Killer Complaints

It is amazing how the act of complaining to someone who really cares about their job can be devastating.

Selfishness is quite literally a killer.

In this era of complaints procedures and compliance and all that sort of crap the norm is to yell as loud as you can as soon as you can. We all believe that the guy in front of us is there to rob us. If things are not perfect then that is “NOT GOOD ENOUGH! I WILL COMPLAIN.”

All the wankers on the TV who say that complaining is our right are WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!! Complaining is a last resort, not the opening salvo. Let me explain:

When you complain it makes you stressed. It makes your “opponent” even more stressed and it adds noting to your day. Complaining has a knack of making mildly annoying things incredibly annoying and believe it or not it rarely achieves anything. Complaining is the perfect way to make life a misery.

If you have a bad cup of coffee, your room is smaller than you imagined, your trousers are faded, the bike broke, you can’t find the lavatory, the food was cold, there is a smell, it didn’t arrive in time, it was broken in transit, the pump went, it sank (well maybe not this one), it was too expensive or anything else do you really think that complaining will help? It won’t. Most of the time folks YOU ARE AT FAULT!

Suck it up! YOU ARE AT FAULT. Not the poor schmuck with the apron in front of you eating the turd pie you are throwing at her.

Your complaining will achieve nothing except increased blood pressure and the creation of a new enemy. Do you really think that they made the smell – broke it on purpose – went slowly – made it – just to piss you off?

The thing this era of moaning forgets is that we all work – all of us – for each other. We all want the best and there is not one person on this planet who sets out to create a deliberately crappy experience / product. Even crooks have quality control. It might be a plausible website or a decent sales patter but whoever it is they all try their best.

So, people;

SHUT UP MOANING AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.

YOU CHOSE TO BE THERE.

YOU CHOSE THE FOOD.

YOU CHOSE THE RESTAURANT.

YOU ARE AT FAULT FOR HAVING BAD JUDGEMENT.

Now, grow a pair and get on with something more important

So this is Christmas….An appraisal of 2011

Incredibly it has been a whole year since I last posted anything. There have been reasons. Good reasons. Whatever,  I thought it was about time I put down some thoughts again about what it means to be alive in 2011.

For me it was a close run thing and frankly I doubted seeing 2012.

REASONS TO STOP BLOGGING PART 1

In the past 12 months these things have stopped me blogging:

1. Lost my business

2. Been mis-diagnosed with cancer,

3. Been operated on and subsequently had sepsis

4. Been hospitalised in intensive care twice

5. Watched some of the most boring sporting events ever seen.

6. Had little to say that was any sort of contribution to knowledge

7.  I have no job

8. A tax bill the size of Mars

9.A fistful of rejections from companies I hate doing things I care nothing about.

10. The euro is collapsing.

11. Politicians are fiddling while Rome burns.

12. My team is 6th in the league.

13. Half a cup of luke warm tea.

14. Staying at home won’t pay the bills.

15. A paunch.

Reasons to Start Blogging Again:

1.I am still alive.

2. I am well again.

3. My kids are happy.

4. My mum has a new boyfriend.

5. My wife has a job

6. Who gives a shit about the weather?

7. I Still have my own hair.

8. Christmas

9. I am not living in the Middle East / Russia / Greece

10. I do not have to react to every fashion

11. I do not care what the columnists think

12. They can’t take what I no longer have

13. Chocolate

14. Good sex – not like in the movies or agony columns but real sex with grunts and failures and successes in equal measure.

15. I have new shoes

16. I just cleared up the dog mess. That’s over for now.

All in all its looking good!

HRH Mrs Queen called the year Diana died her anus horribilis. I would say 2011 was just an anus.When I wasn’t being murdered by the medics I was contemplating suicide. Thank god I made it  through – even if the blackness still descends sometimes even now.

Frankly I can’t wait until 2012.

Christmas is coming and the goose is very thin

December and the snow lies thick on the ground. Roads are closed and the world is wrapped in a misty vapour trail.

Britain panics again and the shops, schools and airports are closed.

