Y.C.M.T.S.U.

 

_____________

 

Are you going mad? I know I am.

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It’s only £20….

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Well, when was the last time you did that? 

Exactly.

Don’t drink and drive, unless the Government says so.

 

 

 

 

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Anarchy For The UK

Equality vs Equity - Difference and Comparison | Diffen

I think I’ve spoken about Invalidation before on this blog. It works like this…

As an experiment, ask someone you know to pinch your arm. Instruct this person that no matter what you do the only response they should give you is: “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Have them pinch you until it starts to hurt. Once the pain has irritated you enough to tell the person how much it hurts and you want them to stop, all you will hear is:

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

How many times in your life have you heard someone say this phrase to you? If you have ever had a bonafide reason to phone a business to complain about something, it’s likely you will have been on the receiving end of something like this:

‘I’m sorry you feel that way, at Sainsbury’s we want to ensure that all our shoppers have a pleasant experience and everyone is treated equally.’ What they won’t do is apologise. If they do make an effort to sound like they are making an apology, they will inevitably apologise for the way YOU are feeling rather than what THEY have done. Then they offer you a £10 voucher which you can only spend in their shop. It’s good innit?

Is any of this familiar?

Debating

  • I don’t always do that.
  • It’s not that bad. (that far, that heavy, that hot, that serious, etc.)

Judging & Labeling You

  • You are a cry baby.
  • You have a problem.
  • You are too sensitive.
  • You are over-reacting. You are too thin-skinned.
  • You are way too emotional.
  • You are an insensitive jerk. .
  • You need to get your head examined!
  • You are impossible to talk to.
  • You are impossible.
  • You are hopeless.

Turning Things Around

  • You are making a big deal out of nothing.
  • You are blowing this way out of proportion.
  • You are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Trying to get you to question yourself

  • What is your problem?
  • What’s wrong with you?
  • What’s the matter with you?
  • Why can’t you just get over it?
  • Why do you always have to ….?
  • Is that all you can do, complain?
  • Why are you making such a big deal over it?
  • What’s wrong with you, can’t you take a joke?
  • How can you let a little thing like that bother you?
  • Don’t you think you are being a little dramatic?
  • Do you really think that crying about it is going to help anything?

Telling You How You “Should” Feel or Act

  • You should be excited.
  • You should be thrilled.
  • You should feel guilty.
  • You should feel thankful that…
  • You should be happy that ….
  • You should be glad that …
  • You should just drop it.
  • You shouldn’t worry so much.
  • You shouldn’t let it bother you.
  • You should just forget about it.
  • You should feel ashamed of yourself.
  • You shouldn’t wear your heart out on your sleeve.
  • You shouldn’t say that about your father/mother.

Defending The Other Person

  • Maybe they were just having a bad day.
  • I am sure she didn’t mean it like that.
  • You just took it wrong.
  • I am sure she means well.

Negating, Denial & Confusion

  • Now you know that isn’t true.
  • You don’t mean that. You know you love your baby brother.
  • You don’t really mean that. You are just … (in a bad mood today, tired, cranky)

Sarcasm and Mocking

  • Oh, you poor thing. Did I hurt your little feelings?
  • What did you think? The world was created to serve you?
  • What happened to you? Did you get out of the wrong side of bed again?

Laying Guilt Trips

  • Don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself?
  • What about my feelings?!
  • Have you ever stopped to consider my feelings?

Philosophizing Or Clichés

  • Time heals all wounds.
  • Every cloud has a silver lining.
  • Life is full of pain and pleasure.
  • In time you will understand this.
  • When you are older you will understand
  • You are just going through a phase.
  • Everything has its reasons.
  • Everything is just the way it is supposed to be.

Talking about you when you can hear it

  • She is impossible to talk to.
  • You can’t say anything to her.

Showing Intolerance

  • This is getting really old.
  • This is getting really pathetic.
  • I am sick of hearing about it.

 

We’ve all said some of these things to friends and family and others in our lives and we’ve all been on the receiving end too. Try and catch yourself doing it and then offer an alternative. Say something like this if you messed up and left someone waiting: “I totally understand that you’re upset because I wasn’t on time which was rude and irresponsible of me.”

Politicians are the greatest invalidators of them all. They wrote the fucking lexicon on it.

“Let me be clear” – followed by something completely off-topic or unclear.

