One reason why I don’t write often on Sparrow Chat is I’m too busy doing other things. Yet, when I stop to think what I’ve been doing, I can’t really remember. Busy doing nothing, or nothing of consequence. It’s like the old song from Bing Crosby:
“I’m busy doing nothing, working the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do…”
I see they’ve moved the Doomsday Clock forward again: 85 seconds to midnight. This time last year, it was moved forward to 89 seconds to midnight.
Meanwhile UK Prime Minister Starmer is in China cozily chatting away to Xi Jinping while the Chinese dictator is building nukes like they’re going out of fashion. They are most definitely in fashion, as Putin regularly reveals with Red Square fashion displays of his latest toys to obliterate the planet and everything on it. Simon Tisdall had something to say on that subject in today’s Guardian.
What is it with power? We are so totally incapable as a species of dealing sanely with power, yet we hand it out often to the worst possible people and then complain when they use it against us. We are so ignorant and unintelligent en masse that our only relief is to fight each other, usually at the behest of the power-crazed dictator we handed the power to in the first place.
In the news yesterday, a woman in Aceh Province, Indonesia, fainted and had to be carried to an ambulance after receiving 140 lashes with a cane for having sex outside of marriage and drinking alcohol. Her male companion also received 140 lashes for similar “offences against Sharia law.”
Sharia law? Who the hell came up with that? A power-crazed, body of men who were determined to subjugate people to their will using the name of a divinity to legitimize it.
Which raises another question: police, the military, they are there to protect the populace against individual threat, or a communal threat to the nation. They are paid by the people through their taxes. Why then do the police and the military not come to the aid of the people when they are being oppressed by their own governments? Every uprising, every protest against tyranny by governments is put down by the police or military happy to do the bidding of the politicians in power.
Okay, I’ve opened WordPress at the post page determined to write something. My last post was on New Year’s Day and that’s long gone. Well, to be accurate seventeen days gone, but with the speed of events taking place in the world today, New Year is ancient history.
I suppose if we ignore Ukraine, side-step Iran and place Gaza in the ‘For Later’, tray (with a goodly selection of other wartorn nations), then Greenland is probably the dire emergency of the moment. President Macron of France certainly seems to think so and has moved a number of French military personnel to the island to join up with members from other NATO countries already stationed there, or on their way.
In an interview given by M. Jean-Noël Barrot, French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, to RTL on January 14th, he was asked:
“Q. – On Greenland, a meeting is being held in Washington shortly which looks set to be tense. (…) Trump, in fact, is taking the Putin approach: “I want, I get”. He’s threatening to do to Greenland the same thing Putin did to Ukraine, isn’t he?
THE MINISTER – In any case, Greenland isn’t for sale, because the Prime Minister of Greenland said so very forcefully, very clearly and very calmly yesterday evening. Greenland doesn’t want to be owned or governed or incorporated by the United States. Greenland has chosen Denmark, chosen NATO and chosen the European Union.
Q. – Donald Trump’s response: I’ll take it one way or another.
THE MINISTER – If it’s about taking it other than by buying Greenland, it obviously seems extraordinary, because for a member of NATO – the security alliance that has brought together North America and Europe for nearly 80 years – to attack another NATO member wouldn’t make any sense, it would be contrary even to the United States’ interests. And I’m hearing more and more voices in the United States saying that. And so this blackmail obviously has to stop. “
The blackmail has to stop. Easy to say, less easy to achieve.
The American President is drunk on power. He’s also a bully and a narcissist. It’s not a great combination. He has surrounded himself with yes-men. It would not be surprising to wake up one morning and learn that a battalion of US marines has landed on the island and taken control, probably resulting in a few dead Greenlanders, as happened in Venezuela recently.
One can only surmise how a small contingent of French and other European soldiers would react in that situation? Would they make a stand? Would US troops fire on NATO allies? Or would the NATO troops just stand there and look foolish while the Americans took over the island?
Perhaps the one hope is that sufficient Republicans in Congress would be so appalled by the situation they would side with the Democrats in swiftly bringing the debacle to a close. Perhaps.
I’m not a betting man, but if I were I would give this one a miss.
