we've been heading down since the seventies... the cost of transport and the corresponding widespread inflation has only been offset by the access that fuel affords to the desperate enough to work for a dollar a day.

billions of extra dollars to the oil giants, billions of new workers far too poor to quibble about environmental destruction of their homes and habitats, and the extortion of their efforts by capitalism of the most ruthless and predatory kind, dragging round a tattered mask of democracy as raison d'etre.

the quest for happiness as prime mover has to learn to give way to considering others' fate as important to one's own future serenity as one's own, because there is no more 'own' to speak of, we are all daily more deeply linked by the knowledge of what's happening globally, and how the connections flow. for good, we realise that the class struggle is global, and for bad, we realise that the rise of the middle classes in brazil, china, singapore, malaysia is at the cost of middle classes in the 'first world'.

the system allows for only so many on that bus, it appears!

we need a system that balances itself with a middle class that is not zero-sum, and to expect the world elite class's captured politicians to give the voters'needs higher priority than their mates-in-class, well that's like wanting water to flow uphill, innit?

you need a ram pump, and a lot of head to do that.

the head may be the downward dive of social disaffection, the ram pump the energy emerging when enough people have nothing more to lose, and express their fury. then we may see change, until then, it's spray the lime of lies over the reality and hope people have too much on their minds to notice how foul the air's becoming.

olfactory fatigue, like after 15 minutes in a fish shop, it gets tuned out.

the paradox is that middle class kids are educated, and this leads to an understanding of history less burdened by the ignorant chauvinism of the past.

the young feel much more globally connected, it will be they who will unite the world in a juster system after we fade away. the petty squabbles we undergo today will be history, i don't think the present hologram is going to hold together much longer.

interesting diary, vbo, thanks!


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty