[cunning plan] for the tea and bikkie queue

One nice thing about being back here is the minutae.

We were having a discussion today about cups of tea and biscuits. When you go into the store caf on a Tuesday, as you know, you have to get to the biscuits quickly when they bring them out at 11, otherwise the chocky ones will be gone by the time you get back from the tea queue.

Now, if you try to be clever and one of you gets the biscuits, where there is no queue and the other is in the tea queue, the one who gets the biscuits can then go and reserve a table by sitting at it.

But [and this is a big but], that’s assuming the other people who’ve rushed the caf have not also had the same idea, in which case you don’t get that nice spot in the corner you’d spied earlier and you have to make do with sitting up on those stool thingies, which detracts from the whole experience.

This can constitute a discussion of some 30 minutes later back home or even longer if the tea line person brought white coffee instead of black because he’d forgotten.
How do you organize these things yourself?

[crash test dummies] or just your standard alien

Several people in Roswell, N.M., have reported spotting an unidentified flying object over the northwest side of the city, a mecca for those interested in UFOs.

Andre Buonaiuto said he and his wife saw a flying saucer Monday night, KOAT-TV in Albuquerque reported Wednesday.

And the Airforce explanation?

"Aliens" observed in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research.

The "unusual" military activities in the New Mexico desert were high altitude research balloon launch and recovery operations. Reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and "crew," were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.

Well, that's a relief. Unless, of course, all those crash test dummies and store front mannequins are actually ... aliens! The only way to verify this is when you next go to the mall or shopping centre. Here's how to do it:

1. Approach one of the mannequins respectfully, then seize it in a headlock and disrobe it;

2. Unscrew the head and place one thermometer you've just brought deep into the neck recess and one in another place, thereby establishing if it is alive or not;

3. When store security has you in a headlock, explain that you are saving the world by exposing the mannequin plan to invade and take over the world.

4. They'll then award you a medal and you can sell your story for £10 000.

Easy-peasy.

[rescue package] let's bend the rules

Couldn't hold back on this one:

Analysts expect the government would waive any antitrust concerns related to Lloyds and HBOS. “In more normal times, a tie-up … wouldn't have even been considered because of the competition issues,” CreditInsights analyst Simon Adamson told Bloomberg. “These aren't normal times.”

At the same time:

World banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, are pumping $US360 billion into global markets in a coordinated effort to avert a lock-up of the financial system.

Isn't that interesting? Forgive the logic, if it is faulty but it looks a little like this to me:

Sub-prime lending, billionaire boys' club type speculation with people's funds, hedge funds et al, egged on by advertising, created both unreal expectations of what constitutes the good life and gave a pie-in-the-sky way to get it - credit and mortgages, together with essentially bad financial advice.

The bottom dropped out and who is poised to 'help'? Why the big finance of course and governments gratefully step to one side and waive financial regulations, e.g. anti-trust laws, in these 'abnormal times'.

Wonderful. Net effect?

Well, given that the average citizen has been effectively owned by his/her bank since the late 60s and given that those banks are now effectively owned by the big money e.g. the Fed regulated, in effect, by the FOMC, then the big money now, in real terms, directly controls the average cit and can leverage governments worldwide.

So, in the case of the Fed, this means New York and this in turn means Morgan etc. Take a quick look at their history.

Now, given that it was the actions of the finance, in the first place, which got the world into trouble, [yes, of course it was technically our aspirations and ambitions but the finance was surely playing on our human folly and vulnerability in the most cynical manner, e.g. sub-prime lending], then again and again we come back to the same question - was all this the result of incompetence or design?

Either way, 'short and curlies' is the phrase hovering over my mind just now.

Those in the business are talking up the economy - that we've now bottomed out and are looking at a jittery return of confidence in the next few years and it may well be so but the difference is who will be in the driving seat once that happens and where will we all be?

UPDATE: Courtesy of Anon. It's on the edge, with lots of underlining for emphasis but watch the vid anyway and chew it over.

[orgone] accumulating craziness and stripping away inhibitions

Wilhelm Reich, [whose brother Third became famous in a separate sphere], was operating at a time of great craziness, the 30s. My own study is more from the 1890s through to the early 30s, when equally weird things were happening and social experimentation was at it's height.

One manifestation of this was the hypothesized existence of orgone which, as Wiki says, entailed:

... an extrapolation of the Freudian concept of libido as a physical, bioenergetic force, developed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the late 1930s, who generalized and abstracted it far beyond Freud's semi-metaphoric use.

Reich's followers, such as Charles R. Kelley, went to the extent of claiming orgone to be the creative substratum in all of nature, and compared it to Mesmer's animal magnetism, the Odic force of Carl Reichenbach and Henri Bergson's Élan vital.

