MY GENERATION: Revelations and revolutions: revelry and reverie.

Just to remind you all that my book with the above title has now been published, on Kindle only at the moment but paperback to follow. Just go on Amazon books and type my name into the search box, scroll down the ensuing list and it will appear.

EBAY/PAYPAL PISS IN THE SAME POT: WILL EMPTY IT OVER YOU IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG.

E-bay and Pay Pal, same company, appear to be OK until something goes wrong then they show their true colours, the colour is arsehole brown. I would strongly recommend that if you have accounts with them you close them ASAP.

I have accounts with them and I have so far been unable to close them. I haven’t used the accounts for several years, then it appeared that My E-bay account had been hacked and used in a gold bullion bar scam. My email had also been hacked so all correspondence from E-Bay went straight into my trash file before I could read it. At that time I found I was still able to contact them by email and eventually had one from them, I had to keep going through my trash file, agreeing that my account had been hacked and I didn’t owe them £33,000, of course no apology for not keeping my account secure. They had put a block on my account, I asked them to close the account. What did they do? Removed the block. I asked PayPal to close my account at the same time, if the email reached them, I had to do that in a convoluted way also, they took no notice. All big companies make it really difficult to contact them other than by phone centre and I flatly refuse to waste my time doing that. Presumably they don’t want anything in writing that you can use as evidence. You can in theory speak to them in chat room or email them, login required, but I can’t login to either account. “Something has gone wrong please use the call centre”. A couple of months later I get a letter from a debt collection agency saying I owe PayPal about £1300, that was the first I heard of it. Then the debt collection agency rang me, they wanted me to ring a number to report a crime and get a report from the police. Fuck off it’s not my problem why should I waste my valuable time? Several weeks later I have heard nothing from the debt collectors or PayPal, I couldn’t care less I know I don’t owe them anything, but some people would be worried about it. These companies are incompetent and uncaring despite all the bollox they put on their websites. I am going to report them to the financial services ombudsman but in my experience they are also incompetent.

I have finally managed to get a postal address and find that many others have similar experiences. All these companies should take a bit more care, hire staff with more than 3 brain cells who speak English. On another note about another scam; If no one (Facebook) would take the adverts of the scammers and the credit card companies didn’t give them merchant accounts there wouldn’t be any scams. British Telecom could stop cold calls tomorrow, I have stopped answering the phone now unless I recognise the number. The problem is these companies make money out of it and they couldn’t care less about all hassle and time wasting of the poor buggers who are the victims. They also make it very difficult to complain.

The time has come to kick them all into touch and go off grid, I know people who are doing it and I am going to join them. If you have any problems with E-bay/PayPal the postal address for both is: Hotham House, 1 Heron Square, Richmond upon Thames TW9 1EJ.   

OH DIDDUMS.

The Extinction Rebellion protests are causing inconvenience and even making people late for work, quelle dommage. Attempting to halt the destruction of the environment is obviously considered less important than getting to work on time. Most jobs, not all, are crap anyway. If we did away with all the unnecessary jobs, had an economy which didn’t depend on continual growth, obviously unsustainable, and shared out the profits equably no one would need to work more than a couple of days a week, if at all.

At the moment the economy is all about creating a demand for goods and services that you are considered a failure if you don’t have. So, all those people are making themselves work slaves for something that, if they thought about it, they really don’t need. Why spend money you don’t have, to buy things you don’t need, to impress people you don’t like. Producing and using all these things is destroying the environment. In terms of possessions what most people have is totally pathetic in comparison with what the very rich have, and no matter how hard you work you will never come near. Far more important is to have less stress, good health and the time to enjoy what you do have.

Our leaders seem to think it is important that everybody works 40+ hours a week, even though all those unnecessary jobs make everything less efficient. Perhaps they are worried that if people have free time to think about things more of them will begin to question the status quo. Extinction Rebellion don’t have leaders which is the ideal. You can have a very good life without all that crap. I recommend my book “My Generation: Revelations and Revolutions : Revelry and Reverie” which will help show you how to do it.

In the meantime don’t get stressed about being inconvenienced; make the most of it, a lot of the protests are pure street theatre; you might even think about joining in. fffffff

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY AFTER AND THE DAY AFTER, RECURRING.

Among those who know me there may be some who think that Carol literally dropping dead, unhinged me a bit, they may well be right, but in fact I was probably never properly hinged in the first place, being able to swing in only two directions would never have been enough for me. Certainly, it has shaken me out of my complacency and despite that, and all the other stuff that has happened, has made me realise that the vast majority are not as lucky as I. When I look at the state of the world, which has got steadily worse for the majority in the course of my lifetime, I find that many of my old hippie anarchist attitudes are coming back.

