Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts

Wednesday 12 July 2023

Monopoly


Continuing with "How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World" by Francis Wheen and it has remarked on how "The Market" and Money are the new religion. Global companies and money eulogise the "Free Market" and then use their power to become monopolies or cartels to manipulate prices and push the consumer into penury.

Any government that does not facilitate this are attacked to attempt to bring them into line. The UK and USA have certainly been brought into line.

In the book the USA continually attacks countries like France, Finland and Sweden for not being in thrall to big money like the "land of the free".


This book is nearly twenty years old and things have got much worse. Lying and cheating are the norms the further up the money chain you go.

Seven Days In is still getting a good number of reads so I expect it to hit 100K visits this month (it is standing at 41K today) and a million since my first post (It is standing at 980K today) and when that happens I will share it with you.

If you want to buy a book my dark poetry is on the link below.

The music is, appropriately "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" by the Pet Shop Boys, 

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not others. C'est La Vie.

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

  1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
  2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
  3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
  4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
  5. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
  6. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
  7. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
  8. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer

Monday 3 July 2023

Send Out The Clowns


"How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World" by Francis Wheen worries me more as I read it. Don't get me wrong it is an excellent book, but the remarks on the front say it is hilarious and funny, to the point you expect comedy, but it is genuinely frightening, just going over the fatwa issued on Salman Rushdie and how western governments and religion seemed virtually OK with it.

I feel Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rishi Sunak are treated as jokes and figures of fun when the reality is that the clowns are very dangerous. They are bullies who think they are above the law when they should be behind bars. People defend them, saying what they do is legal, but it is their mates who make the laws and if they don't like them they just ignore them because they are allowed to get away with breaking the law.

This is my first post in July and I am hitting three thousand visits a day, so if that keeps up, in theory, I could hit a hundred thousand this month, but we shall see. Last year I did twenty posts, this year I am already up to twenty-six.

Recent posts were usually lucky to get twenty visits but recently they are hitting fifty and the last one is up to seventy-four, so I don't know what is happening.

If you want to buy a book my dark poetry is on the link below.

The music is "They Murdered The Clown" by Graham Parker, just an amazing song.

I recently discovered that my American Amazon Author page has a feed from this blog which you can see here. It only shows on the .com site but not others. C'est La Vie.

Mike Singleton - Vocal Stories

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

  1. Barter Books - An Amazing Bookshop In A Railway Station In Alnwick
  2. The Plagiaristic Poetry Series - Poems Taken From Random-Themed Lines
  3. Another Raven - A Take On Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven"
  4. The Cleaner - An Autism-Focused Christmas Special
  5. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
  6. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag
  7. The Accidental Book - Helping a Great Vocal Friend Resulted In Me Publishing My First Book
  8. Call Me Les - A Great Friend and An Amazing Writer

Tuesday 9 August 2016

Carnival Dumpster - An Experiment


When I write blog posts I often get sidetracked and end up writing about things that weren't there when I started writing. This is just to see if I can write something reasonably focused.

People have described be as a Corbynista , because I am generally left wing. It's more about caring that people get the best and are not mistreated and stay under the heel of privileged classes. I will expand this in my new blog And Annoyingly but I started out as a Tory voter (my dad still is) , and recently watched an excellent TED talk by a right wing conservative here which rightly points out that in the modern world we need to work together , watch it here it's excellent.

No Do Vote - Please
I'm also reading PJ O'Rourke's "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages The Bastards" which again has a lot of useful and pertinent points in there . His one paragraph evaluation of Donald Trump is brilliant which is basically "if he didn't have paroled Enron accountants he'd be worth less than your cat"


The title of the post is just something that came to me and basically I suppose with what I've been going on about is surreally appropriate.

Anyway there is only one song that this post can have, and that's the Bonzo Dog Band's "No Matter Who You Vote For, The Government Always Gets In".

Have a totally wonderful day everybody.