One reason why I don’t post as much as I once did is because, hovering on the verge of eighty years on this planet, one tends to feel ‘out of the loop’. By that I mean a distinct gnawing in the gut that society has passed me by. The doctor looks bored and churns out more pills. Were I twenty years younger he’d have me in the hospital undergoing myriad tests, but now the attitude is “why bother, he’s going to die soon anyway. Save the costs of those tests for the youngsters, the producers”
I don’t produce anymore. If I manage to sell a book, which is rare, I may earn a few coppers in royalties, but nothing to improve the economic state of the country. Instead, I simply drain the nation’s reserves by taking my pension every month. Politicians, along with most young people today, conveniently forget that I worked for in excess of forty years. I paid my taxes and National Insurance, the latter supposedly to be invested by the government to cover the costs of my pension when I eventually became old enough to receive it.
Of course, the politicians don’t own up to the fact that they robbed the pension funds to do other things leaving it to the next lot, who happened to stir up sufficient enthusiasm in the people to vote them into office, to replace the stolen loot. Did they do so? No, of course they didn’t.
Politicians constantly criticize the rest of the population for being unable to live on the meagre earnings they pocket every month. The ‘masses’ complain always of energy bills that are too high and prices in the shops off the scale.
They say we should be able to manage our housekeeping better and not find ourselves homeless because we can’t afford the rent on the rundown rat and mould-infested derelict the landlord refuses to maintain from his villa in the Canary Islands. Even if we manage to pay the rent we can’t cook because the gas is cut off, or have a bath because there’s no electricity to heat the water…oh no, that’s been cut off too, and they came this morning to reclaim the invalid carriage that’s the only way to get to the shops, if only there was money to buy something if one could even get there.
At best, it’s a pot calling the kettle situation. Politicians have exposed themselves as bad housekeepers since they stopped being kings or landowners lording it over the peasantry. Today, politicians are voted into office by those they still regard as “the peasantry“. There are numerous instances of supposedly confidential remarks on the subject being publicly broadcast, to a politician’s embarrassment, for that attitude to be confirmed.
Are we just useless at housekeeping? No, the bloody politicians are! When was the last time you heard the economy was in the black, that the government had a surplus to spend on making our lives a little better? I’ve lived eighty years but my memory’s still good, so let me think…Nope, not in my lifetime, Mister Starmer, and no-one offered me free luxury spectacles and fancy suits for just doing my job, either.
The problem is that the younger generations today have no memory of how things were a generation or two back. It wasn’t all good, of course. There were two world wars for a start, but how many in today’s Britain are aware that in the 1960s high earners, millionaires, were taxed at 95% of their income, and that included many pop stars of the day. If the government of that day could do it, they can do it now. So why don’t they?
Unfortunately younger generations aren’t aware of what happened years ago. They are happy to accept what the lying politicians tell them. One excuse is that corporations will move their operations to countries that don’t tax as heavily. It’s rubbish! Oh a few may do so but the majority won’t, as was proved in the 1960s/70s. It costs an enormous amount to move the production of a large corporation overseas, and relatively even more for the smaller ones.
Although I don’t feel it, or regard myself as an old man, the above probably sounds like the rantings of an aging geezer who thinks the world was a lot better in his day. My father would say similar about his life, and he lived through two world wars.
I began by writing that I felt ‘out of the loop’ because I didn’t seem to matter to the world anymore. I know I’m not alone in feeling that way. It’s a very common complaint of mature people who no longer work and live off their pensions.
The one asset we do have is experience. You can’t learn it from books or the internet. It’s a unique history of someone’s life bequeathed to everyone as they grow older. It’s also different for everyone, dependent on the lives they’ve lived that have shaped their view of the world and it’s human inhabitants.
Taken together, it’s a vast wealth of knowledge , a web of life’s experiences now totally ignored, even despised by those who have not yet lived sufficiently to have any but the most simplistic ideas of what living a life is about.
There was a time in history, within certain societies, when Elders were revered, even worshipped, for their knowledge and wisdom. They would be the ones consulted before any major social decision was taken.
But why bother with all that now? The internet provides all the answers. Artificial Intelligence will be the arbiter of all knowledge, the fountain of all wisdom. Little do they know in their arrogance today what is in store for these future guardians of the earth and it’s inhabitants, sold on the power of digitization as the future saviour of mankind.
Perhaps after all, this writer should be relieved, even happy to be a castaway from society, the old wolf no longer capable of leading the pack, cast out to the fringes, thrust out of the loop.
