Power to the people

Cicero is feeling guilty. And fears he may be giving his devoted and loyal readers the wrong impression. And he would like to make amends.

You may from recent posts be left with the impression that Cicero has something against this country’s Apparatchik class and that in his eyes these people can do no right. But in this post Cicero would like to suggest that those working to create wealth can at times be prone to much silliness too.

A few weeks back Little Ed, to much gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts from the Two Caesars and their acolytes, promised when speaking to the Last Lot, that should the Last Lot become the Next Lot after the Two Caesars have sought the judgement of the Vulgar Mob, that they would pass a law to cap energy price rises. A very relevant topic given the inflation busting price increases that our energy companies have just announced.

Now clearly such a law is more beneficial than debating and legislating to tax carrier bags to save the odd polar bear. Even if it will have the same effect as Canute as trying to stop the waves. You can’t buck the market. You can’t nationalise capitalism by getting them to pay for it. You really must stop listening to and reading the works of Pater, Little Ed.

Now such nonsense is bad enough. But it was trumped by the nonsense of one of those affected. A classic case of shooting yourself in the foot. 

Little Ed’s Marxist cant, while loved by the Vulgar Mob not unnaturally, was received with distinct unenthusiasm by those whose job it is to risk their capital to extract the oil and gas from the ground and to transport this vast distances so that we might keep our lights on, homes warm, and our offices and factories working at full stretch. Freezing prices artificially for 2 years will destroy investment, destroy jobs, destroy the economy. You might win some cheap votes, they warned, but such a policy will lead to blackouts, food riots and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

And while Cicero might agree with the sentiments, such dire warnings might have been a wee bit over the top.

And no sooner had their apocalyptic warnings started when, in a brazen piece of marketing cheek, and it was not a bad piece of marketing, one of their number announced that it was not possible to fix your energy prices not for two years, which would clearly result in the end of civilisation, but for 4 years.

The Marketing Head Honcho who signed off this campaign clearly was not cc-ed into the Armageddon memo.

So silliness is not just an Apparatchik monopoly.

So re-arrange these words into meaningful sentences. Pot black calling kettle. Left right hand doing not what hand knowing. Billy a who’s silly.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus. Semper. 

The yoof of today

As you know Cicero is well ancient.

He has seen generations come and go, the ebb and flow of fashion, and changing cultural, moral and philosophical mores. And if he was to rely solely on our august and venerable Fourth Estate for his news and information he would be holding his head in despair and concern. Fortunately Cicero is more pragmatic and realistic and refuses to let the supposed decline in our moral welfare as illustrated through the news headlines get to him.  And nor should they you.

Pick up any quality newspaper, so obviously that excludes the paper they call ‘The Grauniad’, any day of the week and you would quickly gain the impression that in this country our young people, and by that we mean kids less than 16, are doing nothing but getting pregnant, injecting drugs or turning up at school drunk. Some of them no doubt doing all three at the same time. And no doubt much more depravity besides.

Nero, Caligula and other depraved Roman Caesars of Cicero’s acquaintance would be proud of the yoof of this Green and Pleasant Land.

In denouncing our yoof the baying hounds of the Fourth Estate are led by the Daily Mail, whenever they are not having a go at Li’le Ed’s Pater.

So when you read on a daily basis that 5000 kids are turning up at school drunk; that every girl sits their GCSEs pregnant or when breast feeding; and that hundreds of thousands of 14 year olds have tasted coke, and we don’t mean the diet kind here, at least once a week, you do start to believe that the yoof of today are running amok and that our moral fibre is on the point of collapse.

And if you don’t believe Cicero on this, have a look at the Daily Mail today…or tomorrow…or the day after.

Now in Cicero’s humble opinion such statistics have a serious flaw that makes the data spurious-the numbers are generated by asking the yoof the last time they had sex, got drunk or intravenously injected.

In other words some researcher approached some acne ridden yoof and asked them these questions.

Now Cicero doesn’t know what you were like when you were a spotty adolescent, and Cicero can barely remember what he did and thought last week never mind when he was a pimply yoof, but does it not occur to anyone, and especially to those who ply their trade in the Fourth Estate, that the yoof might make especially unreliable witnesses? Has it not struck the finest of our investigative journalists, even those in the Daily Mail, that the respondents to these surveys might be exaggerating to impress?

Imagine the kudos a 15 year old would get among his peers by admitting that he is regularly drunk and that he can drink anyone under the table.

Naturally a 14 year old will acquire additional swagger by publicising that he or she is a 3 times a night kind of person.

And of course a 13 year old would look and appear older in front of his mates by letting any Tom, Dick or Harriet researcher that he was a total coke head.

And it is on the back of such dubiousity that tomorrow’s fish wrappers generate their lurid headlines. That our Apparatchiks and their policy makers develop their policies. That Mr Tonbridge Wells declares that he deplores the yoof of today.

And that is why Cicero can be more optimistic when he sees these headlines. Quite simply they are wrong.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus. Semper.