Tuesday 5 June 2012

Obfuscation and Entreprenurs

It amazes me how in IT and web related circles most of the charlatans working in those areas usually cement their indespensability by coming up with new cloudy nebulous descriptions  for what is essentially the same thing.

So subroutines became objects and so on. A few months ago someone sent me an email asking if I had receved a "wire-frame" , I replied no but I had go the blank document they sent me.

I was recently invited to a "deep dive" . I didn't realise we had taken up sub aquatic activities! I think they meant a detailed analysis session!!

The other thing is that the government seem to think the economy could be kick started by using prisoners as cheap labour. Well the entrepreneurs will pay next to nothing while the taxpayer foots the security bill.

everywhere you look people are trying to take you for a ride and not in a good way. Rant over.

Sunday 26 June 2011

How The Government Effectively Fuels Us


I see a lot of folk rightly complaining about the latest price rise on fuel , but I'm lucky , mostly I'm indirectly affected. However I filled up my car at the weekend and immedietly doubled its value (the write off value is £50 , which is what it now costs to fill up).

unusually the villains of the piece are the oil companies , who let's face it DO deserve most of the flack they get but think on this. David Cameron , that brilliant responsibilty dodger (Nick Clegg knows)  is the latest in a long line of politicians not really taking responsibility just the financial fruits of a captive market. . After the petrol company and garage set their price of about 54p the government adds on fuel duty and VAT which result in another 170% being added on to the price you pay (around £1.40).

So when the goverment say they cant't do anything about the price of fuel , you what they are talking . It's an easy win for them , and will do until they can find a way of taxing the air that we breathe!!

Here's where I got some of the figures from.

This song is vaguely connected and makes me feel good , the good old Foos!!

Friday 7 May 2010

Looks Like A Hung Parliament

Which is fine as long as I can pull the trapdoor lever.

The thing is , we're still going to have a government and New Labour is almost indistinguishable from the Tories. Also I wouldnt trust any politician with going for the tea unless I know them or it's Boris Johnson or Tony Benn.

The hung Parliament will resurrect the debate over proportional representation , but , flawed though it is , first past the post does keep out extremists like the BNP . Imagine if we gone two BNP members , the next election that may encourage more people to vote for them. No way Proportional Representation.

It seemes that loads of people have not been allowed to vote . My local Polling station was open for fifteen hours and I was waiting for a local delivery . At 12 it hadn't turned up so I went and voted. I'm just wondering why people went to polling station without much time to spare, but this could mean that resuklts may be challenged , so will there be by-elections there/

Because I've voted I can express my disappointment and the Tories being the largest party and potentially forming the next government. I'll bet 95% of the electorate don't have a clue about their policies and only voted Tory because David Cameron is not as ugly as Gordon Brown!!

If you look at all election results since the sixties that's been the case. So all labour need to do is replace Gordon Brown with , say , Daniel Craig or Sean Connery. If you don't believe me, these are the results since 1970:

  • 1970 & 1974 Ted Heath (Tory) beat Harold Wilson (Labour)
  • 1974 (Oct) Harold Wilson (Labour) beat Ted Heath (Tory)
    Odd one out , maybe a hangover when the populace thought about who they were voting for
  • 1979 Margaret Thatcher (Tory) beat Jim Callaghan (Labour)
  • 1983 Margaret Thatcher (Tory) beat Michael Foot (Labour)
  • 1987 Margaret Thatcher (Tory) beat Neil Kinnock (Labour)
  • 1992 John Major (Tory) beat Neil Kinnock (Labour)
  • 1997 Tony Blair (Labour) beat John Major (Tory)
  • 2001 Tony Blair (Labour) beat William Hague (Tory)
  • 2005 Tony Blair (Labour) beat Michael Howard (Tory)
  • 2010 David Cameron (Tory) beat Gordon Brown (Labour)
So to win the next election Labour need to replace Gordon Brown with someone more photogenic than David Cameron . Job Done.