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IOLO

religiousbollocks

Allowing indulgence to delusioned individuals who believe in utter bollocks is one of the major drivers in modern life on planet earth.

From US evengalists, to Brazilian Catholics to Hindus or the BJP and all those mad mullah inspired mass murderers, there is so much bad that is done in the service of utter dogma.

Religion isn’t a crutch, it’s an excuse, used to enslave and control.

It destroys opponents and pretends to have benevolence, yet is mostly based on the ideas of primitive middle eastern gurus and paedophiles.

Christianity is nothing to do with the super white churches of the mid west.

Mormonism is so funny it makes me laugh – perhaps a little bit less than Scientology or Christian Science.

The shia hate the sunni more than they hate the jews or christians, apparently.

Apparently there’s one god. And all these people ‘follow’ him, but is it the same god, and why do they therefore hate each other so much ?

It’s all utter bollocks.

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IOLO

peopleofprivilege

People of privilege believe that they are special and chosen. They follow various idols – a religion or money or their own self image.

People of privilege see others as beneath them: they are immigrants, or foreigners or socialists or scum. They are, worst of all, different.

They see themselves in the castle on the hill, not the poor ghetto they exist in. They see themselves as gods, not humans. They see themselves as protectors of the past, not the inventors of the future.

Because tomorrow they will leave their trailers or two up two down and become as rich as Donald Trump or Putin or those other guys that people of privilege vote for, just as the turkeys welcome Christmas.

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IOLO

wristtied

A watch is an interesting edifice. It’s basically a handcuff to time.

But people collect them and invest in them and you can buy one for a couple of quid or for millions.

Time has a fascinating history, and the ability to enchain it in a device was a true indicator of mechanical and industrial progress.

Its relationship to navigation was even more profound.

However, I have never worn a watch – well not since I lost the very expensive Omega that my parents bought me for my eighteenth birthday. I think it lasted two years before being left in a campsite washroom.

Recently I took to wearing the Apple Watch 4 that I bought and inherited from my mum as she became frail and kept on falling at home.

I have a bad heart and it is genuinely good at helping me monitor this. But it has loads of useless functions too. Almost nothing works unless you have an iPhone within ten feet.

There’s no wrist iConferencing, you can’t even play spotify without a phone. It’s a £800 conceit, which is still more functional and far more sensible than a £10k Patek Pilippe.

The point is that we are all handcuffed to capitalism, to stupid conceits.

You need to spend £2.5m on a petrol car that will get you from 0-60 in around 2 seconds. An EV will dot his for £150k. But who, and why would you, want to go from 0-60 in 2 secs in the real world ?

Utility and value have long been disconnected, and this is where the theses of our great capitalist writers fall down.

The rich gather more, pointlessly, and the poor suffer more, tragically.

As we all watch the time tick on…

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IOLO

notnice

It seems that we have become an uncivil society.

All that online anger and vitriol is spilling over into the real world and we are abusing each other like never before.

Let’s face it, we are animals, and animals are creatures who live according to primordial instincts. We win by, at the very least, belittling others. In reality we win by killing them.

Facebook is no different to Rome or a Stone Age Cave.

The only objective is to win, to come out ahead. Or, as we call it these days, to be an Influencer.

There was a period at the end of the last century and the beginning of the current one where I had some hope for the age I lived in, but we have since had Trump and Johnson and Putin and Erdogan.

We still have the ridiculous edifice of religion and all its dogma.

How can you have Truth when you have Faith, ie a belief in the supernatural ?

Trump could espouse anything that entered his weak mind because his constituency already believed in utter bollocks, and then betrayed that rubbish by following him (how many of the Ten Commandments has this man broken ?).

We now make up reality and beliefs on the fly.

So, when truth, reality and facts are relative concepts, what is the point of education ?

As China is now proving, there is nothing but control. The ‘communist’ nation that is totally built on capitalism.

Politics is a mode of control, as is religion.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that people are no longer nice to each other, when you need to prove that you have eaten your neighbour online to get kudos online.

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IOLO

legopolution

There surely cannot be a single company that has got away with its anti-social practices more than the Danish company, Lego.

Modern times and global warming, as well as many other things, have caught up with diesel cars and oil companies, with earbuds and straws and plastic bottles.

Yet, all those people who diligently separate their recycling and worry about the environment give their little innoe=cent children these awful plastic edifices.

There is little doubt that an archaeologist digging up our era a thousand years or more from now will use their robots to vaccum dust earth off tiny and large bits of never destructible plastic, shaking their heads at our use of a material that destroyed us, chuckling to themselves about our sheer primitiveness.

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IOLO

hidingaway

No posts for a longtime. There’s a reason – despondancy.

I guess if you lived through the two world wars of the past century you would have little sympathy for us cowering citizens with face masks, trying to engage in a socialised world again.

This weekend, one of the biggest festivals on earth is taking place as normal. 110,000 mainly young, unvaccinated people will descend on our town and revel.

This seems pretty crazy. I will not be leaving the house. But it seems that the UK has decided on herd immunity without telling anyone this is the policy (indeed, the Government denies it).

But is it wasn’t for the pandemic, I reckon I would be hiding away anyway.

Burnt by many business betrayals and failures. The wind knocked out of me by my own stupidities.

Despondent about modern life.

