Categories
All in the Mind

The Mental Health Trap Revisited 

Everyone needs emotional wellbeing, a sense of purpose and belonging in this world. We may use different criteria to measure our success and rely on help and friendship from others to varying extents, but we all need some inner serenity to keep going in life. Mental health may superficially describe your psychic fitness, but the term nearly always implies its opposite as in mental illness. Mental health services are little more than rebranded psychiatric services, but with a vastly expanded remit to monitor the behaviour of anyone who fails to fall into line or is just a wee bit weird. The new catch-all moniker for socially awkward personalities has normalised proactive psychiatric screening from cradle to grave. 

Once you contextualise your challenges in terms of subjective psychobabble labels assigned to you from a checklist of observed mannerisms, others will view your trials and tribulations as neurological defects that need lifelong professional treatment. It’s the medicalisation of the human experience. To complicate matters, genuine physiological handicaps, alongside a whole host of environmental factors, may play a key role in shaping personality profiles. Childhood socialisation patterns evolve around play. If you’re not very good at ball games, you may well prefer more solitary pursuits like building Lego or Meccano models. With the advent of video games, smart phones and tablets, children now spend much less time engaged in unstructured outdoor play. Media reports and societal fears about child abductions have led to increased vigilance, reducing opportunities for spontaneous outdoor play. This is a self-reinforcing trend. It’s not much fun heading down the park with a ball, if there’s nobody else to play with. We’ve also seen a generational shift from a high-trust to a low-trust and more risk-averse society, leaving children little freedom outside the confines of their bedrooms immersed in a virtual reality beyond their parents’ sphere of influence.  

In traditional societies, these relative strengths and weaknesses tended to balance out as sooner or later we would meet others with similar interests. We did not diagnose young boys more interested in toy trains than football with autism and neither did we diagnose their hyperactive peers who could not concentrate long enough to learn their times tables with ADHD. In the modern age of mechanical wizardry and heavy industry we had plenty of space for a diverse range of skillsets, requiring a mix of physical dexterity, precise hand-eye coordination, fast mental arithmetic, analogical reasoning and extreme attention to detail, all tasks we are increasingly delegating to artificially intelligent machines. 

More formal social etiquette along the lines of “Good Morning, Mrs Green” with its simple conventions papered over the cracks that emerge in more nuanced postmodern communication styles encoded with neurolinguistic programming and personalised messaging. When London Underground stopped addressing passengers as ladies and gentlemen in favour of “Hello, everyone” lest they assume their gender or age, it confirmed that authorities considered the great unwashed plebs as little more than zoo animals who must be kept in a permanent state of puerile docility. The manufactured rage against the machine of my youth, expressed largely through pop music and choreographed countercultures, has now become the new normal. The transient identity groups of mods, rockers, hippies, metalheads, punks and goths of the 1960s, 70s and 80s would later morph into mental health labels, mass-marketed medical conditions and gender identities. At least we had a perception of independent creativity, but these days we subject our inner selves to trained professionals who often pander to our counter-cultural predilections to win favour with us.  

My main gripe with the mental health mantra is neither the importance of spiritual awareness nor the challenges of an increasingly atomised and hyper-surveilled society.  The problem is that it empowers the state, in close liaison with its corporate partners, to delve into every aspect of our private lives, and more disturbingly, to identify individuals who are, to put it mildly, more trouble than they’re worth. 

Clinical depression and personality disorders are now among the leading entitlements for long-term incapacity benefit, something that has risen sharply since the late 1980s and now accounts for 6 to 7% of the working age adults in the UK, but still around 3% in other comparable European countries owing to different eligibility criteria. However, in an apparent U-turn the Labour-branded government plans to reduce the current 2.6 million on ESA or UC (universal credit) by 1 million before 2030 at a time of rising unemployment, economic stagnation and smart automation. Sooner or later something will have to give. If governments prioritise pandemic planning, wars, refugees and climate change, they will logically have to make cuts elsewhere. Labour, more than any other party, has championed the welfare state. Its adversaries have accused Labour administrations of fostering a culture of workless welfare dependency. Now Labour is pulling the plug on some of the most vulnerable in society, while simultaneously fast-tracking the assisted dying bill with provisions to allow people with insurmountable mental illnesses to choose the easy way out. 

Many parents had their children diagnosed with one label or another to gain access to additional support at school. Others sought professional help as adults to deal with despondency or toxic relationships at work, often following the advice of mainstream media influencers or well-meaning acquaintances. The labels were at best only a means to get more help and I now believe that, without any neurophysiological causes such as brain damage, they have hindered more than helped us, often preventing us from identifying more immediate roadblocks to success in life. 

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, unemployment in the UK remained well below 2% with most teenagers leaving school at 15 or 16 and relatively few going on to higher education. If you could hold down a job into your mid 20s, chances are you could afford to move out of your parental home, get married and start a family. Councils would prioritise local families on low incomes and throughout the 1960s to late 1990s more and more families, often with only one income, could afford to buy a house with the average salary-to-house-price ratios well below 5. By the turn of the millennium, nearly 70% of households were owner-occupied. Then property prices sky-rocketed with a typical three-bedroom costing 10x or even 15x the average annual salary in many regions. Employers began to prefer ready-trained imported workers and failed to invest in local talent often complaining about bad attitudes among the products of British state schools and colleges.  

Unsurprisingly, a growing proportion of young men and women fail to reach the key milestones of early adulthood, settling down with a clear path ahead before they hit forty. Many remain in a permanent state of limbo with a tapestry of fragmented relationships and uninspiring short-term jobs. It is no surprise that with so much uncertainty about their future in a rapidly changing cultural landscape, more and more youngsters succumb to self-destructive behaviours, such as drug addiction or emotionally draining fixations with perceived bodily imperfections. We need to look at society rather than desperate expressions of discontent with a world that no longer makes any sense to many of us. 

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics War Crimes

Pawns on the Grand Chessboard 

 Arms manufacturers are the big winners of the tumultuous events in the public-facing citadels of power across the Western world over the last couple of weeks. Just as the new White House administration tried to broker a peace deal with Russia over the three-year old war over Eastern Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen’s EU and Sir Keir Starmer’s UK have announced the biggest increase in military spending since the fall of the former Soviet Union. Their carefully choreographed pronouncements elicit disturbing levels of self-righteous groupthink that tolerate no dissent from unconditional support for Zelensky’s regime. 

 If you disagree with the transfer of hundreds of billions of € to the Military Industrial Complex, you are, in the closed minds of mainstream groupthinkers, a traitor to their warped vision of liberal democracy, which means compliance with the emerging corporate dictatorship of BlackRock, Vanguard, the ECB and insidious NGOs. Any divergence from the new party line, as promoted indefatigably by all the main media outlets around Europe, is predictably labelled either pro-Putin or far-right. 

 The same nefarious operators who had so successfully persuaded successive US administrations to squander trillions of dollars on disastrous regime-change wars had apparently moved shop to a more bellicose Europe. When it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, the gut feeling of most ordinary Europeans was to steer clear of foreign conflicts and limit any intervention to humanitarian aid and arms embargoes. The French and German governments both distanced themselves from the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq back in 2003. By contrast, Americans were much more receptive to the kind of blanket humanitarian war propaganda pumped out by CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS and MSNBC, especially if the actions of a foreign regime posed a threat to Israel, evoking memories of the Holocaust. 

Since 9/11, the spectre of international terrorism has justified most military adventures. Alas, the Ukraine-Russia war evokes deep-seated emotions among millions of Europeans that stem from the tumult and troubled outcomes of the World Wars and 45 years of Soviet repression of national identities. The peoples of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland have longstanding grudges against Russia for its past invasions of their countries before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, while the citizens of most other former Warsaw Pact countries looked west after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Elsewhere in Europe, while the Cold War shaped feelings toward Russia before 1991, tensions have only recently resurfaced with an intriguing twist. 

