motivation

Helping is better than being helped

June 4, 2017 No Comments

Helping is better than being helped

My mother is now bed bound because someone who has never even met her decided that her perfectly adequate chair was unsuitable for her. Now someone else who has never met her is supposed to come around to the house to determine whether the chair is suitable, until then she is trapped in her bed.

This is because the consultant, who has never met me, decided that my mother was too heavy for me to carry and decided to force me to accept help from teams of carers, who are not willing to take the health and safety risk of putting her in a chair on the days that she is well enough. On top of this, she is to spend all day in a position which makes it easier for them to change her when they come in, which hurts her back.

Today I caught one of them asking if she would not prefer to be eating rolls and sausage than her raw diet. She can do this if she wants, but if she does she will have to be put back on the surgical grade antacid and the laxative, she will be in further pain which warrants a painkiller, and she will be confused because the medication does that. When I explained this to my mother, she decided she would rather continue on her raw diet.

When a hostile nurse explained to me that every decision was now to go through social work, I declined any further input. Why are we having ten people involved, when my mother has previously done very well with only one person, I asked? She immediately became very frightened and did not answer.

The bottom line is, because I have had help forced on me, my mother’s quality of life has actually declined and we are at constant risk of input from morons who don’t actually care about her well being any more than they care about mine. I object to this, and I object to 14 hours of my day revolving around sitting waiting for people I do not want to see.

This was only one of the bits of interference that annoyed me this week. The other one was from my friend, who again tried to joke about bringing cake to my house when I was miserable about Wolfe and struggling. He apparently doesn’t know about boundaries, so I have had to explain this, in a variety of ways, ever since.

Why it would not be perfectly simple to do what a person asks in their home I do not know, but apparently he is a bit thick in this respect.

So this time I got really annoyed.

Am I the only person that can see that having to physically eject someone from my home for bringing and offering cake repeatedly when I ask him not to is a bit ridiculous? He even suggested that my objection somehow deprived my mother, and said he would do what he liked in my home. I am not sure why this is a difficult issue for him. If I don’t want your cake in my home, you don’t bring cake, surely?

It is not the actions of a friend to try to sabotage your life. When people do things like this, they are actively trying to damage you. I have explained this to him time and time again. He refuses to understand, and apparently refused to recognise that I ought to be able to set the rules in my home.

I am constantly under attack, the last thing I need is more bullshit from someone pretending to visit me in order to damage my health via my mother.

Anyway, at the time I cried. He thought this was hilarious, and it is unlikely that he is ever going to explain why he thinks damaging me is a good idea, since he has tried it so often. Being alone sucks.

health, motivation

90 year old is now a raw foodist

May 31, 2017 No Comments

90 year old is now a raw foodist

My mother returned from hospital dehydrated, sleepy, with a prescription for a double dose of ensure, which is a particularly horrible plastic food they like to give old people, a double dose of a surgical grade antacid to counteract the effects of an injection to dissolve her giant blood clot and a double dose of laxative. She had been on a saline drip which had caused her right arm to basically be one huge bruise. She lasted about two days before starting to sleep constantly again.

She has been back for about three weeks now. Yesterday I got a call from a dietician who had been assigned to her in hospital, who had now gotten around to actually dealing with her case. She seemed unsure if my mother was actually still alive, and referred to her as ‘being home for a short while.’ She asked when would be suitable to come around? That is what is best for my mother, after all.

“Actually” I said “I have been kind of passively studying herbalism and wellness for most of my life, and I have put her on a high calorie alkaline diet. She doesn’t need ensure, she doesn’t need laxatives, and she really doesn’t need the antacid, which in its description includes sore joints, confusion and a contraindication with her heart tablet. So we really don’t need you.”

“What is she eating?” the dietician seemed concerned.

“Raw chocolate, various grasses, a few seaweeds and some herbs. She also gets seven portions of fruit and vegetables a day. She has put on some weight, her skin problems have improved, she is alert, and she is no longer screwing herself up to the right. We are doing fine. She tried some porridge the other morning, but she really prefers what I am giving her.”

The dietician seemed dumbfounded. “Does she have a choice?” She tried to regain control of this dangerous situation.

Given that my mother had stopped eating altogether, this seemed a bit cheeky, so I salved her ego by prattling on about holistic treatment of dementia, and how my mother has not only surpassed the expected life expectancy by five years, but retained her capacity until very recently. She has always been rather dismissive of my health interest. She is really quite keen on it now that she is drinking a drink that tastes of salted caramel (today, tomorrow’s is cherry bakewell flavour) but actually contains a host of supernutrients and the optimum antioxidants possible, in addition to her seven a day.

