Some stuff worth reading...on open borders, Bowie, vegans and High Street robots (plus other goodies too!)

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The Islamophobic Case for Open Borders

"In America, 77% of those raised Muslim, are still Muslim, according to Pew. That’s a fairly high retention rate, but Islam in the West still loses about one-fourth of each Muslim-born generation. At that rate of member loss, less than half of the descendants of Muslims would still be Muslim after three generations. Germany’s assimilation of Turkish migrants seems to illustrate how this process plays out. Less than 2% of the German population self-identifies as Muslim. Almost twice as many people in Germany are of Turkish descent, and there are also substantial numbers of Arabs. Since Turkey’s population is almost exclusively Muslim, it seems that Islam must have lost roughly half of the natural increase of its emigrants in Germany to apostasy."

Bowie was an entrepreneur before he was an artist or performer

"I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend. I didn’t want to be a trend, I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new ideas and new perspectives. And so I had to govern everything around that. So I pulled myself in, and decided to use the easiest medium to start off with -- which was rock and roll -- and to add bits and pieces to it over the years, so that by the end of it, I was my own medium."

Why councils are shutting down 'stop smoking' services

'Councils remain committed to helping smokers quit, however they face significant cuts to public health budgets this year, and spending large volumes of money on a service people are not using will fast undermine the cost-effectiveness of providing it.'

The powerful state damages society - always

"Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power."

People promoting meat don't like vegans much

"A provocative advertisement encouraging Australians to eat lamb has been criticised for discriminating against vegans and portraying excessive violence.

The advertisement, which has gone viral on social media and been viewed more than 250,000 times on YouTube, depicts a military campaign to bring Australians home from overseas so that they can eat lamb on Australia Day.

In a controversial scene that has reportedly sparked more than 60 complaints to the advertising watchdog, a team of special agents break into an Australian man’s apartment in New York and ignite a blowtorch after he reveals he has become a vegan."

You can watch the ad here.

Donald Trump and Bernie Saunders are mining the same seam of dissatisfaction

"While the white working class is shrinking in the US, it remains the largest voting block in the country. That may be why leaders of both parties are concerned that white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest and South, are supporting populist candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They don’t understand that many of these voters blame Wall Street, corporate leaders, and politicians – the East Coast establishment –for destroying their jobs and communities over the past few decades."

Robots will save the High Street

"Through all these varying examples, we see an automation of retail that develops itself in full speed. Whether it are new types of vending machines that help increase consumptive convenience, offering fresh and healthy products 24/7, or technology that changes our traditional ideas of ordering and preparing food in restaurant — it’s clear that retail landscapes and practices of consumption are strongly influenced by a sense of automation."

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The happiest of happy times - David Bowie and the remembering of childhood

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And we were a happy crew, me and you
We were a happy crew, me and you

Now this isn't a piece about how important David Bowie is to me and how my life will never be the same now he's gone - the great man's relevance to my life is about happenstance, about the fact that he was there at a happy time.

I've written before how the presence of David Bowie in my life was only realised some while after that presence had ended - for the simplest of simple reasons. The great man was still to be great and his nascent stardom wasn't of interest to a nine year old. But now, when I think about Bowie it's not a memory of a concert or how his music and lyrics meant something but of a time and place when I was part of a happy crew.

And this is how remembering works. It's one thing to speak of the influence and importance of a man just gone - if nothing else, within his genre Bowie was both influential and important. It's quite another for that passing to bring about a recollection of our own life and experience. I guess this is why those closest too us are mourned (and missed) most.

This remembering - informal, emotional, connected remembering - is even stronger when, as is my case with Bowie, when the recollection is of fun, happiness, joy and pleasure. I described the time I met Bowie like this:

For us boys this was brilliant - we weren't interested in the presence of the rock god but in the prospect of jungle adventure, tree climbing and the discussion of those things that matter to nine-year old boys. And we were looked after in that slightly offhand but rather sweet way of hippies. Someone fed us - usually something slightly spicy and pasta-y, probably vegetarian. It might have been Richard's mum, or the couple with a little toddler called Siddhartha, maybe even the rock god himself, this didn't impinge on us - we just welcomed the food.

Richard Finnegan and I were - in Spirogyra's words - a 'happy crew, me and you". And my remembering those happy times - and for me being ten was great - was triggered by the sad death of David Bowie. So in writing that they were the happiest of happy times, I have the child of a little tear in my eyes. Both at the death of a man who, in the tiniest of ways, was part of my life and also at remembering something fine that cannot be recreated - there's no going back to being ten except in that remembering:

When the subbuteo men broke (and finally refused to be re-glued) we played the game with my sisters farm set – minutes to go and it’s Sheep 2, Cows 1…

And climbing the cherry trees and digging for Roman remains in the garden (which of course we found in abundance)

Playing cricket with a big plastic ball and the roses as fielders – and ducking my Mum’s sandals when we knocked a flower off

Back then bikes were old, slightly rusty and lacked brakes – but we still raced down The Glade (with my little brother in the old pushchair – and that didn’t even have steering)

I hope - and know it's probably, mostly true - that today's nine and ten year olds have the same happiest of happy times. And I know that there will be something, not always a sad thing like a death, that will trigger the memory of those times, will bring the recollection and reflection - even the ghost of a smile to their lips. For me the opening chords of 'Space Oddity' will always take me back to that garden on Foxgrove Road, to the hippy bloke with the beard doing yoga, to Siddhartha (who'll be in his late forties now) and to our happy crew crashing through the undergrowth hunting aliens or seeking lost treasures.

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School friends, parties and a rock god: commenting on Katie Hopkins

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My best mate at primary school was called Richard Finnigan. He was the sort of kid who Katie Hopkins would dislike:

Call me controlling, call me ruthlessly aggressive. But I'm convinced one of the best things I can do for my children - India, eight, Poppy, seven, and Max, four - is to choose their friends for them.

Richard's parents were separated and, since it was the 1960s and a Catholic school, this was a big deal. Moreover Richard's Mum, Mary, was a real hippy - trips to Kathmandu and everything - who famously lived with a rock god.

Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger.  Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street.

So it's no surprise that, when Richard had a birthday party, only two of us - me and Andy Bower - turned up. You know - drugs, long hair, tut, tut.

The Finnigan's lived in one of those huge Victorian houses on Foxgrove Road (now mostly demolished and replaced with soul-less blocks of nice flats or twee little cul-de-sacs of town houses). The house had a huge and rather overgrown garden, a tangle of rhododendrons, self-seeded ash and sycamore and the vestiges of paths, statues and ponds that marked its former glory.

For us boys this was brilliant - we weren't interested in the presence of the rock god but in the prospect of jungle adventure, tree climbing and the discussion of those things that matter to nine-year old boys. And we were looked after in that slightly offhand but rather sweet way of hippies. Someone fed us - usually something slightly spicy and pasta-y, probably vegetarian. It might have been Richard's mum, or the couple with a little toddler called Siddhartha, maybe even the rock god himself, this didn't impinge on us - we just welcomed the food.

Parents who want to control the fun of their offspring or who think that somehow the thing we disapprove of in the parents will rub off on our children are telling us more about their own inadequacies than anything else. And, at school, children will make friends with who they wish to not who their controlling mums want them to be friends with.

Perhaps Katie should ease up a little - rather than taking the ridiculous view that consorting with thick children will make her children thick, she should perhaps consider whether her controlling nature might just be damaging them.

Mind you this is the woman who thinks that people who do things she disapproves of should pay more tax, so discovering she's bringing up her children to be ghastly little fascists like her shouldn't surprise us, should it?

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