 For the best part of two decades in the absence of ideological clashes, it seemed Russia would eventually fully integrate with the rest of Europe, but rather than follow the West’s newfound love of postmodern woke ideology, Russia became a bastion of social conservatism. Back in the 1960s and 70s, left-wing radicals were much more likely to sympathise with the USSR than socially conservative Christians and the patriotic working classes. When the Labour Party under Michael Foot advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1983 general election, its vote plummeted to a post-war low, despite industrial decline, high unemployment and shoddy public services. 

Yet today’s most outspoken opponents of resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin are affluent trendy lefties, including Germany’s outgoing Green foreign minister, Analena Baerbock, who's party campaigned in the 1980s against Pershing nuclear missiles on German soil, even at the expense of preventing their country’s reunification, which still seemed a distant prospect before the Peaceful Revolution (Friedliche Revolution) against Erich Honecker’s stubborn refusal to follow Gorbachev’s liberalisation process of greater openness and transparency known as Glasnost. 

This was in stark contrast to neighbouring Poland, where in 1981 around a million workers in the Solidarity movement went on strike, forcing General Wojciech Jaruzelski to declare martial law and send in tanks to suppress protests. Future historians will try to explain how an environmentalist organisation that opposed both mass consumerism and militarism in the 1980's could become one of the most fervent proponents of European rearmament and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in unison with the big banking cartels. 

 The only common thread that links the old Greens of the 1980's to the new global governance enthusiasts is their opposition to nuclear power, but that may well perfectly align with the World Economic Forum’s plans to shift manufacturing away from cars, household appliances and disposable gadgets to AI-enhanced drones, digital services and genetic engineering, leading us to a near future with well-paid jobs only for the best and brightest and everyone else on Universal Basic Income. 

Is the West at war with itself? 

The United States has been the guiding force behind the Western alliance since its inception in the aftermath of World War Two, accounting for 68-70% of NATO’s combined military expenditure. Its other member states would literally have to triple their defence budgets to make up in its absence. 

 Yet NATO lost on the battle ground despite a much larger military outlay as measured in euros. Russia’s military spending may have doubled, but it’s still lower in dollar terms than French and British defence budgets combined. They’re clearly getting much better value for their money and invested in the right technologies, such as drones and hypersonic missiles, to neutralise their opponents. 

 As long as Russia can defend its control of its vast mineral and fossil fuel resources, it holds all the trump cards with a growing market in India and China. Since the disastrous Yeltsin years of gangster capitalism opening up Siberia’s vast resources to Western multinationals enriching only a handful of oligarchs, the Russian government strategy has been to regain and retain control of its natural assets. The linguistic and religious rights of the inhabitants of the disputed territories is a sideshow and could have been easily accommodated within a neutral but independent Ukraine with regional autonomy. 

There are significant Russian-speaking minorities in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Latvia and Lithuania. Indeed, in Kazakhstan and Belarus, Russian is, de facto, the dominant lingua franca. Western sanctions ended up hurting the West more than Russia. They succeeded only in driving up energy prices in Europe, stemming Russia’s brain drain, boosting its domestic manufacturing capabilities and strengthening its economic ties with China. 

Meanwhile, Atlanticist Europeans like Guy Verhofstadt, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron appear to be at loggerheads with the Trump administration over Ukraine, while also strategically distancing themselves from the US State Department’s steadfast support for Israeli bombing raids over Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Yemen. 

 Why is Ukraine so important for European elites, while the White House now seems much more concerned with Israeli security? How could senior advisors let the President suggest the annexation of Canada and Greenland, both allegedly close allies, while Canada’s new banker Prime Minister, Mark Carney, pivots to the European axis? May I suggest this is all a big charade to get the European wing of the Global Empire to rearm on a massive scale, while the much-maligned Trump/Musk/Netanyahu axis diverts all available military resources to fight Israel’s dirty wars. 

 The Ukraine quagmire may end with BlackRock controlling much of its prime farmland and copious mineral deposits, while Russia keeps Crimea and the breakaway Eastern regions. However, in a weird inversion of objective reality, more and more young Europeans will look east rather than west for the promise of personal freedom and democracy built around strong families and social cohesion. 

 It’s now becoming painfully obvious to all but the most dim-witted or intellectually dishonest observers, that the European elites personified by Starmer, Merz and Macron, hate their own people. Both the ideological left and the socially conservative right hate Starmer, but the rot started much earlier. 

As if squandering £450 billion on the covid psyop was not enough, Starmer has doubled down spending tens of billions more on military adventurism and global grandstanding. Millions placed their trust in Labour to save the welfare state, invest in education, cut the NHS waiting list and care for the most vulnerable in society, yet with rising unemployment and long-term worklessness, the government is about to slash disability benefits calling on over 1 million working age adults, mainly with ill-defined mental health issues, to get off their backbones and work. Successive administrations got people hooked on welfare and now they’re pulling the plug just as they fast-track the assisted dying bill with relaxed safeguards for sufferers of emotional distress. 

 With the government still spending upwards of £6 billion on temporary accommodation for undocumented immigrants, the stage is set for social unrest bordering on civil war. 

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

The End of the Pseudo-American Dream 

All we are saying .. is give war a chance.

All we are saying is ... Give war just one more chance 

Last weekend, a crowd of avid Guardian readers, former Trotskyists and BBC journalists took to the streets of London to demand continued Western military support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine. Their attire wouldn't have looked out of place at a 1980s student demo for nuclear disarmament and against American imperialism. Alas, their main disagreement with the current US administration is not that it is disengaging from the Eastern European theatre of war and scaling down its regime-change operations, but that it has allegedly surrendered to a power-hungry dictator hellbent on reversing the last three decades of woke progressivism, as advertised on TV. 

Over the last few days, we’ve witnessed the biggest outcry of collective cognitive dissonance in a kind of coordinated mass formation since the tumultuous fall of the former Soviet Union that disenfranchised millions of nachalniks or supervisors. Who would have guessed that by early 2025, the biggest cheerleaders for NATO expansion at all costs would be the European elites? Yet mainstream politicians and opinion leaders around Europe have acted almost in lockstep to oppose any peace deal between the US and Russia that would involve territorial concessions, whatever the cost may be in terms of human lives and higher energy prices. The war was never about Ukraine’s eastern borders, but NATO’s. Without the USA on board, European states would have to triple military expenditure to stand a chance of winning on the battlefield. The NeoCon lobbyists that once dominated the corridors of power in Washington DC have retreated to Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London 

Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, now in a coalition of the losers to keep out the allegedly pro-Putin AfD, announced a massive boost to military spending from 2% to 3% of GDP over the next five years in a period of economic stagnation and rising unemployment. In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer followed suit. More disturbingly, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives doubled down on their unremitting support for Saint Zelensky. For once, the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail were united in their fierce condemnation of President Trump and Vice President Vance for daring to question the Ukrainian gravy train that, at huge expense to American and European taxpayers, prolonged a war that has killed around a million young men and women. 

 Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first to condemn Trump’s plans to help Netanyahu complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and suggest annexing Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal. However, in their noisy exchange at the White House, it was Donald Trump and not Volodymyr Zelensky who wanted to avoid World War Three at all costs and file for peace before an escalation of the conflict plunges us into a new Dark Age. Zelensky’s acolytes, loyal to the former Biden administration, seem to think a nuclear showdown is a small price to pay for their concept of woke freedom. 

The reality on the ground is that the US can no longer afford to bankroll NATO expansion. Behind the scenes, Deep State operatives have reached the conclusion that they can no longer counter the Russia-China axis by military means. Indeed, that may be why corporate lobbyists let Donald Trump win the presidency again. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t take long to cosy up to the new White House resident, with Mark even apologising publicly for Biden-era censorship. The America-First rhetoric was always a metaphor for a move to a multipolar world and an end to the New American Century. Economic sanctions have only strengthened Russia’s ties with its Asian neighbours. The US had to cut its losses and divert its attention to the defence of Israel, another battle they may lose. 

