Category: All in the Mind

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All in the Mind

Rebranding Eugenics

Brave New World of happy teletubbies with a diverse range of disabilities

The Dark Roots of the Autism Industrial Complex

The modern concept of mental health, particularly the screening of deviant or noncompliant behaviours, took shape in the 19th-century expansion of universal schooling. As industrial economies came to rely more on brainpower and social capital than unskilled manual labour alone, businesses turned to the state, churches and charities to help cultivate a new social order. This fostered growing interest in child psychology and the classification of personality disorders with the aim of weeding out perceived bad apples from the future pool of human resources.

Early psychiatric screening helped reclassify people as biological liabilities, fuelling eugenic sterilisation in North America and Scandinavia and most notoriously the Nazi T4 euthanasia programme, where human beings were dissected, classified and discarded in the name of systemic optimisation. The same dehumanising logic has now resurfaced in the AI age treating commoners as data inputs or guinea pigs, ripe for experimentation, rather than autonomous participants with agency and consent.

Comparisons with mid 20th century National Socialism rarely bode well, as they risk trivialising the scale of systematic murder the ideology enabled and may invite accusations of hyperbole. However, we need only connect the dots between the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Eugenics Society, John Hopkins University and most ominously the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Anthropology and Psychiatry (KWI-A and KWI-P) to understand the scientific basis for later sterilisation and euthanasia programmes that targeted the mentally retarded and clinically insane before the Second World War had even started.

Austrian-American psychiatrist, Leo Kanner, has long been credited with identifying infantile autism as a distinct disorder. This contrasted with his Swiss colleague Eugen Bleuler’s definition of autism as a symptom of extreme isolation observed in some schizophrenic patients. Although a social activist of Jewish heritage, Dr Kanner worked at the Rockefeller-funded John Hopkins Hospital and had initially supported the sterilisation of the feeble-minded, a view he would change in 1942 as the full horror of Nazi experiments came to light.

In 1981 Lorna Wing introduced the concept of high-functioning autism, which she named after the previously little-known Austrian psychiatrist, Hans Asperger. Prof. Simon Baron Cohen later popularised this as the extreme male brain (The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, 2003). However, Dr Wing brushed over Asperger’s collaboration with the euthanasia programme at the Spiegelgrund clinic. Edith Sheffer argued in her book The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (2018) that Hans Asperger was not the heroic pioneer shielding vulnerable children, as Lorna Wing portrayed him, but rather a participant in a system that selected who was worthy to live based on productivity, conformity and social value. Autism, as a diagnostic category, arose within this bureaucratic, medicalised framework of surveillance, selection and ultimately disposal.

Before the rise to power of the Fatherland Front in 1934, Red Vienna under Social Democratic rule pursued a progressive eugenics agenda, in which the state aimed to improve public health, hygiene and child welfare through a mix of carrot and stick tactics. Special needs practitioners, known locally as Heilpädagogen or healing educationalists, would identify gifted children and target the unfit for sterilisation. This kind of positive eugenics overlapped with the modern ideas of child development, early education and psychological screening, but often carried implicit assumptions about heritable fitness. Later under more authoritarian administrations, this pre-existing welfare infrastructure was co-opted into a far more coercive system of negative eugenics. The psychiatric system, especially at the Spiegelgrund clinic, played a central role in the Aktion T4 child euthanasia programme. Doctors had to classify children as educable or not. Those deemed unfit were sent to euthanasia clinics. Sheffer argues that autism, particularly the notion of a socially detached child, was shaped by this broader ideological context. That is, autism was pathologised precisely because non-conforming children were seen as a threat to the Volksgemeinschaft (the racially and socially unified community).

Eugenics and psychiatry evolved symbiotically in the early 20th century with substantial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation on both sides of the Atlantic, the Harriman family and the Kellogg Foundation among others. Charles Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton founded modern psychometrics and coined the term eugenics as the scientific basis both for racial discrimination and the later technocracy movement. German neuropathologist, Emil Kraeplin is often viewed as the father of modern scientific or biological psychiatry. In 1917, German-American banker, James Loeb, a former patient of Kraeplin’s, helped fund the German Institute for Psychiatric Research, which later became part of the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science.

Echoes of eugenics in the Swinging 60s

Despite his contempt for National Socialism, German-born psychologist, Hans Jürgen Eysenck, played a leading role the post-war promotion of psychometric testing and hereditarian theories. Along with his second wife, Sybil, Eysenck worked at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, where he developed a distinctive dimensional model of personality structure based on biogenetic variation. Through his prolific writing in scientific journals and broadsheet newspapers and his regular public speaking engagements, HJ Eysenck kept alive soft eugenics in the egalitarian interlude from the swinging sixties to the end of the cold war. Throughout this era, environmental determinism prevailed in psychology. Universal psychometric testing fell out of favour in Western Europe, often limited to occupational aptitude tests (civil service, military etc.), while it remained pervasive in the USA. Americans are more likely to know, discuss and treat IQ as part of personal identity. Western Europeans may undergo similar cognitive assessments but without the label, score or social meaning attached.

Marketing Deviance

In the 1980s, we began to see the proactive marketing of common emotional challenges, often through celebrity endorsement, such as depression, obsessive behaviour and social anxiety. These subjective labels would not have hitherto qualified as psychiatric conditions. American films, soap operas, and sitcoms helped normalise not only psychotherapy as a rite of passage but also psychoactive medications for successful young professionals. This shift marked a significant turning point in how society perceived and addressed mental health issues.

The mainstreaming of these conditions was not merely a commercial venture but a reflection of a broader societal trend. The term mental health has become a catch-all for a wide range of behaviours and emotions that were once considered normal variations of the human experience.

Managing Noncompliance

Soviet scientists and public health officials initially embraced the Fabian approach to progressive eugenics to improve society collectively. This contrasted with Western race or class-based approaches by focusing on social and environmental conditions, rather than hereditary determinism, through family planning. Yuri Filipchenko, Alexander Serebrovsky and Nikolai Koltsov played pivotal roles in aligning genetics with socialism, founding the Russian Eugenics Society in 1920.

