Dial you down that thermostat,
Pull you out that plug.
Keep you now the cold at bay,
Beneath a crocheted rug.
Turn you off your games machine,
Ration out your brews.
The energy’s shot up, you see?
They said so on the news.
Bread and butter for your dinner,
Hard cheese for your tea,
Seal the doors, plug the draughts,
Or we’re all going to freeze.
I don’t know how it’s come to this,
We really tried our best.
There’s only one thing left to do,
And that’s to wear a vest.
But when by night the darkness falls,
With your single bulb to see,
Remember what a pleasure,
It is to sit and read.
When the world is looking shallow,
And the future’s looking thin,
For depth and riches, turn you round,
And cast the gaze within.
The Rivendale Review 
Very good.
Thanks George, couldn’t resist.
Very nice! You have captured the mood here in very snowy and very cold Ohio, USA.
On Sun, Feb 6, 2022, 7:34 AM The Rivendale Review wrote:
> Michael Graeme posted: ” Dial you down that thermostat,Pull you out that > plug.Keep you now the cold at bay,Beneath a crocheted rug. Turn you off > your games machine,Ration out your brews.The energy’s shot up, you see?They > said so on the news. Bread and butter for your d” >
Thank you, Ken. Good to hear from you.
“I don’t know how it’s come to this,”
–
The price of extracting a barrel of oil at a Kuwaiti wellhead is around $0.50. (If that, the wells have been there for 70 years, the pipes get replaced every 20-30 years, and the natural pressure is still bringing the oil to the surface.)
The refineries (all over the world) were built in the 1950s and now, through maintenance, replaced approximately every 30-40 years, the costs are therefore amortised over 30 years and billions and billions of barrels. Yet they tell us that Oil costs $90 per barrel.
The cost of transporting the oil (or gas) via pipelines is effectively nil, or $0.02 or $0.03 per barrel or m3 for running the pumps.
Tankers and Supertankers run on “Bunker Oil” which is the muck left after all the possible products have been extracted from the crude oil.
Someone is getting very rich from the lies told to us. As long as the government gets it’s share, it goes along with the theft.
–
“We really tried our best”
–
No, I am afraid we did not.
We allowed lies and more lies from our leaders to run our lives because we were too lazy to find out the truth. Like frogs in a pan, as long as the heat was incrementally applied we did not jump.
And now, it may be too late.
–
Michael, I wrote this about ten years ago and the scene was set in the 1960s.
Please delete if it is too long or too depressing.
–
Muruwah : PJ Lang
One evening in March, at about 11.00 pm two porters wheeled in trolleys with the bodies of an old couple. Charles helped the porters place them on the autopsy tables and they left the morgue to return to the main hospital building. Prof took a look at the two and said ‘There will probably two or three more before morning. It is bloody cold out there. Any time it gets below freezing we have the old people being brought in.’
‘But why?’
‘Hypothermia. They get too cold to be able to resist freezing. Oh it will be called Flu or Pneumonia or heart failure, but basically they are too poor to eat properly and are weakened by inadequate food, so their bodies do not generate enough warmth regardless of how many cardigans they wear. They are too poor to buy coal to keep warm and so they die of cold. I will look and find fluid in the lungs, or a blood clot in the heart or lungs, and that will be the immediate cause of death, but in reality they were just too old, too cold and too weak to survive. The official reported causes will be Flu or Pneumonia but unofficially the pathologists across the country keep a count and as of last Saturday, there have been 21,658 deaths from the cold since October. Before the warm weather returns it could well rise to 25,000.”
“How is that possible? Britain is one of the world’s wealthiest countries. People live in beautiful houses surely they can afford fires and food.”
“Charles, it is a fact of life that the wealthier the country, the poorer the people. It was noticed by a chap named Henry George in the 1860s. He travelled across America and noted that the wealthy cities, Chicago, Boston, New York had people who were much poorer than the rural ‘poor’ in the small towns and small cities. That in the big industrial cities people were starving, whilst in the smaller towns they were not. It was noticed in Charles Dickens’ time. The Industrial Revolution caused millions to die from starvation and exposure. From 1750 to 1850 average height in Britain dropped by two inches due to bad nutrition. Life expectancy dropped in the towns to only 25 years. People were working longer hours and much harder yet they were eating less and dying sooner. At the same time, the wealth of industrialists and commercial owners went through the roof. The nobility detested those who had more wealth than them, because they were in ‘Trade’. They still do. Henry George reasoned that a greater part of the wealth created by technological advances is retained and possessed by land owners and rich people creating monopolies. They do it through charging for the use of land but more importantly charging for the ‘tools’, the machines, needed to earn a living. Before the Industrial Revolution, the worker owned his tools. The carpenter owned his hammer, the blacksmith his forge, the weaver her loom. Owning the machines is much more profitable than operating the machines. By charging ‘rents’ just to work, this concentrates wealth in the owners. This concentration of unearned wealth is the main cause of poverty not low production.
