Conditioning

Subject: Conditioning.

As a human being I am, along with you the most conditioned mammal on the planet.
The conditioning which started the moment I was born has continued every day since and is a major ingredient to how I respond each morning. As I wake up from the refuge of sleep there is not a moment when I am not bombarded with signals and rules which determine my movements and thoughts. The very basis for being who I am has been decided by others. From my parents and friends to my employers. From the neighbour to the woman on the till in Sainsbury, from the policeman to the pensioner crossing the street I am programmed to react in an appropriate way.
Much of the cultural programming as well as the etiquette we present to others has been drummed into us and we are similar to robots in much of our response.
Much of our lives we are driven by others, the need to follow instructions when we are very young, the timetable of school life, the responsibility of having a job and being responsive to the boss, and finally if we are married the explicit and implicit signals we receive from our partner who rightly, having joined in a union, expect something from their own commitment to that union.

 But what if one day you wake up with no boss, no timetable, no deadlines, no one to please other than yourself. Of course you have the baggage of having been trained all those years, of having a schedule to do things which in our subconscious we presume is still important. 

From the shower to brushing your teeth, from the clothes you wear to the food you eat, people from the past have had a hand in guiding you.
But what if you wake up and decide you are a free man and that opinion belongs to someone else. That their prejudice has no place in your daily agenda, that like a new born baby you too are naked (sorry for the imagery) and the day will not follow a prescribed path.
You may or may not wash or clean your teeth. You may or may not dress and instead stay all day in your dressing gown. Your food can be wholesome or crass, it's your choice. The exercise you take or don't take is a decision you make and whilst it will have consequences they are consequences under your control. The whole agenda which others sought to embroil you with is no more, you come and go as you please there is no longer a right and wrong way, only your way.
The selfish gene has found it feet at last, the assumptions other people hold about you are for them to hold and for you to ignore.
Is this freedom or is it anarchy. Can we throw off a lifetimes conformity and find another cloak to draw around us, something more lose fitting, more appropriate to our new found freedom. Or will we be hauled on board again like a shipwrecked sailor to be re-provisioned with salutary warnings about what's good for us, when in fact all they mean is what's good for them.

Heathrow

Subject: Heathrow.

Watching. The scenes at Heathrow and listening to the complaints of passengers who couldn't get away to fly to some distant destination and a spot of sunshine one had to consider how their complaints went down in the areas where a plane flight is but a distant dream. The statement which one often heard, that they the passengers would have the discomfort of settling down on the floor for the night makes one wonder if they have ever considered the plight of the homeless where each night they have to settle and spend the night, not even in the relative luxury of terminal 5 but a cold wet doorway to snatch a couple of hours before being moved on by the authority's.
Our lives are so disconnected, the gulf which exists between people makes any sense of unity remote, made more so by the importance we attach these days to consumerism.
If we aren't consuming something we feel we have failed. The announcement that we are flying out to some sun drenched destination is part of the kudos we attach to the way other people see and evaluate us. The shirts, the shoes, the car is a package with our name on it for people to wonder at. Beneath the skin we are common so we have to do something overt to signal how special we see ourselves. We fail to see the wonder in just being who we are. We fail to understand the mind as a instrument of compassion and interpretation. A rich source of excitement and supposition which can take us on flights of fancy just as rewarding as those flights that failed to get away from Heathrow.
It might be argued that journeys should only be taken with consideration. The consideration of what cost they signify to global pollution not only in terms of fuel particulates but of the despoliation which we as humans bring to the places we visit.
The sheer numbers and the demands we make to find the things we left behind, the food and drink which specify where we come from rather than the produce of the place we have come to visit. We twist our destinations into a series of artificial pit stops and rather than absorb the local cuisine, we demand and through our demands spoil where ever our footprint takes us.
So I find some pleasure with the thought that some holiday makers were left stranded unable to further pollute those foreigners with our substitute for real living and suggest instead the simplicity of a corner field and tent in Pembroke 

Sticking your head above the parapet

Subject: Sticking your head above the parapet.

Can a white person suffer from racialism.
The question asked was to an audience in Britain. Of course the audience had its proponents who argued that white people can never know the prejudice of race such as a black person experiences and its humiliating to black people to ask such a thing.
There were the usual protagonists who make their living articulating the black persons hurt and their disadvantaged position in our society. A black persons  negative identification, due to the colour of their skin, categorises that person according to racial  norms and the embedded hurt in some of the black speakers seemed to me to speak as much about them as about racism.
They all use Britain as their bench mark and hold this society as failing in its ability to be colour blind but it's strange that as a society, we seem to attract so many people who after travelling from the four corners on earth to get here, after arriving, soon seem to be at odds with our society and want to change what they find here. It's doubtful if their memory cast its thoughts back to where they originate from or the crucial issues that made them want to leave.
In the program no one seemed to think that 'white people' could ever be offended by racial opinion.  It is assumed that race and prejudice are the province of the powerful and that through the years of white expansion in terms of, British, Portuguese, Spanish, and German Empires, the countries which the white supremacist conquered and who set up mirror images of their own systems back home which excluded the indigenous local. A "them and us" mentality furthered the resentment which is  naturally felt by people who had had the power and their unique system of governance taken away from them by force.
Resentments is  meal eaten slowly and having decided to leave their own country they carried the resentment into their newly adopted home where for a few it festered.

