So yet another shit journey on Wizzair surrounded by bad breath and farts. again they ran out of beer before the mid rows and passengers have no concept of personal space. I can hardly wait for the obligatory round of applause upon a safe landing, although safe landings are by no means guaranteed on such cattle class flights. on previous journeys I have experienced numerous delays and at least one front wheel becoming detached.
At the moment my concerns about landing are superseded by the lack of suitable booze and air conditioning. sauna I can handle, but the sweaty boys changing room that is Wizzair BHX to OTP, is now after 2 and a half hours, unbearable. The things we do for others eh?
So the next step, should we manage to land, is to negotiate the militaristic Romanian customs and immigration. These people clearly miss the ways of the old dictator and adorn themselves with more weapons than John Rambo on a bad hair Monday, and the dress code of the IRA.
With luck they will turn me loose outside and my ride will be waiting. Else wise I will find myself stranded in the sub zero air of midnight Bucharest. this would not be the first time nor I doubt the last.
My lift did promise to come armed with champagne, and if true I shall find myself in better spirits.
The journey to England this round consisted of alternating bouts of babysitting both children and purported adults across the dead centre of the country from Birmingham to Leicestershire, onwards to Lowestoft and the reverse for three weeks straight.
I think I can call the mission a success despite my true calling being a doctor of journalism. Many skills were remembered from my days of a teacher and many memories of why I vowed never more to teach.
The schooling system in the United Kingdom has broken down. It was never great, but with liberal use of wooden rulers and wooden blackboard erasers for punishment they turned me out in an almost functional state. Today class sizes are doubled and the spoilt child is spared the birch in its varied forms. The result seems to be kids replacing the violence suffered at the hands of teaching staff with violence on the streets. Stabbings and muggings abound when playground drug deals go awry. and that's just the parents.
I took particular interest in the little darlings proficiency in mathematics. The modern syllabus consists of counting up to ten Lego bricks from ages four to seven. Everyone except my good self were happy with this, so I grabbed a pencil and had them doing longhand calculations in under half an hour. Why are classes dumbed down? I shall elucidate thus:
Streaming of different talents is banned. The chain is as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest links receive all the attention because they are worth more in terms of funding. A school, sorry 'academy' gets a fat bung for every retard they can educate to write their own name in crayon, but there is no such reward for turning out a prodigy; therefore the top talents are held back and given nothing to exercise their grey matter.
After a short while they inevitably allow their attention to wander and get branded ADHD or some such invented label, and then the student becomes profitable once again.
Subsequent to this 'diagnosis' made by the teacher, so qualified with their bachelors degree in art history or finger painting in menstrual blood, the hapless little genius is dosed to the eyeballs with amphetamines and antidepressants so they can sit at the back of the 30 something strong class like a zombie, at last feeling as challenged as all the rest of the darling little customers.
It is small wonder that the average IQ is falling by nearly a point per year, and at this rate in a decades time Britain will be almost as stupid as America (who only manages to stay in the 90’s by importing Chinese students).
But that was always going to be the case when women are allowed free choice of partner.
Rare is the female who is attracted by intellect. Most of the fairer sex prefer boys who can display brutish violence or fountains of money. they will also by design, ditch and swap partners if they think they can muster greater remuneration for the rental of their saggy snatch. Family values are thrown away for the thrill of instant gratification and Instagram likes.
which leads my glorious rant to the subject of 'social' media: The singular most devastating blow to societal cohesion in the 21st century. Two complete generations now spend their lives creating themselves as a product, with all the marketing zeal of MacDonalds happy meals together with its blatant lies of nutritional excellence. Fabulous imagery of perfect lives portrayed by everyone in the connected world, all confabulations of those who are crying on the inside, starved of real attention, compounded by the viewing of all their 'friends' equally fake profiles causing the introspective nightmare of comparison and the empty feeling of decay.
How can society recover from this bane? certainly there are a few Luddites pulling the plug on social media for real, but nowhere as many as claim to be, while posting about their new Palaeolithic diet on twitter and raving about how their lives have improved since leaving Facebook. Most also post concurrently on Facebook about how their lives improved since they stopped using twitter. Any story for likes.
Myself, I see the great shame of a wasted resource. The internet when it first began was a wonderful, frightening, enlightened, sick and twisted place. There was everything there for those skilled in boolean logic search terms, later known as google fu, and shortly after google came the wanton commercialisation, bombardment of pop-ups, scripts, endless fake links tricking hapless fools to betting sites, porn sites, and financial scams.
The rise of email scams from flight 419 and his royal excellency chief dear in jesus mugu mbulu click click, head of the bank of Nigeria, who finds himself temporarily embarrassed, but with your help and a modest transfer fee would be happy to share his 99 billion dollar inheritance. Numerous elderly and obese Americans are reeled in by that bait even today.
And…… then we were hit with the worst, most despicable thing the internet ever spawned: SEO. Search engine optimisation. After this aborted fetus of an idea took hold, the internet began to fester like the bloated body of a dead dog rotting in the hot sun. Search terms no longer worked. Finding relevant results became impossible. Meta-search engines like Dogpile couldn't even keep up. All internet traffic was routed to the biggest corporate sites and fuck you if you didn't like it. So today for most people the internet is Facebook, Twitter, you tube, Netflix, and Wikipedia. Its like going from satellite tv back to a black and white CRT box with 4 big chunky buttons to kerchunk through, and only 3 of those worked. So yes the internet is officially dead. Even those corporate platforms remaining are so censored and normalised as to provide zero interest. Should someone get too spicy for the NPC users the offender gets banned. Or at worst they actually get their door kicked in by armed secret police and dragged off in the back of a van. Maybe it is time for something new. Maybe that thing is already here but nobody deemed us fit to know. After all it was popularity that killed every good thing past.