On Mandela's death

It was 1968.

I was 19, young and idealistic. I went with a number of friends to London to participate in a demonstration calling for an end to Apartheid in South Africa.

As a white European, I remember being called a "traitor to my race" by some hecklers that day.

Water off a duck's back, as far as I was concerned.

You admire individuals for the quality that is inside their heads and in their minds, not the skin colour on their anatomy. The contents of the package matter far more than the wrapping.

I had also been told that democracy was the answer to all our problems. Curious that many of those who embraced that belief often also approved of the white dominated government in South Africa which could guarantee all the benefits of the lifestyle and its economy remained in the hands of 5% of the population, and 95% of the people did not even have the democratic right to protest.

Nelson Mandela was by any stretch of the imagination an intelligent man. At that time he had been in prison for four years.

It went on to be twenty-seven years in total.

Many of us would have hoped that he would have been released earlier. Few would have believed, though, that he would become an icon, a symbol of everything that could possibly be good in any leader anywhere in the world.

He also managed to become a great unifier, bringing people together the way that Apartheid had separated them. That so many white people of European descent have made so many comments reflecting their profound admiration of the man upon the day of Mandela's death speaks to this ability to bring people together. On the news last night I took note of the civil war in the Central African Republic. It could also be a tribute to Mandela if both sides would stop the fighting, stop killing each other and, in the spirit of what Mandela stood for, come together in unity and settle their differences.

Meanwhile I am not sure whether atheists are supposed to use the phrase RIP, but anyway - RIP Madiba. Thanks for the example, the courage, the warmth, the humour, the intelligence and the dignity. You are and will be missed.

Ah the glories of living in the countryside (????) and maybe plagiarism

Like many atheists (and unlike Roman Catholics of whom it is seemingly expected) I am not into confessions much - in my case I do not need to confess to anything much apart from the hidden urge to eat chocolate, particularly when my good lady is not home. It is my nature to come out with the facts, so where is the need to confess?

 Anyway a number of confessions for you:

 1. I have never read the children's book "Heidi". I think that I saw a TV dramatisation when I was a child, but they are never to be trusted to be faithful to the text.
 2. I am an out-and-out urban dweller. My take on living in rural areas runs pretty much on the lines of "if you have seen one cow eating grass, you have seen them all". And that is about as exciting as living in the countryside gets as far as I can see. And yes, I did spend five (terrible) years of my life teaching in a mainly rural area.
3. I am not prone to look upon either life in the countryside or the behaviour of children (rural or urban raised) with rose-tinted spectacles.

Now that was difficult, but my breast seems clearer as a result.

So what is the point of this, you may ask? Well apart from the fact that you want to push for a pro-urban agenda and all the associated politics usw?

Stop yawning!

My latest adventure onto the Internet revolves around Johanna Spyri, the author of the children's book "Heidi". Almost without question the most significant children's book to come out of Switzerland. Written about children for "those who love children" apparently.

With a bit of an agenda under the surface. Heidi, the orphan girl, lived high in Alps eventually with her crusty old grandfather, who had fallen out with the local villagers. Her closest friend, Peter, was a goatherd (rural kids didn't go to school in Switzerland at the time, it seems, so he could not read or write).

All well and good until when she was 8 or 9, when her actual guardian, her Aunt Dete, picked her up and carted her off to be the companion to an invalid girl in (shock, horror) an urban area. And not just any old urban area. Where this really hits home - Frankfurt! (am Main, not an der Oder).

Shock, horror. Poor child, removed from an idyllic life in the mountains surrounded by goats and thrust into .... Well I am not sure that the place was inhabited by half the German banking community in those days or whether the gruesome Bahnhofsviertel existed in owt like its current form, and the upmarket shopping area may still have been in its infancy.

But anyway Heidi started to see her health suffer (urban smog, rather than clean Alpine air? Well not these days, but then maybe?), she started having nightmares, sleepwalking (as one does when one is unhappy), and eventually Clara's doctor had her sent back to the Alps and grandfather and Peter and the goats, and ....

 "Happily ever after" of course followed. Her grandfather left his seclusion and made peace with the villagers with whom he had been at odds for years. Heidi taught the illiterate Peter to read and write. And she kept in touch with Clara. The latter was recommended by her doctor to spend the summer in Switzerland where she could grow stronger on goat's milk and fresh mountain air.

And finally the coup de grâce. Peter (in a fit of rural pique - tut, tut, this spoils the image) kicked Clara's wheelchair down the mountain. Which meant that the poor invalid girl had nowt to do but learn to walk. And guess what .... A miracle straight out of the sort of stuff you get from American evangelists, eh?

Wonderful. Urban life - Sch*ße, rural life - miraculous, yea, yea, yea! Or as they used to say in MAD magazine: "YECCCCCCH!".

The only difference I personally saw between teaching kids in the city and those in the countryside, was that urban kids, on balance (avoiding stereotypes), tended to be more alert to the world in general. One kid I knew in my teaching days in the rural area was already truanting half the time as he was working on his father's pig farm, and constantly informed people that he didn't need to know much else. Try that in Sheffield or Manchester.

As for the exam results achieved, it usually came down to the school, its intake, and the internal organisation. If inner-city schools had their problems, so did the ones in rural areas, or some of them at least. The final school in which I taught had principally an intake from the affluent suburbs and parental expectations were high, and the results, surprise, surprise, were outstanding.

Not Heidi's sort of school (or the UK equivalent).

Intriguing about Spyri's book was the discovery in 2010 that she may not actually have been responsible for the original ideas and many of them may have come from another novel written by (don't say it too loudly - the Swiss will not thank you for this) a German (!) called Adam von Kamp some 50 years earlier. Spyri's biographer even agreed that there may have unintentional copying (should we avoid the word "plagiarism" here - after all we are not talking about German politicians and their dubious doctorates).

To quote from the (UK) Daily Telegraph in 2010:

“The Swiss have rallied to the defence of their literary icon, saying that many 19th century writers in central Europe were preoccupied by the drift to the cities and the possible harmful effects on children”.

So the mythical values of living in the countryside prevailed. They may have been illiterate and poor, and stuck with inadequate transportation, a simple diet and not much by way of advanced facilities, but they were cheerful and happy and everything always turned out for the best.

Fine, now give me modern urban areas and facilities and transportation, and some decent or half-decent schools (ever the problem with cash-strapped education authorities) and try to persuade me that kids cannot grow up in urban areas and be happy and successful. 

The Alps are amazing to visit - as a tourist. 

For somewhere to live, then please give me Hamburg or Berlin or Köln/Cologne - or even Frankfurt. Everything you will ever need is there and is easily reached thanks to the excellent local transportation facilities. So much so that even people from the local rural areas are only too glad and come take advantage of what is there!

Quote of the day

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.

Mahatma Gandhi

So what's in a number?

Tacloban in the Philippines is a city of approximately 220,000 people.

As anyone watching news bulletins around the world will know it was at the centre of the typhoon, Haiyan, which passed through in the past few days wreaking immense damage in the process.

Large numbers of homes and business properties have been destroyed. Many of its people have been forced to live on the street or in emergency accommodation and have nowhere else to go.

And many people have died. The original figure issued by the authorities in the city was approximately 10,000. Close on 5% of the population of the city.

Enter Benigno Aquino, President of the Philippines, to survey the disaster (and for once "disaster" is an appropriate word). According to the aforesaid gentleman with regard to the number of dead, the figure was "too much" and the actual figure would be closer to 2,000 to 2,500.  That would only be 1.25 to 1.5% of the local population.

Good news?

Well I know that politicians are fond of this "silver lining" approach (remember the old Margaret Thatcher comment about all the jobs they had created as UK unemployment topped 12%?), but this really touches rock bottom.

10 people dying in a disaster of this enormity would be a relief to the politicians maybe but still a loss to their families and friends. 2,000 dying is, by any calculation, an appalling loss of life and many people will have been damaged by the consequences of the storm.

And take the number of injured and the conditions to which many others have been reduced.

It will take years to put people's lives back together. Many will find the loss of their loved ones an enormous emotional burden for a very long time - ask any mother who has lost a child under any circumstances about the impact of such an event.

There is no "silver lining" in this situation, and merely flipping around a figure indicative of the great tragedy involved and replacing it with a smaller figure which hardly diminishes the nature of that tragedy is cynical in the extreme! But unfortunately typical of the political class with which we seem to be stuck worldwide! 

Annual vacations

Well we returned from our annual vacation yesterday.

Last year we had 3 weeks visiting my wife's family in Thailand.

This year Thailand disappeared early from the agenda (not enough money), while the UK disappeared shortly after (see earlier posts on this subject, thankfully we decided not to feed the British paranoia about foreign nationals, that said even I would never have imagined that the UK would get so paranoid that it had even started spying upon modern democratic Germany - theoretically an important ally!).

