Ina Disguise's Blog: New blog, page 77

What fresh English bullshit is this?

So, today Theresa May traversed the not-particularly perilous Georgian pavements of Edinburgh (they were built like that for the coaches and horses) and went for tea (but no scone, it’s Edinburgh) with Nicola Sturgeon.

I have a generic email from the SNP indicating that Scotland is to be included as they ‘explore the options’ for Brexit together. Nicola assures us that she is ‘exploring all options’ for Scotland to remain in the EU and, despite media rumours to the contrary, Europe is quite enthusiastic to have Scotland help pay the bailouts for Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal.

Theresa May was a remain supporter.  Scotland digging its heels in would make it far easier to scapegoat Scotland for not giving our charming English friends what they want. You can look forward to thousands, if not millions of English trolls, chavs and generally quite stupid people ranting about the whinging jocks getting their own way if Theresa decides to use the option of gifting Scotland the blame for not bothering to Brexit at all. Win-win, since the conservatives can then claim that it is not their fault that they cannot carry out the wishes of England and Wales.

It would be a lot better for Scotland if a deal can be cut to allow the UK to exit, in exchange for us going on our merry way, complete with our recovered resources.  This gives them the best of both, since the situation of our goods being shipped from England and showing up as English trade can simply be reversed.   The enormous munitions dump to the west of our coast could be cleared at the expense of the MOD, and I am sure they can enjoy the scrap value of a couple of centuries of rusting metal. We would like our sea back too, thank you very much.

English journalists such as Faisal Islam are already preparing articles suggesting that we are ‘further complicating’ Brexit.  At no point does anyone plan to admit that the UK cannot afford Brexit without the benefit of Scotland. Lie upon lie, as per usual.

I do not agree with every policy the SNP goes with.  The current strategy has gone very well. At this point it is important to be extremely careful with the immediate future.  Whilst a great many English remainers and Brexiteers will be catching on to the depth of deception in the media, you have to take decades, if not centuries of bigotry into account.  They don’t like thinking.  They like hating.  Likewise the selfish and complacent Scotland hating no-voters will do anything, and invent anything to prove their rightness, even when the truth is staring them in the face.

So, my thought for the day is – do not be conned by offers of short term gain.  There is only one way out of this.  Agreeing to complex soft soaped negotiations is a waste of time.  Conservatives, like most young greedy bucks, are only after one thing.  Be prudent, Nicola, and do not get suckered in to taking the blame for Cameron’s fatal error.

 

 

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Work update – bored and miserable

As I am unable to get away, I have been stuck in the big city all week and have moved the work on quite a bit.  Still working on some other stuff, but the Fool’s Mandala is going very well, and should be ready first.  The new Be my Ballantine Collection, which is antique inspired, is underway, and work on Wolfish and the enlightenment section of the work in honour of David Wolfe is ongoing.  Float like a Butterfly and Folie a Versailles will take somewhat longer, so all in all I think we are looking at Christmas for a release of the next section of the collections, which will include several improbably expensive handbags, a couple of carpets and an installation.

Not writing fiction terribly much at the moment, as Brexit has been rather exciting.  Need to work on my courses to get further with the virtual elements of the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing project, so we are looking at next year before I can continue with that.

I can confirm that I am thoroughly bored with Wolfe as a topic, and so I will be looking around for somebody a bit more developed and self aware. The development I am working on at the moment is interesting, but I do not want to think about Wolfe anymore.  Six years is plenty of focus on one person.

Thinking of writing some non-fiction stuff about public speaking,  but I am not sure how serious I am about this.

May do some more political posts, but it gets boring when things are settled. I am not really interested in small events.

I would like to do something interesting and different.  This rut is getting tiresome and lonely. Wolfe is terribly depressing, when it comes down to it.  You cannot help someone who cannot help themselves.

I would have got away this week, but my Conservative friend is so lazy and mean spirited that he cannot manage to put cat food in a plate, and I do not have anyone else to ask.  I do not understand this, since if he needed something, I would find it more difficult to not help. I do not understand people at all.

I am going to do another two boxes for Wolfe.  Honey I made you our Glorious Leader, and Honey I made you a zombie.  I might just sell the three of them, since he is too lazy/stupid/up his own ass to protest anyway.

 

 

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Effective, bold communication

This morning, before I wrote the Dear David Cameron post, I witnessed the following exchange between Angus Robertson and David Cameron.  My fellow Scots will note that the BBC did not include the good wishes (which the Independent included) immediately preceding the comment. The BBC video is here:

Angus Robertson and David Cameron at PMQs

This scene was approved of by several Scottish National Party members, and my response was appreciated by approximately three of the seventy or so who read my alternative to Angus’s response.

