Over the last little while I have been talking to a lot of people. Not with just one aim in mind you understand, but as a result of having so much on the go at the same time. Regular readers of this page (I am assured there might be as many as two of you) will know that I do tend to bang on about politics a bit. Not as much as I used to, but a bit.

Combine that with a media career and what you get is someone who talks to a lot of people about a lot of different things so when somebody asks me that question; ‘What are you up to lately?’ I hardly know where to start.

So, I’ll start at the end. Which is where things sit right now…

Amongst the many ideas on the slate at the minute are;

A comedy short

As proof-of-concept for a comedy feature. If I say the words Baseball bats and Scotland – it’s exactly not what you think it is. We are putting together a kickstarter for that short and all I need to do is sit down and write the thing. If you liked Electric Man, you’ll like this. And no, it isn’t in the style of Ronnie Corbett. And neither am I. And now I’ve put this photo in here I do somewhat regret it. Moving on….

ETA: Filming after the summer holidays

Thriller/Action Feature

I have had a first draft of this ready for a while and since we are heading to London this May for a few meetings I shall be putting this out to a single trusted reader to get it in shape for May. We spent ages talking to industry figures at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival. My wife thinks I just go for the cake and wine and I do, but the talking is also work, trust me.

Anyway, this year we are going full on – we want to get some film making done no matter what – of course this isn’t the perfect  project  given that it is set in three different time periods in Venice, Lyon and London. So, you need to go where the money is. Glasgow is lovely for meeting people and it gives you no guarantees when you get a meeting in London but at least they might actually read the script and as a writer that’s about the best you can hope for.

ETA: Meetings in May

Documentaries

Half my week this week has been talking to people about a documentary we want to make. And to be honest this can be both uplifting and infuriating.

I spent three hours being told what kind of documentaries we couldn’t make in a meeting with STV at Film City in Glasgow but you never know we might be able to get a good story together to fit in between episodes of Coronation Street – I wish I was joking but you need to make it half an hour so that it fits between two episodes. I will keep you updated on that. I didn’t even know that there were two episodes in one night. Is the second one a kind of, after-the-watershed, fifty shades of Corrie?

Anway, the STV opportunity is open to people who have had publicly shown documentaries at festivals or on TV and you can find out about it at the Scottish Documentary Institute. They are worth checking out if you are that kind of film maker even if you don’t currently feel like making a half hour programme that suits viewers of Corrie.

So Friday was kinda frustrating. I went in with three ideas only to discover that of those three only one of them stood even half a chance. Hey ho, that’s the business. I go in for lots of things and get about 1 in 10. The next day was better though.  Our documentary idea is about the future and how that future need not be the dark and bleak thing everyone seems to think it’s going to be. Having just begun the research (fitting it in between other jobs) I am more hopeful than I have been in ages.

A few weeks back I spoke with Professor Colin McInnes from University of Glasgow. You think you are clever until you start talking to people like him. He’s an expert on solar sails and holds the James Watt chair currently. He said something that I hadn’t thought of before. In a conversation about the future of the planet he said ‘Artists are all doom and gloom, engineers are all optimists’ because…

Give engineers enough time and money and they’ll fix anything

Now, he’s an engineer and so I thought he might be a bit biased. Then yesterday  I went to talk to Mark Stevenson: this was just a chat and he wasn’t talking ‘on the record’ or anything but I hope he won’t mind me plugging his show a little bit. He’s just written his second book and that’s great but he also makes a living talking to organizations and governments about the future. Because he sits and thinks about it whilst they generally don’t. I have started his first book and I heard the talk and it cheered me up no end.

It takes him an hour to tell you that we might, just might, be not-fucked. The future can be beautiful if we just let it be.

Highlights were…. people are making diesel from air, the next generation (and some of this generation) should be able to live healthy lives and reach 120. Oh, and there is no need for famine at all. The books are seriously worth checking out. I wanted to make a documentary about how there is a possible future that isn’t a shitstorm – then discovered that there are people all around the world actively inventing it at a rate that would bamboozle you. The talk was the first event in a long time where I walked in feeling one way (a bit meh) and walked out feeling like there was a reason to smile.

ETA: Documentary – who knows. part 1, this year.

ETA: The future – Sooner than you think.

 

 

In my very last post I said it would get worse. It did.

Well, there’s good news and bad news and good news.

First, the good news and that comes from Abraham Lincoln (via a French bloke called Jacques Abbadie who may have nicked it from Aesop in the first place).