However, tensions soon emerged between Mendelian geneticists and Marxist ideologues, especially those wedded to socio-environmental determination of human traits. In the late 1920s Stalin cracked down on Western-influenced science and denounced Serebrovsky’s work. Soviet journals began publishing attacks on eugenics as a bourgeois science and in 1936 Eugenics was formally banned as a scientific field.

By the late 1930s, genetics itself came under fire, culminating in the rise of Trofim Lysenko, who promoted Lamarckian biology and rejected Mendelian inheritance. In the 1930s, American geneticist, Hermann J Muller, promoted a vision of soft eugenics rooted in Mendelian genetics, arguing that informed reproductive choices could reduce hereditary disease. He shared many ideals with Julian Huxley, who had invited Muller to join him at the recently founded William Marsh Rice Institute of Rice University in 1912. After accepting a short-term research post at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute in Berlin in 1932, Muller worked in the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1937. He opposed both racially motivated eugenics and Trofim Lysenko’s Neo-Lamarckian denial of genetics in the USSR, positioning himself as a scientific advocate for genetic determinism tempered by ethics.

Into the Abyss

The key players of the Nazi eugenics programmes received direct or indirect funding from American philanthropic organisations with oversight from the IFEO, International Federation of Eugenics Organizations, headed by American eugenicist Charles Davenport.

  • Ernst Rüdin spearheaded psychiatric genetics, helping to draft the 1933 Sterilisation Law and providing the intellectual foundation for sterilisation and euthanasia (Aktion T4). In 1930, Rüdin argued for eugenics at the First International Congress for Mental Hygiene, held in Washington DC and two years later became President of IFEO.
  • Hans Luxenburger pioneered the use of twin studies to investigate the heritability of psychiatric and neurological disorders alongside Ernst Rüdin and Franz Kallmann. The latter of Jewish descent, was purged under new racial laws In 1936. However, his colleague and the Rockefeller Foundation help him relocate to the United States where he continued research into neurological disorders via twin adoption studies.
  • Otmar von Verschuer advanced racial hygiene through hereditary research, mentored Josef Mengele, and promoted sterilisation of mixed-race children and the mentally ill.
  • Eugen Fischer contributed anthropological theories on race mixing and heritability that legitimised sterilisation and racial laws. He chaired the IFEO’s  Commission on Bastardization and Miscegenation.
  • Karl Brandt and Philipp Bouhler led the implementation of Aktion T4, coordinating mass murder of the disabled and mentally ill in gas chambers and via lethal injections. While not direct recipients of foreign funding, their actions relied on Rockefeller-funded pseudoscience that legitimised their work.

The Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in financing German eugenics research, largely through grants to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry (KWI-P). Between 1925 and 1935, the foundation provided nearly $3 million to German researchers, including Rüdin, Verschuer and Fischer, with specific grants such as a donation to the KWI-A in 1936 of $655,000, which would have been over 1000 times the average annual salary in Germany at the time. These funds supported studies on heredity and racial hygiene, which were later misused by the Nazis to justify sterilisation and euthanasia programs. The Foundation continued funding even after the 1933 Nuremberg Laws, though it withdrew support in 1939 when the misuse became undeniable. Only in 2021 did the Rockefeller Foundation acknowledge its historical involvement in eugenics and issued a statement supporting anti-eugenics efforts. Though the Foundation later distanced itself, it had enabled much of the scientific groundwork.

Rüdin and Verschuer developed diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, feeblemindedness and racial purity, leading to sterilisation or euthanasia of hundreds of thousands. Fischer’s work justified the sterilisation of over 400,000 people and the targeting of mixed-race children. Beginning in 1939, Brandt and Bouhler co-led the infamous T4 euthanasia programme, responsible for the organised killing of 250,000 to 300,000 people through institutions like Hadamar, Hartheim and Brandenburg.

After the war Brandt was tried and executed at the 1947 Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial for crimes against humanity, while his colleague, Bouhler, committed suicide in 1945. However, the most influential figures, Rüdin, Verschuer and Fischer, escaped serious postwar punishment. Verschuer resumed academic work in West Germany and contributed to ongoing postwar genetics research.

While secret, news about state-sanctioned mass murder leaked out as families noticed suspicious deaths. By 1940–41 growing awareness sparked public protests, especially from the Catholic Church. Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen (Münster, 1941) gave a famous sermon denouncing the euthanasia of the disabled. While the official programme was paused, decentralised killings continued until 1945.

In the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials with the condemnation of coercive medical experimentation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed that "everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." In the coming decades, these noble concepts would be endlessly redefined.

Shift to Behaviourism

By the mid 1930s the Soviet Union had abandoned eugenics in favour of Pavlovian behaviourism. Nobel Laureate Ivan Pavlov believed many mental disorders were malfunctions of the higher nervous activity affecting the brain’s balance between excitation and inhibition. He saw neuroses as learned maladaptations caused by excessive or contradictory stimuli or what we might now call environmental stress.

His famous experimental neuroses in dogs, created by overloading them with conflicting signals, were designed to mimic human breakdowns such as hysteria or anxiety.

Pavlov acknowledged that temperament had a physiological basis and could make an individual vulnerable to stress. However, he believed any temperament could be strengthened or weakened by the right conditioning, in contrast with hard genetic determinism common among early 20th-century eugenicists.

Unlike psychiatrists who still used moral or degeneracy theories, Pavlov framed illness in mechanistic, reversible terms. In principle, a maladaptive reflex pattern could be extinguished and replaced, meaning the person could be cured by reconditioning.

After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Alexander Luria and Boris Teplov solidified Pavlov's theories on conditioned reflexes and higher nervous activity as the official paradigm for psychiatry and psychology in the USSR with the abolition of psychoanalysis and a focus on physiological mechanisms. The nomenklatura denounced psychoanalysis as a bourgeois pseudoscience and replaced it with a purely physiological model of the mind.