I then took Twisty for coffee, during which he indicated that he thoroughly approved of Angus Robertson’s tone, and that we should not pander to the frivolity of the English politicians, left or right.  I vehemently disagreed with this, as my feeling is that one should play the game as it is served to you, so to speak. To the Etonian brain, this is the communication of a barbarous spanked child, not a national statesman.

We returned from this outing, followed by a lengthy drive in which we took in Irvine, Ardrossan, and Lochwinnoch, to find Theresa May standing outside Downing Street declaring war on any notion of Scottish independence.

In the last few hours, the cabinet reshuffle has amused and entertained a dismayed public with Theresa’s appointments.  I will say before I start on the issue I plan to address in this post, that I think her choices are inspired and, I am happy to say, bold. I also appreciated much of what she had to say about several foreign companies enjoying tax concessions that we simply cannot afford, although I cannot understand how Starbuck’s alleged 18m tax contribution has been overlooked, or why she would be announcing a crackdown on three companies involved in her husband’s hedge fund.

If this statement is intended to give her integrity, then great, however if it is in error, I suggest an entire department devoted to tax avoidance generally is a better idea than hammering individuals, benefit claimants and the disabled in the manner we have come to expect. Personally, I would introduce a tax concession scheme based on partnering such companies with British nationals who are capable of growing new businesses, and fund a growth of British business without government interference using this method.

To get to the point, tonight’s burning topic is communication.  From a Westminster perspective, Angus Robertson’s point, whilst highly relevant, is made at the wrong time, in an over-serious, blaming tone, and has been taken as an attack by the comparatively restrained, and to us, over-polite English.  We are significantly different nations, and we communicate in a vastly different way.  Hence my demonstration of the rhetorical method of saying the same thing in the form of my last post.

Many years ago, I was interviewed by a government department devoted to gathering numerical and very precise statistics.  They came to Glasgow to recruit.  After a couple of hours of testing, a roomful of individuals from all over the world were reduced to three.  Me, a drunk man who had spend the night on a bench before coming for interview, and a hippy.  We were, according to the tests, the most intelligent people in the room.  All the passive candidates left.

Six weeks later, I called the department to find out who had got the job, since it evidently was not me.  I was told that the department had decided to recruit nobody and would be using English staff.

“You aren’t in England.”  I said “People probably look a bit different up here.”

“Ahem.” the uncomfortable English rose who had managed to get three expenses paid days in Glasgow was evidently shifting uncomfortably in her seat. She was unused to direct communication.

“I hope that you enjoyed your free holiday.”  I said nastily, and promptly gave up on the job.

Likewise, I have just been weeded out of a job for failing to have demonstrated that I have dealt with people at all levels.  I would have thought that this was obvious by the fact that I have worked my way up through two sectors, from dishwasher to Stately home caterer with my own business, and then from general office worker to Senior manager in a major bank, but apparently this is too much of a stretch for your average, dull-witted Human Resources department and they simply cannot be bothered to read or interpret my CV.  In short, despite my communication skills, I am screwed by the fact that I cannot understand how people can be this stupid, so am unable to figure out how to compensate for it by spelling out information that I would regard as blisteringly obvious.

Hopefully by now you can see a pattern emerging.  If you and your respondent are talking two different languages, you are unlikely to reach consensus.  To those trained to play the Westminster game, direct Scottish communication comes across as over-serious and savage stabbing in place of elegant swordplay.

In a game of rhetoric, you pack as many layers into the same short speech as you want, in as few, preferably soothing words as possible.  What you never do, is communicate directly.  In this way, you can present a fairly savage attack as a string of compliments and gracious thanks.  (see previous post for an example)

This, they understand. This is exactly what they are trained to do at those expensive institutions, and this is what they respond well to. It is calculated to make them difficult to relate to, and to make it difficult for them to relate to you.  We train cold fish, capable of endless debate, in order to crush opposition.

My point is, Scotland, that in order to win the game, we need to play the game on their pitch.  Our direct and honest methods are cutting no ice.  Some refinement is in order, otherwise nobody will listen, and if nobody listens, our blunt instruments will fail against a well aimed rapier every time. Yes, we can do it, but we need to listen and learn how to win.

In the meantime, my congratulations to Boris.  I think he is a good and bold choice.  The UK should not set out to be apologetic at this point.    Once you have secured the safety of the UK, perhaps you will reconsider your historically poor attitude to my country. If not, I guess I will pick a fight later.

Ina

 

 

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Dear David Cameron

Dear David Cameron

As an SNP member, I would just like to say a few words on behalf of Angus Robertson, who, in the heat of the moment, rated ongoing argument above the traditional and somewhat theatrical values of British Parliament.  I, for one, would like to thank you for your term in office, not only because of your support of Scotland, but because you have achieved so much on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised of the UK.

