Cross posted from Restoring Nottingham
Back in early December, the very outspoken Kelvin Mackenzie wrote a
piece for the Telegraph about the notion of the South "carrying the rest
of the country" from an economic perspective.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9717537/Kelvin-MacKenzie-overtaxed-South-needs-its-own-party.html
Unsurprisingly
the comments section directed lots of flak MacKenzie's way, most of it
justifiable. My first reaction was probably included a few swear words
as well. Part of that was due to my recollection as a youngster that
every time something was being developed to move the country forward,
the viewpoint was that "it has to be in London / South because
everything else is here" - a logic that used to make me very angry. The
other part was his ignorance of the fact that the UK had grown to its
lofty position in the world because of its industrial and military
dominance over the preceding centuries, most of which had been sourced
from across the breadth of Britain in the lives and labours.
Of
course the notion of MacKenzie writing in the Telegraph was one
designed to provoke uproar. That there was any surprise in that was a
surprise in itself.
I did however sit and wonder if he
had a point or if he was right. Strangely enough, to me, he is correct,
but not in the way he probably thinks. To me it's not the south that
needs special treatment and needs to go it alone, but that the rest of
the nation needs to look at itself and in many respects needs to mimic
London and the south. There needs, for me, to be a revolution in the
regions so that they develop their own economic prosperity to move
forward.
Notice the words "their own". I'm not
talking about waiting or expecting government to deign to drop one of
it's bright ideas on us for a little special pot here or a little
special business park here. It often strikes me as tokenism and it
still leaves our future in someone else's hands. What I'm talking about
is generating our own economic "revolution", here in Nottinghamshire. I
happen to think every other county should do likewise but the intention
of this blog is to move Nottingham forward.
There are a few reasons for this and they are linked to each other.
The first is that it's just good sense. If you spend any time over at the Witterings from Witney
blog, you will see its owner, talk often about Switzerland. If you
haven't, go take a read. In essence, the whole nation moves along
through the exercise of democracy at local level. Swiss Cantons are
very important components of Switzerland. As another commentator
pointed out (and I can't find the link at the moment), this gives
Switzerland a very powerful advantage. There is redundancy built into
the system. Because each region is taking care of its own affairs, a
failure in one area does not impact the whole too much.
If
Nottingham was its own top to bottom success story it could better
withstand a downturn not only inside a part of Nottinghamshire, but also
a downturn in an area like London. A Nottingham that was just one
success story in a nation full of them would not only reduce the risk of
a downturn in one area but would become another source of growth in an
economy floundering around for growth right now.
The
other reason can be found in many of those blogs I pointed you to in a
previous post. You'll see that most are talking often about the EU and
right now the referendum. A key question for them is, if we vote to get out of the EU, what is the plan for afterwards?
They're
right - you can't just vote to leave the EU and everything be hunky
dory on day one of a free Britain. You have to have a plan to survive
and thrive in the aftermath. With Labour saying you can't have a
referendum and Dave saying he'll campaign to stay in, it seems they're
not putting together a plan for thriving if we vote to leave (presuming
of course we actually get a vote on it). There have to be plans for
both economic and democratic dimensions. If they won't plan for it, we
have to (and would probably make a better job of it)
The
democratic dimension is being worked on right certainly by some of the
bloggers I mentioned in my previous post with their work on what is
known as the Harrogate Agenda.
Economically both they and myself are trying to point out that our
entire economic future is not tied to staying in the EU as our
politicians and the press are trying to claim. There are emerging
economies out there and some real success stories and we could be
engaging and trading with them to power our growth out of this
recession.
Yes there's a recession on and right now
it's biting in Nottingham, but we should not wait for the so called
great and the good nor rely on other regions for our wealth and
welfare. We need a revolution for success right here in
Nottinghamshire. Don't wait for them. Get started now
That however is down to each and every single one of us to power it.
Saturday, 2 February 2013
Where's our political tonnage?
"No they're real. Caused by different currents in the sea". Still not knowing anything about them, I joked something about steering well clear of them.
My friends response was "No, when you're in 35000 tonnes of ship, you tend not to worry too much about them"
I could help but wonder as this nation finds itself in a maelstrom of mixed currents, where our 35000 tonnes of political courage is to steer us through it. All we seem to have are 600 odd pieces of balsa wood currently trying to navigate it.
