Friends, after scouring the news around the globe this morning and thought about a few things, I have concluded that we truly are creatures of habit.

Of course, the first thing I did when I got up was to attend to nature’s demands then have a cup of tea. In the cup I put sugar, one teaspoon as I always do, waited impatiently for the kettle to boil, poured in the water, put the lid on the cup to keep it hot, switched on the television, waited impatiently for it to come on. I then returned to the kitchen, took off the lid, put in the skim milk, stirred the brew, put the spoon on the sink and returned to my viewing chair and sat down.

Then I went through the various networks, Australia first, then CNN, then BBC, etc, as I sipped. My spirits rose and fell like a seesaw as they always do. People had been murdered during the night, killed in car accidents, in storms, in wildfires. Tsunami warnings were posted in Indonesia, sports reports gave information on winners and losers, etc. Though it was all new there was a terrible sameness about it all.

Then I went to my computer and posted my messages, switched off the comment moderation and sat thinking about what I might write about. I thought of all the posts I’d written and suddenly they all seemed the same too, a myriad voices, all mine, crying out in the wilderness of cyberspace for change, for injustices to be rectified, for the world to be different to what it is.

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A Score of Uninspiring, Vision-less, Non-leaders.

I scanned the headlines across the world this morning desperately looking for some sign that the G20 leaders might have actually done something different, something ground-breaking.

All they did was to get lots of photo opportunities, wine and dine themselves, announce lots of good intentions, agree each country had to deal with its own problems and that there needed to be a bit of tinkering around the financial edges then say they will meet again in March. Talk about roads being paved with good intentions!

But the bottom line is that the free market capitalist system, the one favoured by George Woeful Bush and American and European capitalists, the one based upon infinite greed and the law of the jungle and little regulation, the one that is destroying our planet, the one that has currently hit a brick wall, prevails. Surprise, surprise.

The big push now is to get banks to lend the bailout money, for gullible people to start borrowing and spending more than they can afford, for them to consume the current glut of goods and services so that the wealthy can resume their privileged lifestyles and the corporations can once again make products that we don’t need and amass massive profits with which they can overpay their executives and shareholders until we get out of the current crisis and then enjoy a short boom until we hit the next recession or depression.

It’s sickening really. Disappointing. Worrying. As I said in the last post, “The bastards who are manipulating things for their own advantage don’t want anything to change, won’t allow anything to change!”

Bring on the revolution!

(photo: Reuters)

“Help!”

Friends, the bigwigs from twenty different nations are meeting this weekend in America. In theory they are getting together to sort out the mess created by the American sub-prime crisis. Of course this scandal is but another manifestation of what happens when you allow greed and lack of regulation  by right-wing Governments to control the economies of the world.

Yet George Bush was out there today spreading his duplicitous message that capitalism and lack of regulation and  free markets are the way to go even when much of the world is heading towards recession if not depression.

And the G20 leaders are in New York to put their manicured, pudgy fingers in the financial dyke to try to stop the failure that is capitalism from collapsing upon their heads and sweeping them and their nations away.

If you Google the word ‘recession’ you’ll find all sorts of references which show how the world lurches from one recession to the next. Boom to bust is the colourful way that it’s described. That translated means that we move from one period which shows great growth, share market and real estate increases, massive profits, etc, to one where the bottom drops out of the market and lots of people lose their jobs and lots of money.  Up and down it goes like a carnival ride.

But by lots of people, I don’t mean the really wealthy. Oh, no! In the main, they get out of the share and real estate markets BEFORE they collapse then, with lots of cash at their disposal, eventually buy back in at rock-bottom prices and make more fortunes. Their gain mirrors a corresponding loss by the ‘little people’,  those whose taxes are currently being used to bailout big corporations and banks, those who are being foreclosed upon, those who are struggling to put a meal on the table, those who’re watching their super funds evaporate!

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“I can see Russia!”

Friends, even though the Republicans McCain and Palin were routed in the recent election, the headlines are still filled with conjecture about Sarah Palin and whether she’ll run for President in 2012!

This seems to me to suggest that all is not right with the American psyche. After all, why continue to talk about two losers? And more importantly, why continue to talk about a woman that failed so completely as a political candidate?

No matter that Sarah was rather confused about what a continent was or what the Bush doctrine was, no siree. The mayor of Warsilla’s joke about the pit-bull and lipstick made up for her unbelievable paucity of experience and knowledge about her own country as well as the rest of the world. The fact that she’d been a Beauty Queen and was still a pretty attractive woman and that she could wink carried the day in the minds of many.

Her own party machine, once the choice was made, soon realized they’d made a blunder. They tried desperately to protect her from the media and any searching questions. Yet still she continued making speeches using her Downs Syndrome child as a stage prop. And the Republican crowds cheered and applauded hysterically. But the truth is that some of them voted for the Democrats.

Now all that is history. She presented herself to America and thankfully was rejected. That should be the end of it. She tried and failed and there’s no disgrace in that. But the worrying thing to me is that, given her complete failure and rejection, the headlines still talk about Sarah Palin and the possibility of her making a bid for the Presidency.

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Beach House Belonging To A Struggling Billionaire.

Friends, occasionally I feel that my occasional nightmares and reality have somehow merged. Why?

This morning I saw on CNN that Pelosi had called for aid for the American auto industry, billions of dollars of it. For aid, translate taxpayers dollars.