I am sure it is a huge relief for you to be out of office, and a sad day for us in Scotland, since we have no way of knowing whether your successor will be able to push the envelope for Scottish independence as far as you have done.  We must express our gratitude for your ongoing assistance in this matter.

The case for Scottish independence ought now to be clear to even the most moronic and thoughtless Scot. The Scottish referendum, and attitudes of the BBC, Labour and Conservatives throughout, enlightened Scots from all walks of life on issues such as the general attitude of English dominion, contempt for our nationhood, desperation to hang on to our many resources, and cutthroat kneejerk responses to every problem presented.

The declaration of airstrikes on Syria the day after the independence referendum, the announcement of the intention to sell our land for fracking, at the risk of our whisky industry, the lack of help for the oil industry, when you had just announced that we could not manage such a big resource by ourselves.  All of these have made Scotland aware of Westminster’s contempt for our country and values. EVEL, a critical error for Westminster, was the icing on the cake.

On a personal basis, I always used to be a strong supporter of the BBC.  I have you to thank for letting me know that the independent media we all pay for is not at all independent.  It has been a real education.

Never has there been as strong support for the SNP.  You have opened hearts and minds in Scotland to the prospect of managing our own destiny, and we will, as a nation work harder than ever to achieve that goal as a result.  We are all now aware of Blair’s underhand theft of our coastal waters, our resources, our input into the British economy.  Without you, none of this would have been possible.

Several generations of Scots are now aware and considerably more astute as a result of your period of tenure.  We are inclined to more generosity, in the form of donating to food banks, more open-mindedness, in the form of seeing that there is a way of restoring and investing in our industrial future, and that in the future there will be no need for entire towns to empty as a result of poor planning and grasping from Westminster in the place of conscious investment for the purpose of sustaining populations across Scotland, whether rural, semi-rural or inner city.

As we will have to renegotiate our relationship with the EU, there is now hope for our coastal populations and shipbuilding industry, decimated by your predecessors.  It is, alas Blair’s doing that we have lost the Scottish regiments that we, and indeed your own family, were so proud of. Again, we in Scotland would like to extend our thanks for making all of this clear to us. Between you and the sterling political genius of Alex Salmond, we are all developing a strong, confident political consciousness that Joann Lamont of the Labour Party would not have thought possible due to our inferior Scottish DNA.

As you leave office, we look forward to welcoming you, as a fellow Scot, to your forthcoming estate in Scotland.  It is increasingly likely that we will, of course, be leaving the UK, and so we look forward to your joining us as we rebuild our country and restore our economy, recovering from the ravages from decades of being bled dry and told that we are too weak to manage on our own.  I am sure that the good people of Aberdeenshire, many of them keen Conservatives, will value your input as we create our new political landscape. You have done us a great favour.

Let us hear it for David Cameron.  A leader who brought us all to the understanding of Scotland, and its place in the UK.  Thank you for years of education and backhanded support for our cause.  We wish you well for your future.

Lots of love,

 

Scotland

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Finest British Bullshit

Finest British Bullshit

OK, so according to the media, we are supposed to believe that Andrea Leadsom was so hurt by the Times that she immediately gave up to go home and wear an apron, that Theresa May is now an angel, that Boris has been thwarted in his attempt to take a massive pay cut and be PM, that George Osborne is strutting around a remarkably fake looking New York street waiting to be puffball interviewed about some vague double dealing on Wall Street, and David Cameron is doing an impersonation of Dick Van Dyke on his way out of Downing Street, having been released from his weighty responsibility for the entire country.  (Still no mention of the several thousand dead disabled people we are not supposed to notice)

According to the media, we are supposed to be doubting Jeremy Corbyn as a leader, we are all basically Conservative anyway, and the country is supposedly past the need for collective representation because we all worship money and if we don’t, we deserve to be repeatedly stabbed in the face until we do.

Angela Eagle is a false flag, designed to thoroughly put anyone off voting labour until the UK is safely out of the Brexit zone.  I have rocks in my garden with more charisma and leadership ability.  As is usual with the former New labour, someone we cannot see has told them what to do, and they are all repeating the same line because if they keep repeating it, we will eventually believe it.

So what has actually happened?  Here is my view:

As per my previous posts of the last week or so, Boris was not interested in being Prime Minister at all.  He was somehow volunteered for/pressured into the Leave campaign, and could not really be bothered with it, so stupidly trusted Gove to do all the actual work, hence the rather out of character and lame campaign.  They all imagined that people would vote to ensure that everything stayed the same because they don’t actually see people, they see statistics, and according to the statistics, everything in the garden is just lovely for everyone, including the 3.9 million shoeless children and dead disabled people nobody cares to remember.