Is it just me or isn’t this all a bit predictable? It isn’t as if a volcano has erupted is it?

Meanwhile in Haiti, where there was a real disaster last year the reports state that $6 billion aid has been wisely spent on brothels and casinos

Twas ever thus

 

Women – Leave us to be men

There is something about being a man in the early twenty first century that really sucks and I have just figured it out.

It is women.

That’s right. The gentle sex are rapidly destroying everything and no one has noticed.

It isn’t that women are bad or that we should all be misogynists. The problem is that women are making men redundant.

If I was a woman I would explain that, as a man I should just shut up and let the argument rage, instead I will lay out some reasons and let you make your own minds up.

WHY WOMEN ARE EVIL

Our mass media is filled with descriptions of men and they are rarely good; “hoodies” “gangsters” Rapists’ criminals, paedophiles, war mongerers and all manner of other despicable descriptions abound. How on earth are we supposed to deal with this? It does not describe us anymore than calling a beautiful woman a tart describes her but it has become short hand for masculinity and it needs to stop.

Men these days are forced to hide behind a rictus grinning mask of empathy and wonder if one of these myriad epithets describes us.  In the deep recess of our own minds we wonder if we are capable of depravity on a scale that qualifies us as one of these monsters. We nod and agree with the women who sob and quiver as another man is buried in a mine or a soldier returns from war or a vile character is jailed and all the while all we really want to do is shout out “SHUT UP!” and go and kill something in revenge.

There are daily images of death and destruction all around us and rightly many people recoil in horror.  Many women recoil and many men shiver but the responses are not the same at all. Women recoil and wonder how it all got to be like this and ask if it will ever end. But I have to tell you  that that is not a typical male response. It is 100% female. Men see these things and instinctively we want to fight. We want to right the wrongs. We want to make it better with fists and steel not by joining some limp wristed NGO or writing a petition.

The result of neutering generations of men was apparent this week on the streets of London. A protest by students resulted in the smallest riot I have ever witnessed. One police van was seized and some wall were painted. The media was outraged and opposition politicians glibbly suggested that they might have been on the front lines if they hadn’t been busy with something more important. All the while a couple of teenage school girls took over the protest and channeled male anger by forming a two person cordon around the defunk police van. With teeny blonde hair, shiny eyes, pop socks and ever such pretty skirts they are the symbols of what has happened to men. It was probably the most depressing thing I have ever seen.

I don’t blame the girls. Good manners and all that. I blame their mothers. Those girls had the self confidence of Roman Legions. The boys backed off. their confidence is shot and no wonder. If you watch the pictures the boys behind scarfs and the girls flashed perfect smiles. That one picture sums up the problem.

Ever since women decided that men were the enemy the gender war has been fought in public by harridans and hirsute horrors like Andrea Dworkin but behind closed doors it has been won by mums and grandmothers who have steadily neutered and dispossessed men of a reason to fight.

Men are born ready. Born ready to fight.

Our destiny as men is to live short dynamic lives. No man has ever felt his life fulfilled if all he ever knows is conciliation and balance. We are not passive. Our strengths are action, destruction and creation and conquest. We are not made to sit and suckle. We are not made to grow fat and soft on the fruits of steady progress. Our design is reaction and drama. We sort our world view out by battle not by discussion. There is a reason the armies are constantly filled by young men. There is a reason why we should never allow playing fields to be bulldozed. There is a reason why Etonians run the country. All are steeped in war and conquest and all the female hormones in the world will not change that.

I wish the men of this western world I inhabit would wake one morning and say enough.

We should refuse to tolerate the diplomatic. We should invoke a greater truth.

We know what we stand for and it is not moderation.

We should wage the wars we want to and we should do it without fear or favour.

We should copy Russian ruthlessness and Islamic certainty.

We should release our sons to conquor the world again and we will  be all the better for it.

It is time that the yoke was removed from the men of the West before all we have left is a discussion group and a set of rules devised by those girls at the police van. If we do not then men will become more feckless, useless and despondent and for all their protests and demands for equality women will be left with nothing.

