No side effects from yesterday’s vaccine.

GP called to discuss my imminent demise. She said I’m “a fat bastard and need to get out more.” I need another blood test next week to confirm. She was very nice about it.

Getting all the wrapping done as things arrive this year. Leaving it all until xmas eve is too stressful. Easier to hide, too.

Big kid reckons that the two boxes that arrived yesterday, and that I refused to open, contained xmas presents.

His theory is that I will open them to check that they are what the kids want, then return them with a note asking for them to be forwarded on to Santa for delivery early on xmas morning.

Blood test results suggest I’m in imminent danger of heart attack, kidney failure and cancer.

I don’t understand how people think Joe Biden is a good guy. He’s probably done more than anyone to drag the political centre to the right, and paved the way for fascism.

Suggesting that pardoning his drug addict son is somehow good and righteous is obscene.

Blaming smartphones is laughable.

Had my pneumonia vaccine and diabetes blood test this morning. Nurse was very kind and thoughtful. I didn’t pass out, although the blood test was quite painful. Now I have vaccine side effects to look forward to later…

Years ago, I would grab a Greggs sausage roll every morning for breakfast on the way into work.

Is this the end for Greggs sausage rolls?

Our little tree now has lights.

Kids were excited but chilling out now to carols.

I knew where this is before clicking through.

Some more pizza prep and cooked pics. 🍕🍕🍕

Boys are having so much fun on a Portal call with their “Papa” (my Dad, their Grandad).

Making pizza.

Dough has risen once, now going back under the cling film to rise again.

Used wholemeal bread flour as I didn’t have any of my usual white. Didn’t use as much semolina flour as usual, either, but what was leftover. Mainly pasta flour and some white rye.

Salt, sugar, honey, olive oil all added to the mix (along with yeast and hand hot water, obvs).

Kids decorated our little xmas tree, but I left the batteries in the lights all year, so they’re ruined.

I think I might have binned the star lights I usually hang in the window - a relief as they cause a disproportionate amount of stress untangling and hanging them.

“Volcano with exploding baked bean and cheese lava” for lunch.

Big kid is getting one of his five a day.

Little kid not interested (despite his love of volcanoes, lava and baked beans).

Breathing calmed down so went for a short walk to the corner shop with Kid A where he bought a can of baked beans with his own cash.

Then we walked around the long block talking about how those beans are now his beans, what would happen to the beans if I reimbursed him with a bank transfer, what he could do with a bottomless backpack, the striking similarity between the Chinese lion adorning a neighbour’s drive wall and the Chinese lions outside the Chinese restaurant in Spilsby, and how Lime bikes are taking over the world.

Breathless!

A million housewives every day
Pick up a can of beans and say
“What an amazing example of
Synchronisation!”

Or in my case, “£1.59?! What a rip-off!”

Retreated to the relative safety of the bedroom where I’m finding solace with Radiohead and OK Computer on a loop.

An airbag saved my life

Wife wants to know what I think about the Assisted Dying Bill.

She’s strongly in favour: “It can’t come soon enough for some people,” she says.

Breathless again. Ffs.

ON THE BALES

The recent farmers' protests in the UK and a comment on micro.blog about old style rectangular straw bales reminded me (again) of my own farming history.

[@Miraz](https://micro.blog/Miraz) It has taken me many years to get used to this way of packing hay. I grew up with the old rectangular bales that we had to fill the loft with for the horses' winter. What do they call this big rolls of hay? Also "bales"?

Now, obviously, without farmers we don’t eat. All those fields left to grow wild kindly paid for by the European Union… oh, wait, that freebie blew away in the Farage wind and now costs us £2.4 billion of our own money every year.

Talking of wind, apparently the new inheritance tax farmers are protesting will incentivise them to use or sell their farmland for use as wind or solar farms. Presumably to keep the lights and the air conditioning on for the rich when it all goes tits up, while the rest of us scrabble around blaming immigrants and woke lefties.

