GOOGLE THE NEW STASI

Right. thats it - I am off for good now.

I heard yesterday that Google is launching a whole load of new stuff that is deisigned to make life better.

One of these things is the ability to walk a virtual street in any major city in real time. Right now it's Denver and Vegas - soon it will be your house on that screen.

I don't often worry about security and all that kind of stuff. If you are bad you are bad and should worry about it - right? But this is fucking terrible!

I'll say that again.. FUCKING TERRIBLE!

This is what Stalin did.

Do you seriously think that Google is going to be the big philantropist forever? Like hell it will. It will be just like every other multi-headed hydra that ruins peoples lives.

Get this - Google will track your searches and report on them - but who to?
It will allow us all to look at every street in every city in the world.
It will be the ultimate big brother and you will get fucked over by it because you are active on the web, you are honest and you are not trying to be subversive.

I bet you the criminals will figure out how to get around it so who will the authorities clobber with the big google hammer.... US THAT'S WHO!

Now I know this is impossible but will someone tell me a search engine that works well and that I can fix into firefox because I want out of the google experiment. I want out now and I suggest you do too before that search for horse blankets turns into a charge for beastiality and you do 5 years inside!

Pissed Off Housewife: 250 Posts to Tell You Why I'm Pissed

Pissed Off Housewife: 250 Posts to Tell You Why I'm Pissed

मोवे on

http://baria.vox.com/

Hey there popsters

I have been getting all sorts of hassle with blogger recently and so I have decided to move the blog to that address.

Please come and join me

It is much prettier and I can post better stuff.

later

Euge

Birdy Num Num

Last night I had dinner with Roz from Women in Docs.

Good food, no wine, fine company at a Viet noshery in the West End. All in all much more convivial that a a subway "sandwich" (is that what you call food in America? Really?) in a mall in Wisconsin.

So we talked and ate well and the best thing about it was that she is a talented musician and...AND .. she understands that winning or losing in the music business is not about being a prima donna. It is about simple hard work. It was an absolute joy not to have to explain every little thing about the latest release and what we were going to do. I actually felt like I was talking to a friend and not just the "talent".

I think thats why most labels think of the acts as enemies and bands hate their labels. We both expect miracles and when they aren't delivered it is as if God just condemned you to hell.

So dear reader please remember that the guy on the other side of the table may be a bastard or he may be a saint but whoever he is you chose to join him and you should have the balls to take on some of the responsibility. It is not a one way relationship.

Eat right.

id

Oi!

One of the things about getting older is that you never think twice about being bad. Either you are or you aren't. It's a choice you have already made when you were about 15 and it is not going to change.

There are some people though who seem to think that a piece of plastic and picture are somehow going to alter your DNA.

Take last week.

I was at a big festival On Caxton Street where AS WE ARE were playing a set and so were Intercooler. Bloody excellent. Just in country, sunshine, mates and beer. Nothing better.

So in the midst of 30 000 revellers I made my way to a beer stall - the place is hopping like 6th St Austin during sxsw or Glastonbury 10 years ago. All good.

The girl at the tent tells me I can't buy beer without a wrist band. Okay. So go to the white tent inthe middle of the street and they will give me one.

Off I go. After a few minutes of doing that weird little dance that we all do in crowds - you know the one - turn side on - put your arm between people - bend knees, slidddddeeeee, stand, shuffle and repeat- I got to the tent which was manned by a youth with knock knees and a severe case of superioritis.

" have you got any ID" says Spotty Herbert

"I have got my credit cards but I didn't bring my passport, No."

"Can't give you a band then."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Whats your date of birth?

"My what? " I nearly pissed my pants laughing. Nobody has asked me that in 10 years.

"I would tell you that but you wouldn't believe me."I said. "Don't these flecks of grey in my hair give the game away?"

"What is your date of birth?"

I told him and he looked at me with disbelief ; " I look this young because I have spent the past 20 years pickling myself from the inside. "

"No one was born then: he said - absolutley seriously. Now you know why he was in the tent instead of at the party.

"Listen snot nose. I was born before your dada and I am still alive and well. Now give me the fucking band and let me get a beer!"

Thats when a nice copper came up and put the band on my wrist.