This new paradigm emphasised the biological and physiological underpinnings of mental illness. Soviet psychiatrists in this era viewed mental disorders not as psychological conflicts but as disturbances in the brain's higher nervous activity. This led to a rise in research on the brain's role in behaviour, emotion and cognition.

Andrei Snezhnevsky, a leading figure at the Moscow School of Psychiatry, coined the term sluggish schizophrenia (вялотекущая шизофрения  or vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya) in the 1960s.

Sluggish schizophrenia could not be framed in purely Pavlovian terms. Instead, it was billed as a biological brain disorder, in keeping with Soviet claims that psychiatry was a medical science, not social policing. Symptoms included pathological reformism, perseverance in defending one’s opinion and suspiciousness toward the authorities. Progression was said to be extremely slow, sometimes over decades, which made it convenient for indefinite confinement. We could almost describe as an adult form of oppositional defiant disorder.

Although Pavlov’s reflex theory was still officially revered, by the 1960s Soviet psychiatry had moved towards biological determinism in mental illness, at least rhetorically, while quietly applying ideological criteria. Sluggish schizophrenia worked politically because it allowed the state to present dissenters as biologically ill, not criminal and framed nonconformity as a medical risk to society rather than a legitimate political stance.

In the West, John B Watson pioneered our understanding of behaviourism. He believed that psychology should focus only on observable behaviour, not internal mental states. Watson famously claimed he could shape any infant into any kind of adult purely via conditioning, given control of their environment. Although active during the height of the American eugenics’ movement (1900s–1930s), Watson preferred environmental explanations. While eugenicists promoted sterilisation to eliminate defective genes, Watson’s emphasis on environmental control implied that upbringing could override biology, making sterilisation less central from his perspective. However, behaviourism’s blank slate rhetoric could co-exist with eugenics in policy circles: one could argue for “improving” the environment and removing genetic defects simultaneously.

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) developed the concept of operant conditioning as behaviour shaped by reinforcement and punishment with applications education, social engineering, psychiatric treatment and even utopian communities such as Walden Two.

Skinner did not outright deny genetic influence, but like Watson, he prioritised environmental control as the main lever for shaping society. He was less politically engaged in eugenics debates than some contemporaries, focusing instead on behavioural technology for improving the human condition. Skinner’s framework allowed policymakers to imagine behaviour as infinitely malleable, potentially reducing the scientific rationale for sterilisation. But in practice, both approaches could operate in parallel, eugenics targeting the “unfit” biologically, behaviourism reforming those deemed socially deviant. In the U.S., compulsory sterilisation laws (e.g., Buck v. Bell, 1927) targeted the “feebleminded,” mentally ill, epileptic and criminal. Many eugenicists saw mental illness as heritable; sterilisation was framed as preventive public health. Behaviourism did not drive these laws, inspired by hereditarian psychiatry and social Darwinism, but it could be used alongside eugenics to manage those who remained. Skinner marked a shift from conditioning reflexes to operant shaping of complex behaviours. Both contributed to a vision of society as modifiable through controlled stimuli and reinforcement schedules.

While behaviourism offered an alternative to purely genetic determinism, in authoritarian settings it could blend seamlessly with policies aimed at eliminating or re-engineering undesirable traits.

Going Underground

A belief in genetic determinism, that intelligence, personality and social potential are largely hereditary, underpinned much of pre-1945 racial eugenics and continues to feed into some strands of modern genetic engineering discourse. But such determinism is not a necessarily prerequisite for psychiatric abuse. In the Soviet model, the suppression of dissent through psychiatry relied less on heredity than on identifying and neutralising politically unsound tendencies, regardless of genetic origin. By contrast, progressive eugenics retains the selective impulse of its racial counterpart but redefines its ideal population: discrimination is not based on skin colour or ethnicity, but on perceived educability and ideological alignment. In their utopian vision, progressive eugenicists envisage a society as a network of university campuses, with the uneducable or stubbornly traditional relegated to controlled reservations, vestiges of the past preserved only for heritage value.

In their 1994 book, The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray marked a big shift away from the intellectual egalitarianism of the boomer decades. It had once again become politically correct to affirm that some people are more intellectually gifted than others. The Overton window shifted further eight years later when Steven Pinker, a self-declared liberal, wrote a scathing critique of behaviourism in his best-seller, the Blank Slate. While the new generation of evolutionary psychologists steered clear of endorsing eugenics or distanced themselves from racial sociobiology, they cleared the way for a more radical departure from the existentialism of the 1960s with its emphasis on personal agency. Both radical behaviourism, as favoured by Soviet psychologists, and hard genetic determinism, as favoured by neoliberal sociobiologists, reduce human beings to mere programmable machines with only the illusion of free will. They share a mechanistic view of humanity and differ mainly in their focus on our hardware, as in our genetic inheritance, versus software, as in our environment in determining divergent intellectual and behavioural outcomes. While academics debated the relative importances of genes and memes, both concepts could be invoked to justify a more stratified society with greater surveillance and restrictions on personal freedom.

Groupthink

The infamous Asch and Milgram experiments illustrate the dynamics of group conformity and obedience, revealing how individuals often prioritise social acceptance over critical thinking. Solomon Asch's studies demonstrated that people would conform to a group's incorrect answers, while Stanley Milgram's research on the early 1960s highlighted the extent to which individuals would obey authority figures, even to the point of inflicting harm on others. Participants played the role of teachers instructed to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to learners, in reality actors, if they gave incorrect answers. In this framework, human actions are seen as responses to social pressures rather than autonomous choices. However, Asch maintained a belief in the potential for critical thinking and free will, even in the face of conformity. By  contrast, Milgram's findings suggested that obedience to authority could diminish individual moral agency, indicating that emotions and situational pressures might often override critical thinking. Together, their work illustrates the complex interplay between group behaviour, individual agency and the factors that influence our actions.

On the one hand, the reductionist camp views humans as deterministic systems, whether biological or environmental, leading to greater social control and via psychiatry, education, sterilisation, while on the other hand the voluntarist camp sees humans as moral agents, capable of genuine choice, favouring the ethics of responsibility, dignity and personal liberty.