 USAID and international NGOs raised the hopes of millions of young Ukrainians that they could aspire to Western European living standards through the stage-managed EuroMaidan protests against Yanukovych’s policy of neutrality. The deposed leader had failed to sign an association agreement with the EU in favour of a free trade pact with Belarus, the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, the fledgling Eurasian Economic Union as part of a larger realignment with China’s Belt-and-Road initiative. In the intervening decade, the BRICS bloc has grown stronger and the G7 weaker. Now, the collective West, as the Russians call it, is at war with itself as the technological innovation moves east. One Western faction wants to pivot to macro-regional protectionism, which in the American context means putting the USA and Israel first and another wants to pursue woke globalism at all costs, even if that means destroying their countries. 

 The downfall of the US Empire was never going to be pretty because various lobbies behind the Global Deep State, allied with multinationals with little interest in the parochial concerns of ordinary citizens, have long compromised its politicians to pursue their grand chessboard strategy that would ultimately bring the whole world under the same surveillance grid. 

 There have always been at least two American dreams. For generations of Americans, this meant being the master of your own destiny in a land of boundless opportunities. Alas, with slavery and debt servitude, such opportunities have not always been available to all citizens in equal measure. The original American dream was not built on welfare largesse or entitlement but on self-reliance and open competition, rewarding both hard workers with a can-do attitude and devious entrepreneurs. It had losers as well as winners. Long gone are the days when Emma Lazarus could proclaim: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 

The advent of AI-enhanced smart automation may soon see most citizens on UBI, at the mercy of tech giants. 

For the rest of the world, the American Dream has been a frenzy of consumer indulgence and commercialised entertainment in the era of carefree mass motoring and Hollywood movies projected onto TV screens everywhere electric power could reach. Many critics have accused the USA of spreading cultural decadence and depravity, but they mistake Hollywood for the real America, which is now, outside a few metropolitan bubbles, much more socially conservative than Western Europe with much higher church attendance across denominations My travels through the backwaters of West Virginia and Tennessee took me to a bygone era of god-fearing rednecks, oblivious to the machinations of US-based multinationals around the globe. On the outside, we had the America of Britney Spears, McDonald's, Walmart and Richard Gere. On the inside, we had the America of the first and second amendments granting free speech and gun rights. Millions of Europeans fled to North America to escape religious persecution, censorship and corruption. Yet today’s large corporations are enforcing a new kind of woke dogma intolerant of traditional family values. 

 Whose Freedom and Democracy? 

The fallout over the US exit from the Ukrainian quagmire has once again pitted the based working classes against the vocal woke professional classes. The latter consider themselves the bastions of liberal democracy and fierce opponents of xenophobia and autocracy. This is a classic clash between us and them, i.e. the people vs the managerial classes. In 2020, we learned what they (the managerial classes) really meant by freedom of movement. They meant the freedom of NGOs and large corporations to move human resources around the globe and to re-engineer once cohesive communities with deep cultural roots into mere themed human habitation zones. They did not mean your freedom to walk the streets safely at night or even your freedom to visit your local park, pub, or gym without a special permit, proving compliance with their latest edicts. If you feel insecure about your gender identity, you may now have the freedom to use facilities once reserved for members of the other biological sex, but if you want to pray silently within a few hundred yards from an abortion centre, you could be arrested. While I’ve traditionally supported a woman’s right to choose in the first 12 weeks of gestation, i.e. before a foetus becomes sentient, I’ve always respected pro-lifers and welcomed the provision of alternatives to abortion for women unable to care for their unborn babies. The last 30 years have seen two significant developments. First, neonatal care has enabled premature babies to survive as early as the 21st week of pregnancy. Second, fertility rates have plummeted with more and more women delaying motherhood into their 30s or even 40s. In the same period, we’ve also seen a decline in stable two-parent households and a significant rise in old people with dementia confined to care homes, paving the way for the proposed Assisted Dying Bill. The same legislation that bans praying near abortion clinics could soon prevent vigils outside assisted dying centres. Is that the freedom we are fighting for? 

As for democracy, the self-styled liberal elites are quite happy to rig or annul elections if people fail to vote for one of their preferred options. Only last week, at the behest of the EU Commission, the Romanian authorities arrested former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu, allegedly because he had accepted funds from foreign oligarchs. Millions of Romanians no longer buy the official narrative. They remember all too well Ceaușescu-era machinations. Meanwhile, the outcome of the German general elections saw the pro-NATO CDU/CSU gain the most votes in the former West and the Eurosceptic AfD sweeping the board in the former East outside Berlin (averaging around 35 to 38% of the vote). The establishment parties could only appeal to social conformity and war guilt, but are delivering the exact opposite, more destabilisation and more war. 

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out 

Or is that BIBO: Bias In, Bias Out? 

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence raises profound ethical questions with far-reaching implications for our autonomy as human beings. However, today, I want to focus on a more immediate challenge: workplace displacement and its impact on the job market.  

Some argue that AI assistants will usher in a new era of hyper-creativity, while others fear mass layoffs as intelligent automation outperforms well-paid professionals. Why pay a solicitor £250 an hour to resolve a business dispute when an AI-driven consultancy can handle the same task at a fraction of the cost? With the latest AI models, web services can parse mountains of Kafkaesque legislation in seconds and recommend a course of action just a few clicks away. Yet, when it comes to non-verbal human interaction, we are still a long way from reaching the singularity.  

Over the last six months, I’ve tested various AI coding companions with mixed results. Many analysts suggest that programmers may soon follow in the footsteps of typesetters. While code-completion tools like TabNine, GitHub Copilot, and Codeium can significantly boost productivity, they cannot replace a solid understanding of data architecture and software design principles. Developers who rely too heavily on AI without mastering the fundamentals risk introducing performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and unintended side effects. More importantly, they must remain aware of machine learning’s limitations—an AI-generated suggestion may be well-structured yet fail to align with the intended logic, merely predicting what a developer might type next rather than intelligently reusing custom helper functions. 

Just as we transitioned from hand-coding assembly to higher-level languages like C, C++, Java, and C#, and later to more accessible scripting languages like Python and JavaScript, we may soon rely on large language models (LLMs) to translate technical requirements into robust, high-performance code. Instead of manually debugging thousands of lines of poorly documented code, we could focus on defining validation criteria, running unit and integration tests, benchmarking performance, and instructing AI assistants to refactor inefficient algorithms. As always, the devil is in the details. 

 Why, then, would anyone invest the extra time and effort to learn lower-level languages like C, with manual memory management, or grapple with Rust’s borrow checker when they could be far more productive using simpler, untyped interpreted languages like Lua? The short answer has traditionally been performance. Easier scripting languages, with their higher levels of abstraction, are generally more beginner-friendly, whereas strongly typed, compiled languages offer fine-grained control over data structures and memory management but come with a steep learning curve and greater attention to detail. 

 Historically, we have traded the faster development times of scripting languages for the raw performance of compiled ones, particularly when building minimum viable products (MVPs) for startups. Companies as diverse as Twitter and Facebook initially relied on frameworks like Ruby on Rails and the HipHop PHP compiler. Once they had viable businesses with millions of users and advertising revenue, they could invest in scalable solutions and hire top-tier systems programmers and infrastructure engineers. This allowed more creative frontend and mid-tier developers to focus on the rapidly evolving details of customer-facing UX and UI. 

However, with AI coding assistants, hard languages like Rust become compelling choices outside their niche of systems programming for anything from rapid API development to Web apps, not because developers need to master their intricacies, but because they do not or, more accurately, only at a conceptual level. AI can handle the minutiae of lifetime management or the boilerplate of defining custom structs and enums with generics. A language like Rust could then act as an intermediary representation, precise and performant enough for machines, yet intelligible to skilled developers for oversight or debugging.  

Unlike higher-abstraction languages, Rust’s fine-grained control, smoothed over by AI, ensures safety and efficiency without sacrificing flexibility. The result? APIs that are fast, reliable, and future-proof, with AI bridging the gap between human intent and Rust’s low-level power.  