So eventually it became a return trip to .... Köln/Cologne. For 4 days. In a cheap hotel near the Mauritiuskirche. In between Neumarkt, the Rudolfplatz and the Zülpicherplatz for those who know the city. Four days wandering all over the main part of the city, revisiting haunts that we used to frequent when we lived there in 2003 and 2004 (the ones that were still there at least), visiting my former landlady, a Doctor in Psychology (great having conversations with really intelligent people - nice as well that she hadn't forgotten us after nine years).

And reminiscent of Manchester (UK, not NH), where I also used to live, it rained almost non-stop for four days. Managed to get a glass of Kölsch (Cologne's local beer) on my final day to remind myself of good times past. Pity that the good times always seem to be in the past .... Now with some economic positivism and creating the sort of economic environment about which I am always talking - capitalism working for the masses and not just the mega-rich - then the good times could return.

As it is most people in Europe actually seem to support the Scrooge economy apparently (see the Pew Global Attitudes report on the subject), so don't expect the good times to return any time soon!

While supping on my glass of Kölsch and talking to a couple of total strangers in the bar where I was (one a native of Turkey - hope that he was a lapsed Muslim, or he will be permanently damned for drinking alcohol! My wife meanwhile was back in the hotel watching one of those awful talent shows that she loves so much, and which she could have watched at home in Frankfurt), I got round to thinking about vacations in general.

Europeans have longer holidays available to them generally than Americans. Out of this has sprung a major tourist based industry. Travel agencies provide thousands of jobs for people advertising holidays and booking them for people to use with the extra vacation time that they have available. This in turn creates large numbers of jobs in the airline industry, plenty of charter companies have sprung up to absorb the gaps in the schedules that the major airlines cannot provide usw.

Hotels in Spain and Greece get tons of business as a result (sunny, warm and relatively cheap). If you think that things are bad now in Spain and Greece, wait till you cut the vacation possibilities for people in other parts of Europe, and people haven't the time to visit.

What would happen to the tourist industry in Spain and Greece and how many more unemployed would there be?

But I keep hearing from Americans that Europeans don't work hard enough (totally wrong IMHO - particularly when you emphasise quality over quantity - an idiot can spend 16 hours working a day and produce nowt, a highly talented person can work for 3 hours and produce tons of good stuff - like I used to in my IT days). And they take too many holidays.

However, as taking those holidays produce employment elsewhere. Think about the consequences for a minute. There are spin-offs! See above.

Myself I never used to take the full holidays when working and I always disliked public holidays. As an atheist I have no hang-ups about working on Sundays or on "religious" holidays - why not work on December 25th? It is just another day on the calendar.

When working in Munich in 1995, I flew on Lufthansa to Berlin in the morning and back on the last flight available (about 1600 - they cut the evening shift). The crew were all working, very cheerful and not complaining at all! The one plus from my perspective was that the price was dirt cheap (they wanted to fill the planes, so ....). Just another day on the calendar. And a very enjoyable trip I would add.

Most people coming back to work from vacations tend to be more optimistic and tend to work better, in my experience. It is a false economy often to tie people to their desks or factory stools and grind work out of them. But as the world is increasingly driven by false economies, we should not be surprised if such attitudes come increasingly to prevail - to the detriment of businesses elsewhere.

Really rocking in Boston

Initial digression - for those who think that sport and politics don't mix, you're reading the wrong article. End of digression.

First six lines of the opening stanza of the classic rock hit from Chuck Berry "Sweet Little Sixteen" from 1957 (if I remember rightly):

They're really rocking in Boston

In Pittsburgh, P. A.

Deep in the heart of Texas

And 'round the Frisco Bay

All over St. Louis

Way down in New Orleans

Baseball meets rock 'n' roll. The Red Sox have beyond all expectations won the World Series. I am delighted, needless to say - not ecstatic, just delighted.

The baseball teams in Pittsburgh and St Louis had great seasons if not quite winning the top prize, the Texas Rangers made the playoffs. New Orleans of course does not have a baseball team (given the climate there, they would probably have to play inside in a dome - not really .....), while the Giants did a bit of Boston in reverse. They will be back though. Two World Series victories in recent years indicate their importance to the game.

From the excellent writer, Richard Justice, on mlb.mlb.com today I would like to quote the following (sorry for any copyright infringements usw) with my underling and blocking:

"To love these Red Sox, you have to appreciate other things - for instance, such old-fashioned values as teamwork and unselfishness. You have to believe that those things really do matter.

If you can wrap your mind around a professional sports team that prides itself on its closeness and work ethic, you can fall in love with the Red Sox".

I agree with Mr Justice's sentiments. But why are "teamwork" and "unselfishness" "old-fashioned"? As someone who tends to be at his best being a person who will take individual responsibility in a team concept, the first is maybe open to interpretation - that I can see.

But "unselfishness"? There are loads of unselfish people and organisations on this planet, true. But how many of them are responsible for how the world economy runs? In fact they are more likely to be working in situations helping people on the receiving end of the cynical, selfish, greed and speculation economy. And as for "work ethic" .... the theory that you can get anywhere with work ethic and productivity in this world is one of the biggest myths out there. I personally have always committed myself to both work ethic and productivity - they seem to the best road to the dole queue going, the quicker you get things finished, the sooner they can fire you.

In fact some people can get richer in 20 minutes gambling on the phone than most people can manage in a lifetime of hard work.

So the lessons of the Red Sox win might well apply in a sporting context. You can put the past behind you, you can through skill and hard work and concern and involvement with/for others achieve the epitome of success.

Try it though in a business, commercial, professional usw context? Well there will be exceptions that prove the rule, but what I have seen of the world in the past 30 years that is simply not how things work any more. The concepts are seen as "old-fashioned", even if the myths to the contrary are maintained for public consumption. That is sad, but unfortunately true.

 

American spying or knowing your enemy

I watched a bit of the discussion tonight between the NSA's top guy and Congress about what's going on with the American spying and what seems to be going wrong as a result.

Fine, the USA and its representatives haven't been attacked on American soil since 2001 and this is a large part the result of intelligence and so on.

Fine, fine, fine .....

And as there are quite a few Muslims living in Spain and France, that maybe explains that they had to listen to 1000s of  'phone calls in those countries as they might pick up the odd lead. After all not every conversation would be about having couscous for dinner.

Which brings me to Germany.

Since the Second World War most of Germany (that is all of it except the DDR from 1949 to 1989) has been a major ally of the USA. Their security services cooperate a lot in their different ways. If they want some information, they will probably get round to sharing it. It isn't 1944 any more, when you would like to have known what Hitler had planned.

So we get to the crucial question - why in the first place would they want to spy on Angela Merkel's mobile 'phone? If it were business since she became the German Chancellor, she would no doubt have been willing to share information with the US. And if what I gather from CNN last night is correct, they have been doing this since before she became Chancellor.

All the weirder. That was before 2006 (please name the US President at the time. He later became famous for massaging Angie's shoulders at international meetings after she came to power, if you want a further clue).

She is a conservative. A Euro-conservative, but a conservative nonetheless. She probably regrets arguing the case now, but back in 2003 she was pushing for German troops to support the Americans in the Iraq War. Unlike 90% of people in Germany this struck her as the right thing to do.

Obviously a staunch ally. So what could be interesting in any mobile 'phone calls that she would not air through official channels. Sauerkraut and Bratwurst tonight maybe? I doubt that that would be so important!

So why would you be so dumb as to do summat really stupid like that? It makes no sense and has caused a diplomatic spat that could have been avoided.

And as a leading member of her (conservative) party was tonight indicating that whichever member of the American diplomatic corps in Germany was found to be responsible for passing on the information regarding her mobile 'phone would be prosecuted in a German court ....

These are allied countries, in case anyone hasn't noticed. If you want to pursue your enemies, do so by all means. But ruffling the feathers of people who are supposed to be your friends? Well it doesn't augur well for the future relationship, does it?

Only one life and only a game

As regular readers will know I am certain that we have this one life to live and that is it.

So when it ends - well, bye and thanks for trying. Not that I will be aware of owt, all will have gone, recognition, speech, sight, hearing, intelligence (the world should feel sad to lose my 157 IQ and my vast (successful) experience in IT, but as the commercial world seems to regard that as unimportant and is happy to leave me to starve, why should the rest of the world worry?).

Meanwhile back to this life. Towards the end of the last football (North American = soccer) season I got tired of the big clubs acting like business monopolies - actually Microsoft and company think more like democracies than the top European football clubs these days. If anyone challenges your monopoly, buy their best players .....

After years of being overly concerned about some megarich dumboes kicking a ball around, I decided enuff was enuff, and kicked any interest into the proverbial touch. The last remaining interest in sport is baseball - when the World Series ends this week, whether the Red Sox win or lose, I shall think about letting that go as well.

One point to be made here - if your team loses, it is not the end of the world. Losing your job, not being able to exercise your talents (OK, kicking a ball around for money if you are good enough), getting into debt, not having a permanent roof over your head, being obsessed that Margaret Thatcher really knew what she was doing - these are serious problems. They matter, they are important. As are being stuck in a war situation, suffering severe health or addiction problems usw.