If as a white person I were to go and live in Zimbabwe there is no doubt I would feel the odd man out and experience racialism. As a white man living in Saudi Arabia or Iran I would feel the impact of not being one of them. If I relocated to China or Japan I would be looked upon as an outsider and inferior. 

Non of this was inferred by the liberal UK audience, who on these occasions turn over on their backs in meek subservience and seek  forgiveness with many heartfelt apologies. As each black speaker decried the country they had chosen to settle in, the audience warmed to their anger and engaged in the usual bout of middle class self flagellation.
Mr Mugabe's overt racism was never mentioned. President Zuma's overwhelming desire to convert the whole racial power structure in South Africa to a black one  on the basis of a democratic mandate which, in a tribal setting, is an anathema to the chief and his elders, whilst subjugating the remaining whites still living there.
Of course people will say that, in the African context, it's about time the whites received their comeuppance but that aside, "racial profiling"   this time appertaining to a person with a white skin, is alive and well.
In this mornings multicultural audience no one had a good word to say for the beleaguered white person. The ideologically bullied,  home produced white man or women in the audience was unwilling to stick their head above the parapet and so the  issue was turned on its head and we were reminded, in monologue after monologue, what bad shits we white folk really are.

And in the beginning

Subject: And in the beginning.

One of the fascinating things about the human mind is it's capacity to think and devise complicated assumptions. I have just been listening to a program on the origins of life on earth and how the complex process started.
According to the science and there are many sciences which form the study of life. The geologist and the bacterial scientist, the chemist and the physical theorist who posits the earliest dates regarding the formation of earth. Each are piecing together a rough set of assumptions, followed by the evidence, founded in experimentation in trying to replicate the conditions on earth 3.7 billions of years ago. The formation of the earth began 4.1 billions of years ago as a fluid amalgam of matter brought together by the influence of gravity and the matter which made up the universe. No life was possible at that stage and only as cooling and solidification occurred did the conditions for the elementary chemistry, the building blocks for life, emerge.
The question, the chicken and edge question was why and how did these elementary chemical constituents they weren't compounds yet, how did they trigger the impulses for life to begin.

Life at its most fundamental is a protein/DNA compound which replicates but the catalyst the protein DNA were not in the form to produce early life. It is suggested that RNA which is part of the molecular structure, and the basis of how we propagate, became the first interactive building block linked with protein to form what we call life. The signature for these chemical events are seen in rocks dated 3.7 billion years old and represent the earliest and most fundamental starter kit for what we witness around us today.

Given that we are hedonistic, so imbued with our own importance, just over 2000 years ago, mankind devised a story setting himself in the middle of a heavenly relationship, a relationship exclusive and beneficial to himself. Events in the world would revolve around him and that heaven a paradise after death beckons if we fulfil the scripture.
All this necessarily ignores the findings of science, the slow unearthing of our irrelevance which, if not yet definitive is at least is a million miles away from Adam and Eve.

Robots take over.

Subject: Robots take over.

As if to soften us up for the inevitable, the airwaves (see fibre cable) are full of talk about robots taking over our jobs. It is apparently "inevitable" that in the next 20 or so years whole swathes of human work will be done by an artificial intelligence motivated robot.

Where you had humans going out to work each day to provide their input into a task that business needed fulfilling, there will be a mechanical operative coupled by a computer program willing to work (not sure if artificial intelligence will find the need to unionise) 24 -7.   Once the cost of the build is covered, (tax deductible) there are no further overheads. No wages, no toilets or canteens, the coffee machine will be a thing of the past. With no one coming into work the need for public transport or the peek-hour traffic jams become a thing of the past. Goods will need to be transported but in lorries which are driven by a computer such as the Uber driverless trucks that are being tested as we speak. 

Technology and the ingenuity of the human mind can devise ways and means to gradually take the human out of the equation. The trade and industrial interplay can go on as before but with more and more people being excluded from the process, the gap between the haves and the have nots will expand at a rate never seen before as the profit becomes more and more refined to that section of society which can invest in the new technology. 

And what of us, the people. 

Already economists are talking of paying some sort of gratuity to people, either at the start of their lives or peace meal throughout life, a sort of living wage (the living will be defined by someone else) which will be bequeathed until they can devise some sort of way to bring population numbers down. 

Security forces will have to be kept on standby to protect "assets" and keep recalcitrant trouble makes in line with policy.   

The attitude to the worthiness of people and their entitlement will have to be reviewed since theirs is no longer an earned relationship with the state but a welfare one, on a massive scale, and you see already how program makers for certain tv channels depict the beneficiaries of the current welfare state.

With all that free time and a small stipend in our pockets how will we survive before collectively going mad. Without any sense of worth or opportunity how can we survive.