Tuesday, 29 January 2013
Friday, 18 January 2013
A funny?
Seen elsewhere on the internet today (with a slight adaptation).
"It was so cold today I saw an MP put his hands in his own pockets"
I thank you!
"It was so cold today I saw an MP put his hands in his own pockets"
I thank you!
Sunday, 30 December 2012
UKIP - Episode One
The last 48 hours or so have seen several bloggers take another look at UKIP. Unfortunately for UKIP most of these posts (and the comments) seem to have found their progress wanting. I can't say with 100% certainty but one of the things that is driving some of the commentary is off the back of this article in the Daily Mail.
I've listed all of the articles here and I recommend you take in the some of the observations and have a think about them:
Witterings from Witney
Autonomous Mind
EUReferendum
There are several things that strike me about them but my take on them is that the party is not where it should be in a political environment where UKIP victories should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
On the face of it, it is head scratching but we seem to keep coming back to the same observations on the leadership, the organisation and strategy. These seem to be failings that have punished them in the past and continue to do so, yet there appears no outward sign that these weaknesses are being resolved. I'm not anti UKIP because as I've said before I'd welcome a fourth party just to shake things up. UKIP are about the closest thing right now but they just not ready in all manner of areas which is stupid because its there for the taking. Events in Europe are running away with the mainstream parties and as much as Cameron, Milliband and the other clone tries to pretend - they are not in control.
If this were a poker game we're very close to that point where everyone gets to see each others cards. Events could effectively see UKIP about to be dealt a hand of aces, but right now they don't look ready to play them.
To that end I'm on a bit of a UKIP watch, looking at commentary and exploring it. This was episode one.
I've listed all of the articles here and I recommend you take in the some of the observations and have a think about them:
Witterings from Witney
Autonomous Mind
EUReferendum
There are several things that strike me about them but my take on them is that the party is not where it should be in a political environment where UKIP victories should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
On the face of it, it is head scratching but we seem to keep coming back to the same observations on the leadership, the organisation and strategy. These seem to be failings that have punished them in the past and continue to do so, yet there appears no outward sign that these weaknesses are being resolved. I'm not anti UKIP because as I've said before I'd welcome a fourth party just to shake things up. UKIP are about the closest thing right now but they just not ready in all manner of areas which is stupid because its there for the taking. Events in Europe are running away with the mainstream parties and as much as Cameron, Milliband and the other clone tries to pretend - they are not in control.
If this were a poker game we're very close to that point where everyone gets to see each others cards. Events could effectively see UKIP about to be dealt a hand of aces, but right now they don't look ready to play them.
To that end I'm on a bit of a UKIP watch, looking at commentary and exploring it. This was episode one.
Saturday, 29 December 2012
Someone thought it
Many moons ago as a college student, I was at a college party and to be fair was a little worse for wear. For some reason I needed to cross the dance floor. Just before I did so, the dry ice machine went into overdrive and we ended up with floor to ceiling fog. To make matters worse the strobe lighting also went into overdrive.
As I journeyed across the dance floor the combination of alcohol, fog and strobe lighting was really quite disorientating and nauseating. I had no sense of where I was or direction of travel. The sensory overload was coming from every imaginable direction. It was very surreal and very uncomfortable and it felt inescapable
Unfortunately there was more to come. The DJ was playing New Model Army's 51st State of America and this had prompted everyone who who was up for a bit of "slam dancing" to take to the floor. Slam dancing was in effect, moving around the whole dance floor with your fists flailing around in all directions. I was desperate to get off the floor and as I made for safety, out of the fog, came a dance floor assassin enjoying the madness with one of his flailing fists catching me smack in the face before disappearing into the fog again.
Why do I tell this strange tale of my student days on this blog/ I tell it because it sits for me as a perfect analogy of the seemingly inescapable madness that goes on all around us. It reminds me of the total inversion of common sense and of honesty that grips much of the western world. This inversion sees failure and mediocrity lauded over genuine achievement. It sees tyranny masquerading as open society. It sees obvious lies treated as the truth. It sees thieves as victims and let off and it sees genuine victims treated as corrupt or hung out to dry. There's much much more to this. It's everywhere and its endless. To witness it is to feel like I did all those years ago, drunk and surrounded by fog, disorientating strobe lights and the occasional punch in the face where you come right up against it before it runs off again leaving you reeling. The whole thing is a disorientating nauseating experience from which there seems no escape.
