Look Through Any Window...

Which is the title of a song by the Hollies. What I'd love is if the couple at the table were talking about... oh, anything but what you know they're talking about, which is work. Notice how everyone is smiling. Clear blue skies and warm weather do that to people.

(I'm honestly running out of things to say about the human condition. Someone fast forward to November 1st. Please.)

Candy Dulfer - Strasbourg St Denis

When you get a tune in your head and it won't go away.

Candy Dulfer's early albums, should you have heard any, which I had, will not prepare you for this performance, and the rest of the concert, which is also on You Tube. This is engaged, enjoyable and thoughtful - not usually words I associate with "smooth jazz".

Brexit - The View Ahead

So far Boris has done everything right. Set out his position like he means it. Telling the EU they won’t get their money without a re-negotiated deal is spot-on. Refusing to travel to for meetings with people who say they won’t change their minds is solid stuff as well. Appearing to spend money on preparing for No Deal is just what the doctor ordered. It all makes us realise just how poor at negotiation Theresa May’s lot were.

According to the House of Parliament’s estimate’s https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/parliament-and-elections/elections-elections/brexit-votes-by-constituency/ 408 MPs represent constituencies that voted 50.1% or more Leave. 363 voted 52% Leave, and 292 voted 55% Leave. That’s 292 MPs who should be voting to Leave There are 650 seats in the House. 163 MPs represent constituencies where Leave got 45% or less: they have a solid rationale for voting to repeal A50. That leaves 195 swing constituencies, where the statistics and estimates may blur the result.

I said voting to repeal A50. Not to create endless uncertainty and delay. Nobody voted for that. There was a point to frustrating the process in April when May brought her unacceptable agreement to the House. It was all they could do, and they should have done it. In typical British fashion, the House did the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

Most of the comments and calculations, and my first draft of this, were based on the assumption that the House was a bunch of weasels who want another Government to run the Government. That’s true of some of them: Corbyn and his thugs, Hammond and some others who don’t know their time has passed. Take their names, and treat them as exceptions.

Let’s assume that the House (of Commons) understands that, however much its individual members may want to Remain, almost all of them understand that they have been given their instructions and will not, therefore, be voting to repeal A50. Party policy or not.

The House can and should obstruct a really, really awful deal. It may feel it should obstruct an un-prepared No-Deal exit, though quite how much more time anyone in business needs since June 2016 is not clear. The EU will not throw the UK out. It needs the money and it doesn’t need the optics of “throwing out the UK”. So every time the House asks for an extension, the EU will oblige.

What the House needs to believe, however grudgingly and reluctantly, are two things: first, that the UK is prepared for a No-Deal exit, however imperfectly; and second, that the voters, and more importantly the companies that fund the political parties, are not willing to take another delay with yet more uncertainty.

Many of the MPs are much closer to both those conclusions than you might think. That’s because the media have not been reporting the preparations being made and the money being spent on a No-Deal UK. If they had, Project Fear would seem farcical. The MP’s however, see what is happening in their constituencies, and don’t believe the Guardian, Mark Carney or the Motor Industry any more than you and I do. No-Deal is going to be a speed-bump, not a car wreck, and a lot of MPs know this.

So what difference does Boris make? While Theresa May had Olly “Wormtongue” Robbins whispering in her ear, the House had very good reasons to suppose that any preparations would be insufficient, and that the deal would be awful. Boris can assure them that progress is being made, and come Halloween, the UK will be prepared enough. He can also remind them that the EU are not going to change a single word of the agreement, that the Backstop (My Precious!) will not be removed, at least by Junker’s administration, and that there is no point in buying more time, because nothing will change in the EU position at the end of it.

There’s something else. The House would have had no confidence in May’s ability to lead when and if anything awkward happened. She had the wrong advisors for that: Wormtongue would have told her that it was the consequence of leaving the EU and she should look to make peace with Mordor. The House did not, and rightly, want to step into the unknown with a weak leader who did not believe in her cause.

The House can believe that Boris will step up, and that his advisors are at least on his side.

An election would be a distraction for Boris’ preparations. The timing is awful, since Remainers need Parliament to be sitting in the weeks before Halloween, and Parliament doesn’t reconvene until the 3rd of September. It’s also irrelevant: this isn’t about a party political majority. It’s about a Leave-majority. Boris can’t count on his own party, just as Corbyn can’t count on his party.

