The Errors of Comedy

THE ERRORS OF COMEDY? Lance Goodman

Copyright © 2020 Lance Goodman All rights reserved.

ISBN: ISBN-13:

This is dedicated to the one I love.

For her patience and forbearance.

Thanks to Sean Holland for the edit – and the rescue!

Table of Contents Chest pain is not funny. ...............................................................5 NASA, in a leaked report, .............................................................7 Camelot’s mystery. ......................................................................8 Capital....................................................................................... 12 George Carlin.............................................................................18 The Psychology of the penis. ...................................................... 21 Back to the future in the past. .................................................... 23 Threats to the public’s health. .................................................... 25 Fuck off. .................................................................................... 27 Your papers please?...................................................................31 Inequality and the 1%. ............................................................... 35 It’s raining again. .......................................................................40 Masters of the Universe. ............................................................ 41 Dirty Money. .............................................................................43 A scientologist homeopath in a K hole. .......................................46

Introduction

What follows is a series of short, some very short, essays on a range of topics almost picked at random. The choice is not driven by any narrative line but my random interests in events and issues I think are pertinent.

They can be read in any order you like. If there is a theme at all it is about resisting dominant, bigoted narratives that flood the cultural universe, often to be found in the pages of UK tabloid newspapers.

lancegoodman@mac.com Twitter: @SociologicalBen https://funnypeoplefunnythings.wordpress.com

https://sustainablesociety.uk

1 Chest pain is not funny.

The ‘joker’ lay almost flat on his back on the opposite hospital bed to me.

“You’ve heard of a French letter, yeah? Well, what’s a Dutch letter? A condom with clogs on so they can hear you coming” (boom boom).

He rasped his jokes in between sucking in oxygen through plastic nasal speculum, while his rheumy eyes, long devoid of sparkle, attempted to project wit, but utterly failed to do so.

“Did you hear about the two queers in a telephone box? They were ‘ringing’ (geddit?), ringing each other”.

And so I found myself transported back in time to when Jim Davidson was allowed, the mini metro was cutting edge technology and sexual assault was regarded as a little light flirting. A time when the classification of ‘rape’ was reserved for activities including the actual blindfolding and torture of young ladies in darkly lit back alleys in Whitechapel.

The ‘joker’ lay almost flat on his back on the opposite hospital bed. He wore, or rather was draped, in an NHS gown which barely covered his legs. The flap of the gown rode up so high on his thigh that it invited a shrivelled walnut shaped hairy scrotum to make its appearance, but thankfully we were spared. His dark sunken eyes and sallow complexion, his wrinkled turtle necked skin upholding a blotchy, mottled liver spotted complexion which, thanks to hair loss, covered his whole pate, were all testament to years of smoking. He rasped his jokes in between sucking in oxygen through plastic nasal speculae, while his rheumy eyes, long devoid of sparkle, attempted to project wit, but utterly failed to do so.

Instead, Death’s bony fingers drummed impatiently on the bedside table, perhaps waiting for his cue, and certainly waiting for the end of the jokes.

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“OH, DO SHUT UP”, Death silently boomed into his ear, “YOU ARE ALREADY LATE”.

Why it did not occur to Death to merely sever the plastic oxygen tube with one swing of the scythe is something to regret, no doubt, and to take to his grave, always supposing Death has a grave.

A hospital ward is not always a happy place.

It might be something to do with the people who go there. It might be something to do with the amount of forced cheer amid the pools of blood, piss and broken dreams. It is often a place in which a lifetime’s aspirations, vision and long hoped for achievement smash into the reality of desperation and blood flecked sputum often spewed out through clouds of alcohol infused breath and fag ash. A place where one hoped to live but come to die, where the milk of human kindness is not supposed to curdle, and where faith, hope and charity are not merely long faded memories or the names of a trio of white doe eyed fluffy kittens the vet accidentally put down after mixing up the lab results with that of a cancer riddled mutt with rabies.

The patients are not much better. especially when they tell jokes.

So, I find myself admitted for investigations and treatment after spending a brightly lit and noisy night in the ED. Ah, sleep, perchance to dream of fluffy pillows, soft warm duvets and dark peace. Imagine, if you can, being in a K hole but with operating theatre lights trained to hit your retina with the brightness of a thousand Hiroshimas. Noise assaults your every sense, you can even taste it. It’s not the EDs fault...for how else can they help assess, diagnose and treat humanity’s fear, stupidity and decrepitude. The only people at peace here are the near dead (and the actual dead).

“WELL, WHAT DID THEY EXPECT WITH THE ‘IRISHMAN WALKS INTO A BAR’ ROUTINE.” I’m keeping my witticisms to the minimum over the next few days.

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(Homage to Terry Pratchett’s character: ‘Death’)

2 NASA, in a leaked report.

NASA today revealed that the search for extra-terrestrial life forms may be over.

In a surprise finding, NASA scientists explored sites closer to home: Washington DC. The life form they found is a simple organic body with no discernible nervous system or capacity for intellectual or intelligent processing.

Being an ‘organic simple' rather than a 'complex carbon' based life form, it lacks empathic understanding or ethical reasoning powers. There is evidence however that it has adapted to its hosts’ social environment by emulating the behaviour of Homo Sapiens by being a complete and utter bastard.

NASA thinks the life form is not alone and is widespread, developing symbiotic relationships with certain personality types even to the point 7

of taking over the host nervous system in a parasitic manner. To spot them, look for narcissism, psychopathy, stupid haircuts and orange skin.

Due to critical faculties being impaired in the hosts, dress sense reduces to either drab high collar uniform or the standard business suit. The hosts' judgement is so impaired that their survival depends upon a high degree of sycophancy around them.

The search for intelligent life in the solar system has been called off as a result of this discovery, as scientists reason that if this is the best the galaxies can produce, then the search is not worth it.

Dr Nigel Flange of the Faculty of Research Studies stated: "There's a Star Man waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds".

So, if you see a strangely suited, orange skinned creature or one with a fat face and hair like a badger's back combed bollock...you have been warned, they may be from another galaxy and know not of what they speak.

3 Camelot’s mystery.

Arthur: "Well I am king..."

Man: "Oh, king, eh, very nice. And 'ow'd you get that, eh? By exploiting

the workers! By 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there's ever going to be any progress.. ."

Arthur: "I am Arthur, King of the Britons".

Woman: "I didn't know we 'ad a king! I thought we were an autonomous collective."

Man: "You're fooling yourself! We're living in a dictatorship! A self-

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perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes ..."

Woman: "There you go, bringing class into it again... " Woman: "Well I didn't vote for you!"

Arthur: "You don't vote for kings!"

