Kaput: banks, shares, savings, younameit...

The US parliament (Congress?) did not approve the bankers bailout plan. Markets are going kaput.

Of course, why should failed bank executives' employers, i.e. the banks, be saved from annihilation just because they failed?
Answer: Because the extent, the reach, and the consequence of their failure is tremendous.
Savings will topple, people are left without a penny, and those banks' senior management is left without its golden parachute...

Of course, some say that it is better this way. I'm not sure I wouldn't support this view myself: why use our children's money to bail out out bankers' fathers?

Whatever the case may be, it is useful to pray. Buying power in many European countries is down by 35% in the past 8 years. The erstwhile middle class is getting poorer. And in becoming so, it is breeding widespread discontent.

Easy to grasp, if you think of this in the following way: see your children worse off than you were.
In the hitherto inalienable grand scheme of life, offspring were supposedly bequeathed a better world than their forefathers.

No longer! Pray, pray, fast, right now, immediately. Who else is there to save us but God & ourselves. We are incapable of saving ourselves.

That leaves only God. Yet again.

DaDa DadADAda DaDa DadADAda

MANIFESTO

OF

SURREALISM

BY

ANDRÉ BRETON

(1924)

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!).
Nope! Man is no longer a dreamer. He has been roused violently; he is no longer discontent with his destiny but, rather, desperately hopeless. There are few if any objects earned through own efforts since such effort is insufficient to warrant the objects; nowadays we inherit or grasp or partake in an historical aberration, a revolutionary turn of events...
(A revolutionary turn of events which shows that half of Fortune's listed top billionaires are Russian. Imagine the above sentence, 20 years ago: Dangerous science fiction!)

So what is in store. Nothing. The store is empty.

The surrealist manifesto has been duly incorporated and floated and now lists in a few SEs. Indeed, not so long ago, people made money off surrealist inspired derivatives.

We need a new manifesto.

We need is something that is obscure enough to be under the radar for a while and, at the same time, popular enough to have widespread appeal!

Hell of a product. Unobtainium!

We need help and no-one is listening ! Make them listen. Call: +4790369389

The telemegaphone (left) guarantees your voice will resound over a Norwegian mountain. THAT'S BETTER THAN NOWHERE!

And what's more, the device is commendably & politically correctly green: it's wind-powered. (One wonders how these people expect struggling oil people to survive.)


At least let's have some contemporary SURREALIST humour courtesy of the telemegaphone.

(It's better, i.e. healthier and more constructive, than sitting around moping and hoping it will all go away, simply because you are moping. Simply because the "sun will shine following the rain" etc. That sentimental clap-trap does not apply in real life.)

Here we go again. I DON'T WANT...

...to be the reference others look up to. I was happy looking up to my elders.
They are dying away, one after the other, like flies.
Now Solzhenitsyn is dead. He too was a reference for me, conveniently tucked away in a corner of my comfortable world.
A world that is crumbling irreparably.
All my old references are disappearing, one by one.
Am I now expected to take play that role? A reference for others to look up to! Perish the thought! Let me instead bewail my lost Atlantis...

It's uncomfortable and unsettling. I don't want it. After all, nobody asked me!

Presumably nature must take its course; the show must certainly go on.
(Can I, may I, hide for the duration and return when it's all been dealt with?)

Paradox: in Greece, people see one another

as impediments.

Except from benefactors and immediate family -- the non-threatening part of the family, that is.

(more later)

A quickie: remember that oft misquoted line about hell, woman, scorn, and fury.
Here it is a l'original:
Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd
Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd.
(From W.Congreve, "The Mourning Bride")

Style is going out of style...

...in cars. Elsewhere too. How you dress and, most certainly, in how you act. Look at this Ferrari: it exemplifies the marriage between the beautiful and the aerodynamic.

There was a time, not so long ago, when streamlined styling was sought after and admired. Attractive...

No longer. Our tastes are moving away from sleek, elegant lines in the direction of clumsy macho -- tough, rugged and ugly ducklings:





Seriously ugly has become the trend. Let's see where it takes us. Along with the sullen and clumsy rap gesticulating, ugly items -- ugliness justified by function -- seem to have taken the fort.

Maybe we've had one too many of designed, feigned elegance and phony refinement and soggy exaltation -- and this tripped the trigger...

I admit, the wholesale ugly is sometimes attractive. Nevertheless I haven't yet reached the point where I turn away from the elegant in favour of the awkward and unwieldy.

I miss the older generation

People seem to be slipping away, out of circulation, leaving me feeling lonely and strangely unfulfilled. I don't know what it is... They are either no longer actively pursuing their old role or, worse, some of them are dying away merrily.
I miss that generation. I miss the presence of that generation. These are people I used to look up to, act against, talk against, and generally challenge at every waking moment. It was part of the meaning of life: the part that dealt with defining who I am, defined as who I believed I was not. (I.e. a rebel with a cause)

Presumably, I now am that generation.

But I feel that I still haven't finished with that other generation -- although they seem to have finished with me. I am not ready to take on their role. I feel singularly unprepared to take on the serious aspects of life, take them on for real...

Do not strive for excellence... And a few business words.

Do not strive for excellence; rather, go for best yet.

Talk about optimise -- but practise a policy of slight improvements.

Pursue and promote leadership as a competency, but recruit executives -- people who do things as opposed to people who talk about things.

