Hope Care

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Indeed I'm wading into this rather late (forgive me, for it's a busy life on this island Britain) but here is the truth as I see it;

Health care, hope care, here is the new age of the United States of capitalism. Had an accident? Not your fault? Not covered by an insurance policy? Father got cancer but a clause in his policy states he cant get treatment? Welcome to the American health care system. That's number 37th in the World Health Organisations ranking of medical care systems.

How about Britain? Under funded and beleaguered but still punching its way to 18th place on the same WHO list.

The Soccer Mom stuck in her 2 cents claiming a nationalised health system would be 'Evil'.

Brilliant.

That's another golden quote from a dyed in the wool Christian American. So lets pick that one up.

If Jesus was alive today, if he was the head of policy for whether a nation has a health care system that has limitless care for anyone , a system that is paid for according to a percentage of your wage, even if you have no job to speak of (don't forget the unemployed, homeless etc are entitled to it as well.

OR

a system that is exclusive to those who can pay for it. A system that ends care where the money ends.

Of course there's allot of talk of the cost of a nationalised system for the United States, that it would bankrupt an already faltering economy. Consider this though, the UK spends 8.4% of its GDP on its socialised system. The USA spends 15% on what amounts to smoke and mirrors, a non-entity, the falsehood that is Medicare.

Please, if you have a better argument, Republican Party of America, please do present it. please do at least though, present the truth.

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The Lost Anarchist

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On the micro scale, The Lost has come blinking and bewildered into the sunlight. I find him selling the Big Issue. He looks annoyed to have been shuffled down a course, dragged into this system that is society. He looks annoyed that ASBO's and court orders were threatened. I'm positive for him. I'm positive for myself. Not only have the local authorities done something pro-active, perhaps The Lost will recover. Perhaps they have sent him down the right course.

"This is really good" I say

" I s'pose it's a step up" sez he.

Of course, all of this raises interesting questions of the systematization of society.

It should be said at this point that I am no anarchist. Indeed, to what end does an anarchist protest?

History, the animal kingdoms, archeology and of course a great weight of human experience shows us, teaches us that once we are stripped of our comforts we quickly become animalists, favouring survival of the fittest. The nature of business, consumerism, in fact all things manifested on this planet are a microcosm of natural selection. We compete. It is our nature. To strip away society is to strip away our civilisation.

In the wild, in the tribal reality that is civilisation stripped we are free to live or die.

In society we are free to live.

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The Choice

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Get up, fire the computer up, boil the kettle and toast some bread. Feel guilty about where the fuel for those appliances (beamed down thousands of miles of electrical cable) has come from.

Read the news, shout at the screen , laugh at the Sun, gurn at the Mail. I sip my tea and crunch my toast.

Where has my tea come from? Who picked it? How much were they paid? Do they know how to read? What about the fuel spent bringing it to me? What wells have given me this? Did Iraq or Nigeria or even Iran supply me with this cup of tea today? Do I sip from the cup of Exxon's pre Iraq-war dossier? Do I drink from the cup of the ruling class who stand in golden castles surrounded by the seething, crawling masses who have nothing. Perhaps I drink in the riots, the torture, the violence, the oppression of those who order in Iran. But what of the alternative? What of fair pay, fair play capitalism?

What of walking into a supermarket and knowing the provenance of all you buy. What of market forces driving out all the bullshit I sleep-walk into on a daily basis. What of not feeling guilty about filling or even charging my car?

What of socialist capitalism?

What of knowing?

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Sit Up And Beg

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"They said they've got two people willing to testify that I've been begging."

The Lost tells me about the trouble he gets from the local police force. It struck me, made me angry.

The Lost has been given his chances. The system has processed, marked and rejected him. The housing foundation threw him out for fighting. Sure, maybe he should have kept his fists to himself, but this is a man who spends his days alone in a crowd. To suddenly find yourself sharing space with others who are equally socially cold, or worse have set up there clique's must have been difficult. I might have thrown the odd fist about.