The dangers in upgrading a metaphor into a science and surrounding it with scientific trappings is especially poignant with orgone:

Freud focused on a solipsistic conception of the mind, in which unconscious and inherently selfish primal drives (primarilly the sexual drive, or libido) were suppressed or sublimated by internal representations (cathexes) of parental figures; for Reich libido was a life-affirming force repressed by society directly ...

In plain English, if you could release this sexual energy and accumulate it in an orgone accumulator, then the sky was the limit. With a world backdrop of Nazi Germany, eugenics and the like, such a concept was always going to be seized upon by both the bohemian world and twould be examined by the crazies at the top of the political tree.

Politically, it was a double-edged sword in that while it could be harnessed as a destructor of the old order of values and society, a desirable outcome for the new order, it was, at the same time, going to free humans from all social constraints and that was something up with which governments were not going to put, especially Nazi Germany, where Reich had offended Hitler anyway.

Orgone was at once anarchic and destructive, a cranked up form of hedonistic rush, where one followed basic impulses rather than any consensus of rules. It was free sex with a codicil that the only law was to do as you wished, every last person, in some sort of sexual healing claimed to set the world to rights.

In a largely sympathetic article on Reich, Gerald Grow wrote:

During the 1940s, Reich became more and more isolated, working with a small circle of trainees and close supporters and a wider circle of kindred spirits, including A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill school, and William Steig, the cartoonist ... Like many charismatic figures, Reich could be overbearing (Sharaf reports that Reich warned one student: “Keep away from me. I am overwhelming. I burn through people.”), and his faith in his creative thinking repeatedly led him beyond what some considered to be sanity.

Therein lie two interesting threads - A.S. Neill and the borderline of sanity. Anyone over forty years of age in education is probably going to know that Neill's theories had enormous currency in education, as Spock's did with families and were one of the key factors leading to the disastrous 70s "open plan" education experiment on which it is hard to find any negative online reviews, due to education being dominated today largely by the same people. Nevertheless, this touches on the issue:

The construction of open classroom schools declined by the mid-1970s. Concerns about noise and distraction encouraged educators to return to a traditional approach. Although the open classroom movement lost popularity, certain aspects of its philosophy and methods were reshaped and used.

Were they ever and now you can observe the result - less literacy, less numeracy, inadequate socialization and inadequate interface between education and the corporate world into which graduates must survive.

But that's another issue.

[job hunting] from portsmouth to queensferry

This job hunting has some unexpected sidelights to it.

I was talking to a supermarket sub-manager about running his staffing programme when what looked like the young chap in charge of the produce section came through to the alcove where we were speaking and said that a customer had asked him for half a head of lettuce. Produce apparently told him they only sold whole heads of lettuce.

Produce then told the sub-manager the moron was causing trouble and at that moment, what was clearly the angry woman herself appeared, at which Produce turned round to her and said, "and this lady wants the other half."

The sub-manager asked me if I'd wait, smoothed it over and then told Produce, "That was impressive. We like people who think on their feet. You're from Portsmouth, right?"

"Right, sir, South Hayling," said Produce.

"Well, why did you leave Portsmouth?"

"There's nothing but tarts and footballers down there."

"Really?" the sub-manager said, while I cringed. "My wife comes from Purbrook!"

Produce replied, "Gosh - did she ever try out for Pompey?"

[dead pubs] dead society

Toque says, about this pub:

The plan is to demolish Chequers and build some flats. Local residents do not want the pub to be demolished ...

That's as maybe and this blog thoroughly agrees with the sentiment. However, business is business and if it's not paying, it has to be sold. The real question is why people stopped drinking there in any numbers anyway.

The answers include the smoking ban, supermarket and off-licence booze, massive franchise establishments, changing fast and trendy lifestyles, poor service, the change downwards in the nature of the remaining clientele and so on but the simple fact is that people are not coming through that door, except in search of a pee.

Why? In my case - the cost. With lunch at £6, dinner main course at £10 and a beer at £3, just one evening with your wife or mates adds up to a substantial bill. Only the white collar worker in relatively safe employment can afford that any more.

One of this blogger's major character flaws is to continually ask why. So why has the price gone into the stratosphere and the pub become a less cheery place to go now? More importantly, what ultimate price will be paid by the society by removing one of the key pillars in British social cohesion? Like the coffee houses of the time of the men of letters, the pub was always the ideas exchange, where social values and community cohesion were reinforced.

Was the acquisitive society on speed a natural consequence of change or was there any social engineering behind this, long ago?