But your team lost? Ho-hum. The world will continue to turn, and if you have a job that you enjoy and money coming in from somewhere honest (yes, I know that line is getting thinner by the day) - why the **** are you getting upset over some silly vastly overpaid idiot who cannot shoot straight or hit the ball over the wall, or walked in a run?

It is 38 years ago now, but I still remember one of the strangest stories that I ever heard. There are and were two large soccer teams in the city of Sheffield in the North of England. I taught in a school there for a year. In 1974 I left. I loved Sheffield but hated the job, and as my father had health problems, moving closer to home made some sense.

The following year one of Sheffield's soccer teams, Sheffield Wednesday, was relegated to the third tier of the English game for the first (but ultimately not the last) time in history. I picked up a snippet from the national press about a 17-year-old supporter of that team who became so depressed as a result, he committed suicide.

Nowt about his job, family, whether he had a girlfriend, school maybe? Or difficulties with his parents or .... No, merely because he was a fanatical supporter of a lousy team, his life became intolerable.

It takes some believing, but there are many people who have a similar fanaticism. Whether they would go to that extreme in a bad year, though?

Sad, and weird, and definitely not worth it. Perspective? Sorry, but I will not even try to understand. Eventually you have to learn to switch off and switch out.

Anyway there will be other days and other seasons if you are that keen. How many Red Sox supporters have lived through the 2012 and 2013 seasons with contrasting emotions? So even if you do experience a bad year, it is not forever.

Not like losing your job and being stuck in permanent poverty. Not like losing a limb and having to live without it. Not like become addicted to heroin and wanting to live without it!

So come on. Remember that they are grotesquely overpaid and it is only a game! Eventually! You have this one life, there must be other ways to get through it - at least if the politicians, the megarich, the greedy business community and the neo-Fascists in our midst will let us!

Everything that's fit to see

Let me take you back into history - ancient history, in fact all of 50 years ago.

I was 14, my cousin and closest friend, Paul, was 15. We had reached that age when we were tentatively getting interested in girls.

Very tentatively, I would add, and mainly from a distance. We shouldn't really have been that interested (according to common myth - we weren't 18 yet!) in finding out what a girl might look like fully (whisper the word) naked. But when certain aspects of your body start awakening, sometimes your mind follows.

After some tentative missions in trying to discover all the amazing facts involved with this, we finally discovered a second-hand magazine store in a grotty street in a run-down area of town (the whole neighbourhood has since been knocked down and rebuilt incidentally). There amidst all the imported American "Captain Marvel" and "Spiderman" comics were 3 small rectangular magazines staring back out through the shop window - with names like "QT" ("Cutie" - get it?). 3 totally naked young women - estimated age 22 - on the covers. Shaved where it mattered. Not the fetish prevalent these days for doing it as young women do (and I will never come to terms with this, but that is me), but because the publisher's way of getting past summat called "The Obscene Publications Act" was that this was "art", not "pornography".

If you know the story how the painter, Manet, upset the authorities in 19th century France by painting a nude model alongside fully-clothed men - the human form is artistic in context, when you change the context though ....

So you stand there for 3-4 minutes ogling at these pictures, discussing what was missing, and go home. What was missing could not be seen in magazines until I was 19, incidentally.

I do not think that Paul or I turned into dangerous perverts as a result of this incidentally. He became a very solid citizen and when he sadly died last year he was described in his obituary as a "a great friend to everybody". He was and it was a fitting obituary - pity there aren't more like him.

Since then we have the mass growth in glamour magazines since the 1970s, hard-core stuff across many European countries, and finally the Internet. And even daily newspapers producing photos of topless models - and do not try and persuade me that children in the UK do not see the "Sun" or German kids never see "Bild" for example.

So when I hear that Facebook will not even allow a naked female breast to be seen on its site ..... Even with aboriginal cultures in South America, Africa and the South Pacific where nobody has trained women to think that there is summat wrong with such.

I understand that there is a problem with "sexting" - vulnerable young women taking naked photos of themselves and those later appearing on the Internet. And I can understand that you would not want that sort of thing on Facebook (along with the cyber bullying and the insulting threats which turn young people suicidal usw). But the blanket ban is ridiculous.

As it is, unless you live in somewhere like Saudi Arabia or China, the Internet is awash with accessible pornography, and attempts to limit access have proved futile. Parental control on the computer is all well and good, but a lot of 14-year-old kids are computer savvy and know how to change such controls.

The equivalents of Paul and myself these days could easily come home, switch on the computer, change the parental controls when nobody else is around, go off to watch "Sexy Susan does everything and more" for 15 minutes, leave the Internet, turn the parental control back to where it was, clean out the cache so nobody will find out what they were up to when nobody else was around, and only blanch for a few seconds about that strange message that flashed up while they were watching what they were watching and hope it wasn't a virus .....

Digression - should you come back and catch them, do not throw the proverbial wobbler. Rather tick them off, advise them them that that nice girl, Susan, down the street, does not do "everything and more" and it is not like that in reality. Ask cousin Susan's husband who is always complaining that she is better in the kitchen than in the bedroom. And if all else fails guide them to the comments of former French porn star, Raffaella Andersen, on the industry - they are not too complimentary. End of digression.

So back to Facebook. Having established that while there are plenty of naked female breasts (and not just breasts) to be seen elsewhere on the Web, let us consider what can be seen on Facebook that is nice and friendly and not insulting and all about great camaraderie and not insulting or bullying people.

Like people beheading their wives for being unfaithful. Or at least beheading their wives (or a female of their acquaintance).

So it is always possible that the video that appeared this week came from Mexico means that it could actually be a drug gang-related incident (not the first time that Mexican gangs have issued videos of executions of rival gang leaders on Facebook incidentally). Rather than a marital dispute.

It raises the question whether it was an "honour" killing (a dubious phrase if ever there was one - there is nowt "honourable" involved with any such killing). And even if it was, it was also nowt short of COLD-BLOODED MURDER!

Rather than sticking such an abomination on Facebook for all to see, their management should help the authorities trace the killer involved and where it took place. And have him brought to justice for his misdeeds.

It is a strange sense of priorities that some people have that is not acceptable for a woman to expose a naked breast, but it is OK for her head to be cut off! It does not change the fact that this vile atrocity took place, but presenting it whether to shock or excite or even cry for justice is frankly unacceptable, in any way, shape or form. And no pre-announcement about what is to follow will improve the situation one iota.

As for what your average 14-year-old boy is supposed to think when he sees summat like this?

It is surely time for some consistency here. Even if what some regard as "immoral" needs stepping on under certain circumstances, there can be no grounds whatsoever for openly advertising grotesque criminal activity, wharrever its root cause!

On happiness and then having a bank account in the Cayman Islands

Regular readers may think that I am getting repetitive but anyway.

A quick definition of happiness (from a personal perspective):

1. Having a job that you enjoy, that challenges you intellectually but always allows you the possibility to find solutions and is not too dependent upon other people.

2. Earning enough money to provide the basic needs, buy one or two items that are of interest (I want a new PC - and stress PC, not laptop nor tablet - for example), allows you to travel occasionally and, needless to say, lets you save something for the future.

3.  Staying out of debt.

4. Having a number of reliable friends (family can fit into the same category, blood ties do not, however, necessarily improve the quality of friendship).

5. Staying healthy.

6. Enjoying the pleasures of the flesh occasionally (too late for regularly, so .....).

That is it for the moment. There is no need for massive material pleasure. All the material goods, the sort of house with 15 bedrooms that Scott Sullivan of Worldcom was building (that was replaced by one small room out of which it was difficult to emerge for the best part of 3-4 years) - not really, in fact not at all. No car (I can live with a decent train service, see Germany, maybe France, but definitely not the UK). Children/grandchildren? I spent six years teaching other people's kids. I learned even then that I find it difficult communicating with them and their company only improves when they become young adults, so not really.

Pretty undemanding and seemingly unachievable. Which is a ridiculous conclusion but nonetheless true.

So what would I do with a bank account in the Cayman Islands meanwhile? In fact what would anyone do with summat like that?

The pragmatist in me raises the question - what is the use of having that much money and not spending it? Just leaving it accumulating interest? Real fun, eh?

From a pragmatic point of view having so much money that you cannot spend it usefully strikes me as ridiculous. Go and spend it in profligate mode then? Not my style either, but there are many uses it could be put to.

There are loads of things that need doing on this planet, if you look around. There are millions of people currently unemployed who would love to be given the sense of purpose, the dignity and self-respect that comes from working for a living.

So why not put the two together?

Just a thought.

The glories of war and learning from history

Last month our television was put to rest. I was in favour of having it repaired, my wife decided that it needed replacing and consequently we now have a monstrosity that takes up most of the space on one side of the room. Despite our financial difficulties the 440 Euro needed to pay for this was translated into 24 monthly payments of 18 Euro plus a few cents and will disappear accordingly from her bank account.