"Bloody idiot!" she said to me with a smile.

Thats when you know you made the right choice all those years ago and ID cards are just an excuse to rort more money out of us so that imbecilic youths can get a job.

Suffice to say I got really pissed, started 5 fights and robbed a liquor store on the way home where I beat my wife and shot the dog.

A good night out all round.

थे करसे ऑफ़ फॉरेन Holidays

Aloha,

as I wend my way around the globe I often meet people who say that it is a really glamorous life. "jet setter" they say and smile knowingly to themselves.

The smile tells me a great deal about what that person has experienced in their lives.

If it has a painful tinge to it I know that person has been to places far and wide and has truly experienced life. On the other hand if their eyes light up and they grin like a cheshire cat as they secretly contemplate the debauchery that they consider inevitably part of global exploration I know that they have never been further than the back yard.

Forgive me if that sounds cynical but invariably that synopsis is accurate. You see one of the deep joys of travel is to experience new things; foods, people, cultures, smells, rip-offs and all manner of human life. However one of the deep frustrations is that unless you are truly familiar with the place you are visiting you will never have a clue what is going on.

Of course there are always friendly guides who will describe how Hannibal marched his elephants over yon hill or how in 1956 the President was victorious in his campaign to oust the corrupt regime of the American lick spittle who came before him but that is about as much use as eating coal if you are constipated. The truth is you will never get to grips with what makes a country tick until you give over a significant portion of your life to it.

So it is that I sit here in Australia - my adopted home - on a dreary Sunday and wonder how the hell I got it so wrong this time.

Today is Mothering Sunday here and last week (a week later than the rest of the planet) was labour day and I have been waiting for both these "holidays" to pass before I can get on with my life.

I have had worse: I once went to Chile with my wife. The journey of a lifetime. It certainly was!

I mean, it is not as if Chile is on the way to anywhere is it? You really have to want to go there to get there. If you went any further you would fall off the world or go swimming in Antarctica and neither of those options are specially appealing to me.

So we traveled across the great Pacific ocean and stopped half way - after 10 hours from New Zealand no less - on Easter Island. What a place! Remote does not describe it. Another 8 hours and we arrived in Santiago.

The excitement rose in me. What adventures lay in this great sliver of a country? The only country on earth where the revolutionaries coined a battle chant "There can be no revolution without song" (No ai revolucion sin canson - or something like that). This was the home of Allende and all that amazing story telling and best of all it was where the infamous BERNARDO O'Higgins made his mark. A half black - half Irish revolutionary with a fantastically mongrel name. He had to be a great bloke to have a beer with. I was so enamoured with Chile that I even named my dog after O'Higgins. Finally we were here and I was ready to explore.

We had a plan to go to the Atacama desert and roam through the plains and valleys, mountains and fjords for weeks. All ready and raring to go!

So we check in and after a pleasant interlude off we went to the Zona Rosa. Streets filled with life and love, colour and cacophany. There were mariachi on every corner and all the people were dressed to the nines. I was in heaven.

There. Across the street, a restaurant. Excellent. Just the thing to get us ready for a true Chilean experience. We ordered Gambas and wine and tucked into to our well earned dinner. All was well in the world until 30 minutes in the waiter came over and asked if we would pay the bill please because they were closing.

CLOSING? Oh well, there were millions of other places to go and we were just getting started. It was only 9pm after all. So we paid the bill and wandered off arm in arm through the the streets of Santiago. More and more people - a real buzz of excitement. THIS PLACE IS AMAZING!

So we go to a bar - "Sorry Senor we are closed."

?

Try another bar

same again.

?

What's going on?

"Ah, Senor, there is a Presidential election and we must close so that there are no more riots like in the old days."

OH CRAP!

Well, you guessed it. In 40 minutes the entire city was dark. Not a soul about except for the guys who worked at MacDonalds and a few political activists tooting horns and waving flags, (YANQUI PIG CAPITALISTS have a dispensation to sell their crap apparently).

So that was it. back to the hotel. Except the Hotel was closed and we had to jump over the locked gates and buzz the concierge to get into our room.

This was a country in lockdown. Jesus! We had just come to visit a real life Graham Greene novel, except this time there were no vacuum blueprints to sell and we had no inside track with the espionage rings. We were alone in a foreign land with nothing but Big Macs for company.

