to be glowing as she smiled, and returned to her sewing.

economics, health

Merry Christmas to readers old and new

December 24, 2017 No Comments

Sorry that I have not posted in some time. My mother was being killed by the NHS and my attention was rather diverted by that.

How do they do this? A couple of consultants decide that your aged relatives are a burden to you and pass this down the line, whereupon a team of nurses will tell you that they are professional and acting in your parent’s best interests as they then precede to feed them crap to ensure that the pharmaceutical drugs they are using destroy every nutrient in their body until they die of infection.

Be warned, this is very likely to happen to you. I have seen it done to three people now, and there is no escape.

In the event that you wish to enjoy your full lifespan, I suggest that you avoid the NHS.

My alter ego, the serious academic type who fell in totally uncharacteristic love with Wolfe some years ago is now going to take on the NHS, the pharmaceutical industry and the social engineering system they have been perfecting since the first phase of their eugenics system, WW1 and 2, and demonstrate exactly how this works and how education has changed even in my lifetime to reduce your status as an economic unit to the point that there is little possibility of escape from a system that tells you what to eat, what to wear, what to worry about and when to die.

Merry Christmas, enjoy whatever someone else told you to enjoy, and I will return in a more cheerful state when I have more fully recovered from this latest case of institutional murder.

My mother was a much loved, much misunderstood, mischievous lady who deserved better. Better from her other children, better from the NHS, a better final chapter.

economics, health, politics

How the world works

December 5, 2017 No Comments

A potted history

The 1950s, for a starting point, which is similar to now because they too had been wooed into thinking that manufactured chemicals were all beneficial and anything modern was good. This was immediately post-war, which saw the massive growth of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, both of which had hugely benefitted from WW2.

This was the post-union golden age in the USA, where large manufacturers were enabled by lack of workers’ rights. This meant potentially unlimited growth, however education was less accessible, so your degree actually meant something, and your technical skill, often gained in your workplace from an apprenticeship gained on leaving school, was duly rewarded.

A high level of employment meant that consumer confidence was relatively high. In the UK, properties which had been impossible to maintain during the war period were now being snapped up by this population of eager consumers, who set to work spend, spend, spending on new-fangled fabrics and trendy furniture.

A golden time for many, still miserable for the rest, the 1950s saw huge interest in marketing, methods of communicating and advertising, on which my father founded his career as a commercial artist.

Moving through to the 70s, and we see the ‘natural backlash,’ and the food counter culture, which my father was again a big part of. Both of my family doctors as a child were homeopaths as well as conventional doctors. The enmity that we see now between natural health and conventional medicine did not yet exist, and so as a child, I was just as likely to be prescribed herbs or homeopathy as an antibiotic. At that time, the pharmaceutical companies had not yet seen fit to condemn anyone in opposition, and perfectly normal people did not see fit to argue over science that does not exist.

Do you see the difference between this and today? Today the Board of Nutrition and the medical community are entirely dominated by the food manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. They endlessly repeat a mantra of guidelines that aren’t even correct.

You are told to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. The benefits of increasing your consumption continue on a steep trajectory until you hit seven. The World health organisation recommend 9-15. The reason for this lie is that it is not possible for producers of fresh fruit and vegetables to have a member of the board of nutrition on the payroll to represent them. This lie alone ought to tell you that something is wrong with your reliance on advice from authority figures that you used to unthinkingly trust.

The medical community, meanwhile, are apparently taught that all natural medicine is to be condemned and replaced with pharmaceutical products. This change has happened in my lifetime. The doctors themselves seem to be unaware of this change, presumably the free holidays have affected their memories.

This attitude percolates down to the point that people scrap daily online that everything ‘scientific’ is good and anyone that does not subscribe to their viewpoint is bonkers or stupid. Science is sponsored. As with all statistics, the results are used to paint a picture, but that is all it is. In a vast number of cases, the science does not exist, because the science does not attract profits for companies who have had it all their own way for decades, with budgets bigger than entire countries.