My mother has improved by the day, to the point that memories from nine years ago that she has never acknowledged have returned, and she now asks for things and has regained her grip. All because I made a giant vat full of supermix when I was raw. It is the best four hundred I have ever spent.

Supermix has 80 ingredients, a mixture of Wolfe suggestions and old European remedies. I really made it for me, since she didn’t like the idea of health food, and when I lived on it for 5 weeks my very grumpy neighbour told me it was the best I had ever looked. Evidently I did something right.

My friend, who was also disparaging about my brief healthy period, is now building up his own supermix, and I am in the process of discarding the ‘normal’ food and trying to regain my former glow.

It just goes to show, when people ignore what you are saying, belittle your attempts to take care of yourself when you are taking care of others, and participate in their own bullshit, you really should just shut the door and get on with it, because usually, you are right.

business, creativity, motivation

Introduction to Ina

May 26, 2017 No Comments

Introduction to Ina

This week, I decided to launch myself a bit more seriously, in preparation for the finished Boris pieces, which I think are the start of a more revealing art period. Several of the sites would like me to write a regular blog, and so here is your handy introduction to Ina Disguise.

My father, also an artist, always advised me to do anything but art, since producing artwork for money is not the happiest of experiences if you like to express anything. Therefore, his reasoning was avoid art in order to produce better art. This led to my becoming a habitual over worker, as I took him at his word and worked every hour I could to avoid doing any artwork for many years.

Ina Disguise came about as a result of my inability to have a conversation with David Wolfe, a natural health promoter that I wanted to talk to about some academic work I was doing on eco-economics, marketing and behavioural economics. I managed to connect with him briefly on a few websites, but he only seemed to want to talk trash and pretend to himself that he is very clever. I am not sure why he does this, because apart from his lousy writing and a murky past, he actually is very clever.

As my family were trying to use abusing me as an excuse to rob their own mother, this came as the last straw and I became very unhappy, despite having just lost about 160lb and looking unusually hot that year. Therefore, after spending several months fighting off the urge to eat myself into oblivion, I started sewing, which is a habit I had previously formed whilst avoiding horrible and hurtful people and recovering from failed love affairs. If you cannot have the relationship, you might as well have a nice carpet out of your misdirected emotions.

Since he had blocked me from actually speaking to him, after it transpired that I was unusual in seeing through his many disguises online, I then wrote Best Scandal Ever in an effort to appease and inform him why I was buttering him up in the first place. Best Romance Ever followed, and, since I am of the opinion that keeping one’s brain balanced is rather important, I spent the time that I was not writing doing a lot more stitching.

I had previously amassed art materials with every spare penny from every job I had had since being told that I had to give up everything for my parents as nobody else in the family would ever be willing to do it. Currently two of them are sitting idle with pensions whilst I am unable to earn my own.

Anyway, within a year of putting my work out in public, GQ had got in touch, which has been an enormous encouragement, and my work has now been in Tatler several times, and last month I realised an early ambition and managed to get a spot in World of Interiors. I cannot tell you how much the girls from these magazines have helped me at what has been a very rough and ego bashing time.

So now I work in batches, usually five or six pieces at a time, and I have released several batches over the last four years, with varying results. Some of the pieces are more popular with other people than me, but my experiments have taught me a lot. Scale is a great tutor, as is ensuring that you are spoilt for stock volume in raw materials. As with writing, the ideas you would like to have only come when you have indulged the ideas you initially think are merely basic.

Wolfe taught me a lot about marketing, allowing yourself to express even the most rudimentary ideas, on the basis that most people cannot manage that and will show some interest anyway. There is simply no point in waiting until you are good enough, because if you don’t practise and attempt things, you don’t develop the stamina, skill and confidence to get to the good stuff. One of my pieces, Raw Sex Object, took seven years to complete, and I am not even interested in selling it because it is really a giant sampler.

Anyway, Wolfe has never understood that I am not trying to kill his career, and I cannot be bothered explaining it to him, so I have now embarked on the Boris adventure, as I perceive Boris to be a far more settled and confident person who might actually appreciate my amusing coded communication skills. I shall lavish attention on poor Boris until I presumably focus on a very serious person, such as the Pope. In the meantime, enjoy the artwork.

Ina

business, creativity, motivation

Looking for Work

May 16, 2017 No Comments

Every so often I wonder if I am managing, and I look for additional work. Tonight, since my mother has at last returned from hospital, I looked for work from home.

I have a fair amount of experience working from home, not just because of my lack of interest in social jostling. I worked from home for some time as my parents illnesses progressed, and so I have an unusual level of insight when it comes to work from home jobs.

