CHRISTMAS IS COMING, THE EXECUTIVES ARE GETTING FAT

Yes it is that time of year again.

I have started to see Christmas decorations and whatnot around the place. Instead of just going through the silent weeping and gnashing of teeth that we all seem to do when we start to see the little lights up everywhere. I have made a suggestion repeatedly for years and I would like to float it here again.

Every Christmas most of us get angry at all the nonsense but on the day we enjoy it simply because we can see our families and friends in a nice relaxed atmosphere.

It seems strange that we all decide to do this just one day of the year but treat each other like sh*t the other 364 days of the year.

So, here is my suggestion… from now on we treat each other well for 364 days a year and on Christmas day we call each other every kind of b@stard we can think of. Get out all the negativity on just one day and have a good time the other days.

That said, I think that this advice is unlikely to be followed so I would instead like to suggest you get involved with BUY NOTHING DAY.

The blurb…

Saturday November 28th is Buy Nothing Day (UK). It’s a day where you challenge yourself, your family and friends to switch off from shopping and tune into life. The rules are simple, for 24 hours you will detox from shopping and anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending!

Everything we buy has an impact on the environment. Buy Nothing Day highlights the environmental and ethical consequences of shopping. The developed countries – only 20% of the world population are consuming over 80% of the earth’s natural resources, causing a disproportionate level of environmental damage and an unfair distribution of wealth.

Buy nothing day is also celebrated in more than 50 countries around the world and gets bigger every year.

One year I stood with a friend and some other guys [in the cold] on a stall in Glasgow city centre that was doing a sort of swap-shop thing only thankfully without any sign of Noel Edmonds but you don’t even need to do that. As it says on their site, in this case… ” Literally, doing nothing is doing something!”

The thing to think about is this…

For the plastic piece of nonsense that you don’t want/need at Christmas time someone comes up with the idea. Then that someone goes and tells a second someone with more money than they probably deserve that they have an idea to make that second someone more money.

Then that second person goes and pays someone probably less than they deserve for working in dangerous and dirty conditions to go and get the raw materials. Those raw materials are then shipped to a factory somewhere polluting the air, sea and land. They are processed before being shipped to another factory somewhere else, also polluting the air, sea and land. In the second factory the processed materials are put together by people definitely getting paid less than they need. Once assembled, those materials are then shipped into shops in rich countries [did I mention that this causes pollution] which are probably staffed by people being paid less than they need, and sold to the kind of people who buy unnecessary, worthless and puerile gifts.

Finally, these gifts are opened and put it in the bin shortly after, which increases the ever-growing rubbish problem.

Given that all along the line the process seems to create much more misery than happiness, is all this really necessary?

BUY NOTHING DAY this year is 28th November in most countries but 27th in others. Please check for local events.

BROTHER GORILLA [Part 1]

This is the first part of an only tangentially related two-part post.

There is a famous song by French anarchist George De Brassens that will be part two, but in this first part I just want to post a little film I made to show that the term “Brother Gorilla” is not actually that far from the truth.

The audio is Douglas Adams and comes from probably his best book which is Last Chance to See. I haven’t actually seen any of the more recent TV series with Stephen Fry but I am sure I will get around to watching it soon enough.

Speaking of Stephen Fry, I recently watched a debate on youtube featuring him that you could watch and some of the things in that debate I wrote about a while ago in a slightly different way and got a little bit of abuse for.

Anyway, the film…

HE’S A VERY NAUGHTY BOY

This is a clip of a very famous interview and is always nice to see again.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The other famous anniversaries of today are being covered extensively elsewhere so I would just like to point out that today would be the 178th birthday of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Given that I will just give you some of the things he had to say. Some short quotes first and then a longer [but not long] piece…

 

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Below is an extract from Notes From Underground

“And what is it, that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations and absolutely nothing more, and through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed.

In fact, this has already happened to him . Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers? To whom the attillas could not hold a candle and if they are not so conspicuous as the attillas it is simply because they are so often met with or are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us.

In any case, civilization has made mankind, if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.

In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever.

Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves.