The only way to reach the truth, or to get the level of treatment that is possible, is to find out by yourself. Find out what to eat, find out how to solve problems that medical science cannot solve, of which there are many.

Someone online mentioned trusting a professional the other day. My experience of professionals, whether they be financial, scientific or medical, is that they are paid to give you information that is limited by the scope of their day-to-day jobs. You cannot expect them to be interested in their subject, because they have a salary to spend and holidays to take. Trusting a professional is not an option.

The only answer is to find out by yourself. The world is not improving, and you are not stupid. Trust nobody, there is a lot of money invested in keeping you dumb.

economics, health, politics

Corporatist Healthcare – a handy peep

May 3, 2017 3 Comments

As we know, the NHS is quietly on the way to being privatised. Whilst the system is not set to change over to the American system immediately – I thought the articles from the USA today were very interesting. Here is the first, from congressman Mo Brooks. Enjoy reading the Independent article and then watch the video:

Poor people don’t deserve healthcare because they haven’t led good lives

https://www.facebook.com/ThisWeekABC/videos/1260450274053196/

Quite the charmer, isn’t he?

Here is the third entry, from Congressman Tom MacArthur:

Personal tragedy drives deal making GOP congressman on health care

Now this last article is quite complex, the congressman is proposing a corporate solution to a public health issue – he proposes that states accommodate higher cost patients at their own discretion, based upon a system where they can opt out of full coverage healthcare insurance schemes. So having a baby will cost you lots of money in some states because they have opted out of mandatory maternity cover, but should your baby then have cancer, the state may or may not have a financial pool to pick up the increased cost of insurance. Otherwise, the insurance companies have the option to simply charge anyone with pre-existing conditions more for being ill rather than opting people out of the system on the basis of their illness altogether.

Now he does this on the basis that, unusually for a republican, he is aware that it may well happen, and in fact has happened to him, twice. His background in the insurance industry has made him unusually clued up on the issue of insurance. Here we see the great failure of the American healthcare and political system.

Rather than showing concern for the victims of their piss-poor idea of taking care of their own people, he cites the example of himself and his father, both of whom certainly have a work ethic, but no apparent sense of responsibility for direct care. You cannot be in two places at once, had either him or his father had direct responsibility for caring, they would have been unable to fund medical care at all, but rather than reflect upon this, he comes up with a corporate solution to a public health issue that again shits on the poor and unwell.

The Republicans would seem to be desperate to prove that there is a corporate solution to everything, that corporations are capable of showing some responsibility towards their victims/customers, and that everything will mysteriously work itself out, regardless of people’s individual circumstances or the level of understanding at state level.

Having worked in hundreds of different places in my life, the understanding of his policy is likely to be limited. Rules will be misinterpreted, states will get it wrong, the public will be told by a bored receptionist that no, they cannot get any help with their stroke/cancer/brain injury and that they are uninsurable. People will try several places and simply give up and watch their loved ones die.

This of course, does not matter to a conservative, as long as their costs are kept down and they aren’t held back by the great unwashed. This is the reason they become fearful in later life. Having spent so many years shitting all over everybody else, they suddenly realise that they too, require help and nobody is available to provide it because they need to amass their own pile of not very self-protective cash.

The system of American healthcare, and the idea that it will never happen to you is laughable to us in Europe, because of our more advanced idea of social conscience that they were so eager to stamp out when they smashed their unions. My grandfather was lured to the USA on the promise of work in the 1920s, only to find out that he was expected to be a scab, whereupon as a good communist he left rather quickly.

I was asked whether I wanted to move to the USA in 1998 when I was touring and playing backgammon.

“No,” I replied “I could not live in a country where I know perfectly well that people are dying of poverty. I actually had no idea that the NHS was as important to me until I was actually here with people who just don’t get it. This is not a civilised country.”