I have watched carefully over the years, as home working went from quirk to fad to increasingly preferred option, and I see that I am not the only person who appreciates the lack of commute and lack of conversation involved in working from home.

Glassdoor is a good site to look at for reviews of home working options, as is the student room in the UK. You will tend to find the reviews via your search for the company you intend to work for on Google. I recommend this before you even think about applying for that underpaid source of vital income online.

People per hour has improved enormously since its previous incarnation, and Odesk has now become Upwork. As long as you are willing to put in the extra hours on the pitching processes, these are invaluable if you need to supplement your dwindling income.

Homepage-new

Clickworker is also very useful and can generate you income from all your gadgets if you are so inclined. There are a few sites that do similar hit based work, such as Mechanical Turk if you can be bothered going through the irritating process of registering for American tax.

http://www.lionbridge.com/careers/

Lionbridge is a good direct employer, and an increasing number of successful direct employment models are now available to you if you feel working from home is for you.

I have worked for about five or six different online employers over the years, and with the exception of Ipsos Mori, they have been very good. To be fair to Ipsos Mori, they do try to create a good opportunity, but as with so many companies, internal problems make them rather miserable to work for, reflected in their poor employee reviews. I cannot emphasise the importance of checking before you apply for information from ex employees enough.

So, yesterday JT Coxx advertised a free seminar on my Facebook timeline. The enticing advertisement said that there were too few female motivational speakers, and naturally my interest was piqued, being something of a motivational speaking connoisseur. I duly checked the reviews, to find that JT Coxx is considered worldwide to be an abrasive, arrogant scammer who creates free seminars to con people out of hundreds and thousands of dollars. This theme seemed familiar, given the descriptions I had previously been given of the boiler room tactics employed by David Wolfe. They are cut from similar cloth, being in the voice-of-yesteryear Tony Robbins punch the air market.

Sadly, I decided not to bother with the free seminar from JT Coxx. The quality just wasn’t up to much, and I cannot afford to squander my time and money on Wolfe. So, my conclusion tonight, when reviewing the working from home, hiding from the world options, was

Why am I looking to write blog posts and copy for other people for button money, when I should be developing my online presence?

Which in itself, of course is a motivational statement – why be a follower when you can be a leader? The pay may not emerge for some time, if ever, but far better to position yourself as a predator rather than prey, whether you are grazing stock, in the form of an employee, or prey in the form of the horror of being an actual customer!

So, there hangs the crux of the matter. Rather than concentrating on the Zig Ziglar school of not being a moaner, don’t put yourself in the position of having something to moan about – avoid irritants where possible. Separate yourself from the idea of being an employee, and instead strategise ways of freeing yourself from the whole paradigm. If you must be employed – seek out miserable jobs to remind yourself why you are looking elsewhere for inspiration. That is the key to being a great employee after all, playing a role that you despise as well as you possibly can under difficult circumstances.

I think in order to progress, I will release the existing work on audible and work on hubpages. The carpet is needing my attention once I have my mother in a more stable state of health. Thereafter I will keep a closer look at the world of employment, to remind myself why I really need to get a move on to avoid it.

creativity, motivation

Writing Development

May 14, 2017 No Comments

Writing Development

As someone who has always been told that I tell a good story, it is one of the few things that I am fairly confident about. I am wildly undisciplined, I rarely redraft before publishing, and as a result I have to go back and read things I have put out months and years later.

I have found, however, that the blog has been very helpful in building this confidence, and in forming a writing habit. Having said this, I took a look at Reality Check this evening, and was horrified that emotional topics put me in a frenzied panic which renders me almost unreadable. Mandatory Equality, on the other hand, is a fun read which took little time to make a complicated point.

I have not achieved very much over the last 4 years or so, apart from 11 books, 3 art collections and the beginnings of two computer games. I am very glad that I have not achieved very much.

Why? Having read Reality Check, a particularly personal story which is very patchy and a severely abbreviated history of the last twenty years of family life – I have stuck rather too closely to the ‘write what you know’ hypothesis and was too horrified to do the story justice. When I think about the ideas I have for the forthcoming Lucifer Ogilivie in comparison, I am having far more elegant and interesting ideas now BECAUSE I AM WILLING TO GIVE MYSELF THE TIME TO THINK IT THROUGH.

This is the problem for anyone embarking on a career of self expression. It takes time to take yourself seriously enough to determine a good direction to go in. Rushing it just ends up with a sub-standard product. Self expression requires self development, and that takes dedication and selfishness. Otherwise you might as well consign yourself to a lifetime of mediocrity.