Nobody has to vote to Leave. That was done in June 2016. They have to vote to obstruct Leave. To Leave, they just have to not come up with the tricks they used to prevent May’s agreement going through.

I started this by assuming the House was actually full of people who were, under a think layer of gunk, basically decent. I’m going to end it by reminding you that the mainstream media is presently staffed, managed and owned almost entirely by people who would not know the truth if it bit them in the ass and gave them an infectious disease.

Expect bought-and-paid-for Project Fear to rise to hysterical levels in October. It didn’t work in 2016, and it won’t work now. Not even the journalists believe it. However, the journalists’ masters don’t need you to believe it. They need just enough of 650 Very Special People to believe it.

Expect has-been ex-ministers and attention-seeking backbenchers to introduce ridiculous bills to frustrate the Halloween deadline. Expect most of those to be voted down by narrow margins. Expect screaming headlines and bought-and-paid-for marches in the last week of October. When Halloween comes and goes and the House fails to delay, because it has realised the EU cannot let go of its Precious, expect howls of anguish on the front pages of the mainstream media November 1st or some near date. For months afterwards, expect celebrity Remainers to threaten legal action. Expect every traffic jam near a port to be reported as a blow to UK trade. Expect every nasty, dirty trick in the book.

The difference between the MPs and the journalists is that MPs have to listen to the people, or they won’t be re-elected. Journalists have to listen to whoever pays their salary, and it’s been a long time since the revenue from the cover price and the local cinema and estate agents did that. Journalists are paid by billionaires and NGO / EU grants, and play the tunes those pipers want.

Which is slightly off-topic. I could be wrong about the MPs. Angela Merkel might tell Brussels to drop its Precious into Mount Doom and let the UK go, so Volkswagen can sell us some cars. The New Lot might view Brexit as a distraction, and want to be shot of Farage and an EU country which will apply for, and get, an exception to its Armed Forces being in the EU Army. With the UK in, Project Mo’ Yurup will always falter. The House might decide to commit collective suicide and repeal A50.

One thing I do know. I know this: If Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants a quick billion for his personal pension scheme, he just needs to threaten to open Turkey's Western borders in first week of October, and flood Europe with millions of vibrant and diverse lawyers and doctors.

‘Cause that’s what tipped the balance back in June 2016.

Movie Wokeness Is Marketing to a Non-White Male Audience

Computing Forever has a comprehensive review of the various movie franchises that have been infected by woke-ness, diversity, feminism, misandry and other things off-putting to Men Who Want To Watch Movies.


His take is that these changes is deliberate political-inspired posturing by the Hollywood studios, which have become infested by manginas, allies, and LBGQTI supporters. I mean, other than the Warshowski’s.

(These guys made The Matrix)

I’m not so sure. There’s a veneer of Woke-speak in the marketing, and remember that actor/ess interviews are part of the marketing. The veneer isn’t the wood. The wood is surely at least two things: first, Hollywood blockbusters are primarily made for the Chinese and Indian markets, rather than the domestic US market; second, White Men Who Want To Watch Movies are now only twenty-five per cent of the population of the USA, and the prime age range, which I understand to be 18-30, has been, I suspect, deserting the movies in favour of computer games, and box sets or streaming, for quite the time now. Hollywood used to make movies for White Men, because there were enough of them to make a decent audience. Now there aren’t.

So Hollywood makes movies for White Women, diversities in the USA, and the Chinese and Indian markets. (The James Bond franchise had been taking into account the quirks of local markets since forever.) No more evil slanty-eyed Chinese or dumb Black criminals, unless they are cool super-villans. (That explains why nobody complains about the portrayal of Mexican and South American gangsters: psychopathy is super-cool.) No more Uma Thurman. Women have to be “real” and sassy, or strong, or hot messes. These groups are now the primary market.

Who gets to be the Bad Guy, the Dope and the Loser? The one group who isn’t paying dues to Hollywood. The White Man. He has to be the dupe, the dope, the clown and the clueless. Ain’t nobody else left.