Perhaps the royal estates can be turned over for allotment use and peoples creative juices stimulated by the size of your marrow !!

Is there any use in resisting change. Has Globalisation been slowed by the claims of being blind to the subjugation of people across the globe at the behest of a few multinational companies and their shareholders. 

Is anyone fighting our corner.

We have of course been here before.  The term Luddite was coined to describe a person who resisted change and smashed the machinery which was taking his living away. 

The police, law enforcement, the judiciary, that private army used to curb the rash interest of the population as a whole is waiting in the wings to quell any revolt. The Establishment have historically used what ever force necessary to keep their interests alive and unless there is a will to fight, unlikely in our community, softened by years of sweets and propaganda, we will do as we are told.

Brave new world, 1984, it was all foretold but we read it as fiction not fact. Surely we are all the same flesh and blood, they wouldn't do that to us would they, would they ?

A religious mind set

Subject: A religious mind set.

It seems to me that much of the liberal discussion around what makes an ISIS terrorist go out to blow themselves up, along with innocent people is that the mindset is 'presumed' rational. The irrationality of extremist views, i.e. people who hold their specific religion pre-eminent in their lives have little or no common rationality. The cause outranks the mayhem and public trauma since the religious cause fills every crevice in the terrorists life, it is the be all and end all of their existence.
The term religion is such a broad church (no pun intended). From the benign Church of England style Christianity to the intensity of the Later Day Saints. From Orthodox Jews who proclaim the West Bank to be part of Israel's Promised Land  and show a contempt for Palestinian claims and place the Palestinian Arab in a category far beneath them, to the Hindu who segregates people according to their birth in the infamous caste system. Then we have the Muslim faith with its cleft between the disputed claims for leadership on Prophet Mohamed's death (Sunni and Shia) with a willingness to pronounce a fatwa or a Jihad against the enemies of Islam.
Islam is a religious movement which carries so much baggage. It seems to engender in its followers an extreme sense of beleaguerment and entitlement. A survival strategy which teaches the importance of strict adherence to the detail of the faith and a rigour of worship that is, in the West, alien.  The preacher has a text which seems a mixture of religion and historical politics interwoven to bring the past into the present.
The diktat surrounding dress, particularly female dress is medieval in nature but significant as a dress code to distinguish them from us. The faith and culture is not only patriarchal in emphasis but is tribalistic in its insistence on conformity. To be a good Muslim you must conform.
Conformity is the key to how people become so locked in. The Muslim life is dictated by the pulpit and what the pulpit preaches is god's word. The Imam who could also be a hate monger, encourages the congregation to recognise its uniqueness and has a ready audience, a pliable audience who readily promulgates their community values into that collective called, being Muslim. It 'out values' any sense of nationality or the norms within another society, since god's calling is greater.
Western sociologists try to emphasise the importance of 'education' in deradicalising young Muslims, but if that education is seen to flow across the values of the faith, in any way then it "has to be rejected". There are no ifs and buts. It is called a religious 'faith' because it often lacks a rational explanation.
In the west we have become agnostic to religion and would rather go our individualistic, often hedonistic way, paying little or no allegiance to anything.  A total anathema to a Muslim person.
Not understanding, we continue to hope for integration but how can there be integration when the fundamentals are so different.
We are in a bind because the numbers make the impact within our society of this foreign religion, critical. The implications are not of the same as our acceptance of single sex weddings or even xenophobia, the cultural structure and strictures within the faith make for impossible bed fellows.
Only we of "no faith" can accept the change since having no steadfast faith. Perhaps  we should be pliable and adaptable since what ever we think, long as the rewards are there, our masters will put in place what ever is necessary to make it worth their while.

Reality

Subject: Reality

So our reality is made up of 'actual reality' and 'perceived reality'. Actual reality is what it says on the box it is real and complete in itself without any adornment without any subjective analysis. Actual reality is hard to find amongst our thoughts which are cluttered with prejudice and assumption, thoughts gained through a life of living with and amongst shadowy perceptions and assumptions.
What we see and hear goes through the filter of scepticism and propaganda where our reality is distorted by so many things. Our upbringing and the people we mix with. The books we read and the shows we watch cloud our vision of everything, distorting actual reality and substituting a perception a perceived reality which is made up.
The mental clutter we experience in life is normal and unless you are a monk locked away on a retreat struggling to gain access to this actual reality what hope have we who simply take our day as we see it and modify what we see with prejudice. Now I don't use the term prejudice with the prejudicial assumption that it is necessarily harmful or injurious it's just that we prefix everything with our convictions, we don't see "the wood for the trees" as they say. If we were to stop and think that our thoughts come from somewhere and that the somewhere could have been good or bad and that depending on our perception of the somewhere that we had gathered our thought, we embellish it with thoughts about the scene in front of you and add further distortions which we file away as our truth. If our truth is made up of a multitude of distortions gained throughout our lives the real truth is hidden out of sight for ever.
It reminds me of the dilemma of "false news". What do you believe if so many conflicting stories are put out as factual. Do you give up on your search for the truth and withdraw into the realm of the personal only to find the personal is distorted with fake concepts about reality.
These dilemmas can only be solved by honing ones thoughts down to the particular and examining each particular presumption for what it is. Like a geologist, the lump of rock he holds is full of information about reality the reality of a particular period in time but what if we dig down further into the foundations of our life to find its basic elements, its truism, its reality.