Free Will and Mind-Body Dualism

Philosophers have long wrestled with free will and its implications for self-determination, personal responsibility and informed consent. From a hard determinist standpoint that views the world through a materialist lens, our desires and needs are mere products of a complex maze of interweaving biological processes and environmental stimuli. We would have no greater intrinsic worth than the bacteria swimming in a petri dish with only the illusion of freedom. Compatibilists try to reconcile material determinism, as in the belief that nothing exists outside the physical realm, with personal agency and independence of mind. Arguably, true free will, at least within our physiological constraints, relies on mind-body dualism, that has long been out of favour with mainstream neuroscientists. In his book “Free Agents, How Evolution Gave Us Free Will”, Kevin J. Mitchell provides a compelling case that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but purposeful agents. Nevertheless, he rejects the kind of magical dualism associated with René Descartes. This physicalist outlook stands in stark contrast to John C. Eccles’ and Karl Popper’s thinking in their 1977 book, The Self and its Brain, which lays out the case for scientific dualism that maintains the mind (self) is not reducible to the brain and conscious will can affect the probabilities of synaptic events through quantum indeterminacy. Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist and philosopher of science, argues that computation cannot emulate consciousness. In his 1989 book The Emperors’ New Mind he hypothesised quantum mechanics may give rise to human consciousness. Penrose later teamed up with Stuart Hameroff to develop the orchestrated objective reduction theory (Orch-OR), that sees consciousness arise from non-computable quantum processes in the brain’s microtubules. If Penrose is correct, then our minds cannot be reduced to algorithms and replicated in machines, placing a hard ceiling on artificial general intelligence (AGI). The implication is profound. It affirms a unique worthiness of human beings, not just as complex information processors but as conscious agents in a way machines can never be. Conversely, if the reductionist models favoured by mainstream science prevail, the ruling classes may come to see most of humanity as expendable zoo animals. Human rights only make sense if we value people’s inner selves and not merely their utility in terms of their physical or mental dexterity.

The Equality Delusion

In the boomer decades, we assumed that most adults could participate fully in society as respected workers, parents, neighbours and engaged citizens. Schools strove to provide equal opportunities rather than lifetime guardianship. The mentally handicapped accounted for a tiny minority with rare and profound impairments. Everyone else was assumed to be accountable for their actions. Parents and extended kin bore the moral and practical duty of raising children. State agencies intervened only in extreme cases of neglect and abuse. We have since experienced thirty to forty years of managed stratification by personality and intelligence profiles with the growing demonisation of the unenlightened underclasses. Ironically in the same period, the child welfare system has become increasingly obsessed with equality, diversity and inclusion, while on the ground the wealth gap continues to grow and a global superculture supresses a rich tapestry of rooted cultural traditions.

Many still assume the progressive managerial classes seek to redress inequality and promote cultural diversity as an antidote to global homogenisation. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

The mental health mantra focuses on our adaptability to a socially re-engineered world. It medicalises incompatibility with the system. While most professionals in the extended social care sector believe they are helping to improve livelihoods, their superiors have other thinly veiled plans for an intellectually tiered society.

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Your Life in their Hands

How progressive middle managers want you to place your trust in official experts

The Labour-dominated Westminster parliament approved the third reading of The Terminally Ill Adults Bill (commonly known as the Assisted Dying Bill) by only 314 to 291 votes after defeating amendments that could have offered some minimal safeguards, such as forbidding doctors from pre-emptively presenting assisted suicide as a care pathway, which could be dangerous with patients in a deep state of melancholy or suffering from mild dementia. Only the unelected House of Lords may now revise the legislation before it becomes law. It comes as little surprise the French Parliament also recently passed analogous legislation. Contrary to media portrayals, the policy does not come from a large grassroots movement, but straight out of the World Economic Forum playbook via a spider’s web of NGOs and charities. Just as the technophile professional classes look forward to extending their lives through AI-guided medicine, epigenome reprogramming, somatic and cognitive augmentation, they seem happy to relieve plebeians of their suffering through end-of-life ceremonies.

Some may argue that we already have euthanasia in all but name, leaving millions of atomised commoners to while their time on a cocktail of audiovisual entertainment, comfort food and risky medications, which in combination often have undisclosed side effects. With a reduced quality of life and limited personal independence, especially with long-term medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, angina, atrial fibrillation and most ominously dementia, sooner or later we’ll end up in hospital at the mercy of medics who may decide whether to keep us alive or give us life-shortening palliative care.

As early as the 1990s the Liverpool Care Pathway provided a framework for the triage of worthy and unworthy patients, by prioritising different approaches depending on the perceived quality of a patient’s remaining life, which in the case of lonely dementia patients is likely to be very diminished. While a public outcry led health authorities to phase out the Liverpool Care Pathway in 2013, only seven years later, tens of thousands of covid patients were given high doses of midazolam, which Dr Luke Evan MP described as essential to a good death and asked the then Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, to check if supplies would suffice.

Groupthink

In her many prime-time TV appearances promoting her Assisted Dying Bill, Kim Leadbeater MP exuded her complete deference to the medical establishment. While Labour politicians often like to appeal to our compassion for the weakest in society, their underlying assumption is that we all share the same belief system, espoused by the progressive mainstream media. They look on the experts behind the covid lockdowns as tech deities whose conflicting logic must never be questioned. They worship the likes of Anthony Fauci and Chris Whitty with a quasi-religious zeal. To question these messianic figures provokes not just unease, but accusations of betrayal, as though one has violated a moral or spiritual covenant. I know from dealing with my extended family of past and present Labour activists which subjects and celebrities to avoid in polite conversation. It’s seldom a good idea to question Greta Thunberg’s saintliness. However, judging from books I’ve seen on prominent display in the houses of Labour-activist relatives, the likes of Bill Gates are also held in great esteem, despite his obsession with overpopulation. Unlike many on the cultural left, I’ve swung from a position of population pessimism in the early 2000s, when I believed the expansion of consumer affluence could not scale to the projected peak population of 10 billion human beings, to a more optimistic stance. Yet the peak oil event came and went in 2008 as living standards, by common metrics such as access to electricity, clean water and life-expectancy, continued to improve across the former third world. Not only did obesity become a bigger health challenge than undernourishment, but policymakers began to worry more about an ageing population with fertility rates dropping way below replacement level.