To say we were disappointed is an understatement. Gutted from Brisbane and wife. Big fish have bigger guts and ours were spilled all over the pavements of Chile.

The lock down went on for days.

We tried. Believe me we tried. We walked about 10kms each way to the Bernardo O'Higgins parc only to find it was a dry and desolate field where only the homeless and horny visited. We roamed the beautiful streets for days with no one to meet and nothing to do. It was like that Charlton Heston movie where he is the last man alive and everyone else is a zombie.

We even managed to book ourselves onto a Cultural excursion around the city. Our marvellous guide and his driver were excellent but we were the only ones on the tour on a 50 seater bus. It seems like everyone else had got the message. At the end of the tour there is a big dinner and dance show where the tables are set for hundreds of merry makers to dance traditional dances and drink local wines and generally have a great time in the company of other follish travellers. On the night we went we were joined by 5 rather bemused Koreans and a Russian who was trying to sell paper making machinery. The five hour excursion was over and done with in about 2 hours.

Which reminds me - why is it that you take an hour to eat dinner with friends and 4 minutes alone?

BY day 5 we had had enough and made our way to airline office.

"Get us out of here please"

"Certainly sir. We were wondering if you would leave or stay. Only the Embassy staff are here at present. Most everyone else has gone to Argentina." said the wily airline rep.

Would you like to go to Buenos Aires for a few days? I can arrange a nice hotel but they are having some economic problems now so the taxi's aren't running to the Airport. Perhaps you would like a limosine?"

"Nah. Fuck that. Get us home asap!"

And so we left the next day.

A dream of discovery destroyed by the vagiaries of national holidays and blind expectation of perpetual motion in every country but the one you live in had managed to comprehensively destroy our plans.

This is just one story. There are many more and everyone who travels will tell you about the day that a certain country was shut. It has happened to me in Spain, El Salvador, Australia, New Zealand, Wales, America, France (which closes for the whole of August), and many more.

So perhaps now you have an incling of why I am cynical and why travel broadens the mind and expands time to fill whatever voids have been left by local traditions and cultures.

It is not glamourous. It is generally fucking boring and I wish I had a playstation or something.

via condios muchacho's

लोस्त opportunity

Ah my minnions at last we hear the news the kingdom has been waiting for: Tony Blair has given a date for departure!

I am both heartened and saddened by the announcement.

You see I have been a member of the Labour party in the UK since I was a student and Maggie Thatcher was king.

The awful reality of being in politics is that it is almost unheard of for a top politico to leave with the good wishes of the people.

There are of course some like Harold Wilson and that Aussie guy who went missing who leave a bereaved public but normally it ends in tears and Blairs departure is no exception.

Before he was elected we of the Labour old guard had a lot to cheer about. The Tories were in disarray and although we missed John Smith there was always the hope of the new. So with girded loins and renewed vigour we went out on the stump and battered on doors with gusto.

I remember knocking on a door in Islington and being chased away by a guy in a towel who was sworn member of the fascist BNP. He hated me and if he hadn't been in danger of revealing his miniscule manhood I think he may well have caused me some serious damage but that was small fry when placed under the microscope of the body politic. Small and rather wrinkled as I recall.

Anyway, on the night of the election in '97 I was a member of the Socialist Republic of Islingtons General council - which is not as good as being int he old Soviet politbureau but it has a nice ring to it. As we Red brothers sat watching the results unfold every seat won was cheered with abandon. We could not believe it - after 18 years we were going to win!

Then one momentous moment occurred: A guy who was well disliked withinn the ranks for being a pompous prig of man with no more right to be in the socialist movement than Himmler and who had plagued the Islington meetings for years - Mr Stephen Twigg - was elected; against all the odds, to replace Michael "I am not really totally gay" Portillo.


Rapture!

We had won and got rid of the pompous ass all at once, Brilliant!

So a crowd of us ran out and jumped in cabs and went to Westminster only to be greeted by deathly silence.

After a short discussion there were two options. Gloat or Gloat. I chose to gloat. the question was where - either at that overblown farce of a party at Millbank or outside the central office of the defeated Tories.

