politics – Philip Letts

Social Media Under Fire

29th May 202029th May 2020 by lettsgroup

Trump’s fired the starting gun. Removed the pin. Knifed the back. Like a long love affair kicked into the summer sun Donnie’s decided that @Jack (Dorsey…… is there any other kind of Jack?) is to become a droplet off his duck-like ass. The last feather attached to his media composting hat (… interesting visual).

Jack’s the latest in a string of jilted lovers. Used, scoffed at, trampled and spat out. Look at how it worked out for poor ol’ Kim Yong Ding Dong who is apparently still alive (er, right………). Just don’t tell his stunt doubles.

It could be that Donnie wants to take the whole of Silicon Valley down with Jack just to get California to secede so he can permanently eradicate those smokin’ totin’ lefty delegates from November’s election count. Hey, where Bozzer goes Donnie can follow. Check Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

And if you’re still following me (not in the twitter kind of a way) then you’ll get that the Jack in this tale means TOTAL social media take down. Perhaps not like China where any media caution was jettisoned forever ago to the prevailing tornado of a wind. And not in the consumer way of god I’m so bored of Facebook and twitter and Linkedin gibberish and how in spams name am I supposed to possess a friggin elephant-like memory for every password I conjured up just to watch a stream of drivel from my so called friends who I pray I’ll never actually bump into but naively accumulated forever ago when it was the trendy thing to do and apparently even hotter than going to a Cold Play gig. And go figure how you delete/block/muzzle/censor them!

So Donnie’s gonna give Silicon Valley a dose of the neo-liberal cold freeze cos hey, if a Pangolin can nuke the planet, he should at the very least get a pass for downing a few techies on the West Coast. And what better way than getting them square (is that another Jack tech thing?) where it counts, right between their nuts packed with share certificates, which is Wall Street for we will sue your rear ends for publishing content we don’t like, er I mean is offensive or blatantly false or just plain anti-Donnie.

But, thinking this one through, not that Donnie hasn’t already, if some weird dude posts pics of pangolins getting mass murdered in Vietnam can we ALL sue Zuckerpunch or just Donnie? And if the social media companies become responsible for the content on their platform like publishers then presumably they’ll have to pay us citizens for our/their content which kinda screws local media who was about to get paid out by them but sounds kinda ka-ching for the rest of us.

Maybe Donnie’s onto something. Perhaps the social media company take down is actually his entire beat Joe election strategy. You see, if he gets all the social media companies to pay us for sharing the endless crap we publish on their platforms, er publishing outfits then bingo – the whole unemployment things gone. No more bailouts. No more government funded benefits. The neo-con way to fund UBI.

And who needs the hassle of joining the virtual dole queue if you could get paid for shaking your bootie on tiktok or sharin’ it ALL out pretty loud anywhere else controlled by Zucker/Jack/every-friggin-vc-in-America. Wanna dance the cookaracha that’ll get you $5, wanna like Kim’s latest lip gloss that’ll pay $1, wanna share McDonald’s promo’s that’ll earn you 1c. (MickeyD haven’t gotten to where they’ve gotten without being cheaper than Jock which btw is Scottish for Jack.)

Or, jettison your social media accounts, drown out Donnie and pray that netflix isn’t next on the list.

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A Miracle Cure for the Climate Change Crisis

4th May 20204th May 2020 by lettsgroup

This weekend I had one of those sleepless, tossing and turning kinda nights. You know, the one where your mind spins like a Corona press conference while your body sweat shop’s like an Amazon warehouse. Then, suddenly, as if by magic I awoke to a place of peace and calm and magical light bulbs. That place where your deepest insights surface and everything suddenly seems to make karmic sense. Where colours are brighter, sounds are intensified and smells are, well, orgasmic right to the point where you sadly came to realise that you’re not tripping with the Kardashians but instead lying on an old pair of socks. I wasn’t in heaven or hell or even Nigella Lawson’s kitchen, I was being struck by that proverbial light bulb moment.

