THE SUPERMARKET SWEEP: CONTROLLING EVERYTHING.

Have you ever wondered whilst you are wandering round the local town/city centre why it is all so similar? Is the local character diminishing? I’ll tell you what I think is to blame: the rise of supermarkets.

Once upon a time there were family businesses: butchers, bakers, family owned travel agents, wool/knitting shops, toy shops, sweet shops and so on. However more and more of these small family concerns are disappearing. Adam Smith, the “godfather” of free market economic thought believed that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers (no, it wasn’t Napoleon that first said it). He wrote his pro capitalist pap supporting individual greed as being good for the nation in 1776. I wonder if he would recognise the United Kingdom now, as the result of individual greed has been the impoverishment of 90% of the population and the disappearance of individual traders.

Supermarkets want to own everything. They may have started out as organizations that bought food in bulk to offer cheap prices but they weren’t content to stop there. Now they have opticians, travel agents, hairdressers, they even sell cars and insurance, mobile phones, you name it, they have it. Is this good for the economy? No it is not. Pretty soon our choices will be between one supermarket or another. They always choose a site out of town so that they can get you to buy petrol from them and the duplicitous tossers agree amongst themselves not to compete by setting up in different areas, therefore restricting choice.

When I go to my town centre in Corby, at least a third of the shop units are empty. The others are all national chains: Jane Norman, W.H. Smith, McDonalds, Burger King, Wilko and so on plus a lot of discount and pound shops. The nearest thing to a supermarket is the COOP extra, not the cheapest place to shop. If I go to Kettering, Wellingborough or Northampton they largely have the same choice of shops, although as Towns that have been established longer than our new town they still have some vestige of a traditional town, but they are rapidly losing that as the big boys buy everything up. Everywhere is becoming homogenous, there is little of the local character of places left.

We have a Tory government at the moment and they are pushing the same policies that they always do: restricting spending on the public sector, promoting big business interests and giving no help to anyone. Likewise the banks are following suit and are not lending money to prospective small business owners and they are squeezing everything out of existing small businesses. In my opinion both the banks and the government work to protect the big supermarkets because they have a lot of money and economic power.

Supermarkets are evil. They force down our farmers prices, they tell them what to grow, they exploit the third world and they limit choice. On top of all that they have caused the death of small businesses and destroyed the character of our town and city centers. 

I wish that there was something we could do about it. The only thing we can do is boycott them, but most of the sheeple will never go for that.  

THE LEGACY OF FUKISHIMA

The nuclear disaster at Fukishima over a year ago was a warning to humankind as to what can happen when you use a reactor to provide electricity. There was no terrorist attack, no accident caused by workers or work practices, there was an earthquake. Common sense should have told a nation prone to earthquakes that nuclear power was not their best choice for creating energy: then again, producing energy is only a secondary result from nuclear reactors, primarily they make poison for the world’s most powerful weapons. A year on from that disaster there is very little being said about it. The subject is treated as if it is over and done with. Of course, it isn’t because every living thing on earth will be affected by the radiation created by the collapse of the Fukishima nuclear plant.

Tests carried out in Harwell Radiation Laboratories in England show that airborne radiation in Japan is 100 times higher than the peak radiation at the time of the 1960’s nuclear testing. This was based on the amount of Cesium 137 in the atmosphere. The air quality is three times worse than after the Chernobyl incident, which has been estimated to have killed one million people to date. Details here The information was obtained from studying donated car air filters, but as the article states:

The estimates must be considered as conservative or low since the smallest particles go through the car air filters and emerge from the car’s exhaust. The smallest radioactive particles simply go through a human’s skin or go to the bottom of a human’s lungs and stay there. The poison radiates cells within a range extending 20 cells deep in all directions. The dead and dying or mutated cells become cancers and hundreds of other radiation related diseases.

In fact, a person only has to inhale a piece of cesium that is 1000^th of the size of a pinhead to risk getting Cancer. To make things worse the Japanese authorities are BURNING radioactive waste. As if there isn’t enough poison in the air, they are adding more! Now reactor four at Fukishima is collapsing. If this happens it has been estimated by some that Cesium 137 levels will be 85 times higher that the Chernobyl disaster. More here It is already being claimed that there is an increase in deaths in the USA because of Fukishima. It should also be remembered that as the nuclear plant is on the coast the disaster also led to thousands of gallons of radioactive water escaping in to the sea. 

 WHY ISN’T THIS FRONT PAGE NEWS? : Because big brother doesn’t want anti-nuclear sentiment to rise. If reactor number four does collapse it will devastate the world. The UK government has a public health campaign running currently that advises anyone who has had a cough for three weeks should go to a Doctor because they might have cancer. I wonder if we are already being affected by increasing radiation? Are more of us about to die of cancer?

One thing is for sure, if we are then we will die in ignorance.