“We never said that.” – Yes, you did, otherwise, I wouldn’t be quoting it!

“No, you are misquoting me.” – I’m showing you the actual film footage of you saying it?

It’s omnipresent in the language they use and accompanied by blatant lying, Ad Hominem attacks, and bullying tactics. The biggest stage for their abusive behaviour is The House Of Commons, which is perfectly set-up for constant invalidating to bounce around the chamber like a huge political shit slinging match which never seems to resolve the argument or make it feel like anything is actually getting done. PMQ’s should be called Prime Ministers Fuck You time.

Invalidation is considered by the psychiatric profession to be at number two in the Shrinkers Billboard Chart Of Abuse. They say it’s one of the worst things you can do to a fellow human. Apparently, it doesn’t agree with us to be told the way we are feeling is fucking wrong.

So with all the invalidation that goes on at home, in the workplace, in the media, in the myriad call centre’s of companies like eBay and Amazon and the very people we supposedly elect to run the country, it stands to reason therefore that we are all either abusing each other or being systematically abused by the system.

So what could be the result of this, how do people respond when you constantly deny them their feelings? The simple answer is they get depressed. To paraphrase Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan: “When was the last time you felt good about anything?”

Try getting through an episode of Newsnight, A Daily Briefing or Sky News, or the shit-show that is Question Time, without feeling some kind of anger or beside yourself disbelief. It’s that moment when you shake your head and say and tweet: ‘FFS…you can’t make this shit up.’

Try to think in terms of the fact that everything you see, is given to you to see, and everything you don’t see, it’s still there, but you just aren’t being shown it.

Take for example the famous Intelligence and Security Committee Report into outside interference of the Brexit referendum and 2017 election, now commonly referred to as ‘The Russia Report.’

Is it too conspiratorial to hazard a guess about the handling of this report and throw this one at ya… howz about… if they didn’t want you to know about it, you probably wouldn’t even know it existed. The fact you know it is there but you can’t see it, could be deliberate, to heap on even more confusion, hatred, and anxiety? Dangle a carrot, then pull it away, and off you go Tweeting your outrage with hash-fucking-tag-Russia-report.  Tweet till yer heart’s content, which, by the way, it never will be, because all it does is achieve a morbid perpetuation of anxiety which you spread to inadvertently increase the shit feelings you and everyone else have about fucking everything. It might be better to just move on and accept you are dead anyway, it may help you to live longer.

You get a nice slab of division by making a section of people rant against another section of people for ranting about something they don’t want others to rant about.

It doesn’t have to be like this at all because leaders can easily bring people together if they need it. When the State wants you to pick up a rifle and go and kill someone for them, it seems so easy to bring the nation together. We want YOU! We need Spitfires. Everybody needs to do their part.

Together we can beat this virus.

There has been a lot of this going on. But there has also been a feeling of one rule for them and one rule for us. The Cummings Trip was not so much a scandal because of what he had done, it was that he had shown us all there was no spirit of being ‘in this together’. How many contradictions have you heard coming out of the mouths of politicians lately? Go out, but don’t go out, go to school but don’t go to a house, go to the beach but don’t all go to the beach at the same time. These are the rules but we are not going to make the rules.

Sometimes these contradictions are delivered in the same sentence. It rose to farcical proportions with the Cummings eye test story. It was insulting bullshit of biblical proportions. Gove, haplessly trying to defend Cummings, said he had driven a car on several occasions to test an incapacity he may have had. Becoming aware of the ridiculousness of what he was saying, he then folded on camera looking up to his left muttering ‘how can I put this’ before laughing at himself.

But he wasn’t laughing at himself, he was laughing at you. He’s laughing at us, with such brazen assuredness only a completely corrupt system can allow.

In protecting us from the virus, you must ask yourself, if it really is that possible to get things as shambolically wrong as this current Government so obviously has. There’s been a steady stream of contradictions, false promises, mixed messages, denials, and massaging of the figures. If you watch the Daily Briefing, you will only ever see a slide of a graph that goes downwards. I have a strong suspicion that right now, the graph is hastily trending upwards and they took the scientists out of the briefings and then cancelled the briefing itself to hide us from this uncomfortable truth. This gives them time to deny an upturn in the R-rate and therefore not be forced into the obvious shame of re-imposing a lockdown which will prompt questions about how things seem to be not going very well at all. These current politicians are so cuntish, they will let people die rather than being made to look squeamish for mistakes they’ve made.

