It's July and there's a good impression of November going on out there; fog and rain and humidity.
No, I'm not going to indulge in that English-ism of wittering on about the weather. Except I am, sort of. Briefly.
It must be absolutely plain to even the thickest that the weather is weird. Regularly weird. A month's worth of rain in 24 hours (and that month was probably January, not July), America and us having more super-cell thunderstorms, Russia with multiple deaths and floods, Washington at 112f records.
I can now confidently predict that the involved governments will now start concentrating on ..... lining their own pockets, protecting the fiscal status quo and screwing over the people so we're too worried about paying for our broadband to care about climate change.
We need some leaders, not peacock brained fuckwits from the upper classes.
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Thursday, 5 July 2012
As David Bowie once sang; oh no, not again!
On Monday, upon return from a relaxing fortnights holiday, I went back to work to receive the news that my company had sold my company to another company.
Bugger!
Given that this would be my third experience of this, neither of the other two had ended well for the previous companies I'd worked for, I started worrying. Now this process will take some time, EU competition laws mean a 3 month farting about period while the i's get crossed and so forth. I'm also informed that nothing can be 'done' to us for a year, so there's 'nothing to worry about in the short term' (a philosophy that has landed us, as a species, in the ordure more than once). Time to take stock.
I'm in my late 50's so my options are limited; a spell in the forces, volunteering overseas (my wife would love that one), sell up and join a touring rep company, retrain (still a possibility) as an acrobat (hmmm, maybe not then) and so on. One re-evaluates the skills set one has accrued over the years, reflecting on missed, lost or ignored opportunities. It's one of those 'interesting times' that the Chinese wish upon you when they're a bit less than keen.
It did make me think, however, of the incredibly unfair society in which we live, where decisions made by people who are fairly well insulated from fiscal non-viability affect those of us who are mere puppets of a capitalist conspiracy to, well, you get the picture. Of course this is about Bob diamond. and Nick Leeson and George Osborne, Gordon Brown and all the others.
I have a Son, coming up to his 21st Birthday, who has rarely worked. A fanatically funny and energetic lad as a youth, class joker and all that, who was effectively told not to be so happy and frivolous. A boy who needed stimulus and fairness more than anything but who was let down by a systems designed to stamp out well-behaved fodder for the jobs market while adhering to Government/OFSTED quanta and targets. After an altercation with the school bully he was expelled, but not expelled, that halfway house called exclusion; he had to work from home. After an unsuccessful year he got little in the way of qualifications but was lucky enough to find a placement on an apprenticeship. 6 months playing with woodworking tools in an attempt to give him building skills. The advice seemed sound; in a couple of years time the Olympics will absorb thousands of builders and there will be a shortage around the country, can't fail. then the economy tanked and it all went Pete Tong.
Fast forward to now. Those Olympics are upon us, the labour was cheap and plentiful but the rest of the country has little in the way of building work.Thousand languish, my lad amongst them. His Mother and I separated due to her alcoholism and he left home to live with his girlfriend. But, he can't find work, the DWP have sanctioned him for some spurious reasons (among thousands of others) in an attempt to lower the unemployment figures. He now faces the undignified prospect of having to give up his home because he's, gasp, under 25 and not living at home, so his chances of having a relationship are now under threat.
All of this is because some guys who have 6+ figure salaries and get bonuses when the fail got greedy (or stupid, I can't make up my mind which). And that, sorry David, pompous ass Cameron, privately educated from a fund that he seems to want to deny others the ability to build, wants to remove a substantial proportion of the safeguards put in place by several generations of government, to avoid/stop a 'culture of dependency'. A culture made inevitable by the actions of a monied few who have mismanaged the wealth of our nation/planet. and based upon the actions of a minority of fiddlers who have taken the system for a ride.
Just like the bankers!
So, while Bob Diamond gives up his job for the sake of the bank 'he loves' and the real culprits evade detection, what will Cameron do about this? bugger all, I suspect.
It's time for change, and we all should be making noises to make this happen.
Sorry if this was a bit tedious but I had to get it out. I suspect I'm not alone on this one.
Bugger!
Given that this would be my third experience of this, neither of the other two had ended well for the previous companies I'd worked for, I started worrying. Now this process will take some time, EU competition laws mean a 3 month farting about period while the i's get crossed and so forth. I'm also informed that nothing can be 'done' to us for a year, so there's 'nothing to worry about in the short term' (a philosophy that has landed us, as a species, in the ordure more than once). Time to take stock.