So now he finds himself on the streets. No hope to speak of, just the kindness, or the want to appear kind of strangers. No doubt he'll find himself in front of the local magistrates where they will see no option but to impose a fine. How will he pay for that? What if they ask for community service? To work for free? Would it do him any good? I plan to sit in on his case if/when it happens.

This is just one of the problems I mull over on a daily basis...

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Line Busy

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Torture

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Ah, the world of business. With spiraling R and D costs and the huge risks involved in market investment the car industry is learning to outsource. Awarding contracts to specialists is, of course, not a new idea. The Saxons' arrived in Britain as part of an outsourcing idea in the chambers of King Vortigern... or possibly Rome.

The superpowers of the Twentieth century outsourced the war of ideals to the developing world in South America and Asia whilst feeding the fires with guns and ordnance, propaganda and promises.

It was to no great surprise that this weeks news held tidings that MI5/6 etc had outsourced torture to the Pakistani security services.

So;

On the one hand we condemn torture in Iran/Rwanda/Zimbabwe/China etc, etc and on the other we (by proxy) torture our own citizens for doing things that they have been inspired to do by the heavy handed foreign policies that include torture.

All things are cyclical.

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MyFace

Facebook.

Part of the egalitarian dream, part of all the puff I've been making out of the Internet recently.

Today though...

Today I found one of my friends had joined a "Cheltenham needs an Asda" group.

Hang on, what?

1,000,000 people against the BNP. Jolly good.

Joe Bloggs missing somewhere - can you help? Great. But "Cheltenham needs an Asda". What kind of corporate balls is this? Fortunately Facebook supplies a "report group" button for offensive data being published on there site. Unfortunately the drop down menu supplied (racist, pornographic, etc..) didn't include 'this offends my existence'.

The solitary comment on the message board read; "I love Asda".

F*ck.

Undesirable Al-Qaeda

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"Al-Qaeda's North African branch has claimed responsibility for the killing of an American aid worker"

Brilliant, that's gonna get everyone on side.

"Look, look, we've killed another innocent trying to help our children! Aren't we just marvelous!"

Haven't they learnt the PR lesson yet? Surely they are aware that news has been knocked of its attempted truth throne by the easy route PR movement?

Surely they witnessed the skillful PR war during Russia's little adventure into Georgia?

No matter.

It's all being blown wide open by the Internet. No longer can you shut the doors to a country. No longer can you quietly tidy up the population every time it makes a fuss about freedom, choice, torture or any other such tiresome issue.

Now you're on the spot

Now people can film the police shooting, beating and breaking the rules before it's sent across the world to the everyday. Revolution can happen. Propaganda can only go so far...

That is until someone works out how to manage the whole thing effectively, block out the undesirables, stop some sort of truth getting through...

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Mrs George

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Watching , consuming the events of this planet through the lens of the popular media is like picking a scab. Everyday you scar a bit more. Everyday you destroy sensitivity, become a bit more more hardened, a little less hurt by the damage you do to your perception.

There are many things that upset me on this world. Many things that spur me into a caffeine fueled rage on paper. Not much makes me cry though. Not much reaches out and touches me in that certain way.

The outpouring of grief, anger, frustration and pain that greeted the police vans containing the accused last week surprised me. It wasn't the reaction of the people. It wasn't to anyone's surprise that the woman who raped, abused the children in her care, who broadcast these acts to the everyday would produce such a reaction. It was the strength of the reaction. It reached out of my televisions cathode ray tube and twisted my gut, squeezed my soul. It felt like a pressure on my being.

Of course, to secure a successful conviction the parents of the 'featured' children will have to identify them in the pictures, the videos...

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Spitfear

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Nick Griffin is an intelligent man. He holds a degree in law from one of the most highly regarded centres for learning and enlightenment on this planet. 