Farmers are notoriously tight-fisted, as I related in my own story about having my farm labouring wages deducted by the farmer after he gave me a lift home. Tight as a duck’s arse as we used to say. Steve, the farmer’s foreman, walked like a duck. Probably because he spent all day sitting on a tractor shovelling straw bales on to trailers for us to stack.

My first day on the bales ended in disaster. Steve could have lifted me down on his tractor shovel thing, as he he did many times thereafter, but instead allowed newbie me to slide down the ropes we’d just tightened.

My fingertips took several days to regrow. I had fifty pence deducted from my wages for the cost of replenishing the first aid kit, and received a straight knockout for bleeding on the ropes.

Baling was actually decent fun when you got used to the physical aspect of the work. I worked with my mate who lived on the same road, and it was a challenge to stack the bales in the right way and learn particular tricks for making them fit into impossibly small spaces. The lorry drivers often helped and, being Northumbrians, they were usually a good crack. They wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible and to make sure their load wasn’t going to topple over on the long road back to Cockermouth.

The days were often hot and long, and I would spend a lot of time visualising my first pint of the evening when we were done. But invariably, by the time I’d got home, soaked in the bath, eaten and gone out, the last thing I wanted was beer. I usually drank a shandy instead and went home for an early night.

BYE BYE BIDEN

Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic 📚

Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. (p. 127)

This seems to sum up his career neatly. Far from the popular public image that he has cultivated and that the media have happily gone along with for the most part.

Foreign policy

“I’m not going to start World War Three for you!”

Not Biden, but British army General Mike Jackson refusing to follow Biden’s friend General Wesley Clark’s orders to confront Russia in Kosovo. (p. 172)

The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. It seems that Biden wants to go out with a bang, despite his previous utterances.

”There is no such thing as a winnable nuclear war.” (p. 152)

Biden saying one thing and doing another is characteristic of his entire political career. He’s not unique in that respect, of course, and perhaps he’s actually better at it than most. He did get elected president after all.

Israel

Biden was the ultimate Friend of Israel. He helped provide Israel with huge amounts of US aid money, and Israel lobbyists on his campaign staff returned the favour helping Biden raise huge amounts of money to run his various election campaigns.

Biden spent his entire career giving unqualified support to Israel, and claimed that Americans “couldn’t afford” to criticise Israel in public.

Yugoslavia

Toward the end of Bush’s term, the ex-communist Eastern European country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a miasma of nationalism and ethnic and religious sectarianism, forces unleashed by a Western-imposed program of economic “shock therapy” that in essence exported Western neoliberal policies to the once prosperous country, running its living standards into the ground. War soon broke out. (p. 156)

Later, Biden agitated for Clinton’s military intervention in Serbia, which lay the foundations for future “humanitarian” bombing campaigns elsewhere.

If you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war. (p. 158)
###Iraq

Despite [or because of?] his role in starting the war, Biden was still considered one of the party’s wisest heads on foreign policy. (p. 173)

George W. Bush apparently followed Biden’s instructions on selling the war on Iraq to the American people and the United Nations.

Biden proposed an ethno-nationalist “three state solution” for Iraq similar to Israel’s proposals to came up Arab states into weaker sectarian units.

He proposed to Balkanise Iraq into smaller ethnic and religious sectarian states with limited freedom of movement and borders controlled by foreign troops.

A bit like Gaza and the rest of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories now.

Flawed as it was, the plan burnished Biden’s credentials as a foreign policy expert. (p. 179)

Iraq duped Biden forcing withdrawal of US troops. In response, ISIS ‘emerged' from an oppressed religious minority.

War on Terror

Biden’s ‘counter-terrorism plus’ policy saw the US bomb seven Muslim countries without declaring war, much like Israel is now doing with more American bombs.

That helped to fuel anti-Americanism and an immigration and prisons crisis.

Instead of providing homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails. (p. 85)

Domestic policy

Race relations

Racist Clinton doubled the American prison population and achieved the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Mostly with black people.

This policy usefully helped to reduce official unemployment figures and paint Clinton’s neoliberalism as an economic miracle.