I'm in my late 50's so my options are limited; a spell in the forces, volunteering overseas (my wife would love that one), sell up and join a touring rep company, retrain (still a possibility) as an acrobat (hmmm, maybe not then) and so on. One re-evaluates the skills set one has accrued over the years, reflecting on missed, lost or ignored opportunities. It's one of those 'interesting times' that the Chinese wish upon you when they're a bit less than keen.
It did make me think, however, of the incredibly unfair society in which we live, where decisions made by people who are fairly well insulated from fiscal non-viability affect those of us who are mere puppets of a capitalist conspiracy to, well, you get the picture. Of course this is about Bob diamond. and Nick Leeson and George Osborne, Gordon Brown and all the others.
I have a Son, coming up to his 21st Birthday, who has rarely worked. A fanatically funny and energetic lad as a youth, class joker and all that, who was effectively told not to be so happy and frivolous. A boy who needed stimulus and fairness more than anything but who was let down by a systems designed to stamp out well-behaved fodder for the jobs market while adhering to Government/OFSTED quanta and targets. After an altercation with the school bully he was expelled, but not expelled, that halfway house called exclusion; he had to work from home. After an unsuccessful year he got little in the way of qualifications but was lucky enough to find a placement on an apprenticeship. 6 months playing with woodworking tools in an attempt to give him building skills. The advice seemed sound; in a couple of years time the Olympics will absorb thousands of builders and there will be a shortage around the country, can't fail. then the economy tanked and it all went Pete Tong.
Fast forward to now. Those Olympics are upon us, the labour was cheap and plentiful but the rest of the country has little in the way of building work.Thousand languish, my lad amongst them. His Mother and I separated due to her alcoholism and he left home to live with his girlfriend. But, he can't find work, the DWP have sanctioned him for some spurious reasons (among thousands of others) in an attempt to lower the unemployment figures. He now faces the undignified prospect of having to give up his home because he's, gasp, under 25 and not living at home, so his chances of having a relationship are now under threat.
All of this is because some guys who have 6+ figure salaries and get bonuses when the fail got greedy (or stupid, I can't make up my mind which). And that, sorry David, pompous ass Cameron, privately educated from a fund that he seems to want to deny others the ability to build, wants to remove a substantial proportion of the safeguards put in place by several generations of government, to avoid/stop a 'culture of dependency'. A culture made inevitable by the actions of a monied few who have mismanaged the wealth of our nation/planet. and based upon the actions of a minority of fiddlers who have taken the system for a ride.
Just like the bankers!
So, while Bob Diamond gives up his job for the sake of the bank 'he loves' and the real culprits evade detection, what will Cameron do about this? bugger all, I suspect.
It's time for change, and we all should be making noises to make this happen.
Sorry if this was a bit tedious but I had to get it out. I suspect I'm not alone on this one.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Bully for you.
Bullying is a problem, we know this. Very few people go through life without being bullied at some point, by someone. I know I've been bullied mercilessly.
On the other hand I know I've bullied someone. I've probably bullied someone without realising it. I bet you have too.
Bullying has been turned into a 'cause', something to be 'tackled' or 'dealt with' and in doing so has become seriously misunderstood.
The case of Jordan Green, a young Harrogate boy who took his own life gave rise to rumours of bullying which subsequently led to a firestorm of activity in the twittereverseablogosphere, activity ranging from 'what an awful shame' to 'grab your torches and pitchforks folks, we're a going' to a lynching. And then his mother releases a statement decrying the press for misrepresentation and misreporting of the case, stating there was no clear reason for Jordan's suicide and that bullying was not a significant factor. It all went terribly quiet after that.
Now bullying is a problem, but it's not a problem that is new. Is bullying getting worse? No one knows because any statistics are guesses or extrapolations of thin data, but we all have our own stories. I'm kinda dyslexic and OCD, not massively but enough for me to have been labeled 'stupid' by my teachers (I was educated before Man went to the Moon). I was bullied by my teachers and a large number of schoolmates. In those days I was told to 'just stand up to them', a technique that either a) got me a hiding, b) gave me sway over my bully, allowing me to now bully him, or b) end up earning respect, grudging or otherwise, from my peer group.
Then I had children. boys.
