Mars – Amazing

It looks like an orange that’s been dropped from the second floor onto the pavement and split. A meteor hit it some time ago now, and the Martians being clever people new it was coming and came to the Earth to live, you see we’re all Martians really, that’s why Mars fascinates humans: we build high towers, and pyramids, and obsess about space travel, and hanker for something that’s just beyond imagining, and want explanations for everything.

Because we want to go home.

Karl Marx

Surely he protests too much? Marx was pretty astute. He understood that humanity would win out and that capitalism was simply a stepping stone on the path to humanism. The problem that Popper and other philosophers have with Marx is that he attempted to formulate what would come after capitalism and that National Socialism and Communism were born. However this divergence from the path does not make him wrong in his analysis that capitalism would implode.

It’s not the markets stupid, it’s alienation. Alienation from the product of our labour and each other.

We just don’t care about each other, or ourselves, any more. Hiding in our houses, scared to go out at night, wishing we didn’t have to go to work, having to fill in endless forms and comply with hundreds of annoying rules. It’s this that Marx could see. He didn’t predict half the population would be so depressed that they’d comfort eat themselves to death mind. Freud did, nearly, his idea of over civilization and mass neurosis is bang on the money.

Greedy Banker

Where Marx went wrong was trying to extend the logic of his argument beyond his brilliantly intuitive analysis of capitalism. Because of the brilliance of his analysis and the fact that most who study his ideas of alienation empathise with them led those same folk to credit his arguments in favour of socialism/communism with the same brilliance and embrace it. Hence Popper and other philosophers reject his historicism and socialism as nothing more than scientist, which it is.

It will be interesting to see what will actually emerge from this and where the path will lead.

I think it means we need less wrong-headed politicians and a few with brains. The reason for banks closing is greed on the part of politicians just as much as bankers.

The parable is daft, there is nothing accidental in banks colluding with valuers and brokers to push up values and make borrowing easier; it was done to generate commissions and charges. The writing was on the wall fo them when folk took the law into their own hands and started issuing proceedings to recover dishonestly high bank charges. Again the politicians collude in defence of this by kicking the cases into the long grass for years.

Coincidence and accidents? Not likely fella.

Boris Johnson strikes me as Caliban to Gordon Brown’s Prospero, not sure who David Cameron would be.

Even if you have less than £35,000 in the bank get it out now. Why? Do you know how long it will take to get your cash off the Government? Let’s face it they’re bust as well. You know there is a problem when the Sky News people are trying to sell nationalisation in the US. The people with savings are the losers if the bail out fails. The ones with the debt win. It’s the end of capitalism. Marx and Engels were right. Once you get production controlled by too few folk there is a natural tendency to exploit the monopoly – look at oil. I believe that it is humanity at work. When kids are dying for want of a fifty pence vitamin the race will react unfavourably. I think it laughable to see George Bush desperately trying to give all that money to Banks. And why? So they keep getting paid. It’s not about you or me, or jobs or mortgages. It’s about keeping power and stopping natural redistribution.

Contribute to the fiasco, even if you only have fifty quid in a bank take it out now.

“There’s no contrition, no admission of fallibility, no recognition of blunders – and most certainly no apology. This isn’t clever. It insults the electorate’s intelligence and helps explain why, like AIG, he’s doomed.” (Randall, J. Telegraph, 19.09.08)

He seems to be saying that Tony Blair wasn’t so bad. But of course he was. He bottled it and did as the yanks told him. So the public loathed him for his spineless connivance in war crime activities, torture and killing. Gordon Brown has the power, the time and the cheque book. The electoral system is completely undemocratic. This is why his only hope is to bring in PR. There are precedents for doing so in Scotland and the European elections. The House of Lords has been fixed, they have a healthy majority. The Queen would sign the bill. The Tories would be finished, for good. The time for gloating is not yet nigh.

So I think it’s premature to write off Gordon Brown completely. As for Labour, like I say,  they have the power and the cheque book, so they could yet fix it. One way of course is to guillotine through proportional representation for the next election. A list system would mean he could buy off all the plotters with a high place on the list. Of course the Lib Dems would have a Damascean vision, and see the virtues of New Labour’s electoral reform ideas. Errant Labour MPs would also see the wisdom of Gordon. As for the Tories, well, they’d never see the inside of Downing Street again, ever.

It is interesting to note that the Tory revival is coterminus with David Cameron disappearing into the undergrowth, along with fellow prefect  and TUC shop proprietor George Osbourne. As soon as they start gloating (they won’t be able to resist) the public will turn on them.

Envy, it’ll do for the toffs everytime.

The British love an underdog, especially the possibilities of “comebacks” – look at Tim Henman mania and now Murray. We love it. Brown has carefully positioned himself as the underdog. There was little he could say while capitalism crumbled – gloating would be counter-productive – making excuses would just grate. So getting fit, losing weight and keeping schtum were good moves. I remember Jim Callaghan and have loathed the useless slime ball since I sat one Christmas Day wishing the electricity would come back on so I could watch the tele. It would be fatal for Labour and Gordon Brown to let the unions mess it up. PR is the only way. He won’t do it though.

