Jeremy Clarkson was right

Two posts in one day must be some sort of record.

I had to go out just after writing Hard Choices, to pick up Little Petal. Her car had been leaking water over the past couple of days and she had taken it up to the garage, confident that they would tell her the head gasket had gone and the car was not worth repairing. I, however, was quietly confident that a hose was leaking. It often happens in the cold weather, when the rubber goes hard overnight in the frosts, and then has to heat up to normal working temperature. It causes thermal and mechanical stresses and after a while, cracks. Simples, innit, peeps?

I was proved right. As Little Petal and the mechanic stood beside the opened bonnet of the car, the hose announced it had had enough and enveloped them in a cloud of steam. She phoned me as I was polishing the post to ask if I could go and collect her.

It's funny how you never see the typos until the post is published, or never realise how awkward or open to misinterpretation your wording was until you see it on the final page. Drafts just don't seem to engage the same part of the critical faculties as the real thing. This is probably what happened to Gordon. "British Jobs for British people" must have sounded brilliant when the speech was written, but look what's happened now. If Gordon had blogged his ideas and allowed comments he would have realised a lot sooner just what he had planted.

So, on the way back down the hill, I was explaining to Little Petal just why I believe Gordon has to go. She protested that Globalisation was Blair's baby, and I replied that Blair was a barrister, not an economist. He might have had the idea, but Gordon was the engineer who made it happen. But nobody could have predicted the problems, she said. I disagreed, saying that plenty of people had been pointing out the un-sustainability of the housing boom or the folly in allowing so much personal debt to accumulate, but their advice was ignored. As I saw it, Gordon had to go because he either ignored the advice, which means he was incompetent, or never saw the pitfalls, which again means he was incompetent.

Little Petal's final argument was that Gordon shouldn't go, because that would mean David Cameron taking over, and she didn't like David Cameron. To me that argument smacks of an officer in the German army refusing to go along with the plot to assassinate Hitler because that would mean Goering taking over, and he didn't like fat people.

But I never got a chance to deliver that witty riposte, because I was approaching a right-turn which I needed to take, and as I checked the mirror before putting on the indicator, I saw that a car had pulled out from the car immediately behind me and was about to try and overtake us both, regardless of the presence of the junction. I put the indicator on, because I needed to start slowing for the turn. He decided to have a go at getting past me anyway, and then changed his mind as he realised how close we were to the turning, and just managed to swerve in behind me. I had to go a little further because if I had braked as I would have normally he would either have smashed into the back of me, or braked hard enough to make the car behind smash into the back of him. He had to brake and slow to a crawl, and I got a look at him as I crossed over into the side road.

It was an Audi, one of the ones which Jeremy Clarkson had declared to be the new un-cool car. And yes, I have begun to notice that, as well as the massive 4-wheel drive cars and white vans, the Audis are featuring more and more and more as the car most likely to cut you up or squeeze you onto the verge.

So, if Jeremy Clarkson is capable of noticing trends and pointing them out, why not make him Prime Minister? He is well-qualified, after all, since so many people find him annoying, irritating, and unbelievably arrogant. But it doesn't really matter what the personality is, providing the person is right. That's all we ultimately need.

Hard Choices

Or you could call this divided loyalties. My sympathies lie with the protesters outside the refineries and power stations. It is galling to be out of work and see someone from another country doing work you want to do and are capable of doing. I know it from experience. I am, or was, a software engineer. My work opportunities have dried up over the past few years as, first of all, foreign IT workers entered the country on fast-track visas, and then, after the government admitted that IT skills should not be on the shortlist, companies instead outsourced the work to overseas countries where the cost of living, and therefore the wage bill, was less. Countries to which I couldn't go and get a job. I am a victim of outsourcing. I am not alone, either, as thousands of people would agree if they got their chance to put up their hands and complain.

The chance came yesterday, when the BBC news website opened up a "Have your say" page for the current strikes. Within an hour, the page index numbers had marched to the right at the bottom of the article. When I finished reading all the comments on a page and clicked on the next button, I found myself beginning again at the top of the comments I had only just finished reading, because that number of new comments had been added in such a short time.

One or two of the comments pointed out that it was not illegal, under EU laws, to employ people from an EU state. Nobody, at the time I was reading, pointed out that this was an installation contract, and so the contractor not only had every right but also every reason to employ its own trained staff to carry out the work. I chatted on the phone for a while with a kindred spirit who pointed out that none of these people had clustered around electrical outlets protesting about the import into this country of cheap giant plasma flatscreen TVs.