We are one of them, no matter who the them might be.

Subject: We are one of them, no matter who the them might be.

Given that the world is in a mess which means the people who live on the planet are in a mess, what is the cause of the mess.
Is it a avarice, greed, intolerance is it jealousy, pride, hatred, self absorption, narcissism. These are just a few of the human traits which make us complex, competitive, self centred human beings continually stripped down for a fight.
Given the complexity of our lives from birth to death, given the associations we contrive to join and become a part of to support us through the trials and tribulations, including the religious and tribal props and the cultural norms we pick up by osmosis, is it any wonder we are in a mess both collectively and as individuals.
If we were able to mentally disconnect for a while and focus on who we are without the props and the pseudo identity, if we could find the root of our being, perhaps the associative dilemma we carry around as our identity would fall away and reveal something simpler more at home in our own skin, less associated with the the 'impulse control disorder' which we all suffer from.
Leaving the tribe, leaving the association of values we have cherished since we began to think and started to evaluate everything outside our bodies fundamental  functions takes a strong person or at least a strong value system on which to fasten ones star to. 

The religious person will say, yes that's what we do, we internalise the good humanitarian aspects of our religion as a life style taken from a description published in a book of many diktats.  The problem of religion is its competitive nature, setting one intolerance against another, each declaring "it is the authentic voice".

Humanities problem is its inability to define its self in terms which all men and women can understand and go along with. The competing claims are the composite group think which is different in each group or culture. 

If we are to rewrite the script we imbibed through our tribe, a script to evaluate our lives and could  tear up the prejudice to which we are all prone to, perhaps the slimmed down individual to arise from the exercise would be better able to get along with others, be more cosmopolitan simply by reminding oneself that we are one of them no matter who the them might be.

Sound bytes and pop ups

Subject: Sound bytes and pop ups

I know there are times when we feel powerless and impotent to resist what is happening to us as individuals or collectively as a nation. We throw up our hands and resign any interest in what is happening, we, as it were, take the 5th amendment knowing that our silence will afford our enemies the space and time they need to entrench themselves ever further into the mechanism which governs our life in a parliamentary democracy.
Closing our eyes and ears and stuffing our mouths full of burgers is the fall back position for a monkey but not for an intelligent human being. One of the differentials which defines us is our ability to think and reason and to engage in reason one has to examine the facts or at least those facts which present themselves to you as being important.

I am not inclined to think a fox hunting ban or its reversal is important. I do not buy the argument that we as a nation are at risk of invasion if we did not have Trident. I am not elevated by the image of Scotland going it alone but if the Scott's were to do this I don't think the emotional union we have with Scotland would suffer. (Perhaps the thought of Queen having to show her passport before going on holiday to Balmoral ?).

No the things which make me angry is the state of our schools, the ongoing blight of our hospital system and the plight of affordable housing. These are the foundations on which we found our lives, these are the important elements which mark us out as a nation. When we fail in any one of these facilities we signal to the world our banality, our crass failure to provide for our people
People visiting the country and having read "The Road to Wigan Pier" would be distressed, having marvelled at Buckingham palace and the bearskin headed guards outside, walked amongst the fallen Kings in Westminster Abby, or crossed over the threshold of the up market shops in the swanky parts of the capitol,  to get off the train in any one of a number of our Northern towns or nearer to home, caught a tube into East

Ham and emerge into a different universe.
It is a disgrace that our schools are now staggering under class sizes of 33 children to a class, a figure not seen for decades.
It's a disgrace that our hospitals are now having to park patients in the corridors for lack of beds and where the 'waiting times' are back to those of decades ago.
It's a disgrace that people can now no longer afford to pay even the deposit on a house and worse not even afford to rent because affordable houses are not being built.
The black marks against government which in the past would have afforded the political opposition the opportunity to swing voters their way has been destroyed on the cult of personality.
The machine which poses for a free press has done much to ridicule the debate. To bring it down to the lowest common denominator, that of personality rather than political conviction.
Mrs May who was, until given the post of Prime Minister, an ardent remainer in the battle for Brexit suddenly has become the iron maiden in calling for us to leave. A U turn of stunning proportions.
When Jeremy Corbyn sticks to his lifelong belief in the un-viability of war as a mechanism for settling disputes he is called out of touch with the realities of the modern world.
When her Chancellor suggests having to raise taxes to meet the increased expenditure necessary to meet the crisis in our schools and hospitals he is roundly criticised by her.
When Corbyn suggests the same he is painted as some sort of demented lefty.
As in so many other things we have fallen under the allure of our so called cousins the Americans with their billions spent on glitzy advertising usually to project a negative image towards one or other of the contestants. Add the inevitable  sound byte designed to package in as few words as possible something which a book wouldn't do justice and we have as ill informed a platform to make a decision as it is possible to have.
The fact that it works shows how trivial we all have become, how our attention spans have shrunk under the onslaught of the constant bombardment by the advertising industry in all other facets of our lives. They are the informers on who we pin not only our next purchase but our next government.