Not sure whether Americans still use the "instalment plan" (see the Phil Spector produced Crystals' song "He's sure the boy I love" from the early 1960s - when the boy of her dreams has no money as could be seen by him buying on "the instalment plan"), or whether they simply stash the bill on their ever-increasing credit card debt. Buying by instalments seems more sensible, but anyway ....

Anyway this is now her new toy. Whether there is owt interesting on or not, it gets switched on and left on. Apart from wasting electricity, it is also an annoying source of noise when you are working on a translation. And particularly annoying when she heads off to the kitchen for half an hour and is obviously not watching it.

As was the case yesterday morning. Sunday. Germany. Mainstream channel ZDF. Summat that I had completely forgotten - religious broadcasts. There was this Lutheran pastor going on about his church's Catholic "Geschwister" - brothers and sisters. Nice word, nice thought.

So flip your mind back, as you are seditiously prone to do (particularly as a tolerant atheist), nearly 400 years to the start of the 30 Years War.

The 30 Years War was actually a series of wars rather than a continuous unbroken event. Its results were devastating. To quote the ever reliable Wikipedia (irony):

"A major consequence of the Thirty Years' War was the devastation of entire regions, denuded by the foraging armies. Famine and disease significantly decreased the population of the German states, Bohemia, the Low Countries and Italy; most of the combatant powers were bankrupted".

Great stuff, eh? Isn't war wonderful (extreme irony)? States getting bankrupted for the old political reasons rather than the new economic-political reasons. And no 17th century version of the Marshall Plan to bail out those involved either!

One of the fascinating things about this is that, if you bother to check out what historians inform you were the causes of the war, there is no one single reason for 30 years of wanton destruction. Events regarding the succession to the throne in Bohemia (today a significant part of the Czech Republic) eventually kick-started the whole series of events but the plot and counterplot elsewhere were far more significant than that.

That Protestants and Catholics chose to revive their rivalries upon a large scale should not be so surprising, given the times, but the relationships between the Catholic Bourbon dynasty in France and the Catholic Hapsburg dynasty in the Austrian dominated Holy Roman Empire and in Spain and in the "Southern Netherlands" (now Belgium) complicated the issue. Add to the fact that a bit of "Swedish imperialism" (yes, folks - Swedish imperialism!) was also a driving force.

By the end of the war Catholic France was the dominant power on the "Protestant" side, while Protestant Denmark was for some years fighting on the "Catholic"side, having previously fought for the "Protestant" side.

And eventually nobody really won. The towns of Munster and Osnabrück in Westfalen gained historical notoriety as the places where negotiations took place and eventually brought the whole sordid business to an end. After which Europe did not improve a great deal for several generations.

To bear in mind that at the time there was not even a semblance of anything democratic going on. The powers that existed were invested in not so benign monarchies - in many cases primitive dictatorships. The role of the common people was to serve their rulers and otherwise do as they were told. If you died in a war, if you died in a famine - same difference. Religion had a way of rearing its very ugly head, and may the proverbial non-existent Heaven save you if you embraced a Protestant (be it Lutheran or Calvinist) belief and the ruler of the state was a Catholic.

 To sit back and look at this now and think about Catholic "Geschwister" - we have come a long way. To think that continental Europe (outside of the Balkans) has managed nearly 70 years without a significant war ..... We have definitely come a long way.

To a point we have learned from history. Where economics are concerned we are backsliding considerably (and the return of rampant poverty, particularly among the elderly, must not be ignored), but the lot of the common people, which improved massively in the first 25 years following the Second World War, still is not as bad as in the 17th century.

Not that the craving for war has disappeared among small elements of the populations at large. And the need for extravagant "defence" ("offence"????) spending for such remains part of the platform of many principally (but not exclusively) conservative parties across the continent. If the UKIP/EXP ever gains power in the UK, they want four more nuclear weapons (check their manifesto - it is in there!). You wonder quite why. If the idea of a nuclear weapon is to frighten off potential attacks, why is one not enough, what do you need with all the others - unless your purpose is aggressive???? "We hate the EU, so let's nuke Brussels! And Berlin and Paris and Vienna and Warsaw and Riga and Ljubljana and Tallinn and ..... " (starts to salivate madly at the thought). Potentially dangerous people.

So maybe another war on the European continent is not so unlikely? Probably not - the old powers have moved on, merged, democratised, or simply faded into non-belligerent successful economic states (check Austria). It is a bit harder though for some than others (see France as well as the UK).

And who knows? The spirit of Gustavus Adolphus may suddenly re-emerge (check out some time the obscure town of Lützen in Saxony where he died in battle in 1632) and we may see a rise in Swedish imperialism again. Well I wouldn't bet your mortgage on it .....

If it's good for business, it's good for me ....

OK, I keep hearing this ....

So please inform me:

1. How is this supposed to work?

2. As one of your representatives told me on LinkedIn last week that you can neither guarantee me a job nor create jobs out of thin air (or using your imagination or planning for the future - same thing as he was concerned), how is this in my interest?

3. You can fire me at a moment's notice, not because I am not productive or competent, but because you arbitrarily think that I am "too old" or "too expensive" (that incidentally in the UK can equal making 15,000 pounds a year, in Germany the figure is somewhat higher and in a more trustworthy currency). Again, can you please tell me how this is in my interest?

4. You help the economy grow. Fine, but if over 90% of economic growth goes into the pockets, bank accounts, investments etc of 7-8% of the population, how does this benefit me?

And while we are here can you tell me how you keep unemployment low, how you stop underemployment, how you help fight poverty, how you create the possibilities where people like me who do not want to be dependent on government handouts need not be, and how those, like me, who believe in work ethic (and are not born salesmen and/or gamblers) can live satisfactorily as a result of their work ethic, and those like me who want to live without being in debt can do so?

I am not a polemicist, I am a pragmatist. I want results not theories. And I do not want to hear excuses or owt concerning "luck" or "winners and losers".

Robots that can read

Readers who visit my blog on a regular or occasional basis may not realise the fact that the writer receives a list of daily stats telling him/her what posts have been read, the country of origin of the readers, which sites are being used to access the blog usw.

Some days you note that your readership is really low - often when your muse has been asleep for days and you have produced few or no new items.

And then there are the days when you get a far higher number of readers than usual.

It isn't usually though that you have aroused the interest of extra new people in various locations around the world. It is rather that you have awoken a robot.


There are several interesting locations for these robots, mainly in parts of Eastern Europe, but also increasingly in the USA.

The intention is to get the blogger to access the site related to the robot by pressing the link on your stats page.

In the past 24 hours I have had 41 visits from an American based robot from a site called vampirestat.com. As a trained IT professional I am not inclined, ever, to press the links to sites like this - there is always the possibility that I may well be unleashing summat rather nasty. I have had to clear viruses off here before and I have better things to do with my time.

My response, rather, is to copy the name of the site and stick it in a google search. Which is how I came to find out that a robot is accessing my material.

Anyway I hope the robots are enjoying the content of the blog and learning summat - including a few bits of Northern English vocabulary. If nowt else I try to get people to think and react and not just acquiesce.

A thinking robot - what a quaint concept. Maybe they should run for politics, I am sure that a number of political parties, particularly conservative political parties, would be only too glad to have them!

Should the Chinese be allowed to dictate world economic policy?

Firstly reread the item that I wrote on August 1st, 2012 called: "Trading issues with the Chinese".

I raised a bit of a furore with a comment that I wrote on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. I made two suggestions what China should do in the foreseeable future. My two simple suggestions were:

1. Hold democratic elections.
2. Float its currency the same as every other country does.

The first of these drew fire from different non-Chinese critics who told me that democracy does not work - one from Scotland pointing out that the UK Conservative government receives very little support in Scotland (true enough) and that the government was taking action of which most Scots disapprove (again reasonable enough). The same could, incidentally, be said of my native North of England.

And there is no doubt that we are prone to see an increasingly corrupted version of democracy with the first past the post system in many countries. The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives has been playing a game of brinkmanship recently - closing down parts of the government, threatening a debt default. They are only in a position to do so as they gerrymandered the districts in the first place. At the 2012 elections they received overall over million votes fewer nationally than the Democrats for the House seats and have a majority in the region of 30.

Meanwhile the current UK coalition is a rare example of a government where more than 50% of voters in the UK voted for the parties in question. The abominable Margaret Thatcher, for example, never gained more than 43% of the vote and wreaked havoc - mainly upon the people who did not vote for her!

OK. But remember that democracy is more than just a political procedure - it is the ability to involve yourself in all sorts of actions that are not possible under a dictatorship. The Chinese equivalent of the Occupy movement would have been crushed far more brutally under its dictatorship for example. And the chances are that blog writers like myself would have been imprisoned in many different countries (and maybe even tortured) for publishing some of the views that are expressed in them. See what would happen to atheist bloggers in Iran or Saudi Arabia for example!

And think of Germany and dictatorship - even for one second - without blanching at the thought of what happened last time. "Antifa und stolz darauf" - that I can say and think in a democracy!