The same thing goes for food in the USA. Mo Brooks, above, blames people for smoking, drinking or eating the wrong thing, yet there is no question of shutting down the providers of poison. No question of the corporation showing the responsibility and education he expects from the individual.

Their ideas of ‘cheap food at any cost’ have led to suffering all over the world, from smallholders losing their farms to people who can afford American chemicals and trucks, to the infestation of patented life in the form of seeds. GM and hybrid crops from America are economic and agricultural invasion, not supplied, as they say to prevent starvation, but supplied to make the poor poorer and starve them out, and to create a smaller population of more malleable landowners.

If we are to survive as an independent nation, we should be more wary of America generally. They are extremely fond of money, and they are not responsible citizens of the world. I am with Prince Charles. There is no reason at all why Britain should not, as an island be the purveyors of clean food and clean politics, rather than becoming immersed in the complex deception and domineering double talk employed by the Yanks in the course of their complete disrespect for the poor, whatever country they are unfortunate enough to be poor in.

economics, politics

Why the UK needs le Pen to win

April 30, 2017 No Comments

Greetings fellow couch potatoes.

Never did I think I would see the day that I would actually want Front Nationale to win in France. I spent some time observing them in Second Life, and the crowd ten years ago were not particularly edifying. An older le Pen was in charge then.

Times change and so do we, and I was commenting only last week that our fortunes in the UK depend heavily on the outcome of the French election.

Why? Macron is the French equivalent of Tony Blair, a corporatist who welcomes Europe and wholly imaginary ‘unity’ in France (Front Nationale has always been a far stronger right wing force in France than we have in the UK – my ex, who was rather swarthy himself, was a keen supporter.)

If Le Pen wins however, our negotiating position significantly improves in Europe. Two feeder economies in negotiation are far stronger than one. It is, to put it simply, our best chance of having a country at all in a century or so.

The EU was set up on the basis that there was safety in size – you can easily see the future being China versus India versus Russia versus the USA in only a couple of decades. An attempt to form a super-state rather than forge shaky alliances with other countries in Europe is therefore considered desirable for defensive and negotiating purposes. The other reason for the EU is corporatism.

Labour is significantly cheaper when there is plenty of it and it creates a nice division amongst the population in terms of fighting for employment rights or even having a job at all. As far back as 2002, there were over three hundred applicants for each relevant job available in Scotland, and I am sure if you asked other people, it goes far further back than that. In the event that you want 30 or so specific PHD qualified applicants, you can easily have them under a system of free movement.

As I have said before this is bad for you as an individual. More supply means you are compensated far less for your skills, and you have limited means to fight back if you simply cannot get a job at all.

So as a Scottish Nationalist, I am afraid I cannot buy into the idea of unlimited immigration in the face of the lack of employment I have experienced. It is utterly soul destroying to find your government offering grants to people from other countries to stay after their degree, whilst doing nothing at all to aid natives in the form of providing relevant jobs in sufficient quantity.

The entire system in fact, falls down if you cannot secure a sufficient supply of jobs. The sociological basis of racism is competition for resources, as we have seen from the example of the north of England. These people are not all racist, they are starving and living in decaying circumstances.

This is why Brexit was a good move for the English population, and an unusually intelligent decision. Weak pound equals jobs, stalling immigration means less competition for jobs. This adds up to a potentially better standard of living for everybody in the UK. A revival in manufacturing was exactly what the UK needed, and a low pound is the most exquisitely democratic way of making sure that happens.

We have not even begun the system of starve-in-order-to-boom yet, and people are complaining, backtracking and I am getting the impression that the Conservatives believe that we cannot Brexit at all. This is extremely shortsighted, and there seems to be a prevailing misunderstanding of Conservative history in the party. Conservatism has not always been the party of the rich cutting taxes. The idea is that you provide opportunities for the masses, and the government is thereby enabled to cut taxation because everybody is paying it. What we have now is a system where they cut taxes at any cost, including people quite literally starving to death.