Planning for the future.

Subject: Planning for the future.

Is it a women thing. Bodicia, Margaret Thatcher and Teresa May were/are tough, no nonsense people who have the belief that what they say is right and are deaf to any other points of view.
Mrs May has just provided the population as a whole,  with the chilling prospect that "austerity" is still and will remain the only game in town. The public sector has had seven years of under cost of living increases such that our nurses are turning to food banks to make ends meet. The schools are facing a shortfall of 4 billion pounds of government sending which will have profound effects on the way our schools will be run and the education our kids can expect.
She batted away these apoplectic visions with benign references to how well the economy performs. Of course in some ways this is true if we don't rethink our obsession with reducing taxes and placing the benefits of the economy  towards the better off.
There has been plenty of instances where the wealthy have been rewarded on the assumption that in a trickle down concept of the economy the rewards offered higher up will benefit those lower down.
Mrs May seems to think that the cost of the food banks and unfulfilled educational prospects is a price worth paying since I suppose being a vicars daughter she presumes our real rewards are in heaven.
Of course we are famous for muddling through, disinclined to devote money towards future projects in the "national interest" rather we prefer the short term political interest.

 The French alternatively have rooted their policy making in the "grand project". 

"Planification". Urban development and energy policy spring to mind with 95% of the electricity generation being state owned and designed in house and  run on nuclear power.
Their advanced military complex and super fast railways crisscrossing the nation with their home grown technology spilling over into Airbus, keeps the skill base within the country whilst we flaunt our skills with contempt, favouring rather a 'quick return' in the derivative market.
Our failure to invest, train or plan beyond the next election must make our Victorian forefathers turn in their graves.

There was a window beyond which i could not see.

Subject: There was a window beyond which I could not see.

If history is a reflection of the past, a window into what happened at a certain time, an observation of what other people did at that moment. It cannot be judged and can only be reference to what current opinions are today but without stigma.
Actions of men and women, communities, societies, nations, are conditioned by the norms around them, just as we are today.  Victorians were different people to those which developed in Mesopotamia and different even to ourselves a 150 years later.
Our norms will become historic and people in the future may criticise us just as we seem keen to criticise our forebears. The values of any society are moulded by the make up of that society and its current experiences.
One of the defining traits of Political Correctness is the almost messianic assurance that they are right and that their judgements are infallible. Like most people who believe they are infallible, (religion comes to mind), they are implacably opposed to other points of view and will go to any lengths to close down dissent for their narrow philosophy.
We of the great unwashed are easily persuaded since we have no focus, no messianic to bind us. Like lowly cattle we are easily guided into this pen or that, fodder for the small clique who wish to indoctrinate us some more. Of how to think since if you can capture how a man or woman conceptualises the world around them you have them captive in their own thoughts and actions. Once again religion comes to mind.

The Vicars Daughter

Subject: The Vicars daughter.

It never ceases to amaze me that people are so easily led, led by the nose, led by what the newspapers feed them, by what they hear on their TV. 

In this age of celebrity the prime minister has to be first and foremost, charismatic, the issue of politics and Manifesto are relegated to incidental. Even in terms of political pronouncement it comes to us through the filter of analysis by the pundit.
What hope a world filled and fed on sound bites, of twitter feeds, artificially specified to limit the number of words no matter how complex the issue which needs explaining.
Subliminally we are becoming myopic, turned on and off by a flash of light that in its fleeting moment has some information which we absorb by osmosis not really aware that our brains have been changed by these repeated messages, no matter how banal.
Politics used to have content, it was absorbed and valued by the relevance it made for "us" and our specific economic situation. It spoke to the situation we were in and we were fairly certain that our aims and needs were catered for by this party or that. The effectiveness of the party was of less relevance than its stated desire since we understood the difficulties in a complex world where the odds were stacked against us.
Today we see whole swathes of working class Labour voters voting for the Tories on the basis that Jeremy Corbyn has been repeatedly painted as the village idiot, a mantra which has become the bread and butter of certain powerful news papers and media outlets.
The editing of the TV broadcast with an initial attack on Corbyn and then a prognosis of ills which can only be due to his leadership, is the everyday script of most of the mainstream soothsayers. No mention that it has been many years since the Labour Party was in power and the list of ills which beset the country now are the direct result of Tory policy. 

The list is endless as we track back to 1970s NHS waiting times. The inability to build houses to meet the affordability of working class incomes and the fact that in the public sector the affordability has been hampered by pay rise freezes dating back seven years. Our schools in many areas have become, once again, merely holding pens for dissatisfied youth who on leaving school are faced with not having any relevant skills and a bleak job market of underpaid temporary work.
This massive indictment of the Conservative party is barely heard in the cacophony  of character assassination reined down each day, month in, month out on Corbyns head. No analysis of what he is saying, no acceptance of the financial disaster some families are now facing, only the ceaseless corruption of the man's character.
It's a bleak world we are facing post Brexit made intolerably worse by a Tory led, vicars daughter who is insensitive to criticism and insensitive to the harm she will knowingly inflict on whole swathes of this nation.