Why the Baby Boomers will die lonely deaths

If you really want to know the price of something but the value of nothing ask a politician or banker.

If you want to know how the criminals rose to power look to the generation they came from. The most indulged and despicable bunch since Attila the Hun first drew breath are singing their last song and as ever, it is the relentless chant of “me, me, me” that canons off the empty factory walls and tin roofs of depair.

If all they needed was love all we need is theirs already because no one loves the boomers like the boomers themselves.

Today, in the UK, thanks to the profligate habits of our parents the fees for University have risen by three times.

Over £9000 per person is simply staggering. This will end all forms of higher education for the poor, the middle class and perhaps even the gifted. That is a legacy to be proud of, isn’t it Mr Cameron?

This rise is symptomatic of the insanity of paying back the debts of decades in a few months. The only reason it is happening is ideological. There is no rational explanation for the wholesale destruction of higher education by an unrepresentative government apart from a deep seated urge to crush the weak and the poor and re-create a mystical Victorian idyll where lands and wealth belong to the aristocracy and everyone else was a serf.

Like all good thieves these minnions of times past have stolen the future but when we ask for  it back they say that they have spent it already.

How can we prosecute them? There is no jail for the soon to be dead. Even Pol Pot escaped justice and so will these massed ranks of spoilt monsters.

I see the legacy of the baby boomers writ large across the wastelands of the UK and they still do not want to pay for a lifetimes indulgence and blind  luck.

Soon they will be old and despite holding all the strings there is one thing you can be certain of; When age comes creeping across your threshold you will need someone to help you. There is one consolation for the rest of us: Too bad they abandoned the weak when they felt strong. No one will come to help you now. You are alone.

So I warn you, my friends, get ready for years of stories of neglect and pensioner abuse.The boomers will scream as long as they have breath. Just like the babies they are. Crying until death and hoping that mummy will make it all better. Like the Tea party fanatics they have forgotten what makes us human – compassion and a sense of wonder -  not a cruise ship and ever increasing house prices.

There will be calls for retribution and “something needs to be done” but sooner or later the Jeremy Clarksons of this world will discover an unpleasant truth; whilst you were enjoying yourselves you fucked up our future. Now we hope you enjoy your old age as you wallow in your own filth because we are not going to clean it up for you anymore.

Today the Tax man wrote and asked for payment of a bill that I have never seen before and about which I know nothing. I am not alone. There are millions of us. The tax man is DEMANDING payment. I am demanding Justice. We should resist this ever increasing suction and refuse to pay. They want money to cover the cost of health care – for the boomers mostly and for bank debt – boomers and for government debt – boomers and so on. They do not demand money for education, for the military or for social care because these are all benefits fo rthe young and they are not part of the UBER class.

Along side the insanity of forcing the next generation into subservient professions you can see things in play that do not make for a pleasant future. I predict an entire generation of poverty, ignorance and waste whilst the Asian economies educate and treasure their young people.It is a bloody disgrace and yet the boomers have no shame and will inevitably blame everyone but themselves.

Like the ancient parable of Aladin and the old man who would not let go when he was offered a piggy back we have only one choice open to us. We must escape from these parasitic hoardes as soon as we can.

 

 

 

 

We are selling our future and it is time it stopped

Good people. Have we taken leave of our senses?

Today the news was announced that Britain and France can no longer operate more than 1 aircraft carrier each and so we are to share one between us.

What sort of idiotic plan is that? Two teams with different cultures, religions, work patterns and a thousand years of animosity bonded by the common goal of saving cash!

I simply cannot believe how short sighted, stupid and dangerous this plan is.

Throughout history accountants have managed to comprehensively mess up everything and now their bastard brethren in the banks and their satanic love children the economists are dictating the most fundamental principles that make any nation whole. It has to be stopped.

I have watched with disbelief, anger and now stupefaction as we have plundered the wealth of centuries only to sell our souls and our inventiveness on the shores of foreign powers who are about as respectful of our well being as a wolf is of chickens. We import millions of tons of plastic crap and export technology. We watch helpless as the fools in the towers squander our money on long forgotten scams that make the South Sea Bubble look like an infants game and yet we do nothing.