Perhaps it would take a messy haired free thinker to point this out, once we have secured a Frexit. It would seem unlikely that a thinker is going to emerge from anywhere else in the party. A more egalitarian, conscience-led Conservatism would be considerably more popular.

I will be going further into this topic in Lucifer Ogilvie, but I thought I would just plant the seed, if it is not already there.

Boris’s carpet is going very well, and the first layer is almost complete. I think it is going to be rather nice.

Toodle Pip, chums

Ina

economics, motivation, politics

Is the UK turning into America?

April 29, 2017 258 Comments

In the last twenty years we have seen the full death of integrity in the UK. Integrity at work is frowned upon, and in some cases is a sacking offence. Integrity of belief in politics is to be sneered at unless you are a Conservative. Integrity in product development is often dubious. The integrity of the BBC has been severely compromised. Only this evening I commented that Tony Parsons and Julie Birchhill hadn’t been on for a while, and then I realised that this was because Labour is not in power, and they are probably quite lazy now anyway.

The media is pumped into our homes by an inflated and lower quality supplier, in my case free of charge, although I could just plug in the box my broadband supplier sends me and get a lot of extra useless channels if I really wanted it. Freeview is more than enough, I do not need anything extra, and to be honest I could live without that too. All too often, we see the same faces presented to us year after year, sometimes being paid millions of pounds to appear, and the people concerned are neither talented nor interesting.

We have lowered the denomination of information to the point where it is largely useless, education is of considerably lower quality to improve the statistics and innovation is apparently to be discouraged unless it relates to mass market products. From ‘the bland leading the bland’ days of Tony Blair, British culture has been in a downward spiral until we now apparently have a population so stupid that they respond to our unelected PM repeating the words strong and stable over and over again in place of anything approaching attractive policy.

What became of the questioners, the innovators, the creative thinkers, the academics straying into other walks of life and seeing a new angle, or even discussing it? What became of the BBC I used to be so proud of? What became of honesty, hard work and the individual? In their place we seem to now see subdued lackeys lazily carrying out the mugwump instructions of people with too much money and no imagination, who in turn are carrying out instructions from people with even more money and less imagination.

I have written many previous posts on the danger of corporatisation. It endangers education, creativity, healthcare, public service provision, politics and the nature of your daily life. Nobody listens, because life is more convenient if you do not have to think. Perhaps if I appeared on Sky or Dave making jokes about it people would take it more seriously.

True freedom takes work and confrontation. It involves actual debate, and an actual exchange of real ideas. It does not need to be repressed by strong and stable leadership, and there is no passing the buck. Sometimes freedom costs, and sometimes you really should start paying, in the form of putting some actual work in and saying NO to things that you know perfectly well just won’t work.

If the UK is to stop the American rot of complacency, lazy thinking and blaming others for their problems instead of actually helping them solve these problems, now would be a good time to do it. No thanks, we do not wish to bomb Syria. No thanks, we do not wish to sell the NHS. No thanks, we do not wish to be sucked into more American economic mistakes in the form of the ‘consumption-led economy.’

I have never heard such rubbish as I heard on the news today on this very subject. It is lazy, stupid thinking to make consumers with ever-shrinking disposable income the focus of economic policy. It is a cop-out which leads to disaster, and if that disaster fails to affect you, it will certainly be visited upon your children.

Boris may well have had a Brexit accident, but it was a good accident. A weak pound encourages the export trade, which is the only way of having a genuinely strong economy. Small businesses are proportionately far better for the economy, in much the same way as feeding the poor makes more sense than tax breaks for the rich, who merely squirrel their extra money away instead of spending it. Small businesses employ more people, innovate, answer problems far more effectively, just as the poor spend and stimulate their local area instead of sending their cash to the nearest tax haven.