The good news is...

That Donald Trump has forgotten this one, simple, truism. Which is unusual for a con-man. You see, his whole schtick has been that he could do just about anything if he was a Republican; You can go back and check him saying it on video. That he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and so forth… and no-one wanted to believe that he was right.

But it might be the last time he told the actual truth.

All of which puts us here. At the mercy of a madman who is struggling to keep a grip on reality.

The American media has gone into overdrive (I know, I watch it constantly) as people debate the facts, the post-facts and the alternative facts – filling up air time with babble, running around to check the ‘facts’ before another tweet appears and another ‘fact’ needs to be checked.

Why is that good news?

I’m glad you asked.

It’s good news because those words -wrongly attributed to Lincoln – are coming back to haunt President Trump. No matter how many times a day he tweets, no matter what he forces his underlings to defend from a podium or on a news show he can only ever win the support of his base. He already had the most votes he was ever going to get and even then it was 3 million votes short of a majority.

Trump seems to think that by continuing in the same vein he will get the same results and that, like so much that he believes, is simply not realistic or even real. So, a majority of Americans are actually sane and we should be grateful for that. However…

The bad news…

Very few of those sane people seem to be in the US Congress. Despite the fact that this so-called President has already done several things that are, in my opinion, impeachable there are no moves to impeach him because only the Republican majority could do that. And they are clinging on to the tiger’s tail in the hopes that somehow, we don’t know how, but somehow, they make it to the next election.

They aren’t going to impeach him until it is too late.

I was speaking to a friend the other day and had the idea (like a lot of other people) that Trump is an opportunistic hazard waiting to become a dictator. Yes, yes, yes… it’s all Steve Bannon but we are judged by our actions and it is Trump who signs  the orders. It didn’t take me, or other people, long to make the link to the possibility of a Reichstag incident. You can read about that here.

A single incident that became the basis for a complete shutting down of civil liberties, the judiciary… we know the rest.

And, I had to admit, I was worried about that. Until I thought of another incident that would be even worse.

The Gulf of Tonkin – 1964 –

Initially reported as two separate attacks with the North Vietnamese firing first (they didn’t) on the  USS Maddox in the first encounter and with sketchy details of the second encounter the combined incidents were used as the basis for Gulf of Tonkin resolution allowing Lyndon Johnson to counteract communist aggression in the area.

You can see where this leads already, can’t you?

The second incident (August 4th, 1964) never even happened but it was still used as the basis for congressional action. The orange bawheid (a particularly Scottish insult) is already seeing things that aren’t there – illegal voters, inauguration crowds, bowling green attacks – so there is no evidence to suggest that he would be calm and measured should something actually happen. More to the point, he has made up so much already that another fiction isn’t going to pose a problem.

So, something or nothing happens in the middle east and President Tangerine demands the power to support (insert allies here…Israel, Saudia Arabia… doesn’t matter) which gets passed because all he is asking for is the power to act. It doesn’t mean he’s going to.

Of course, it does.

A war in the middle east (we should have kept the oil, maybe we will next time) serves multiple purposes. He’s already put Iran ‘on notice’ and hinted what he would do. All he needs is the match and if he doesn’t get one then he’ll probably just imagine one.

But that doesn’t give him his final result. The war is not an end in itself. Sure, it might be to some people but not to our peachy pal. No, his final win is the shutting down of the protests. Creating an atmosphere where he has to be supported because that is what his fragile ego needs.

The GOP already enacted a state of emergency this week I hear, in a midwestern state, so that they could over turn some ethics laws that were proving troublesome. Do you even doubt for a second that this moron would hesitate to do the same in case of war?

But I promised to end on good news…

And strangely that good news is his insanity. The good news is that he will throw anyone under the bus to make himself feel better; His staff, the congress and (most importantly) the intelligence community are currently coming to terms with this madness but one thing is utterly clear – he will not save them. He will not protect them and as a result, they will not protect him in the end.

Do not try to impeach him first. Go after his aides and allies.

Let the Republican leadership know that when this all falls apart they better have damn good reasons for letting him go this long. That there will be hearings about who knew what, when . And what kept them from addressing the Russian interference.

Keep up the protests, hive off his support and leave him in his bathrobe watching TV – alone in a big house, with his inadequate personality and unable to trust anyone.

They cannot change the world for him. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time… and so, eventually, he will turn on them.

Then they will then turn on him.