Sitting, cradling our heads in our hands we weep and and moan and look forward to austerity. We wallow in the foamy piss that fountains from the pizzle of our lords and masters and we consider ourselves lucky if our phones do not ring with bad news and the bailiffs are otherwise occupied. We have only ourselves to blame. We created democracy and yet we vote for dolts and buffoons.

It need not be like this.

We can change it.

Don’t let them fool you again. There is no need for the money to dry up. There is no sane reason your children cannot find work.

We are all wealthy and we can decide how we should spend our resources.

There is no reason on earth why we should sell our childrens’ future to pay a short term debt that we could easily walk away from. Money is  created by governments and spent by us. Don’t think it is a finite supply. It is no more finite than the stars in the sky. If it was we would all be fighting for a few scraps of metal called groats. We are not because we created money. It is a tool like any other and we have forgotten how to use it.

This schimera that the powerful would have us believe is just that, a phantom. There is no debt that we owe to anyone but ourselves. We are the banks. We are the government and when there was a run on the banks we scared the hell out of them and so they scared us. There is no need to constantly bend at the knee of the money launderers and charlatans because we have the power and they know it.

Mark my words good people. Soon we will be back where we started in the dark ages with false prohets, fake remedies and dictators lording over us with one eye on God and the other on the till, like a cross eyed Hitler.

There will be a war and we will be forced to make the decisions we are so studiously avoiding right now.

We are forcing it upon ourselves and the writing is clear. So far no one has had the power to resist and so the battles have been one sided. We think war is a game played on playstations in the dead of night. It is not. It stinks and we will loose because our sons are fat and indolent and know nothing of struggle. If you are rich and powerful there is nothing better than a war for cementing your position and killing off a few proles never did anyone any harm. It simply leaves more for the survivors. Win or loose the people who control the people will always control the resources and nothing makes you richer than standing next to a pauper.

We will be forced to fight for our resources and our children for their lives but we have a choice. Either we say enough now and avoid an enormous battle or we continue to allow the destruction of all that has been created by our forefathers and engage in a bigger war than has ever been fought by mankind before.

I am not joking.

This is serious.

I am not talking about preventing other people from becoming as rich as we are but I am talking about preventing ourselves becoming the poor.

There is a time honoured recipe for the powerful to remain in power. Look around you. You will see the plan in full swing.

First you disarm the public, then you remove the powers to move freely by creating bomb plots and enemies under every seat cushion. Next  you forbid the right to strike. After that you remove any option to react by making all public meetings subject to approval. Then you homogenise the media and create best seller lists written by comics and sportsmen who know noting apart from fame and ego. The people know nothing and forgoe the process of thinking and the desire to vote on anything apart from talent shows. Finally you dissuade them from innovation and farming so that they are permanent slaves to a system that feeds and clothes them but never allow them more than that.

Here you have our society.

Then final stages are simplicity.

Remove education and restrict it to the few.

Destroy wealth and create poverty.

Divide and rule.

Obfuscate and obliterate.

Invent terror where there is none.

Hide terror where there is.

Demonise the other.

Bring out the soothsayers and get the populous to stare deep into the well and when they are mesmorised pick their pockets, rape their daughters and plunder their homes and blame it all on God’s wrath.

Call God Mammon and accuse the infirm of theft before opening the wonders of the world like Pandora’s box and discretely forget that not everyone is on the same team.

In the battle of rich v poor. Us v them we are in control but we have abdicated our responsibilities.

Frankly that is not good enough.

Are the Stars out tonight?

Another day and another conversation with my daughter.

She asks simple questions that have incredibly complex answers. Last night the question was “Daddy, what is a star?”

In normal circumstances I would have replied with the stock answer – ” A ball of flaming gas that is so big you can’t imagine its size.”

But these are not normal circumstances. I am questioning everything and it occurred to me that there is a slight flaw in this answer that I can’t explain. Actually it may be a flaw as big as our universe. I don’t know.