No 2 Son grew up with an astonishing sense of right and wrong and an almost pathological hatred of injustice, so when the local school bully tried it on he ended up with a bloody nose. Guess who the school came down hard on? At the meeting I queried the head as to how he was going to end bullying? given that the human race has been bullying away for thousands of years, any such 'cure' would surely be aligned with the discovery of DNA or the wheel? He said a program of awareness and counselling. I simply stopped at that point, his assertion that bullying 'would not be tolerated' led me to reply 'how do you know who the bullies are? He had no effective method of finding out, outside of the bullied telling him (and we all know what a tell-tale gets). I left the meeting with my opinion of bullying, and bullies, unchanged. It's a part of who we are; politicians bully each other on TV all the time, employers, employees, wives, husbands and children all bully each other. sometimes we call bullying by other names and use many different passive/aggressive techniques. We will never eradicate bullying, it's as much a part of us as intolerance, bigotry and kindness.
So what can we do? Well, stop overreacting to tales of bullying and cut out the rhetoric of the evangelistic, 'this must stop', 'something must be done', 'join the Parents Against Pressure group for a midnite walk against bullying'. To lose a child is appalling, to lose a child to suicide is doubly so, (I had a nephew who took his own life at 17, he wasn't being bullied he just saw no point to his life; no job, no prospects, a society short of care). To then have that child's death mistakenly appropriated for a cause simply amplifies the pain.
As well as all of us being bullies, we almost always have jerky knees. Heidi Green, I'm sorry for your loss and for all you have gone through at the hands of the ant-bully bullies!
On the other hand I know I've bullied someone. I've probably bullied someone without realising it. I bet you have too.
Bullying has been turned into a 'cause', something to be 'tackled' or 'dealt with' and in doing so has become seriously misunderstood.
The case of Jordan Green, a young Harrogate boy who took his own life gave rise to rumours of bullying which subsequently led to a firestorm of activity in the twittereverseablogosphere, activity ranging from 'what an awful shame' to 'grab your torches and pitchforks folks, we're a going' to a lynching. And then his mother releases a statement decrying the press for misrepresentation and misreporting of the case, stating there was no clear reason for Jordan's suicide and that bullying was not a significant factor. It all went terribly quiet after that.
Now bullying is a problem, but it's not a problem that is new. Is bullying getting worse? No one knows because any statistics are guesses or extrapolations of thin data, but we all have our own stories. I'm kinda dyslexic and OCD, not massively but enough for me to have been labeled 'stupid' by my teachers (I was educated before Man went to the Moon). I was bullied by my teachers and a large number of schoolmates. In those days I was told to 'just stand up to them', a technique that either a) got me a hiding, b) gave me sway over my bully, allowing me to now bully him, or b) end up earning respect, grudging or otherwise, from my peer group.
Then I had children. boys.
No 2 Son grew up with an astonishing sense of right and wrong and an almost pathological hatred of injustice, so when the local school bully tried it on he ended up with a bloody nose. Guess who the school came down hard on? At the meeting I queried the head as to how he was going to end bullying? given that the human race has been bullying away for thousands of years, any such 'cure' would surely be aligned with the discovery of DNA or the wheel? He said a program of awareness and counselling. I simply stopped at that point, his assertion that bullying 'would not be tolerated' led me to reply 'how do you know who the bullies are? He had no effective method of finding out, outside of the bullied telling him (and we all know what a tell-tale gets). I left the meeting with my opinion of bullying, and bullies, unchanged. It's a part of who we are; politicians bully each other on TV all the time, employers, employees, wives, husbands and children all bully each other. sometimes we call bullying by other names and use many different passive/aggressive techniques. We will never eradicate bullying, it's as much a part of us as intolerance, bigotry and kindness.
So what can we do? Well, stop overreacting to tales of bullying and cut out the rhetoric of the evangelistic, 'this must stop', 'something must be done', 'join the Parents Against Pressure group for a midnite walk against bullying'. To lose a child is appalling, to lose a child to suicide is doubly so, (I had a nephew who took his own life at 17, he wasn't being bullied he just saw no point to his life; no job, no prospects, a society short of care). To then have that child's death mistakenly appropriated for a cause simply amplifies the pain.
As well as all of us being bullies, we almost always have jerky knees. Heidi Green, I'm sorry for your loss and for all you have gone through at the hands of the ant-bully bullies!
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