Moscow remembers

Subject: Moscow remembers.

Yesterday there were thousands on the streets of Moscow ordinary people walking in procession through the streets, celebrating an anniversary of the Russian defeat of Germany.
The contribution of the Russians in defeating Germany was immense and it was the numbers of ordinary Russians who laid down their lives in the millions who were being remembered. It’s almost impossible to imagine the trauma for the average Russian during the war. The attrition of Stalingrad where the German and Russian armies laid into each other with a ferocity which was almost unbelievable. In open warfare the conscripted Russian soldier ordered to march through minefields in front of the tanks to explode the mines before the tanks arrived. Used as cannon fodder, millions lost their lives as they slowly repulsed the German army and even many more millions of civilians whose villages were plundered, the women raped and the men shot. In total 11 million soldiers and  20 million civilians died and such was the megalomaniac mind of Stalin the soldiers captured and interned in concentration camps in Germany and Poland were, when released after the war ended, re-interned in soviet camps in Siberia for the crime of being captured in the first place. Kafkaesque in the extreme.
The stoic nature of the Russian, an outsider as far as continental Europe was concerned,  laid the invincibility of soviet arms at the doorstep of the western coalition and  the need for a nuclear deterrent which sidestepped the implicit life force which was Russia.
The Gorbachev years, as he dismantled the centralised planning of the USSR and the Yeltsin years, when a free for all sale of all methods of production and mineral rights turned the upper echelons of the society into a casino where the nations wealth  was traded by a few corrupt oligarchs. 

Putin has reestablished self belief into the Russian people and made them proud of their heritage by returning the nation to centre stage in world politics.
The people streaming down the streets of Moscow under a cloudless blue sky each carrying a placard showing the face of a family member lost in the war was a sombre reminder of the carnage which comes when hubris takes the place of common sense.

Testing testing testing

Subject: Testing testing testing

There was a time, before predictive testing, when dying was a process we knew little about until it just arrived out of the blue.  People lived to be a certain age and then, with few exceptions they fell off their perch, more or less on time. People died of predictable diseases,  understandable mortal generalities written on the death certificate. They were not a precise traceable event, rather the slow break down of an ageing body, or at least that was what we thought.
Age was the crucial thing, 70 years in men 75 years in woman and with few exceptions, these actuarial signposts were pretty accurate. 

Now a days we know so much more because we have become watchful. We watch our diet, and we watch our exercise. We go for tests and we become, 'category conscious', we ask the question how well am I and ultimately, how long do I have to live. We try to cheat the Grim Reaper out of his scheduled by availing ourselves of the latest medicine has to offer. And medicine in its blind scientific surety will continue to find new and more expensive ways of keeping us what is called, alive

And so dying becomes complicated, drawn out and more stressful than it need be. The diabetic, the weak heart, the person with lung disease and the feared Big C are all flagged up in advance of actually killing you and a set of procedures put in place to keep you alive no matter how intrusive or emasculating these procedures are. The quality of life is supplanted by "life" itself, eking out an existence of days and months largely because you let the medics in, unknowingly, through an innocent blood test or a sample of flesh to examine under the microscope. Through the microscope the process of dying is revealed in all its gruesome efficiency. It's been a part of our living and has been going on since birth as cells began to replicate themselves with a lessening efficiency, slowly introducing misalignments, malcontents to challenge and replace the good with a variant of bad.
Throughout our lifetime we churn out trillions of cells, all to a chromosomic template in a replacement process which even the Chinese could not replicated. This replication process has its limits and starts to produce, on the conveyor belt, goods the "fat controller" shouldn't pass but because the consumer (our body) has become lazy and starts to accept everything  with an "it'll do" attitude, prevalent in a routine that has gone on too long. The floor around the production line becomes knee deep in rejected components and it's at this stage we do the 'test' and find all kinds of mayhem.
Perhaps without the test we would be wonderfully ignorant of the chaos in the cell factory or of the Sword of Damocles waiting to fall.
Life has at least two components. The beat beat beat of the heart and all the wonderful contingent processes which accompany it, and that other quality which the mind lends itself to fabricate and on which we base our claim to be living. Tamper with either and life actually ceases, life in the sense of a quality we apprehend as actually being alive. Without the test and our inquisitive need to know maybe we would pass into a state where death is a reward.

Minding our own business has its attractions

Subject: Minding our own business has its attractions.

I am currently struck by the massive, inter-connective web of business and national affairs over which we have little or no control, control relinquished as we reclined for 40 years in a comfortable club in which the committee ran the clubs affairs whilst we, the members sat at the bar dreaming of our past achievements, willing to allow the processing of all future affairs to go on behind closed doors.
If it were acceptable for 40 years, why now the need for change. Put simply, "Because the people wish it".
That phrase "the people" is a misnomer since the voter has become, in the 40 years of European tutelage, a benign repository of media misinformation. Where from the torrid headlines of the leader writers blurb and the editorial commentary, (these purveyors of self interest) have fed the electorate a steady gruel of an anti EU information. Given the chance to vote is it any wonder that the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express readership, by far the greatest in number of newspapers bought, placed their cross to pull out of the Union. 

