Weekending 23 June 2023
UKRAINE. NEW ZEALAND. CORRUPTION. UPSETTING ELON MUSK. PLATO. BLOWING UP CHINA. ME NOT GETTING PAID ENOUGH. YOUNGSTERS NOT GETTING PAID ENOUGH. CHANGING THE WORLD. POOH-TIN. The usual stuff.
It’s been a busy week of industrial action (mine), caring and sympathising. And getting words out. Here’s a pot-pourri — in parts, very pourri — of my LinkedIn contributions this last week. All power to Weekending!
Airpower
“We must never forget the solid assurances of sea power and those which belong to air power if it can be locally exercised.”
An assurance is no guarantee. But it’s better than an assumption. Winston would’ve agreed, and so do I.
We shall never surrender
Russia’s gas won’t endanger Europe, we were assured. Well, it did. So much for assurances. An assurance is no guarantee, that much diplomats know. It sounds like one: that they also know. But it isn’t one. If you like, an assurance is a guarantee, without any assurance. Earlier this year, I wrote about assurances. It’s
Air power
I coach English legal drafting and say so on my LinkedIn CV.
LinkedIn — bless them — sent me this job opportunity:
National Coach WU16
Royal Belgian Football Association · Tubize (On-site)
Skill match: Coaching
Er, I can blow a whistle, if that’s any use?
Purchase power
Are you feeling is present continuous tense. It’s inappropriate for expressing a feeling of permanence.
Explosive power
Baby power
It’s a conundrum, a clash of paradigms. But which prevails? Firms want people with ten years’ anything; graduates want the pay and conditions of those ten years their senior.
If you want to hire people with ten years of acquired whatever it is, that kind-a excludes Joe, here, buffing up on his hypertext mark-up language (perhaps Joe will give me some tips once he’s finished the book). And, for that matter, it excludes anyone aged under 30. So, why are the firm wasting the graduate’s time? Surely they know what they want and that they’ll not find it in a 20-year-old?
I sometimes go and look at job offers and look at what they want. And sometimes they end up telling me that what they want is not what they say they want. And I wonder if that’s a firm I particularly want to work for.
Instead, I tell them what I want and, after they’ve picked themselves up from the floor, they respond with, “Well, we can’t offer you what you’re looking for.”
And I bite hard into my tongue to prevent myself saying, “Can’t, or won’t?”
They offer the best of in-house training and support but aren’t interested in anyone who actually would want it.
Either that, or kids are too greedy. What’s new?
Pronoun power
There’s a lot of pronoun shifts these days. My transgender niece, who used to be my nephew, insists on being referred to as they, but a business contact and friend likes to be called he, though he used to be she. I think they’re both great, and one of them is less confusing than the other, simply because I’ve known them all my life. But, people get used to change. And I’m people.
Governments get less used to change, although they introduce a fair amount of it. They say, “We have done this” and “We have done that” and, in particular, they go into the passive mood when talking about money. “Taxes need to be raised” and “Expenditure is necessary.”
The Guardian has banned all gambling publicity and I recently wrote (NB: before they had done that), “I wonder how much gambling addiction there would be if the odds, and chances of winning, on the one hand, and the tiny admonition that gambling can be addictive were printed in each other’s typefaces?” Would that be a change that is easy to get used to, to enact and to enforce? I reckon, yeah.
But first, governments should get used to the change of saying, “Your money will be expended on this or that project,” “Your taxes will be raised,” “It is necessary to spend your money.” Because when they don’t put it like that, the people (of which I am one, don’t forget), tend to forget whose money it actually is.
Bear power
I think he’s turning into Mr Xi. Limitlessly. Can a Russian bear become Winnie the Pooh?
Discretionary power
I cannot see it helping to balance a see-saw, to leave him who gleefully allowed his underling to flail helplessly in the air himself now flailing helplessly.