Stock up on candles for this winter. And get some thermals.

Of course the whole sector is riddled with corruption and political connivance at a high level.

Remember the bank charges case? The banks have for years been stealing money from consumers in the full knowledge that what they were doing was unlawful. By any standards this is theft. The Theft Act of 1968 says so. Anything happened to the folk responsible for the largest fraud in UK history? Not likely. So a few brave souls began to reclaim the right and issued  summonses and requests for bank statement, using the Data Protection legislation to do so. The banks settled them all, not wanting a judgement recorded against them. Then, conveniently, the Office of fair Trading stepped in, issued hastily prepared proceedings, the government (who control The Court Service)  allocated a judge to deal with it and the whole case (worth billions) has been kicked into the long grass. The issues are very straightforward, the case is stopping hundreds of thousands of people from getting their money back, what happens? The OFT gets a second rate QC to fight the case against at least a hundred top rate commercial lawyers who are defending the banks. The banks will appeal this all the way to Europe. The Government could easily have passed emergency legislation to make the banks give the money back and instructed Scotland Yard to arrest those responsible.

Now with that kind of political interference and fixing of the court system it’s little wonder that the sector is rife with corruption. But incredibly they are still levying the charges.

The Tories will put rates back to 11% quicker than you can say “I’m bust”.  George Osborne reckons it’s the fault of house prices that HBOS is bust, but it’s his mates in the city who’ve ramped up prices in collusion with the valuers who suddenly decided that land in the UK was worth 100% more than it was ten years ago. And why? To generate massive commissions and bonuses. Where are they now? Gone fishing. Ken Clarke reckons capitalism is okay and there’s no real problem with the concept. How dumb is that? Of course there’s a problem.

Get your savings out as soon as you can, they’ll spend it all if you don’t.

While we have a political class with a direct financial interest in property prices going up there will be corruption within the whole system. The dude who said you can’t buck the market was right. American and British governments (one and the same?) have colluded in this for votes: low interest rates and artificially high house price inflation gets votes. The whole world pays the price for a few million making a few quid. It’s the home owners who’ve bought at the top of the market and the dopes who re-mortgaged up to the hilt who will pay in the end.

The best plan for the British debtor is to stop paying. If we all cancel our direct debits for three months that will be the end of it: the Courts wouldn’t be able to cope, debt collectors would be swamped; the utilities companies and banks would go bust; the government wouldn’t be able to pay their huge wage bill and ridiculously high pensions; councils would get no council tax; insurance companies would go bust.

Now that would make life interesting. A house in the UK should cost about £20,000.00. Housing should not be a huge financial issue for families. In Europe they don’t do this and they are not suffering like we are, it’s not really a global problem it’s an American one. We are feeling the effects of the “credit crunch” not because it’s a global issue but because we live in a monarchical society, we have less democracy than Saudi Arabia and the Americans have a direct veto on all our politics. In other words we are part of America with none of the rights that American citizens have.  Think about it. Tony Blair didn’t have to go to war in Iraq. The British people didn’t want him to, it was political suicide. Anyone watching him could see him visibly crumble and crumple as a result. Politically, if domestic politics was his only concern, he should not have done it. He did it anyway. He had no choice, he was told he had to. Lets face it the CIA can kill anyone. Another example of this was the government reclassifying cannabis from C to B when their own scientists said this was stupid. The Federal American Government see such moves as contrary to their national interest. Quite simply we are living in an American satellite with none of the rights of American citizens. Harold Wilson knew this and sought to gain American citizenship for us all. Look what happened to him…

Anyway I’d better not rabbit on about it too much or I’ll have a car accident. Think I’ll get the bus.

If you’ve got money on deposit in banks realise you will only be covered for £35,000.00 in the UK. There is no way that the Bank of England will help another bank. The Northern Rock was a special case, because the northern based Labour Party needed to protect the feckless geordies who borrowed money. Money they could never afford to pay back if interest rates went up a tenth of one per cent.

Talking of geordies I see Newcastle United and Kevin Keegan are starring in their own pantomime. The fans are the panto horse. I saw a dude from geordie land wittering on about how geordies should run the club. Now that made me laugh. Say a hundred thousand geordies decided to buy the club. That will cost about four grand a piece. And that’s for a load of debt. Then they need probably the same again to pay the debt off and be at a zero starting point. Then they need the same again to buy a team and a manager. Not likely is it? Now this Ashley fellow would appear to be a cockney, like me. Now geordies don’t like us. I should know I lived amongst them for thirty years. Predictably they are insulting the poor bloke and threatening his family. The thing he should remember is that most geordies are all mouth and trousers, full of wind and piss and couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Manchester United fans, back in the seventies, the heyday of football hooliganism easily trounced thousands of them (they’re usually to pissed to do much). If I was Ashley I’d let the club disappear into the League and then the conference. I mean all the lad has tried to do is help the ungrateful soft cocks out. Look how he gets repaid. Now Newcastle supporters aren’t typical geordies, although they think they are, and I hope Ashley craps all over them. Threatening his family? What a bunch of turds in black and white shirts.

