Health Warning

Don’t Talk To Strangers

I remember a time when paedophilia was in the headlines and the warning to children «don’t talk to strangers» was widely broadcast. The warning was a bit heavy-handed: as an aging man I felt it inhibited me in any potentially mutually happy and innocuous encounter with a passing child. However, the caution may well have been effective in many cases and, if so, was worth much more than any slight inhibition or inconvenience on my or anybody else’s part.

I’m concerned with a different issue now, one that would come with a warning along the lines of «beware what you believe, what you think you know, becuase you are being manipulated». In this case the danger is not just possible, it is certain. It’s obvious because product advertising is all around us and that is exactly what product advertising seeks to do. However, everyone by now should be conscious of that and the worst outcome is probably that you buy something you don’t really want or need or, more seriously, really can’t afford. Apply that to your view of the world though, your view of other people, your country, the whole planet even, and the question becomes very much more serious.

Let’s be clear; attempts, often very subtle, subliminal and sophisticated, are now being made all the time to manipulate you in these much wider aspects. So how do you warn a population at large that that is happening in a way that they will appreciate, understand and take to heart?

There is an easy but ineffectual answer: the educational system. The answer is ineffectual because most current educational systems fail most people to some extent most of the time. It might be effective if everyone on the planet had a PhD but that is never going to be the case however low governments make standards in order to show superficially better statistics.

I can’t think of an answer at the moment but I have a flight of fancy. Suppose that, just as every cigarette packet (in Europe) now has to carry a health warning, every newspaper and news bulletin had to carry the warning that «while every effort has been made to ensure that the factual content of what you read/see is true, it may not be». And suppose that any divergence from that, in any medium, should be actionable in a court of law.

OK, it’s fanciful and heavy-handed but it addresses the really big question: how can the manipulators on national and global questions be subjected to some control?

Pandora's Box

Two Very Important Questions: Pandora’s Box

If Johnson succeeds in by-passing Parliament and getting a no-deal Brexit, and if Corbyn wins the next general election and wants to pass extreme socialist legislation unlikely to get through Parliament, why shouldn’t he use the same mechanism? Rationally, what’s the objection?

Secondly, if Parliament can be by-passed in this way, how effective is Parliament as the bastion of British democracy? Read Orwell before sending answers on a postcard.

Conspiracy Theory

Everyone loves a conspiracy theory so why not? When we think of solidarity and collective protection we typically think of unions and cooperatives, the less privileged trying to protect themselves from more powerful individual people or organisations. But suppose some of those more powerful individuals and organisations decide to themselves form a collective? Individually they don’t need to because they are rich and powerful and can do more or less what they want. But suppose they have higher ambitions; to control a large part of the world in their favour? What is to stop them if they so choose? They would need to control the media but already mostly do. Most people read only one newspaper or watch only one news channel so the main media need be the only targets. Their only problem is the Internet. It has been designed so that it cannot easily be controlled but it holds limitless information to be used and that can be obtained at a price. And who can best afford that price? So at least if they cannot control it they can make good use of it to further their purposes. Who or what can counter this?

Answers on a postcard again (after having read your Orwell).

Summer Or Autumn?

Summer Or Autumn?

As happened last year for the first time in my memory, autumn seems to have arrived in mid-August. The days are still hot but below 35 degrees in the sun and the early mornings and evenings are cool, typically around 11-14 degrees. I find that very pleasant and, if the past is anything to go by, it should last into October. Winter as known in the UK doesn’t usually start here until December.

When my son Carl was here he immediately remarked that the blue of the sky here is a type of blue that he had never seen in the UK. It’s what I have been trying to capture on camera but it probably needs a better camera than mine. I’ve been trying to define the difference without much success but am coming to the conclusion that it is less a matter of shade (although the shade here seems to have more violet/purple in it than in the UK), than of depth: the blue in the sky, of whatever shade, seems to have much more depth than in the UK sky.

Last night I went to the mussels and chips evening in the square in front of the Bar du Pont. Despite the fact that there were far more visitors than locals, so fewer people I knew, it proved to be a lovely evening. There was music from a man from Faucon playing a guitar, dancing and, what I love most, people of all ages just having a great time. Just before I left the guitarist struck up with «Emmenez-moi», an Aznavour song that always makes my own heart sing.

«Emmenez-moi au bout de la terre, emmenez-moi au pays des merveils, il me semble que la misère, serait moins pénible au soleil». As a friend once remarked, «c’est joyeux».

I couldn’t ask for more.

The Garden

Because of the change in intensity of the weather, watering has become a less desperate activity, although it is still needed every other day. Many of my plants have been «fried» despite my attempts to keep them thriving and I’ve had to replace the plants in the hanging baskets and will have to look later on at what has survived in the back garden. However I have a bumper crop of grapes on my balcony. I never, in any musings on my future, imagined having a home where I could simply reach up from a seat on a balcony and grab a bunch of grapes but now I can.