I am very happy to see that I am not the only one and worldwide, protest movements are gathering momentum, many of them started months, even years ago. They are not a mass movement of the people, who are mostly complacent or “The Man” has managed to mire them into subservience. They are a movement of thinking people who are fed up with authoritarian regimes and “The Man” destroying the environment for profit, and ruining people’s lives. I think those of us who have the wherewithal and the time have a responsibility to do something about it.

In an ideal world peaceful protest and civil disobedience would be the way to go about it, and Gandhi managed to defeat the might of the British Empire in India, this way. It can only work if you have the vast majority of the people on board. I have been involved in Green protest and activism since the 70’s, marching and wheeling my bike around London, but what has it achieved? Sweet FA, other than to raise awareness, but pollution and the destruction of the environment have got steadily worse until it has started to impact on people’s lives and not just in the third world. I think we have reached the tipping point now and the extinction of the human population has begun and will probably accelerate. Let us hope we don’t take everything else with us, otherwise it will be beneficial for the environment and a solution to the overpopulation problem.

When I first started going on protest marches everything was more good-natured, we marched the police marched along side us and there might have been a few scuffles. One of them tried to arrest me on a demo and I knocked his helmet off and legged it into the crowd. A few years later, and I think it started with the Miners Strike, the police would be in full riot gear. They would corral protestors into dead ends where there was no escape and then advance on us in a line beating their truncheons on their riot shields and then on the protestor’s heads. It seems that worldwide it is usually the police who cause the violence to escalate and in many other countries they are even worse than here and routinely use tear gas, water cannon, rubber bullets and even live rounds. We are therefore justified in responding with violence ourselves, it is self-defence.

If we could start a revolution in the rank and file of the police it would be brilliant, the police should be there to protect the public, in practice they are there to uphold the status quo. ”The law is an ass”, and I have recent personal experience of this with Electricity North West and their fucking mast. The law allows them to put a communications mast about a metre from my new build, and yes, I have an axe to grind but bearing in mind that they have already cost me £61,000, I think I am justified. I will get it back one way or another and I think I have already cost them £millions by helping to ruin the sale of the company, it has certainly changed their attitude towards me, from aggressive to conciliatory. Revenge is a dish best taken cold. All the organisations that should be there to protect the public from this sort of thing bend over backwards to represent the interests of big companies. I pointed out to the police that ENWL had put false information in their application for a Lawful Development Certificate and if deliberate it would be an offence, I had evidence. They didn’t want to know, but when I put a security camera to monitor them parking where they shouldn’t, 2 officers came up the same day to make me remove it. All any of these organisations will say is that I would have to take them on in the Courts myself. ENWL have blatantly told me in writing that I would be risking massive costs if I took this action and lost, which, bearing in mind the Courts would probably be biased their favour, could be the outcome. We are therefore justified in taking whatever direct action is necessary to get the better of them, including sabotage.

Many of the protests are against authoritarian regimes like China, and you have to be very brave to take them on. In fact, all regimes are to some extent authoritarian as my own experiences have shown. In the UK we are less likely to killed or imprisoned without trial and tortured, but it has happened covertly. Some people have had their reputations destroyed and been bankrupted for taking on the wrong people.

So, there we have it those in power are on the whole not that smart and often in thrall to those extremely rich individuals and companies that really hold the power. As Bob Marley said, “if you are a big tree, I am small axe, sharpened to cut you down”. Viva La Revolution.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

We need to develop a universal complete disrespect for all authority until such time as authority is deserving of it. I already did about fifty-five years ago, authority is even less deserving of it now.

IS VEGANISM GOOD FOR ANIMALS, GOOD FOR YOU AND GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?

Short answer, probably not. On the face of it vegans would seem to hold the moral high ground, who could deny that being kind to animals by not killing and eating them or otherwise exploiting them is a noble goal, but in practice I think you will find there is a bit more to it than that, as with most things in life.

