To bribe or not to bribe

The British have a death wish. 

A British made TV program tonight broadcast a documentary on the dodgy dealings in Brazil of Rolls Royce, one of the few manufacturing companies left in this country, being exposed for paying bribes. The thrill of the exposure and the excitement of the lead commentator in turning the stone to see what's under it was palpable

 

But it's not RT the Russian program maker who are broadcasting the scoop it's our own  BBCs, Panorama who seem determined to bring down Rolls Royce.
In the ways of investigatory reporting, the story of handing over bribes to obtain the contract, which is common in certain parts of the world, is condemned the Brit who is interviewed and who specialises in the legal aspect of the ethical veracity of bribe paying. It is clear in his condemnation that it's wrong, irrespective of the fact that if you didn't pay a bribe the work goes elsewhere to someone else who "was" prepared to pay the bribe.
International global based business deals across boarders with very different business practices. Cultures vastly different from ours are expected to conform to Western standards. The reality is, standards depend on whom and where they are applied and the reality is that nations exist in the world where bribery is common.
The self important voice of the investigator who rather gleefully tells us that Rolls Royce's finances are coming under strain and the company is in a bit of a tail spin, is reporting  as if the news and the investigatory report were simply a virus in a petri dish to be probed and analysed as a sixth form project but of course it isn't. Rolls Royce and its ilk are the basis of our survival.
Of course bribes shouldn't be paid but Pratt & Whitney or General Electric have the advantage of a large domestic market and even higher revenues from the military. This business is not construed as a bribe but it is a significant advantage as America continues to buy strategically from its home grown manufacturers.
The deals that go on within Russia are never the meat and two veg of RTs reporting.
The internecine conflicts within the high tech industries in America are never the grist of a CNN investigatory program but we in England flout our morality like a poor man flouts his new shoes.
Perhaps the program maker has the script already written where we too go down the drain and he is last man standing.

A conundrum

It's an interesting conundrum.

Is it true that by refuting an argument (defeating it) you have more knowledge than the person making the argument in the first place. Or is it fact that neither of you know anything more than the other. 

Is knowledge nothing more than a game of supposition since knowledge is merely hypothesis until it is overturned by a new hypothesis.

Can we say we know anything at all, or like Socrates deny having any knowledge of any subject and proceed through argument to prove the surety of the other person is false.

Wisdom comes therefore in acknowledging how little we know, not how much.
Of course you will declare that there are many things I know. I am sure of the knowledge which I am intricately bound up with like, how to find my way home, but of the knowledge regarding the ethical contemplation of home and the support it has for our lives, this is not a surety and the knowledge you have regarding the matter is yours and personal and can in no way be presumed as knowledge when applied to others.

We walk in an oasis of our own making with arrangements in our mind that we process as knowledge  when in actual fact we are alone in the wasteland of our our own mental fantasy.

If our "presumption" that others, anyone, has the foggiest idea of where we are mentally  or what we specifically believe in, is wrong, then the equally tricky presumption that "anyone" understands "anyone" else is flawed. 

If no one is in tune with anyone else other than perhaps emotionally for a moment then we should re-jig our assumptions about so much of what we take for granted. 

Reality is that we are individuals with no firm connections. Our insecurity leads us to form alliances but these alliances are only secure so long as we need them and remember they are a two way street, either can be broken at any time.

The whole edifice of society and our place in it is based on a notion, a conjecture, that we are not alone and that other people really care. With very few exceptions the healthy mind rushes to new pastures as soon as it believes it has obtained a sense of its own security, that the ground is safe to proceed to forming new connections, which we have argued is in themselves false since no connections can be possible, given the desperate convoluted individuality in each of us. 

The Robin is back

The cheeky Robin Redbreast is back. As I mow the lawn he watches me from a few feet away. There is no bird like him for his fearlessness and apparent interest in what we humans are up to. Of course it's the worms he's after but given other birds also keep an eye open for food, it's his apparent lack of fear when so many other birds fly a mile at the sight of a human. What is it in his psychology that allows him to treat us as if perhaps not a friend, at least not to be feared.