Is the Auckland authority incapable of instilling a sense of justice and fairness with a properly administered, medically sound system that treats all patients on an equal footing, according to sound principles? Is that not what authorities have it within their remit to do? For how long will it be before the flailer is back on terra firma, and leaving his supposedly opposite number flailing as he had hitherto flailed?
Or can the administration not be trusted itself to institute justice within that which it administers?
Power grid
We live in a world in which the maxim of rules are made to be broken doesn’t even have to be a maxim.
Rules are now made with so many loopholes built into them, by negligence, inattentiveness or deliberately, at the behest of the wealthy, the canny, or the wily, or get put in corners of laws at the behest of lobbyists, who vaunt and protect their clients’ interests, by conniving or unsuspecting, as the case may be, lawmakers, who ensure the loopholes created are covered by equally vaunted obligations, duties and coercive measures imposed on the public, that the public believes in its wide-eyed innocence that the trouble it is being put to can but mean that said law is entirely effective in its stated goals.
For instance: viruses, money-laundering, sorting waste, cleansing society of gay deviants, firearms proliferation, olive oil and, here, holing the Russian economy below its waterline.
Well, with all the hullabaloo about sanctions of a severity never before seen, the Russians should be veritably on their knees, isn’t that the case? In 2022, the EU upped its Russian trade. Ye gods.
Where there’s a fat will, there’s a fat bill, for services. And this is our freedom and democracy?
Follow the money, but don’t pursue it.
Power corrupts
With a Belgian investigator into EU corruption now having a finger pointed at him for ... corruption, and the Olympic Games raided in Paris for suspected ... corruption, one does wonder at what incentive the highly principled UN (they’re in its charter, no less) needs in order to induce a state of such rigor mortis in its quest to cleanse the world of badness.
I have heard accounts from African refugee camps in which resettlement of refugees is withheld from the needy by UN workers until such time as their sweaty palms have been greased with lucre. (That’s the palms of the UN administrators, lest there be any misunderstanding.)
Time for a closet clear-out, methinks.
Autocratic power?
There is no shortage of economists. But why do they all seek to perpetuate a system they have studied and whose failings they must have observed? This is seminal, make no mistake. It is not only Africa that must hear this.
The fundamental problem with economies, legislation, interests and the eternal quandary, whether or not to throw off Marx’s chains, lies in enlightenment. It’s the one commodity the world now lacks.
It has in surfeit sympathetic fawning; it has oodles of bold words; it has tidal waves of highfalutin measures. But it has no measure of enlightenment, because enlightenment cannot be measured as a resource. It can only be measured in its effects.
Hobbes advocated autocracy, because democracy leads only to war. Whether on a battlefield or in the commercial markets — it’s all war. The holy grail that democracy offers demands a ruling class and uneducated masses. It cannot otherwise function. Autocracy, imbued with benevolence, and a realisation of what rules and regulations are even for, with enlightenment as to what government is; that is what Hobbes advocated; and that is what the world has not.
Where’s King Solomon, when you need him?
Let's shake up the world
What’s necessity? In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, there comes a scene where the king cannot sleep. He wonders that a ship’s boy posted high on a mast as look-out can sleep at his station in the wildest of seas and yet he, in all his comfort, cannot get a wink. Henry is a troubled man. His railing is interrupted by his counsellors, who advise of rebellion ferm…
Power of peace
People want Ukraine to win. To win the war. They say, Glory to Ukraine, and I wish them that too, ultimately. But glory, whilst it has been bestowed on its warriors for deserving acts of personal bravery and patriotic dedication, will only truly be bestowed on Ukraine herself once she has also proved herself deserving. And that, while I egg them on in the task, will not come when it wins its war. It will come when it wins its peace.
And, if and when it comes, glory will be not bestowed on Ukraine by Ukraine, unlike that which Ukraine bestows upon its warriors, for one does not appropriate glory to oneself.
It will be bestowed by an admiring world. If it admires.
Men of power
Alexander De Croo, the prime minister of Belgium, says he authorised a visa for an Iranian mayor to come to Brussels, and to have the mayor’s hotel bill paid by me and my countrymen, “in order to avoid a serious diplomatic incident with Iran.”