The fact is, though, that yet again globalisation has twisted and turned and surprised many. They thought it meant a flow into the country of clothing and software and call-centres from India, of cheap toys from China, of magic electronics from the far east. Nobody realised that sometimes the goods would arrive dismantled and would require assembling in this country, and the manufacturer would probably stipulate who put them together.

When I say nobody, there are some people who probably did have some idea. Gordon Brown, for instance, ought to have known. And the reporters now have latched onto this, following the lines that he spoke at the conference in 2007, promising "British Jobs for British Workers". Yes, he probably didn't mean he would flout the EU employment laws, but we now ought to know just what did he mean? After all, if it means we become the dumb animals in the fields while rich foreigners who have become owners or shareholders in great (sic) Britain Plc ride around in their high-tech vehicles, why weren't we told that at the time he announced his vision for our future with that snappy soundbite?

So, even though I know they're not necessarily in the right, my sympathies now lie with the protesters. They have seen a worrying future, where their jobs might be taken away from them by the (often foreign-owned) companies and given to workers who come from outside these shores. And even though they might be in the EU, and therefore have a right to come and work here, they weren't the ones who elected the government sitting over it all and collecting the taxes, making the rules, and trying hard not to shoulder the blame.

If Gordon Brown meant, as his spokesman claimed he did, that Britain would be skilled up to compete in a brave new high-tech world, why has it not begun? Why will the wind turbines which are springing up around the soon-to-be green and pleasant land be made abroad and not in our own country? Why do solar-voltaic cells come from the far-east and not our own silicon valleys? Did Gordon believe in Thatchers vision of our country being a giant service industry selling clever tricks and financial magic to the rest of the world, while the actual goods and produce came in from the countries who didn't know enough to do the tricks?

If so, then why didn't he make sure it was protected? Or is that another part of the Globalisation plan? Everybody gets their turn for a few short months, until a competitor decides they can undercut them? It could be a giant world-wide version of Tesco driving down the price of the farm produce it fills the shelves with. Except that, particularly in the case of oil and gas, the opposite seems to be happening. Everything is getting much more expensive. Including the local and central taxes we all have to pay.

Perhaps the new British jobs for British People that Gordon sees are going to be provided by Tescos and the like. Pushing trolleys around the car-park, stacking shelves, cleaning floors. After all, where I live in the countryside, far away from software houses and what few industries still need knowledge skills, it's one of the few jobs I could get into. And while I'm pushing my long snake of trolleys back from the the collection points to the doors, will I do it happily, or will I look enviously at the rich shareholders, the foreign workers, and want a re-adjustment?

So, my sympathies, I repeat, are with the protesters. It's time for Gordon to either sort things out, or shuffle off. It isn't any good his saying this recession started abroad, not here, because he should have been aware that this was a risk under globalisation. If he wasn't aware, then he shouldn't have been pushing forwards with something he didn't properly understand. And if he was aware, and couldn't prevent it, then he has to go for reasons of incompetence.

It's not about luck, stupid.

We were walking towards the exit at Morrisons last week when Little Petal asked me if I wanted to get a lottery ticket. "No," I answered, "I'm tired of hoping."

She said that was sad, and I suppose it is, because in today's world it would seem that we have nothing left but to hope that we get lucky. The old Victorian ethos of hard work and self-improvement leading to a better life was thrown away, first by Thatcher as she persuaded the country to scrap all the dirty manufacturing processes and switch to nice clean services funded by a growth in home ownership, and then by Blair and Brown as they pushed their Globalisation baby along in their shiny new labour pram and tried to be better than Thatcher.

Globalisation, as many saw it in this country, meant the jobs done by call-centres in places like Newcastle going overseas to places like India, or computing jobs being taken away from UK residents and given to people brought in from overseas on fast-track visas to work at a third of the rate.

But globalisation for the Indians has recently taken a nasty turn. Textile workers in Mumbai have been queuing in the streets outside the factories, hoping that one of them will open its doors and hire workers for a day. The problem? The countries which had "Globalised" their textile industries out to cheaper places were now in recession and no longer buying so much. If only Labour had written under their adverts "your fortunes can go down as well as up under our policies". But then who reads the small-print?

Mr Brown recently asked that the world continue to stay with globalisation through "this difficult stage" rather than switch to protectionism. He doesn't want to see his pet project left drowning in the seas as we all swim frantically for the lifeboats. The thing is, Mr Brown, we're all desperate to be lucky, that's the brave new world that has emerged from the results of Thatcher and Blair, and globalisation doesn't promise so much to the people at the bottom, does it? But then the world has always been targeting those in search of profits. Blame the church for that, the Old Testament parable of the talents has been used to justify a lot of religious and political taxation, even though it was only an analogy. If you look at that analogy, it isn't about making a profit, or of being lucky, it's about self-improvement.