These statistics are now produced by private companies who do not take a huge interest in responsibility or accuracy, as in order to land the research contracts the line managers pressure the staff into getting high returns. I know because I have extensive experience in social research data gathering.  Even when you are conducting a survey to determine people’s views, the questions are ordered in a way to determine the result.  In a way, all research is futile because in the absence of a previously formed opinion, you basically force one on people. Hence, our governments are deluded into getting the response they wanted in the first place.  Months of work used to go into making sure you got a result approaching accuracy, but the level of response was not enough when the companies were honest, so now they are not.  This is important, because labour are making decisions on the same faked statistics as the conservatives.

So, this morning, in a very predictable turnaround, Leadsom steps down, meaning that no plan has to be published for our Brexit from the EU.  Had the leadership campaign been allowed to continue, we would be told how they plan to go about actually doing it.  The ‘sophisticated opposition’ mentioned by one of her supporters was basically just the Conservative elite deciding that more interesting deals can be struck without the watchful eye of the public.  Whilst some are arguing that Murdoch is responsible, in the form of the Times article, I do not think that this is the case at all.  Leadsom gives the appearance of extreme malleability, so were I a billionaire powermonger, I would push her for PM.  She was clumsy and inexperienced.

Now we are being told that May is the best thing to happen to the UK since the much-lauded Blair.  We already know that this is not the case, and in any case we are a bit more savvy than we were back then.  The line they are taking, that fat cat executives are now to be scapegoated to appease the angry public, is not helpful at all.  It is a commercial irritant, and it will not change the structure of business, the nature of business, or the threats that we absolutely must avoid of business legally challenging government and avoiding taxation on the promise of job creation. The latter is literally killing the country.

So, the usual Conservative rhetoric, that they are going to beat up on the boardrooms, and give you more control over your level of misery, is just that.  Leadsom said she was concerned about mothers getting no stimulation, and her solution was to cut maternity pay – this is the Conservative way of solving problems.  And yet people vote for this self-inflicted punishment, over and over again.  Will the English ever learn?

I have already suggested an alternative solution, and this solution involves taking a larger scale approach altogether. You do not prune a garden by taking off single twigs in the form of fat cat executives and pointing at them.  That is extremely wasteful of your time.  There are far more effective ways of decrowning trees in order to let your newly propagated seeds grow. (HINT HINT)

Anyway, I digress.  Labour, on the other hand, appear to be being directed by the invisible hand of Blair’s PR machine.  I am now wondering if this guy is a narcissistic sociopath.  He appears to feel no genuine remorse for his errors, and is enjoying a very nice life thanks to his devotion to his own wallet. I do not believe for one second that Labour consists of New Labourite robots, tainted with with the poison of the genuine socialists in the party and devoid of any memory at all of what Labour are supposed to stand for.

Jeremy Corbyn, their most popular leader in the last four decades, by far outshines Blair with the public, which ought to be telling our political parties that people are suffering.  You have to starve people into being politically motivated, whether this is starvation of opportunity, starvation of hope, or literal starvation makes little difference.  The population is clearly hungry, and Jeremy Corbyn is shaping up to be a contender.

We are supposed to believe that the PLP consists of extremely stupid people, obsessed with the memory of Blair and Brown, reading incorrect statistics, believing that they would really rather be in the Tory party, but lacking the expensive education.  We are supposed to believe that these people are all suffering from a collective delusion in which they burn the Corbyn witch and return to bland, centrist politics which does not genuinely change anything apart from making life more expensive for the squeezed middle.

It is my view that the people trying to bring Corbyn down are career victims, on a party line set by a retired politician so obsessed with his own image that he is prepared to destroy Labour in order to preserve his creation, New Labour.  They are deluded by a politics which is out of date.  Corbyn represents the core values of the real labour party that we remember pre-Blair.  As such, if these people are so far gone that they fail to recognise it when they are reminded of their own values, they really need to leave the party and form a new one.

As I have said in my previous post Capitalism, Socialism and Corporatism, Conservative and labour are supposed to mutually regulate, and allow us the illusion of choice in how we treat each other.  They are not supposed to determine our culture, our values and predetermine that the poor are to be left behind whilst we create elites that care for nobody.  Money is not supposed to accumulate in vast piles.  It is supposed to circulate, to benefit everyone.

In case nobody in our political class understands this, I repeat once again:

DEAD PEOPLE CANNOT SPEND MONEY

STARVATION PRODUCES ACTIVISM

DEMOTIVATION PRODUCES REVOLT

I am sure you can all manage to do better than this.  Should you require further input on core social values, I am sure you can either read a book, or ask questions.

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The Fear Defence

The Fear Defence

Watching the horrific video of the licensed-to-carry black male in America being killed by a terrified sounding cop, it struck me that fear is being used as a method of justifying violence rather a lot.