I think to say the class war is over is to misunderstand two hundred years and more of political history and philosophical analysis. It’s an issue of class to say something as crass, and wrong-headed quite frankly. Envy is a loaded word. In the context of the smug “I’m okay, it’s your fault you’re not” attitude it may make some sense. But it’s unintelligent to put it forward as a rational comment. Define “class”, define “envy”. Get real.

Of course birth is everything. To say otherwise is to fly in the face of, as the not very funny Pyhton smugsters may have allegedly plagiarised, “the bleedin’ obvious.”

It isn’t Gordon Brown’s fault that the US thought that houses make money. But it was his fault that he did. He let the banks, the brokers, the estate agents and all the others with a vested in the rest in ramping up house prices fleece trillions from the economy. He has presided over the ransacking of private sector pensions. He fiercely resists the needed rationalisation (ie redundancies) of the public sector. And of course he had a vested interest in the commissions generated in the housing boom – tax receipts. He ran out of money two years ago, Blair saw it coming and bailed out.

Houses don’t generate wealth, they are for living in. Production creates wealth. Ask the Chinese. They know this.

The latest case to collapse and embarrass the prosecuting authorities was the prosecution of those terrorists. In the Telegraph a view was expressed to the effect that the jury were stupid and biased for acquitting the “liquid bombers”. Conveniently forgetting that they convicted some of murder in the same trial. The only folk who heard every word of the evidence were the jury, the lawyers and the judge. They clearly gave the matter much thought.

It is this dangerous “Dirty Harry” point of view that undermines respect for the law across the whole of society. People are not stupid. The police hate lawyers, nine of them shot one called Mark Saunders, who also happened to be rich. He posed no threat, other than as a lawyer. The officers who killed him are allowed to compare notes and get their stories straight. The family, who are challenging this process, are in a position to take them on. There are many dead men who have died violently in the custody of the police who did not have such relatives.

Predictably the Police spin against the grieving family. The only reason, they say, there will not be any prosecutions is because the family are “prejudicing” the case by challenging them. What? Not likely. The chances of the killers being brought to book is zero.

In Lancaster, here in Lancashire, a man who reversed over a four year old child at high speed, and then went over him again going forwards, got out of his car to have a look. He saw what he’d done and ran away with an accomplice. In that case the villain was charged with careless driving. The child was from a background that could be described as economically challenged, working class in other words. Saunders is upper class.

Who said the class war is over?

I personally wish Saunders’ family luck. But they need to watch their backs carefully. The police in the Uk have no respect for the law and get away with it every time.

Of course Lie Detector tests are only 98% accurate and not admissable in Portuguese or English Courts. This is the alleged reason for their refusal. They are of course determinative in the Court of Public Opinion. Like the UK Government are fond of saying:

“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.”

Explains the Official Secrets Act then. I wonder if they have found the data they lost that belongs to 25,000,000 people: bank details, addresses, dates of birth, mothers’ maiden names: everything you need to steal money.

We got a letter from them about that. It said that if one is an “innocent victim of bank fraud” one will be reimbursed. But what exactly is an “innocent victim” then? By implication there must be “guilty victims”. I can imagine the pain that will be endured by anyone trying to make a claim. The same letter advised against changing banks. This means they won’t pay and you should change banks.

So if you live in the UK and you have had any dealings with the Inland Revenue change your bank, cancel your cards, change your passwords and then your name. Once you’ve done that write a letter of claim to them for the hassle. You will get a standard letter back that says in three hundred words what they could have said in one: tough.

 Are they to blame? No, they never do anything wrong.

Will someone get the bullet? No, they never do.

Is our personal data secure in the UK with HMG? No.

Will they lose our medical records next? Yes.

To make matters worse UKReg and Fasthosts have been effectively shut down by hackers. 100,000 UK websites offline since Thursday 29th November. They reset all the passwords without telling anyone. This meant everything failed: Sites, email, DNS, Databases, control panel – the lot. I can’t get on even now to change DNS and make glue records.  I rang the premium rate number and there were 51 people ahead of me in the queue.

The thing that is worrying is that Fashosts called in the Police to try and resolve it and they still got shutdown. Of course being hacked may not be their fault, but reseting passwords and posting them out (I still haven’t got mine) is sheer idiocy. Of course some would say this was just an excuse, delaying tactics even, or a ruse to generate premium rate ‘phone numbers.

Either way as soon as I get back in I will be transferring everything out.

Of course lie detector tests are not determinative in the UK legal system because they are not admissable as evidence. However the case does seem to be playing out in the Court of Public Opinion. I would have thought passing a lie detector test would be more effective in gaining worldwide goodwill than expensive lawyers and a PR machine.

I hope they are innocent, I really do. But whatever the outcome the whole incident is a tragedy for all the family whatever happened. It’s the little girl we should think of.

I think there is a bloodlust in the air. This may or may not be justified.