Is it seeing his picture on the Christmas card makes him presuppose we like him. Does his red breast indicate a full heart ❤️ courageous and courtly such that whilst being so small he can communicate a sort of equanimity.
Of course it was the nightingale who pierced her heart to make the white rose red for the Prince. I think the robin is too shrewd for that, he has covered most eventualities and won me over with his pluck and fortitude.
I pause my mowing sensible to the moment, sharing the moment with something so fragile so small and vulnerable but with that bright chest puffed out like a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Coldstream Guards. Don't mess with me he says, get on with the mowing I can't wait all day for the worms.

The Listening Project

 There's a delightful program on BBC radio 4 where ordinary people record their conversation with each other, usually down memory lane. 

It's the sort of simple unadorned program which the Beeb does best. People who are comfortable in each other's company totally relaxed, remembering events and situations father to daughter, mother to son, grandchild to grandparent which they remember with special affection.
The program is called 'The Listening Program' and it's a gem as it highlights the intimacy of the family. It's the most un-contrived program on the airwaves, every story is fresh with the power of speech, often enriched with accent, always with some pathos mixed with simple joy. It's a comfort to hear these memories as fresh today as when they happened, each speaker an expert in this private domain of sentiment and love.
It's especially poignant when the youngster, have watched a parent, an uncle or aunt now reveals the unfolding learning experience they learnt back then. What they saw became today's knowledge in its simplest form, transporting them back to when the parent had such mystery. When Mom or Dad were endowed with such wisdom.
With the passage of years the roles have changed but love and respect have replaced the one dimensional parent child relationship with a meeting of ways.
Adults with time for each other.❤️️

Can I change my mind please

With only a few days to go before the the US Election the revelation from the FBI that there are more damaging emails sent from Hillary Clintons smart phone when she was Secretary of State, has startled the world.

What ever the actual content, the voting public are skittish towards both contestants and it wouldn't take much to frighten the horses.
Virtually every candidate who has lined up in the past for the Presidents job has some sort of skeleton in their cupboard. From Abraham Lincoln to Kennedy, from Reagan to Bush and of course Hillary's husband was almost thrown out of the job.
Powerful people are used to getting their own way, even using questionable methods to ensure it. Power corrupts and so we should begin to assume that the politician who has risen to the top of the pile has enough skeletons to fill a graveyard.
Would the Trump presidency be so bad. Would Hillary's presidency be anything other than the same old same old. Would she go for the status quo, would she be an appeaser towards so much of what we have become to know as the American Establishment.
The Global experiment, which was a contributor to the Banking crisis and itself revealed the paucity and un-sustainability of the American financial empire, was I'm sure a regular breakfast conversation between Hillary and Bill when Bill was President.

Trump in his "inward vision" for America is a massive swing in the psychology of a country that wished to put its imprint on the 🌎.  The country has had to keep recycling the dollar and in the process print billion to pump prime the Global economy and keep the deficit economy on track.

Trump has no baggage other than that he is successful in making money. To make the kind of money he has in Real Estate, means that he knows how to use the teams of experts needed to build and revamp his buildings. He knows how to coordinate and drive people and you can't beat his vision, even within a narrow prospectus of glitzy hotels.
Historically when Ronald Reagan was chosen he was chosen on his personality. As an actor in B grade films his lineage was hardly the stuff of Presidents and yet he is remembered for the simplicity of purpose and the clarity of of his agenda to defeat the USSR in the Cold War. He certainly was not proposed for the job because of his knowledge of the minuta of internecine politics. He was not an insider like Hillary, he was not a wheeler dealer within the system which is her claim to fame. I was not a supporter of his conservative rhetoric (along side Margaret Thatcher) but like Churchill he was the man for the moment.
Hillary seems to me to have a very grey image of what we need to lead the free (sic) world.
It seems with the passage of time, under the spotlight of the media debate, she seems to be "dodgy", but then perhaps they all are.