If I can see this, and our government cannot, who do I vote for? Sort yourselves out.

economics, politics

Manifesto of Murder

April 23, 2017 No Comments

So far on our trip along the path to the General Election, we have some disastrous proposals from both Labour and Conservative.

Speaking as a Scot, I am glad that I do not have to consider any of them.

Your choice in England is as follows:

Labour:

Tenner an hour official minimum wage
A spurious fake tenner for carers which would immediately be lopped off income support
Common Purpose ‘Let us pretend that we do not have an underground third world economy run by people of other colours exploiting each other by using a noisy liberal racist agenda under the banner of diversity.’
Let us also cling to Brexit as a vote winner because the North of England is tired of having massive populations of immigrants using up all the social housing and yet having no work.
Let us continue to pump money into London despite saying that we are doing something for everywhere else
Let us set up a committee to discuss the above for at least ten years without actually implementing anything
Please let us not notice that the ship is sinking and we will never be out of debt
Let us enjoy more PFI and employ Irish builders to rebuild the last lot of crumbling buildings we still haven’t paid for.

Conservative:

We must continue to kill the disabled and welfare claimants rather than create jobs anywhere apart from London
We must expand the commonwealth and exploit it as we no longer have the will or capacity to create jobs in the UK
More tax breaks for American companies!
More tax breaks for foreign billionaires!
More tax breaks for us!
The NHS must be destroyed!
No more pensions and useless eaters!
Tax rises for the squeezed middle!
We will pay for a hard Brexit by punishing you for voting for it!
Negotiation is hard, please vote Labour

So basically it is not looking good for England. People seems to be very stupid, and the dangerous assumption that politicians have some sort of divine right to distribute misery rather than shock, horror actually administrate the country properly seems to prevail very widely indeed.

Just to remind you, no politician is more talented than you are, you are perfectly capable of taking action yourself and those very impressive soundbites they are so fond of are actually written by graduate interns who barely know what they are doing, never mind anyone else.

In other words, nobody is capable of running the country and you should drop the assumption that either political theory is better. One leads to your premature death, the other leads to bankruptcy.

Perhaps the answer is to vote for whatever is less painful in the short term, perhaps you enjoy reading about the suffering of others. You have certainly been conditioned not to feel it if you have followed the media over the last few decades.

I miss the days of my childhood, when people still had meetings that you were allowed to disrupt and protest and actually cared about the cause they pretended to support. It is all so fake now, and people seem to be drugged into stupidity.

Personally, I suspect that looking at Liam Fox, Philip Hammond and David Davies, Theresa has decided that she would like to just take the pension and run. As manifestos go so far, it does not look as if the Tories actually want to be in power at all.

Whatever you do then, prepare for a thin Christmas, because as far as I can see, disaster now looms, regardless of Brexit.

creativity, economics, motivation

General Election blues

April 19, 2017 No Comments

In a shock move, Theresa May has decided to call a general election in 7 weeks. This after saying that a second independence referendum would cause instability. The only instability she refers to, of course is the instability of losing the collateral of a billion barrelsworth of oil that Andrew Neil blatantly denied the existence of only a few weeks ago.

Whilst I am grateful to Andrew for circulating my every tweet on facebook in addition to promoting me to his own fans by openly denying the truth that we in the village of Scotland already knew before the 2014 referendum, I am thoroughly pissed off with the hypocrisy of the English war against my country.

After conducting a small survey a few months ago, I ascertained that the Scottish electorate were not particularly clued up about economics and that even the most diehard supporter of managing our own destiny was not playing with a full deck of cards, I seriously considered leaving the SNP due to the hostile and rather hysterical response of the members to my short and comic survey on the attitudes of yes and no indy voters to the issue of brexit. People are easily shocked, confused and inclined to crap behaviour, and since the class war is alive and well, particularly in central Scotland, there often seems no point in considering anything beyond your own nose, since inevitably someone will try to cut yours off without actually hearing anything that you had to say.