So, if you want to write, first take yourself seriously enough to take your time over it. Edit at least once, and give yourself space to move on and then look back. Don’t market like mad too quickly, because chances are your next work will be a development on the last. As with artwork, your crap idea will develop with time into what you really should have done in the first place, so you need to be willing to make mistakes and admit to them.

This is harder than it sounds – and it takes failure to humble yourself to your craft. I read other self-published work all the time that will never get anywhere without an editor. Again, a matter of taking yourself seriously enough to put the time, work and possibly money into.

For example, I took a look at the art carpets available online – I am almost ready to go to market as a carpet maker after twenty years of making, and sometimes not making, but thinking about, carpets – this is because I know what direction my carpet paintings are to go in, because my idea was always to be the Tiffany, or the Faberge of carpet makers. Carpet making is my thing, but it is not so great that I want to be grafting away at putting hundreds out. Far better to perfect the art and put out ten good ones.

Several mainstream art sites that I looked at last night had people that should not have bothered marketing their carpets at all, in much the same way that many books being pumped out are not ready.

You do have to balance this, however with what you want to write – a writer that wants to market a product will have the capacity for increased volume of less intense work, such as David Wolfe. A writer trying to create a cult like following willing to pay for more expensive retreats, such as Gabriel Cousins will, however need to put more time and thought into creating an ethos. Likewise Jilly Cooper, who must write at a fearsome pace to put out work that badly constructed, needs less preparation than Chekhov.

So, to conclude – to write well, decide who you are and then write badly. As Aristotle says, if you wish to acquire a virtue, first pretend to have it, and eventually you will.

creativity, health, motivation

Things people say

May 1, 2017 No Comments

The election is becoming tiresome, with Theresa May displaying some pretty weak communication skills and a crippling lack of charisma, versus the idealistic Jeremy Corbyn (he reminds me of my dad)

I still wonder if the Conservatives even want to win? They don’t seem to?

Anyway a couple of things from today:

A foolish consultant who does not know that the social work department is inherently corrupt insisted on us having carers to help with my mother. I realise those of you who do not understand what the social work department really do will think that this is a good thing, and that I should be grateful, but here is why it is just another way of ripping you off in much the same way as good old Theresa has tried to rip people off in the last week:

I managed my mother by myself through sundowning, through endless infections, through her own children trying to rob her. Just before she went to hospital this time I was carrying her to the commode, letting her sit up for an hour when she could, she was washed and dressed at times to suit her and she could sleep when she wanted and chat at 4am whenever she felt like it.

Now that we have carers, I am a freak if I am not out of bed at 8 and feeding her, which means that I am not very happy or able to work as much at the moment, my sleep is destroyed, and she is noted as being inappropriately asleep if she is not wide awake right after her vat of porridge and honey.

They were brought in on the basis that it should take two to move her rather than me carrying her due to health and safety concerns. The carers have refused to move her and have written off our handmade disabled chair as not suitable – they are now unable to rule it suitable without an expert decision so she is not allowed out of bed, putting her at risk of bedsores.

In addition, I have already been threatened/visited by the social work department who asked such delightful questions as

Does she even recognise you?
Who has power of attorney?
Can we use your toilet? (this last is used as an excuse to gain entrance to your house so the answer is no)

So we now have 4 visits of two people per day and she actually has less appropriate care, all in order to put us at risk from the local council. People in nice houses do not invite the social work in, especially if they have been directly told by a social worker that the social work department are not there for the carer, they are there to gather evidence in order to seize the assets of the patient.

Naturally I am not impressed by this service and I am not sure why I am judged incompetent to wipe her bottom, since that is all that the carers actually do.

So, today they were asking about the carpet for Boris. The nurse and the carers have separately expressed great interest in the carpet for Boris, so evidently this one is a winner.

How much are they?

Well, the last one I did was in Tatler, and it is nine and a half

Why is it worth that much?

Well you are paying for storage, the studio, the fact it is a niche product, twenty years of skill and the fact I need about 200kg of wool in stock to make a product like this, which has also cost every spare penny over the last 22 years because I refuse to ask for a grant for a creative wank, so to speak.

The other conversation I had was with my ex, who noted that I appear to be quite bright.

Men don’t listen at all, otherwise he would have given up years ago and I would have written a world shattering book.

Lack of confidence is tiresome. Maybe it is time I tried staggering self belief.

Hey Theresa,

There aren’t sufficient care home owners in the UK to win the election for you on the basis of your dementia tax social care policy. And frankly, as a carer in a nice property, I cannot afford your corrupt system of social care as it is, never mind your diehard conservative voters who will also be bullied repeatedly by the social work department.

Just sayin’

economics, motivation, politics

Is the UK turning into America?