Sacred Cows

Nothing compares with the biggest sacred cow of them all, the NHS. Labour activists will typically blame all its failings on Tory cuts and creeping privatisation, while turning a blind eye to its one-size-fits-all attitude to healthcare as well as its growing obsession with mental health surveillance. While we once hoped our public health service could save us, the onus is now on us to save the NHS through our compliance with public health edicts, namely to put the common good before narrow self-interest.

It does not take a huge leap of imagination to see how public health groupthink could persuade civic-minded but atomised individuals to make the ultimate sacrifice for the common good of younger generations. Online influencers and soap opera storylines could subtly lionise assisted dying volunteers as symbols of virtue doing their bit to help combat climate change or free up valuable healthcare resources.

End of Life Ceremonies

Once planned life termination is normalised, funeral companies or social services could organise celebration-of-life events to let relatives and old friends say their last goodbyes. While farewell ceremonies may seem a good way to end your life if you’re a well-connected high-achiever suffering from a terminal illness, other prospects loom for the lonely with limited financial means and whose only social life is online, a cohort that’s likely to grow over the coming years.

Is it completely beyond the realms of possibility that community care coordinators, with a little help from AI agents, could first identify lonely individuals with decreased autonomy and then invite them to a celebration-of-life event with all their favourite music and food as well as long lost friends and distant relatives contacted after trawling through social media. In their absence, creative community care coordinates could recruit people from a similar cultural background or reach out to occasional online acquaintances to wish farewell to someone about to transition to the next world. The scary bit is that the prospect of one last party with old and new friends could persuade many to agree to high-tech euthanasia.

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Turning Nasty

Killing you softly with condescending compassion

The good old days of universal love for all human beings irrespective of colour, creed or caste are coming to an end with a cruel twist. The new breed of eugenicists, allied with the world’s tech giants, like to appeal to an illusory kind of environmentally friendly boutique progressivism that delivers a carefree green utopia for the chosen few and planned obsolescence for everyone else. Deceptive advertising entertains us with visions of shiny happy multicoloured people sharing a post-industrial paradise of luxuriant college campuses and theme parks, interspersed with pristine nature reserves, solar and wind farms powering hyperactive underground data-centres connecting and monitoring all sentient human beings. It lures the trendy professional classes into a false sense of moral superiority over the reactionary great unwashed whose failure to adapt will quietly consign them to the history books.

In the meantime, the managerial classes have resorted to time-honoured divide-and-rule tactics by guilt-tripping the settled working classes for their intolerance of newfangled rival underclasses, whether defined by ethnicity, migration status, sexual identity or disability. In times of plenty with opportunities galore for most resourceful citizens to thrive as valued members of cohesive communities, there was no need to obsess with diversity, equality and inclusion, only to care for the unlucky few who fell by the wayside owing to significant social and physiological handicaps. As the current debt-driven economic model becomes more unsustainable by the day with diminishing returns on unfunded government expenditure, something will have to give way with the weakest inevitably bearing the brunt as more and more workers fail to find a niche in the era of smart automation. If you cannot grasp the logic behind AI-assisted solutions, your paid job may soon become superfluous, further raising the IQ bar in the cognitive professions. You may stay in the new Garden of Eden the techno-patrician class has planned for you on universal basic income, but only if you know your place and do not rock the boat. It’s very much a case of one rule for thee and one rule for me.

The priorities of regional governance teams only make sense once you realise their end goal is to phase most of us out with plausible deniability over the next two natural generations, which explains the authorities’ focus on shaping young minds. While Sir Keir Starmer grandstands on the world stage striking deals with his Davos chums, at home his team neutralises discontent by throwing shiny baubles or cheap gimmicks to the masses while failing dismally to provide the infrastructure and social framework people need. He trades fishing rights for faster passport checks for British citizens at European airports because policy advisors think the plebs care more about inexpensive holidays in the Sun than keeping alive rooted multigenerational concerns. Likewise, his team believe you care more about getting new subsidised obesity injections on the overrated NHS than keeping family farms safe from predatory investment bankers, biotech multinationals, renewable energy giants and property developers. They want obedient consumers with limited autonomy or critical thinking skills, but happy to receive social credits in the form of universal welfare in exchange for their acquiescence with a new form of digital feudalism.

Engineered Hostilities

As the world as we knew it falls apart, different sets of opinion leaders can stir up trouble by scapegoating rival groups of commoners for heinous crimes and degeneracy. The liberal intelligentsia may take pride in their tolerance of ethnic diversity, but they openly belittle the native working classes with accusations of intolerance, lack of education and bigotry, blaming some of the most underprivileged in society for their own misery. By contrast, another set of populist influencers both on the fringes of the mainstream media like Fox News in the States or GB News on his side of the Big Pond as well as well-funded alternative media outlets like Rebel News, tap into growing nativist resentment by highlighting the criminality, incompatible customs and corruption of identifiable ethno-religious groups. The narrow focus on Muslims endears the captive audience of Western malcontents to the Israeli cause for an Arab-free Jewish homeland. Yet behind the scenes we see many of the same movers and shakers pulling the strings of political actors on both sides of the Palestinian and mass migration debates.