Both of the recent killings of black males this week were committed by police who appear to be trained to fear first, think later and to kill before risking their lives.  The result has been that far more have been killed, and yet again America is displaying the usual inability to react appropriately.

Today an Etsy seller was promoting her bluelivesmatter wristbands, and rather than just roll their eyes and move on, she was duly challenged on facebook by a variety of other sellers.  Why do people stop and discuss this stuff?  It is not acceptable for the police to kill civilians going about their business. It is not acceptable that they feel they are working a warzone because these same civilians are armed, and what on earth does it take before America decides to take action on gun control?

It does not take an enormous amount of effort to determine that the real problem is that the population is armed, therefore the police need to be armed, therefore life is cheap.  Likewise it does not induce huge strain to see that American foreign policy and cultural influence is not beneficial to the rest of the world. I am not sure why people would be confused about this.  Life matters.

From the perspective of someone like me, looking at culture and economics, America’s devotion to capitalism means that social stratification is used by marketers and government alike to suppress wages, to market goods, to encourage social groups to compete with one another for goods, services and rights.  If the population were not being kept stupid via tension and overmarketing, they would soon see that racial tension is a method of divide and conquer, useful only to an oppressive regime which relies on capital labour to maintain a hugely unfair economic system.

Instead Americans of any colour continue to get confused over things like how airline staff should talk to them when they have some money, and whether it is OK to risk being murdered because you want to carry a gun around with you.

The solution to the problem is very simple.  Strict gun laws lessen the need for armed police, putting fewer people at risk from trigger happy and apparently poorly trained police.

It has been said that in a military situation, American troops are extremely wasteful with ammunition for much the same reason.  Bullets are apparently cheaper than discourse.  Lose the bullets, lose the problem. We have reached saturation point in terms of feeling sympathetic to a problem which has been going on for far too long, for entirely spurious reasons. America is not OK, and we should be distancing ourselves as much as we can. It is a rude, stupid and violent society, and it is not improving with events like this. Having money does not justify crappy behaviour towards others.  Being poor should not put you at risk of being shot dead.  Not rocket science.

Interestingly, under our beloved Conservative government, it appears that jobcentre staff have been retrained much the same way as American police. Even if you are asking for a form to be signed off or a simple question, the staff will react as if you are a potential assailant, and each jobcentre has security staff on hand to haul you out of the door if you should raise your voice for any reason.  The appearance of fear is being used as justification for making sure that you are aware that you do not matter, that nobody cares about you, and that you should not expect to be treated with the smallest amount of dignity. In this way they can laugh about making sure that you cannot survive, and that you cannot question them when they get it wrong.

They have also been instructed to give you no information, and calls are recorded to retrain anyone stupid enough to be helpful. I am aware that there are American  companies involved with the DWP, and so I am forced to wonder whether we are all entering a war situation, in which those fortunate enough to not need anything assume everything is OK, whilst those who do are in a vortex of pain leading to premature death in the form of being repeatedly told that they do not matter, that they are frightening, and that they will not be getting any help from anywhere.

If this is the case, and from the evidence I have looked at, it certainly seems as if it is, then we are already in a situation that cannot continue.  Either the politics of fear and loathing will kill even more people, whilst everyone else becomes dimly aware that there is a problem, or we have to decide that this is not acceptable to us as a society. I move that we adopt the latter policy.

Black lives matter, blue lives matter, life matters.  You matter.  We need to take action in our own countries to defeat the loathsome strategy of the fear defence, especially when the fear is staged to justify murder.  Murder by starvation, or murder by shooting innocent people.  It is all murder.

 

 

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Underemployment and the new reality

Underemployment and the new reality

I have talked about sticking out from the crowd, the indignity of constant temporary work, and the failings in the treatment of carers by family and state in previous posts, which you are welcome to go through from the news tab.

Today, I am going to talk about the years following graduation.

When I graduated, I already had a successful career under my belt, and had run a business.  This made me unemployable for several reasons:

Desperation for a new career
Being a threat to middle managers responsible for recruiting trainees
The perceived likelihood of my staying only until I found a better job
My location, even in a major city in Scotland

I can say this with confidence for several reasons:

I was obsessed with work to the point of working three jobs at a time for the sheer hell of it
I had enjoyed an almost 100 percent success rate at interview in my first career
Since I had got to the top of that rather limited career ladder it was clear that work was a priority

Several reasons were given for my lack of attractiveness as an employee:

Why would I want to work alongside graduates ten years younger than me?
Why didn’t I have a family on the go in my thirties? (they would also have rejected me if I had)
Too much experience

One employer became irate, because I quickly applied for jobs which did not require a degree, and which I would have got easily without it.  I applied for a job typing this guy’s letters twice, and eventually he chased me away on the grounds that I was more qualified than he was.