April 29, 2017 156 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.

creativity, motivation

Fun with status

April 26, 2017 No Comments

Here are three people, each believing that they are very very important:

One believes she is very, very important, because her mother did not inform her that she is not. Her only achievement in life was getting married and driving her husband into making a lot of money. She now believes that every word she says is automatically true and that everything she does is correct because her bank balance and spending capacity tells her so.
Two believes that he is very, very important because he managed to land a job paying twice as much as his last job, despite both of these jobs consisting of doing nothing apart from wearing a suit and signing documents as if he knows what he is doing.
Three does not believe she is very important, but does what the other two tell her to do and spreads malicious gossip on their instruction to gain approval from them.

They are, I am told, members of my family, who decided when I was working in England for ten years that I was born to serve them and that they need not participate in their parents’ care because I would do what I was told.

They have apparently not noticed that their refusal to pick up a paintbrush, be even basically polite or assist at all with the work that is necessary to keep my mother’s house and gardens going means that they have declined to have any status when it comes to the care of their mother or this house.

In the last twenty years, I have cleaned, maintained, cared for both of their elderly parents whilst working up to five jobs at a time. I only gave up working round about the time of the first referendum because the Scottish Government stopped funding research for a period around that time, and my job ground to a halt. It was expedient to do so because my mother was requiring more in the way of care at that time.

It is interesting that they associate status with money – number one made a false statement to the police because she believed that I had escaped from the house at one point (I kid you not) and gave a statement indicating that the slave had escaped and was to be returned to the house forthwith so that she could dump her sick mother there.

None of them are either capable or emotionally equipped to have dealt with any of the problems associated with their parents becoming ill, and they attempted to deprive my mother of her money entirely seven years ago on the basis that I had gone out for an afternoon. They apparently still believe that this is justifiable behaviour.

Fortunately I got them out of the prosecution that would have followed this activity by putting my foot down, however I am now feeling considerably less sympathetic as they are currently attempting to interfere with my mother’s medical care at the hospital. The last few years have consisted of them running to the nearest authority figure at every opportunity to have me punished for refusing to acknowledge their imaginary superiority.

Frighteningly, everyone I have spoken to in the caring profession says that behaviour such as this from absent, lazy and toxic relatives is actually normal. No help is available for carers in terms of protecting them from their own family, and if you accept help from social services for any other reason, such as care or respite, anything such people say is used as grounds for action against your sick loved one, in the form of removing them to a Conservative Care home and making you homeless.

So, if your family owns anything, you are left with little option to protect it than trying to avoid being in the care system at all, effectively putting you in a situation of modern slavery, just as my deranged sister described in her false missing person’s report. I was fortunate, the police officers involved knew me and simply ascertained whether I was being held against my will or not. Other people may not be so lucky.

It has horrified me that my parents early life apparently led them to instruct their first three children to be grasping lower middle class scum that I would not want to be associated with under any circumstances. I am guessing that these are the ‘ordinary working families’ that Theresa May is so fond of referring to.

I am not sure what kind of mentality you would require to sit and gloat over your paycheque and begrudge every penny in tax, since prior to taking care of my parents, I used to work up to 20 hours a day as a normal routine. Even when I was studying, I was working three or four part time jobs. At no point did I have time to even look at my paycheque, never mind consider that my tax and national insurance was something to be grudgingly given. I just loved working.

So then, are we to believe that the majority of voters are small-minded, lazy, grasping scum that would rob their own mother given half a chance, and who begrudge the less fortunate a means of eating or heating their house? If this is the definition of an ordinary working family, I would suggest a cultural change is in order.

Taxes paid are just that, they are paid. What is left over is yours. It is then up to you to budget around that.

Status is earned, and it is up to you how you choose to earn it. If you choose to earn it via piles of cash, then naturally you should seek validation from other people who believe the same thing. If you choose to earn it via malicious gossip, then you should partner yourself with people who are idle and stupid enough to listen to you.

If however, you choose to earn it via actual work, you will swiftly realise that other people, such as the above, are essentially worthless and should really be the first ones to go in the event of mass extermination, since all they seem to be capable of doing is hurting other people and consuming goods which would be better to be sent to people who are actually worthwhile.

I noticed when I was interviewing a cross section of the population that worthwhile people are often the least valued, and who are repeatedly told that they are not entitled to status on the grounds that they are poor. It got to the point that I asked my dear brother why people earning 50k or more so often know considerably less about the world around them than people scraping a living. Are they stupid or just cheats, I asked?

“Thoughtless” he said.

Nice to see some self-awareness.

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.

economics, motivation

The Gamebia Project Update

March 20, 2017 No 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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