Woman: "Well 'ow'd you become king then ?"

Arthur: "The Lady of the Lake-- her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!"

Man: "Listen: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some... farcical aquatic ceremony!"

(Monty Python and The Holy Grail).

I was reminded of this discussion after seeing a Facebook post about Prince Harry and his girlfriend, Meghan Markle. The Daily Mail ran with this story: Harry was out shooting anything that moved in Bavaria, while Meghan was in Toronto. The 'story' was that Meghan is a vegetarian while her 'prince charming' is out and about putting a bullet between the eyes of unsuspecting fauna that unhappily strayed into his crosshairs.

Earlier in the week we were fed stories about 'Wills' and 'Harry' and their emotional struggles to come to terms with their mother's death. I should not have to say, that of course this is a personal tragedy for them both, and they deserve the same respect as anyone who has lost a parent in such circumstances.

Perhaps that is my point here. That as ordinary human beings, if 'pricked, do they not bleed?' It is not their very human being that I find nauseatingly obnoxious. It is their status as 'Royals' - an anachronism which the peasants in the Holy Grail upon meeting Arthur recognised.

Of course the film is fiction, and it is unlikely that 'the peasant' in the 12th century had such a discourse to challenge the 'Divine Right of Kings'.

The 'Divine Right' was of course complete bollocks. The Church was and still is complicit in this fiction and fairy tale.

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It was merely a justification for rich and powerful families to keep the populace in line and to keep their Royal and unearned standard of living based on the sweating backs of labouring classes. Of course it is about class, it still is! How do powerful people justify their wealth and privilege?

They need a unifying myth. God is a great 'go to' myth. How does a Pope get to live in a palace while never getting any shit in his fingernails? How do the Cardinals and Bishops live in well fed and isolated splendour while also ignoring the founder's injunctions on wealth? Keep the populace ignorant and claim the status of God's emissary on earth. Challenge the Pope and you challenge God himself.

Today, we have added 'The American Dream', 'Free Market Capitalism' and especially in the UK a renaissance of Imperial Glory as we wallow in post-colonial melancholia.

I'm also pissed off with the seemingly never-ending chorus of sycophantic media arse licking of anything that smells of money, privilege and royal heritage. The UK press are sickeningly uncritical of anything the saints of Windsor are up to. I swear I'll have to move to an island in the middle of the Pacific when the Queen dies. I'll have to do so to avoid the swamp of cherry-picked nostalgia. They will all be at it.

We will be told ad nauseam how the present incumbent of the 'Divine Right' has served the country; how she showed forbearance when her castle (her castle FFS!) burned down; how she managed the Royal PR to become immensely popular even after the Diana fiasco; how the 'fuzzy wuzzies' all over the world call her Queen and how much they love her; how she carried out her 'duty' as if she had no choice but to accept a life of wealth and privilege; how her 'annus horibilis' nonetheless turned into a triumph.

Why all of this fawning? Why do the ruling class and the establishment especially, whip out the flag at the drop of a royal wave? Why do we buy into it?

Royalty is symbolic. It has no legal powers (much) but its symbolic power is immense, and the ruling class know it. Royals sit at the symbolic head of a 'natural hierarchy' of 'God - Queen - Ruling class - Oiks'.

Most of us know God is a myth, a fairy tale. So, the top of the hierarchy 10

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has been removed, but not for everyone. If the Queen is also seen as a privileged mythology and has no right to be second in the hierarchy then we, domino like, come to the ruling class. If we get that far having dismissed the justifications for God and Queen...might we examine the founding myths the ruling class use?

Our current inability to echo the question from the Holy Grail about the divine right stems from uncritical, unthinking acceptance of this hierarchy. The Queen's position is a lynch pin holding the whole mythology together. Remove the lynch pin and the whole edifice could fall apart. If the Queen is not God appointed, if "some watery tart waving about a scimitar" is not the basis for executive power, then what is? Remove the Queen, remove the myth and what have you left? The Hierarchy then needs another justification. In the US, the 'Dream' is a founding myth, alongside 'rugged individualism'. In the UK, we would have to find faith in something. We are losing faith with free market capitalism, but we do have the military and mythical 'British Values', values which of course airbrush out of history privateering, colonial conquest, genocide, concentration camps and class exploitation. All justified with a sense of racial superiority as expressed in the 'civilising process' of the White Man's burden.

If the peasants ask “why are you King then?� they might ask other awkward questions such as 'who has power, how did they get it, in whose interest do they use it and how do we get rid of them?' The Queen acts as bulwark against such awkward questions, because if we can accept Royalty as myth we can accept any number of myths.

It works by evoking 'magic' and 'awe' - raw emotions and vicarious experiences. Young women may not be able to look and dress like Kate, but they can aspire to. Calling the Princes 'Wills and Harry' and of course 'Kate', provides a patina of unearned ordinariness which allows us to think they are like us, and if they are like us then we too can aspire.

Evoking the Princes' pain over their mother's death serves various purposes, one of which is the myth "they are just like us". Such thinking serves to deflect awkward questions.

"Us" do not have a divine right to be anything.

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4 Capital.

When no one is looking, when silence falls like a heavy blanket, while dust particles float in the shaft of sunlight in the dimness, slim bony fingers move over the keyboard. Nods are given and winks flashed in order to transfer big numbers via noughts and ones from a shady hidden one to a darker other. Old school ties are metaphorically straightened, thoughts turn to the Club when the day’s work is done. Dreams of avarice beckon one on like an old fashioned Soho whore in the doorway.

Lust will put its boots on after Greed has paved the way and to make it acceptable to one’s addled moral conscience, cliché upon banality upon lies will tell the story to oneself, to provide the silken pure white sheets that cover the blood and sweated faecal stains of the night’s endeavours.

Capital accumulates in strange ways. Some are open and honest, save for the overlooking of the true nature of the transaction which always involves taking more candy from the baby than is actually given to it.

This is a sleight of hand worthy of cardsharps and magicians of the most celebrated of seaside ‘end of pier’ shows. Now you see the surplus….

Capital used to just kill people openly by pitting spears and wishful thinking against flag, cannon and musket. Gold, nutmeg and people were exchanged for religion and germs backed up by guns and steel.

This imperial and colonial routine followed the removing, at home, of peasants’ access to the commons through telling them the story of Divine Right of Kings, backed up visions of hell for the non-believer.

‘Divine Right’ has been replaced by threats of ‘Venezuelan Marxism’ as the stick with which to beat the peasants.