If you know how any of this stuff works please tell me. I would be keen to know.

 

My questions go thus:

Nothing can burn in a vacuum. Space is a vacuum. How can anything burn? Is that really what a star is?

Atomic explosions create and require huge amounts of energy and I understand that this could be a reason for the stars but if they are not controlled explosions why do the fires burn for so long and in such a controlled manner?

IF modern theory is correct and there are more than three dimensions does the energy come from another dimension to either keep the fires burning or does most of the energy created leak into the 4th dimension?

Now I know that is a tough one. I am no physicist but my understanding is that proof of the existence of other dimensions is what the Large hadron collider is all about. The way I understand it is that gravity does not make sense in mathematical terms and in fact we should all be squashed by the gravitational pull form all the matter on earth and yet we are not. So where does all that gravity go? To another dimension? It is all a bit like the Golden Compass books but in real life.

So there you have it. One simple question. One moment to re-consider and a whole raft of new questions appear. I really wish I was a vegetable sometimes. Life is simple. The answers are not.

There is no such thing as fossil fuel

My daughter asked me about petrol today.

‘Daddy, what is petrol made from?”

Being a devoted dad and bringer of all knowledge I of course recited the time honoured spiel about fossils being squashed and turned into liquid which changes to oil over centuries etc etc.

Babbling on about hydrocarbons and fractiles and different grades of gasoline seemed a bit much so I stayed with the basic facts as I had been taught them.

So far so good.

The trouble with all this is that it feels like a lie. Maybe I am deluded but it just doesn’t stack up.

 

Think about it, this is how the standard story goes:

Plants die by the billion for an absolute eternity.

Those same plants magically happen to fall into pits where the earth overs them up before they can rot.

The unrotted plants chose not to become coal or rock or even dust, instead they convert themselves into black goo and hide in the most inhospitable places on Earth.

Then they just sit and simmer for about 40 million years.

These magical oil pits don’t get churned up into mountains or seabeds, instead the pits disappear underground – sometimes by miles.

They never appear to have leaked and left behind traces, instead they remain hermetically sealed as reservoirs in the mantle.

 

Hmmmmm….

 

Why do they do that and why don’t they head up and get found in the Himlayas instead of going down into the sea off the coast of Qatar? Sounds a bit suspect to me.

 

There are miles of rocks near my home where fossils are to be found. It is called the Jurassic coast and to my knowledge there is one solitary oil well amongst billions of fossils. So why do all those plants turn into lakes of oil that only sporadically appear on the surface as shale or in deposits like Jed Clampets bubbling spring instead of making themselves into compost as they seem to have been doing for the last 39 million years.

Millions of years later, when we discover the stuff we squirt it all over the place, turn it into yogurt pots and deodorant and generally waste it in engineering the most hopeless inventions since the Vatican installed a condom machine. (Plastic bag anyone?) We treat this stuff like it is endless in supply and my gut feeling is that maybe, just maybe it is!

The oil companies and governments profess ignorance when asked how to make more but surely if you can convert a cup of tea into a hairdryer (which is a similarly far fetched proposition as making cars from oil) you can synthesise more of the stuff.

So here is the big question; If we can turn sludge into hair gel and a heavy liquid like gasoline can be used to power rockets and crude oil can be converted to fertilizer how can it be that we can’t make more oil? I think we can but that it doesn’t suit the money machines so they ignore that little gem and carry on fucking us all over for more tax and bigger cars.

I am not certain, and I fear that the CIA / Chevron consortia will “eliminate” me for saying this but I think we very probably can make more. In fact I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if all the oil we are paying for, killing for and dying for is actually manufactured in underground caverns in Oman.

Take a look at your roads. 50 years ago there were no cars. Now we have about 3 each and they can be bought more cheaply than a house which is made from mud, wood and a few bits of metal. The roads are enormous, gas companies are more powerful than countries and the tax revenues are extraordinary. And we use this marvel to do what exactly? To go shopping, sightseeing and converting open fields into landfill sites.