It's biggest manifestation comes in what we often call political correctness. When many of us see the stories on the madness, we often see accompanying comments to it in which the average man and woman in the street say
"This is political correctness gone mad" or something similar.
My first memory of this craziness came in the mid to late 80's when the stories started coming through into the mainstream press. There were stories in which we first got a taste of the madness. It seemed surreal in which everything we had thought nothing odd about was suddenly considered sexist, racist and every other "ist" you could think off. These stories started being discussed by a bewildered population outside of the press typically calling them "crazy". Those conversations started to include things like stories about British nursery rhymes such as bah bah black sheep being banned in parts of the country because of these "ists" amongst other things. Whether the nursery rhyme was actually a true example of something being banned I can't say but the awareness of this madness was very real.
The common comment was that it was madness but we thought it would die down. To a degree it seemed to but what happened in reality was that it diverted into other areas and it is still with us today and is probably even more pervasive than it was back then. We still regard it as madness as we did then. That however is not the really scary bit.
The scary bit is the understanding that is held by the public. The understanding most people have as we did back then is that this political correctness is some kind of mad aberration of thought held by a small lunatic fringe. The common perception it's just some people who've gone off the rails and have become detached from reality with some odd notion and that some other idiots have just fallen for it. The view held by most people is that they are what some of my late relatives would have called "crackpots".
The inference in that thinking is that it's a benign madness that has either taken a temporary hold and has happened by some kind of accident. Right there in that thinking is the danger. Such a perception creates a shrugging of the shoulders in most people who then try to get back on with their daily lives presuming some how of course this "madness" will leave them alone.
Unfortunately that is far from the truth. The real truth is that far from being a bit of aberrant nonsense that bewilders us, it is, in fact, the manifestation of a very deliberate thought process. Some very bright yet malign minds sowed the seeds for this many decades ago, to bring about something very destructive to the way we live our lives. It's aim is not to leave us alone. Its aim is to entwine itself in as many aspects as possible of our daily lives. Shrugging our shoulders is not an option.
Serendipity struck today because as I was writing this post, James Higham over at Nourishing Obscurity also brought the subject up.
Political Correctness is one item in the toolbox of a group of Marxist academics who wanted to bring about a Marxist utopia. Political correctness was not a spontaneous creation running from the 1980's to today. It has been slowly gaining ground inch by inch for decades now. It's original proponents thought endlessly about it. Why? Because it was a means to an end.
James has a nice little 13 minute video within his post that gives a summary of it. Also below is a somewhat dated video that gives a bit more background to it. If you can get past the dated aspect and hear the words it lays out in 20 minutes more background of this seemingly spontaneous madness.
The reason I've posted this is because although it's probably known to most bloggers it's something that passes by most of the non blogging population and I hope that one day they will come upon this post and understand what is really happening around them. I'm struggling to articulate just how dangerous it is that this is a deliberate philosophy as opposed to a spontaneous buffoonery by imbeciles that it is widely regarded as. If people knew the difference, I'm certain they would not be so passive about it's existence.
It was Marcus Tullius Cicero who wrote:
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
That was their plan. To get inside and collapse it. It was people like communist revolutionary, Willi Munzenberg who described the strategy of the Frankfurt Institute as thus:
"We will make the west so corrupt that it stinks"
I'm going to end the post here. It's not the end of a direction I'm taking, but, for now, I need you to understand that you're looking at a deliberate philosophy. The madness you see is not an accident. Someone (in fact several someones) thought it up. That should scare us all.