So now the car industry in America (and in other countries around the world) is holding out their large hands for donations to help them deal with the fact that their fuel-guzzling cars are no longer relevant to the needs of a globally-warmed world. They join the list of other industries and institutions crying out for help: like ailing bankers, insurance companies, investment houses, mortgage lenders, developers, oil companies, etc.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but didn’t all these industries and institutions enjoy massive profits during the last decade or so and huge share price rises? Haven’t the executives who work for them enjoyed huge salaries and obscenely generous share options. Haven’t these companies enjoyed generous tax concessions thanks to right-wing governments?

They have made all this money, billions and billions of dollars of profit, but suddenly now they’re poor, now they need handouts. Come on. Two plus two doesn’t equal four.

I get the feeling that we, the peasants, are being screwed. Again!

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Friends, this morning, at approximately nine am.,  I went out to transfer a few five day-old chicks to a larger box. Originally there were six but one, its leg inexplicably broken, died a few hours after it arrived. That caused a cloud to descend upon this household during last weekend.

And what did I find? One headless chicken in the water container. Yes, one of the chicks had been attacked by a large predatory bird called a Butcher Bird. Somehow the bird had managed to grab the cute chicken through the closely spaced wire mesh and pecked it until the brains were gone, the skull, everything from the lower neck up! I suffered trauma, removed the hapless chick, experienced deep feelings of misgiving, of apprehension, of anger.

This incident, one hardly worth mentioning, is the unfortunate truth of the world we live in. The strong feed on the weak and defenseless. It’s the Law of the Jungle! Of course, I’ve seen it a thousand times on television, the lions catching deer and antelope. But you have to be personally involved in experiencing what death really means for the reality to sink in.

You have to hold the still-warm headless chicken, a few minutes before such a beautiful, lively little thing, and gently throw its limp, deformed body away, its life over before it really began.

On this violent, cruel earth, it’s so hard sometimes trying to hang onto hope, to try to believe that things will get better, will be nice.

I suspect that around the world, many people are feeling like me: rather flat, deflated, a little empty. The euphoria of the Obama election is over and the reality of our crazy world again bites hard.

The financial scene looks more and more dire, the U.S. is still slaughtering lots of Afghan civilians, bombs are exploding in Iraq,  the Palestinians are still being killed, occupied and having their land stolen, Bush and the Forty Thieves are still in the White House, and Obama can’t do anything until the end of January when the transition period ends. Of course, one could ask why it takes so long to affect a transition but then, if the election took 21 months I suppose we couldn’t expect quick action with a transition, could we?

Now I imagine that during this transition period the lobbying will be in full swing. All of the principal, unprincipled power players in America and elsewhere in the world will be lobbying their butts off trying to get some advantage for themselves from ‘The Man’.

Yes, the Jewish lobby will certainly be in there pushing their missile-armed barrow full of fanatical ambitions. They’ve already had a win with Rahm Emanuel being appointed Chief of Staff, an appointment that astounds me. Why would a man of peace appoint a radical Jewish head-kicker to such a position?

Then there are the Corporations which have hundreds of over-sized barrows as big as dump trucks filled with demands like: no regulation, lots of handouts of taxpayer’s money, freedom to pollute, to rip off consumers, lower taxes, etc. And the Media Barons will have a barrow like a stretch limousine, all black and shiny and they’ll want the freedom to swallow up their opposition and set up bigger and bigger Media Empires which tell smaller and smaller amounts of truth (and treat their audience as dummies which most of them are).

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Friends, as the known world collapses around our ears and our leaders run around like headless chooks not knowing what to do, perhaps it’s time we did a quick reality check, really confronted ourselves, tried to cut through all the crap we’ve been fed about what we are, what we should be, how the world should be.

Where to start? Why not at the beginning? Each one of us began life the same way. We were pushed, pulled or extracted from a woman’s body while she shrieked in pain. We were covered in blood and tissue and someone belted us and we started yelling. Eventually we were cleaned up and then proceeded to drink from our mother’s breasts which then led to our first urination and the expelling of faeces, a rather unfortunate, messy process that continues throughout our lives.

Eventually we learned to control our expelling functions and how to sit on a toilet, one all white and shiny, and how to wipe ourselves and wash our hands. We also learned to transport food into our mouths in a reasonable manner, one which did not put food all over our faces or our clothing.

Dressed in pink or blue, we then began to learn what our roles were, what was expected, what was frowned upon. The indoctrination was prolonged and intense and conformity was highly rewarded. We were kissed and applauded when we succeeded and we were smacked, shouted at or sent to our rooms when we transgressed.

Then television came into our lives. We watched cartoons and childrens’ shows and saw what we should be doing, what we should be thinking, what we should be eating and drinking. Yes, the commercial world got into our minds very early and began to shape us so we would end up dutiful consumers and we would prize whatever the advertising agencies presented us with.

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New Humans?

Well, the election is over. The whole world is still in party-mode. There is a sense of hope. But is it misplaced? After all, a new, charismatic leader has emerged but the powerful vested interests are still the same. They have suffered a setback but they will regroup, rise again.

I suppose people might accuse me of being overly cynical. But then, I’ve been alive long enough to be cynical. Life has bashed me up on many occasions. Each time I’ve got to my feet, dusted myself off, and starting fighting again. But eventually you realize that the world is bigger than you, that noble dreams and hopes have little place in this world. It is a world where survival of the fittest is still the operative rationale.

Some posts back, in a comment I made the observation that evolution might, one day, via mutation, throw up a new type of human, one that was rational, truly intelligent, inwardly peaceful, creative, compassionate, spiritual, generous. Perhaps this has already occurred. Perhaps somewhere in the world such humans, a family, a small group, even a community may already be in existence.

But hang on! Could you imagine how long a community of rational, truly intelligent, inwardly peaceful, creative, compassionate, spiritual, generous humans would survive in our current world? They wouldn’t last five minutes.

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