I chose the latter and so off I went - alone to heckle - jeer and release a lifetimes worth of frustrations on the poor tory boys inside.

I raged all night until John Major arrived at which point I exploded in uncontrolled abuse of all that is holy and christian and generally right wing.

At this point a rather affected and, it has to be said large, tory worker came rushing from the building and grabbed me across the crash barriers

"What is your fucking Problem?" he screamed

"YOU ARE! ALWAYS HAVE BEEN ALWAYS WILL BE!" I replied - the best reply I have ever conjoured in a moment of stress it has to be said.

At that point a scuffle ensued and the police seperated us.

He was ushered to the Smith Square sanctum and I was marched towards a police van.

"SHUT UP." said the copper
"I won't I know my rights" says I

"Look shut up !" he said again and continued, "If you do I'll let you go."

"HUH?"

"Its the end of my shift and I can't be arsed nicking you and anyway I think you are right."

Stunned silence.

He made me wait on the back step of the van whilst Korean and Swiss TV interviewed me before gently nudging me off towards the tube.

"result" was his last word to me as I staggered off in a delirious state.

I knew at that moment that worlds could change and that anything in life was possible.

Now, 10 years later I see the opportunities Blair has wasted and I bitterly regret every one but please forgive me if I also feel a tiny twinge of regret that the passing of Blair as PM marks the passing of the hopes of an entire generation of us, We are now middle aged and small c conservative and worried about our mortgages.

It could have been so much better - and - for a moment it was.

BRISBANE ROCKS! But no one buys cd's any more

Hi,

Well would you believe it?

Apparently Rolling Stone has said that Brisbane is one of the top 5 cities for new bands in the world!

Must be true then.

Bris-vegas as we locals (now living a billion miles away) like to call it has about 5 venues worth the name and about 10 million bands. It's really great to be here but hardly the cutting edge yet - or did I miss it?

Saying that, last week I was in Fortitude Valley at Rics when I came across one band that I think is excellent but being "hammered" at the time I have forgotten their name. The last time that happened the band was called THE GRATES and if you haven't see/heard them you should. Fantastic - just what music is all about.

What's really disappointing about the Rolling Stone piece is that because of it people like Peter Beattie ( the local state premier) are now on the "band wagon" pushing local acts overseas. It's a bloody shame that people won't listen for the sake of it and make up their own minds once they get past the age of 25. Some do. Most don't and it makes for sad and boring media.

The kids aren't buying cd's but they are buying live music and they know that the labels are all fucked. Radio and TV is going the same way and even the press has no influence on whats happening out there anymore - except when it comes to the dinosaurs thinking they are kool.

In simple terms it means that cd sales are falling off a cliff and the majors are totally fucked trying to figure it out.

Here is a snapshot for you to ponder:

in 2002 the sales of a single needed to be about 9000 to reach No1 in Australia (pop 19 million) and about 90 000 in the UK (pop 65 million). Today its about 9000 in UK and less than 3000 in Australia.

Now in the USA where diamond sales (over 10 million) were rare but Gold sales of over 1 million were like confetti the sales figures are even worse.

Avil Lavigne has sold about 280 000 - Timbaland is holding around 250 000 whilst old rock tossers like Nickelback are at 5 million. Modest Mouse - 250 000 - Snoop Dog did 9000 (thats all so far!! and he is banned from Aus for life so he is now officially a 2 time loser!) last and thankfully least - Good Charlotte - sales - bog all.

What that says to me is that the idea of new music being sold is an impossibilty. Only well known acts and repackaged music is selling and even then it's mostly through some weird outlets like garage's and shopping channels on TV.

We are at the end of an era. It is happening before your eyes and the only profitable entertainment is live and experiential - like fun fairs.

So if you are just getting into this business my advice is get yourselves set up as club promoters or fairground roustabouts. There is no point being the music junky anymore. You will end up like the sad kid on the end of the front row who prefers bartok to slipknot (like me!).

Now my little afficionados - rock off!!!!

the worlds smartest man

the worlds smartest man said is should do this

I am not the worlds smartest man - although I have an IQ of 8004 so I agreed.

Thank you for the advice sire

you are indeed the worlds smartest man and whilst I too would like to be the worlds smartest man I am not.