Shoving a rifle in someone’s face while you steal their land, is of course 12

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a bit passé, a bit too obvious and unnecessary in the digital networked age. Instead, join the Club, the one that Capital keeps hidden in the murk of misinformation, disinformation, ideology and obfuscation. We are told, or we pretend to believe, the Club does not exist. Yet, some of us aspire to joining the Club, dreaming of the day the invitation flops onto the doormat accompanied by the sound of crying and dying babies being droned bombed in faraway places to the soundtrack of the tuneless drivel of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or ‘Gosudárstvennyj gimn Rossíjskoj Federácii’.

Its membership is exclusive of course, and the hoi polloi have as much a chance of joining, as it has of finding itself showered with gold plated rose petals in a one star, pissed stained, public lavatory run by Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council on fire. Instead the Club works behind the scenes while the hoi polloi get fingered and fucked like a Hollywood starlet in a Producer’s hotel bedroom. Our collective prostate is being massaged by the big, fat, hairy knuckled finger of corporate banking and will go onto until we realise our screams for mercy are caused not by the pain of seeing the ‘skiving disabled sick shirking their responsibilities for looking after their mums and dads while sponging off the state’. Rather we might see that the origins of our screams lead back to the invitation to the hotel room, that it was a promise to be bent over and humped by the fickle phallus of finance lightly lubricated by the emollient of ideological cover. Yet in that room, we have chosen, or been forced, to swallow the salted seminal poison of the misdirection and legerdemain of finance capital.

Not all banks are bad of course. But when we read of certain activities linking South Africa, fraud, money laundering, and the buying of influence, which has ruined a UK public relations company and damaged auditors KPMG, we might like to consider that given the heroic role of finance in the US and the UK that this might be a tip of the iceberg? We might want to open the hotel door little wider just as the skirts are being lifted for another go at the naïf?

(PS. In 2020, the answer to the last was ‘no’ as the vagaries of the UK election system and the combined force of the ideological machine 13

resulted in the election of a clown as PM).

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5 Sex. Authority. Nanny. Spanking and Masochism.

All traits probably to be found in the breasts of certain posh and blond Tory spokespersons, and their fellow travellers. These men, and it is usually men, are both architects and victims of the 'repressive desublimation' they want for us and themselves. They want to punish themselves and to amplify their autoerotic impulses through punishing the country, for what is Austerity other than puritanical self-loathing and punishment as redemption for unfulfilled, and prohibited, sexual sins?

Through the offer of gratifications, repressive desublimation removes the energies otherwise available for a social critique; and thus to function as a conservative force under the guise of liberation.

In other words, deeper psychosexual tensions within the individual need to find a gratifying release which for some is Austerity for others it is guns, both are touted as in some way providing liberation and freedom in an inversion of morality. I blame the public schools.

"Suppression of the natural sexuality of the child...makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good, and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyses the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties" (Wilhelm Reich 1933).

Authority, and its fear, are repressed sexual impulses manifest then in obedience and conformity. Love of 'Monarchy, Military and Middle England' are manifestations of unfulfilled sexual desires which are both exciting but repressed as dirty. On the outside we are clean, we wear clean uniforms and we conform, to then outwardly express cleanliness because we are trying to fool everyone, especially ourselves, and that our inner dirty little secret must stay hidden. In extremis, this is turned into authoritarian control for everyone, because they fear they can't control themselves.

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Scratch the surface of a conformist authoritarian and you will find a dirty little wanker terrified that he has been caught out.

We do have restrictions to protect third parties from the actions of 'free' individuals. In the case of guns, apart from a questionable emotional attachment to semi-automatic weapons, there is no reason for a civilian to own such military hardware. By all means buy and own sport handguns and sport shotguns but within a strictly licensed and controlled environment. But military hardware? No, I argue you should not own one.

Never.

Not even in rifle clubs.

There is darkness there. Look deep into your soul, really deep and I think you'll find psychosexual issues at the root of much of gun ownership and gun worship. It's a penis substitute for weak or bullied people who perceive lack of control in many areas of life, and thus have a deep emotional drive to show to the world and to themselves that they are people to be reckoned with. They then rationalise this psychosexual inner drama by externalising it and referring to spurious notions of liberty, rights and second amendment bollocks. It's a small wonder this does not happen more often as more and more Americans begin to feel national impotency in the eyes of a laughing world, adding to their sense of personal impotency. ‘Shooting one off shows 'em eh? Still got it, still got a hard one in my hand’.

What turns a person on about a powerful tube that ejaculates at the stroke of a finger?

Shooting inanimate objects in controlled sporting conditions in ranges is probably not based in sex, but I strongly suspect that is the case for owning an AK47* in Nevada.

So, no, Mr Trump, this is not 'pure evil*'. A category so shorn of 16

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explanatory power that it's as useful as showing a pair of shaved bollocks to a judge in order to support your claim for leniency.

*insert your favourite grouping of letters and numbers. *Trump’s comment after yet another mass shooting.

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6 George Carlin.

George Carlin was, and Frankie Boyle is, a comedian. And it falls to comedians to, at times, spike the ideological and smug self-serving petty bourgeois bubble that surrounds many politicians, a bubble that allows them to utter, on publicly funded platforms such as the BBC, complete codshit they allow to flow from their silver spooned throats like cancer inducing projectile vomit.

George reminds us that there is a 'Big Club', who don't want you to know that "you are owned". Members of this Club don't "want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking ". The Big Club exists and "you ain't in it", because "good honest hard working people continue elect rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about you " while they sell you the "American Dream". It’s a dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Frankie suggests "The Conservative party doesn’t really do principle, it’s

more of a pitch by elite interests at what they think the public might buy". This pitch is fronted by cartoons such as Boris Johnson and latterly by "Jacob Rees-Mogg, a composite figure drawn from the nightmares of 18th century millworkers. He looks like a Punch cartoon of the first giraffe in England, and maintains the general air of someone who has had a wank to the Book of Deuteronomy."

A Tory somewhere will spot an opportunity and start printing 'wipe clean' old testaments. Jesus will weep.

We should not have to be reminded that the Tories represent the interests of Capital while simultaneously trying to convince us that having milk snatched from babies mouths, throwing the disabled in front of buses, telling the mentally ill to 'pull themselves together and get a (zero hours) job' is the best thing since discovering that your willy is a source of eternal gratification, especially when you get someone else to stroke it.

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Members of the Big Club in the UK often share a certain background, but not exclusively so...they manage to co-opt members of all classes, some of whom lemming like, leap willingly into the abyss while some of their peers push them over the edge singing 'Rule Britannia'.