In late 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly expressed intentions to facilitate the voluntary migration of Gazans, stating, "Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it." Other Knesset members urged Western nations to accept Gazan refugees, drawing parallels to Europe's acceptance of refugees during the Yugoslav and Syrian civil wars. Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, supported this idea, describing it as a humanitarian solution for Gaza's residents. In short, Netanyahu wants to offload his country’s Arab problem on Europe despite fostering alliances with critics of mass immigrations such as Viktor Orbán. The plot thickens further when we look at the close collaboration between the various Soros foundations, championing both open borders and the Palestinian cause, and refugee charities. David Miliband had few qualms about supporting the 2003 UK/US occupation of Iraq, largely an extension of Israeli foreign policy objectives, as junior minister and later as Foreign Secretary before accepting a job as CEO of the International Rescue Committee. This well-funded NGO came later into the public eye at the height of Syrian refugee crisis, triggered by a civil war between allies of Al Qaeda and ISIS and the Syrian government. Israel, the US, UK and other Western administrations were not neutral this conflict. They armed and trained the head-chopping rebels via their spurious rescue workers, the White Helmets. Indeed in 2018, Israel helped evacuate fleeing ISIS-allied militants. This seems a very odd move from a government that wants to protect its citizens from the excesses of Islamic fundamentalism, unless you believe depopulation through endless fragmented proxy wars is in the long-term interests of the chosen few or rather your survival strategy is to let your adversaries kill each other.

Many may prefer to believe in a rift between the pro-Palestinian left, supported by the likes of George Soros, and the pro-Israel right. In reality, the Israel lobby practically owns nearly all key Democrat and Republican politicians in the US, but outside North America and guilt-ridden Germany, Israel has lost the battle of hearts and minds. The aim was never to create a secure Jewish homeland living in peace with its neighbours, but to trigger a series of destabilising proxy wars and unsustainable migratory flows, raising tensions on the ground among indigenous Europeans and newcomers and requiring higher levels of surveillance.

It comes as little surprise that the Tony Blair Institute has finally got its way with digital ID in the form of the proposed BritCard mobile app.  It aims to integrate various identifiers such as passports, driving licenses, biometric data and national insurance numbers, allowing users to prove their identity for government services, work, renting and accessing benefits. It is already being marketed as a tool to clamp down on illegal immigration and unauthorised workers. In all likelihood, while not initially mandatory for UK citizens, banks, public venues and online services will require it.

The authorities may often seem incompetent, but they know how to play on contradictory fears to justify greater surveillance for the common good.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

On the Brink of Civil War?

Social unrest in an age of hyper-surveillance and hypersensitivity

The Labour-branded government has announced sweeping cutbacks in social welfare and core public services at a time of rising unemployment and on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution. You could hardly choose a worse time to wean the most vulnerable in society off welfare dependence. With hundreds of billions squandered in recent years on lockdowns, military misadventures, hairbrained energy transition schemes and accommodating record levels of net immigration, something had to give. One week the government announces cuts in winter fuel payments with savings of up to £1.5 billion, but the next it announces £3 billion more to help Ukraine’s war effort. After years of championing the disabled, the Labour administration is telling a million incapacity benefit claimants to get a job, inadvertently admitting that the UK’s watered-down definition of disability has hidden the true scale of worklessness. No wonder, many Labour supporters are angry, but the pipe dream of endless state generosity could not go on forever. The old arguments that Keynesian economics can boost growth and equality no longer holds sway when many WEF-endorsed policies aim to fast-track the transition away from the carefree mass consumerism of 1990s and early 2000s to the new virtual economy offering abstract services we never used to need.

On the surface, away from overseas conflict zones and inner-city crime blackspots, all seems quiet in the suburbs and small towns where most British people live. The homicide rate has declined since its postwar peak around the turn of the millennium. People have by and large retreated to their humble abodes, preferring to binge-watch Netflix movies than head out for a night on the town. More people die through substance abuse and personal neglect at home than in pub brawls or street fights. In Scotland alone deaths attributed to alcohol or recreational drugs has hovered around 2500 since 2020, while the total homicide rate for 2023-24 was just 57 with 36 outside the home. The lockdowns of 2020 and 21 only accelerated this trend. Yet emotional insecurity and underlying internecine tensions may have hit an all-time high, at least since records began, due to a breakdown in trust and social cohesion. Low-level crime remains rampant among the Island’s diverse communities. The police have given up trying to stop burglars, drug-dealers, grooming gangs and money-launderers. They also apply very different standards to different parallel communities, but always seem to have time to monitor social media activity and arrest critical thinkers for daring to contradict official narratives. In 2023 over 3,300 UK residents were arrested for social media posts alone and that was before the infamous Online Safety Act had time to kick in.

Just in case you were under the mistaken impression that laws against alleged hate speech and misinformation only affected xenophobes, antivaxxers and transphobes, London’s Metropolitan Police dispatched 20 armed officers to handcuff and arrest six women at a Quaker meeting house in London during a peaceful gathering on the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, because they were planning  non-violent direct action against fossil fuel companies and arms manufacturers. This comes after Hertfordshire Police dispatched 6 officers to arrest a couple for daring to criticise the appointment of a new head teacher at their daughter’s primary school.

Slowly but surely, the post-millennial social contract between the self-styled progressive managerial classes and the atomised consumer classes is coming apart. The sheer hypocrisy of the condescending illiberal intelligentsia has never been more undeniable. The exact details hardly matter, but affluent trendy lefties are now blaming the selfish misbehaviour and perceived ignorance of the settled working classes for all our societal and environmental problems. A toxic mix of woke identity politics and green zealotry has succeeded only in sowing the seeds of distrust and widening the gap between haves and have-nots by creating rival groups of impoverished strivers and welfare dependents.

One week the prime minister affirms his support for Israel’s counter-insurgency operations as it resumes bombing civilian targets in Gaza. The next week the deputy PM, Angela Rayner, joins public celebrations of Ramadan and promises stronger laws against Islamophobia. Come June, woke officialdom will be promoting Pride Month again and yet schools and businesses are busy downgrading Easter for fear of offending non-Christians. Meanwhile much parliamentary time is devoted to Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill, despite the opposition of all traditional religions. The sanctity of life is the one thing Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics could agree on. Nobody dare mention that these policies conspire mainly to destabilise social cohesion and empower the surveillance state to suppress rational critique, inviting us only to express our emotions.