Maybe this will make me closer to my ideal

yours

not, the worlds smartest man

HOW OUR FUTURE IS WRITTEN IN CODE

Kia Ora,

Interest.

That's the key to everything.
Do you have any interest?

If you can't be bothered then there you haven't any interest.

If you have no money then you won't collect any interest.

The fascinating thing about the word is that you can only be interesting if you already have a interest of some form.

"WHAT THE HELL IS HE ON ABOUT NOW?" I hear you cry. Well , if you will indulge me I will explain.

Interest is a noun that can be used in many ways but in essence the value of it all boils down to the same thing. DOES ANYONE CARE?

If they do and they are prepared to use some of their limited heartbeats in pursuing the object of their desire then it is of interest and will by association accrue the same.

This is important because the more people care the more interest is generated and the more interest is generated the more people care. Got me?

It is called a positive feedback cycle and it is how everything develops and grows.

Mathematicians can work out feedback cycles and they can calculate the effect of changes in interest. What is really interesting (sorry) is that you can also measure that effect on the way you see yourself.

In terms of your life you can see that, if you are a person who has interest in the world around you, and in events that happen to others, your own value is increased. eg. The last person you want to see is the dullard who does nothing but watch TV and eat KFC right? But the guy who is a "jet setter" is intrinsically interesting because his life experience is something that you would like to have yourself.

That's why movie stars and pop singers are objects of fascination.

So what is more useless than a pop singer that never tours?
A chocolate fireguard perhaps?

Believe it or not Karl Marxs - yes he of the big beard and creation of communism - had this off pat - he called it the stupidity of the rural village. In other words, the less you knew the less you were able to know and therefore the less you were told.

Now if you take that idea forward and then look at how interest is seen in a financial market you can see that the same rules apply.

Every single one of us has an interest in interest rates.

Your house, your money, your job - they all depend on interest rates being set at a reasonable level for your country.

So what happens when things here get into a big mess?

This time the result is not just a fat, boring old fart sitting on a couch with nothing to say. This time it means that you loose your job and then your house and then your reason to live.

"BUT I CAN"T DO ANYTHING ABOUT THAT CAN I"

Well, believe it or not you can.

There are two ways:
First you get involved in politics and shape how other act and react and that in turn will affect the perceptions of bankers who set interest rates and suddenly you have made a difference.

Second you get busy and stop letting your country of birth or residence dictate who and what you are.

For example -
If you are born in Zimbabwe you currently live with 2500% inflation, starvation and a generally shit life.
OPTIONS: Leave, do nothing or change it.

You are born and live in the USA. The housing market has collapsed, your currency is falling and every other country hates you.
OPTIONS; Get involved and change it or do nothing or leave.

You are born in the UK, there are loads of jobs and lots of money about but you can't afford to buy a tiny apartment.
OPTIONS: see above.

Notice anything about this? Well, no matter where you are you have 3 options and only one of them means that you are going to come out of it a winner. GET INVOLVED AND CHANGE THINGS!

Leaving is nice option but unless you are already in a strong position you are going to be much worse off by emigrating. Countries that will take you are limited and generally a lot worse than your own. Would you emigrate to Zimbabwe?

So the way to better yourself and your life is to gather interest - both in your self and in others.

The code that you need to break is the code that has been instilled in you since birth. The code of conduct.

If you can't break that code you will never make a change and your future will be pre-ordained. From Cradle to Grave you will fit into little boxes made up by an actuary somewhere.

You will have spend 70 years taking up space and achieving bog all.

Don't do it.

Make a change.
Crack the code.

wet

Bom Dia,
welcome to the Bush Tucker Trials,

from down here. I know that should be G'day but that's far too obvious.

I am delighted to be back in the sun burnt country that claims itself to be the Lucky Country.

In many way it is.

Sunburnt that is.
In others it is extra ordinarily lucky:
Space, resources, food, mullet haircuts being in fashion for over 40 years, crap cars being cool, total obliviousness of how daft the life saver hats look, blonde girls with enormous breasts, the ability to say "look" before every sentence as if you know what you are talking about even if you haven't a clue - that kind of thing.

But I have come "home" to find that in one respect the luck has truly run out. The place is parched dry.