Our society is riddled with contradictions. We complain about a health and social care service being brought to its knees like a catholic choir boy being forced to swallow the acrid jizzum of Capital's High Priests while being told it tastes like honey, and yet we don't want to 'tax the rich' in case they take fright and hide away. We gawp at, and cheer on, one London based couple receiving State handouts because they talk posh, are pretty and went to a decent school while baying for the blood of other State supported couples who have the temerity not to be born in a gilded tower in Mayfair but to have lived in some other smoke stained tower in Kensington.

Frankie writes: "The contradictions of our society are managed by having

an elite class who have internalised them, often through attending public school and Oxbridge (Oxbridge is a compound term formed from the words obnoxious and privilege). What we often think of as the self-belief instilled by an elite education is really a kind of class exceptionalism, a belief that privilege is earned through talent and hard work, against all of the available evidence".

Don't confuse an 'elite' education' with 'education'.

Theresa May had an education. This included St. Juliana's Convent School for Girls, a Roman Catholic independent school. When she was 13, May won a place at the former Holton Park Girls' Grammar School, a state school in Wheatley. May then attended the University of Oxford where she read geography at St Hugh's College, graduating with a second class BA degree.

I'm assuming the geography she read at Oxford included the 'Ladybird of Book of the British Empire', Capitalism for Dummies' and 'How to Airbrush History'.

Recently May stated "A free market economy, operating under the right 19

rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created. It was the new combination which led societies out of darkness and stagnation and into the light of the modern age ... That is unquestionably the best, and indeed the only sustainable, means of increasing the living standards of everyone in a country".

May either does not know or wilfully ignores the fact that the 'free market' bit is bollocks, that neoliberalism is all rhetoric, not reality, one which serves the interests of Oligarchs and Plutocrats. That the notion of 'progress' is blind to the past and present human suffering required to create it, that to call other eras, and human societies that exist or have existed 'darkness and stagnation' is the arrogance of Anglo-American modernity...a modernity that is consuming itself, the biosphere and the planet. May is the product of a petty bourgeois home, spouting petty bourgeois platitudes, to a petty bourgeois audience whose tears of joy at such banalities flow as acid to the hopes, dreams and ambitions of billions.

The Big Club cheers while it watches its rentier and casino finance wealth pile up in untouchable tax havens. The arms dealers, the tobacco Lords, the military-industrial complex, the fossil fuel and media Barons, shower themselves with praise and dividends while the little people are distracted by two morons with an arsenal of nuclear weapons whose size is only matched by ego.

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7 The Psychology of the Penis.

Psychoanalysts in the US have been examining detailed evidence provided by professors in projectile physics (rocket scientists) at the Bikini Atoll Institute for the Study of Ionising Radiation, University of Hawaii, following the testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.

As the radioactive fallout settled down into the aquatic food chain, detailed psychological profiling using data found in molluscs, revealed a long suspected, but to date, unconfirmed thesis.

Notwithstanding the difficulty of extrapolating conclusions from the study of molluscs' post nuclear blast mating behaviour, a eureka moment occurred to scientists when observing two mussels (glowing bright green at this stage) facing each other and sticking out their little elongating pink feet from under their shells.

The diminutive molluscs did this in rapid succession as if to compare the size of their tiny muscles. A limitation to the analysis was the requirement to anthropomorphise this behaviour in order to apply the findings to the already documented psychodynamic behaviour in human ‘Alpha Males’, who have a tendency to display similar behaviour.

A key factor in the study, was the use of the nuclear weapon and its ionic radiative effect on aquatic fauna, who in response to being bathed in the fallout displayed alpha male behaviour normally seen in Political Leaders of tinpot dictatorships such as PRNK and in Washington DC. Dr Gottfried Freud of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Understanding of Marine Fauna, said of the molluscs, "it was as if they were in a competition to see who had the biggest dick". This finding suggests that political leaders not only like to compare the size of their phallic shaped rockets but that actual use, such as penetrating the space of another's enclosed airspace, actually encourages further comparison which could lead to further use and escalation.

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Dr Freud added that if this analysis was correct, then the aquatic studies reveal "we are fucked".

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8 Back to the future in the past.

Sources close to Downing Street are playing down rumours that future legislation might be based on the exegesis of certain texts which are to be found hidden away on dusty shelves in the dark corners of the library in the Ancestral Westcountry homes of the Aristocracy. While accepting that the House of Commons stores its Acts of Parliament written on now ancient 'vellum' (in this case, goat or sheepskin), it is keen to assure the public that the future will not be a repeat of the past and that tradition should not hinder the move into an age of the 'white heat of technology'.

Downing Street was forced, it is said, to speak out on its forward thinking agenda by a rogue ‘would be ministerial’ Aristocrat who is keen on 'hanging, flogging, shooting and keel hauling striking nurses'.

He has publicly gone on record as saying that "while the actual burning of witches might be regrettable, at least it got the peasants out in the fresh air for a few minutes break from shovelling shit all day, and cleared the Catholic Church of heresy once and for all".

The rogue aristo, code name ''JRM", also referred to "buggery, felching, rimming and midnight sodomy as sins", albeit in a wistful tone which some have interpreted as nostalgia for the practices commonly undertaken at some 'high end public schools' (allegedly).

Downing Street was reportedly apoplectic that this hinted leak of forthcoming social legislation was made to Derek behind the bar at the 'Crown and Noose' in Soho. 'JRM' also made reference to stripping women of the vote if caught wearing trousers or 'speaking louder than a man in public' or if they should fall pregnant and not follow through with it.

Dr Roger Felcher of the Institute of Studies said:

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"Young man, there's no need to feel down".

We will not tolerate homophobia in Downing Street or the Admiral Duncan said a Downing Street spokesperson, "JRM, can just grease his schoolboy opinions and shove them up his pretty little tight arse".

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9 Threats to the public’s health.

Public Health England are considering issuing a Health Alert aimed at people aged 18-24. It seems that this age group is susceptible to a particularly nasty virus which, if it infects you, causes neurological damage resulting in behaviour that may cause offence and distress to decent honest folk.

Symptoms include delusions of grandeur, moral vacuity and temporal shifts back to the 19th century, i.e. victims may start to believe that Victoria is still Queen, that Britain has an empire and that it is perfectly fine to say 'fuzzy wuzzy' in public.

The 'Rees-Mogg' virus is particularly virulent in Cotswold villages, certain Oxbridge colleges and expensive private schools. Its origins have been traced back to a turd found in the middle of a playing field at Eton.

There has not been a single case reported in Rotherham.

Transmission of the virus occurs by sharing champagne glasses and reading the Daily Mail. Young people in Essex, particularly Romford, seem to have immunity.

Dr Harry Felcher of the Institute says of the victims, "In their minds there's something lacking, what they need's a damn good wacking".