Hollywood has learned a lot from Chinese movies, though it has yet to incorporate a love story and a dance scene into a Fast And Furious to keep the Indian audience happy. What it doesn’t know how to get right is Having A Hero / Major Character Who Isn’t A White Man (or Denzel Washington or a Lead Girl In A Sci-Fi series). I don’t either: it’s a tricky balance of ignoring the gender and colour of the Lead, but somehow building in both to the character and plot, without it interfering with the way the character functions. At the moment, NWM Leads have to flaunt their NWM-ness at the audience and lord it over the WM supporting cast, because Hollywood thinks that’s what the White Women + Diversities want to see. And maybe Hollywood is right. I don’t know: I haven’t seen the research.

Meantime, the Fast and Furious franchise is stuffed to the gills with WM leads. After the cars, WM leads are the whole point of F&F. But then F&F really is made for the Chinese, who don’t go for any of this woke stuff. And look at (some of) the box set series. The ones I have, from Sons of Anarchy, through House, to Elementary and The Shield, have strong, white, male characters who take no shit from anyone. Not All Box Sets Are Like That (Game of Thrones!), but some are, because if the producers get it right, the WM audience will buy in bulk.

The old-school feminists understood that the masculine world is a shifting, elusive and fluid thing. They knew that whenever they managed to get into some male bastion, the men had somehow gone to another bastion somewhere else. What they didn’t know was that the only reason they got access to the old bastion was that the men were already leaving. I can’t help feeling that’s what’s happened to a lot of pop culture: WMs have mostly abandoned it, because there are new and more interesting things to do. As a result, it has been turned into an audience-delivery mechanism for advertisers. The WM stragglers are complaining, but the stragglers always will.

99F in the City

I went into work today. Because aircon. The trains and the office have it, and my house doesn't. I managed to get lunch by walking slowly in shadows. Any time in the sunshine was just painful. When I got home, I spent four hours waiting for the temperature to drop enough so I could even think about sleeping.

Hottest Day of the Year. I was there!

Louis Rossmann on Giving Up

Two things: if you’re a nerd then you will really appreciate Louis Rossmann, who seems to be the King of Macbook board repair, and a general all-round self-aware person with a direct style I like. His board repair videos are guaranteed to calm the most troubled soul.

This is him talking about people who can’t solve problems, and how much freaking effort it is to solve problems in real life.


I cannot endorse these sentiments enough. Solving technical problems is difficult, experimental, full of hours of wrong directions followed by a moment of “oh, yes, I do it this way” realisation that solves the problem in five minutes. I let my emotions get involved, in the sense that I give voice to my frustration and puzzlement, and occasionally express the opinion that if I was someone really actually clever, like for instance Terence Tao, I would have solved this as soon as I looked at it. Two things to notice here: first, my idea of clever is Terence Tao, not the guy at the next desk; and second, a long time ago, I realised that the really smart people would never work at the companies I work for, and the people at those companies have no idea who Terence Tao is, let alone any way of appreciating how clever he is, so actually, in their world, I’m as smart as they will see.

I also have one actual virtue. I will not give up if it is a problem I believe to be within my competence and the scope of my tools. So I don’t bother trying to fix my work laptop when it does strange stuff because I don’t have administrator rights on it. I’m not going to tackle a problem that needs a proper programming language to fix, because the part of the business I’m in doesn’t have access to properly installed programming languages. If it’s an SQL problem, I am going to solve it. I just keep going at it: try this, try that, even read the manual.

Many of my colleagues don’t do that. They try once, see an error message and give up, or don’t get the results they thought they should get, and give up. For the longest while I have put that down to a) a lack of moral fibre, b) laziness and freeloading, since they always ask me if I can do it for them, c) tactical incompetence, where you suddenly can’t do something for someone who you suspect is off-loading the task to you because they too lack moral fibre.

Louis’ suggestion is that many of my colleagues are suffering from having a very low bar for feeling like a failure. Having various attempts fail is one thing, but feeling that you have failed, and are therefore a failure, or will feel like one if you carry on producing failing attempts, is another thing altogether. He has a high bar for feeling like a failure. So do I. Many people have a very, very low bar. A couple of tries and they are done.