In the state that was until recently my home - Queensland - there are Level 5 water restrictions.
It is deadly serious. A matter of life and death.

Practically it means rationed 4 minute showers and no watering of anything other than your liver with quarts of XXXX lager. Strange then that the first night I was here a huge bowser was parked outside my flat and two guys (not the Blackburn Rovers footballer Tugais in case you made a mistake) were hosing down the plants in a rather feeble traffic island. ( I love government hypocrasy don't you?)

There is a ban of putting cigarette butts anywhere except a bin or it's an on the spot $150 fine. Smoking is banned almost everywhere and for this time of year temperatures are about 6-7 degrees hotter than usual.

In Canberra the Roo's are killing dogs again to stop them drinking the water in the lakes and even the biggest rivers are running dry.

The fifth biggest continent on Earth can't provide enough food for 19 million inhabitants. So they are importing it from China. That is really scary. It's as if the whole of Europe only had the population of Paris and London combined. The rest was desolate. NOW DO YOU GET IT?

Or if you are American imagine Wyoming everywhere but with no steers just snakes. The bad lands. Now what good are your fucking Chevrolets 67 small block's and your Hummers? Arnie was right!!

Last year when I was living here the council on the Gold Coast allowed some folks to wash their cars for the first time in 5 years but that seems like madness now. All the dams are empty and whilst no one prays openy for rain it won'r be long before they are waving sticks and jumping up and down like Sitting Bull on an ants nest.

It is Global Warming writ large and in living colour.
The colour is Red.
The colour of blood and the desert soil in the outback.
It's fucking scary.

UK was dry for 6 weeks before I left.
Singapore is supposed to be having a wet season but isn't.
Aus is as dry as a witches tit.

What the hell happened to all the rain?

Anyhow, I can't fix it. Even if I have contributed about a billion tonnes to CO2 during my travels. Its a shitty legacy we will leave for our kids.

So:

Advice number 1 Learn to sail or you will never go anywhere again when the oil runs out in 2050.

Advice number 2. Invest in property in rural Lancashire where it never stops raining.

3. Buy a shot gun and man traps to keep all the thirsty bankers oil barons and airline execs away.

4. Learn as much as you can about Aboriginal Aussies survival techniques - you will need them.

We all know about the Grub sucking and the boiled/baked/fried lizards and it has a universal reaction of YEAAACH but if this continues we will all be doing it. (I wonder if we really will need to drink our own piss before too long?)

When the cows die and your toilet runs dry you are going to be out there eating maggots and caterpillars too.

Don't laugh. This is serious!

Anyway, Today I woke - at a weird time as usual when traveling - and I am off to live the life of Nero and sample the delights of a Food and Wine festival on Caxton Street. Bands will be playing and nosh galore and we will all fiddle whilst Brisbane burns and I bet it will be fucking brilliant.

The day I arrived I went out for lunch and it ended up as a 12 hour bonanza of beer and chilli.
Lots of chat - catch up - business and we even saw a really good band from Cairns but I am buggered if I can remember their name. Cabaret or Blue something. Singer was Latvian I do remember that but after 10 hours and 10 pints of something in a green bottle you tend to forget.

I drink to forget what I have already forgotten which is shit 'cos I remember then. In vino veritas means that you end up embarrassed and hungover which is bad when trying to entice new artists to work with you.

So, there you have it. A day at the races - the race to extinction as it turns out - is neatly combined with a day at the pub.

Drink my friends drink! For tomorrow we die - but before that we have to eat worms again.

अमेरिकन Business

Godan dayin keneri,

one of the things about being alone in a foreign land is that you suddenly find that you have hours of spare time that simply aren't available at home. So what do you do with all that life that suddenly lands in your lap with no commitments to fill it?

I guess that depends on what you are made of and what is pre-occupying you at the time.

For some it involves beer, fags and a canoodle in a dodgy bar filled with ex-pat oil workers and lady boys. For others there is the opportunity to go shopping with abandon. Then again there are the solitary types who hike mountains and masturbate frantically in the privacy of their sleeping bags. Yet again there are others who take the opportunity to go sight seeing and absorb some local culture.