I did apply all over the UK for the first year or two, and as my father became more unwell, and my mother showed no signs of really understanding the responsibility she was attempting to bear, I eventually shrunk the geographical region to the one I was in.  Even with these restrictions, I managed to keep myself in temporary and part-time work until 2014.  Fortunately this coincided with my mother requiring more in the way of attention.

Obviously, in the course of all this mobility, I met a lot of people and worked my way through a number of industries, which made my CV rather messy.  Basically, my view was that earning money and doing something was better than focusing on one industry and being unemployed.  I am not what you would call a lazy person.  When you are fielding 30 rejection letters a day, at times, and working in jobs which will only last a week or two you have little time to do anything apart from secure more work.  It is amazing how many companies and agencies expect you to participate in not one but two interview processes for a two week job.

As you can see from this, an economy which is strictly aimed at benefit to business does not allow individuals to get a mortgage, commit themselves to loans of any kind, or to spend any money, since you have to ensure that you have enough in the bank to see you through to the next job.  On one notable occasion when this did not work, I tried to extend my credit card, which I had restricted the limit on myself, in order to get to work to pay the next month’s bills, and was told that I could not do this as I had placed a limit on my credit rating. This astonished me.  Being careful with money rules you out for money to get to work to pay the bills.

Employment agencies are yet another way of putting you another layer of administration away from gaining employment.  I was told by one agency that agreeing to temporary work meant that they would not consider you for permanent work as the bonuses for the staff would come in more frequently if you filled the small jobs.  If you are in this position, it is wise to identify the agencies in your local area which provide the most temporary work, and register for permanent work only on all the others.

Broadly speaking, however, you would be well advised to develop a second career online, using the means at your disposal.  Zoella and Pewdiepie are two examples of people who provide inane yet extremely popular videos for a living, which not only provide for them using youtube hits, but the goods and fees they can command from companies wishing to promote their product.  Bear in mind if you choose this route, that your face is your fortune.  Ina, if she had a face, would probably have another twelve thousand or so followers on youtube, but since she has no face, the hits on audio work are minimal.

Instagram is very important now, if you want to go down this route.  Mobile apps generally are winning over aging social media such as facebook and twitter, although I see that facebook has finally caught on and is vaguely threatening to let us see our friends’ and family posts again.  Personally, I do not exist under my real name online, as far as I am aware, so Ina is my primary identity these days.

From a governance perspective, having a vast number of underemployed and demotivated people is not wise, since they will inevitably spend their time looking at what is going on in the rest of the world. Telling them that it is their fault, no matter what set of circumstances affects their opportunities and future, does not actually help them get anywhere at all, in the same way that benefiting only those with savings and investments does not stimulate local economies.  Scotland is not the only part of the UK which has seen local economies decline due to a lack of interest from central government in doing anything at all for anywhere outside their personal interest area.  David Cameron’s famous letter of complaint to his local council is a case in point.  Sitting in Westminster, it simply did not occur to him that his country pile would be affected by his own cuts to local government spending.

Living in a country where your government consists of fallible people, rather than advisory teams working from accurate statistics (much of the statistics they are fond of quoting are now provided by private companies, who are unable to attain accurate samples since they are pressuring their staff to be inventive to keep the paperwork looking good) is not fun if you can see how and why the decline in your quality of life and future is happening.  It means that you seek change, and when change happens, it has the potential to improve your hopeless case.  I caught the Panorama programme on leave voters this evening, and a guy who could barely string a sentence together was complaining that 14 pounds an hour was not enough for him.  Oh how I laughed.

As I was saying in my previous few posts, the previous two decades or so have separated politics from the people they claim to represent, and the views that they hold, to the point that they have no idea how people are affected by their decisions, and they either do not care, or do not know, how people feel about those decisions.

It is my view that we should make the Brexit and Chilcott events the end of this dubious period in British history.  Understand that you are just as capable as the politicians you complain about, so that there is nothing to stop you replacing them.  Understand that the media is feeding you a line, and that it is up to you to pursue the truth.  Prepare yourselves for a more serious, and yet more progressive way of looking at the world, because ignoring what little power you have means that you only have yourself to blame when it all goes wrong.  Filling yourself full of consumer information rather than the information you need to reach your own potential will lead to the ideocracy that we should all fear.  Unless you are choosing to be the next Zoella, it is not useful to be more concerned about bath bombs than bombs in Istanbul or Bangladesh.

 

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Must I come down there?

Must I come down there?

Honestly, what a shambles.  Do I really have to go down to Westminster and tell them what to do?  How would they feel about a sub celebrity in a sparkling burkha and sunglasses yelling at them?

Cameron – Activate article 50 and then step down, preferably taking your boy with you, you are stalling progress for everybody else.

Gove – give it up. Nobody likes you.