AI can also help with cross-compilation and migration. Let us suppose your lead mobile developer is most comfortable within the Apple eco-system with a strong preference for Swift and X-Code, but you need to support Android and desktop users too. Until recently, you may have weighed the pros and cons of hiring an experienced Android developer or choosing a cross-platform suboptimal framework like Flutter or React Native, often resulting in larger app download sizes and a greater drain on battery life. Coding assistants can not only port your code base, but they can also advise you on how to make the best use of inbuilt platform services. 

In data science and language model training, where Python still reigns supreme, there has been much hype about Mojo and its potential to combine pythonic simplicity with C-level performance.  I foresee that with coding assistants, developers may choose the flow-code representation they feel most comfortable with and then drill down to the native source code when necessary, boosting productivity and letting us focus on functionality, data integrity and efficiency. 

What does this mean for the millions working in software development, whether in programming, design or data analysis? Essentially, the days of needing an army of narrowly focused coders churning out repetitive lines of code are coming to an end. Instead, the future belongs to adaptable, big-picture thinkers, sometimes called lazy programmers, who focus on the whole system rather than isolated fragments. Success in this new landscape will be less about grinding out code and more about mastering the key pillars of software development: thoughtful architecture, intelligent use of design patterns, robust data modelling and a sharp performance optimisation. Demand will remain high for those who can weave these elements together to build efficient, scalable systems. However, if your primary strengths lie in rote learning, fast typing and syntactical perfection, you may soon find your skillset redundant in an AI-assisted world. 

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Endless Moral Dilemmas in the age of Confusion?  

Who stands to gain from never-ending destabilisation and dysfunctional societies? 

In early December ‘24, the Western media welcomed the swift overthrow of Bashar Al Assad’s Baath government. Western leaders are suddenly wining and dining former terrorists, including the leader of newly rebranded HTS (Hayat Tahir Al-Sham or Organisation for the Liberation of Syria), Mohammed al-Julani, associated with Al Nusra, Al Qaeda and ISIS. After over 13 years of crippling sanctions against Syria, the West is promising billions in aid to help the construction of a new gas pipeline from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to bypass Europe’s reliance on Russian gas or expensive LNG tankers. Within days, it became clear Israel welcomed the coup d’état too as it proceeded to expand its occupation of the Golan Height to Mount Hernon and bomb the remnants of the former Syrian regime’s air defences. Meanwhile Turkey continued to occupy the North-western Idlib region and the US still controls the country’s oil-rich east. The reality on the ground stands in stark contrast to the stage-managed scenes of jubilation. Many political analysts, including those critical of US and Israeli meddling in the region, marked the ousting of the Assad Dynasty as a strategic defeat both for Russia, engaged in the war over Eastern Ukraine, and its BRICS ally, Iran. Meanwhile the Israeli Defence Forces continue their onslaught on the peoples of Gaza and the West Bank without respite. 

Back in Europe, five days before Yuletide, a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia, reportedly belonging to the Shia minority, drove a rental SUV into a busy Christmas market in the Saxony-Anhalt city of Magdeburg. It had all the hallmarks of similar terrorist attacks attributed to Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the politically correct German media could not decide if the perpetrator, 50-year-old Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, was a militant leftwing atheist, a far-right AFD sympathiser, a Hamas supporter or an Israel-Firster. Indeed, his social media pronouncements were all over the place, but he did appear in a BBC documentary showcasing his website intended to help asylum-seeking apostates from Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region. For a couple of days social media commentators on the tribal left and right blamed each other for at least 5 deaths and over 200 casualties, but does the guy’s political allegiance really matter? I can’t help but notice the lull in terror incidents across Western Europe in the covid-scam years. Nothing stacks up if we take mainstream media accounts at face value. Why would a supporter of a political party critical of mass immigration from Muslim countries target a Christmas market rather than a mosque?  

The timing could not have been worse for Germany’s ruling traffic light coalition (Ampelkoalition) struggling to deal with rising energy prices, industrial decline and economic stagnation. It’s become increasingly obvious to most astute observers that rather than pay taxes to help deal with an ageing native population, newcomers to most European countries are now a net drain on public finances, not least in terms of additional infrastructure and, dare I say, policing. Therein lies the technocratic endgame. Out of engineered chaos our overlords hope to rebuild law and order. 

On the eastern fringes of European Union, the Romanian constitutional court annulled the first round the country’s presidential elections for fear that independent candidate, Câlin Georgescu, might win the second round. The establishment rallied behind the other candidate, Elena Lasconi. Inevitably, they accused Russia of indirectly bankrolling Georgescu’s social media campaign. Over on the other side of the Black Sea, in Georgia, the Western Mafia has refused to recognise Irakli Kobakhidze’s new government, despite his Party, Georgian Dream, getting over 53% of the vote. To cap it all, EU Commissioner, Thierry Breton, has suggested that Elon Musk’s endorsement of Alice Weidel’s AFD Party threatens European liberal democracy. What he meant was growing sections of the electorate no longer align with the goals of the neoliberal elite behind superstate projects like the EU. 

Back in the UK, six months after the government clamped down hard on protests against the consequences of rapid ethnocultural shifts, the suppressed truth emerged about the tragic case of Axel Rudakabana in the aftermath of his cold-blooded murder of 3 young girls and attempt to hack to death everyone else in the dance class. Although born in South Wales, his parents hailed from Rwanda and had fought alongside the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front favoured by the US/UK Deep State. He was totally obsessed with genocide, which given Rwanda's recent history should surprise nobody, but with a sinister black-supremacist twist. His purported allegiance to Al Qaeda may well have been a red herring. Indeed in his isolation, he may well have been drawn to any organisation, whether genuine or contrived, that endorses his deep-seated urge for revenge. What's certain is that social and psychiatric services had long known about Axel's violent tendencies and emotional disturbance. Over his lifetime, the authorities had spent hundreds of thousands of £ on Axel's and his family's rehabilitation and inclusion in British society. Yet we are still supposed to believe the current levels of mass migration are both economically necessary and environmentally sustainable.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has kept shtum about ongoing mass protests in Romania against the EU-backed cancellation of their elections. When the elites can no longer deliver the goods and can only offer managed decline with coordinated attacks against nostalgia for better times, we know the game is up. If the elites can no longer trust us to endorse their solutions or believe their narratives, then why on earth should we trust them? In the end, Western leaders rely on technology they ill-understand to control the masses. The subversion of that technology may well be their downfall. 

Categories
All in the Mind

The Ongoing War Against Humanity 

Are you a burden on society? 

Few slopes are as slippery as the 35 pages of the new Assisted Dying Bill in England and Wales, replete with enigmatic terminology and subjective reassurances. In a sign of the times, the second reading passed through the UK Parliament by 330 to 275 votes. A few powerful speeches gave me hope that some MPs might rethink in time for the third reading, but few can deny that the establishment supported what they deceptively call dignity in dying. Indeed, a well-funded lobby group of the same name, formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, in cahoots with the woke global media empire behind LBC and The News Agents (featuring none other than Jon Sopel, Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall), plastered the London Underground with posters portraying photogenic middle-aged adults, presumably with a hidden terminal illness, celebrating the end of their physical existence on planet earth. 

Before 2020, public opinion firmly opposed any moves towards the legalisation of euthanasia, which, for the sake of clarity, means intervening to cut short someone else's life when we have the means to let life go on. This may involve either active euthanasia by administering lethal drugs or gases, or passive euthanasia, with the withdrawal of life-sustaining nourishment, basic bodily care, or treatment. Most edge cases concern switching off the life-support systems of patients in an irreversible coma. The development of functional MRI scanners and electroencephalograms (EEG) has enabled clinicians to determine whether someone's brain remains functionally alive, but in rare cases, people have survived prolonged comatose states. 

