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Saw this pigeon down at Telehouse. It looks like CGI, but there’s no trickery. The flesh had been torn from its neck, exposing the spine. It was steering clear of the flock there, but was quite agile, and dodged my attempts both to feed it and to grab it to take it to the pigeon hospital.
Not sure if it’s the weather or it’s time to fly home, but the swifts are massing over the Olympic Park.
Philosophically, neoliberalism is superficial and incoherent - almost as if it were designed to appeal to uncritical, incurious swots. In practice it is a failure: enabling a rentier plutocracy’s march to fascism
“Principled” conservatives: you may think the “dash for fash” is a cynical ploy to attract voters disenfranchised by neoliberal technocrats, a plan to entrench a rentier-capitalist plutocracy, or merely an unintended consequence of incompetent electioneering. Whatever. Why are you enabling fascists?
Here’s the thing about technocrats: they find themselves running a death camp, so they set about improving the productivity of the gas chambers.
One of the problems of the modern political class in Britain is that being a person of action means being photographed in front of a whiteboard gesturing with a dry wipe marker.
The didgeridoo player at Stratford station always attracts pigeons, who stamp their feet in time to the rhythm. The electric guitar player seems to drive the birds off though.
Rejoice, elder peasants! Those high-paid, high-skilled, high-productivity jobs could soon be yours.
Over-50s could deliver takeaways, says work and pensions secretary
So, the right wing argument for not doing much about climate change is, “It’s not so bad. It’s not as if everyone will die.”
Banking printing money from interest rate hikes. The extractive energy sector struck a money gusher after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now the Tories are working assiduously to promote the interests of these sectors, which were shrewd enough I guess to direct some of the free money the Tories’ way.
Ethical banking
This piece on Farage’s crusade against NatWest on Richard Murphy’s Funding the Future blog is interesting.
Three comments:
- Regarding banks and banking in the modern economy, neoliberalism is ideologically, philosophically, and practically incompetent.
- In a free market, the seller as much as the buyer is free to choose, and sometimes (whisper it) the seller has the freer choice.
- Libertarians and the hard neoliberal right are tilting against KYC, which prevents them doing profitable business with Russian oligarchs at the moment.
Pigeon Tribes
Based on their colouring, local pigeons are different tribes. From Terry Spinks Place in Canning Town north to Three Mills in Bow, there are many birds with “Skeletor” patterns (white-to-speckled-white heads, feathering to dark colouring). At Canary Wharf, there are many “Cappuccino” pigeons. You see neither Skeletors nor Cappuccinos in Poplar: most are darker urban pigeons, though there are some classic rock-dove greys. There’s the odd stand-out red pigeon, and some albino birds, too - but very few.
I occasionally see a dilapidated ice cream van around Hackney that looks like a horror movie prop. Surely a spoof, it’s emblazoned with the company name “NAZ Ice”.
I’m not sure why a public transport service whose exhortations fail to get people to do self-interested things like “keep to the left” or “let the passengers off first” thinks that a few posters will be effective in combating the harassment of women on the network.
The choice in British politics is between weak, unprincipled invertebrates and weak, unprincipled invertebrates who try to make themselves look strong by kicking migrants and transgender people.
What electoral constituency is Starmer trying to appeal to?
Twenty is plenty
So, I am posting in greyscale from an eInk device.
Does “elite overproduction” explain all the mess the UK and the US are in? I don’t think so, but it sure is an important factor.