Nationhood and the Kafkaesque State

   

Subject: Nationhood and the kafkaesque State.

Consider the difference between a nation and a state.
A 'state' is a multi ethnic, multi cultural collection of people and beliefs. A 'nation' is a ethnic and culturally the same collection of people who can be recognised by their sameness.
Under these definitions Scotland Ireland and Wales are 'nations' and England is a 'state' given its wholesale diversity, wilfully carried out by successive governments for wholly economic reasons. The arguments in Scotland and Ireland about needing recognition and independence for ethnic reasons was lost on the English decades ago as the people succumbed to the onslaught of multiculturalism. The tools used, such as political correctness was the equivalent of placing non believers in the stocks in the market place and pelting them with ripe fruit. The fussed up odium, mostly in the chattering classes in London who had at their disposal the press and the media to reinforce their prejudice meant that it was a brave individual who stuck his or her head above the parapet.
Part of the smoke screen to persuade people that their nationality was intact was the move away from calling themselves English and rather say, we are British, a term of inclusiveness to include the Scots, Irish and Welsh whist disguising the dismantling of England as a Nation and replacing it as a State. There were deliberate moves put out by the establishment to make talking about being English inappropriate and slightly racist. Any attempt to convert the English to think of themselves as a sovereign nation (impossible now given my definition of nationhood and the multicultural mix we now have), with parliament attempting to devote itself to recognising questions which were wholly concerned with matters within the boarders of England ran into all kinds of headwind and constitutional problems.
With decades of Tory right wing rule in London committed to dismantling the welfare state and the public sector those nations such as Scotland, with a far finer appreciation of the society it sees itself a part of and the damage the London based government seems determined to inflict on the "uneducated hooligan white van man, St George flag flying louts", is not in their own pedigree. Un-inflected as it is to anywhere near the same degree as the elitist public school mentality in England which is myopic to the pain and suffering it imposes on that very 'nation' it has reduced to a "kafkaesque state". 

The Garden Bridge

Subject: The Garden Bridge.

Once upon a time there was a bridge which professed to be a garden bridge, a bridge as imagined by Joanna Lumley, one of the nations luvvies who has been able to reinvent herself by popping up all over the place and has the ear of people in power.
The bridge has been described as a 'folly', an ornament, little functionality other than a statement which describes a desire to have one.
If you are Bill Gates then you can build follies all over the place it is after all your own money. But what if the folly is to be built with public money. What if the people who desire the folly and who have already lined  up a design company who have agreed to build the folly, then the only hurdle is to ensure the rules governing the spending of tax payers money can if necessary be circumvented.
These rules depend on 'costed plans' being presented to the client and the companies who tender for the work being sufficiently able to meet the technical standees and have some sort of track record and the expertise to build it.
The ex mayor of London, our current Foreign Minister, probably the 3rd most important official in the land had taken up the project and offered, through the offices of Transport for London, to meet 50% of the cost to do the preliminary planning work. George Osborn, the 2nd most important minister of the crown, promised the other 50%.
To date 80 million pounds have been invoiced without a spade entering the soil.
Models must have been made and plans showing the artistic representation drawn up. Negotiations with certain bodies who keep an eye on "planning" must have been entered into with perhaps a few lunches.  Legal consultation doesn't come cheap but consuming  80 million pounds in times of austerity is highway robbery.
Today we listened to the editor of an architectural journal describe how after 2 years of digging for information into meetings where no minutes were kept (remember this is public money and I would have thought minutes a statutory requirement), he described a plethora of dodgy practice to obtain the go ahead for the bridge to be built and secondly to explain where the 80 million was spent and who got it.
Thomas Heatherwick in collaboration with Arup the builders presented their plans along with two other design/builders and submitted tenders. Both of the other competitive bids had the pedigree to build and design bridges, Heatherwick had virtually non. Heatherwick and Lumley had many preliminary meetings with Boris Johnson the mayor prior to the other designers being brought on board to tender. The tender process a, statuary requirement, was obfuscated by a preference already being in place.
Two of the officials in TFL have subsequently been taken on by Arup in senior positions "but no assumptions can be drawn" we are told, according to the powers that be, that their pursuance of the Garden Bridge project, to the benefit of Heatherwick / Arup, had anything to do with their new jobs. Yeh, pull the other one !!!
Only today has the current mayor, Sadiq Kahn pulled the plug on the project. But will we see a proper independent investigation of Boris Johnson or TFL and their involvement.  Will they, as usual sidestep any legal remedy, "too big to tumble" "too engrained in the establishment", "too many pals pulling for them" !!

What chance the Infidel

Subject: What chance the Infidel

The argument raging about freedom of expression, the freedom to wear what you want the freedom to join which ever congregation you want, both religious and political, always rightly expresses its rage at 'loosing the right of an individual' to follow what ever course they wish to follow, so long as it does no harm to others.