The Benefit Culture

Listening to a heated debate on the axing of Concentrix from the business of chasing Welfare claimants revealed not only the complex system of benefits that people can claim, housing, tax, child benefits the list goes on but also the complexity of people's lives, single mothers, disabled children, people who have hit the buffers in life and in there own individual way, desperate. A bureaucratic nightmare which is further complicated by the closure of the offices where in the past face to face discussion between claimant and the authority used to take place. Now the whole business is done over the phone with the inevitable frustration that the call takes ages to connect and then the person in the Welfare Office simply bats them off with a plethora of rules. 

When you drill down, behind it all, is the austerity of the financial settlement between Government and its citizens, which it is argued has to be made for the nation to become solvent again and a private company were engaged (Concentrix) to root out the people who were not what they were appeared.
Part of the problem is the complexity of claims and the opportunity for some to "play the game" by putting in bogus claims.
The complexity and the opportunity are not the fault of the claimant or even the bogus claimant and the need to address the hugely complex human plethora of changed and changing circumstance is a situation brought about by the changing state of the nation as it closed down avenues for work whilst still trying to fulfil the founding ideals of the Welfare State set up in 1947.
Can we, should we provide a Welfare blanket in the way we used to. The Welfare claimant in the 1950s kept their situation to themselves to avoid the claim by neighbours that they were scrounges. Today claimants ware their Welfare status on their chest happy to be seen as being "on benefit". The psycology, 'to get off benefits' is missing and a lifestyle is created to accommodate the payments as they come in. No wonder the terror of a delay when the relative comfort associated with regular payments is thrown up in the air.
The skill of a woman in the 1930s, 40s and 50s to make the rations fit the needs of the family, "to make ends meet" as the saying goes, was the guile she employed.
No 40" TVs, no mobile phones, no motor car, probably no washing machine and certainly no dish washer. No overseas holidays, no credit/debit cards, Clothing that was mended not thrown away it was a different world and one which largely people accepted and were certainly proud of their ability to manage their affairs within the financial constrains imposed.
Today it's entitlement, it's a right of passage that a certain standard is yours irrespective of where the actual money comes from. My mother and father would run a mile from credit arrangements on the basis that they could "not afford" the things Hire Purchase offered. Affordability was the touchstone of the working class household and their pride in their own self sufficiency was the cement which bound them together as a society

The Great American Debate

And so it continued. He said, she said, he lied, she lied, this bitter playground squabble. Unfortunately the definition of squabble describes a noisy quarrel about something 'trivial', sadly the subject matter was anything but trivial and was carried out by candidates for the most powerful office in the world. 

Unseemly, childish, unbecoming. These are descriptions fitting childish people, has the American political system fallen to this.
I tuned in early at 1am thinking the debated started then. CNN were in full warrior mode with teams of journalists and opinion makers contending their views as to how the debate would go and the substance of the contestants.

Trump seemed to have only one ally, a young woman, very confident very savvy, willing to hold her own and row against the stream. Her analysis of the disillusioned parts of Americas great cities was spot on. Her observation that the Clintons had, along with George W Bush, and latterly Obama, presided over this state of affairs for decades, arguing that market forces should be allowed to prosper whilst the industrial heartland in the States disintegrated, along with the people who worked there.

Trump speaks for these people he talks of putting America first, of preventing immigrant labour drive down wage rates, of stopping the Chinese from dumping. These are the messages the ordinary working American wishes to hear. Enough of the liberal waffle about Americas responsibilities, of its humanitarian agenda and its security commitments. It is probably all talk, it's probably political campaigning but who cares, it hits a nerve and sounds good. There's little in their lives to cheer, so why not cheer the showman.
These people don't know and don't care. For them the global agenda which has made one percent immensely rich, has allowed the rest to languish in varying degrees of need The Clinton doesn't speak  for them the Obama's doesn't cater for their raw needs. The tired old rhetoric  that Hillary espouses, they have heard time and time again, for them nothing changes as they sink further and further behind.
And so as the debate gets under way, these two monoliths, like huge icebergs grind away at each other with little or no attempt to understand where the other comes from. All political agendas are like this. There seem to be little or no common ground. The people they are meant to serve are the  in the grist in the political wheel, the outcome of their plight is of little  insignificance to the established politician. Maybe a crass uncouth entrepreneur, untainted by years of double speak is just what the people have been waiting for.