As I journeyed across the dance floor the combination of alcohol, fog and strobe lighting was really quite disorientating and nauseating. I had no sense of where I was or direction of travel. The sensory overload was coming from every imaginable direction. It was very surreal and very uncomfortable and it felt inescapable
Unfortunately there was more to come. The DJ was playing New Model Army's 51st State of America and this had prompted everyone who who was up for a bit of "slam dancing" to take to the floor. Slam dancing was in effect, moving around the whole dance floor with your fists flailing around in all directions. I was desperate to get off the floor and as I made for safety, out of the fog, came a dance floor assassin enjoying the madness with one of his flailing fists catching me smack in the face before disappearing into the fog again.
Why do I tell this strange tale of my student days on this blog/ I tell it because it sits for me as a perfect analogy of the seemingly inescapable madness that goes on all around us. It reminds me of the total inversion of common sense and of honesty that grips much of the western world. This inversion sees failure and mediocrity lauded over genuine achievement. It sees tyranny masquerading as open society. It sees obvious lies treated as the truth. It sees thieves as victims and let off and it sees genuine victims treated as corrupt or hung out to dry. There's much much more to this. It's everywhere and its endless. To witness it is to feel like I did all those years ago, drunk and surrounded by fog, disorientating strobe lights and the occasional punch in the face where you come right up against it before it runs off again leaving you reeling. The whole thing is a disorientating nauseating experience from which there seems no escape.
It's biggest manifestation comes in what we often call political correctness. When many of us see the stories on the madness, we often see accompanying comments to it in which the average man and woman in the street say
"This is political correctness gone mad" or something similar.
My first memory of this craziness came in the mid to late 80's when the stories started coming through into the mainstream press. There were stories in which we first got a taste of the madness. It seemed surreal in which everything we had thought nothing odd about was suddenly considered sexist, racist and every other "ist" you could think off. These stories started being discussed by a bewildered population outside of the press typically calling them "crazy". Those conversations started to include things like stories about British nursery rhymes such as bah bah black sheep being banned in parts of the country because of these "ists" amongst other things. Whether the nursery rhyme was actually a true example of something being banned I can't say but the awareness of this madness was very real.
The common comment was that it was madness but we thought it would die down. To a degree it seemed to but what happened in reality was that it diverted into other areas and it is still with us today and is probably even more pervasive than it was back then. We still regard it as madness as we did then. That however is not the really scary bit.
The scary bit is the understanding that is held by the public. The understanding most people have as we did back then is that this political correctness is some kind of mad aberration of thought held by a small lunatic fringe. The common perception it's just some people who've gone off the rails and have become detached from reality with some odd notion and that some other idiots have just fallen for it. The view held by most people is that they are what some of my late relatives would have called "crackpots".
The inference in that thinking is that it's a benign madness that has either taken a temporary hold and has happened by some kind of accident. Right there in that thinking is the danger. Such a perception creates a shrugging of the shoulders in most people who then try to get back on with their daily lives presuming some how of course this "madness" will leave them alone.
Unfortunately that is far from the truth. The real truth is that far from being a bit of aberrant nonsense that bewilders us, it is, in fact, the manifestation of a very deliberate thought process. Some very bright yet malign minds sowed the seeds for this many decades ago, to bring about something very destructive to the way we live our lives. It's aim is not to leave us alone. Its aim is to entwine itself in as many aspects as possible of our daily lives. Shrugging our shoulders is not an option.
Serendipity struck today because as I was writing this post, James Higham over at Nourishing Obscurity also brought the subject up.
Political Correctness is one item in the toolbox of a group of Marxist academics who wanted to bring about a Marxist utopia. Political correctness was not a spontaneous creation running from the 1980's to today. It has been slowly gaining ground inch by inch for decades now. It's original proponents thought endlessly about it. Why? Because it was a means to an end.
James has a nice little 13 minute video within his post that gives a summary of it. Also below is a somewhat dated video that gives a bit more background to it. If you can get past the dated aspect and hear the words it lays out in 20 minutes more background of this seemingly spontaneous madness.
The reason I've posted this is because although it's probably known to most bloggers it's something that passes by most of the non blogging population and I hope that one day they will come upon this post and understand what is really happening around them. I'm struggling to articulate just how dangerous it is that this is a deliberate philosophy as opposed to a spontaneous buffoonery by imbeciles that it is widely regarded as. If people knew the difference, I'm certain they would not be so passive about it's existence.
