Picture Of The Day #59

Italian: Evolution of the Left.

‘Anni’: Year.

‘Oggi’: Today.

Quote Of The Day #94

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he lived and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demand of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called for duty service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the nation income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevent women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.” [My emphasis]

The Rise Of The Anti-Socrates

I’d like to reference two of my favourite pop culture icons in a discussion of the rise of what I like to call the ‘anti-Socrates.’

First, The Simpsons episode Little Girl in the Big Ten…

“Laziness is counter-revolutionary. Questions are decadent. Fast hands mean less whipping.” See here.

Thoughts From The Lockdown Update #3

Fortunately, the town where I live in Central Queensland is not subject to any special Covid19 measures. As I type these words, the county of my birth and the city where I spent more than a decade of my teaching career are both subject to so-called ‘Tier 2’ restrictions.

In the 1977 Dr Who story The Sunmakers…

…the population of Earth has been moved to Pluto after the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem. To keep the people docile and easy to dominate, the alien race that controls Pluto pumps the atmosphere full of a chemical that induces anxiety. Even Leela, the Doctor’s minimally-clothed assistant, is affected.

Have we reached a stage where the fear of Covid19 is not worse than the illness itself?

Quote Of The Day #85

“I have a very simple idea. It is old fashioned – old Labour. If someone is in Parliament, he or she should be elected. I was brought up to believe that democracy meant that we elected people and could get rid of them.“ [My emphasis]

None Of The Above

In the film Brewster’s Millions Richard Pryor is set the task of spending $30million in 30 days so that he can inherit a fortune of $300million. In order to waste as much money as possible, he decides to run for mayor of New York. Pryor doesn’t want the job so stands on a slogan of ‘none of the above.’

I bet the good people of the United States wish ‘none of the above’ was an option in this November’s presidential election.

Hands In The Till?

One thing that I vividly remember from my eighteenth birthday is the pay rise I received. I was working on a potato harvester at the time and my hourly rate went up from £1.90/hour to £2.10/hour. A 20p/hour pay rise doesn’t sound like much but it was 1987. I earned an extra £1.60 a day and £8.00 a week. This was just before I went to university and beer was 50p a pint in the union bar.

The recent Covid19 shenanigans have highlighted just how little some people are being paid. Minimum wage for people over the age of 25 is £8.72/hour. Other people appear to be earning vast salaries for doing next to nothing – the daily attendance allowance at the House of Lords is £323 a day, which would take a minimum wage worker more than 37 hours to make. Other people seem to have a great deal of money without having a job at all.

Step forward Mr Tony Blair.

Trevor Phillips For Prime Minister Update #2

I am a great admirer of Trevor Phillips, a writer, broadcaster and former politician. This is the third piece I have written about him and I genuinely believe he would be a good choice for the leadership of the United Kingdom. He is certainly a better choice than the current buffoon in Downing Street or the Christopher Biggins tribute act that Labour want to put in his place.

Original post from February 2017: Trevor Phillips for Prime Minister

First update from March 2020: Trevor Phillips for Prime Minister Update

Thoughts From The Lockdown Update #2

Original post: Thoughts From The Lockdown

First update: Thoughts From The Lockdown Update

The lockdown is just about over in Queensland. We are allowed to travel all over the state (interstate travel is banned until at least the end of June) and most businesses are open. Cinemas open on Friday 5th and pubs and restaurants will be opening on 12th June.

As the world returns to normal – whatever that is – I’d like to ask, was the lockdown actually worth it?

Thoughts From The Lockdown Update

The original of this post – Thoughts From The Lockdown – was shared on 2nd May 2020. In that post I expressed my contempt for the catastrophising of the media and the desperate neediness and narcissism of so many ‘celebrities.’ I also made the less-than-breathtaking observation that the super-rich have done very nicely out of the current crisis.

At the time of writing, there have been 7,060 cases of Covid19 in Australia and 99 deaths; in the UK, the figures are 246,406 and 34,796. Worldwide there have been 320,180 deaths linked to the virus.

Worrying, yes. But do they justify the current response(s) from various world governments?

Picture Of The Day #45

I wrote a post called Don’t Go On Twitter in February and I stand by that advice. The current lockdown has confirmed my opinion that this platform consists entirely of time-rich pseudo-leftists desperate for approval and insane alt-rightists trolling them.

Here is well-known philosopher ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan on opinions…

I Don’t Want To Live In Airstrip One

I haven’t written much recently as everything on the news is about Coronavirus. I used to watch the 10 ‘o’ clock news on Sky UK (starts at 7am in Queensland during the northern Summer) before I went to work but have stopped doing so as they only cover one story.

Here in Queensland we have been in this limbo state of semi-lockdown for six weeks. Fortunately there are encouraging signs that the lockdown is ending. Businesses are reopening and some children are returning to school on Monday (11/05/20) and hopefully the rest will be back on 25/05/20.

I’ve taken the title for this piece from George Orwell’s brilliant dystopian novel 1984 but I’d like to draw your attention to another of my favourite writers, Isaac Asimov.

Thoughts From The Lockdown

Here in Queensland (my place of exile since 2005) we are in Week 5 of the so-called lockdown. The last week of the previous school term involved working at home, then there was a two week school ‘break’ – not ‘holiday’ as we were informed. We have just completed the second week of the second term, so the third week of home schooling. Fortunately, the premier of Queensland has said that because we have all been good and listened to nanny, there are going to be some relaxations of the rules today. As I type these words, there have been 1,033 confirmed cases in Queensland and six (yes, six!) deaths. For Australia as a whole, those figures are 6,767 and 93 respectively.