The Terminally Ill Adults Bill technically restricts assisted suicide to over-18-year-olds with less than six months left to live, but who determines how long someone is likely to survive? The course of many life-threatening illnesses, such as cancer, is extremely hard to forecast with accuracy. Many have defied the prognosis of medical experts. Indeed, sceptics of invasive treatments such as chemo and radiotherapy have long pointed to the disturbingly high incidence of remission compared to natural remedies like the Gerson method or immunotherapy. We now effectively have a cancer industrial complex, if I dare coin the term, with nearly one in two adults expected to develop cancer at least once in their lifetime. Recent US data from 2017-2019 shows men have about a 41.6% lifetime risk, while women have a slightly lower risk at 38.7%. 

Medical Meddling 

Proponents of the assisted dying bill are keen to emphasise the importance of choice and, wait for it, bodily autonomy, but they also tend to favour the proactive administration of medications and invasive procedures for the common good of wider society, something they like to call modern medicine, rather than a more holistic approach focusing on diet, exercise, a strong immune system and natural remedies. The mechanistic approach, favoured by euthanasia advocates, assumes that we should conform to the needs of a complex society that exploits technology not only to stop the spread of perceived pathogens but also to cleanse itself of irreparably defective individuals, who, as George Bernard Shaw once opined, can no longer justify their existence. It gives a new meaning to the original purpose of public healthcare to look after us from cradle to grave. The medical profession is now involved in every aspect of our intimate lives, from conception and fertility treatment to end-of-life ceremonies, as well as every step in between. Doctors can now artificially lengthen or shorten our lives, with plausible deniability about any adverse effects of their preferred prescriptions. 

The counterargument is obviously that modern medicine has helped boost life expectancy at age 5 in much of the world from around 60 or below at the turn of the 20th century to over 80 by the year 2000. The rise in life expectancy at birth is even more dramatic due to a steep decline in infant mortality. In 1900, it was just around 45 in most of Western Europe when most mothers still gave birth at home with the help of lay midwives and without access to incubators or other medical advancements we now take for granted. Nonetheless, if you could survive early childhood, were well-nourished, had access to clean water and air, kept fit with a strong immune system and escaped serious accidents, you could still live into your 60s, 70s and beyond, but life was shorter and fraught with adversity. Unsurprisingly, people in traditional low-tech societies counted each new day as a blessing. People had a much more spiritual outlook on life, tended to trust in God and reconciled themselves to nature's fate. 

Of greater philosophical importance is our respect for both human life and free will. It took the best part of two millennia for modern civilization, as it evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries, to afford all human lives the same intrinsic worth. If all lives really do matter, irrespective of your social status, perceived intelligence, prowess, or physique, then as a matter of principle, we should always discourage others from taking the easy way out of their malaise through suicidal ideation or by using subtle means to promote self-sacrifice among atomised individuals with low self-esteem. 

What matters is not so much how long you live but that you live your best life in a society that values both self-determination and human survival. Historically, most people now confined to care homes, wasting away their final years in a strictly controlled environment with minimal personal independence and often diminishing dignity, would have died of natural causes. We might simply have learned that a sixty-five-year-old grandfather had collapsed while chopping wood for his stove. The true cause of death may well have been mild dementia or a heart attack, but the unfortunate incident happened in the pursuit of autonomy. The flip side of proactive medical interventionism is that it often undermines human nature and, most of all, our desire to be masters of our destiny as free agents. 

Do Not Resuscitate notices epitomise all that's wrong with modern healthcare, placing our lives in the hands of strangers. A better approach would be a clear statement telling medics not to intervene without your consent. While most of us may want the public health service to be there in the event of serious accidents or medical emergencies, we do not necessarily want to be lulled into institutionalised numbness surrounded by condescending nurses amid kitsch memorabilia and piped music. Some of us would rather muddle our way through life than schedule our demise to suit someone else's agenda. If we take life in our stride, we may well live to a ripe old age, but natural tragedies may get the better of us without round-the-clock medical vigilance. Live and let live! 

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Battle of the Billionaires

And the Eclipse of American Exceptionalism

It’s time to ask if the surprise outcome of the 2024 US Presidential Election reflects a growing rift between different factions within the technocratic elite or if it’s only a psyop to engineer a low-level civil war between rednecks and cosmopolitan Americans. Many still believe Trump, with Robert F Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard in his team, will rein in the Deep State and put the interests of ordinary Americans first before the grandiose nation-destroying plans of the woke illiberal intelligentsia. Others, especially on this side of the big pond, believe Elon Musk bought the election and will use the second Trump Presidency to abolish democracy. This is odd because both Elon Musk and RFK claimed that if the Harris / Walz ticket won, this could be the end of American democracy as we knew it. Authoritarians have a habit of always accusing their adversaries of the same crimes they commit themselves. Senior figures behind Kamala’s ill-fated campaign, from John Kerry to Bill Gates himself, talked openly about overturning the first amendment to ward off the omnipresent danger of malinformation. What we are witnessing are the death throes of the American Dream of freedom and democracy, with both concepts reduced to little more than commodities.

I once believed electoral outcomes could change the balance of power. Alas we witness a mere pantomime of engineered outcomes. In 1979 many disgruntled leftwingers wondered how Maggie Thatcher could appeal to the aspiring working classes. The next year Ronald Reagan captured the imagination of the American middle classes. By the time the pendulum swung the other way and Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street with a whopping majority, it became obvious to me he only did so because he had big business on his side. Indeed, since 1974 Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has backed the winning horse. After backing the Tories from 2010 to 2019, the Sun newspaper flipped again to back the uncharismatic Sir Keir Starmer.

Before the results of the recent 2024 US Presidential race rolled in, one thing was certain in my mind. The multi-trillion-dollar Military-Biotech Industrial Complex would not relinquish power without a fight. If the winner posed a threat to the big banks and corporations, the Deep State would move heaven and earth to prevent him or her from entering office. With Queen Kamala, they had their perfect puppet, who judging by her performance over the last four years, would do nothing to hold her string-pullers to account.

Yet despite his rhetoric about draining the swamp and his promises to clamp down on corruption in the 3-letter agencies, Donald Trump appointed Susie Wiles, a longstanding political lobbyist whose former clients included Pfizer and Big Tobacco. The self-obsessed orange man may have cold-shouldered his former neocon Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and UN ambassador, Nicki Haley, but judging by his choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, and Christian Zionist, Mike Huckabee, as US Ambassador to Israel, the US Deep State looks set to pivot away from direct confrontation with Russia over Ukraine and to support Israel in an all-out war with Iran. Will this make World War Three more likely as most key Middle East countries, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt too, are now aligning in the BRICs bloc. We may well be witnessing a rift in the Western Military Industrial Complex between the neoconservative Israel-First faction and the neoliberal anti-Russian faction. Just as the US manoeuvres its way out of the Ukrainian quagmire and Vice President elect, JD Vance, threatens to stop subsidising the defence of its European NATO allies because they fail to uphold American values of free speech. Meanwhile former Dutch PM and new NATO Secretary, Mark Rutte, has threatened to expel the US from NATO if they agree a compromise with Russia to end the war over Eastern Ukraine. This may mark a shift from a US-centred world to a multipolar world with European elites now more belligerent than their American counterparts, but with only 7 weeks of his tenure to go, Biden authorised airstrikes over Russia with the UK ready to deploy its Storm Shadow missiles in an escalation that could further drain NATO’s resources.

Some pinned their hopes on Matt Gaetz, an outspoken social conservative able to speak truth to power over Mossad’s potential involvement in the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein, but had to stand down amid sexual misconduct allegations.