They say that Cleopatra, excuse an instance from Roman history, was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave girls breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times. But these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now. That though now man has learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages he is still far from learned how to act as reason and science would dictate.

But yet you are fully convinced that he will be certain to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits and when common sense and science have completely reeducated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests. That is not all. Then, you say, science itself will teach man, though to my mind it’s a superfluous luxury, that he never has really had any will or caprice of his own and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature…so that everything he does is not done by his willing it but is done of itself – by the laws of nature. Consequently, we have only to discover these laws of nature and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.

All human actions will then of course be tabulated according to these laws mathematically like tables of logarithms up to 108,000 and entered in an index. Or, better still there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons in which everything would be so clearly calculated and explained that there would be no more incidence or adventures in the world.

Then -this is all what you say-new economic relations would be established – all ready made and worked out with mathematical exactitude so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye simply because every possible answer to it will be provided then the…palace of crystal will be built. Then, in fact…those will be halcyon days.

Of course there is no guarantee…this is my comment, that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then. For what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated?

But on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational.

Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people.

But all that would not matter, what is bad, this is my comment again, is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then.

Man is stupid you know, phenomenally stupid. Or rather he is not stupid but he is so ungraceful that you could not find another like him in all creation.

I for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity, a gentleman of ignoble or rather a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo say to us all

‘I say gentlemen hadn’t we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds simply to send these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at out own sweet foolish will?’

That again would not matter, but what is annoying, is that he would be sure to find followers.

Such is the nature of man.

And all that for the most foolish reason, which one would think is hardly worth mentioning…that is that man everywhere, at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and his advantage dictated”.

IN CASE YOU NEVER CAUGHT THIS…

A half hour interview with Aldous Huxley. Parts 2 and 3 are on the continuation page…

 

SONG FOR SATURDAY 31/10/09

TABLOID TV

Does anyone else remember when the term ‘tabloid TV’ was considered a large insult?

Difficile est saturam non scribere

NEXT BLOG

I am behind the computer times as usual. For the first time in about 3 years today I thought I would indulge in a bit of random blog surfing, just to see where I ended up.

I failed miserably at it.

Either wordpress doesn’t have the facility or I couldn’t find it and blogger was infuriating because if you tried it twenty times then 15 of them would go to one of two sites trying to sell things. I don’t know if those sites pay blogger for that privilege but it was so maddening I stopped the attempt after 5 minutes.

So, I have no new blogs to visit.

THIS IS DELIBERATE [REPOST]

Reposting this because I like it. Go to the link at the bottom to find out what it all means.

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For a translation of this article COPY THE BINARY then CLICK HERE and translate.

MOONSHINE

The Vatican is hosting a Galileo exhibition and while this may cause a great deal of mirth about the hypocrisy of it all we have to remember that institutions do change and this is a change for the better.

Or is it?

You see, the thing with the Galileo story is that the Church did not in fact tell Galileo that he was wrong. They told him he might well be right. They just also told him that he couldn’t go around telling anyone that as it was the church that decided what is true and isn’t.

It is also worth noting that although they eventually made an apology in 1992 to Galileo it wasn’t exactly a full holding up of the hands. Pope John Paul said that the whole story was based  “tragic mutual incomprehension”. I would have thought that incomprehension was part of it but I am not sure about mutual.

That reading of the situation was reiterated by an Archbishop this week who talked about ‘mistakes on both sides’.

Bertolt Brecht might agree as in his play The Life of Galileo the only thing that Galileo later regretted was the actual recanting, something that Giordano Bruno never did.

The publicity coming from the Vatican on this [I really resent giving them the capital 'V' on 'Vatican'] is that religion is not opposed to science but that we all must work together.

But to what end? Because as far as I know the doctrine of *papal infallibilty still exists so what is going on with all that. Will the Pope’s next public appearance be in a shade of grey instead of the traditional white. Instead of a mitre will he have a telescope and a compass.

I doubt it somehow but then, 12 years of catholic schooling means I am very quick to doubt anything these people say at all.

———————————————————————————————————————————

*Papal infallibility was only dogmatised, if that is the right word, in 1870 so was it applied retroactively?