They are not accountable, they really just don’t want to show you the reality, it’s just not convenient at the moment you scumbags. Anywayz, all you can do is write to your local MP and take the pills your doctor gives you and drink booze to keep your anxiety and frustration levels in check. Go Tweet your rage across the internet.

Equality vs. Equity vs. Capitalism | Cato @ Liberty

 

The Big Lie

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique and logical fallacy about the use of a lie which is so colossal that no one would ever believe someone could have the outright balls to distort the truth to such an extent.

You can get away with it if you follow the rules.

The primary rules are: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your opposition; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

The above should sound or look familiar because, right now, this government is being marched onwards by a bunch of elitist Anarchists who will take advantage of every opportunity to create a political storm.

If I had several weeks to devote to this, it would not be possible to provide you with all the examples of how propaganda pervades every aspect of our society.  Propaganda is not a separate stream of information; it is embedded, so much so, that you can’t see it, but you can certainly feel it.

It might surprise you to know the idea of the Big Lie explained above, came from Hitler, and the rules to make it work came from Goebbels. Hitler and Goebbels did not invent propaganda though. The word was actually coined by the Catholic Church to describe its efforts to discredit Protestant teachings in the 1600s.

equity vs equality : TheRightCantMeme

Chaos

Nietsche loved chaos and Hitler and Goebbels loved Nietsche. Dominic Cumming loves chaos too, he even sniggers as he is creating it in front of your eyes.

Out of chaos comes order and Dominic ‘Rasputin’ Cummings wants to destroy the old order and bring in a new one, it’s called ARPA. To do this, he needs to fuck the Civil Service and everything that goes with it, and he can’t have any rules or regulations from the EU hanging over him as he is doing it, hence Brexit.

Brexit is now unravelling. There was no such thing as Project Fear just as much as there was no such thing as giving the NHS £350 million a week. The NHS is toast. The Farmers have been thrown under the bus, non-labelled chlorinated chicken is on its way from America, and the fruit is gonna rot. Project fear warned about all of these things happening, it was all a big lie back then, yet recently even Prince Charles shot an Info-flick appealing for a land army to mobilise and go and help in the fields. You first Farage and Duncan Smith.

If Project Fear had been a real thing, and not just some made up part of the Cummings propaganda machine to maim the opposition with, they would have had one of those three-word slogans too, it may likely have been: Don’t Lose Control

You can’t blame anyone for the way they voted in the referendum, we are way past that and frankly, I don’t give a fuck. There was no proper debate, everything was shrouded in a mist created by finger-pointing rhetoric and constant misinformation. How could anybody come to an informed decision with so much bullshit flying around?

It was such an important question about the country’s future and it was taken away from us as it was turned into a media circus and a strange sort of non-electing election campaign, which saw known Remainer Boris Johnson hedging his bets on which side to take right up until the very last minute. Yes, it was that important to him. Then when he won, he walked away, knowing it would be a poisoned chalice. Life is all about timing, it’s true, but no one can foresee the future and this virus has turned out to be an even poisoned chalice of a different and unexpected kind. He may have won a slot to be next resident at number 10 but he is now out of his depth, spending too much time away, and seemingly unable to make his mind up about important decisions. Some of his decisions defy logic and rather than being helpful to his people they seem purely political and helpful to himself, his friends, and his allies. Regardless. He looks very flustered at PMQ’s as his lying is uncovered by the new leader of the opposition.

If you go into a lockdown later than all the other European Countries, you have to come out of it later, it’s logical, it’s not something you can rush because you want things to be seen as desperately different from what they are. You can’t spin a virus a lie and ease off restrictions just to take Cummings off the front pages. You can’t tell people that a world-beating track and trace system is in place when it’s just not because, this virus, it’s real and it doesn’t respond to Gaslighting.

Right now there is such division in this country that you have people screaming on Twitter about Ali G being racist. Like any sane person, I abhor racism, but when John Barnes is being called out for saying he thinks Ali G is not racist, by people who say he can’t speak for the black community, surely things have gone off the scale bonkers.

