… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Category: Uncategorized

  • THE STATE WE’RE IN :: Statement 1

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    A short series of statements that recognises the current urgency and absolute primacy of the climate crisis. May be revised or corrected. Undecided how this series will go. Away njoio over the weekend (no not Glastonbury).

    Let’s get this clear from the outset: I represent nobody except myself. Despite supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s UK Labour party I have never been a member of the Labour party. I may have briefly been a member of SERA (Socialist, Environment and Resources Association) approximately 40 years ago while I was an active anti-nuclear activist. SERA was and continues to be closely associated with the Labour party.

    I have been publishing inconsistently on the internet since 1998 or 1999 and I am certainly amoung the earliest bloggers. I have a portfolio of posts and articles that establishes me a competent and accomplished blogger, journalist or political activist – whatever I am. I warned of climate crisis online – from memory – in 1999.

    Politicians encounter problems addressing the climate crisis because of 1. the short-termism inherent in contemporary politics and 2. the huge influence of climate crisis deniers on them.

    1. Politicians are typically elected for terms of four or five years. They are concerned with one or at most two terms only by which time they will have lost power to the opposition.
    2. Climate crisis deniers exert huge influence over politicians. For example, the Murdoch media empire promotes climate change denial. Rupert Murdoch has historically exerted huge influence on successive UK prime ministers, certainly since Blair. “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.” Dodgy Brexit financer Aaron Banks said “Global climate change represents the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich ever via inflated energy costs“. The UK’s next prime minister will probably be a no-dealer tied to transatlantic climate science denial network.

    I have difficulties comprehending climate change deniers. Perhaps I understand it in the ignoramus US resident Donald Trump.

    Climate crisis activist protocol says stay positive, promote the notion that climate crisis can be averted. I am breaking with that protocol. I believe that the tipping point has been passed, that climate change has now acquired it’s own frightening dynamic. Apologies for saying this to those of you who have children.

    10/7/19 There’s an issue with normally intelligent people having minds closed to the state we’re in. I’m talking in terms of the world having been destroyed, having passed tipping points that develop their own frightening dynamic. Their minds are closed and they cannot contemplate the state we’re in.

  • Climate Crisis

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    Please ensure that your elected representatives are fully aware of your concern about the climate crisis. Please tell them that you demand action.

  • Recognising Russia’s suffering during WW2

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    News in UK is all about D-day. Russia suffered huge military and civilian casualties during WW2.

  • Just checking in

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    Just checking in. Brexit poll a week from today looks bad news if the opinion polls are accurate. Nigel “No more Mr. Nice Guy” Farage’s party of bigots and climate change enthusiasts may do well. Unfortunately he has the support of a lot of angry, misguided people who somehow genuinely believe that Brexit is in their interests. He plans to try yet again to join the “Westminster elite” which he condemns after seven failed attempts. There are many unanswered questions about Farage dealings, Trump (and the Clinton emails), Assange, Cambridge Analytica, Arron Banks, the dodgy Brexit campaign donation funnelled through Arron Banks’ dodgy offshore company …

    Coming soon: the great universal credit deception

    …

    After years of ministers pretending otherwise, Amber Rudd, the DWP secretary, now admits universal credit’s introduction has left people so short of cash that they have resorted to food banks. What Iain Duncan Smith hailed in 2011 as a transformation of welfare has turned into something grotesque, with massive delays and huge flaws both of administration and design, repeatedly damned by MP select committees. The independent National Audit Office judges that universal credit has neither saved public money nor helped people into work. But it has left thousands of vulnerable claimants penniless, while others starve and even lose their homes. In a House of Commons debate last summer the London Labour MP Catherine West recounted how one of her constituents had “fallen off benefits” and ended up “sleeping in a tent in a bin chamber” on a housing estate.

    Such are the horrors whose very documentation by journalists the DWP letter dismisses as “unfair”. Rather than halt universal credit, as demanded by so many groups, the department’s managers now say they will respond “in a different way … very different to anything we’ve done before”.

    What follows is an elaborate media strategy to manufacture a Whitehall fantasy, one in which the benefits system is running like a dream while a Conservative government generously helps people on the escalator to prosperity. It begins at the end of this month with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the Metro newspaper; inside will be a further four-page advertorial feature. This will “myth-bust the common inaccuracies reported on UC”. What’s more, “the features won’t look or feel like DWP or UC – you won’t see our branding … We want to grab the readers’ attention and make them wonder who has done this ‘UC uncovered’ investigation.”

    Not only is this a costly exercise, with a Metro wraparound going for a headline rate of £250,000 (of your money, let’s not forget), but the Advertising Standards Authority will doubtless be interested in that description of the feature. Its guidelines stipulate that“marketers and publishers must make clear that advertorials are marketing communications”

    …

    Under Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) the state – probably the Home Secretary – could make secret orders which could never be revealed. That sounds familiar somehow. RIPA has since been replaced by the Investigatory Powers Act but I’m sure that similar laws still exist. It’s a way for the state to attack people while hiding. A hypothetical example – the state could interfere in a political activist’s affairs e.g. frustrating complaints, actually denying the activist’s human rights so that the activist would be consumed with pressing more personal issues and thereby distracted from the bigger political issues. People tend to change their jobs and move away in my experience. Isn’t that the obvious thing to do if you’ve been prevented from doing your job and prevented from discussing it with anyone under threat of imprisonment? I think that the way to deal with this nonsense is to carry on regardless so that many more people become aware of these actions against democracy (even if they can’t discuss it with anyone).

  • Do not use his name is the wrong response

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    New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed never to say the name of the Christchurch mosque gunman.

    This is an inappropriate response. Not using the name is a sign of respect reserved for gods.

    We’ve seen a similar response in the UK where the paedophile Jimmy Savile has been purged from archives. We should instead see him often, point and name him as a prolific paedophile.