You see, it had suddenly hit me that the most prophetic crisis of our life time, the one that makes Corona look like a nat on a flea on a Mexican bottled beer, had found its miracle cure. The climate change crisis had discovered it’s Viagra, it’s hydroxychloroquine, it’s Trumpian antidote without needing to figure out how to turn his ceaseless twitter thing off. Cos the climate crisis has discovered its very own cure and its called Covid-19. Yes, Coronavirus, may be a pain up the human butt, but it could also prove to be the ultimate cure for our planet. Nature’s way of rebalancing itself. You know, just like Dave boy Attenborough or Tonto or my meditation instructor told me so.

And can you blame nature? Well, 3 odd million people probably can echoed by a horrifying amount of deceased, but perhaps it’s nature’s ultimate wake up call screaming out ‘Christ alive if we have to wait for the UN to come up with a coherent plan to solve global warming you won’t need Nigella’s dream convection heated cook top to boil the water, you’ll just dunk the pasta in the sea. And forget farting to get the hot tub going, our global warming will have it to the point where losing the mother in law takes on a whole new in-tub dimension’.

You see, the planet couldn’t wait any longer for us mortals to come up with a plan to save it or for Bozzer to host a conference in Glasgow so it invented its very own miracle cure. And, to be honest, you couldn’t have figured out a more perfect way to solve this climate thingy than Covid. It’s like it was purpose built for it. You know, better designed than an iPhone. More purpose built than a Bovis home. Or better fitting than Pamela Anderson’s bikini.

You see, experts have told us that the four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet (sorry MickeyD), avoid air travel (sorry I’m-really-Rich-Branson), live car-free (sorry everyone), and have fewer children (sorry MickeyD again). Coronavirus miraculously tackles all four simultaneously. The plant based diet thingy mostly because we’ll all be so broke that we’ll only be able to afford to eat the grass off our lawn. The having kids thing cos no one wants to have sex in lockdown and after that who in the world would want to have sex ever again just to risk having kids around for the next lockdown – sorry to say it again but have you met my teenagers? And for the answer to the air travel and being car-free part go back to the plant-based diet bit. BTW it really will mean car-free (not care-free) – i.e. bye bye Formula 1 or go karting dependent on how old you are. Unless, of course, your Lewis Hamilton in which case your gonna be depressed as shit either way cos your little enough to do both.

But Corona, the miracle cure for the climate crisis, doesn’t just stop there. Oh no, its got us all so shit scared of bat’s and pangolins and any other friggin wild virus carrying creature and we’re so super friggin terrified of forests that we’ll never go anywhere near one again which deals with the whole habitat destruction thingy. And as if that wasn’t enough, it looks like all the predators on the planet are gonna rise up and eat us as thanks to Corona they’ll have figured out that they’ve got us on the run and that we’re not quite as smarty pants and dominating as we conned them into thinking we were. And, as if we needed another nail in our human coffin, they’ll hone in on the fact that we must be an even lower form of sub species given the morons we’ve chosen as leaders to get us through this Corona crisis. So they’ll hoover up enough of us to permanently deal with the over-population and car and travel things and pretty much any other human created climate hell in a basket invention we came up with over the last 100 years. At least those of us that survive might get to keep this planet.

I think when I die, which by the look of things could be pretty soon, I’ll return as a bat.

Hope in the Time of Coronavirus

27th Apr 202027th Apr 2020 by lettsgroup

Hope in the time of Coronavirus has been in short supply. Lockdown loonies combined with the incessant, daily pandemic curve-watching mixed up with our precondition of job loss terror has unleashed a perfect storm for our fragile souls. And this mega storm has created a national wellbeing crisis. One that needs a different kind of leadership – a leadership of hope.

You see, when we’re all feeling a little depressed we need small, incremental green shoots, particularly as we’re heading towards the second half of lockdown loonies. Cos with the benefit of hindsight it seems that around four weeks is our limit before lockdownitis truly sets in. The walls start closing in, the routine starts to feel a little, well, routine-like and we start reliving weird apocalyptic zombie movies in our nightly dreams that are just starting to feel a little too, like, possible. Enough I hear you shout! Time to snap out of it! Time to start thinking differently, to pick ourselves up, to shake off those lockdown blues. Time to stop staring at endless news conferences in the hope that, well, there might just be the vaguest amount of hope. Time to think about a new tomorrow, a better tomorrow and most important of all time to get back to McDonald’s.