In no particular order, I’d like to share some thoughts about what the past month or so has revealed about the state of our society.

Joke Of The Day #13

Why did the tyrannosaurus die of Covid19?

Quote Of The Day #80

“[T]he Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers…”

Full text of speech here.

Rene Descartes And Celebrity Culture

Rene Descartes was a seventeenth century French mathematician and philosopher most famous for his proposition “Cogito, ego sum” – “I think, therefore I am.” This is one of the pillars of modern Western philosophy and Enlightenment thinking – radical doubt as a secure basis of knowledge as opposed to the ‘faith’ insisted upon by the various religious ideologies and the deluded bigots who demand RESPECT for their childish fantasies.

How do we know we exist? Perhaps we are just brains in jars like Morbius and the universe is an illusion. Unlikely but an interesting thought experiment that forces us to understand the nature of knowledge. Without doubt, without thought, what is knowledge? Far too deep for a pedestrian thinker like myself.

The Covid19 crisis has brought forward an important question for the ‘celebrity’ world. If they are not in the papers, do ‘celebrities’ really exist?

All Washing Machines Are Racist! Update

I wrote the original of this post in October 2017 – All Washing Machines Are Racist! – to highlight my contempt for the type of minted pseudo-leftist who feels guilty about how well off they are under the brutal neoliberalism that has dominated the West for the past forty years. I even had a go at writing a song for the upper class idiots at Guardian Towers – Everything Is Racist.

One of the unexpectedly positive side-effects of this Covid19 nonsense has been the decline in the amount of attention the media gives to identitarian morons and men who think they are women. Seems that when society is faced with a real crisis, pretend ones go by the wayside. But I reckoned without the awesome ability of oppressed multimillionaire Afua Hirsch to link anything to her personal mania – here is the link to the story I used as the header for this post.

Reblog: Jonathan Sumption

Augustus Caesar, first emperor of Rome, was a great man. He emerged as the ultimate victor in the series of civil wars that disfigured the Roman Republic for the last 70 years of its existence. He created a monarchical system that lasted for more than 200 years and gave Rome a remarkable long period of peace until the accession of the repugnant Septimius Severus in the last decade of the second century AD.

Even with supreme power in the Roman Empire, Augustus could not escape the tyranny of death. Determined to secure his new system, Augustus wished to designate an approved successor. Unfortunately he was predeceased by virtually all his choices. His nephew and son-in-law Marcellus died of plague aged 19; his best friend and second son-in-law Marcus Agrippa died relatively young (aged 51) as well; the two sons of his daughter Julia and Agrippa who Augustus adopted as his own sons also died before him. Augustus was left with his stepson Tiberius, who he personally disliked, who proved to be an able if rather austere emperor.

The point I am making is that societies in the past had to deal with death all the time. Our own society is so afraid of death that it is prepared to destroy itself to escape the remote possibility of death from Covid19.

Kakistocracy Rules (Badly)

‘Democracy’ comes from the Greek words ‘demos’ (people) and ‘kratia’ (power) – the power of ordinary people as opposed to the power of the ‘aristos,’ the so-called ‘best’ in society. Whilst democracy has many faults, it is certainly better than rule by an arrogant elite who think they are superior to us plebeians.

Unfortunately, democracy in the West has been replaced with plutocracy and technocracy. Plutocracy – rule by the rich – has grown out of a belief that the best way to help ordinary people is to give even more money to those whose wallets are already bursting at the seams. And as for technocracy – rule by ‘experts’ – all I can say is that these ‘experts’ are really, really bad at their jobs. The various international organisations on whose ‘expertise’ the modern world is allegedly based appear to be adding the coronavirus to their litany of failures over Yugoslavia, the financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing refugee problems sparked by the Syrian civil war.

Combine plutocracy and inept technocracy and what we really have is kakistocracy – rule by the worst, the least qualified and the most unscrupulous.

Video Of The Day #21

https://dai.ly/x6hsyou

This is the final episode of Red Dwarf IV from 1991 – Meltdown. Fast forward to 23:22 if you don’t want to watch the whole episode.

Picture Of the Day #44

As ever The Simpsons had it right. This is a still from the 2000 episode Treehouse of Horror XI – the segment is called ‘Night of the Dolphin.’

Video Of The Day #20

This clip is from The Simpsons episode Homer the Vigilante from 1994. It shows Springfield newsreader Kent Brockman reacting with the same calm as the media have reacted to the Covid19 outbreak.

Picture Of The Day #43

“Hong Kong Flu-y, number one super virus,

Hong Kong Flu-y, quicker than the human brain,

Oh, it’s got style, a groovy smile and spread that just won’t stop,

When the going gets rough, it’s super tough,

With the Hong Kong Flu-y chop.” See here.

They Walk Among Us

I was doing the shopping yesterday and got some strange looks when I came round the corner of one aisle and started laughing when I saw that the toilet paper aisle was empty. How exactly is buying loads of toilet paper going to help against Covid19 ? Are these people going to wrap it round their heads like a mummy?

Two questions…

1/ Do the media actually want Covid19 to turn into the new Black Death?

2/ Are there more morons these days or are they just more visible?