I personally think serious diplomatic incidents with Iran are precisely what the world needs right now. As one politicologue put it, “I hardly think the mayor went back to Iran and told its government ‘I have seen the light.’”
And upsetting donors is also something the world has a shortage of right now. We wouldn’t actually want to upset the scoundrels — I’ll put it no stronger — who’re busy squeezing both ends of every lemon they can get their sticky fingers on, now, would we?
They can upset us. But, by Gad, Mr B., don’t you go upsetting them.
A minor European power
I write what is me and what is in me. I review it — and take out the expletives. To pander to people’s sensibilities. I restructure it to make it make more logical sense. I add a funny to help it along; and then I shorten the last sentence, to leave folk with a gunshot ending. When it’s finished, it’s still me, or what’s in me, but without expletives.
I don’t wait to see who’s liked or appreciated it and my blog on the Substack gets very few comments and not that many readers. I’ve acted the lead in Shakespeare dramas, so I’m not shy. I have a fair number of followers here. Maybe I drop coins through a hole in my pocket.
I’d like to win a Pulitzer prize, but I won’t. I’d like to be as famous as Bill Bryson, but I won’t be. I’d like one person to read something I wrote from my heart and feel inspired by it. And that happened yesterday.
I don’t know how often it happened before that, not for sure. But yesterday it happened. I’m a success.
Now, for the next one.
The right to be forgotten
No. Because, just as on 22 February 2022, now, on 22 June 2023, my life is in danger from Russian aggression. And Ukraine is fighting for my life.
Ukraine is mired in corruption. And so is Britain. And so is Belgium. And so is Africa. And so is New Zealand. And so is where you are. We are all mired in corruption. It’s today’s business model.
I am battling a client today because it refuses to pay VAT on my bill. VAT, which is an obligation, imposed on me as a supplier, by law. I have no choice in the matter: I must charge VAT. They want me to take the VAT off my fee. I’ve said, “No.”
And Ukraine has said, “No.” It said, “No,” when the people of Lviv and Kyiv joined hands to link the two towns in 1991. It said, “No,” at the Maidan Dignity Revolution. It said, “No,” on 22 February 2022 and it is saying, “No,” now.
Now is the time for those who suffer from the indignity of those who say, “No,” to fairness to say, “No,” to their unfairness.
Ukraine’s not just doing this for itself. It’s doing this heavy lifting for everyone. So, keep saying, “Yes.”
Powerplato
Plato, who disapproved of democracy, said democracy’s founded in two tenets: 1: that all are free within the bounds set by law. And, 2: that all who operate under the law are equal.
What democracy’s freedom allows is structures like government, democratically enacting laws that still introduce inequalities. It is a tendency of man to favour what benefits him most. Like water choosing the path of least resistance, to gain the greatest flow.
Water’s natural and, in The African Queen, Katharine Hepburn had the most significant line: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on this Earth to rise above.”
It’s not just the US’s Jim Crow laws or South Africa’s and Rhodesia’s apartheid. Strength in numbers implies inequality: companies are more powerful than their single stockholders. They can go bankrupt with less consequence than individuals. Liability is limited, but not an individual’s. Because of laws. Companies pay for laws. The democratically elected favour people who pay, more than people who vote. And they in fact represent all the people, not simply those who vote for them.
That’s why democracy is rotten to the core. But we have little alternative. The only autocracy that works half-properly is the Vatican.
People power
Please don’t forget my appeal for Africa. Thank you.
Please give: you'll be paid back, so that you can give again
Image: Mr Abs Ngum. He’s sitting in the back of a safari truck at Fathala Park in Senegal. Safaris have been a growing industry sector in The Gambia and neighbouring Senegal over the last ten or 20 years. If Abs’s taxi venture succeeds, he’d like to branch out into safaris, offering safe, secure, knowledgeable tours to western tourists keen to see local…