The point with democracy is to improve it - rather as I have said about the EU. The way to deal with the EU's many faults is to improve it (and democratise it fully).

Meanwhile we have the point about the Chinese currency. A Chinese writer complained about my suggestion that the currency markets are too liberal and that would be harmful to Chinese interests.

All well and good.

They are also for the record too liberal for a lot of other countries round the world. See what happened to the Rouble in Russia in the 1990s or the Baht in Thailand in 1998.

The point that writer missed though is obvious. We have a global economy - an often nasty animal that stands up and bites the people who can least afford it, while rewarding those who are already so well-off they wouldn't notice how much money they made in the last 60 seconds.

We are all signed up to the rules of this, like it or not. So if you want to take part, you should play by the same rules as everyone else.

If all the countries signed up to the various trading agreements started making noises about how it was not in their interest, most of these agreements would collapse. I personally need some persuading myself that Europe should not impose some sort of protectionism, with allowances made for African countries as the only exception, but general principle says that would be a "bad thing" (exports would be badly affected in the short term at least).

But the fact remains that the ludicrously cheap fixed exchange rate for the Chinese currency is killing industry and jobs everywhere else in the world (see also the article above). There is only one argument against obliging the Chinese to float their currency - THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE DOES! - and that would be the inflationary impact. That item at my local electronic store costing 5 Euro may well now cost 14 Euro?

Perhaps, but then I might be able to find an article of the same kind made in Spain or Greece (or even the UK) for 10 Euro. In other words it would provide the possibility for booting up the European manufacturing base, and create jobs here.

So what is fair to everyone else might not be in China's interest - but why should the rules be skewed to work for them and nobody else? It makes no sense and we are shooting ourselves in the foot by letting the situation continue to exist!

The chances though of getting Europe's politicians (individually or as a collective body) to act on this? Yes, well .... In the week that the news appeared that according to the latest opinion poll in France the neo-Fascist Front National are ahead of the rest, you begin to despair of any intelligent or reasoned solutions ever being adopted. Sadly for us all.

Just not getting it

I suppose that LinkedIn has become my last real social media outlet.

The last post that I wrote on this blog "On the job market and job security" which I first wrote on there produced a number of comments.

The American readers of the piece seemed to support the implications of what I was saying -  encouraging (love that word) company loyalty and flexibility within the organisation and returning to a time when all the people working for the organisation were in it together, and looking to long-term objectives rather than short-term gain (so riding the curve in any downturn, which should probably be temporary in the long-scale view, 12 months over 12 years is not actually a long time).

One British correspondent though (theoretically an entrepreneur or a company director or both) took umbrage at what I had to say, accused me of misrepresenting Thatcher (no I didn't - he just did not look deeply enough into what I was saying, I suppose that I should not be surprised) and then went onto endorse her position. Detect summat of an inconsistency here? She didn't actually say that, but I agree with it anyway? Huh?

His view on job creation though was simplistic, and static, not intelligently thought-through and dynamic. Success was simply job creation, not job creation along with job security.

Fine. Consider an absurd but possible version of this thinking.

Let us say that you create 5 million jobs. All of which are due to last three months and finish with no hope of renewal. Great idea? It gives the economy a quick boost. And then?

And then?

Well it was job creation. No security.

We live in the "consumer society", so much of the economy is built on what people purchase and can afford to purchase.

Would you take out a 25-year mortgage on that principle? Would you buy a new car, a new refrigerator, a new wardrobe or outfit on that basis?

A new outfit may be affordable, for the rest you would probably do what I would do. Pay off the outstanding bills, and put the rest in the bank to cover what happens when the three month period has run its course.

Profligate, frivolous spending? Well if you have no sense or a ridiculous propensity for unreal optimism, then you might indulge yourself. Don't ask me to pay your accommodation for you in three months time though!

Americans have this annoying habit of producing generalised tags for different generations (well, you know what I think of stereotypes by now). So now we have the "Millennials". Interestingly generally absurd generalisations aside, I noted an article upon this group on LinkedIn the other day. One thing that I noted was a sane and sensible attitude to debt. You do not take out a mortgage and just hope that you can pay it off. You do not load yourself down with debt that you cannot pay. You complain about the ridiculous level of debt needed to get you through college.

Brilliant! Sounds like I am an ageing Millennial!

Common-sense attitudes. As a lot of these young people have experienced 2008 and learned its lessons (you wish their parents and grandparents would!), these attitudes are also not surprising.

And they also value job security!

Common-sense again prevails.

But you cannot have an economy that, blah, blah, blah .....

Blah, blah, blah, Wahnsinn!!!!

We have a mess. We have people like Thatcher and Bush who caused it. The approach worked only for the top few percent, the rest of us got stuck with debt, unemployment, insecurity and the ever imminent threat of poverty.

The model did not work, we need to find summat where more sense prevails and common and lasting prosperity can be created. Yes we need to slash government debt, of course, and we need to cut the dependency upon government handouts. And for that matter we need to slash private debt burdens as well!

Which means that we need to take a new approach or adapt an old one. We need a dynamic, comprehensive, inclusive approach to building an economy and the job creation that is attached to it. Not the old static, monetary-based solutions.

And for those who accuse me of proposing Marx and Engels style solutions, let me correct you. There is a model out there that could be used and adapted for the current era. A model that created a dynamic, vibrant economy that raised living standards across the board long-term, kept debt low and provided good-paying jobs and low unemployment. German names again, but not Marx and Engels - but rather Adenauer and Erhard! Check out what they achieved in the 1950s and 60s. Check out the model, adapt and apply!

On the job market and job security

Lou Adler is one of the more interesting writers on LinkedIn.com.

His articles tend towards the American job market and he tends to sound optimistic at the moment (this is a week before the GOP radicals cause a default on the US debt of course, then the floor on the job market will almost certainly collapse unless they see sense).

Anyway first read his article:

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131010025706-15454-hire-economics-don-t-read-everything-you-believe?trk=tod-posts-art-

And my comments on the same article:

Interesting article at least for the American job market even if there is hardly a country in Europe where it applies. I would pick up though upon the point about job security and compensation. I recall Margaret Thatcher boasting in the UK in the 1980s about "getting rid of the job for life". Personally I have never seen this as something about which people should boast. Strengthening the job market means providing greater job security and making sure that talented people receive adequate rewards for their services. No matter how talented and dedicated to the task you are, the prospect of losing your job through no fault of your own is definitely a negative where motivation, incentive and productivity are concerned. Over the past 30 years companies have been far too prone to look at short-term gain rather than the good of the company in the long haul, and employees have become as dispensable as machinery. Creating an atmosphere where people are encouraged to stay and be productive should be the objective - upgrading their skills where necessary, even if that costs something in the short-term. New opportunities will come along, new businesses will arise? Yes, but there will also be a new generation of talented people to move into the slots.

Keeping out desirables and other nonsense continued - how to win an argument by default

Read yesterday's piece first, please, if you have not already done so.

There are wonderful days in your life. The days someone who tells you all the time how much she loves you finally listens to what you are saying.

So when I was continuing the discussion on completing the online visa form today for her so that she can get into the UK, adding in the process (three times) that she was the one that wanted to go not me, the quiet comment emerged from my wife's mouth:"I don't think we're going to England".

Maybe my hostility to the idea has finally got through - I am not that acerbic or prone to getting angry (having an old voodoo doll of Margaret Thatcher that you can stick pins in occasionally also keeps you calm - pity there's no Hell for her to rot in!), so you have to get the point over quietly and repetitively - but there is the other factor hitting home. Cost!

Before even looking at the cost of a plane ticket and hotels, we would have to shovel out 246 Euro minimum (for American readers that is, at today's conversion rate, $333.95) for the cost of the visa and the cheapest return for two people to Düsseldorf and back (she won't travel on her own unless forced) for the statutory humiliation required to get it. The prospect of paying out that much in advance strikes even her as outrageous.

Anyway this afternoon after she had gone to work, I proceeded down the interesting path of completing all the required documentation online. Changing her mind is always a possibility. Unfortunately in this case it could still happen.

Get past like all the questions like "are you a terrorist?", "are you a supporter of a terrorist group?", do you advocate terrorism?" (I wonder if anyone actually answers "yes" to these questions), you get to the interestingly funny bit at the end - paying for the appointment.

First thing to bear in mind is that you have to pay for the appointment before being given one. If you decide you do not want to go eventually .... Well they have you neatly scammed, right?

This though turned out to be third most enjoyable moment of the day - numbers one and two for reference:

1. Finding out that overnight European time that the Red Sox had won the ALDS in Tampa last night Eastern (American) time.
2. Completing a translation this morning that was the second quality piece of work I have produced in two days - at least I hope the customer thinks so.

Anyway - number 3. Funny joke almost. Name the two most common ways of paying for something in Germany. Answers of course being cash and using Bank Giro Direct Credit with your bank card (with a PIN live, but also available on the Internet occasionally).

Name the methods with which you can pay for a visa online at the contractor site used by the UK Embassy in Germany - Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.

