Monday 4 March 2013

News, Views and Music Issue 184 (March 4th 2013)




March 4th:

Dear all, what has been happening to our stat counter recently?! We now sit on a collective 70,000 hits less than a fortnight after our grand fanfare over reaching 50,000! This can mean only one of four things: that our stat counter is bust, that Alan’s Album Archives really is taking off at long last as we keep saying every few weeks or so, that we’ve been under surveillance by the Coalition who are overcome by how logical and persuading our arguments are and so have decided to re-think their whole manifesto against the unemployed and disabled or that we’ve had our account so badly hit with spam messages for other sites that its increased its size by about 50%. Sadly our guess is the latter, given the amount of weird messages about youtube links we don’t have and articles on increasing audiences we haven’t written that we seem to have been getting. Sorry to anyone whose tried looking at our articles on ‘Venus and Mars’ ‘Dark Horse’ and the AAA DVDs and found hundreds of comments at the bottom – it takes far too much time and energy going through them all, especially when they began to repeat themselves. That said, there are some sensible comments there too so it looks as if not all of our new visitors are unwanted, in which case a big ‘hello!’ to all the new members we’ve made this week and a ‘thankyou’ for taking the time to read our site and come back to it later. Make yourself at home, get yourself a cup of coffee and put one of the records we’ve reviewed on, as one of our ‘guest’ comments suggested and put your feet up for a few hours with us. Ah, that’s better!

Something that’s not better is Coalition policy. Not content to demonise hard-working volunteers on benefits as ‘scroungers’ who don’t deserve a proper wage (see last week) its been on the news this week that a councillor from Truro announced in a temper during a crisis budget meeting that to save money the area should ‘put down all disabled children’. Now, to be fair, he apologised almost immediately, claimed the statement was made in the heat of the moment and before we get on out anti-conservative high horse is currently running as an independent (though he has been a tory in the past). That should have been an end of the matter and we can all move on. But an alarming number of MPs and fellow councillors seem to have agreed, saying that nothing is more important than the economic deficit and that everything should be done to keep costs down. Let’s just remind you again of what would happen if we didn’t get this deficit down: err, nothing much.

This is a symbolic gesture we’re talking about, so that international banks and traders are more likely to stay friends with the Disunited Kingdom. Well, other countries are suffering just as much if not worse and all that a strong credit rating will do is put you minutely nearer to the front of the queue when money starts being handed out again. There are other ways of looking at the world that are far more sensible. They say that nothing is more important than money? There are two, humanity and love. Those two words encompass everything about human civilisation and the way the world is run. It’s bad enough when they try to take our money away from us – it’s worse when they try to take innocent lives as well, even in jest or assume that some have less rights to live than others. The burden on the state doesn’t come from those asking for mere survival. The real burden on any state is those who have it really good in life and fail to pass that goodness on down to the people who need it most, tying up money in bank and savings accounts when it could be out there doing a really good job and helping the maximum amount of people. Hopefully this is a storm in a tea-cup that will blow over. I certainly hope so – and it wouldn’t be the first time. But then again, I’ve been alarmed how many times recently events like this one have become just another excuse for the privileged to talk about the few and I bid you all to keep that in mind the next time someone claims to have found an answer to the deficit: no answer that involves pain, suffering, injustice or the loss of life is any solution to a problem that, really, is only about pieces of green paper that only ever have a metaphorical not a monetary worth. We return you now to your regularly scheduled music review...

In the meantime, though, click here for a link that will take you to the thrilling and exhilarating AAA stories of the week (at least hope so – none of our guys seem to have been doing much so far this year...)

http://paper.li/f-1347835090

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