May – we got rid of Thatcher, we do not want another one. I am sure the submissives will vote for you, but referring to people as a bargaining chip is not what we want to hear after the deaths caused by the inept girning twins you sat behind in parliament.

Leadsom – for goodness sake, get some public speaking training, and stop apologising for taking the party in the direction it needs to go in.  You are no longer working in a stuffy bank job. Try practising in the mirror.  You want the country going in a POSITIVE direction, feeding the ROOTS of the economy to benefit everyone by stimulating DOMESTIC growth.  Stop messing about.

Boris – go and draw up an open trading agreement that we can sign people up to.  One that does not insist on stupid border arrangements and regulations to bar countries from entry.  We want to see some variety, and some hope for underperforming nations. Let Britain be the good guy, for once.

You can give Gove a nice grey job working on the brexit agreements in the EU. There must be someone capable of planning a safe zone for displaced people to rebuild their lives without fear.  In ten years, we will have to evacuate the equatorial regions, so you need to take action on refugees now to avoid being entirely swamped.

Corbyn – do not step down.  If you have to discipline the Blair/Brownites get on with it. Leadership is not about waiting until a stupid person catches up.

Don’t sign TTIP or CETA, get the trading agreement drawn up in advance and reject all the current offerings, as they will not benefit the general population in any way whatsoever.  America is a mess, and it is spreading.

GET ON WITH IT. Must I do everything?

 

Ina

 

 

 

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Broad Brush Thinking

Broad Brush Thinking

I have cleared 15 ton bags of garden rubbish from my garden in the last month.  Not that the garden was a jungle, it is just a large garden, consisting of three lawns, around 35 trees, 4 shrubberies, a large scale rockery and what seems like a mile of mixed hedging.

Occasionally over the years, my friends, whom as I have mentioned are all male, have stopped by to help, which invariably causes great merriment as their ideas about gardening are somewhat different scale to a person trying to manage a large house and garden without spending money on contractors.

The flatulent pedant, as he is known in my memory, recounted a tale of a two week war with his mother about a weed on his 4 square metre patio before he saw my garden.  Another ex took a full afternoon to present me with a square metre of perfectly weeded rosebed, and another likes to tell me that I should pave the lot.  It always makes me laugh, this variety of approaches to life and thought.

Obviously, dealing with something on this scale when you have limited time, you have to organise your time effectively.  At one point I was working 6 days a week at the bank, researching for the government, and conducting corporate interviews by phone whilst decorating and taking care of this garden, all with no assistance and a great deal of criticism from the rest of the family.  Any spare time was spent making lists of things to do, their level of urgency, and the likely time of paint or varnish drying so that I could then schedule hoovering, mowing or chopping whilst waiting for other things to be ready to progress.  In fact, the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing collection was started whilst I was conducting research from home, since the interviews were by telephone, nobody could see that I was sewing whilst working, hence my time was used productively.

You learn a lot about strategy from all this.  Many people have the luxury of never having to learn about strategy, time management or having to accept a margin of error they would never consider if they did not have this level of workload.

So, to get to the point, debating detail is not effective for a broad brush thinker, who is likely to be more interested in the overall structure of the problem.  A broad brush thinker is likely to become a large scale strategist, whereas a ‘devil in the detail’ expert is what you require when you have already determined the shape of the problem at hand.

It hugely surprised me, when I was working on a (personal) three dimensional economic project in 2009 or so, that the economists I wanted to involve in the problem did not understand what I was talking about.  After much messing around, I finally found a physicist in France who understood exactly what I was saying, who told me that basically I was a car designer, trying to explain myself to a crew of mechanics who wanted to know the specifics of the problem.  I desisted with the project at that point, since I felt it unlikely that I would find a crew willing to spend months experimenting to achieve something on my say-so.  Such is the problem of the broad brush thinker.  We have great ideas, but without the means to carry them out via a team of detail mechanics, we may not be much use. When it comes to tackling improbably large projects however, we are exactly what is required for the job.

It struck me last week or so, when despite the screamingly awful Leave Campaign in the UK, I felt very concerned for poor Boris, that I now recognise and resonate with other broad brushers without even realising it.  (Wolfe was a broad brusher too.) I wonder how many more I can find, if I look around?  And will my own capacity for grand strategy ever achieve anything useful or be given an opportunity for useful endeavour? So far it seems to have done little for me apart from ensuring that I become extremely bored with small problems and making sure my parents’ family is taken care of.

I cannot help the way I think, any more than someone who imagines that their love of following rules or sticking to tradition despite the disadvantages can help the way they think.  I get a lot more done, and require less in the way of help, especially in situations where the way forward is not always clear.  This does not mean that you end up with a precise result, but you do get a result.