I don't know many people here who have Visa or Mastercard, given the rip-off charges involved with such cards I wouldn't advise their use anywhere anyway. Paypal - my wife does not have. I do, but it would take several days to get money into the account, and I'm not the one who wants to get the visa. I am not the one who wishes, either, to torture him/herself by making this ludicrous journey, so why should I fit my own thumbscrews?

Cash? You cannot go to Düsseldorf with cash - they will not accept it! They also will not accept bank card payments. Does it get more ridiculous? It is almost as if they have planned to keep people out!

So it looks like I win the argument by default. Of course being what the Germans call "schlau" I could be accused of deliberately manoeuvring the Paypal possibility to my advantage.

Anyway Bern in November sounds interesting. Much more interesting than the UK, let's face it, and it would be her friend that we would be visiting ..... 

Keeping out desirables and other nonsense

As regular readers will know I am still a UK passport holder.

As people reading my stuff last year will realise it is no big deal for me, and nobody will turn me into a raving patriot.

At the same time as readers of this blog will know, I have moved beyond the restrictions of patriotism - I am a citizen of the world, certainly of Europe, and take some pride in my lack of blinkers when it comes to such matters.

There are no tribes in Europe any more - thankfully - though nationalist parties across the continent are only too willing to have you believe otherwise.

I also have some very strange commitments as a British national - in favour of the UK abolishing the monarchy and becoming a republic, pro-EU (but they should get round to abandoning their support for neo-liberal economics), pro-Euro (the pound should go before it falls any further!). I am not sure being an atheist is so strange these days (see Richard Dawkins for example), but that too makes me part of a minority.

And I dislike conservatism and nationalism and the UK is a notoriously conservative country with a pronounced nationalist fringe.

This all could change in a few years if I live that long and the UK compounds its normal stupidity by leaving the EU - in that case I shall definitely be applying for German nationality. This blog will have to change its name (Ein Deutscher in Frankfurt? Well the majority of Frankfurters are, even with the 170 nationalities we have in our wonderful cosmopolitan city - Nigel Farage, please note!).

Anyway I am now stuck with my usual annoyance about yet more stupidity emanating from the UK - though of a permanent nature, rather than the occasional temporary glitch.

My wife has her annual holiday in November. This is normally planned for November because it is the best month to visit her native Thailand. As we do not have any spare money to go there and she does not fancy three weeks sitting round our wonderful cosmopolitan city, we were looking at alternatives. I fancied visiting our friends who live in Northern Germany, close to Bremen, maybe the friend that she has near Bern in Switzerland (I have never met the girl, but I am sure it would be an interesting trip), maybe visit my friends in the Netherlands, or the friends that my wife has in Ålesund in Norway (yes, it would be a bit dark and cold this time of year, but I loved my time in Oslo, so ....).

None of these will happen.

My wife has decided that we are going to England to visit my family! My aunt is 87 years old and may not live much longer and my wife is very fond of her. OK. For the rest my parents have been dead since 1988 and 2000 respectively, my cousin, Paul, who was a great guy, died last year. Most anyone else I have lost contact with. We talk to my aunt on the phone a lot anyway, so going there in person ....

Hardly essential.

Particularly when you think of the cost involved.

Curiously my wife is a lot more concerned about MY family than I am. I was always a friends person rather than a family person. I have lost touch though with many of the friends that I had there - two of the most important ones have died. And the ones left tend to live in geographically awkward places. And given the lousy rail service (and the ridiculous cost of living even with the plummeting pound!) .....

The most stupid side of this follows though (no, not the bit about my wife being a staunch royalist - come on, what else would you expect from a Thai national?). I can take her to Holland (an EU country) or Norway or Switzerland (non-EU countries) without a visa. I can take her to at least 22 others without a visa. It would not cost us a cent to stay with our friends in Bremen. It would also not cost us a cent for a visa to go to Holland.

The UK?

I am a British national. I am a British passport holder. I have a European skin colour (if that is important), I spent 40 years of my life living there.

She is my wife. She has been to the UK twice before (in 2005 and 2008). She is a pacifist Buddhist and the least dangerous person on this planet.

Every time that she goes to the f***ing UK, she needs a f***ing visa. This is as insulting as it gets - and note if some British sleazeballs want to go and hang round the tawdry bars of Pattaya or Patpong for four weeks, they do not need a visa to get into Thailand.

TIME FOR SOME RECIPROCATION????

Then let us get round to the cost! The visa for 6 months costs a cool 100 Euro. She would like a 10-year visa (no point, we do not go often enough). That would cost, get this, 900 Euro! That is approximately 70% of two economy return class tickets to Bangkok. We cannot afford to go to Thailand? Then we certainly cannot afford 900 Euro for a visa!

This is though not the end of this ridiculous story. I have remarked upon this before in this blog, but it is worth repeating - every time you want a visa you have to go and be finger-printed and have your photo taken. You have to go to Düsseldorf (and now possibly also Munich or Berlin) in person. That is a return train fare. That is another 100 Euro approximately.

Imagine the Thais imposing similar conditions on British sleazeballs who want to visit Pattaya or Patpong! But anyway -

TIME FOR SOME RECIPROCATION????

When she has paid the airfare, the 4-7 days in a hotel (my aunt cannot accommodate us), the train fare from Manchester to Humberside and back, meals for several days ..... And, of course having 12% of your money ripped off at exchange bureaux!

Is it worth it?

They probably have more reason to keep me out than her (not that I am physically dangerous), as you are not supposed to criticise the wonderful disaster that Thatcher and Blair created. She will be her usual, pleasant, affable, likable, personable, kind, understanding self. No chance of her hanging round sleazy bars either.

So why they need to strip her of so much money (never mind the insults to her pride and dignity) for all this rigmarole so she can get into their confounded country for as many days it takes before I am overtaken by the need to get back to civilisation (well one thing to be said, if I must be tribal, at least I shall be in the North which for all its deficiencies is not London or the EXP heartlands ....)  .... Words fail me!

Oktoberfest and a recommended ride .... oh, and dirndls

Germany's biggest and best-known beer festival, the Oktoberfest, is currently going on in Munich. Correct me if I am wrong, but this normally starts on the last but one Saturday in September and runs usually until the first Sunday in October, though if there is a public holiday on the Monday (German Reunification Day is October 3rd), that too is included. Correction - a quick countback tells me that in fact if the last Saturday of the month is the 30th, it will start on the 16th, not the 23rd, the duration of the event being 16-17 days.

The major five Munich breweries will have their large tents with beer as may be expected (they are also intelligent enough to provide non-alcoholic drinks, Munich being Munich some people will arrive in cars and drivers are discouraged from drinking and driving), along with Bavarian-biased food (watch your cholesterol level) and the usual entertainment from the oompah bands. Smaller breweries also put in an appearance, and their tents also get crowded.

Well worth the visit, thousands of tourists come annually, and it gets crowded at the weekends which means that it is better to go on a midweek evening.

The event is held in the area called Auf der Wiesn (on the meadow), has a lengthy history that you can read up elsewhere, and is by any stretch a big event. You will already have missed it this year (2013), but the parade on opening days, with dray carts carrying barrels of beer and being pulled by some of the most magnificent horses that you have ever seen, from the centre of Munich and leading to the Wiesn, is well worth seeing.

Alongside but not within the festival grounds themselves is a funfair with the whole range of the typical funfair experience.

One ride that I can personally recommend is what the Germans call the Olympia Looping ("Looping" is one of those strange German borrowings from English that does not seem to have been copied directly). I have always called this the Olympic Rings though this is not the official name. There are five large rings around which a roller-coaster goes very quickly - all the way round the rings.

This is a particularly interesting (!) experience to try when you have come out of a beer tent after drinking two masses (a mass = a 1-litre beer glass) of strong beer. I did this both years upon my visits in 1994 & 1995, once accompanied by friends who wanted to throttle me for taking them on this ride, and once alone. Not incidentally recommended after drinking 3 masses or more (if  you are capable of standing up after drinking 4 masses, you are obviously qualified as someone who is alcohol resistant!).

This still is part of the funfair - that I have checked. A YouTube video, borrowed without permission, follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZNZX9BW5tw

Try it some time and enjoy!

For my female readership, you might also be interested in the traditional Bavarian dress, the dirndl. Not every woman by any means at the Oktoberfest can be seen in a dirndl (some even turn up in lederhosen!), but some do choose to wear one and get themselves noticed. Not every dirndl is all that elegant, but at their best they have definitely an eye-catching quality. There are some interesting pieces on the Internet on how to make your own (my late mother would have been fascinated at the thought).

The word "Dirndl" is also interesting for a linguist. The origin of the word comprises two parts. It was a "Kleid" (dress") for a "Dirne" (think of the old English word "maiden", German plural incidentally adds an "n", so "Dirnen"). Hence Dirnen-Kleid - a maiden's dress. Given a few generations, that got shortened to Dirndl.

And for young foreign men out there who want to impress young Bavarian women with their command of German, do not wharrever start calling them "Dirne(n)" these days!

