on the difficult choices

one of howard's golden glow mixes from this day in 2018; 

'the first half is pretty much jazz standards all the way. second half is more about the alice coltrane/ pharaoh sanders legacy.'

looks like this is going to be a (mostly) written in the morning blogpost. 

alice coltrane will be having an exhibit in LA in february to may next year. hopefully there will be a catalogue. there's some electric miles (sshh  or however many s's and h's that is) in howard's mix which clearly bears the influence of john mclaughlin. 

what did he get up to in the day yesterday? he took the eggs round to a neighbour. he walked the recycling bin down the drive. he attempted to relay the paving slabs in the garden closer to one of the raised beds and put the wooden edging next to it so that his mum has a path with clearer and more reliable footing (sadly with only a very moderate success it must be admitted).

it is the morning. horsemouth has checked the recycling bin (it has not yet been emptied). he has fed the chickens. there has been a heavy-ish dew but horsemouth doesn't know if that is enough to get him excused watering. yesterday he harvested some peas and some carrots and had them for dinner, they were most tasty but the quantities were not huge. there were quite a few tomatoes. 

on the difficult choices

it is all very well to say you have wracked your brains and can't see another way through but to borrow, tax and cut, your problem is that the population are frankly a bit mutinous (and you are short on prison spaces). the troubles of the past fourteen years (and longer) are in part due to a right wing media stirring the pot, they are in part due to persistent ruling class incompetence, but they are also due to a mutinous  people and the struggles of the populace to achieve political representation. people have been getting poorer in real terms all that time and society has been getting progressively less and less equal. 

the economy requires work to be done and it requires productivity but it also requires that people spend money and consume and as more and more people fall into poverty they cannot do this. 

it's no good having the solutions to these problems ready to go in your second term - the people cannot afford to wait. 

another round of austerity is not the difficult choice it is the easy one (it is the one sanctified by the economists an the already wealthy and the poor do not have the political representation or the class power to defend themselves). the difficult choice would be to tax the wealthy and the powerful and deal with the backlash in the media.

the one can of course provide cover for the other. 

today a shuffle round the garden and in the evening some bell-ringing.