It feels like that. How many times have you said, seen, or heard, ‘you can’t make this shit up’? A famous ex-footballer tweeted this today:

“Everything is so ludicrously tribal these days. Huge crowds on a beach: one side says it’s fine. The other side says it’s bringing another COVID 19 wave. Huge crowds protesting against racism: side who says it’s fine on the beach, says it will cause 2nd wave. The other side says it’s fine.”

People are screaming on Twitter about Matt Wankcock being an out-of-his-depth-lying-fuckwit-clueless-twat every time he opens his mouth on the telly and talks like a man trapped in his own Gaslit nightmare mindlessly refuting any sane arguments to say he or his chums might have got decisions wrong. Today he even said, against all scientific reasoning, that the decision to lockdown so late was a good one. Johnson, who is apparently running a country that now officially has over 40,000 dead people due to the virus, can be heard repeatedly saying how proud he is of the job he’s done, so much so, that he has now even decided to take control of the situation himself. Wow.

It looks like a last-ditch-dead-in-a-ditch attempt to start the new campaign of let’s ‘Get COVID Done’

It’s all nonsense of course. But are these Ministers all proper stupid or is there a plan to create chaos and confusion and to divide the public and never allow them to simmer down by giving them a few words of kindness and the odd apology. Is it part of the plan to never admit to any faults or wrong-doing and never concede that there may be some good in those opposed to their ideas and policies? Is there a secret combined effort to create those political whirlwinds that leave us feeling helpless and anxious, confused, and bewildered so that we are easily malleable? Are we in the middle of the big lie?

You would have thought so with the all the horse piss and bollocks that is being trotted out right now. We are, in a world of shit, and people are either dying, are dead, or are going to die because the Government has offered no clear guidance in an emergency. Honestly…

…you can’t make this shit up.

“It is rotten and dismal that a world of so many hundred million people should be ruled by a single caste that has the power to lead millions to life or to death, indeed on a whim…This caste has spun its web over the entire earth; capitalism recognizes no national boundaries…Capitalism has learned nothing from recent events and wants to learn nothing because it places its own interests ahead of those of the other millions. Can one blame those millions for standing up for their own interests, and only for those interests? Can one blame them for striving to forge an international community whose purpose is the struggle against corrupt capitalism? Can one condemn a large segment of the educated youth for protesting against the greatest ability? Is it not an abomination that people with the most brilliant intellectual gifts should sink into poverty and disintegrate, while others dissipate, squander, and waste the money that could help them? … You say the old propertied class also worked hard for what it has. Granted, that may be true in many cases. But do you also know about the conditions under which workers were living during the period when capitalism “earned” its fortune?”

Who do you think wrote that? Joseph Goebbels wrote it. Confusing isn’t it?

Technology Tools for Differentiation – TechCoach.me

I’d like to thank Charlie Coates for telling me about the images I used and I’d like to wish him a very Happy Birthday. Against the odds, he has made it to 80. I’d like to think of him as a friend, which of course he is, but he and his wife Margaret are so much more to me than that.

I can tell Charlie is teetering on the brink of becoming a Socialist now, albeit one that reads the Telegraph. (I think I may have made that bit up)

Here’s to you, Charlie, ground control to Major Coates. 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sobering Timeline

New Songs, £10 Vinyl & a HUGE Thanks.

Thank you, everyone, for helping me out. I’m overwhelmed by your messages and contributions, it’s fantastic. The Dream On 5 Album is now the most downloaded album I have done on Bandcamp.

Today Bandcamp is helping out too by waiving their fees for one day. I have just added a further 6 new tracks to the Dream On 5 album. All the new tracks are at the beginning of the album and marked with two asterisks.
Head over to the Bandcamp site HERE and have a listen to the new songs:

 1. Everything With You** 03:55  
 2. Egg Face** 06:19  
 3. Egg Face Part II** 05:43  
 4. Freak Dance** 03:54  
 5. Reikkler Machiné** 07:04  
 6. Duped And Dumped** 04:17

Please contribute something if you haven’t already. If you have already contributed, please download the new tracks or the whole album for free.

VINYL ON SALE NOW FOR £10

By way of thanks, I wanted to give something back.

Before the Virus came into our lives I was just about to release a Vinyl Dream On album, a compilation of all the songs I liked best from all the releases. Well now is your chance to choose which tracks should go on the vinyl and buy the vinyl album for just £10. Yep, that’s right £10.