This once polite word has descended into meaning a slovenly woman with the lowest possible moral standards! It is pejorative to say the least! Go and check "Dirne" on the German-English dictionary on dict.leo.org if you want some modern equivalent English words! Interesting, though, how words change, isn't it?

Banking bonuses and the usual conservative whining

Firstly read the following item, the sequel to which has reappeared in the news this week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/business/global/european-union-agrees-on-plan-to-cap-banker-bonuses.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Question:

How much does a banking bonus amount to?

If it equals one year's salary, how much is that?

Looking at this situation carefully, there is one point that you may conclude:

We are not talking 40,000 or 50,000 anything - be it Euro, Dollars or joke currencies like the pound.

400,000, 500,000, even 4 million or 5 million?

You would complain tomorrow if you received a bonus of $400,000 or €400,000? And not $800,000 or €800,000?

There are a very large number of people, many of them elderly and unemployable, in the UK who were told by the Tory government that they had to live on 53 pounds a week (= 2,756 pounds a year). A banker cannot do anything if he only gets 400,000 a year???? In fact he would leave his job and go elsewhere if that is all he were offered?

And the UK government thinks that that is critical? And the people forced to live on 53 pounds a week are just a pain in the rear portions? Well in the latter instance of course they think that, but then they despise people who were not born into wealth and had to live increasingly in the McDonalds economy!

Has a perspective gone missing here? Somewhere?

Well the banks' response is that they would have to upgrade their salaries to meet the demands of the new rules.

So the banks, if they are going to stay, have to incorporate the bonuses into their employees' salaries. And when the next crisis comes they will have to lay more people off!

Newsflash - it is 2008 again! Who caused the financial crash? The people living on 53 pounds a week? NO! The European Union? NO! The banks????? THE BANKS!!!! All the nice extra money that they can gamble with and lose and then get bailed out by governments so they can gamble again, and take more risks and lose yet more and get bailed out yet again???? And after the bailing out of course, the government will have even less money, so people regarded as unemployable will have only 43 pounds a week to live on!

The next crisis will come! They will lay off loads of people - as they did in 2008. So what's new???? That is unless some action is taken, globally, to stop banks acting like casinos!

For the record, the city where I now live, Frankfurt, is also a major banking centre. Not as big as London, maybe, but important enough. The German government has been the architect of the above legislation, and yet there isn't a lot of crying from the banks here for some reason! Major international banks may leave? Think of the business that they will lose in the world's fourth-biggest economy! Meanwhile as severe as Hartz IV here is for the people stuck on it, there is no forcing people to live on as little as 70 Euro a week yet!

It is time for some reality. It is time for some pragmatism. It is time to realise that we need to resolve the difficulties at all levels of society - my usual theme of creating decent jobs at all levels, full employment, less need for government to be bailing people out, wherever they are.

But feeding the needs of the greedy banking community and not expecting more disciplined and less frivolous behaviour from them? That should not be a high priority. The banking community should be there to serve, not to gamble or gorge itself!

Winning a court case

Given that we have created a society in which lawyers (and accountants - but that part of the story I will leave for another day) can always find work and usually lead relatively easy lives (which is more often than not the case for the incompetent ones as well), it intrigues me how rarely some of us ever encounter them.

My father hardly had any dealings with them, apart from when he bought the (small, terraced) house that he had, and when he had to detail his belongings at the end of his life - a will possibly overstates it though.

Myself I have had to deal with them three times when buying and selling the various places that I owned between the ages of 27 and 39. Then there were the visits to see them after my father died (in 1988) and similarly following my mother's death in 2000. Her property was eventually sold for a price that would not have bought a decent sized bathroom in the South-East of England. In 38 years after my father originally bought it, it hardly became the desired object in the best area of town, it was simply what they could afford.

Since 2000 I had had little by way of dealings with lawyers. No need, and anyway they are an extravagance that I would not be able to afford, normally.

Until the business arose about chasing up the customers who had not paid me, that is. I contacted a team of lawyers in Antwerp, Belgium, about chasing up the money that I was owed by JTI Development in France and 2BTranslated in Galmaarden, Belgium (see my previous posts on the subject). Their collection service works on the "No collection, no payment" principle. It took several weeks to get moving.

The first stage they carried out efficiently. When it came to taking it to the second stage though, I would have needed €250 for both cases in the small claims court in France and Belgium to pursue the matter. Being permanently broke (as these people had not paid me what I was owed, and finding another job required getting past the stupid predominant ageism out there), this meant 3-4 wasted months to find the money.

JTI eventually beat me to the punch and went into insolvency in June this year - not before they had failed to pay several other people for the translation work undertaken! Rogues!

We have meanwhile been pursuing 2BT, who at the last count were still in business. For the first time in my life (at my age!) I was represented as a plaintiff in a court case. In Herne in Belgium (a relatively obscure place which I have never visited, but important in its own region). Not merely did I have my case presented in court (I was not present I hasten to add) - I won!

By default. 2BT failed to put in an appearance, so the next step is for the Belgian courts to send in the bailiffs and get my money. I suspect that this might be summat of a Pyrrhic victory though - I would not be surprised if they too decided to liquidate themselves out of trouble. If they do pay up, apparently I am guaranteed 85% of my money due (1,494 * 85/100 = app 1,269 Euro). Peanuts to the billionaires out there, but it will put my personal accounts back on the positive side of the balance, and the German tax authorities will get the money that they are due without problems.

So it all comes down to the people who have owed me money for 11 months finally being honest and honourable enough to pay up. Whether the court system can handle that we will have to see.

German elections 2013 - after the event

Before I go any further let me state that most German conservatives are less radical and not so extreme as their American or British counterparts. In the US think of Ford, Eisenhower etc, in the UK, think of Heath, MacMillan and the like.

So that being said, Sunday night was a good night to be a German conservative. Almost a great night. In the vote for the Chancellorship, Angela Merkel pounded her SDP opponent, Peer Steinbrück. Given that Steinbrück comes from his party's "business" wing and that he was close to the banks and the bankers, it should not have been that surprising. If you want a conservative why not pick one who claims to be one in the first place? Merkel would make at least as much sense.

Monday morning the newspapers were even talking of a triumphant night for Merkel.

Well it almost was.

Except for one rather unfortunate detail.

Back to Germany's amazing proportional representation voting system. And back to its rule (designed to keep the extremists out) that a party must win 5% of the vote to be elected to the German Parliament - the Bundestag.

Merkel's CDU, along with its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, won 41.2% of the vote. Between them they won 5 seats short of the number needed to win an absolute majority. That has not been done, I believe, since the days of Adenauer.

Last time round, this might not have been a serious issue. Their usual government partner - the notably more conservative still FDP - won 15% of the vote in 2009. The problem being since that they were not capable of persuading the CDU/CSU to agree to the tax cuts that they promised their voters, and spent most of the four years looking like a party that was totally at odds with itself. Down from 15% to 4.7% in four years. Less than 5% of the vote, say goodbye to the Bundestag.

The new conservative party, the AfD, which was pushing an agenda for getting Germany out of the Euro also got that percentage. A one-issue bucket party - do not expect them to go much further.

Along with the Pirate party (only 2.2% of the vote - their rise in the regional parliaments in the past couple of years failed to go anywhere in the national elections, which given the emptiness of their agenda should not be a surprise), they also failed to qualify for the Bundestag.

In fact only four parties did. Apart from the CDU/CSU, the SDP (Social Democrats), the German Green Party (die Grünen - whose vote also collapsed from where they were when in the regional elections even quite recently to 8.4%, when 16-17 looked possible only a few weeks ago), and die Linke (the offshoot of the former East German Communist Party with a few renegades who left the SDP as it was no longer radical enough).

To rule, the CDU/CSU will have to form an alliance with one of these three. Natural allies they are not, any of them. The thought of the CDU/CSU and die Linke forming an alliance is hysterically funny. Even if they were the two parties to gain votes at this election (the public will usw). Won't happen .... This year, next year, in the next decade, in the next century ..... 

And while those with short memories can recall the Grand Coalition of 2006-2009 (CDU/CSU and SDP), that looks for the moment unlikely as both Steinbrück and the party leader, Sigmar Gabriel (from the opposite populist wing of the party to Steinbrück) have both ruled it out. Stress though "for the moment". There is also the fact to remember that with the 2006-2009 government, the two parties finished almost neck and neck, so there was a fairly equal division of representation. That will not be the case this time as there is summat like 15% difference in the vote and the SDP would be the junior partner. Stress again "for the moment".

As for die Grünen, if they had polled their likely number of votes (in the 12-13% category), then maybe they would agree. As it is they would get very little that they wanted, and would find themselves a bit like the Liberal Democrats in the UK at the moment - forced to support a government whose philosophy they do not like and lose support among their base. Yes, of course they could refuse to agree once in a while when it mattered, which would probably force a general election where they could get hammered even worse than this time.

So ....

Here we are in limbo.