Zen, over on his blog Yeah Whatever (Free), asks "should the rich be rich?" Likewise, I suppose I ought to say "should the lucky be lucky?" Except that I know the answer. You could only stop the rich from being rich or the lucky from being lucky by killing them. Aspiration is something that humans universally, um, aspire to. The same greed which drives some people to become rich appears in others as a jealous need to confiscate and "re-distribute". (Did the French, American and Russian revolutions lead to those countries becoming universally-loved models for the world?)

I can only hope that History does not repeat itself yet again by following a great depression with a great war.

Oh, I'm not doing the hope thing, am I?

Shit.

A Pookah is a Solitary Spirit

In case you've just googled Pookah because you hadn't a clue what I was on about, you've probably come across Robert Anton WIlson on at least one of the hits on page one.

I read lots of Robert Anton Wilson's writings as I grew up, and he mentioned the Pookah when he told of one of the many synchronicities that amazed him when he set about writing the Illuminatii Trilogy. The Pookah he knew of was the giant six-foot rabbit called Harvey in the film with Jimmy Stewart.

I have a Pookah of my own, a black-and-white cat called Winnie. I jokingly used to call her "Winnie the Puke" because of her propensity for regurgitating dried cat food whenever she was forced to eat it, but one day I realised that her mischievous behaviour qualified her to be a Pookah, and the new name "Winnie the Pookah" didn't offend as many people as the first one had..

Pookahs are still around, even now in the age of technology. A friend of mine likes to use the analogy of a 500 pound gorilla whenever he is making a tricky point. His Pookah is the unarguable facts that we normal people find ourselves up against time and time again. We accept things as they are, or, more correctly, as we think they are. In fact, most of the time we are wrong, it's just the Pookah loves to see us making twats of ourselves.

Talking of twats, there's an example of Pookahs on TV at the moment. QI has the concept of an "Elephant in the Room", which it uses as a means of allowing sharp-witted people to get a few more points, as Jo Brand did the other night. (As an aside, the quest on QI who has most impressed me is Johnny Vegas, and the guest who has least impressed me is Vic Reeves. Make of that what you will). An Elephant in the Room is another type of Pookah, which causes confusion amongst humans, mainly for its own amusement, as it watches them argue over what it is or isn't.

Most people know Harvey, the giant six-foot rabbit, as the best example of a Pookah. Pookahs are amazingly adaptive, migrating from books into plays and then to the screen, appearing on TV, and now even emerging into the digital age. There's at least one in Second Life. I was wandering around there the other night with a friend. I got lost in the sky and when she pulled me back down to where she was, it was to announce that she had found a giant demonic rabbit. And so she had. It wasn't a very active Pookah, though, it just sat there and enjoyed the puzzlement it caused to passers-by.

Pookahs can be like buses, one after the other in a chain of surprises. A few days after meeting the one in Second Life I was over in the stores sorting through the cardboard boxes and bags of cuddly toys, trying to make space for my latest attempt to stay alive and solvent; growing exotic mushrooms. As I picked up a large off-white cuddly rabbit I heard faint music, and put it down in shock. The music ceased. I picked up the rabbit again and began to move down the cluttered aisle, and there came a faint chime. I stopped, it ceased. I moved, it chimed.

Feeling around the rabbit (pervert that I am), I found a strange bulge just above its tail. A key. I turned it, and the chimes began a tune.

"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..."

I shall have to sell it, though. When I got it home to show Little Petal, Winnie the Pookah took offense to it. It would seem that Pookahs wll not brook competition, and Winnie was there first. So the Large Chiming Rabbit is going to be put on ebid as soon as I can remember how to log in.

And I might Youtube it as well so you can all share and enjoy. Remember to check back here for updates.

Won't get fooled again...

Over the other side of the pond they're celebrating the imminent exchange of one president for another. What can we say about G W B? That he was not quite as bad as Idi Amin? Debatable. The USA seems to be looking forward to a breath of fresh air. Here's a short bit of atypical English cycnicism.



But look on the bright side, at least Obama was elected by a majority of voters who knew (roughly) what they were voting for. We aren't quite so fortunate.

Go back a few years (and a few hops across the ocean), to when Margaret Thatcher, after two terms in office, was replaced by an ex-chancellor, un-elected by the voting public, in an attempt to recover from the mounting unpopularity that two terms of her ideas had generated. The good ship Great Britain went rudderless into the storm with her arse-end bared for all to see.