This time for me it has been a voyage of discovery; a vertitable orgy of indulgence; I have finally read some new books.

However, it's not all good. As is often the case I picked up the tomes ta Heathrow in the Borders shop there and not being inclined to read Jeffrey "plagiarist" Archer I decided to try and fill in the gaps regarding doing business in the modern world.

As you may know there are a plethora of books that claim to teach you how to make millions or fix companies or manage networks or any of that other corporate crap when in fact they all have one thing in common: one idea expanded and reiterated ad infinitum.

It's kind of interesting that most of these books ignore what they purport to tell us. I mean how many Internet marketing books are there? Book - Internet...? Some dichotomy there I think.

Then there are the enticing quotes on the gate folds - "brilliant.. A masterpiece .. every CEO should read this book..." etc. All total bullshit. These little nuggets are the synopsis of a book and of an entire ideology. The ideology of instant gratification.

I want to tell you that they do not and will not work for you or your organisation. They are simply another pile of pulped paper that would be better used in art classes for 5 year olds.

Take for instance the last one I read - THE TIPPING POINT by Malcolm Gladwell. The bullet points on the cover say, " fascinating" twice, nay thrice! whilst the reality is that the entire thing is dedicated to trying to justify a spurious theory that fads are akin to epidemics. He has three new terms to pontificate about and an interminable analysis of Sesame Street and Blues Clues - I kid you not.

Now that may be fascinating and relevent to the makers of kids TV but it has not the slightest bearing on how anyone else does business - although he does try tp make Hush Puppies some kind of uber-brand.

So I guess what all that means is that most of the stuff you read is totally irrelevent and/or useless.

Sadly there are sufficient numbers of graduates in big companies who rely on these kinds of books so that they can impress their bosses with the new ideas. Unfortunately the bosses are too damn busy to read them for themselves so experience is subsumed in a wave of "modern" thinking which is 99% useless.

Which brings me on to the basis of this rant and that is that American / Western business practises are about to be dealt a body blow by the East.

In the past few days in Singapore I have read a lot of stuff about various markets that I have little knowledge of and I have to say that I am massively impressed with what I have come across.

Did you know for example that Singapore, The Philippines, Malaysia and India are all in the middle of huge property booms? Singapore has more than doubled in the past year alone.

Now there is a great deal of action by foreign companies here - Citibank - HSBC and so but there is an equal amount of action going the other way. Did you know that the ousted PM of thailand is trying to buy an English soccer club? Just like the Americans are doing? Perhaps that will be the battlefield where the lines are first drawn - America v Russia v Asia using African and S American troops. Sounds ominously like 1984 to me!

The difference I have seen on my many visits to Asia is that people here are ready and willing to learn about how we Westerners think whilst Westerners are almost all in the dark when it comes to figuring out what makes Asians tick. That is a legacy of empire and the unwavering belief that we are right.

We aren't. At least not always.

So the business school models that teach us all about profit and loss and corporate legacy and so on are going to have to change and change quickly. Much as Microsoft will loose out to Linux and ipods so will Citibank fall to the claws of an emerging and dynamic asian tiger where longterm planning take over from short term gain.

You can already see it in the UK where the richest man is Mr Mittal - an Indian, followed by 2 Brits and a Russian, and an Iraqi Jew and 2 more Indians. Pretty soon you will be amazed to find that 7-11 in downtown Montana now sells shells made in Amritzar, beef jerky from Phnom Phen and the latest Chinese chart hits for download on your Tawaniese made cell watch and nano computer. (wanc for short - made by the wanc corporation of Dubai).

America and the West have an unflinching belief in their systems and methods but I can't see why. they don't even work in the home states so why on earth would they translate across continents?

There is a definitive list of certainties in this world and it is this:

DEATH
TAXES

I would also like to add one more vital element to this combination; shit.

You will die; you will be taxed; and you will continue to shit until it is all over and even then you will probably manage to squeeze one more turd from the passage of time.

All else is maleable and transient.

So before you get too concerned about your career and life aspirations take these items as the basis of your creed and try to adapt to the new world. It could be better than you think and I for one would rather eat a curry than a Big Mac anyday - even if the last turd before my passing requires a loo roll in the fridge.

see you in paradise parishioners.