He is almost certainly aware of the bigger picture, of the long history of immigration, cultural blending, the construction, the building of images that makes up what we identify as being British. He is almost certainly aware also that the Supermarine Shrew (or Spitfire as it came to be known) his PR department use to colour his "Battle For Britain" campaign was used in anger to beat back a force that held very similar views that his political party chooses to propagate.

He is almost certainly aware as well that we are all descended from one race, one creed. We are all speaking with only slightly different voices, holding slightly different views of roughly the same colour. He knows all we want is the safety of ours, the security of the future. He knows this transcends colour, creed, sexual or political orientation. It could be argued also that he is/was intelligent enough to have foreseen the scramble to the political centre, the loss of certainty, the pleasing of today's headlines instead of tomorrows, next weeks, next months, next years, next decades concerns.

It could be argued he foresaw the vacuum this would leave. The disillusioned, the people who can't see the Yahweh or El for the Allah or Muhammad. Those people that feel hemmed in by the influx of immigration that results from the sun setting on the largest Empire Homo erectus has so far grown. He must have known.

He must have seen his niche, seen his moment.

But is that really it? Is it just the pursuit of power? What process made the man? 

Was it a heavy handed father? A callous Mother?

A bullying black or homosexual class mate?

All of this is nothing

All of this is just dust and shadows. Speculation and perhaps slander. What is real is Fear. 

Fear spreads like a disease. 

Make no mistake, the BNP are racist, they are hateful, they are Darkness and Fear... 

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Expenses

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In a not too brave and reasonably well judged publicity stunt the Public School Boy has ordered his Party to pay back any unjustified expenses. The icing on that particular cake was a well managed photo opp that saw him making all of this clear under the watchful eye of The Bulldog. All of this just a week after The Numbers Man faced changing government policy because of a (as a Canadian I spoke to last week joked) "celebrity"  and was then photographed in front of a Swastika. 

Bugger.

This is the stuff of election change.

It is going to happen.

But listen.

Do you hear that?

That is the sound of the public sector nervously shuffling its feet. Mark my words, a scythe shall but taken to the green fields of public spending. Health care will be put into the hands of business men and women. The men and women who choose profit , personal gain and stuff over their fellow human being...

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Spa Talent

The following was received  by junction point 234......... 

Narrow beam communication with no security priority.....

Believed to be some sort of 'light relief' for the admiralty....

Performance profile attached....

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Its cool warm Friday evening. We're sat in Conservative Cheltenham. Our ears are being assaulted in the only way new jazz knows how. It takes real concentration, I feel tired by it. Tired in the same way I'm tired by an intellectual Book or filtering through motorway traffic on a motorcycle. I love both. 
Dale Campbell does this. He assembles some people who are a little outside of the everyday, people who somehow, through all the lack of grassroots in this pretty spa town, have actually done IT. Originality on a plate. Take it. Take them. Their yours.
So whats the craic?
Ricky Tart is a stand up, rapping, dancing smorgasbord of entertainment. The girls swoon. 
Fire In The Cave have a talented drummer, some sort of crazy evasive bass player and some bloke from the Guillemots. 
Dale Campbell does his familiar yet no less startling guitar assault.
The not quite quartet are Ricky and Dale. Ricky does the jokes, Dale wields his guitar.
Did you like that? Come to the Frog and Fiddle on the last Friday of every month. Its available for you delectation... 

There are no bones to be made. This is the new edge.

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Speaking

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Indeed it is difficult to swallow anything that comes forth from the lips of a man who openly denies the holocaust, sites the destruction of Israel as a central aim of his government and enforces an anti-liberal attitude on his population but...

The staged walk out of various 'western' delegates at the UN yesterday was one of (as the man himself put it); 

"Arrogance and selfishness"

For such an apparent extremist to begin his speech by not only praising Allah but also mentioning Abraham and Jesus the Christ was actually a nod of respect to those who stand in the other domains of Yahweh. It had been mooted that various delegates had threatened to walk out if The Bearded Man uttered a word out of turn. 