Another sign of the times is the hysterical reaction to the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jnr as Secretary of Health and Human Services. This seemed to annoy some faux-progressive commentators much more than Trump’s electoral success. Carole Cadwalladr took to X (formerly Twitter) to call RFK not only a vaccine-denier, but a fluoride-denier (rather ironic as fluoridation is not common in continental Europe). By the Guardian journalist’s warped logic, if you demand transparency, accountability and above all, liability from multibillion-dollar corporations, you are somehow denying people the benefits of the last century of scientific advances. It turns out RFK has never opposed vaccination if it has passed the strictest safety trials. Every debate about the safety and effectiveness of the coercively administered covid shots with Fauci fans always ends with references to the polio outbreak of the mid 20th century and the dramatic decline since the late 1950s. Yet by far the biggest factor is rapid decline in infant mortality over the last 70 years has been better sanitation. Children born in the 1960s and 70s were among the healthiest in history. Lifelong disabilities or chronic illnesses reached historic lows after post-war slum clearances and urban renewal, until a curious reversal of fortunes since the late 1980s when the incidence of neurological disorders and allergies started to increase. This happened to coincide with a massive expansion in the childhood vaccine schedule, most notably for MMR, and legislation to give vaccine manufacturers blanket immunity for any injuries or deaths that can be attributed to vaccines. In most Western nations, it is up to governments to pay damages. Of course, there are many other potential causes of rising health conditions such as processed foods, additives and, possibly, exposure to electronic gadgets and radiation. While people are living longer, most adults over 30 are now on one form of regular medication or another (that’s most over 50s on statins, beta blockers and/or diabetes drugs and a growing number of middle-aged adults on psychoactive meds). However, RFK would not only have to contend with the combined might of BigTech and BigPharma, but also with Trump’s choice of Surgeon General, Dr Janette Nesheiwat, a covid vaccine evangelist. I fear other global events or manufactured scandals may prevent RFK from having much influence.

The next administration may well have to deal the collapse of the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency. All it takes is for China and Saudi Arabia to sell off US T-Bonds (treasury bonds) if the US continues to support Israeli aggression or bombs Iran on its behalf. The US Deep State can then blame the ensuing economic meltdown on Trump and let vulture funds asset-strip the nation.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Free Movement Pivot 

Cognitive dissonance in an era of high-tech surveillance 

In the ongoing debate on the sustainability of high levels of rapid migration in terms of infrastructure and social cohesion, one trend just caught my eye. All of a sudden and from some quite unexpected quarters, we hear talk of deportation, something almost unthinkable outside the fringe ethno-nationalist right until recently. In a radical departure from the old consensus that immigration has to be managed and, when economic and environmental circumstances allow, openly welcomed, mainstream opinion leaders have now started to publicly advocate reversing the last twenty odd years of rapid de-acculturation by sending home unassimilated newcomers in their midst. Bastions of social democracy and global convergence like Sweden and Denmark have changed their tune and begun to deport criminals and long-term welfare claimants with an immigrant background. My main concern has always been with destabilisation or any policy that can undermine the hard-won freedoms and way of life of settled communities to advance agendas that mainly benefit global corporations to the detriment of the little people. 

By and large the concept of free movement is a good thing, but like all good things has its limitations. Should the homeless be free to set up camp in your garden or squat in your house while you’re away? Should holidaymakers be free to park their caravans in wildlife reserves or on cultivated fields? Should grown men be free to wander into women’s changing rooms? Should property developers be free to build on parks or green spaces for profit or to accommodate growing demand for affordable housing? There are obvious limits in complex societies on the extent to which we can encroach on other people’s spaces and undermine their self-determination and traditions. Most disputes over land affect less than 1% of the Earth’s total landmass where over half of the global population dwell and most of the other half live in the approximately 12.5% of land considered arable with only a tiny fraction inhabiting remote settlements scattered around the next 30% of resource-exploitable land. That leaves around 56% of the remaining terrain mostly uninhabitable or unused due to extreme conditions such as deserts, tundra or high mountains. Yet that 1% assigned to the urbanosphere is nearly as large as the combined area of France, Germany, Poland and Italy.  

The same progressive opinion leaders who hailed the wonders of our interconnected humanosphere, made possible by automotive, aeronautical and cybernetic technology, now want us to scale back to a more sustainable lifestyle, but sustainable for whom? How can they simultaneously promote mass migration to the most highly developed regions of the world and greater restrictions of our freedom to travel around our own neck of the woods? The same big businesses that sold us the dream of carefree motoring, suburban houses and regular holidays abroad, are now selling us smart green technology as millions of middle-class Westerners adapt to a minimalist lifestyle. Historically people have emigrated to find a better quality of life, but with the civilisational decline of the once affluent West that may no longer be the case. Sooner or later, something has to give in the clash between autochthons and international commuters. The mercantile classes behind the 18th and 19th century expansion of European empires have evolved into a network of global technocrats who owe no allegiance to their home countries. They have already pivoted from favouring the Western middle classes in the era of mass consumption to exploiting a vast pool of aspirational migrant labour in the shift from a mixed high-wage and high-skill economy to controlled subsistence micromanaged by tech multinationals. However, if they can pivot once for strategic reasons, they can pivot again and abandon new groups of commoners. 

Just as the business elites have betrayed the Western working classes, they can easily ditch their army of globetrotting contingent workers to favour only a much smaller coterie of top-tier engineers and social governance analysts. However, at the dawn of the AI revolution with the transfer of power to a handful of tech giants, we are also witnessing the demise of the global superpower that has dominated the world’s cultural landscape for the best part of a century and reached its pinnacle in the early 1990s after the fall of the former Soviet Union. 

The recent Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine marked a turning point in the balance power between G7-centred international community and the now expanded BRICS bloc, which is in the process of setting up a rival international banking system. Before 2020 the world seemed set on a trajectory of convergence with Africa, China, India and South America all falling within orbit of US-founded tech giants and banking cartels. While the Western middle classes would lose their relative privileges, the emerging technocracy would remain unipolar. Indeed, many critics of a one-world government saw the tech censorship of the lockdown years as a shift towards a more Chinese style of global governance. While the big nations of the Global East and South may have many authoritarian traits, they have not succumbed to woke ideology. The transgender craze with its assault on natural procreation has failed to make inroads in most of Asia, the Middle East and Africa. White guilt has only infected countries with a recent history of colonialism or racial segregation. On current trends, we may soon wonder how long Africans will want to move to Europe or North America. 

The whole progressive rationale for mass migration hinged on the challenges of an ageing population with a low birth rate as a means to increase the tax base and allegedly to pay for our pensions. Alas with net migration running at 750,000 a year, the establishment has stopped pretending most newcomers are high-income professionals. The cost of accommodating asylum seekers alone amounted to a staggering 5.4 billion in 2023, while new projections show the average newcomer to the UK will cost the treasury much more in their lifetime than they pay in taxes. If the AI revolution displaces most lower and medium-skilled workers leaving only core competency workers (an upper crust of well-remunerated engineers, scientists, doctors, policy consultants and administrators) as essential workers outside the UBI control grid, there will no longer be any need to import cheap labour or boost the economy artificially through greater aggregate consumer demand. 

As we shift from a skills-based consumer economy, affording ordinary workers greater personal freedoms, to a more eco-compliance-driven economy, local governance teams will want to restrict people’s freedom of movement by limiting access to cars, long-distance trains and aeroplanes as we saw in the covid-scare years. The trick is to get everyone within the same control grid, which is much more pervasive in the more developed regions of the world.  

We are at a critical juncture in human civilisation. A major geopolitical shift away from the US-centred world order is coinciding with the growing concentration of power in billionaire technotarians who advocate high-tech eugenics and view the masses as little more than zoo animals. Alas I see a split in our technocratic masters. Some are still hedging their bets on the survival of American exceptionalism and mass consumerism. Others are content to adopt the Chinese model of epistocracy with a vanguard group of social scientists manufacturing consent among a pacified populace. Both groups exploit our conflicting desires for free movement and social cohesion to continue to divide and rule. They can pose on the left or on the right. They can advocate open borders or mass deportations, but the end game is still total surveillance. 

Categories
All in the Mind

Phasing you out

How the progressive elites want to eliminate the undesirables and that might include you

Is it just me or does anyone else think the more politicians and celebrity influencers pretend to care about the disadvantaged, the more they justify measures that will quietly phase out the plebeian misfits they want to exclude from their vision of a greener, brighter and fairer world?

By greener the progressive elites mean with fewer useless eaters. Brighter and fairer may also imply the eradication of the unenlightened.