Really, unwilling to try again.

I may only live once, but I’ve had enough of it.

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IOLO

selectivedemocracy

So, if we recognize it or not, we are in the middle of the second American Revolution.

These things are no longer fought with pickaxes and guns. They are fought with ideas, rules and regulations.

It is very clear that the Republican Party had recognized that the only way it will win majorities is to gerrymander, or even more insidiously, to rework democracy.

You see, democracy is very convenient when it works for you, but is a bloody nuisance when it doesn’t. And democracy will no longer get GOP anywhere.

So, they need a new model. Perhaps we can kindly call it ‘selective democracy’, whereby you select those ‘worthy’ of participating.

Of course, they will generally be middle aged white men and anyone who agrees with them.

So, the process involves trying to shore up majorities that became minorities, to change rules, boundaries, lines and logic. Usually shamelessly.

It is unfortunate that Americans no longer believe in their republic, their constitution or even what is outright fair. They just care about winning. Indeed, it’s worse than that, they just care about beating other people, at whatever cost.

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IOLO

valleyfascists

They pretend to be ‘liberal’ and ‘tolerant’. They espouse to free speech and equality. But what they really care about is their free vanillacappuccion with soy milk and their own excessive wealth, so they can determine the next world order.

My wife works for one of the biggest Silicon Valley companies and the tales of entitlement are breathtaking. In a startup you worry about making payroll for your ten staff which amounts to the salary of an average Big Internet employee. Still they moan and complain about how badly paid and how badly treated they are. Really.

These are the people who pretend to hate Trump and be Democrat, Labour or Liberal but are really the new slave gangmasters and factory managers who work mining huge wealth from ordinary people for their super rich bosses. But they are Trump, hundreds of thousands of little greedy people who will walk over bodies to their entitlements.

The dark, satanic mills of the internet are here and they are real. There is no Jerusalem, only Silicon Valley (or Texas or wherever comes next).

They are, of course, very comfortable, so they think they are doing well. The model suits them so they only push back about their already cushy positions. They do not offer half of their inflated salaries to house the homeless, the just moan, endlessly. Poor workers don’t complain because they would lose their jobs.

I do love the way that people are able to invent their own narratives, it reminds me of the pitch scene in the comedy ‘Silicon Valley’ where every startup ends their pitch with ‘..and we will make the world a better place’.

128 characters, spouting your every action, sharing your badly considered and badly educated thoughts do not make the world a better place, yet these are the winning pitches.

Silicon Valley was built on a cold war arms race and then descended into trivia that now dominates every aspect of our lives.

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IOLO

shortsoldhell

To know the meaning of the title of this piece, you have to have been the CEO of a public company, which I once was (on the junior NASDAQ market).

Short selling is when you can ‘borrow’ public company stocks for next to nothing and make huge margins if that company fails.

In other words, it’s like paying 1p at 100/1 that a horse will come in last, when the same horse requires a £1 stake at 2/1 on winning.

At one point shorts controlled more shares in my company than actually existed. How was this possible ? Because of all the vested interests involved, and because share trading makes a weekend in Vegas look like a logical proposition.

Many professional financiers will argue that shorting provides a form of ‘natural selection’ whereby weak companies get their comeuppance, but believe me this is not the case.

In markets, news is meant to be closely controlled and announced. However, my experience is that any good news saw a drop in your share price, since investors presumed that everyone already knew about this, so it was already factored into the share price.

The reality is, for the vast majority of public companies, they have to run parallel universes. One being the business they run and the other being market perceptions.

Now, all of a sudden this ludicrous situation has been broken.

You can buy a watch for £10, but still some people will buy a watch for £10,000. They both tell the time. The important factor in a market is supply and demand, and all of a sudden those who have made so much money for so long mis-manipulating this in public share markets are getting their comeuppance.

And how they are squealing! From the stupid regulators to the loss making shorters, they have been taken to task by forces which are illogical to them.

People are buying shares in GameStop and AMC as if they were cigarette cards. You can’t short the sale of a cigarette card. These are ‘fan investors’, including some spilling over from the ludicrous world of pseudo currencies, where such behaviour has long gone on (when the value of nothing is $250m, why not ?!).

Bitcoin is a currency whose only underlying value is vast environmental damage (you earn Bitcoin by using massive computing power, burning energy in the process).

Adam Smith must be turning in his grave, but the reality is that sentiment is the fuel of markets and social media is a flue.

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IOLO

pandemicfuckwitage

We live on an island. New Zealanders live on an island. We’re both roughly the same distance from Wuhan. So how come the Uk has the highest per capita death toll on earth and New Zealand has practically the lowest ?

The answer is Boris Johnson. As far as I can tell his answer to this pandemic has been:

blahblah handshakes fine blahblah wash hands blahblah maybe keep distance blahblah need PPE blahblah argh lockdown blahblah facemasks, why ? blahblah summer fun! spread out for cheap! blahblah I don’t feel well.. blahblah oops blahblah second lockdown blahblah oh fuck! blahblah third lockdown blahblah

Last March we should have stopped all international flights and got everyone to wear facemasks, like China and Japan and South Korea did.

But we’re run by chumps with Oxford degrees (can they be rescinded for anti-Darwinian stupidity ?). So 100,000 are dead blahblahblah..