Once again, like with the download album, you can pay £10 or a bit more if you want. However, this is a big thank you to everyone who has helped me out so I encourage you to pay £10 and tell your friends about it too.

The album is limited to 200 at the price of £10

Click HERE to check out the new Kickstarter and grab your vinyl quickly.

TWELVE

A very special thank you to all the people who have subscribed to the Twelve website. Please subscribe if you can, it’s only £20 for the whole year and you get the huge back catalogue too. Click HERE to listen to the music and subscribe.

…and finally…

THANK YOU ONE AND ALL

New Tracks… and a BIG thanks!

Thank You – New Tracks Added

A huge thanks to everyone who has donated a pound or more towards helping me make it through this crisis.

As a thank you, I have added another 5 tracks to D R E A M . O N . 5 . 

The new tracks are:

  1. Stuck * 03:12
  2. YOU (wth me nt me) * 06:13
  3. Stylus * 03:36
  4. Public Service * 04:22
  5. Silent * 03:26

Each of the new tracks has an asterisk* next to it so you can download them individually for free if you have already downloaded the album, or you can download the whole album in its entirety and new tracklisting.

Please donate if you haven’t already, just £1 will make a difference.

The response to my last email knocked me sideways. Some of the messages and donations have been more than generous and kind and I’ve seen so many new names.

For so long we’ve been taking music for free off musicians who, by virtue must then be expected to make it for free. It makes no sense but it’s just the way it is.

At the moment it feels like we are all appreciating that if you don’t contribute at least something, eventually the music won’t be there anymore. Imagine a world with only commercially viable acts pumped out by billionaire owned companies.

I don’t mind selling an album for £1, in fact, I would love to sell all my albums for £1 and if enough people paid £1, it can be done.

I’m going to think long and hard about this.

Should I be asking people to buy an album download for £7, a CD for £10, and a Vinyl record for £20 or should I simply ask people to give what they can to become a patron of the music and the arts and in return give more back if more comes in. Not quantity but quality. Recorded in a proper studio and in deluxe packaging for ultra-cheap.

This would make music a real thing of choice, like a free press that is funded by people who seek the truth rather than the propaganda of a press owned by powerful billionaires.

(Check out The Byline Times and Double Down News)

Music is important, especially in times like these. Many think of musicians and artists as a kind of underbelly that lives in a damp rehearsal room and either makes it or doesn’t, as an industry that discovers and finds ‘the next big thing’ but in reality, it finds what it thinks will fit its own agenda and turns it into the next big thing.

There is another side to music though.

Neil Young made very uncommercial albums after his big hit record. He said that his album Harvest “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”

The three albums which followed became known as the Ditch Trilogy and are now considered to be some of his best albums.

I love what The Brian Jonestown Massacre says: “Keep Music Evil”

I wish I would have thought of that. I guess mine could be “Keep Evil Music Alive.”

Anyway, enjoy the new songs, one is rocking, one is like a groovy European Me, two are weird and the other one is dark melodic guitar ambiance.

Become a patron of the Arts…please donate and “Keep Evil Music Alive” as they (now) say.

Thanks to all the new TWELVE subscribers too! Please subscribe if you can. It’s only £20 for a whole year. The more people subscribe, the better it will get.

Peace and Love and Stay home and Stay Vigilant and remember to question everything, and again, thank you.

CHRIS
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The Road To Happiness Lies In An Organised Diminution Of Work

What is creativity?

It’s a word we often use to describe a kind of lah-di-dah feeling or ability to express one’s inner self by building a box model, writing a song, painting a picture or hanging your curtains in a different way to your next-door neighbours.

“Oh my God, look at those curtains, you’re so creative!” (usually followed by: “I wish I could be like that!!”)

But that is not what creativity is.

Being creative means solving a problem in a new way. It means changing your perspective. Being creative means taking risks and ignoring doubt and facing fears. It means breaking with routine and doing something different for the sake of doing something different. 

So….Radiohead are creative, Oasis aren’t.

Being creative means you’re thinking…

Our world is all about money. We do things all day long every day to ourselves which human beings are not supposed to do. We do this so we can make large amounts of money for others and small amounts for ourselves. They get wealth and power and we get to surround ourselves with a load of shit we don’t need.