So, at a conference about racism  he decided to label the Israeli government racist.

Correct!

Give that man a prize!

Indeed it is no less racist than his very own government but as he later stated;

"...everybody must enjoy the right to freely express his or her opinions... we should not be intolerant of listening to the opinions of others...."

Surely that's what the UN is. A sort of international Parliament?

No?

Oh.

Then what is it?

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High Street Charity

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Things had not started well. An anxiety dream followed by waking up, having a nose bleed and banging my head on the bathroom door handle had led to the brewing of a foul mood. Bad news from the bank and shuffling savings into bills added to the sombre mood. Radio 4 spoke of children so badly raped that they themselves would never have children. I had left the house, walked down to the high street and been drag netted by the usual smiley, slightly bo-ho looking charity raisers. This time something within me gave in. I stood and listened to the insufferable evil that the everyday decides to impose on the poor in certain areas of Brazil. Frankly this type of charity hard selling irritates me. It is too smiley, too happy, too idealistic, naive, insert more of the same here...

But then...

The voice that says these things is the very apathy I rant about to others. The very antipathy of why I write this blog. I signed up. As I walked away I turned to see the girl who had sold me the charity smiling to herself. It could have been a quip by a colleague, it could have been the pleasure of the sell, but something deeper glowed from her face....

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Who Are You?

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So things are going pretty well. You've successfully beat off The Bear, you're economy is in pretty good shape and those that would see you dead are under you're military or commercial size tens. Then things take a turn. Some of those you trained to fight The Bear fly a plane , no sorry, 2 planes into your financial heart.

Sorry.

I'll try that again.

Some of those that you trained to fight The Bear train some further further people who then go and learn to fly in your back garden so that they can fly 4 planes into various soft spots around your infrastructure. Over night you are made to look slow, silly and more than a little bit open. So what do you do? Point the finger? Attack those that you believe to be responsible? The first problem you have is that those who attacked you represent not a country, but an ideal. How do you attack that?

So, due to those at the top of your administration being the sorts who "shoot from the hip" you find yourself invading not one but two countries in one of the most sensitive areas in the world. An area that cradled the 3 dominant religious ideals. An area that has seen no peace. An area that is a prime source of your energy needs. Nobody offers help. None of your allies are happy with this sticky state of affairs. No matter, you do it anyway and drag The Kingdom into the mix. They probably owe you a few anyway. 

So, the prisoners start pouring in. What do you do with them? Remember, you're angry. Remember those men and women at the top are black and white types. You start torturing them. Not enough of your people kick up a fuss. Apathy rules. You give those in charge of the "detention centres"  free reign to do as they will to get what they want. 

Then the those at the top are replaced. The new men and women at the top don't agree with the previous men and women's methods. Not only that but some very important people in The Kingdom have started pointing there fingers at you and your methods. You're starting to get annoyed. You might get a bit desperate...

Change has come and God may bless it but what will the CIA do?

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Bad News for Lloyds

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Into WH Smiths, look at the headlines, get the papers, get the papers.

Tick.

Go to Tesco's buy washing powder, feel bad for feeding the behemoth.

Tick.

Go to the bank, pay some money in... but what's this? A music channel plays apathy on the screen that once showed the BBC news. I ask the man behind the desk about the channel change.

"It's too gloomy."

Ha! Too gloomy for you maybe. Was it not too gloomy when people started dying at the hands of NATO in Iraq or Afghanistan? Was it not too gloomy when Madeleine McCann went missing? 

Men, women and children dying.

Tick.

Banks start loosing money. Quick! Turn it off! Turn it off! 

"People have a right to know". 

I walk away.

Tick. 

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The Dream

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A baby is born to a dead mother.