In a complex world with competing demands, it’s almost impossible to keep everyone happy. One person’s concept of emancipation or self-expression may harm someone else’s privacy, dignity, safety and livelihood. As a victim of teenage bullying myself, I can empathise with confused adolescent boys identifying as girls because they fail to meet classic male stereotypes. I had a different kind of identity crisis, which thankfully did not lead me to believe I may have been born in the body, but I can understand how gullible troubled teenagers can succumb to the trans cult and blame their alienation on reactionary transphobes. But what about shy teenage girls who feel threatened by the presence of a biological male undressing next to them in the changing rooms?

In times of plenty with boundless opportunities for expansion, it may be easy to open your heart to the plight of refugees fleeing extreme poverty or tyranny and welcome them into your land. It’s not so easy when newcomers not only compete with the settled population over access to services, affordable housing and jobs, but transform the cultural landscape limiting everyone’s freedom. Numerous social attitudes surveys across Europe have found a distinct pattern, the more affluent you are, the more relaxed you are about the consequences of rapid demographic change. However, among the lower classes, settled communities tend to be more critical of mass migration and ethnic minorities more socially conservative on family issues.

Fear of Islamic or Zionist Fundamentalism

Two divergent critiques of global imperialism compete to explain the growing powerless of the working classes. One blames radical Islam and the other blames Israel for the destabilisation of viable societies. Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) in France are both fiercely pro-Israel. GBNews talking heads, with the honourable exception of Neil Oliver relegated to weekly online videos, regularly conflate the Muslim role in the grooming gang scandal with animated protests featuring Hamas flags against Israeli war crimes with sporadic reports of antisemitic hate crimes. Pro-Israel lobbies have succeeded in winning over much of the European nationalist right, with Netanyahu receiving a warm welcome from Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, amid calls from other European leaders for his arrest. Yet Israel would never gotten away with such a scale of death and destruction in Gaza without the logistical support of the United States and EU and our collective wilful blindness to a grotesque imbalance of power. In theory, a truly independent European superstate could break ranks with the US and demand an immediate ceasefire, enforced by a naval blockade and trade sanctions. However, they did no such thing. Frightened politicians, wary of the Muslim vote, distanced themselves from the excesses of Israeli military operations, but were powerless to stop the slaughter.

Hundreds of thousands of mainly white working-class girls would not have fallen prey to mainly Pakistani and Bangladeshi grooming gangs if they had grown up in stable two parent families in tight-knit communities able to defend themselves against predators who could easily take advantage of vulnerable and lure gullible girls with flashy cars, drugs and booze. While many victims could recount vile ordeals with unspeakable levels of depravity, it’s easy to fall into the trap of blaming a literal interpretation of ancient Quranic teachings, such as "...who guard their chastity except with their wives or those whom their right hands possess..." (Quran 23:5–6 and 70:29–30) for the behaviour of sexually frustrated men from South Asian communities transposed to the British Isles. Most Islamic scholars condemn concubinage today. More scandalous were the coordinated efforts by the police, social workers and local councils to suppress crimes committed against one atomised group to placate another community, setting the stage for a turf war with one community screaming rape and the other playing the race card, usually in the guise of Islamophobia. In this spat, the morally superior managerial and media classes have tended to downplay the scale of the grooming gang phenomenon either to further their careers or signal their repudiation of xenophobia. Often, they rely on counter-narratives to blame the settled working classes for their own demise. In recent weeks Labour politicians and their allies in the establishment media have been at pains to promote the Netflix series, Adolescence, about a white teenager, Jamie Miller, from a stable family obsessed with incel culture and the Tate brothers, charged with killing his female classmate, Katie Leonard. The only trouble is that it is complete fiction and was only inspired by a real world of an emotionally disturbed Ugandan-born Hassan Sentamu who killed 15-year-old, Elianne Andam, after his ex-girlfriend had dumped him. Sentamu stems largely from a chaotic upbringing marked by alleged abuse, family breakdown, time in foster care and fatherlessness from an early age. His violent behaviour appears rooted in personal trauma and instability rather than falling prey to online radicalisation or incel culture. If anything, the real-world teenage murder in Croydon, South London, highlights the challenges of cultural integration rather than its success.

Officialdom’s reaction to last July’s Southport stabbing spree followed a similar pattern of deflection. Rather than address people’s very real concerns about societal breakdown amid rapid demographic change and arrest the perpetrators of violence, the establishment doubled down by jailing social media activists and angry protesters. True to form, high-profile self-righteous opinion leaders kept pushing the line that the government needed to take swift and tough action against far-right rioters. Yet objective reality on the ground revealed a very different picture. As rival ethno-religious groups battled it out on the streets over unrelated grievances in Harehills, Leeds and Tower Hamlets, the police adopted a posture of strategic disengagement and stood by and watched, leading to accusations of two-tier policing.

Skewed Moral Compass

A form of subconscious identity-driven bias causes people to minimise or magnify wrongdoing based on the group affiliation of the perpetrators or victims, leading to a skewed moral compass. The antiwar left, often aligned with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain or Jean-Luc Melanchon in France, may have a clear conscience over their opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, but they downplay the high level of violent and sexual crime committed by immigrant communities. By the same token, working-class nationalists often side with Israel over Palestine, while blaming Islam as a whole for the destruction of Western civilisation. Their conscience may be clear over the victims of grooming gangs, but they choose to ignore the innocent victims of military adventurism in far-off lands.

Both groups often fail to see how different kinds of evil, whether perpetrated by state actors, manipulated militias or degenerate commoners, may all be side effects of global destabilisation orchestrated by powerful vested interest groups. Yet we are encouraged to discount such a possibility as a wild conspiracy theory, preferring instead the Punch and Judy spectacle of Trump versus Harris or Labour versus Tories or Reform. Many on the cultural left are up in arms about the Trump administration’s expulsion of foreign students who have protested Israeli war crimes because their actions allegedly intimidate Jewish Americans and lend support to Hamas, which the US considers a terrorist organisation. Yet they were dutifully silent about Big Tech’s censorship of social conservative and naturopathic (i.e. critical of Big Pharma) viewpoints. Indeed, many on the left gave the Biden administration a free pass on its unflinching financial, military and diplomatic support for Israeli war crimes, preferring to believe a Harris administration might set a different tone.