Other studies suggest prevalence began after June 2016 when an older generation, now mostly dead, had a collective psychotic episode resulting in calls for the return of spanking, spam for tea "because it did us no harm" and 'Love thy Neighbour' on the telly.

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10 Fuck off.

Fuck nationalism, fuck fascism and fuck off petty patriotism, the last refuge of the scoundrel, and the bastard son of xenophobia. For every narrative blaming the dispossessed, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the disabled on benefits, the unemployed, the old, the sick and mentally ill for their problems, fuck off.

How many times does it need pointing out? Who crashed the financial system in 2008 leaving you to pick up the bill? Who decided to move your job to a foreign country because their labour is cheaper? Who turns a blind eye to off shore tax havens while simultaneously sipping champagne with asset strippers, amoral financiers and fancy Wall Street brokers? Who likes to import cheap labour? Who makes cuts to public Infrastructures, housing and education? Who spews lies on their front pages and on the sides of buses? Who is relaxed about the filthy rich because they are the filthy rich's friends? Who sells arms to terrorists?

Who owns media empires peddling a narrow narrative about spurious 'market freedom' while undermining the Rule of Law reminiscent of Nazi slurs? Who wants to sell off the NHS to private sector companies they have interests in? Who wants you duped, 'baked off' celebrity obsessed, focused on blaming each other? Who owns swathes of our cities, luxury yachts and gated properties with concierge doctors, private pilots and private armies just in case? Who is militarising the police to protect their assets from indigenous protest?

Brexit sentiment riles at elites, but fails to grasp that British elites will still not give a fuck about your house, your job, your health or education.

Who is it travelling first class, business class, private class while public transport slowly becomes an expensive farce? Who made a pact with Saudi Arabia to secure oil, and thereby provided refuge for the death cult that is Wahaabism not Islam?

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So, fuck off with your fascist inspired stories about people, yes human beings, many of whom literally bear scars from bombs and bullets made in the U.K., the USA, France and Russia. Take your first world middle England petty nationalism that has benefitted from two centuries of plunder, war and genocidal imperialism, wrap it in the Union Jack and stuff it up your arse.

Meanwhile, the western media holds it breath waiting for 'the' result of the 2016 US election. When it comes, it will either be turd like, slithering out hell's anus wearing a blond toupee made from the flaxen hair of Teutonic virgins pulled by force screaming from as yet otherwise unblemished pudenda, or it will plop into our laps like our old flea bitten moggy mewing to distract us from the fact of the decapitation of your budgie with one swish of a razor sharp claw. The western media will pore over the significance of the win. If the puckered lips, which resemble a dockers ringpiece after a curry night in Mumbai wins, then stand by for all the cockroaches of bigotry, fear and petty nationalism to come crawling out from within the festering pus soaked sores they call home to crawl over to your baby's crib and shit in it. If the old guard get their girl in, stand by for a wave of misogyny to distract you from who is actually pulling the levers. Guns will be cocked as second amendment sympathies were given succour by a demagogue whose only success is 'getting away with it'.

The real tragedy here is that many who lost their livelihoods, their prospects and their children's future due to the strategic decisions of the greedy bastards, have turned to a Greedy Bastard to save them. It's like suffering dry anal sex and then instead of reaching for the Vaseline one grabs a pineapple for another go at it in case that feels any better. Not since the Somme were so many led so badly. The western media will lap it up though also decrying the worst excesses as their bank balances improve. A weeping crocodile would have at least the good grace to look embarrassed at his lachrymose act if caught out. The western media will shake their bourgeois heads in disgust and then retire to bed in Uptown New York wondering how this genie was able to not only get out of the bottle but was able to call down a shower of shit. They will forget they rubbed the bottle with all the fervour of a masturbating schoolboy, whose weak grasp of the short term consequences of his 28

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action is in inverse proportion to the clutch of instant gratification. It will get messy....

Well, now we know. Trump won.

The Dow plummets and the Futures market foresees gloom. The capitalist class executive have a momentary wobble as it seems "their girl" will not make it. The political power elite in the US have, despite and because of their best efforts, elected the wrong candidate. Not to worry, there is money to be made in construction, arms, civil surveillance, policing, health insurance and in 'corrections'. The congruence of interest of the capitalist class has backfired momentarily as the men of media wealth have bought the (wrong) man of power. The 'Greedy Bastards' have miscalculated but they need not fear, the flaxen haired turd will not seriously alter the basic foundations upon which money can be made. They'll merely have the inconvenience of switching their investments to less volatile markets and wait for the storm to settle. It will be a media storm at first, but not a lot will change. Police will still kick the crap out of native Americans, and drones will still kill civilians. IS will be pleased as punch, their caliphate one step closer in their eyes.

Putin will welcome another nut job to the growing list of complete bastards that run countries. Big Oil rejoices as the Paris accord gets put back on the shelf. Big Pharma will sell even more antidepressants and Big Celebrity will go into overdrive to provide distraction and succour to an even more duped population. God Bless America.

Now, we've all had a bit of fun with both Brexit and Trump. Markets will get in a tizzy for a while because they don't like uncertainty. The economic infrastructure will not change much as the capitalist class will readjust and will welcome someone in the White House who does not like to pay tax and is contemptuous of health, environmental and social regulations. They publicly abhor his redneck views on women, gays and non-whites but these groups are only useful to Capital as reserve armies of labour. Their concerns are not Capital's concerns. His chief crime is not being Ivy League or Oxbridge and thus speaks like an angry docker whose beer has been spilled. Their own noxious views are of course spoken with far more finesse in boardrooms and banks. Capital does not care who is in the White House as long as the structures remain. And they will. Capital looks with disdain on the culture wars on abortion, gun 29

control, gay and women's rights, as long as they don't affect the bottom line. These culture wars are poor people's wars and it suits Capital very nicely to keep the populace arguing over the cultural superstructure as important as it is for the living breathing individual who experiences the sharp end of bigotry. No, the end of the world as we know it has not arrived, it has morphed into a nastier bigoted version of itself. The nuclear option however....I do shudder to think of Trump in a room full of US hawks. Yet he may work with Putin in mutual backyard Empire building, leaving NATO out in the cold.

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9 Your papers please?

I’m planning a very nice trip to Corfu. It’s a funny old world where I can contemplate this and 'worry' only if the wine will be chilled enough. It again reminds me that this could be what it was like for the middle class in England in the 1930's, blissfully unaware of the dark ages to come.

The lights had yet to go out across Europe but the signs were there.

Given yet again the grievous dismissal of the plight of many people as being that of a 'bunch of migrants', the painting of red doors and the wearing of red wrist bands, a tide of fascist discourse and activity worries me. Our moral universe is in the process of being warped.