Only you, the leader (and politicians, aspiring leaders), are there to talk about things rather than do things.

Do NOT recruit talent to satisfy management consumerism needs, but because you need gifted people.

You only need gifted people if you are, yourself, gifted; otherwise such people will get you down. If, however, you yourself are gifted, then the result of working around such people will be uplifting and the precursor to your operating at high potential.

Your core team is usually composed of people you know, are used to, and who know you, and are used to your quirks. They are the best people out there, if you define best as, "the least fatiguing, getting my job done satisfactorily". The reason you chose one person and not the other is not competency of one over the other. It is other things. You can identify these. Do so.

Tricky Business

Remember that scandals SHOULD not be the resort of business development & improvement and they are NOT, unless when business comes to close exchange with politics -- or when politics becomes the better, or an important, part of the business.

Politics can become the better part of business in democratic and authoritarian environments. The democratic environments are better in the short run because they operate under a veil of legality; authoritarian environments are presumed illegal in politically-correctese.

In the long-run, however, political business is best practised in authoritarian environments because these are (inter alia):

• less corrupt (this no longer holds true in Africa) and thereby cheaper
• more predictable, short-term
• safer, short-term
• more efficient because of red-tape exemptions
• more efficient because of quick decision-making.

Remember the maxim:
"The price of democracy is corruption; the price of efficiency is dictatorship"©

This image has little direct relation to the above UNTIL you come to realise that she works for you in some capacity other than the one illustrated here. Hence you are correlated.

Why fucking the planet and burning what's left will never stop

Because people are mostly ignorant and they don't understand why they do much of what they do.

Because the ignorant people and the dumb people and the dumb-ignorant people are the majority -- but failure of the brain does not always signify failure of the pocket. So some of these dumb-ignorant people are wealthy or well off.

Wealthy people can buy their right to rights. One of these is the privilege of not abiding by all the laws.

All the other people, are too busy trying to assert their rights. They have to assert because they have insufficient money to buy the right to a right.

So,
When you say to these people, "stop polluting the planet!", their reaction is to assert their right... to NOT be bossed around, by you or anyone else. They don't register what you're actually saying!

Do you get it?

Nobody tells them what to do and what not to do!

That's why they keep on fucking nature and burning the planet, the neighbourhood, the forests and the trees: nobody told them not to!

"They want more for themsleves...

and less for everybody else."

That was George Carlin (on "Who Owns You)".
He dead.
He dead the day before yesterday, or summat round there. He was 71.
A very interesting man, amazingly outspoken and undeniably interesting and invariably funny. Hilarious at times! I could just dumb-sit watching a TV screen & laugh like an idiot. It's not that I wanted to clap knowingly at the irreverent truths he would (dare) express -- it's that, too, but that's a bit conventionally stereotyped. No, it's the plain hilarity of some of the things he said and the way he said them.

So why pick that quotation above? Because it is the only time I know of, where I would venture a rephrasing.

Here's what I propose:
From,
"they want more for themselves and less for everybody else" to
"they want so much more for themselves that there's not enough to go round... So they've got to take some of yours -- what else can they do? It's not personal".

Have fun, mate, wherever you may be! Enjoy. And bash all those pretentious, self-serving, plutocratic, smug spirits out there, too.

Thinking of Politicians

...and the endless complaints (by constituents) once said politicians get into power.

(The picture has nothing or something to do with the subject. Which of the two, and why, is left to your creative spirit.)

Politicians are elected on the strength of their "elective appeal" i.e. their propensity to,
a) convince party apparatchiks that they are worthy to be on the party's bandwagon,
b) convince enough voters to cast a vote for them;

and NOT
c) because they are highly qualified and rarely competent talent ready to perform tasks other than the above.

If we want to have people who can manage the country, we should look for managerial clout and experience, and a proven experience... not politicians.

After all how many global corps fight over giving a politician a functional job? CEO? OK, sales rep is OK, no doubt. But then, an ex military also makes a good sales rep -- and cheaper. And usually, better disciplined and much harder working...

Bad news...

Late in the day before yesterday, a good friend lost his father. He too, just joined the "next in line" club.
We all become members of this club, some sooner and some later...
It has got me thinking about "life": life used to be about fun and about having fun. This is nothing new.
Many of us would have been glad to continue this life -- but life itself wishes otherwise. Life insists on getting serious. The differences are unsettling and uncomfortable and demanding; they require us to look for new meanings and to find new truths.

And Truth is rarely pure and never simple*. For some, or for all.



*O. Wilde

Too late, baby...

It looks like the earth is slowly giving up. It also looks like we are not giving up -- destroying, that is. Because after all, things will sort themselves out in the end. They always do. Even when they don't -- but we'll be all dead by then and it will be other peoples' nightmare.

Our children's nightmare to be precise.
But it's going to be all right...

Our children have worldly possessions we all worked so hard to give them. I for one had to marry into money. Our next door neighbours had to help International Aid suppliers with political kickbacks...

Earth & nature have in their possession all those words and speeches about protecting and saving them. We worked very hard to say and write those words. After so many words, you would think that nature would get its act together and stop being suicidal!

I hope it's not a case of diminishing resistance: that nature is giving up with ever increasing speed....
Things go downhill very quickly after that.

What I hate most of all is this: the earth is dying and there's no-one to blame but me. And you of course, but that does not help. You are me.