In little more than a hundred days, the new Labour administration in the UK has not only clamped down on dissent, released murderers and rapists to free up space in prisons and denied cash-strapped pensioners winter fuel payments; it is now letting MPs debate the Assisted Dying Bill on a slippery slope to eugenics.

It’s been sold to us as medically assisted life termination for the chronically ill and especially for the growing numbers of dementia patients in care homes, who would not survive without the wonders of modern medicine. To put things into context, the Alzheimer's Society’s Dementia 2019 report showed an increase from 75,000 people with dementia in care homes in 2001 to over 180,000 in 2019. Longer life expectancy, an ageing population and greater reliance on residential care can only account for part of that dramatic rise. While the total number of care home residents in England rose by around 23% between 2001 and 2017, the proportion of residents with dementia grew by nearly 150%, according to a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2020.

The BBC has long softened public opposition to mercy killing with many heart-wrenching documentaries about sufferers of debilitating conditions such as motor neurone disease who want to say their last goodbyes to friends and family before doctors help them transition peacefully to another world. While euthanasia is still, at the time of writing, against the law in all parts of the UK, some affluent citizens have travelled to the Swiss Dignitas centre to end their lives. During the second lockdown of late 2020, the former health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced severe restrictions on travel abroad, except for the purposes of assisted dying, prompted by his colleague, Andrew Mitchell, who argued perversely that new coronavirus regulations could deter people from travelling to Switzerland for an assisted death. This is the same MP who ushered Labour and Tory MPs out of the chamber before former MP Andrew Bridgen began his speech on covid-19 vaccine deaths and injuries and, as a mere coincidence, has had no qualms about being photographed alongside the WHO's largest corporate sponsor, Bill Gates.

If we look further afield to other Western countries like the Netherlands and Canada that have already legalised euthanasia, we see a clear trend. Once the public accepts the need to help the very old and frail die with dignity, well-funded charities lobby the government to expand the service to younger and younger adults with agonizing and seemingly untreatable physical and mental health conditions. In Canada, a woman with a history of depression and self-harm was offered Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD for short, instead of better social care. Meanwhile in the Netherlands, 29-year-old Zaraya ter Beek, allegedly on the autistic spectrum, became the youngest healthy adult to be granted the right to seek euthanasia, despite having a boyfriend and appearing in several awareness-raising documentaries.

What worries me most is the toxic influence of disheartening mainstream media narratives about apocalyptic climate change and online cults that prey on the vulnerable without real-life friends, but who identify with one or more existential psychological categories that separate them from general natural humanity. Establishment media outlets have taken great care to disown the wilder advocates of self-harm. Indeed, they often exploit the spectre of online disinformation and radicalisation to justify more censorship and thus to cover up inconvenient truths. The same laws that empower the state to block access to child porn can also deny access to truthful reports of heinous war crimes or corporate malfeasance. While Facebook and Tiktok censored posts about covid-19 vaccine injuries, they have allowed countless groups promoting self-mutilation, extreme fasting and assisted dying. All you need is for an online influencer with a large following to announce that he and she is seeking help to transition to the next world.

End-of-life technology is fast evolving from rudimentary suicide pods to brain-computer interfaces that could soon do away with the need for a physical human body or, in a manner of speaking, upload someone’s consciousness to the cloud leaving only a brain in a jar hooked up to a network of computers. If you lack a sense of purpose and self-worth in your terrestrial life, the prospect of transitioning to a virtual existence is very tempting, even if you could easily vanish into thin air in the event of a random network fault or power outage.

The covid scare, with its widespread statistical manipulation and medical malpractice, set the stage for the normalisation of medically assisted homicide by highlighting the distinction between essential and non-essential workers. If you are deemed non-essential, then you may either comply or die. Concepts that would have, prior to 2020, been considered unconscionable have now become thinkable for the greater good of future generations.

Weasel words about cultural alignment and community values often serve to exclude anyone who cannot or will not conform with the emerging woke technocracy. Those who cannot adapt to this progressive Brave New World are being marginalised and guilt-tripped about their personal failings, leading inevitably to the proliferation of mental ill-health among the newly disenfranchised. This is what’s happening to millions of atomised young adults across the Western world dealing with job insecurity and volatile relationships, succumbing to drug addiction and comfort eating. Only this week we learned the government’s solution is to offer the unemployed obese weight loss injections, effectively making further social welfare contingent on their participation in clinical trials for Ozempic or Mounjaro, despite kidney dysfunction, hair loss and suicidal ideation being among their many side effects. The irony is that many long-term unemployed benefits claimants are on antipsychotics known to boost appetite and trigger rapid weight gain.

For decades, millions of us have had to contend with emotional conflicts between our natural bodily and psychological imperfections and media portrayals of shiny happy people performing at the top of their game. Soap operas can have in a similar effect to porn. They both provide grossly unrealistic representations of experiences we desire. We may crave exciting social lives, large villas with swimming pools and superlative bodies as much as the euphoria of erotic performances, but back in the real world few of us will ever approach the exuberance we see on TV or online. By attempting to achieve the unachievable, people can easily fall into despondency and fail to find partners who can live up to their fanciful expectations.

Despite all the technological advances of the last century, we have never been more dissatisfied with our lot in life. In the old world, we treated each new day of life as a blessing and coped with bodily imperfections with great humility. Today even minor disfigurements, without the emotional support of loved ones, can cause severe depression.

With the expansion of artificial intelligence and robotics, growing portions of the once essential workforce will become non-essential without a sense of purpose in life. The introduction of universal basic income will empower the state to link social credits with behavioural and ideological conformity. The scary part is that once you are locked into the corporate control grid with no bargaining power, the managerial classes can control every aspect of your private life and if you are, as George Bernard Shaw put it, more trouble than you are worth to the system, they can coerce you to agree to assisted early life termination. You may be excluded from mainstream society not because you have committed any crimes, but because of your lack of cultural alignment. Once excluded, your house arrest could be so unbearable that you opt for an easy way out.

Dying your own way

Some would argue that we need medically assisted suicide because of the immense success of modern medicine that has kept the chronically ill and mentally infirm on life support. In essence, we intervene to keep people artificially alive and also to facilitate a good death, but at all times medical experts stay in control. Yet many of us prefer to be masters of our own destiny, to live life to the full and then when our bodies or minds fail we let nature take its course.

When my mother retired to a small bungalow after her divorce, she told me repeatedly she wanted to stay there to the end of her days and never fancied ending up in a care home with no privacy or sense of dignity. Alas her mild dementia worsened considerably over the lockdowns and support workers advised us to transfer her to a specialist dementia care home at great expense. We need to ask serious questions about the rise in dementia patients. Indeed, at 88 my mother is among the oldest in her care home, the youngest being in her mid 60s. She is no longer able to make rational decisions about her life. Before moving in late 2022, she told me she didn’t want to bother anyone else and would much prefer just walking the streets alone and dying her own way and I understood her. In times of despair, I have myself considered seeking a way out by travelling to the nearest beach, undressing, swimming out to sea and leaving myself at the mercy of the elements. I never succeeded in this endeavour, because I usually changed my mind long before reaching the destination of my suicide attempt and despite periods of solitude would always encounter another human being giving me a reason to live. On one occasion I reached the River Thames at 3am and decided against diving in because I wanted to see how the spectacle of life would play out. But what if I had chosen instead to see a psychologist who, rather than persuade me to give life another chance, affirmed my despondency? I might not be here today.
Once we empower a legal guardian to agree to assisted death with the best of intentions for all concerned, we have opened the floodgates to the extension of euthanasia to other target groups deemed unfit to inhabit the earth.

Addendum

I wrote a letter to my local MP, Graeme Downie, based on a template from Right To Life UK. After initially sending me a stock reply with platitudes about safeguards, I cited the Canadian and Dutch examples above. It later transpired he had blocked me on X. NewLabour do not debate, they only attempt to inculcate ideological conformity.
My message:

I'm contacting you as a concerned constituent of Dunfermline and Dollar to ask you to speak and vote in opposition to Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill.