You see, we can put up with the endless negative news cycles and the stay at home teens firing up testosterone like it was a chain saw in our left ear. We can handle Donnie and Bozzer banging on and off – mostly off. One being Mr time off and the other just off the rocker. We can take the military style operation of a weekly shop or drive to pick up gas or goddamned exercise in dodging everyone else to perform the perfect social distancing dance in a napkin sized so called community park with not a lot of the community bit left given the gestapo gangs of do gooders taking pics of us getting one inch too close to other earthly beings while dodging rabied dogs snarling at our proverbial heels. We can even take the new roadblock vigilantes straight out of the cast of Hot Fuzz that keep us from going too far to take a walk or jog or simply to go have sex in a forest. Doesn’t everyone do that? And talking about Hot Fuzz, have you met our local villagers? But while we can take all of this, we cannot, cannot, cannot take another friggin second without our Big Mac and fries.

Where’s the leadership of hope from Mickey D? They just keep telling us not yet. Not yet. What the f*** is not yet! Endlessly bombarding us with this horrifically over used Corona statement ‘not yet’ doesn’t solve a goddamned thing. Just cos every politician uses it doesn’t make it right. And they only us ‘not yet’ cos it’s French for I don’t know what the fuck’s going on in my government cos it’s such a friggin crap shoot of chaos right now that ‘not yet’ is as good a statement as your gonna get from me and in any case who thought getting elected meant we had to make decisions in the first place. And btw ‘not yet’ is only as overused as every goddamned Coronavirus statement from EVERY single venue or hotel or attraction or National Trust joint starting with ‘It is with a heavy heart that we have to close for now…’ What the f***, did they all just cut and paste the same friggin statement. They pay the bosses of these joints like cash went out of fashion (which it will soon but that’s another matter) and the closest they can get to writing a goddamned customer statement on the front of their website is a cut and f*** you paste.

But, getting back to the immediate Mickey D issue, how friggin long does it take to do socially distanced drive through or take out or just goddamned click and collect. You see I’m willing to let any politician we can still remember the name of, given Donnie and Bozzer hog EVERY airwave like a Corona virus on a pollution particle, take every last shred of rights from me but I’m not prepared to go another day without my McDonald’s. I mean there has to be some kind of limit right? There has to be a line – and that line could even extend to a friggin queue across London just to be able to exercise my inalienable right to chew on shit from Mickey D.

And that, in the end, is why we need a new kind of leadership. A leadership of hope. The thing that has gotten clearer and clearer from this pandemic is that the old fashioned Putin style, populist, white male, autocratic leader type that thrives off fear and flag and slightly strange free press semantics where the truth is as popular as the Coronavirus, is dead. And when I say dead I don’t just mean Kim Jon Ding-dong, I mean ALL of these old style leaders in government, in corporates and in life. And I guess to wrap this all up in a McWrapper what I’m really trying to say is that we should invest our time not just in finding a virus for this little Corona fella but also on a major Jacinda cloning programme so we can get Arderns running every government and corporate and mostly running McDonald’s. You see, if Jacinda was running things right now, I’d be sitting down at my local Mickey D swigging a chocolate shake soaking up a good old fashioned burger and fries while listening to Jacinda on McTV telling me that everything was going to be just fine. And I wouldn’t need to believe a goddamned word she said cos it wouldn’t matter two hoots of a Corona infected bat so long as I could hang out at my kinda heaven – Mickey D heaven.

McNewNorm really can be as simple as that.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Coronavirus

21st Apr 202021st Apr 2020 by lettsgroup

Sticking with the slightly biblical theme of yesterday’s post I thought that today we should delve a little deeper into who exactly are the saints and the sinners of Covid-19.

Let’s start with the easy one – the saints: naturally the list includes anyone working for any healthcare service anywhere in the world with a big shout out for Kim Jong-ding-dongs poor about to be decapitated physicians, but also care givers (particularly elderly care providers in the thick of it), delivery people, supermarket staff and generally anyone supporting us through lockdown lock-me-up-and-throw-the-key-away-hell-after-all-have-you-met-my-teens? Added to this list should be Milan’s town planner who’s just figured out that pedestrianising the city is the best way to keep Italian drivers off the streets and keep everyone else alive. And a last saintly hat tip goes to Netflix for bringing us ‘Tiger King’ cos we naively thought that shit couldn’t get weirder than this Corona thing!

