Disjecta

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men …” - From Lord Acton’s letters to Bishop Creighton, 1887. The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper which pays Boris Johson to write for it, is concerned about human rights and "activist judges". (An "activist judge" is any judge who upholdsContinue reading "Brexit Britain’s slow drift into oligarchism"

1964 - black and white students call for more integrated education in New York The above picture could not, would not, happen today. Nowadays, everyone wants apartheid. Of course, they call it "safe spaces", but it's essentially the same discredited idea, namely, that it is better to divide people on racial or sexual grounds. ThisContinue reading "The new apartheid"

In the late '70s and early '80s, in the posing stakes, Cabaret Voltaire was unimpeachable.  I may even have "casually" carried this 1983 LP home on the 'bus from school twice, for added effect, if the "right" people hadn't seen me taking it home the first time lol: The Crackdown, Cabaret Voltaire, 1983, Some BizzareContinue reading "The Cabs"

https://youtu.be/fxub3Vq_rq4?t=67

I sent this e-mail recently to Mr. Monk, Chief Executive of investment firm VSA Capital: Attn: Andrew Monk, Esq Dear Mr. Monk, Essentially, your opinion is that, unsupervised by you, staff are lazy cheats: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58662455 This is the great justification of management.  "The plebs are all dishonest scoundrels at heart, and you need to keepContinue reading "I pay lazy bastards I don’t trust"

Line of Black poplar trees (Populus nigra) at sunset, Surfontaine, Picardy, France. I subscribe to a poem-a-day e-mail. You notice 2 things: how all the old poems have heft and musicality and flow, and are animated by an urgent necessity; and how all the new poems are the after-dinner punning posturings of bourgeois cruciverbalists, addictedContinue reading "Hoppy"

Here, some poor woman had to <sue her employers> in order to be allowed to adjust her working hours slightly so that she could finish at 5pm to collect her children. The managerialist mindset is obsessed with forcing you to travel miles to switch on your laptop in a noisy and unhealthy building which they needlessly maintainContinue reading "Are you an untrustworthy idiot?"

I saw a discussion recently in a London law newsletter. Someone wanted to know why, in the British army, officers invariably were upper class / posh. Why were there not more working class officers? Some bloke unwisely ventured to suggest that that was because (in essence) "posh blokes were better at leadership". You can imagineContinue reading "Followership Skills"

"The Road to Freedom", trumpets a popular Irish newspaper's e-mail, as it reports on Ireland's phased abandonment of covid precautions: Heh. In the interests of balance, here's a road to freedom: Here's the freedom: Enjoy!