When something important happens, like a war or a virus, most of these things we do for money, they fall away and those in power look less important than those who do something for the community. The billionaires and the politicians look greedy and foolish and people begin to remember leisure activities with a fondness and longing; Football, music, and time together. No one will miss a politician or a billionaire.

During all of this, the most arrogant and patronising thing I’ve heard is that line about ‘this just shows us how the virus doesn’t discriminate’ when Johnson got it. Who do these people think they are? We know that, are you thick? How about you practice what you preach and keep a distance from each other in meetings? Telling us a virus doesn’t discriminate is simply an attempt at reinforcing their position of entitlement.

This virus, by forcing people apart, has forced people to come together and I believe they are now going to question a lot of things, especially about their relationships and work. How many people spend the majority of their day away from their kids and partners in order to ‘earn a living’ to ‘keep a roof over their heads’ or ‘pay the bills.’ Life is all about the idea that you have to ‘keep food on the table.’ It’s all spin. No one ever says, ‘well I better go out to work and keep the iPhone on the table.’

It’s all a lie. Sure we have to find money and we have to pay our rent and our mortgages but we don’t have to do it the way that we are doing it now.

There is no money tree except when the powers that be need one to use it to cling on to power.

Now they have a problem. How do you tell millions of people who live in shanty towns which consist of a 6 x 6-foot room shared by five people to stay at home? I bet you wish you had shared some of that wealth now, don’t you?

Now, for a lot of people, how useful are the affairs and the dating apps now that they are stuck indoors with the person they once chose to spend the rest of their lives with, in the house, they built ‘for the kids’ who they want to kill. Of course, it’s not like this for the majority but it so easily could be with all this time ahead. The divorce rate in China has just seen a huge spike.

It’s time to get creative.

Everyone is in holiday mode at the moment or enjoying working from home (or not!) but wait until it dawns on people that after two months of this, there is still another month and quite possibly more to go.

I predict a mass swapping of couples, houses, and jobs. This will be because people are going to be forced to find out what’s really important in their lives and it isn’t Boris Johnson, the TV or the latest barbeque or lawnmower.

I’ve long been a believer in Bertrand Russell’s philosophy that humans should work less.  Not because I’m lazy, far from it, but because it makes no sense to live like we do. Do you think we are doing ok as a country, as a world? You have your phone and you have your roof over your head and they keep telling you we are the world’s 5th richest economy right?

Here is a simple fact.

The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population now owns more than half of the world’s wealth.

Are we doing ok despite this or because of it?

Of course, those wealthiest people at the top will tell you it’s because of it. You only ever hear a rich landowner extolling the virtues of a ‘good honest days toil.’ Richard Branson is worth £4 Billon and has his own island in the Caribbean but is now asking that good honest working toiler to give him over £100 million to help him out. He’s doing this as he’s told his own workers to take an unpaid holiday while he sorts out a way to get their money to give to him to pay them with.

What’s weird is that most of us don’t even think this is that unusual. It should be seen as unusual as hell and off-the-scale-out of order. Cuntish, I’d call it.

How did we get here? There’s a bug that kills and ‘doesn’t discriminate’ and you are at home surrounded by your trappings and in a world they gave you, the one they created, and suddenly it is not working as it should. Now there is a money tree that can’t stop giving, millions of jobs that don’t actually need doing are suddenly not being done and there is a lot of mixed messages and confusion amongst the people supposedly running things. It’s funny how it’s them who are panicking and not us. The first thing they did was put a rescue packet together for the Dow Jones until it dawned on them that the virus doesn’t discriminate and someone might have to actually pay for hundreds of thousands of people needlessly dying because it wasn’t going to be the few old people they expected. There could be trouble ahead because they have underfunded the very health system that they now so desperately need. Standing outside Downing Street clapping? Are we really that stupid?

We’ve been living in austerity because we needed to help criminal bankers out. That is what we were told, they fucked up so we all need to tighten our belts, just one of them things right? It’s been tough on those libraries in Wolverhampton and all the public services but it’s worked brilliantly for them. How many bankers went to jail? Some of these criminals walked away with millions and into government.

In the past 12 months alone, the total wealth in the world has grown by 6 percent to $280 trillion, marking the fastest wealth creation since 2012. Since 2012? Where’s all that money gone? Did they spend it all on re-opening that library in Wolverhampton?