But, that’s the obvious list. And the one we should all keep raving about and shouting or clapping or singing or walking round and round the garden on a zimmer frame for or climb endless Everest like stairs or Christ even binge watch the Kardashians for. You see, while politicians may have dawdled/dragged their proverbials/hid in the nice house yet somehow paraded their shiz all over prime-time press conferences the saintly ones have been out there holding us all together. You know actually doing stuff called work and getting us what we need to get through lockdown-looneys. And the great irony is, now we’re stuck at home in gracious perpetuity (with the teens), we’d bight off any of their left feet or arm or pretty much any limb just to be able to go back to work. Yes, the same work we’ve been bitchin’ and moaning about for the last God knows how long suddenly seems as attractive as a simple back massage from Pamela Anderson. The same bosses we’ve been whining about and trying to undermine at every turn now seem almost, well, saintly. Particularly when those bosses are politicians who seem to think its OK for them to go back to work but that we still can’t cos we haven’t figured out how to work Zoom.

But there are also unsung hero’s (obviously not Andrea Bocelli) and we’d (not weed) like to shout them out. There’s the Pope who wears a weird robe thingy while walking the empty streets of Rome with some shady looking dudes in black suits stalking him as he tirelessly searches the alleyways for his flock cos they haven’t shown up at St Peters Square the last few Sundays. There’s Mick Jagger who gets the prize for shutting himself in a pint sized room for that online concert to make himself look bigger and presumably poorer to provide a cover for the fact that he pays Charlie Watts so little he can’t even afford a drum kit and also for the fact that he’s the only man on earth smaller than Tom Cruise. There’s Mike Pence for putting up with Donnie and there’s anyone working with Pence for putting up with him and there’s obviously the entire British population for putting up with you know who.

There’s CNN’s Chris Cuomo for getting Covid-19 and being forced to stay on air while his dad gets it up the rear from Donnie and there’s all of us for having to watch their kinda weird English finance news presenter dude bang on about hoping we all have a ‘profitable hour’! A f****** ‘profitable hour’ tard, how in pandemic hell are we supposed to have ANY ‘profitable hour’ when we’re all bankrupt or doled up or paying others to take our oil cos we lost the manual that explained how to switch the goddamned well off or just plain friggin broke thanks to this Corona thing which, seemingly, he’s the last dunce on the planet to think is not a pandemic but a friggin Mexican beer. Christ, does he watch his own news? Maybe he finds himself as annoying as the rest of us and dozes off when he’s on.

There’s my plumber who’s gotta deserve a shout out in the vain hope that he might show up this decade once we’re set free and hopefully won’t hit me up the ass with partial amber friggin traffic light ‘special’ lockdown-looney pricing. Then there’s my mother, who let’s face it, is the only person out there that actually bothers to read this crap. Love you mum. But, last of all, there’s me. Yep, me. For doing nothing more than putting up with the teens. You see, when they had to go to school for real they could get themselves up just fine. Now you know who has to get them up for ‘school’ every friggin day which you would have thought has gotten easier given their commute is exactly five steps past the kitchen which they raid on the way and all they have to do all day is to sit on the couch and pretend to listen to some poor teacher politely bang on to them online while instead they watch TV, do their nails, fall asleep, raid the fridge a little more, social media meme each other and scream the moment I ask them to do anything what so friggin ever as all of a sudden they miraculously (yes Francis they can do it too) have way too much school stuff on one screen when they’re actually watching Kim, and I don’t mean Kim Jong-ding-dong. Then, of course, when it comes to them having dinner or exercise or anything that doesn’t involve them lying on the couch pretending to be at school they just shout out about how school online means it runs all day and night and seven days a week and could we please just keep bringing the food and drinks so they can keep 100% focused on their studies really, honest, promise. And yet, somehow, I can only hear the odd bit of teacher coming out of the room that they keep tightly locked like a government backed loan, but really all I friggin hear ALL day is Kim or Kylie or Bieber-still-with-a-baby-face-no-matter-how-hard-he-tries-to-be, well, hard or friggin Billie Eilish I-got-my-hair-stuck-in-the-paint-machine and the entire goddamned cast of Glee.