MAKE MONEY FROM HOME? : NOT FROM SURVEYS

Being unemployable these days I have been looking for ways to make some money. I subscribe to “martins money tips”, an email from the consumer guy from GMTV. One email had an article on making money from home and suggested trying filling out surveys online: so I did. Frankly, it turned out to be a massive waste of time. Most of them suggest that you can earn around ten English pounds per month so I subscribed to a dozen. The companies involved were:

Valued opinions (pays cash), My survey (awards points), Toluna (points), Honest Rewards ( cash), Paid surveys 4me (points, I think), Wonderbug (points), Harris (Vouchers), IPSOS (points), Global test market (can’t remember), Opinion Outpost (points), Consumer opinion ( can’t remember), Springboard ( points), Maximiles (points). I may have got some of these wrong, as I have unsubscribed from them all and I am going on memory. Some of them send you several surveys a day. That’s ideal, you may think, until you answer ten or more qualifying questions after which you are told you are screened out of the survey. Others send one a day and chuck you out less often but offer small rewards. Finally there are the more infrequent ones, every few days or once a week or less. The cash incentive per survey is fifty pence or a pound usually. To get  vouchers  requires a lot of points, and I never got anywhere near earning enough for a reward.

After one month I reached the redemption target on ONE survey site, IPSOS. On all the others I was miles away from the required target. I wasted so many hours filling in surveys, some of which were absolutely mind numbingly boring. If you get a topic you like, for me that was technology, television, even the supermarket ones were ok, but some of them are about a certain product, a breakfast cereal, snack, which can be quite boring. Then you have the survey format to deal with. Some are very user friendly, nicely designed and offer you choices in the answers that are easy to pick from. Others look gaudy and leave you feeling frustrated by the lack of opportunity to say exactly what you want to. Some are very repetitive which annoyed me. To go through all that for precious little was a big waste of my time. I opted to send my Argos voucher earned at IPSOS to my son as it was his birthday. When it was arranged a message appeared on screen telling me it would take eight weeks to be delivered. EIGHT WEEKS! What a rip off!

I also noticed that I was suddenly getting a lot of spam from when I began doing surveys. There was definitely a connection between the two because now that I have stopped doing the surveys I have stopped getting the spam.

I guess we stop at homes must accept that society is woefully short of being able to provide decent work from home. We will just have to go on getting state benefits and living off the people who can work. I don’t know about the rest of you disabled people out there, but I don’t like being a scrounger. I want to contribute.

LIVING WITH DEMENTIA

My mother in law has Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed six years ago and for the last three years she has been prescribed Aricept. Every day, from six AM to One PM my sister in law stays with her. For the next two hours my son, her grandson sits with her until my wife gets in from work just after three. For four nights a week my wife stays with her mother, my sister in law stays with her the other three. The family do this because they want my mother in law to end her days at home and not in a care home. They give a lot but it is beginning to take its toll. When Prime Minister Cameron talks about his big society he should acknowledge the role played by unpaid carers. For one thing, how much money are they saving the state?

For six years they have watched their mother’s condition degenerate: each day seems to bring a new change as slowly Janet’s brain closes down, and she communicates less coherently and keeps obsessing on one theme for a day. Some days she looks for her coat and says that she wants to go home. We don’t know what she means. She doesn’t know where she is so she could mean that she wants to go to her own house thinking that she is somewhere else, or does she mean home to Scotland, to the Outer Hebrides? There is no way of telling. Janet calls everybody “Catriona”. That is my sister in laws name. Even if it is my son or myself that are with her we are called Catriona.  She gets confused and frustrated by being asked a question so if whoever is with her can’t catch on to the current obsession they can do nothing more than show patience, keep her happy and comfortable, and hopefully distract her.

Janet is 88: she has other health conditions that come with age. She has Pernicious Anaemia and Diabetes. This means giving her other medication along with her Aricept. Trying to give her pills is like dealing with a child: in fact, in behaviour and conversation that is exactly how she behaves with moods, tantrums and frustration commonplace. She cannot reason or express herself coherently any more. She is hardly eating and all awareness of social   etiquette has gone. She sometimes spits her food out, usually in to a bin, but not always. she was such a wonderful woman: Christian, caring, giving, loving and had very high standards in hygiene and social behaviour. Now she is confused and is no longer able to control her bodily functions. Being doubly incontinent means that costs have been incurred with bedding, mattress, even the carpet below the bed and extra washing killed off the washing machine. Despite all this a recent attempt to get an emergency grant from the department of work (lol) and pensions was refused as “There are more important cases to consider.” 

I have noticed my wife change over the years as the strain of caring takes its toll. She is up at 4:30 AM to wash and dress her mother before starting work at 7:00. She goes straight back to her mother’s at 3:30 after work to make her dinner, wash and change her and get her to bed. Driven by the love that she has for her mother she doesn’t take a break, and having seen more than one horrific documentary about the treatment meted out by carers, some of whom seem to be drawn to that line of work because it allows them to exercise their sadism against a helpless victim that can’t report it; not to mention the “helpers” who help themselves to their patients belongings. For such reasons my wife and her sister are reluctant to take help from outside. Every weekend, when I see my wife I see less sparkle in her eyes, she has no energy and she says that she is feeling like she doesn’t have a home because she is away so much. Her life is not her own, it is lived around the needs of another. Everything is on hold until the inevitable happens.

To lose someone to Alzheimer’s is a tragic loss indeed: you watch your loved one slowly disappear before they die. It is worse than death.