After what seemed like an eternity, a sleaze-ridden government which seemed to have completely forgotten who it was meant to be serving was replaced by a fresh new face, Tony Blair, whom we all (some of us), voted for. Oh, how we sighed with relief! Wonder-kid would save us, Britain would be great again, the damages caused by Thatcher-policies would be redressed. A brave new era was about to dawn.

And what have we got now? Not what we expected. After finally seeing (mostly with relief), a two-plus term Blair bidding farewell, we have an ex-chancellor, un-elected by the general public, taking over, with a brief to do something about the unpopularity which his party seems to have been tarred with. Oh God, Back in Lodi again.

Will history repeat itself?

Good luck, America.

Pray for our souls.

Singing the same old song

The car industry is in trouble. The first hint of it came from Honda pulling out of Formula One racing. There are some cynics who say that the recession was a blessing which allowed them to creep away from an embarrassing period during which they spent a fortune producing one of the slowest cars on the grid. If the teams were to be ranked on the basis of annual budget divided by points won, Honda might have topped that list. Still, Max is determined that the cost of racing will go down, and it looks like most of the teams agree with him. And, although I initially disagreed, I have since come to realise that this might be the most important change that will ever have occurred to the sport. More to follow.

Obviously, budgets are being slashed in an effort to preserve the factories. The companies in England are going on to reduced working patterns in an attempt to ride out the troubles while they, like their American counterparts, beg for government assistance. Sadly, I don't feel they're going to get it, because unlike the banks, there are only jobs at stake. And, unlike the banks, the car companies haven't got themselves into such embarrassing debt levels to outsiders such that the governments have no choice but to step in.

Another little giveaway is the decline in advertising for new cars on the television. But, and this is where my title for this post comes to the fore, what adverts there are, are little changed. Buy our car because you'll get laid/ make your neighbours jealous/ Take up more space on the road than the other drivers/ No reason other than we've made a clever advert with lots of strange martial arts scenes like the Matrix.

Do the car companies deserve to survive on taxpayers money? Not one manufacturer has released an advert along the following lines:

"Remember that summer of discontent when crude oil prices climbed higher than the Jumbo Jets? Remember how the goverments said they heard your pleas and would do something? Remember how they failed to cut the price of oil and waited for the recession to do it for them? Well, we heard your pleas too, and we did something about them. The new (insert car name here) does 50% more miles to the gallon than any other car, so when the oil prices soar again, you won't be forced to empty your pockets to enjoy your driving."

No, not a single car company has made any attempt to look ahead and protect their core market. For that reason, I don't think they're worthy of assistance. If the government is going to pump billions into parts of the transport industry, I think they should be funding research into future technology, whether it be on more fuel-efficient cars or on producing biofuels, I'm not able to judge. But my instinct says it should be on smaller. lighter, more efficient cars capable of running on a range of fuels, and. ideally, on electricity when in towns or villages.

(A few weeks ago, when the BBC news site published an article about the possibility of a bail-out, they asked for readers comments, and I sent in one suggesting that any large injection of money into the car industry should be conditional upon it being used to fund better development of better cars. The BBC didn't publish my comment, or any similar ones. Seems I'm in a minority.)

I decided I'd add this final point:

The modern car is generally wasteful of our natural resources and harmful to the environment, and the only people who get any significant benefit from them are the energy companies who sell us the fuel. If anybody should bail out the car industry to protect their assets, it should be the energy companies. Let them preserve the gas-guzzlers. After all, they've got a large amount of our money regularly coming into their coffers. Invest it (and not in a bank, you suckers).

The Myth of History

I am a product of the books that I read in my youth that inspired me, the films and TV programs that I watched later on in life which captured my imagination, the people I have known who have told me some of their part in the world, and lastly, of my own experiences.

I have always been inspired to live and act by something, and it is a strange feeling to find the idols of the past exposed and uncovered. At primary school, fascinated by the story told by Apsley Cherry-Garrad in his book "The Worst Journey in the World", I created an abridgment, read by myself and two others one morning during the assembly, of Captain Scott's journey to, and failure to return from, the South Pole. Years later, I began to learn more about Shackleton, who never reached the pole, but never perished in the wilderness or threw his mens' lives either, and learned that seasoned explorers such as Wally Herbert considered Scott to have been reckless, or a poor planner. I was forced to revise my opinion of a hero and accept that he did not perish simply due to the capriciousness of the weather, but due to some of his own mistakes.

We learned, at school, that Great Britain had been a major sea-power, never defeated, due to the character of the men who crewed the ships, and the traditions of the past. Britannia ruled the waves. While working at a company I choose to call Wobble and Careless, a friend there told me about a painting he had seen in a gallery in Amsterdam, which showed the Dutch Navy sailing up the Thames and sacking the Port of London. That hadn't been in any of the history books I had read.