This is not the same as turning off life support machines or end-of-life care with strong sedatives for the terminally ill in cases where the choice might be between artificially extending someone's life for a few days or relieving excruciating pain.

Judging by developments in countries such as Canada and the Netherlands, the legalisation of assisted dying will set us on a slippery slope to eugenics, open to wide-scale abuse especially with regard to the growing numbers of marginalised people with mentally health issues caused by atomisation. A 29-year old Dutch woman, Zoraya ter Beek, apparently on the autistic spectrum, has already chosen to end her life ( https://www.thefp.com/p/zoraya-ter-beek-dead-assisted-suicide ). Online peer pressure can easily affect vulnerable young people's sense of self-worth and may lead them to believe they\'re superfluous to requirements.

The risks of assisted suicide were movingly explored in the actor and disability rights campaigner Liz Carr’s recent BBC One documentary ‘Better Off Dead’ (https://youtu.be/gEysXRLTG5M?si=g3KFx2umghZyFOnq), which I would encourage you to watch. 

The documentary warns of the dangers of assisted suicide legislation for people with disabilities and living in poverty. As observed in this article (https://labourlist.org/2024/01/euthanasia-assisted-dying-suicide-prue-leith-esther-rantzen/) by Sir Stephen Timms MP, we have seen such dangers sadly become reality in other countries despite the supposedly strict safeguards that were in place when ‘assisted dying’ was first legalised.

And Graeme Downie MP's brief reply:

Thank you for getting in touch with me about this matter. I will only make a final decision on my vote on this issue once I see the text of any proposed legislation but I want to be honest from the outset that, having been very heavily involved in campaigns on this issue in Scotland, I am minded to support a change in the law. 

Successive governments, of both parties, have taken the position that the law on assisted suicide is a matter of conscience for individual MPs. The Prime Minister has confirmed that any change in the law on assisted dying will not happen via a Government Bill. A change can only be made via a Private Members’ Bill (PMB); that is a Bill introduced by a backbench MP or Peer. 

In my view, if the law does change, it is vital that it also includes strong and proper safeguards. Furthermore, any reform should recognise the concerns that many people have, including those who support reform in principle, to try to achieve the widest possible consensus. 

As your elected representative in Parliament, I will monitor developments in this area closely and bear in mind the points you have raised as it is important to generate a wide degree of viewpoints and knowledge ahead of debating such  sensitive matters.  

The implication here is that our learned MPs know best. Judging by the last 5 years of utter betrayal over health matter, with Labour taking even more extreme stances on medical mandates than the Tories, I have my sincere doubts on their integrity to hold powerful lobbies to account. My final reply remains unanswered.

Did you read my email? We are not talking about edge cases where someone is on a life support machine or is terminally ill experiencing excruciating pain with days to live. We are talking about developments across the Western World to normalise assisted suicide for the marginalised long before the onset of extreme old age or frailty, making people feel superfluous to requirements because they are not socially integrated with a sense of purpose.

This is a very slippery slope, but in Canada a woman with a history of depression was offered MAIDs: https://care.org.uk/news/2023/08/canadian-woman-with-depression-offered-assisted-suicide-after-lack-of-hospital-beds .

Is that the future you want for your constituents ? Can you not detect authoritarian trends ? 

Categories
Computing Uncategorized War Crimes

Global Splintering

What’s going on? Are we seeing a divisive split among global technocrats that cuts into the heart of Western administrations? Only a few months ago, Sir Keir Starmer was the darling of the progressive mainstream media. The BBC salivated over him as he entered 10 Downing Street and laid down the new law of the land targeting far-right thuggery and outdoor smoking, while touring Europe and North America to pledge full alignment with the EU and NATO in the fight against Putin, climate change and the enemies of woke progressivism. However, on the Levantine conflict, Sir Keir had to tread a tricky path between the conflicting demands of Labour activists and the Zionist wing of the Military Industrial Complex, by backtracking on his earlier unconditional support for Israeli military incursions in Gaza. At the Labour Party Conference, Sir Keir showed signs of fatigue by calling both for a ceasefire and the release of the sausages (which rhymes with hostages in southern British English).

All of a sudden, media reports of sleaze and outright corruption within Labour's upper echelons are rife. The same media outlets that ousted Boris Johnson over two and a half years after his electoral success over Party-gate, because he did not comply with absurd covid regulations, are now gunning for Starmer and his cronies over Lord Alli’s lavish donations. To be honest, Lord Alli’s involvement with the new New Labour project was off my radar. My focus was on Sir Keir’s close ties to the Tony Blair Institute, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum and on his earlier actions as Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales between 2008 and 2013. He had obviously been groomed as a young global leader who could appeal to a key section of the wider managerial classes while somehow placating the working classes with promises of economic stability and progressive patriotism. The cracks in Labour’s happy family were all too apparent long before the General Election. While the red-tinted party may have regained votes in Scotland from the SNP and from some disaffected Tories in the English shires, it lost votes in many of its former strongholds.

Some alternative media influencers have intimated Sir Keir may have had a gay relationship with Lord Alli. That may have been a scandal 30 years ago, but why should anyone except Sir Keir’s wife care in a society that embraces all expressions of consensual sexuality? To top it all, many of the same pundits have highlighted Lord Alli’s meetings and apparent friendship with Syrian President, Bashar Al Assad, a prime target for US-led regime-change since at least 2010. Things have not always been that way. The Assad family have close links with the UK. Not only did Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, grow up in London, Bashar did postgraduate studies at the city’s Western Eye Hospital in the early 1990s. Later the US and UK courted the new leader when he succeeded his father in 2000 as they attempted to build an alliance of pro-Western Arab leaders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Alas Assad chose to build stronger ties with Lebanon and Iran to support the Palestinian cause against Israeli repression. That’s when Islamic fundamentalist sects started a six-year long civil war, with the covert support of Western agencies and mercenaries. In 2014 Russia surprised the world by intervening militarily in their first foreign mission since the fall of the Soviet Union to defeat ISIS and its allies and support Assad’s secular government, helping it to recapture most of Syria. The Western media framed Assad as a brutal dictator who gassed his own people with countless claims of war crimes inevitably discovered by Western-funded White Helmets intermingling with rebel Islamic militants. The same self-proclaimed liberal media outlets who would later lie to us about covid, entertained the gullible with their poster child, Bana, whose well-written blog fit the anti-Assad narrative to a T. Yet the BBC had been caught red-handed staging a documentary with crisis actors to implicate Assad in a gas attack. Four years later OPCW inspectors failed to find evidence to blame the Syrian government for the alleged 2017 Douma chemical attack and, unsurprisingly, the Mafia media has gone quiet on the specifics of its blanket accusations ever since, shifting its focus to Vladimir Putin.

Why does all this matter now, you may wonder? Starmer has staked his reputation on ideological conformity, sticking to the dominant fake-progressive narrative, while distancing himself from his more radical policy advisors and Deep State actors. While he could channel his efforts against the spectres of Putin, far-right thugs, smokers and climate change, he could still command the support of most Guardian-reading Labour loyalists and the wider bien-pensant upper-middle classes. Now the US Deep State has pivoted to the Middle East in support of Israel, aiding and abetting an undeniably large scale of death and destruction, Starmer can no longer play the good guy.

Far be it from me to come to Starmer’s defence, but his holier-than-thou demeanour may not be able to stave off the inevitable opposition to direct UK involvement in a war between Israel’s allies and Iran supported logistically by Russia and China. Alliances may shift fast too. GB News talking heads, except for Neil Oliver, and the Reform Party leadership are unashamedly pro-Israel as is the Trump team. The rumours about Keir Starmer’s private life have all the hallmarks of a hatchet job, inspired by the brain behind the Blair project, Peter Mandelson. We may be seeing a split between the one-world-love and Zionist wings of the global techno-cabal. Sir Keir has served his purpose, but there are few charismatic leaders available who will follow the orders of an increasingly unstable and disunited ruling class as the US Empire crumbles?