It was Marcus Tullius Cicero who wrote:
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
That was their plan. To get inside and collapse it. It was people like communist revolutionary, Willi Munzenberg who described the strategy of the Frankfurt Institute as thus:
"We will make the west so corrupt that it stinks"
I'm going to end the post here. It's not the end of a direction I'm taking, but, for now, I need you to understand that you're looking at a deliberate philosophy. The madness you see is not an accident. Someone (in fact several someones) thought it up. That should scare us all.
I won't
Following on from my last post I stumbled upon another piece from our US cousins that applies equally to us and most other nations. I don't watch Judge Judy (which is what this video seems to be) but this is a great example of all that is wrong.
I would say listen to just how wrongheaded the logic is, but there is no logic. The fact that the money is both help and for a specified purpose simply does not register. All this person can see is that it's money and it's "his". In his mind there's no need for accountability.
There's just too much of this It's a thinking that pervades in our society today. Our man here has gone beyond seeing this as welfare. This is now money he's entitled to for whatever he sees fit. It's the "I'm owed" mindset and we can all point to some of this suggesting that its quite a pervasive way of thinking.
Of course in any society there is "I can't" and that is what the welfare state is for. But this video isn't I can't. This video is I won't. I won't eventually generalises into I'm owed because I won't requires you to face up to some stark truths about yourself and that's a bit too close for comfort, so we have to turn it around and make like we're victims of something other than feathering our nests.
The problem is it will cripple us in ways we cannot begin to imagine.
Worse still my notion isn't rocket science. Everyone grasps it because they can see. The only people who won't seem to mention it is politicians and that's for at least two reasons. Firstly there are no votes in it. Secondly and despite their overuse of the word leadership, we simply do not have people running the show with the courage and vision to get this nation on it's feet again.
You / we have to turn this thinking around because without it we will never see a single cut back simply because there are no votes in it. To fail to do so has grave consequences. Endless spending and increases will break the system and whilst the truly vulnerable will lose out, the I can'ts won't know how to cope either and because their first response in all things is to take what's not theirs, the violence will start.
Of course that might suit the advocates of the Cloward Piven strategy just fine
Footnote
Before any trolls decide this video is a race thing - forget it. It isn't and any attempt by such people to claim it is, is just flat out wrong and makes you a disgrace. I don't care what colour a person is. I care about what people do that makes them honest and upright and what they contribute to this nation in order to keep it on the right track. So you can take your Frankfurt School agitprop elsewhere
I would say listen to just how wrongheaded the logic is, but there is no logic. The fact that the money is both help and for a specified purpose simply does not register. All this person can see is that it's money and it's "his". In his mind there's no need for accountability.
There's just too much of this It's a thinking that pervades in our society today. Our man here has gone beyond seeing this as welfare. This is now money he's entitled to for whatever he sees fit. It's the "I'm owed" mindset and we can all point to some of this suggesting that its quite a pervasive way of thinking.
Of course in any society there is "I can't" and that is what the welfare state is for. But this video isn't I can't. This video is I won't. I won't eventually generalises into I'm owed because I won't requires you to face up to some stark truths about yourself and that's a bit too close for comfort, so we have to turn it around and make like we're victims of something other than feathering our nests.
The problem is it will cripple us in ways we cannot begin to imagine.
Worse still my notion isn't rocket science. Everyone grasps it because they can see. The only people who won't seem to mention it is politicians and that's for at least two reasons. Firstly there are no votes in it. Secondly and despite their overuse of the word leadership, we simply do not have people running the show with the courage and vision to get this nation on it's feet again.
You / we have to turn this thinking around because without it we will never see a single cut back simply because there are no votes in it. To fail to do so has grave consequences. Endless spending and increases will break the system and whilst the truly vulnerable will lose out, the I can'ts won't know how to cope either and because their first response in all things is to take what's not theirs, the violence will start.
Of course that might suit the advocates of the Cloward Piven strategy just fine
Footnote
Before any trolls decide this video is a race thing - forget it. It isn't and any attempt by such people to claim it is, is just flat out wrong and makes you a disgrace. I don't care what colour a person is. I care about what people do that makes them honest and upright and what they contribute to this nation in order to keep it on the right track. So you can take your Frankfurt School agitprop elsewhere
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