Henry George thought it an injustice that profit was being earned by wealthy individuals through restricting access to natural and necessary resources, while productive work was loaded with heavy taxes. He said that such a system was equivalent to slavery. Whether they call it wage slaves or debt slaves, it was impossible to escape. The reason that slavery was abolished in the early 1800s was not because it was intrinsically wrong, or immoral, but because using the poor was far more economical and cheaper. A starving child or a mother with starving children, will work 16 hours a day for a crust of bread, will sleep beneath the machines to keep out of the rain and to make sure that she has a job in the morning.
Huge fortunes were made in England by reducing the workers from ‘people’ to ‘Human Resources’. Just as you get rid of machines that are no longer productive, you do the same with your workers. They had knacker’s yards for the horses and the ‘poor house’ for the workers. You have heard of the saying “So poor that they don’t have a pot to piss in”. The only thing the poor had to sell was their urine. They would take it to the Tanneries to use in tanning leather. They might get a ha’penny for a potful. Imagine, so poor that you are not even able to sell your piss.
If you read Jack London’s ‘People of the Abyss’ written in 1900, you get a feel for what is was like in the working class after the factory revolution. And yet 1900 was much, much better than 1850.
Since the war and Clement Attlee, it has got a little better, but Churchill returned Britain to the excesses of Dickensian Britain, which will ignite a class war in the country. When you charge people for the necessities, water, a roof over their heads, warmth and clothing, when you deny them the ability to work without paying for the tools they need, then you have a slave population. The owners will get greedier and greedier, and richer and richer, as they replace work and skills with machines and more machines and the working man, who has no way to acquire the machines necessary to earn even a meagre living much less compete, will get poorer and poorer.
It is why Socialism and Marxism are so seductive. It steals the power from the wealthy. Of course it then gives it not to the worker, but to the politician. Parasites, who like the capitalist lives off the production of others. However an ordinary working man thinks he has more chance of being a shop-steward and eventually a Commissar than of becoming wealthy. People can see the end point of Capitalism and that it is a self destructing system. They can see that in the end, they will be discarded as non-productive. That they will have no economic worth. That they will be regarded as a cost to society and that society, like an industrialist, will cut costs.
So 25,000 people will die this year from being old and cold, and no one will care a damn.
It is why I am a Pathologist, I am too angry to practise medicine and yet I have no other skills. I teach medical students to carve up bodies as I am too cynical to argue about trying to keep them alive.”
“So Professor, what is the answer?”
“There is no answer. The least destructive system devised so far is a benevolent despot. One who demands only a tithe, 10% being a lot less than the politicians charge, and a despot being much cheaper to maintain than the ridiculous parliamentary system that we have. The Swedes did it rather successfully with Bernadotte, and the Americans would be much happier with His Majesty JFK than the farce of the Congress that they now have.
The only truth that I know is that everyone ends up cold, naked and alone on my metal table. Whether rich or poor, young or old, they are all equally dead. I have not seen a corpse any happier being laid in a big satin lined fancy coffin, than those that are thrown with 50 others into a communal pit. Six months later they are equally decayed and equally miserable.
Go home. I have talked myself into a depressive state and I require medication in the form of alcohol to relieve the condition. I am going to close up and I will examine each of them tomorrow.”
Young Prince Charles Ndikuma went home to his room and his kettle, drank his tea, ate a sandwich and didn’t sleep that night.
–
I am not amazed but incredibly depressed that people are not hanging the politicians (all of them from lamp-posts.)
The average age of death from Covid is 82.4 years.
The average age of death from all causes is 81.2 years.
So getting Covid extends our lives by 15 months!
And yet for 2 years and ongoing we allow this nonsense to rule our lives by government decree!
I don’t know how it’s come to this/ We really tried our best? No, we didn’t/haven’t, and a fair point. Thanks for the references to Henry George, who I don’t know, but shall look up, also People of the Abyss. We read Jack London at school, but not that one. Thank you.
I was born in the bomb ruins of the east end, Eat Ham. A tarpaulin for the hospital roof and the coldest winter in memory.
My great-grand father ended in the poor house (Like Barbara Windsor’s ancestors) and my grand mother had 14 children of which only 5 survived.
But they were tough.
My Grandfather carried 300 lb sides of beef from the depths of the cargo holds up ladders and planks to the warehouse on the docks, 8-10 hours a day, and thanked God that he had work to feed his family.
People of the Abyss :
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688
I also read some/most of Orwell’s early work.
His essay on the miners will break your heart or make you so proud that you burst.
I makes me realise just how fortunate I have been and just how many blessings I have received.
PS I loved the poem.
I have also known millionaires die of cold, and live in misery.
There is more to life than longevity, but I agree that life is not fair, but I’m not sure I’d want it to be.