In any case, our feeling is that we have a hope of scouring the last Conservative from our fair country, leaving the rabid killers of the disabled few choices in their war against Scotland. As someone with quite a pedigree in the long term issue of Scottishness and the crushing thereof, with feet in the communist and conservative camp due to my odd but extremely healthy gene mix, I am hopeful that we will get the issue of a more realistic attitude to the management of Scotland cleared up. We simply do not need to be paying for more bridges in London or killing disabled and long term unemployed people to sustain Scotland.

I still do not agree with SNP policy in regard to immigration before job creation, and the word is that I am not alone, however, as a voter, they are on safe ground. It is only backbiting, status seeking and rather sickening empty headed mortgage victims that need persuading as far as I can see, so rather than fighting with each other, I would suggest that cybernats concentrate on actually constructing arguments for Edinburgh types.

What I, and many others who remember and have actually bothered to study Labour Party history wonder, is whether Corbyn will actually remember that Labour was supposed to support PEOPLE WHO GO TO WORK in addition to bleating about diversity a la Common Purpose. Immigration is still a huge issue, particularly for people in Wales, Yorkshire and Cornwall, some of whom have even less hope of ever working than people in the more obscure areas of Scotland. Grants for computers and internet access would go far further towards making work available for such people online than persistent starvation, but apparently it is preferable to force people onto useless courses, run by recruitment agents that have gone into the welfare punishment business. Making an extra tenner available for carers, which would in any case be removed from the accompanying benefits, is not a vote winner and so I am unsure as to why this was the chosen carrot this morning.

Anyway, I am unsure as to where things have gone wrong in terms of Theresa’s lack of actual mandate, since it has never bothered the Conservative Party before. I can only assume that your vote in the General Election refers to the willingness to starve part of the population to death, blame them for pisspoor economic management, the sale of the NHS and the continuation of the totally fucking useless trickledown policy that makes the luxury goods market the only growth sector worth being in. Show me the jobs, show me the quality industry and show me the poor that sustain their local shops by actually eating, and then we will discuss my vote.

creativity, economics, games

The Gamebia Project Update 2 and Boris Johnson

April 7, 2017 8 Comments

I know I haven’t been posting a lot recently. Mother has been in hospital and I am a bit stressed about a forthcoming court appearance as I continue to attempt to run a family of exceptionally stupid and vindictive people who seem intent on making people unhappy just because they can.

The furniture is significantly held back by lack of funds at the moment. The hazard of making more expensive items is that they require more money to develop. So far I think I have the new principle about half right, but it will take another £600 or so to finish the first few pieces and free up space for the next six, never mind finish them.

The distraction of the Gamebia Project has meant that I have not started working on the book for Boris as yet. I have some background reading still to do, although some of the biographies are less than flattering so far. I can see why Boris withdrew authorisation from one of them, as I find myself liking him and Stanley, in particular less and less as I read it. Not my cup of tea at all, but then I am wildly unsuccessful at social climbing or making money, unlike them. It apparently pays to be a cold and selfish fish.

I am selling off the detritus from the Gamebia Project as progress seems to be exceptionally slow. I am still being updated by my former friend, although I suspect he is only bothering because he thinks he will get more stuff that way and I have lost interest entirely due to the very slow pace of development. People often think films have to be epic slogs, but when you need to put out two a day you have to be a little bit more pragmatic. At the rate he is working, he will never make any money from youtube, and he has not even attempted to create the project on fiverr, which on my schedule would have started paying for his rice by now.

So much for trying to help people that cannot be helped. The subject of the project apparently only sees one word in ten that I write, and so he has no idea how the project has to be managed. As he has now stopped pestering me online every time I am on, as he did before he got the equipment, I cannot even repeat the same information ad infinitum to put him on the correct track.