Two things spring to mind. 

The law is all about the individuals freedom and doesn't seem to acknowledge that individuals are few and far between. Most people are collegiate in the sense they are followers of a group. It should therefore be the group and its intentions which should be scrutinised.

The second thing. Is the balance in any society, between the groups and the influence a group has on society as a whole in equilibrium 

Wearing the Burka or a Yarmulke, a Turban or the symbolism of hanging a crucifix around your neck is an example of Group Speak. It is a reflection of an individual's choice and in so doing the individual is expressing their right. The question of whether  wearing a Burka is simply a Patriarchal travesty is a topic for another day. 

But what if the person decides to wear the swastika, is that freedom stretching societies goodwill because of its connotation with the extreme National Socialist Workers Party in Germany, the Nazi party. This is an example of a group become persona non grata and their rights as a group curtailed. 

Any group can have atavistic tendencies, desires which reach far back into the past and which their proponents wish to reignite within modern culture. Whether it is healthy and benign like the Morris Dancers I went to watch last weekend, or an anarchist group who see current society as despotic and wish to bring their own form of despotism into play to defeat it is the point.  One is tolerated and the other not so, even though its aims have on an individualistic basis a perfectly tolerable argument.

The toleration of an argument, a point of view, is at the basis of the human rights act but if the aim of a group is subversion (an attempt to transform established power) then society has a right to defend itself. 

The question being asked is :- Does religion in the form of Islam pose a threat, since Islam is more than a religion it is also a social and legal code based on religious belief.

The behaviour of people who follow a religious code is implicit, it's behaviour towards other people should reflect the teaching of a tolerant god. 

The tolerance of the Hindu the Buddhist, and the Christian (these days) is benign and stays well within the tolerance of secular society. 

The Jews because of their exclusivity are less well tolerated and almost feared because of their strength in networking between each other in business, particularly in finance. 

The Muslims are beginning to be feared because of their historic intolerance to people outside their faith made even more confusing by the intolerance they show towards each other depending on which sect or branch of the religion you belong. 

One has to ask the question " if they can be so brutal towards each other what chance the infidel".

The Bardo

   

Subject: The Bardo

In Buddhist terms, that place after death where the departing spirit lingers before moving on to become something else. A sort of clearing house for Spirits.

This question of Spirits and the world they occupy has a fascination brought on by growing old. The God story is too neat, too simple, too comprehensible. It encompasses our need to be cared for, to receive protection, to be loved. It builds on a story which if it were fiction would be a good read but explained as fact is over the top in at least one sense, it places too much emphasis on us as human beings when all around us the power of the universe makes us seem so puny. 

The simple time line that in 50 billion years the sun will implode, having used up it'd hydrogen and the lights will go out in a very spectacular way. This event alone makes a mockery of the few thousand year time line the Worlds religions have been around. The story of the Bible or the Koran are folk driven with mankind being placed naturally in the centre. Mankind is after all writing the story, prompted, it is suggested by god who having created everything on such a vast scale wishes to install some social norms and ideas on how we should all get along.

It is argued that the concepts of love and respect are religious ideals but of course they stretch back much earlier and were discussed philosophically by the Greeks and before them in even greater antiquity. The socialising of mankind picks up its thread in the Agrarian development seen in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East 10.000 years ago, long before the concept of a monotheistic god but for many reasons, the idea of a one, all powerful, Father figure took hold and we are where we are today. 

The idea of a spirit world is much older and dealt with the problems of death and our relationship to it. The essence of our lives lives on and is not destroyed by our death.

Of course it too is fanciful, other than in the philosophical sense that our good lives on in others, as for that matter so does our bad. We visualise an 'ether', a void into which our thoughts can tumble as entities in themselves when we die since it is difficult to imagine ourselves as not having any purpose or value other than what we do on earth in the short time we are here. 

Surely our ego tells us we are worth more than that. Worth more than a piece of wood which decays as we do. It seems our minds have contrived this immortality for us, where we continue to live in state, alongside our maker, like the prodigal returning home, all forgiven.

"There was a door to which I found no key

There was a veil through which I could not see

Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee

And then no more of Me or Thee".

Crossing the line together.

Subject: Crossing the line together.

What fine specimens of articulate manhood, the English marathon runner who had over extended himself short of the finishing line and was collapsing as his system closed down and his saviour the Welshman who selflessly stopped running and achieving his own time to help this chap to get across the line.

Interviewed afterwards one felt they were both "salt of the earth" as they explained their reminiscence of the event. It was so refreshing to see the bare bones of running camaraderie exemplified in this way, so refreshing after the days of hyperbole and down right avoidance of what we understand as truth, as the politicians embark on their election 'story telling'.

Human endeavour is what elevates our species to do the things it can feel proud of. Sport is often a signpost although with the cloud that doping brings, not all athletes are motivated by their innate will to win within the confines of their own ability. Money and fame distort the human desire to be acknowledged for being good at what they do and like, power is to politics, it blemishes achievement. 