A baby is born with her genetic code programmed to avoid the shadow of breast cancer. Flat screen displays in MacDonald's, gaming with multiple people in multiple time zones, satellite navigation in your car, smart phones and Ipods as fast as you PC five years ago. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 

Think America in the 50's, think Star Trek. A time, a place where technology is thought to solve the problems of humanity. Greed is out-shone by transporters, warp drive and a dream of nuclear power. An ideal of shiny things and common goals. 

No.

Not here.

Not here where Gaza runs red with the blood of Palestinian children. Not here where Hamas refuses to negotiate with a government it neither recognises nor wants compromise. The absolute and total destruction of Israel. The absolute and total destruction of Hamas and its supporters. You choose, You decide.

Can't?

Welcome to the modern world, welcome to how its always been. Welcome to how it will always be. Welcome to humanity...

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The Duelist

....1982422005....

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It took the best part of a decade to develop the Bugatti Veyron. When Ferdinand Piech turned his imperial eye on the culturally rich but financially poor French supercar maker he had a dream. He would instigate the creation of a hypercar that would categorically put everything else in the shade. It would be his legacy, Volkswagen's technical statement and quite possibly the zenith of what could be done with the internal combustion engine. Now very much in the autumn of its life. 

In the beginning three main technical foundations were laid. 

It would have 1000PS. 

It would be capable of 400kph. 

It would meet all of the same quality standards that a Volkswagen Polo has to achieve.

Whilst the first two are difficult, when coupled to the third you, as an engineer, are faced with an almost impossible task. Just think. You go and buy a brand new Polo from a dealer. It is guaranteed by Volkswagen not to go wrong for three years or 60,000 miles. That is three years of everyday drudgery. Hitting that same pothole a bit too hard everyday. Going a bit too fast on the motorway everyday, sitting in traffic for hours every week without over heating, shrugging off freezing temperatures at night and  starting first time in the morning. The modern motor car really is an everyday engineering miracle. Now imagine doing that with a Ferrari. Now double the power of said supercar and with it quadruple the complexity. When all was said and done and production model number 001 rolled off the line the project had cost Volkswagen so much that for every unit produced it is estimated that between 2 to 4 million Euros is lost. So you win the lottery /work very hard / inherit the family estate, walk into a Bugatti dealership and buy a Veyron. By doing that you've just cost Volkswagen in the region of 3 million Euros. 

Here's another thing. In the Alsace, where the Veyron is carefully constructed, it snows on average 1 day in a year. Now, the local authority, council, whatever prefers salt for its icy roads and duly peppers (salts) its roads during the cold season. In the best spirit of car making Bugatti like to take every Veyron produced for a gentle (really?) drive a round the local roads. When the roads are salted they could just do the same, bring the car back in, put it on a ramp and pressure wash the underside, getting rid of any unsightly salt that could cause future corrosion. No one would ever know. Instead 14 gentlemen from the Alsace load the car and themselves onto a transporter and support vehicles and travel to the south of France where they do the bedding in there. 

In many ways this is an amazing, glorious testimony to the sheer determination of Ferdinand Piech. After all, almost all of the great achievements in the relatively short history of humankind have been driven by single-minded men. On the other hand, and this is where I find a point of conflict, a dualism within myself, it is criminally wasteful. For every Veyron produced how many schools could have been built in Nigeria? How many courses of medicines could have been put into the hands of those 1 in 5 that suffer from AIDS in Africa? What about farming subsidies in Columbia or disaster relief in central Asia? Don't even get me started on political determination within the African Union. 

The Veyron is a wide eyed achievement. It is something that inspires, awes and upsets me all in equal measure. It is the same as the tanks that rumbled through Stroud train station the other day. As a fully grown adult I actually ran back into the station to watch those magnificent machines being marched past atop their own cars. I wanted to pilot them, to fire them, to use them in anger, but I also had to quell a desire to throw stones at them, call them names, sabotage them in some way.

This then is where A Slice Of The Now Splits. The current affairs blog will continue every Wednesday (or there abouts) but it will now be joined by a second blog that will celebrate all things machine.

I wish you and yours a happy new year. 

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