Odd little snippets are beginning to come out now that the 60-year D-notices have been lifted, and we are learning that some of the victories in the last war were not due to courage, determination, heroism and self-sacrifice as much as to intercepted and decoded radio transmissions. And that we (Britain), and America, did a deal with Joe Stalin that condemned many people to death or imprisonment for years to come.

The world behind me is changing even as I write this. History is not the tube down to the incinerator in the basement that Orwell foresaw in 1984, it is almost the opposite. We risk being flooded with new information which could make us rethink a lot of what we have till now taken for granted.

History, I am beginning to realise, is always written at a distance, not as it unfolds, but after it has settled down and stopped throwing up the dust which confuses the participants and mixes up the warring sides. In the past, we are told, it was written for political or religious control, but not now, not in our enlightened democratic age. Oh no, it seems, history now is written to make money.

We are all at the mercy of the editors and publishers of history. We know only what they decide to publish. For example, take Custer's Last Stand.

G. A. Custer is/was an iconic figure who stood for heroism, determination and sacrifice, because of what we had been told happened to him. A few years ago, someone decided to give credence to the stories told by the Indians. They had always told these stories, right from the time that they killed him and his men, but nobody published their accounts. The newspapers, book companies and Hollywood told of an heroic doomed stand, of men facing certain death, staring it defiantly in the face. "They faced their foe and died with their eyes open."

"No," said the Indians, "there was no last stand, no small group back-to-back around their flag. They were running, scrambling away through the grass, every man for himself. Custer didn't organise his men into any formation, defensive or otherwise, because he didn't know we were there. We rose up out of the long grass and killed them as we came upon them."

Archeologists excavating the site came up with evidence that supported the Indian tale of events, not the published ones.

The Indians told the truth, but the papers and books and films made all the money.

You are what you buy.

Escape from Reality

I've been quiet for a while.

First, it was because I was busy. I could have posted something along the lines of 'Dude, where's my data?' when a hard disk crash wiped out all of my rail simulation work. Yes, some of it was backed up, but I learned the hard way about using large (250Gb) disks; you need a large disk in order to properly back up everything. I had lots of scattered backups on smaller disks and spent ages searching through them before I got back to where I had been. The strange thing was, this crash followed a similar crash on Little Petal's machine. Sadly, I couldn't do anything for her because her hard disk was a SCSI model, of which I had none similar, and she had studiously refused to do any backups or let me take any Acronis images, even after the machine began to make alarming noises on startup. So a few more days went there as well.

And then; I could have posted about the fun of pedalling around North Somerset on a Bickerton folding bicycle after a long weekend spent in a caravan while I explored the remains for the West Somerset Mineral Railway and rode around on the West Somerset (working) Railway behind a blue Somerset and Dorset 2-8-0 engine, of the same type as that in Rail Simulator. But, when I got home, the pressure of being away from the internet for so long got to me, and I had a mad morning clicking around through all sorts of strange places on the web. One of the porn sites must have had a cleverly-designed popup which, when closed by the little 'x' in the top right corner, installed something called Smitfraud. Trend Housecall recognised it was there but couldn't get rid of it, Spybot tried valiantly to remove it but crashed to the desktop each time I reached a particular stage in the process, so I went online and found the Smitfraud removal tools. They, in combination with using msconfig for a controlled startup, got rid of the fake desktop screaming that I was infected with a virus and got me back the task manager. For a couple of days I felt I had got rid of Smitfraud, but when I used TCPView to see whey the machine still seemed a bit slow, I found that my machine (fortunately not the simulation workstation I had only just finished repairing), was now a zombie relay station for spam and god knows what else. So I had to revert to an Acronis image taken a couple of months earlier.

After that, like Marvin, I fell into a bit of a decline. I used Linux to wander around the dodgy sites. I worked as many hours as I could in gardens to cover the mortgage for the couple of weeks when I went out to Australia, courtesy of Little Petal, and came back to a cold, wet, and thoroughly miserable England. I watched the terminal decline of the economy. I watched my pitiful savings become almost useless after the cut in interest rates. Without a future, I found it too hard to dream. It is hard to escape into flights of fancy when your feet are stuck in the slough of despond. I pondered cutting them off just beneath the knee to escape, Douglas-Bader style, but I doubt the NHS would do the deed and I can't see BUPA offering it as an anti-depressant cure. I couldn't afford BUPA anyway.

Sic Transit MMVIII

And so, for MMIX, I shall begin again. The Sopwith Camel will fly once more.

Australia, by the way, was wonderful.