The politicians seem immune from telling porkies. It's a recognition of their success in the trade if they can, with straight face and without any sign of an ethical tick tell downright lies. The lies might be laced with genuine thoughts that what I am saying is something I want to happen but it doesn't excuse the truth which invariably makes their desire only part of a wish list, something a child would send to Santa.

One has the sense that the politician who least likes lying and therefore is the most exposed to ridicule and derided is Jeremy Corbyn. When asked a difficult question on disarmament for instance he can not put aside his life long belief that nuclear arms are simple too dangerous and should be banned. There are many reasons why this can be questioned but you have to admire the man for not sidestepping his convictions. It is so un-political and as the leader of the opposition it puts him in a nearly impossible position. As a populous we don't seem to want the truth we would rather be fed half truths since this bolsters our view of the world and the place we have within it.

The truth is unpalatable. It means changing the way we live our lives and insists we rationalise our hopes and bring it more into line with the reality around.

Since as human beings we find bad news something to be avoided we fixate on good news even if in our heart of heart we know the news is a sham to make us feel good.

The politics of at least one party is so encompassed with providing benefits which effect only a small section of society and yet appeals to a much larger section on the proviso that the political contract also has something for us, irrespective of historical data which deny this. Yet we live in hope, a hope born of the snake oil seller.

  

Making another culture our own.

Subject: Making another culture our own.

We are rightly concerned about hurting others. In a balanced caring community we try to evoke amongst its members a sense of letting be, by that I mean we recognise that people are different and have for a myriad of reasons and other points of view.
In a mature society we insist on freedom of speech within the law and would be dismayed if someone denounced our right to disagree with someone, particularly with the governing class who's modus operandi is to pursue politically objectives that are not always our own.  The balance we observe is largely based on 'reciprocity', an exchange which has at its heart, mutual benefit.
Societies today are becoming more and more complex as ethnicity, culture, religious affirmation, a proclivity towards sexual preference, complex gender issues, and so much more, as the dust on the heels of those seeking to join a society come from all corners of the world and who's affinity is purely an economic one.
Politics these days try's to represent all reaches of society, not only the core values and in its attempt at being open handed it is often open to conflict from the sections it wishes to appeal to as well as those who are ignored and left behind.
Labour is in a pickle because it has voters, some of whom voted to come out of the EU largely because of open door immigration (free movement of people) which had put tremendous pressure on the Health Service, Schools, Employment and generally where ever a service provision is made to the people. Others within the party see the economy being hit so hard that the immigration issue will fade into insignificance if we don't find a market to trade into.
UKIP have stung the middle class commentators by drawing issue with the insistence of the Muslim population to demand the wearing of the Middle Eastern, Burka on the streets of Britain. The security gained by seeing someone's face and reading their acquiescence or resentment and one presumes their intention, is something which in a court of law has been a prerequisite of the trial. The suggestion also that the Burka precludes any sort of integration and leads to ghettos being formed where women do not learn the language or mix in society, still less are able to go out to work, has no place in a modern Britain. But the "rights" we decree to all get in the way.  We seem oblivious of the fact that the Muslim population is doubling every 10 years, 9 million by 2020 and will make up 50% of the population by 2050. This wouldn't be so controversial if they were not seen, tied as they are by their strong religious adherence, to be a consolidated group who speak with one voice. Their insistence of conforming to Sharia Law is already a fact of life within the community, a fact to which we close our eyes for fear of social disruption but of course the disruption later will be greater unless of course we turn over and capitulate.
Foreign culture whilst richly informative is the result of many things, not least of which is time. Culture is an organic expression of the norms which describe a society and religion plays an enormous part in identifying the values within a culture.
Chinese culture is ingrained with the philosophical acceptance of Confucius who instigated, within the society, a system of social and ethical awareness.
Japanese culture is likewise indebted to Shintoism for its inter personal respect.  Countries who practice the Muslim religion are seen at odds with the conflicting interpretation of Shia and Sunni, seeming incompatible towards each other, an incompatibility taught at home to the children who grow up hating the other sect. Christianity is still hugely influential, particularly in South America in the guise of Catholicism whilst the foundation of a mix of evangelical and orthodox Protestants vi with Catholicism in North America.
Each religion or philosophy is entrenched in its belief and so long as the beliefs are contained to the geographical areas where they are strongly represented all is well.  But bleed that influence across boarders and continents, one begins to see the inevitable displacement of the indigenous culture, with un-fortelled consequences.
The advent of mass communication, mass travel and the instability of North Africa has meant that the cultural bleed is now a haemorrhage into Europe and the cultures of Greece, Italy, France and Germany are being placed under tremendous strain. The strain is leading to a rise in nationalism and closed borders and was the catalyst for Brexit.
The liberal elite are caught in a bind with their Athenian consensus of a freedom based on democracy which itself relies  on the law to make democracy work. If laws are in place but the politicians dig their heads in the sand, it is left to law enforcement to take the strain but who have over the last few years taken a beating as the "human rights" lawyers run rings around them and made them frightened to act for being accused of racism.
It's a rum old world and unless we clearly define our own character and the institutions that define it we will eventually have to take on another.