Cold Cuts

You still here? I thought I'd cleared out these cobwebs months ago. After all the terrifying viral nightmare is over, right? Everything's tickety boo and we're back to just moaning at minor Tory malfeasance, right?

Right?

If only.

Who would have thought, two years ago during Pandemic Christmas, that we'd be facing crippling fuel and food prices while freezing to death in an early cold snap. Yet here we are, proving once again that, under the Tories, things can get much worse. 

Three Prime Minsiters later and Britain is collapsing. No matter the brand of lipstick on this pig, that's the truth. Fortunately, while you sit in abject misery afraid to do the most normal everyday thing and turn the heating on, there is some royal turbulence to distract. Bread and circuses to remind you that you can't afford bread, and that the circus is just a Tory farrago of incompetence and malfeasance. This isn't a government anymore, it's a racket.

They have refused everything they could do to help people. Now, when the weather is at it's worst (for now), people are struggling. I am certainly people, and I am certainly struggling. As with the heatwave, I find I just can't cope with these extremes of weather. It's not even as if we've never had arctic spells before. As a kid this would have been magical: somewhere between the Box of Delights and the planet Hoth. A world of rural adventure as a child, when you are immortal. Skidding around on frozen ice. Now I can't even sit indoors without feeling the cold. It gets into your bones and festers. You can't root it out. There is no scalpel or shovel into the soul.

People should be rioting over this. In fact they should be rioting over the fact the government has intervened to ensure the RMT maintains their dispute by inserting a demand neither side involved wanted. They know that driverless trains are a redline, and so drove a wedge. But nothing will be done because our society is so addled by a partisan hack media. Apathy rains and so we all sit in the damned cold. In short: people should be rioting. 

Fortunately the unions are stepping up. Hopefully actions, which, in the coming week, are almost daily, will coalesce into something that can take a life of its own. A general strike. We cannot afford to let the media, and their tory masters, divide us. This is an obvious tactic, relying on two ideas: that there is a limited pool of resources (ie wages) and so if the Unions get their way, everyone else loses out. Secondly increases in wages cause inflation. This is false and is obvious given that the rampant inflation we are currently experiencing has nothing to do with wages because no one has seen their wage increase (despite many successful direct actions).

To the first point: again it's rubbish. We are one of the richest economies on earth. Corporations, energy companies especially, have made out like bandits these last few years. The resources are there. More importantly they are generated, not by a vanguard of entrepreneurs blazing trails, but by the workers themselves. Those currently getting screwed over and smeared. Don't fall for these lies.

Yet despite the heat of industrial action, this is a cold winter. Who knows how long this cold spell will last. All I know is we can't go on like this. I will have the heating on. I'll be damned if I'm going to be scared into submission by Tory malfeasance. I would encourage others to do likewise, if they can, they can't cut all of us off. Never mind the don't pay campaigns that petered out, the same consequence might well happen just by virtue of cold circumstance.

Great Balls of Fire!

 Facts are simple and facts are straight, facts are lazy and facts are late, facts all come with points of view, facts don't do what I want them to!

Thus spake David Byrne in the guise of the Talking Heads on the song, Crosseyed and Painless, from the very excellent, Remain In Light. An apt description for this summer and my experience of the inferno we are currently subject to. 

Red alert. For the first time Britain is going to experience extreme heat. Others may scoff, but they live in countries adapted to it. We aren't used to that, and that is the trick of climate change. Whisking you away to a place you've never been and expecting you to insta-adapt. We could, but we won't.

Pop quiz: Where was Boris as a COBRA emergency meeting was held, regarding the weather. Was he?

a) Attending, chairing the meeting as a prime minister caring for the nation.

b) Partying at Chequers, like inflation was 1999%

Hint: it's not a.

How does one cope with the legacy of these last two years? Where everything has changed, yet wearing the guise of the ordinary and the usual? Everything has changed, but nothing has changed. Denialists - cranks - will say "it's always been hot". or, the perennial straw man: "we used to grow wine in Roman Times". These are not arguments. They do not explain why things are as they now are. It's probably the wage price spiral anyway.

I am alienated. It looks like the country I grew up in. The faces are the same, the lies are the same. The broken system remains broken. But now, while home burns, Boris fiddles. While Nome burns, the freakshow comes to town. Which of these fact denying truth twisters will remain unbroken from their economic contortion act to become the next monster in chief? 

Something has broken. It may never come back. This brave new world is hot to the touch. The sun, once a friendly welcome beacon - "here comes the sun" - is now an intruder. Angry at our poisoning the sky. Indifferent as we are to our own footprint on its heart. It gets a lot angrier than the rampant Christ-fascist wave in America. One that will drive out the last vestige of resistance to the baked in climate change. Baked in, like me in my house right now. Stifled by invisible waves of hostile air, unable to function. technology is unwelcome in the heatwave. All we can do is yield in our arrogance, if it will let us. I hope my computer will allow me the opportunity to post this without burning my fingers or melting down.

The world is on fire. It may never stop burning. On the plus side, intellectually illiterate self deciever, Liz Truss, may well be the next PM. The best we can hope for; blasted incompetence writ large like the fire that burns over half of the European continent. Pork Markets!

The Shite After Christmas

What is there to say at thi point? We have gone beyond all reason into a place where the political has been replaced by the tedious narrative of culture war. People are either woke or...asleep? I don't know. All I can say is that the gaslighting intensified over the past month. Over Christmas, when people might reasonably expect a break from the nightmare of the last couple of years. But nope, instead we were and still are treated to the intense spectacle of a posh twat refusing all responsibility. We need a report into my behaviour he claims, thus proving the very thing he seeks to refute: that he is an untrustworthy clown.

And yet he will get away with all of this. There is no accountability. The mechanisms of government are a) under his control and b) completely unsuited for that task. The met police, now investigating despite claiming it wasn't their job despite it being their job despite them still prosecuting other people for breaching the rules, have followed his request to fudge everything. He gets what he wants, Sue Grey will get let off the hook and receive a Damehood I'm sure. It is an obvious cover up, conduced right in front of our eyes while we are told there is nothing to see. 

 We are approaching the second anniversary of lockdown and the doors to plague island have already been thrown open. Boris desperately wants the support of the cranks that are in charge of the Tory party and so he gives them what they want, which is an end to any kind of response to the pandemic. But Covid hasn't gone away. Forgetting about it doesn't make it disappear. The new variant, which may well be replaced by something worse, seeded over Christmas and the subsequent death rate increased to reflect that. Now we are seeing almost 2000 people a week die. The price of Boris' premiership.

How can things get any better with this situation? The world seems on the edge of a knife. I think third world war somewhat (and hopefully) unlikely, but there is trouble everywhere. People are tired and angry, but are the angry enough to do anything to change the rotten power structures that continue to oppress us.