So, does veganism benefit animals? Bearing in mind that anything that is bad for the environment is almost certainly bad for animals I will treat the two as one, and one would have to go a lot further than just not eating animals to be of benefit. Nearly everything we do damages the environment so in practice very few of us can validly claim that our actions do not harm animals and the environment of which we are all part. Which is worse, as a farmed animal having a good life on an old-fashioned farm and being quickly killed, or as a wild animal having a lingering death from starvation loss of habitat, or pollution? A lot of vegan food is based on soy and huge areas of vital rain forest are being lost every day to grow the nasty stuff, after a few years the land is useless for anything. For the sake of balance, I would point out that a lot of rain forest is also being lost to grazing land for cattle that end up in junk burghers. So, any type of factory or intensive farming is bad for both man and beast and if you factor in GMO’s, which are of no benefit to anyone save the companies and their shareholders that make them, things begin to get really dangerous and could even be death of us all and the environment. Organic is now sold as a premium “brand” but originally all farming was organic and that should be considered the norm. Crops were rotated, animal shit fertilised the ground and weed-killer was not to be seen. Bugs were predated on by birds and small animals further up the food chain that lived in the hedgerows, when there were hedgerows. Sometimes a crop might have been lost to pests but it would just be ploughed back in to fertilise the soil for next year’s crop. Chickens clucked about in every country person’s garden and were fed on what we now throw away. In those days we ate the eggs but chicken was a luxury; rabbit was the everyday food. As they ate crops and were considered vermin they were widely shot, eaten and were a staple in the diets of country folk; this was considerably better for the rabbit than deliberately introducing myxomatosis which is often how their numbers are controlled now in large scale farming.

We are often told that due our large numbers we now need industrial farming to feed everyone and that eventually we will also need everyone to be vegan for the same reason. There is a film called Soylent Green which addresses this scenario; surely it would make more sense to reduce the population, thus solving a lot of other problems at the same time. It is better to have a sustainable population living well than to be a grossly overcrowded one just existing. As a country it could easily be done, and I have pointed out how in previous posts.  So, everything in those days followed a natural cycle of which eating animals was part. Large scale crop growing damages the land which like a junkie needs ever increasing doses of chemical fertiliser and weedkiller. Bearing in mind the above one of the worst things you can do to the environment and thus the wild animal population is to have children. They all have to eat and have a place to live, twenty years later they will be producing the next generation and so ad infinitum. It inevitably impacts on the natural habitats of animals and indigenous people, who all live in harmony with nature far better than we do and I don’t think any of them are vegan. So, EVERY DAY 200,000 more people and 140 million tons of global warming pollution come into the world. As one of the biggest health problems in our world is obesity, thanks to junk food, and one of the biggest health problems in other parts of the world is starvation we would be better eating less and eating better.

So, is it good for those following the vegan path? We should remember that nature is red in tooth and claw. We are descended from primitive people, hunter gatherers, our ancestors would have foraged for nuts and berries and from time to time killed an animal or animals, if they killed a big animal there would have been feasting, this may well explain why the present day practice of barbequing is so popular. Recent finds suggest that their hunting was much more successful than had been previously thought and meat formed a large part of their diet. Animals themselves predate on each other, and on us given the chance. Our natural state is to be omnivorous. As sentient, intelligent beings, well some of us, we have a choice not to eat animals or animal products but it means we have to take care to get all the nutrients we need. Many vegans don’t and here is a lot of junk vegan food.

 If you genuinely don’t want cause harm to animals you will have to do a lot more than just not eating them. Let’s start with the clothes you wear; obviously all man-made fibres use a lot of resources to produce and produce a lot of pollution. Even washing them releases plastic microparticles into the environment. So called “natural” cotton starts with huge fields of crops which are anything but natural in the way they are farmed, this goes to factories in the third world where it is made into cloth by slave labour and on to sweat shops where it is made into clothes by exploited workers always to the detriment of their health.

As I have said anything done on a large scale is bad and this includes dairy farming. There are however small-scale diary farms where they manage the process without causing harm to animals and produce delicious artisan cheeses. Many of the alternatives to dairy have their own issues, for instance soy milk uses 2000 times as much water to produce.

There are many other examples, but I will resist the temptation to go on and on, I will just repeat that nearly everything we do is harmful to the environment in some way. I have given you some food for thought, non-vegan, I don’t feel the need to apologise for being a carnivore. There are some things I find unacceptable, hunting for trophies, keeping animals and birds in cages, cruelty to animals especially in the third world, unnecessary suffering including kosher and halal slaughter and getting pleasure from harming animals, fox hunting, badger baiting etc.

Many vegans, not all can be a po-faced, joyless lot, and many of the radical ones downright aggressive. Let’s just get back to small farms, proper farmers markets and artisan food producers, perhaps we should all eat more vegetarian and vegan food, a lot of it is delicious in its own right, but not exclude meat and cheese altogether please.