As did I, you no doubt hasten to remind me but for different reasons. My reasons were mainly reasons of unaccountably especially as regards the German handling of Greek debt crisis.

It seemed to me that the jackboot of the Fourth Reich, under the leadership of the Finance Minister Herr Schauble,  deliberately squashed and ran riot over the people of Greece punishing them en mass for accepting the titivating financial prospect Goldman Sachs contrived to offer the German Banks, a false prospectus of the Greek financial position on applying to join the EU. This dreadful, deceitful financially corrupt bank who's place-men sit at the helm of so many national institutions in the West, including our own, The Governor of the Bank of England, have blood on their hands. 

The Germans, once out foxed were in no mood to consider the population as a whole but have relentlessly  punished, not the instigators of the financial charade, (they have shifted their money out long ago) but the innocent ordinary man and women in the street, people for whom the German financial machine had no mercy. Perhaps it goes too far to equate the German banks and their financial governance with the inhuman acts of the Third Reich but the lack of any sort of empathy seemed to me to be  contingent with a 'totalitarian force' and for that reason I wanted out.
It seems as if my faint hearted tolerance for fair play towards the Greeks has sown a more impoverished future for my own people as we unravel the complexities of living all this time with grandma. 

The world is no longer a nationally based free trade area but a collection of powerful financial units which dictate, through the global market what the nation state does. 

Having relinquished much of our individual industrial know how, having modified our population to be consumers rather than producers. Having signaled to the world we back the grocer above the industrialist, we are bound to take a thrashing when we start to compete at the margins. 

Our politicians are as usual mendacious prevaricators when it comes to telling the truth. They shift and happily lie about anything and everything if it politically suites them and sadly we are in their hands when it comes to negotiating the deal and the truth of the matter is lost under the bluster of political cant.

Our future will not, I fear resemble our past but whether this is a bad thing, only time will tell. Influence comes at a cost, even the Americans are beginning to balk at the expense of being a world leader. Small nations such as the Scandinavian group, the antipodeans, Australia and New Zealand in fact most nations who stay and mind their own business seem happily prosperous. Minding our own business has its attractions.

Decades of hard won assumption

Subject: Decades of hard won assumption 

Part of the reason for starting a blog was to set down the ideas and prejudices of a person born in 1940 who is in some ways struggling to come to terms with the ideas and prejudices of of the world today. How our views have changed, or in my case have remained stubbornly fixed in those formed during the period of my childhood struggle to make sense of the world around.
It's a changing and challenging progression from the days when this small island punched above its weight, when Empire was still mentioned by my teachers as a proud establishment the map of the world coloured red showing the countries where our influence and administrative clout still mattered. It was a powerful story embellishing a do or die effort to hold our civilised views against indigenous savagery.
Today the boot is on the other foot as we seek to uphold our views and our way of life against those very people about who we held such prejudicial views.
When I had the opportunity to travel I used to marvel and feel proud to see the structures, the architecture, the railway lines, the cranes standing at the dockside, the nameplates on the machinery, household names in U.K. engineering, Compton Parkinson, English Electric, GEC, still standing strong in good working order, the ruminants  of Empire still performing the task allocated to them in the days when we set the seal of good workmanship on what we designed and produced.

With this heritage in mind I now listen to people who's lives have been encapsulated behind a computer keyboard assuming a mantra of "rights", decrying not only the concept of Empire, with its administrative order, a legal framework of contractual business as well as the structural framework of democratic responsibility. 

These young people articulate a frenzy of the individual, atomistic view of the world where people's rights are mixed up with utopian ideas of equality and racial and religious harmony. It's a fervent dialogue in which the practice's carried on outside the protected bubble of living on these islands is ignored for a welter of criticism at an easy target.  These young men and women are very articulate but forget that their ability to speak out with such viperous freedom would be forbidden in the homeland of their parents and grandparents. It occurs to them not a fig that the rights they demand are the very rights denied in the far off home where their relatives still live. Their excitement is that of the child released from the nursery who's presumes the security therein is there of a right and not hard won over decades of struggle.