Another lesson Biden had first wrongly internalised from American apartheid: that people of different backgrounds simply couldn’t live together in harmony. (p. 177)

Instead Biden backed segregation (busing) and individual states' rights over a united federal states of America.

Women’s rights

”I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” (p. 184)

Biden on the Roe v. Wade decision in 1974

Biden’s neoliberalism

Biden presented as a progressive liberal on the side of the working class. But he spent his career siding with Republicans and moving the Democrats ever further to the right.

At one time even a former Klan recruiter thought Biden had gone too far. Another Klan leader praised Biden’s election platform claiming it was as if it had been written by a Klansman.

Supporting spending cuts

Biden said Jimmy Carter was nothing special, and welcomed Reaganomics as a step in the right direction. Although in typical Biden fashion he also claimed Reagan’s first budget would be an economic disaster before voting for it (along with 29 other Democrats).

Reagan’s cuts cost 270,000 jobs and reduced access to financial support for millions of Americans. Rather than reducing the deficit, it increased it, and made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Like Thatcher in Britain, Reagan’s greatest achievement was in transforming his opposition into his mirror image. You still get a choice at the polls, but there’s very little, if any, substantive policy difference between the two.

”Biden isn’t a liberal anymore.”

Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, who lost to Biden in the 2012 vice-presidential election, but declared a more important victory.

Biden’s support for tax cuts for the rich wasn’t a one-off. This was a repeated pattern of voting indicating where his true loyalties lay. Indeed, later he proposed his own tax cuts that were more severe than Reagan’s, and “right out of the Tea Party playbook”.

Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. (p. 68)

No longer aligned with the working class, Biden now focused on the middle class, solidly Conservative, tax-and-government fearing supporters of the super-rich.

”It’s the middle class, stupid.” (p.147)

Much like the South where Biden always pivoted for support of anti-union, pro-slavery and white supremacist votes. Biden could have tried to bring Southern voters to the Democrats, but instead chose to lead the Democrats to align with the politics of the South.

Biden had successfully facilitated the decades-long wholesale robbery of working- class Americans by law enforcement. (p. 91)

Enter Bill Clinton, who with Biden’s full support, carried on Reagan’s economic policies leading to ever more cuts in government spending and hardship for millions more Americans.

Biden again offered trillions of dollars of cuts to retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, giving Mitch McConnell everything he asked for.

As president, much of Obama’s job involved cleaning up messes that Biden had helped create. (p. 191)

The major legislative accomplishments that Biden had racked up in prior decades had succeeded because they had been in pursuit of Republican goals. (p. 199)

Biden did what he always did: plead fealty to working class voters in public speeches filled with references to his Scranton roots while privately appealing for the support of big-money interests. (p. 214)

By 2020, Biden had shifted (and shifted the Democrats) so far to the right, he was finally electable and the safest establishment option to defeat Trump as president.

I bought an acupressure mat (bed of “nails”) a couple of months ago to help with back pain, relaxation and hopefully to help give me a bit more energy.

I used it for half an hour or so a couple of times a week, while listening to music, and it helped with all of those things.

I hadn’t used it for a month, though, due to not feeling well with one thing and another.

Today I fell into a deep sleep after half an hour on it and had to crawl into bed for another ninety minutes. Still feeling groggy.

I celebrated Thanksgiving only once in my life, and it was certainly memorable.

Looking at The Royal Observatory in Greenwich for my space obsessed four year old. No under fives!

(They do have a special “Ted’s Space Adventure” for 4-7 year olds, but it looks naff and he wants to see the real thing.)

[@Denny](https://micro.blog/Denny) [@antonzuiker](https://micro.blog/antonzuiker) my four year old is obsessed with the solar system and Jupiter in particular. He would love this!

Notionally returned to wfh today.

✅ Made chilli sans carne
✅ Emailed work to say I will try to ease myself back into things, but still feeling exhausted
✅ Declined work meetings on health grounds
✅ Had a three hour nap
✅ Woke just in time for a late lunch
✅ Picked kids up from school