A minority government is not likely. Another election? The CDU/CSU would like the idea, and maybe the FDP might get 5% this time - so somebody is going to have give way.

Expect to hear "for the good of the country" uttered a few times in German, and a bit of humble pie being eaten, somewhere along the line. Some times one slice of bread is better than none at all, even if you would like the full loaf.

The one other alternative, some of you might have worked out, would be a coalition between the SDP, die Grünen and die Linke. Well as much as 8.6% of the voters may like the idea of die Linke in power, hardly anyone else in the country does, and there may be a few rewards for even considering the idea next time round as well - and not rewards of a positive nature.

So on with the political horse-trading. This might take some time, so don't hold your breath. The world will not fall apart in the mean time. Even when the world's powerful economies hold an indecisive election, the world continues to turn. And some of us have become cynical enough to believe that the world will not improve no matter what happens. Things could get worse? They probably will, it is only how quickly that is the question that is currently in play!

Postscript (January 2nd, 2022). I think that referring to the AfD now as a  conservative party would be polite, to say the least. Ultranationalist and everything that involves is where they lie these days, as well as being Covid (and vaccination) deniers😲, which sums them up!

German elections 2013 - the day of the event

See my previous pieces
"Well I can now actually vote - but for whom?" dated March 18th, 2011
and
"Wahl-O-Mat - or who should you vote for in the German elections?" dated September 1st, 2013
and then proceed with this.

So today it is election day here. I keep getting emails telling me to vote. I keep getting stuff in my mailbox from the various parties advising me to vote for them.

Problem being, as a foreign national I cannot vote. I can in the European Parliament elections, I can in the vote for the mayor of Frankfurt, but I cannot vote in German national elections (as I am not a German national) and I cannot vote in the Hessen state elections (held on the same day) as that has national implications (i.e. who will end up in the upper house of the German Parliament). So anyway.

I delineated in the first of the two above posts (the one dated 2011) how the German election system works approximately (at that point on a regional basis, but the national model is not that different) and whom you could vote for.

In the second of these posts I pointed out how they can get your opinions in line with what the parties are supposedly proposing (allowing for the fact that it is not always easy to reduce party positions to simple yes / no / neutral choices. As in my question: how do you get unemployment down?).

Anyway out of the 29 parties standing in the election this time round, for Wahl-O-Mat (see above), I chose 8.

Those being:
1. CDU/CSU - mainstream conservative, for American readers, think of the GOP pre-Reagan
2. FDP - Known here as the "liberals", but that is "traditional liberalism" (more "libertarian" US style, though also pro-EU, maybe surprisingly)
3. SDP - modern European Social Democrats (no nationalisation any more, and "business friendly" - see Blair's Labour Party in the UK for economic policy, almost)
4. Die Grünen (German German Party) - standard European Green party (actually probably the most important Green party in Europe) - suspicious of big business, strongly pro-small business (particularly selling environmentally-friendly products)
5. Die Linke (literally "the Left") - the former East German Communist Party (modified, they do not want the Stasi and the barbed wire fences and the gun turrets back (?)), allied with the renegades in the West who left the SDP. Red-blooded Socialism.
6. Die Piraten (the Pirates) - pro-computer privacy, anti-state involvement. Assange-ists maybe?
7. NPD (abbreviations translate to National Party of Germany) - neo-Fascist
8. Die Rentner Partei (the pensioners/senior citizens' party) -  self-explanatory.

For more detail see the first of the pieces above - the one dated March 18th, 2011.

What Wahl-O-Mat gave me:
1. Piraten 64.7%
2. Grünen 62.7%
3. Rentner 60.8%
4. NPD 59.8%
5= CDU/CSU 58.8%
5= Linke 58.8%
7. SPD 53.9%
8. FDP 40.2%

Shocked? I was. It possibly says more about Wahl-O-Mat than it says about my opinions. In fact you should replace the word "possibly" with "probably". See  fascinatingly the tie between the diametrically opposed CDU/CSU and die Linke!

About the only non-shocking element of that result is that I would have so little faith in the FDP (their policies strike me as being heavily biased in favour of the mega-rich and everybody else can go swim in the sea of proverbial sharks. No thank you).

For the rest, that the NPD would finish as high as fourth? There is no way in 2 million of the proverbial month of Sundays that I would ever support them. They are the most pronounced anti-EU anti-Euro party in Germany (a more "respectable" version of this has since turned up, but it should not be taken that seriously), they dislike most foreigners and hate the rest .... NO WAY! (see also the postscript).

As for the Pirates finishing first?

Check the individual questions on Wahl-O-Mat. Check against the results of the individual questions. You find this rider "the party has no stated position upon this issue". I did that several times with the Pirates. They do not seem to be penalised in the voting.

Go back to the famous slogan from the Clinton elections in the US - "It's the economy, stupid".

IT IS THE ECONOMY, STUPID!!!!

About the only things that the Pirates have to say on the economy is that "everyone should have a good job". Of course they should! You get that from loads of different parties. Take the PSG (a more intellectual, less gutter-snipe version of die Linke who are extraordinarily good at producing slogans about good jobs for all and an end to unemployment) - laudable, but how do you get there? Enter the words "Piraten" and the German word for economy, "Wirtschaft" on google.de. Try finding any current policy initiatives? They still seem to be stuck on the "we are still working that out" excuse from 2-3 years back. NOT WORTH 5 MINUTES OF MY TIME!

I do not want foreign spy agencies or the German government hacking my emails? Of course not, but the economy is far more important than that. Government spying on the poor? Shouldn't boosting the economy to raise the standard of living come first????

And as for the Pirates' take on unemployment. Look at some items on google.de after replacing the word "Wirtschaft" with "Arbeitslosigkeit" (unemployment). Some comments from the Pirates are positively scathing - about the unemployed, not the unemployment!

They are nothing but a one-issue protest bucket party, strong on image and weak on substance.

Unemployment is an issue. Germany has "low unemployment" we are told. Something like 5.5 %, which equals 2.5 to 3 million unemployed. The CDU/CSU-FDP coalition are proud of this.

2.5 million unemployed? That number is a disgrace. It is far, far too high, and getting it down by at least 2 million (to the numbers from the Adenauer-Erhard days) should be the number one priority!

And that ignores underemployment. Which is massive.

I saw one seditious item on Facebook (which I have again left for security reasons) indicating that the real figure for unemployment here was 7 million. Which would not surprise me. At all!

The situation really requires a return to the production-growth bias of the Adenauer-Erhard CDU/CSU (on a European scale, with EU initiatives) with the Schumacher-Brandt led SDP prodding them, not the banking-biased nonsense of the Kohl-Merkel CDU/CSU with the Steinbrück led SDP and its banking allies merely carping about method and not substance. Dynamising the economy, not letting it stagnate. And getting the European partners on board. One place they could start would be getting the Chinese to be forced to float their currency so that it rises (and rises and rises) to its true rate. If they want to benefit from the global market economy, they should play the game according to the same rules as everyone else!

And this would help stop the precipitous decline in European manufacturing and encourage us to produce more on the continent - which should create jobs!

A repeat result of the last election? Do not expect anything to improve much, even slowly. When you sweep the dust under the carpet, the dust is still there.

My two favourite politicians in Germany (Claudia Roth of die Grünen and Sigmar Gabriel of the SDP - who actually seems to be interested in how the economy impacts people, not simply how well (?) the economy is working, a sadly isolated example) will probably hardly feature in this election.

The result at the moment seems close to a dead-heat or a slight majority for more of the same. If we ended up with a Frankfurt coalition (Frankfurt City has recently had a CDU - Grünen coalition), it  might be more interesting. At least the mixture of "management" and "initiatives" sounds interesting on paper. The SDP under Schröder watched its reputation decline, at least where domestic policy is concerned, and in-fighting seems to have replaced policy initiatives. Their absence from the government would not be that frightening.

But in an indecisive election, the possibility of a grand coalition (CDU/CSU-SDP) would be possible. It didn't work too badly the last time (2006-2009 including the global crisis of 2008), and the SDP are more pro-growth than the CDU (let's face it, isn't "growth" a better idea than "austerity"????), but given the personalities involved, it doesn't bear thinking about.

Anyway more in a couple of days time when we know the outcome. I must remember to go out tomorrow and buy a hairshirt. 

Postscript.

One of the questions on Wahl-O-Mat involved getting rid of the Euro. The NPD's position was as might be expected (if essentially BS). And also sounded like a word-for-word translation of the sort of comment that Nigel Farage of the EXP/UKIP has on the subject. Interesting allies that they have in Europe .....

Postscript for the 2021 election (January 2nd, 2022). After becoming a naturalised German citizen in 2019 I actually got the chance to vote in the 2021 election. Checking Wahl-o-Mat again the results were much more accurate. Die Grünen first with 67%, some margin ahead of the rest, and the Piraten party nowhere. Come the election itself I split my vote - different parties for the constituency vote as against the party vote. On tactical grounds. And no! The AfD did not get one second's worth of consideration from me.