It may be some kind of psychological factory setting, or it may be actual lack of moral fibre, either way when someone does the “I can’t do it, can you do it for me because deadlines”, while I continue to respect them as a human being and fellow traveller through this joyous pageant of Life, I can’t entirely take them seriously again. They aren’t One of Us, the Honourable Guild of Problem Solvers.

I feel pretty sure that Louis would think I was being unkind. And he may be right.

Un-burning - Part One

Burn-out is usually defined as a Capitalist malady: it’s the inability to be happily productive, because you can’t handle the stress of your under-resourced job in your dysfunctional workplace. Since The Organisation is not going to change, you must.

Yeah, well, screw that. The Mayo Clinic suggests:

Discuss specific concerns with your supervisor. Maybe you can work together to change expectations or reach compromises or solutions. Try to set goals for what must get done and what can wait.

Seek support. Whether you reach out to co-workers, friends or loved ones, support and collaboration might help you cope. If you have access to an employee assistance program, take advantage of relevant services.

Try a relaxing activity. Explore programs that can help with stress such as yoga, meditation or tai chi.

Get some exercise. Regular physical activity can help you to better deal with stress. It can also take your mind off work.

Get some sleep. Sleep restores well-being and helps protect your health.

Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the act of focusing on your breath flow and being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling at every moment, without interpretation or judgment. In a job setting, this practice involves facing situations with openness and patience, and without judgment.

If you could do the first two of those, the chances are you would not be feeling burned out. One reason burnout happens is exactly because we can’t trust or find support from our “colleagues”.

Yoga, meditation and tai chi are not support mechanisms for improved post-modern Capitalist productivity. Anyone doing any of those seriously would become more aware of, and less inclined to accept, the BS that is making them feel burned-out.

Exercise. Sure. I do that already. One’s motivation to hit the gym tends to slacken when one is feeling stressed.

Sleep. I do that just fine. Telling someone who is stressed-out to sleep more is like telling someone who is living near a main road to enjoy silence.

And anyone who suggests or sells “mindfulness” is not your friend. “Mindful” in English means “Watch what you are saying and doing, you are not among friends”. Seriously. That’s what it means. “Mindfulness” is sold as a "spiritual practice”, but it is in fact a warning to self-censor your reactions and feelings - which is what "facing situations with openness and patience, and without judgment” means.

So that was useful.

What does a practical man of action do?

We admitted we were burned out, that our lives had become unmanageable. (Where have I heard that before?)

I had two thirty-minute Thai massages a week for a couple of weeks. The ones where she holds on to the bar on the ceiling to balance and walks on me.

I got back into the gym: Saturday and Sunday mornings, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. At this stage, simply showing up and hefting any amount of iron will do.

I have one Americano in the morning, with breakfast, and espresso after that. No tea, unless it’s the afternoon and I’m at home. Something about hot water and milk wasn’t helping.

I’m parking the car at the station in the morning. At twenty-five past six there are spaces. Pay by the Ringo App. It’s half the price of parking at Richmond. I feel so much more relaxed at both ends of the day. I kinda knew I resented that walk from the station to where I’ve been parking the car, but I didn’t know how much I resented it.

Yep. It’s pollen time again. Back comes the Beconase. When my eyes start itching, I take a couple of snorts.

I’m easing back my negative self-talk. No more “what’s wrong with me / I’m too old for this / I can’t keep this pace up” and the like. This is the first thing that Mike Cernovich talks about in Gorilla Mindset. I thought I had that one down when I read it.

“Be nice to yourself” I say every now and then.

Since the Doddle at Liverpool Street closed, I haven’t had anywhere convenient to get Amazon deliveries. Then I noticed my local Homebase has an Amazon locker. I experimented with a delivery: the locker broke down for a day, but Amazon sent me a mail when it started working, and I collected the book I’d ordered. I will be using that again. A lack of Amazon delivery turned out to be a little thing that itched.

At work, I recognised that SQL-cutting is monotonous and requires focus. So I’m slowing down a little. I’m taking the pressure off me to cut fast and cut once, because that always works well. I should have learned by now, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.

I move around the office a bit, so I’m not sitting at the same place all day.

I make sure I do something for me during working hours. I’m not the only one at work who gets to the end of the day and realises they haven’t done X, where X is “collect the dry cleaning” or “make a reservation” or “collect the prescription”.