The Environment As An Equaliser

Around where I live in France there have been a number of improvements to open spaces, cleaning them up, refurbishing or developing them, to the benefit of everyone, whatever their status, who lives there. These have all been projects paid for out of the public purse. Why would any individual, other than an altruistic benefactor, want to do that? And therein lies the rub.

Anyone very rich needn’t bother with such matters; they can simply move, as and when they please, to an environment that suits them. Most of the less wealthy may be able to move where they live a few times in their lives or take occasional breaks but wull live for years continuously in one place. The poor are stuck with what they have got. So improvements to the environment are a great equaliser, benefiting everyone, but they are dependent on a public purse to provide them. Anyone happy to disregard or trivialise the need for public services should take heed.

Brexit Theory And Practice

Theory And Practice In Brexit

I have an acquaintance who has a bag emblazoned with the slogan «I want to live in Theory, because in Theory everything works». There can be a general problem with referenda: whether the question posed asks what you want, or what you want within what you can can get. That is, do you want to live in Theory or in Practice? The UK referendum asked what people wanted, not what they wanted within what they could get. It asked for decisions in Theory rather than in Practice. Hence the unicorns. You can get unicorns, paradise, in Theory but not in Practice.

Paradise has easy slogans; who doesn’t want it? Wish what you like and you, in Theory, can have it. Who wants to live in Practice, where everything we want doesn’t always work? Except that in fact that is where we all live. Like it or not, and you probably would like it to be different, we all live in Practice.

So we all want independence, soveriegnty for our country and for our lives. Who wouldn’t? But the UK can’t even feed itself, some 40% of its food is imported. In Practice, how much independence does that allow, if we all want to continue being fed? So the UK needs to trade successfully, pitting its offer of access to a market within the EU of 520 million or alone of access to a market of 60 million, against access to markets of hundreds of millions more than in the UK alone in the USA, China, Japan and India. Where is the relative market strength to negotiate with there? In Practice rather than in Theory, where is the UK’s strongest position?

But there are other considerations in the UK, of course. The question of the Irish border, for instance. Northern Ireland’s independence rests, in Practice, on a delicate balance between, among other things, wars of religion that Britain and the rest of Europe gave up on around the 18th century. The Good Friday agreement resolved that in Pracice but Brexit proposes to re-open the dispute, an essentially meadiaeval war, in Theory.

Then there is Scotland’s desire for greater independence from England. While Scotland is in the UK which is in the EU, the EU quite naturally said it wouldn’t consider Scotland as an independent applicant for EU membership. And an independence referendum proposal in Scotland failed because primarily the old and nationalistic voted for it; the young and less nationalistic saw their future within the UK within the EU. In Theory Scotland will always be part of the UK but take the UK in the EU out from that scenario and how will the young and the EU itself vote then? What do you have in Practice?

And there is the problem of national independence. We all want the nation whose nationality we claim to be independent. In Theory, that is sacrosanct. In Practice, we know that is not true because otherwise why would nations ever conclude alliances, for military, commercial or other reasons? In Theory we are independent (even for food) and have to give nothing we want in exchange: in Practice we know we are interdependent. The only question, in Practice rather than Theory, is on whom: the EU, the USA, or which countries and for what and what do we have to give in exchange?

The problem with Practice is that it doesn’t promise dreams of paradise, all that you want, without conflicts. Theory of course can, provided that you are happy to assume that there are never, anywhere at any time, any conflcits to resolve. Where do you live?

Brexit Review

Review Of Brexit

Everyone now knows, or should know, the battles going on with regard to Brexit. It’s still possible some kind of reasonable deal can be made but the major bets seem to be on a no-deal Brexit, whatever the consequences, which are generally presumed to be seriously negative.

So, to get perspective, let’s go back three years to pre-referendum times. What was happening in the UK then? The UK then was a major player in the most important economic block in the world, economically robust in itself with a strong currency and positive trade balance. The country was prosperous, even if that prosperity wasn’t being shared equitably.

What were the promises of Brexit? Another £350 million for the NHS, now a subsidiary budgetary consideration, subsidiary to emergency measures. Independence to conduct our own trade deals? Some 50 or so to be renegotiated on the basis of access to a market of 60 million rathet than 510 million and new deals in which we pitch our 60 million market strength against that of the size of markets in the USA, China and India. Who are we trying to kid?

Now? There is talk of the Dunkirk spirit, emergency measures to counteract resource deficiencies of food, medical supplies, etc, and major budget allocations not to grow the natioçn’s wealth and make citizens better off but to ward off penury and economic failure. Why? As a political manifesto when no one is at war with the UK, how does that stand up? Where is the gain, who benefits? Certainly not the average working person in the UK, who faces loss of jobs and higher prices for food and other essentials. So why are so many people still voting for this? It makes no sense at all.

If it makes no sense, and most people can be credited with reasonably good sense, what has happened to peoples’ good sense? They must have been manipulated in some way, en masse, and that can happen only via the mass media. So who owns the mass media and what have they to gain? And who in positions of political power are backing this deception and why? Think about it, read your Orwell.