And seeing as that list took a while/my sanity I guess I’m gonna go put my feet up with the teens and you’ll have to read my next post for the list of Coronavirus bad and uglies.

Politics in the Time of Coronavirus

15th Apr 202020th Apr 2020 by lettsgroup

Politics is pretty painful at the best of times – as example the U.S. has you know who, the WHO (not the band) now also knows what it’s like to have you know who, the UK had the EU now it has the other you know who, France had Macron now has dudes in yellow jerseys, Italy never knows who the frig they have and Spain has, er, Ibiza. Don’t even get me started on what Russia or China have. But, even in the best of times there ain’t now’t so queer as politics.

Then again there’s nothing like a good pandemic to take it to a whole new level. And when I say new level I mean it’s like turning your gigantic rocket like speaker up to supersonic super-woof to the point where your ears blast right out of your head as now we have to listen to the truth serum masters of ultimate power bang on incessantly, hour after hour after 24 hour, day in day out. Frig, they make the Kardashians look like Mormons. You can’t move for getting streamed yet another daily press briefing about the newest politico BS mumbo jumbo that is ‘fact first and led by science’. Led by fact and science my left nut. These briefings are about as led by science as McDonald’s is led by Weight Watchers.

You know facts are a bit wobbly when the one FACT we do know is that we have about as many testing kits in the West as we have honest politicians. So how in the world we’re supposed to believe the Corona infected number God himself knows. In fact, it seems the daily stat for people infected with Covid-19 should be renamed the daily number of test kits we actually have that worked versus the fictional level we friggin dream we had. It seems even the number of deaths is not entirely accurate mind you ask any number of expert tyrannical despots how easy it is to bend that little reality.

But, then again, who needs fiction any more – we’re living it! I kinda feel for Matt Damon and the really expensive cast of ‘Contagion’ I mean they genuinely thought they were onto something. Then along came Corona and their supposed movie blockbuster looks, well, a bit less popular. And given we’re all finally living in the global Truman Show it could well mean that the best thing we can do right now is to look to the cast of either movie to step up and run our countries – I mean we can’t really ignore the fact that they have actually gotten through this weird shit before. And the one thing all our current politicians keep telling us is they ain’t seen nothing like this (friggin mess) before. Now that’s reassuring. Mind you as reassuring as their lockdown exit plans? Donald’s entire plan comes down to a date – May 1st. And, well, that’s actually it. A date. But he keeps telling us it’s a plan. I hate to say it Donnie but that’s not really what a plan looks like that’s just three letters and a number! Boris is at least honest enough about not having a plan which is apparently because he no longer believes in plans, after all look where his plan not to have kids out of wedlock got him.

And what would it look like if Matt Damon was actually running the UK? Well, he’s clearly quite Jason Bourne fit and having had me at fit he obviously gets my vote. So what about Jim Carrey for President of the USA? Well given his name isn’t Donal Trump then that’s an easy one too. Then again, according to the latest media ‘fact first’ (my right nut this time) it seems the only leaders getting it right just now are women. So presumably that means that if a Kiwi nurse can fix Boris (and we oh so graciously let her work here) then in the same vein we could let Jacinda run Westminster with the added benefit that a job swap the other end of the world seems like a pretty safe spot for Boris right now.

The other bit I really don’t get is given that we’re all actually living in the movie set of ‘Contagion’ you would have thought that the politicians would have it nailed by now. I mean it’s ALL fiction dudes so you don’t even need to pretend to tell the truth cos, let’s face it, we don’t go to the movies to get a dose of reality – we go to the movies to get as far away from that one as NASA can extra-terrestrially take us. So politicos this could be one of those once in a lifetime moments you’ve been waiting for pretty much all your career when you get ti legit spin it like there’s no spin class like tomorrow.

Oh………. you already are. Oh, shit.

In that case where’s Barack Obama when you need him? Christ (he) just Easter resurrected on my stream endorsing Joe Biden meaning Joe will get EVERY vote like ANYWHERE. Perhaps even less surprising given Joe looks a bit like Matt Damon a few years down the road which finally lays claim to the fact that one day we’ll all wake up and realise that this is just one big Contagion/Truman dream and the only real nightmare we can’t ever frggin wake up from is, yep, you guessed it the Donnie and Boris show. Sorry.