So, I think the next affordable bit of product development is going to be the range of shoes I was planning, which has an initial outlay of about a hundred pounds or so. The Gamebia has, due to cashflow issues, left me without even that for the forseeable future, so I am understandably nervous about going ahead.

The games project and the writing then, since it costs me nothing. I could have farmed some of the work for the game out, if my Gambian friend had paid any attention to what I was saying, but I am having to do it myself.

Getting very bored with pacing myself for normal people. It seems piteously slow. I guess that is how my former muse, Wolfe felt. Nobody sees your vision like you do, and anything else seems like a distraction if you don’t pay attention to the lesson you are learning.

economics, motivation

The Gamebia Project Update

March 20, 2017 8 Comments

I wish that this post was going to contain good news, but the project is not going well at this point.

Scuppered by limited funds, I am scratching together the funds to continue as I was sold a bad batch of computers, at this point if I am successful I will bring the project to break-even at this end.

My protege in the Gambia, who told me that he knew what he was doing, seems to not know what he is doing at all and is now only in communication once every twenty four hours to ask when the next computers are coming rather than getting on with his end of the project.

Despite my own lack of funds I have sent the following items to The Gambia:

Two PC tablet computers, which were intact when they left here, well packed with chargers. One arrived broken, and has been sold to provide 3000 dalasi (£60) to provide immediate assistance to the recipient.
A digital camera, capable of producing video plus cables, batteries, charger and SD card
A condenser microphone for recording interviews and connector cable
A multi adapter to enable several different items to be used with the tablet
An SD reader, in case any of the cables get lost or sold
Three memory sticks, to assist with transferring information should mobile broadband be too expensive
A speaker, to enable testing of the material before sending to me for editing
A mini to usb cable for tethering, but this is now free because the recipient figured out how to get the tablet online despite the expense
An SD card, unspecified

The speaker was taken by the recipient’s brother on the first night, and the SD card went to the recipient’s boss as he had provided loans to the recipient. He has failed to update me on the other items, and so I am unable to report how many of the others he has lost or sold. I included two tablet computers, since I was aware the recipient has constant financial difficulties as this is why he started talking to me in the first place. This should leave sufficient equipment for him to start a channel on youtube, a blog and procure work from fiverr which would easily provide him with an additional income.

I suggested that as the recipient is very shy, that his somewhat more go-getting brother be the face of the project, and sharpen his presentation skills in addition to making better use of the equipment than selling it. The recipient tells me that in Africa, people expect money before success, which tells you rather a lot about why some areas of Africa are in a constant state of economic failure.

The recipient has not said thank you yet, nor is he staying in communication. Before the parcel arrived he was constantly talking online, he now appears once every twenty four hours and either complains, or asks when his next parcel is arriving. I have told him that unless I see some evidence of the project at his end, no further parcels will be forthcoming, which he has responded to with more complaints and excuses. I set up two email addresses, a youtube channel, a separate account for linkedin, a facebook page with likes and recommended a specific twitter account be created for the project. He appears to have struggled with all of this, and now seems not to have understood any of the conversations we had prior to my sending out the equipment.

I have also given instructions for handling the project, and no attempt seems to be being made to actually carry them out. Instead I read messages indicating that he does not know what he is doing at all, and is not really trying to make the thing work.

As you can see, things are not going well so far. From what appeared to be an intelligent and serious person who wanted to self-develop and fund his enormous family, we have a whinging creep who is now trying to say just enough to get more equipment without doing any actual work. I am not at all happy with this so far.

Still, I did this with the full knowledge that it was possible that he would just sell all of it, in which case I need not bother with this silly dude again, so the situation is not beyond saving if the recipient pulls his finger out.

I have been told a story from Germany, which indicated that African workers in Germany managed to work like Germans, and when that project moved to Africa, suddenly forgot how to do it. Perhaps sunshine is to blame, or perhaps the problem is blaming other people when what you really need is a work ethic.

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