Victims are classed as perpetrators, words are used as weapons, humans are stripped of their humanity and discussed in terms of 'swarms', 'bunch' or 'vermin'. An authoritarian, misogynistic, homophobic, monarchy is supported in its war, while arms industries flourish, and our chief moral concerns would be loss of jobs in the industries that plan for mega death.

On a positive note, I billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years, Steven Pinker suggests the overall level of world violence is reducing, while Matt Ridley argues our abilities to trade result in progress. His optimism is based on this belief, but he adds that trade can only occur when we trust. It might be that the left only sees the darkness while the right focuses on the light. Both views don't accept the complexity.

Yet, the very real gains of the world can be cut down in a moment. I guess the Austro-Hungarians, British Victorians and the French of 'La Belle Epoque' in 1914 realised how 'progress' sits on shifting ground. A warped moral order and the population's inability to think cost Europe dear. Don't be fooled again. You don't have to wear a brown shirt to think and talk like a fascist.

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Europe has form in this regard, Britain is not immune.

Hannah Arendt in her examination of the moral collapse that led to the Holocaust referred to 'thoughtlessness'. The point Arendt tried to make in her book 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' was that Nazi bureaucrats like Eichmann, and of course many ordinary Germans, were not demonic or especially evil. The German state under Hitler warped the moral order and inverted concepts, so that people did not think "this is horrible, having to shoot Jews" instead they thought "it is our historical duty to do this, it is horrible what I have to do (shooting Jews) but it is part of our destiny, our history being written now", and thus feelings could be nullified with reason to the State's new moral order.

I fear that what we have now in the UK is a slow turning of the moral order, so that which is inhuman becomes acceptable. Europe's moral collapse in the 20th century has only partly been repaired by the European project that is the EU. The seeds of that collapse produced the bloodied red flowers of the Somme and later the black hearts and shirts of fascists. Both blooms have been cut down, but one wonders if the roots that produced them may not allow another to flourish?

Arendt's 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' (1951) described three linked phenomena: Imperialism involving mass bureaucratised murder based on racist ideology; dissolution of the European class system resulting in a mass of 'superfluous individuals' who could be co-opted into a totalitarian regime; a decline of European nation states manifest as 'nationalism' which when confronted by refugees and ethnic minorities warped into a lethal mix of pseudoscience and ethnic fantasy.

When nations can declare entire 'races' or ethnicities (or religions) as mortal enemies then a foundation of humanity falls - i.e. the notion that we share a common humanity. This is then replaced by 'us and them', friend and enemy' and the destruction of the enemy becomes the ultimate meaning of politics. This then paves the way for the collapse of a moral order as we currently understand it, as the population becomes mobilized to confront the threat. It is the inversion of normal rules, that nations who feel under threat undertake, that is dangerous and that allows 'normal' people to act inhumanely.

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I suspect that racist ideology never fully went away, and is now gaining confidence to say its name in public; I suspect that industrialisation, technological development and globalisation is producing a mass of superfluous, disaffected, disengaged, individuals and I suspect refugees and migrants are again confronting fears about nationhood. Islamists are fuelling that fear, while western media and politicians fan the flames.

We may be moving rapidly towards the destruction of IS being the ultimate goal of politics with the perhaps unintended consequences of reigniting European fears and fascism. Schengen may go and the Dutch may once again hear "Ihre Papiere bitte" as they go through re-erected border controls.

Arendt wrote: "Just as you (Eichmann) supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations - as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason you must hang" (Arendt 1964 p 279).

Putting aside arguments around capital punishment, it is the 'othering', the dehumanising, that is dangerous. We have to remember that the 'final solution' followed on from the first solution (concentration) and the second (deportation) solution. "I just want to send the lot back, but I can't say that" is a call for the second solution. The jungle resembles the first solution. The solution to IS may also involve unleashing dirty nationalistic forces as all Muslims become the 'other', feared non humans who should be barred from international travel.

Allport on 'prejudice' is useful here, the first stage is 'antilocution' - using jokes and words to dehumanise the 'other'. We may already be moving towards 'avoidance' and 'discrimination'. There is increasing evidence of 'physical attacks' and so all we have left to go is the last stage 'extermination' or physical removal. Groups such as Britain First are merely the visible face of fascist thinking, how long before we see supporters roaming the streets acting in quasi vigilante roles protecting white Christians?

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It is ironic in the UK that we are making a big fuss (2016) over the release of the film 'Dad's Army' - a story of Britain's possible last stand against fascism - just at the same time as certain commentators and politicians are scapegoating migrants for the consequences of globalisation, imperialism and capitalism.

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10 Inequality and the 1%.

Ian Duncan Smith, on the Andrew Marr show Sunday 6th December 2015, in response to Tristram Hunts’ argument for the Labour Party to focus on Inequality, and not just income inequality but on wealth and assets, argued that 1) we need a healthy economy to pay for public services such as child support and 2) that income inequality was falling.

The first is the standard response to such issues. It is the justification for switching government support towards lowering taxes on business, inheritance, the rich (the 0.1%), land and investing in research and development, and of course lowering spending on ‘non-productive’ sectors of the economy, i.e. the sick, disabled, unemployed and pensioners. The low paid should not have government support either, as this is actually a subsidy to employers. Low pay in this view also acts as an incentive to work harder, to get education or take up opportunities in order to break out of poverty. In addition, low pay is a result of global competition and is the market in action and thus inevitable. Government involvement distorts the ‘natural’ workings of the market. A healthy economy then results from low taxes and minimal regulation in business activity. A 0% tax on capital is thus the ideal, because it is argued that it is capital investment that creates jobs.

There is also an assumption, a belief, that the economy as it stands today cannot afford public services at the current level. This is based on a particular view of what the ‘economy’ is, i.e. that it is that which is described in the budget by government taxes, receipts and expenditures. Wealth in the form of assets and land, is outside of this economy and is in a sense sacrosanct. The former, it is believed, means that there is little money and what there is requires redirection towards wealth creation rather than social redistribution. The former also now has to be in surplus, the government receiving more than it spends. This will be achieved it is hoped by cutting spending and hoping for growth in the economy.

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This view of the economy is also grounded in a mystification - that we can actually talk of the ‘economy’ as existing as a thing in itself. This model has no conception that the economy is a set of social relationships characterised by powerful social actors who can shape those social relationships to suit their purpose. The economy is nothing but a set of social relationships grounded in the material reality of people meeting their needs through the exercising their capabilities. The above view that the economy has to be in surplus, and that land and wealth in private hands is outside of that process, is the result of a set of decisions made by powerful social actors largely because it suits them to think this way.