We pay for all this using plastic credit cards which are manufactured from oil, then we send bills to ourselves to make sure we pay on time thus burning more oil and adding to the cost and the profits from all this are spent on making more cards and digging up more oil to make more cards, cars and plastic hair products …… and so on ad infinitum.

This is what we call a closed system. It is also the one thing that the theory of oil fails to explain.

In every other natural system there is an escape valve; natures way of squaring the circle of death and new life and yet when we think of oil it is a one way street:

Plant dies – squashed – eons pass – oil flows

Frankly, the more I think about it the bigger the crock grows. I think we have all been duped.

And now I will go and see that man about a rest in a rubber room.

 

 

 

A sad lady

I was walking the dog on Sunday. Strolling along feeling quite settled for once when a mad little mutt flew by.

He looked like Hairy McLairy and was covered in mud. The mud was soon shared and thanks to his friendly nature I also quickly came to resemble Hairy McLairy. Messy and kind but not so adorable. More abominable.

His owner soon joined him and beneath the shades I saw a very scared and edgy lady aged around 60.

I won’t go into too much detail but we had a chat and the upshot is that her husband had left her and she had 2 kids, a house she might be evicted from, no money, no future and no self esteem.

As I said, I was feeling pretty settled and thanks to the recent past I felt in a position to offer some advice.

No leading questions, no hidden agenda. I will never see her again so the freedom to be frank was exhilerating.

I told her “It will end. You will get your life back. You will feel happy again and the pain will stop.”

She thanked me and kissed me on the cheek. She had small bristles on her chin and tear filled eyes and she asked me one more question before we parted.

The question was “Do men feel pain?”

It was a good one.

I replied. “We do, but we aren’t allowed to show it so we just get angry instead.”

So much for equality. It explains a lot.

It is time for a Quiet Revolution

This morning I took my children to school. Bright eyed and eager, they leaft the house full of anticipation and excitement.

In the playground I met one of the other fathers. An honest man. A decent man. He has been looking for work for 9 months after leaving the military. He has had many many interviews and no firm offers. My wife lay in bed and took her time getting up. There is no rush. We have a lot to do but no immediate prospects of improving our lot. We have missed this months mortgage payment and there is no way of catching up for another month so what is the point in stressing about it? There is none but I will stress anyway. It is my burden. She is unaware and so at least one of us can sleep.

I switch on my computer and login. The headlines tell stories of massive cutbacks, redundancies and earthquakes. These things directly affect me in tiny, insubstantial ways but psycologically they are devastating for the people who pay me. They create anguish and emotional turmoil and instability. They create opportunities for spivs and chancers to exploit the system and make yet more money. They are the result of a spurious system that spreads the wealth of the world in insidious ways.

On the back pages, the final segments of the website, the dregs of human necessity parade their wares. The sports pages tell a tale of hubris, ignorance and above all greed that is hard to tolerate today. Sports is a business that I am deeply involved in and I know that the top sports men are paid far in excess of the journey men but today, of all days there is a story that takes my breath away.

A failing footballer – Wayne Rooney – who has been caught many many times with prostitutes (even when his wife was pregnant) and who has singularly failed to deliver on the international stage for the past 5 years is demanding £200 000 wages. PER WEEK! In US$ terms that is about $350 000. That could buy a 4 bedroom house every week where I live. How in God’s name can that be right?

It can be right because we pay for him and the other bladder kicking imbeciles by subscribing to pay TV, buying sweaty shirts with badges on and turning up week after week at freezing cold cattle sheds to watch him and his cohorts as the prance and preen on the manicured turf.

It should not be right that we allow this. What a travesty. There is no other species on the planet that has the gift of destruction and creation that we possess. We create worlds, we create lives and we make everything  that has advanced our kind and then we destroy it all by giving charlatans, crooks and the terminally retarded the keys to the grain store and ask them to help themselves. AS they grow fat we wallow in the folds of their excess and think ourselves fortunate to be near to “great men”. How deluded we can be.

So, dear reader I ask you to start a revolution. Change this. Change it now before we all end up speaking mandarin and living in shacks.

If you really want a revolution turn off the TV.