The dosh pyramid shows that half of the world’s net wealth belongs to the top 1%. The top 10% of adults hold 85%, while the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world’s total wealth. 

Imagine if it were the other way around, what would it be like?

How can you calculate this? Maybe we would all still have what we have now and only have to work 2 days a week to get it without the worry of ever having to lose it. But you already know this, don’t you? If someone were to suggest doing such a thing, those people at the top with all the money, well they would do something about that, wouldn’t they? They would start by buying all the newspapers and television companies which would give them the perfect way to control us and make sure this never happens.

Take a look at what the richest people own and remember money is only useful if you have power. Otherwise, chumps like us might get funny ideas and want to have some of it, after all, it’s not like we haven’t earned it with a lifetime’s worth of good honest hard toil. What do you mean my pension has gone?

They can do what they like. How about buy a London townhouse near parliament for nearly £2 million and still get us to pay to decorate it. Fantastic. No problem, you just stand there and vilify us for wanting a meager hand out when things get bad in our lives and we will pay you to heat your horses stables and clean your moat and pay the bills on your second home. It could be 1720 now instead of 2020, it’s just the same shit done in a different way.

We need to stop working for these fat cats. We need to spend more time living our own lives instead of working and being kept in a place where that work only helps you get through and usually by being in huge debt.

Russell argued that leisure time should be more than just the time we are given to spend recharging our batteries so we can just go back to work. On the contrary, leisure time should constitute the largest part of our lives and be a source of play and creativity.

Well, now you have at least 3 months of that.

What are you gonna do?

We take the length of the working week as natural but it’s far from it, and now, because of the virus, we have that time but are we equipped to use it, after what we’ve been through? It’s not going to be long before people won’t be able to tell a Sunday from a Wednesday and start tuning in with their natural body rhythm, the body clock.

For the majority, leisure time and work don’t fulfill us and yet we cannot help feeling that idleness is a vice.  Maybe now we will scrutinise our working lives and see that there is a virtue and usefulness to lounging and loafing. What do you think a billionaire does all day when he’s done with telling everyone how hard he (you) has worked to get where he has?

Can’t we build robots and machines to do the work for us? Oh, we did? Well now let’s get a supervisor to oversee the machine and a supervisor to oversee the supervisor and another supervisor advise the supervisor who counts the money to give to a money supervisor who in turn has more supervisors. That ain’t work, that’s conscription.

The moving about of matter is not the be-all and end-all of human life. But that is what I was told it was by my parents and family. It was always a case of telling me you have to work, you have to get a job, it was never a case of ‘hey Chris, chill out, don’t worry too much about working all the time, take some time off because leisure is a necessary part of leading a full and meaningful life.’

Whilst the powers that be have decimating the health service they have also decimated the arts in schools by shifting the focus to maths and science and results. Teachers are under unimaginable pressure when they should be enjoying the work they love by teaching children. It’s just so wrong. If we all only worked for 4 hours a day for two days a week, everything would be ok (remember how much wealth there is compared to how many own it) but would people know what to do with their leisure time? Is this where we are now? 

Bertrand Russell believed having leisure time and not knowing what to do with it, is a terrible condemnation of our civilisation. Are we now in such a state that not working leaves us empty human beings with our capacity for play and light-heartedness trampled over by the need for a cult of efficiency designed to give 1% of the world’s population half of everything?

Education is more than about training for the workplace and a society that takes it’s leisure time seriously will also take its education seriously. Then we would have a society that would have time to let people take art seriously because they would have enough time on their hands to produce something of quality without the struggle of economic independence.

That’s how you get Stonehenge.

They want you to think it was a mystery. There is no mystery, people had loads of time because they had lots of food. They didn’t have to drag stones about, they enjoyed it and probably partied all the time while they were doing it. Did you ever stop and think that maybe neolithic people, the ones we were taught at school to think of as cavemen, took their enjoyment seriously? Like Glastonbury does? Their society would have lost the taste for war, because, apart from the killing, a war would involve a lot of serious work and long days for everyone. No thanks, I’ll pop over to the Pyramid and watch Radiohead.

Let’s use all the wealth of this world to cut down on work so we spend more time, running, rowing, swimming, diving, jumping, being at festivals, making love and making and listening to music because our attitudes to work are totally irrational. 