Alex Furgurson

 Alex Furgurson

 

The tenuous nature of life is no where better illustrated by the sad news this morning of Alex Ferguson's brain hemorrhage. Only a couple of days ago we saw Ferguson and his old rival Arsenal Wenger laughing together at the pitch side. The old rivalry which was portrayed as intense dislike for each other had healed as the intensity of football management was peeled away and the men could resume something akin to normality.
Laughing and joking one day, the next at deaths door it signifies the improbability we should attach for looking too far into the future.
The Buddhists call it "Attachment" a false preposition for understanding our lives and the seemingly silly proposition on which we pin too much on the future.
How can we know what is in the 'future'. We only have the 'present' and can only reflect on the 'past' in a non subjective way. The past is gone and whilst we sometimes bathe in the glow of memories finding both pleasure and pain in them, we only have the present to grapple with and find relevance.
Alec Ferguson had not the slightest inkling that his days were numbered. His appointment book was full, no doubt with speaking engagements well into the year, holidays booked, plans to do this and that, money no object, adulation all around him what could go possibly wrong.
It seems a chilling thought that our plans are dependent on fate. That the ability to fulfil our plans are out of our hands, we are simply pawns, not in some celestial game but in the organic frailty of our bodies. The assumptions we make each morning or at night as we go to sleep rarely takes into consideration our health, why should it when we have become immured to to the thought that everything is tickity boo. The heart pumps the blood and the organs perform the job they have been performing for 70/80 years.
What caused his aneurysm, was it the whisky the food or the stress of winning so many championships. Without them he would not be the man so many people revere. His willingness to banish thoughts of loosing and his drive to make his players and staff perform for so long at the top of their pedigree possibly took its toll. He certainly didn't look to the moment to find his answers other than the moment the ball burst into the back of the net. Tomorrow's game and the game after that was what mattered. Last years triumph stood on the mantelpiece and this years success was the measure he placed on living his life.

John meets John

 

Subject: John meets John

What is it in the physiology. A man for a man or a woman for a woman what attracts Gay people towards each other. A man may be attracted by so many different physical aspects or features which make a woman a woman and equally the woman is attracted to attributes such as his looks or masculinity, the cut of his jib, to use a sailing metaphor. Perhaps there is no outstanding physical attraction other than a concoction of the mind where humour or wit, sensitivity or a projected positivity make the person attractive.
The attraction of a male towards another man, or female towards another woman such that they would wish to be intimate, to kiss (other than a gesture) is beyond me and yet it seems to exist in growing numbers. Is this because the procreative commitment with all its responsibility is missing and the coupling remains purely sexual. Is it because the gender differences are quite profound and the same sex interconnection is starting from a like meets like position where emotions are more akin to each other and do not have to bridge the gap of expectation which lies between a man and a woman.
That intolerable enigma where the brain assumes it is understood by the other party but years of cultural modification has meant the receptors in the other persons brain are programmed to reject or further modify what seemed a simple proposition.
One can assume that two men or two women are on the same wavelength regarding so many assumptions we make when talking, perhaps the instinctive protection we seek to find a safe mental harbour without the conflict of inbred misunderstanding is the draw.
One of the phenomenon of this age is the "outing" of men and women in their sexuality their preference for someone of their own sex to find a partner. Even given that in my own childhood the homosexuality laws made it virtually impossible to have a same sex relationship, non the less one can search ones memory in vain to remember anyone who was, as we would in those days describe as "strange" or seemed overly effeminate or overly masculine. Today one has to tread carefully not to miss the signs as men and women line up to proclaim their predilection. This bias can be even more difficult as some people seem to want to have it "both ways" a term which again, in my youth meant something far more innocent.
Has the rise of sex for sexes sake made an impact.  The old fashioned "I'm keeping myself for my husband" had its backlash on the male, reminding him that the implication of gaining the sexual threshold had ramifications far beyond his intent, tending to throttle back the natural impulse. With the pill and abortion available as a backstop the sexual advance is often de rigueur for a good night out and so the mystique of the opposite sex  is lost on the back seat of the motor car or whether both participants are called John.

Boy meets Girl

 

Subject: Boy meets girl.

It occurred to me this morning that it would be a good idea to call  boys by girls names and girls with boys names. The confusion would seal the ongoing feminist clamour for equality since gender would become transparent in terms of the written and spoken word. The ambiguity of who or what a name represented would be complete, the growing sexual smorgasbord board on offer would disappear, other than for the participants, and the boardroom crisis would be resolved at the stroke of a pen since no one would know who was who without the furtive hand on the knee, which is now banned anyway.
Imagine the confusion as the 'year end report' is read out. Jane, (who is a man) takes over the chair and John pours the tea.  The stereo typing, which the feminists claim is a barrier to their promotion, is broken since John could be either man or woman which on reflection deals nicely with the Gay scene, amalgamating two confusions into one.
The tag or label we attach to everyone at birth, including the preconceived route we set each child upon takes its gender influence from the gender specific name or label we attach. Take away the surety of the name and we evolve a new way of looking at gender differences.

John is already doing the cooking and Jane plays rugby. If we didn't have preconceived ideas about what a Jane or a John should do, the the resultant 'mishmash' would fit nicely into a multicultural society where identity becomes irrelevant and the individual homogenises to become a 'social token' available to respond to what ever task is required by the economic needs of the society.