It all comes down to approach, your ability to prioritise, your willingness to get the job done.  A detail oriented person is fabulous when you approach the end of a task, but they are as useful as a chocolate fireguard when you are creating something new.  You cannot add the bells and whistles before you have something to hang them on.

So, before you create your masterwork, always draw the sketch.  Before you add the embellishments, create the scheme.  Before you list the tasks, determine the problem. All of this takes careful thought and a willingness to stretch and bend your reality.  Once you have done all that, then you will have a good idea how to present the tasklist in order to solve the problem.

 

 

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Intelligence and Flexibility

Intelligence and Flexibility

I used to think intelligence was linked to knowledge.  I think most people make this mistake. The two things have some connection, in the form of memory and capacity to learn new topics, but I can honestly say I never heard people say ‘I don’t know’ as often as I did at university, amongst very learned colleagues and academics.

There is nothing wrong with saying ‘I don’t know.’  It certainly beats pretending you know, or assuming that you know.  As the human quest for knowledge has developed, we have attempted to remove cultural and time related barriers to learning by opening everything up for debate.  It does not matter what field you are in, or how advanced you are, debate is welcomed by those with knowledge, in an effort to actually further the field.

What we are seeing now in UK politics seems to me to be an attempt to feign knowledge and discourage interest by maintaining tradition that does not exist. Labour and Conservatives are concentrating hard on killing off their most popular candidates, in favour of forcing us to vote for an increasingly vague ideology, led by rather authoritarian and not-particularly-appealing figures whom we are encouraged to dismiss and dislike.

If you have a look around, politics now is rather bland compared with the days before we joined the Common Market.  Scenes of people being removed from debates and hustings style appearances were once commonplace.  People were highly engaged, and political representatives actually allowed some influence from the people they purported to represent.  When did we decide that accurate representation and the interests of the public were subordinate to a bland version of the original ideology?  When did people like my Conservative neighbour decide that it was OK and not terribly important that thousands of people die after being sanctioned or starved by Conservative policy? When did people stop feeling?

Perhaps this is the secret of of figures like Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson.  Both have a liberal mass appeal, from the opposing sides of an age-old argument that more philosophical thinkers recognise.  Stronger meat, and yet street-friendly interpretations of a system that has become stale, self serving and that fails to engage people, even as thousands of disabled people fall victim to strokes of a policy pen.

Perhaps this is the reason that such figures must be removed.  If people are too engaged in what our governments are doing, then we will actually notice that it is not OK for people to starve to death, or be blamed for poor social management and inhumane policy. Perhaps we will notice that government is serving masters other than the voters they claim to represent.

In both cases, the parties are killing a golden opportunity for positive change, and we are supposed to eat our cereal and watch it happen, knowing full well that they will be replaced by less interesting, less engaged and more Machiavellian forces in the form of rather tedious career politicians, who care a lot more about the number of gnomes in their garden than they do about actual events or progress.  If we are not interested, they are more likely to get away with policies that we do not find desirable or necessary. Whoever is pulling the strings on the crucifixions, they know full well that an engaged, optimistic population is the last thing they want or need.

The civic sense of community has, of course, been eroded by the massive changes in our behaviour in the last two or three decades by the internet.  Now, instead of street by street hivemind disagreement and/or collective action, we have old versus young, fat versus thin, right versus left on a far wider basis.  We dispose of people quite readily on the grounds of a photograph, or a sentence that may not suit us.  We are encouraged to be childlike and yet inflexible. Instead of admiring the capacity for change, we accuse people of flip-flopping or being inconsistent.

It has been amusing, watching the heartfelt anti-democratic protest and accusations of the last week.  Amusing because these same people see no merit in liberalism with walls, amusing because the government did not get the result they wanted or expected, amusing because the public, whether they did it wittingly or not, voted for what they believed was best for them and their future opportunities.

As I said in my previous post, it may be a good accident, and if we are patient, we may reap great benefits.  It does not matter how things happen, it matters how flexible we can be in our approach to solving problems.  That is what intelligence really is.  It is not fear of the unknown, complacency about past achievements, or a reliance on conforming to a status quo that does not work.  It is picking up the pieces and creating something new.  It is making order out of chaos.  It is seeing the diamonds in the dust.

As someone who stands outside traditional political boundaries, I am forced to assimilate information on an individual basis.  It is rare that I commit myself to one ideology, because some arguments continue for centuries, and much politics is just theatre.  It became apparent during my political and religious studies, that many arguments are designed purely to appeal to the ego.  You should not regard anything as being ‘true’ or false, because our reality is shaped by the frictional warzone between extremes.  All you can do is make your best guess, and then make sure you do the work to produce a desirable outcome. Unwillingness to do this is unwillingness for positive change, and the moronic desire to remain in your comfortable shell.

 

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