We value different types of work differently and we assume or are led to assume, that work in itself is a good idea. Fuck that. No one is working right now as they were before. We are not supposed to be like this and these attitudes lead us to unhappiness. What we need to do is recognise the work which is genuinely valuable to our society, doctors, nurses, plumbers, bin men, food retailers, and manufacturers, etc. and only do those jobs.

In a way, this is happening right now but the powers that be are afraid of how we might realise this. Once we have recognised we should only do the valuable labour and forget the rest and that this will increase human happiness. By standing outside of Downing Street applauding something they have spent years underfunding so it becomes ripe for selling off to make them even richer, they are being devious and deflecting the message to be about recognition of the workers and their toil rather than a well-funded system of free healthcare for everyone. That’s the last thing they want, all they want is toil, good honest toil, by underfunded doctors, carers and nurses who have to pay to park their fucking car in front of the hospital.

This virus will go away and the majority will survive. Maybe the world can change after this? Do we have the ability to ‘take back control’ before the super-rich plan a new strategy to hold on to their power? It’s what they will be doing right now, they probably started to plan as early as when they were told the virus was coming.

Don’t be scared, this is not an apocalypse film. What is gonna happen is that the people in power are going to have their chickens come home to roost. How do you help those people to stop spreading a virus that can infect any human being that you forced to live in shacks and mistreated for so long? Those in power will be hedging their bets right now about what to do because right now, filling the coffers is on hold, the main priority is to stop a riot, a mob, a revolution. Saying let them eat iPhones could lead to them being put up against the wall. They are so frightened of this. This is the only reason they are helping people out. Their main focus will always be the economy and the stock exchange and the banks and financiers over human lives. Everything they are doing for us now is purely to avoid the chopping block. They don’t give a fuck about your Grandmother.

But are people going to wake up to this? Have they already but the system has been so well built, it is now impossible to break it down? 

In the meantime, practice being creative.

Here are some tips, and remember, it’s about problem-solving, so here are some very difficult questions that may look easy to start with:

  • What do you like doing?
  • How can you go about doing it with the limitations and resources you have?
  • If you can’t do it, what would you do instead?
  • If you can’t do it, can you do it in a different way?

    Remember, you have at least 3 months to answer these questions. 

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If there is anyone out there who would like to know how to write a song, please get in touch, because I can lead that horse to that water…

I’m going to do a lot of thinking about what I do too as I have to be pragmatic and find solutions because I can’t record drums or go to a studio. Rockfield is booked for the end of May, maybe it’s doable, but we don’t know what will happen around that time yet.

For me, the fun bit is finding the solution, the scary bit is if you will like what I come up with and still want to give me money for it? Maybe if I spend three months or more making it sound as good as Stonehenge looks, then maybe it doesn’t matter what it is?

Please, if you can though, go and download something from my Bandcamp. I’ll be putting a lot of free music up over the coming months and just asking people to donate a quid or two instead of charging the usual £7 an album. I’ve just made a soundtrack album out of all the ideas I was putting together for the studio before the virus hit. It’s here and it’s free https://twelvemusic.bandcamp.com/album/your-film

If everyone helps by donating a pound or two, I might just make it to June, when the powers that be have reluctantly and belatedly decided the self-employed should get fed.  It’s a cheap plan. They want us to take out loans to tide us over and then, instead of paying the loans back in June, they are hoping we use the money to go wild and party like it’s 1999 and get the economy moving whilst being in even more debt.

I’d rather get through this time by giving out music and use the money in June to invest in making a super smashing vinyl release or organising a gig on the top of Mam Tor.

But hey, public opinion and pressure are suddenly making them shake that money tree and do what is required. They are pissed off but they know what happened to Ceaucescu wasn’t that long ago.

…and by the way, I hate this fucking ‘stay safe’ shit. I would expect you all to stay safe anyway, even if there wasn’t a virus, anything less would be foolish, wouldn’t it?

So I will say this instead:

‘stay vigilant and stay home’

Chris

Dream On Tins Staying at £10

The printer just sent me a picture of the tins and cd’s and said they look amazing. They will be delivered here tomorrow and, depending on what time they arrive, they will be in the post to you either tommorow or Wednesday.

I said I was going to put the price up today to £20 but I’m not going to do that now so they will be staying at £10.

Grab your CD’s and tin, or just have a listen to the music.

CD and Audio Stream HERE