In the past the radical wing of the US Democratic Party, embodied by Senators Bernie Sanders (although not technically a party member) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voiced passionate critiques of US foreign policy, but have always stopped short of calling for an end to US military aid to Israel, which averaged $3- to 5 billion in the decade before 2023 and has been estimated $17.9 billio36n since, in addition to other military adventures that serve Israeli interests much more than US priorities focused on national defence, world peace and trading relationships.

As elements within Big Tech, most notably Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, have shifted their support to the Trump team, Sanders and Cortez, both big lockdown cheerleaders, have started a campaign against the oligarchy, which fits the theme of Russian interference in American politics. The growing concentration of wealth in a tiny cabal of tech entrepreneurs and financiers is beyond dispute. Yet the radical corporate left turns a blind eye to the toxic influence of the likes of Bill Gates and Larry Fink of BlackRock, who cleverly steer clear of pronouncements on geopolitical controversies while working in close liaison with the US military industrial complex. At a rally at the Ford Idaho Center on 14 April this year, marshals acted swiftly to expel attendees who unfurled a large banner with the Palestinian flag and the words Free Palestine. Senator Sanders later reiterated his support for Israel’s right to defend itself, despite his critique of its excesses and the verifiable fact that Israel broke the January ceasefire deal.

Narrative Dissonance

Recent news viewership trends reveal a marked shift away from traditional TV news bulletins, often consumed passively, to a wider range of corporate and indie online channels. One way or another a large section of general population has lost all trust in official sources, often completely at odds with their lived experiences. In 2020 the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, worked alongside broadcasters, newspapers, advertisers and online influencers to change some of the most basic human behaviours and perceptions. Overnight neighbours and strangers alike became bio-hazards and previously low-key scientific functionaries became deities. Big Tech stepped in to suppress counternarratives. While YouTube still tolerated flat earthers and Israel firsters, it censored dissident scientists and medics who contradicted the official WHO line. While possibly only 10-15% of Westerners openly disputed the covid narrative, with most preferring to comply in the hope of getting back to normal, they sowed the seeds of doubt in many more. If the MSM can lie so brazenly over flu variants to drive hidden agendas, goodness knows what other mistruths it has told us over the years.

In periods of stability, media narratives go largely unquestioned by the public. But as lived experience begins to contradict official messaging, a growing number of critical observers, once limited to a small subset of the population, begin to seek out independent or dissenting sources of information. Alas such dissenting sources can be easily manipulated and lead critical thinkers to scapegoat the wrong people or place their trust in controlled opposition.

Millions of Americans voted Trump because they hoped his team would reign in the Deep State behind the Biden administration’s authoritarian overreach and lack of empathy with the plight of settled citizens outside their metropolitan bubbles, as expressed so passionately in Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond. Early on the Trump team reversed course on covid-era biotech tyranny and gender-bending with the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Junior, heralded the end of US involvement in the Ukrainian quagmire and tightened border controls with some well publicised deportations to win favour with his base. Yet within weeks, his administration threw its full weight behind the resumption of Israeli military operations in Gaza and started bombing Houthi targets directly in Yemen allegedly to defend traffic through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea, while threatening war with Iran and simultaneously launching a tariff war against the US’s leading trading partners. The Western progressive media, outside the USA itself, is now overwhelmingly hostile to this shift in foreign and domestic policies, while Europeans are losing faith in the core institutions of the post-cold-war settlement. Some call this beginning of the end for globalism as an ideological goal, but others see it either as war by other means or as part of a coordinated implosion of mass consumerism in the next phase of the Great Reset. With high tariffs, China could lose a large chunk of its high-profit-margin exports while Americans would have to adapt to higher retail prices. In all likelihood, the move will only speed up the development of alternative high-tech hubs especially in nanotech and AI, boost bilateral trade relationships between China and other leading geopolitical blocks such as India, Russia, Africa and South America. Until recently, US-based companies had a monopoly on the development of operating systems, but this could end soon with the next generation of microkernel operating systems along the lines of Huawei’s new HarmonyOS. As the Chinese DeepSeek project proved, AI could accelerate the development of new computing ecosystems independent of US tech giants, stripping the American superpower of its last unassailable advantage following the collapse of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Combined with supply-chain disruption from the US-China trade war, this could have catastrophic consequences for the United Kingdom’s service-oriented economy, already suffering from high energy prices and the eclipse of its industrial legacy.

Will we descend into Urban Warfare?

David Betz, Professor of War at King’s College London, argues that the West, including the UK, is increasingly vulnerable to civil conflict due to collapsing social trust, rising economic hardship, extreme political polarisation, and fragmented national identities. He critiques the complacency of Western elites and notes that traditional assumptions, like wealth and democratic stability shielding nations from civil war, may no longer hold. Betz warns that civil strife may resemble past internecine wars, marked by factional violence and systemic decay, as ideologically radicalised groups on all sides exploit digital and societal fault lines in a struggle over identity, survival, and sovereignty.
The country that built its fortune on plentiful coal and gas reserves could soon experience rolling power cuts, as Spain and Portugal witnessed recently. While the chattering classes like to blame Brexit and ageing population for malfunctioning services, the working classes are increasingly blaming the mindboggling incompetence of the wishful thinking chattering classes. Why should commoners struggling to afford utility bills and essential groceries follow the advice of NetZero zealots who wasted countless billions of £ promoting transgenderism in schools? Sooner or later, when the shit hits the proverbial fan, the great unwashed may take the streets.

However, we may not see English skinheads running rampage through Muslim neighbourhoods seeking revenge for the rape of mainly white working-class girls, as a Netflix drama might portray. They are much more likely to target the posh neighbourhoods of the managerial classes only to discover the real decision makers have retreated to their secluded villas in the Mediterranean or Caribbean. While some urban blackspots may see street violence between rival ethnic communities, such as Pakistanis and Indians, a more general trend may be open defiance against incompetent law-enforcers seeking to criminalise dissent.

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
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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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! 

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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.