How else to explain Prince Charles’ enormous personal fortune via historical land rights manifest in the Duchy of Cornwall? How did he come to own all of that property? Well, in 1337 Edward III established the Duchy. It now consists of 53,000 hectares of land in 23 counties. Who gave Edward III those property rights in the first place? The long established historical rights merely masks that in the last instance land was fought over and paid for in blood or subservience or both.

In Scotland, Andy Wightman argues in The Poor had no lawyers. Who owns Scotland and how they got it :

"The land on which many of our lairds sit was stolen in the 17th century, but these ill-gotten gains were protected by acts which maintained their hegemony after the rest of Europe ditched feudalism and concentrated land ownership.”

Shakespeare knew about blood and land (King John, Act 1 Scene 1): CHATILLON: “Philip of France, in right and true behalf

Of thy deceased brother Geffrey's son, Arthur Plantagenet, lays most lawful claim To this fair island and the territories, To Ireland, Poictiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, Desiring thee to lay aside the sword 36

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Which sways usurpingly these several titles, And put these same into young Arthur's hand, Thy nephew and right royal sovereign”.

KING JOHN “What follows if we disallow of this?”

CHATILLON “The proud control of fierce and bloody war, To enforce these rights so forcibly withheld.”

Just as land ownership is a residue of past blood feuds, so in a way is much of current wealth ownership. It is a result of non-productive wealth extraction bestowed merely by accident of birth, inheritance, and a rentier economy.

IDS implies that ‘the economy’ is not healthy enough to withstand tax on wealth and income. He fears that wealthy people will leave the UK and take their wealth with them. In the case of land, that would be an interesting spectacle. It suits him to focus on the economy as defined in the budget, in which he can argue that the economy is in debt and still running an annual deficit. His class are not affected of course by any of this, but they do fear for their investments and asset values. The therefore have a visceral interest in the status quo, change for them might mean losing huge amounts of their asset values. They have got used to ‘earning’ or rather extracting so much money that the numbers have become meaningless in terms of normal human needs. A billionaire can only eat so much bread, and it costs the same as it does for a pauper.

As Nick Hanauer argues, how many pairs of jeans does a billionaire need?

There are many clever people using mathematical models and economic ‘laws’ such as ‘the ‘Laffer curve’ and ‘Say’s law’ but again they overlook the basic premise of social relationships that actually underpin economic activity.

Is there enough money in the economy to fund social and health care, 37

education, research and development in green technologies, poverty relief…?

Putting aside very important questions about what money actually is, focus instead on taken for granted wealth and assets. This is in the private sector and off limits to government because the 0.01% ensure it is.

The scale of their wealth is staggering: • • •

•

• • • • •

•

The richest 1% of the world will own as much as everyone else by 2016.

85 richest people are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world.

The highest paid 3000 people in the UK pay more income tax than the bottom 9 million. this is lauded as ‘the rich are more than paying their way’. What would you rather choose, a tax rate of 90% on your annual income of £1,000,000 or a 0% tax rate on your annual wage £10,000? This means that….

30,000 income tax payers in the UK contribute £18.8 billion in income tax (2014), while one third of tax payers contribute less than those 3,000.

In the US the bottom half have no wealth.

Perhaps 8% of the world’s wealth ($7.6 trillion - That’s $7,600,000,000,000) sits in tax havens.

The UK’s tax gap may be as high as £122 billion each year.

The top 1,000 people in the UK have £547.126 billion. That’s £547,126,000,000.

We don’t know who owns land in England in detail, but one estimate is that 70% of us own about 5% of urban land. Who owns the rest?

About 0.6%of the UK’s population own 50% of rural land (2010). perhaps we should consider a land value tax?

“Roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved,

electric light turns night into day, electric trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still … To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist as a land monopolist 38

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contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced�.

Who said this? Was it some Marxist revolutionary? Or was it in fact Winston Churchill?

The fact is, the money is there, it can also be created. We just choose not to access what is often on offshore tax havens, or to create the money that is required.

As for IDS’s second point. It is not even worth debating.

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11 It’s raining again.

To combat the air of doom and gloom caused by the wettest winter on records, the UK government is discussing a new law which will allow workers to go home early to enjoy the sunshine. The green paper, called "Temperate meteorology and the relaxation of labour - exploring linear relationships between productivity, well-being and hop or other grain based products " seeks to establish guidance for employers, backed by legislation, that will allow calculations regarding the number of hours of clement weather (defined by the % of cloud cover, temperature and sun visibility) to drive decision making regarding recreational practices.

Dr Harry Felcher of the Institute of Rain Studies has called this "groundbreaking legislation that will facilitate the drinking of ale in south facing beer gardens and enhance the UK birth rate through the reckless abandonment of morals, judgement and underwear. This is to be welcomed".

Critics say it is a charter for hedonism and sodomy, and the Scots won't like it as they never will reach the required meteorological thresholds that will trigger said libatory revelry.

My nan says "f*ck the sweaties, let’s get pissed when the sun shines".

Australians have been barred from commentary because a) they have too much sunshine already, b) it’s not their country and c) no one would listen anyway.

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12 Masters of the Universe.

Here comes the sun and the moon and the stars, The earth’s a blue marble next to bloody red mars, And what’s in the midst of them, what’s in the night?

The mystery of gravity, spacetime and light?

And we who look up to them, we who are small, try to explain.

Here comes the rain, the hail, sleet and snow, The frost and the sea mist, the wind that will blow, Where do they come from, where will they go?

The tides that are rising their ebb and their flow?

And we who will feel them, we who are small, try to predict.

Here comes the swallow, the martin, the swift, Migration to England over African Rift, Monarch, Red Admiral, Humming bird moth, Wings that worth more than any gold cloth, And we wish to count them, we wait their return, to summer’s long lease.

There goes the pilchard shoals, the Huer’s last cry, Followed by tuna, tracked down till they die, Cod, marlin and swordfish, monkfish and hake, Trawler net dredging with blood in its wake, And we who consume them, we who are blind, add Salt.

Here comes acidity, salinity and methane, oil, gas, petroleum, carbon and butane, earth’s kept them hidden, silent for years, why did we find them? why did we we drill?

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We think we are masters, we seekers of thrill, try to control.

Cont….

Who is the cancer, who is the sore on the face of our planet? Who is it wants more?

We’ve been here 5 minutes, it’s a blink of the eye, Enough time to spoil, desecrate, poison and die.

We think we have knowledge, we think we have right, we think the blue planet will turn out all right.

Just keep on consuming, just keep the cash flow just keep on assuming, colluding but know finite resources, will end.

(cadence nicked from WH Auden’s Night Mail)

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13 Dirty Money.

Now, let's get something obvious out of the way. Do I like a fiddle? Do I like to pick a pocket or two? Do I enjoy getting away with it? Well, if the opportunity arises to save a few quid I will take it laughing all the way from the pub to the bank. Have I been known to engage in activities that should ideally stay in a dark cupboard lest the very beasts of hell are let loose to defecate upon the heads of babies? In short, am I cleaner than a freshly scrubbed and laundered starched white cotton cloth?

Yet I have to admit that perhaps I have let slip my moral standards from time to time. My righteousness is as a filthy rag rather than crisp white linen. Jesus died to save sinners, but when he saw my track record on all things nefarious, immoral and perverted, it was too much even for the son of God. He was referring to me when, upon the cross, he cried up to God saying "Forgive him, for he not only knows what he has done, but he has encouraged others to do similar, only with less embarrassment and more lubricant". Jesus wept. Not for sinners, but for the complete waste of time his 33 years on earth was spent in order to redeem my wretched black hearted soul. As the last nail was banged in, all he could think about was my irretrievably ungrateful indifference to his suffering while I considered the next venture into silk panties and lace lined debauchery with a sweet, cherry lipped vicar's daughter and her vibrator on the lawn at the Queen's garden party. "Christ, all that healing and wine changing for bugger all" he thought before letting out a wet fart.

That established, am I qualified to consider the implications of the 'Paradise Papers'?

First, let us not forget the 'Panama papers'. This was the leak of over 11 million documents from law firm Mossack Fonseca and shed a little light on over 200,000 offshore entities. They contained personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private. Some of the Mossack Fonseca 'shell' corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion,

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and evading international sanctions. The Paradise papers are a similar leak from law firm Appleby which again shed light on offshore tax havens and the avoidance activities of wealthy individuals and corporations such as Apple.

'Only the little people pay taxes'. I forget who said that, possibly someone as wealthy as Croesus and the morals of a rutting dog with easy access to a pack of bitches on heat. They share the same disdain and indifference towards others as they fuck anything that looks like it needs fucking as long it feels good. They are now fucking the great British public by stealing a decent education from children, kicking the Zimmer frames away from our grannies and laughing in the face of the mentally ill.

As dogs sniff arseholes, the wealthy sniff loopholes.

They are aided and abetted in their endeavours by lawyers whose attachment to ethics is as loose as a coke fuelled Casanova’s commitment to celibacy at an orgy. They are advised by accountants whose devotion to public service is in inverse proportion to their devotion to gaining pecuniary advantage, and serviced by politicians whose obsequiousness in the presence of wealth would make an Edwardian butler blush in embarrassment. The rules of the game are so rigged that not only is the line between good and evil blurred, it has been erased, deleted, rubbed out and thrown away waiting discovery and study by some future historian of 21st century moral philosophy.

Plutocrats, the 0.01%, the 'super-rich' are so detached from the rest of us that not only do they think we should eat cake, we should pay them for the ingredients, the recipe and the Aga to cook them in while they insert a finger of fudge to milk our collective prostates for more cash.

Their moral universe is so distorted that they would consider buggering schoolboys over the high alter in St Paul's Cathedral acceptable if the price was right. To them, the general public are bovine, nothing but a source of capital accumulation, and when we have lost our usefulness we are thrown away like a snot damped tissue in the gathering winds of an October gale.

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Why do only fools and horses work?

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14 A scientologist homeopath in a K hole.

The Nursing Times reports on the falling number of nurses and midwives registered to work in the UK over the past few months.

Perhaps this does not matter to most of us as we worry about whether to buy our Christmas from John Lewis or J D Wetherspoon, or before concerning ourselves with the searing injustice and travesty that is some prancing git in a sparkly shirt on ‘Strictly’ being shown the door before he has had the chance to enthral us with his pretty feet. Perhaps we believe that the real life Holby Cities truly are staffed with the beautiful, if very flawed, people who can perform miracles with just a twitch of a stethoscope, frowning and cries of 'morphine stat' before being covered in projectile vomit. Perhaps we think NHS staff smile through the mask of emetic substances dripping from their faces as they perform miracles every hour.

To take our minds off the future, when many of us will face our last days in some piss stained, overcrowded brightly neon lit corridor being looked after by an alcoholic doctor, and a Zimbabwean care assistant whose slim grasp of English is matched only by a desert dwelling Uzbek goat fucker with access to a torn, half copy of the Beano in which to learn verb conjugation, we stare at the TV screen promising us youthful skin, a drive on an empty mountain road and the chance to vote on some nonentity whose song we will not remember, will not buy and will merely momentarily dose us to kill the pain of ennui that is everyday life in consumer capitalism.

Nursing is being reduced to running around with a bucket, a mop and some hope, all aimed at stopping the bleeding. We all have orifices that need plugging from time to time lest we leave a trail like a pissed up slug on a mission to the next lettuce. However Florence Nightingale had higher hopes for the successors of her young ladies in training than being reduced to cleaning wounds with their own tears and the silk of parachutes from the nearby war museum. The measures of success on

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many shifts includes having the same number of live patients that you started with, avoiding a fight with a drunk (it is a bonus if the drunk is not the consultant) and being sprayed with non-infectious urine.

The great vision for the NHS includes the provision of care by families and a few care assistants. Registered Nursing, you know...the sort that includes people who might be able to spot if your babbling and loss of consciousness is not the result of being given the bill for care but is in fact the early stages of sepsis, is on its way out. Family care is fine, if your family is more Waltons than Addams. Do you really want your old mum, or your wife, poking her finger up your anus in order to clinically examine your tonsils? What your wife does in your spare time at home is your own business, but is she the right person to be prostate tickling in the intensive care unit when you are actually complaining of a headache? Imagine Grandad*, after a six pints of mild and bitter, pushing his way through the throng around your sick bed shouting; "stand back, I've got this" while brandishing a toilet brush and barely concealed menace?

This is what the 'Austerity' actually means. The ‘Health Secretary’ (just let the irony of that title sink in) will blather about more training places...but we know 'more' is not the same as 'enough'. Austerity, we should remember actually means the 'dissembling of the protectionist state in order to facilitate the transfer of public services to private ownership'.

Tory Health Sectaries know this...it is part of the plan. One once called the NHS a 'great commercial opportunity'. Why should their like give a toss about hospitals and schools that they will never use?

They are as disconnected from our social reality as a Scientologist homeopath in a K hole.

*I'm sending Granddad over to Richmond House.

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