Categories
All in the Mind

Why Procreate?

While some of us may seem very self-absorbed thanks to generations of social atomisation and disconnection from our palaeolithic roots, most of us are wired to adore new life. All but the most callous of us have a soft spot for babies or at least are wise and socially responsible enough to give them special dispensation as future citizens for the survival of our community and ultimately of our species, but the world hardly lacks young people and hundreds of millions roam the streets destitute or laze at home with few employment prospects, largely because we have become entirely reliant on big business and big government. Now some want to depend on big biotech (an offshoot of big pharma) to let them procreate when they discover they can't have babies naturally. Based on a narrow interpretation of human rights, this sounds fine. Why should we all not be entitled to have children of our own and why should we restrict such rights to fertile young heterosexual couples?

Historically only the fittest survived. We gave each new member of our community a chance, but when disease or other calamities struck, we just accepted our fate and wished others would survive in their memory. As a result for millennia the global population grew only very gradually with plenty of regional fluctuations, periods of relative prosperity and growth followed by periods of disease, famine and warfare. Pre-agrarian communities needed large areas of bountiful terrain, usually in coastal areas or near rivers, and had to keep their numbers in check. While many hunter-gatherer communities survived into the modern area, with some remote tribes surviving into the 20th century, they were in a matter of generations either outnumbered or assimilated into agrarian societies, who developed the technology to cultivate crops, rear livestock, irrigate and, more important, store surpluses for later re-use. This enabled the specialisation of labour and the growth of non-productive administrative class, making us increasingly interdependent. While in feudal times many still had direct contact with the means of food production, most had to hand over a large proportion of their yield in return for a plot of land. With the advent of the industrial revolution, we could no longer simply draw on nature's bounty, but had to compete for control over storable and stealable resources produced by others by selling our labour. In the post-modern era we sell not so much our labour, as ourselves, for money that we can exchange for the material goods we either need or simply desire. Now, children have become not just another great marketing opportunity for our growth-obsessed business leaders, but also a commodity in and of themselves.

Recent reports in the mainstream media have lamented the refusal of some NHS trusts to provide IVF. Let us set the record straight. In-vitro fertilisation is a relatively new technology, unavailable to previous generations, and not only is it extremely expensive, it is statistically more likely to lead to premature births, birth defects and multiple births at a time when we are struggling to feed the world's 6.9 billion human beings. I know, for some socially responsible women, it must be distressing to see other socially irresponsible women produce offspring with great ease with little thought as to how they will provide for them. However, a little intellectual honesty would be welcome. Infertility has become an issue because many women postpone motherhood to pursue their career or because they wish to start a new family with their new partner. Some men also want to spread their genes with their new partner. With so many children born to parents unable to care for them, why can't infertile couples adopt?

Let's briefly consider the huge changes in family life and social welfare over the last century. Once considered a safety net enabling the downtrodden to find their feet again and ensuring all children had a fair start in life, the UK's benefits system has encouraged the breakup of families through generous handouts to single parents and teenage mothers, attracted widespread abuse of incapacity allowances and created a general culture of entitlement among the descendants of the country's once proud working class. Official unemployment figures mask the reality that over 5 million more people of working age are not in employment, education or training and neither are they full time housewives, so effectively true unemployment stands at 7.5 million. Technological advances have not only reduced infant mortality, but also automated many tedious domestic chores and manual jobs that occupy vast swatches of working classes. Housewives were not unemployed, but a crucial part of a family team, replaced now by myriad teachers, social workers, child psychologists and carers. Neither were chimney sweeps or cobblers useless, they performed essential duties, now often assigned to recent immigrants. The drive to get women into work has led millions to swap the tyranny of housework for the tyranny of low-paid office, retail and care work. Only a privileged minority of women pursue genuinely rewarding and intellectually stimulating careers, most make do with dead-end jobs in supermarkets or care homes, often juggling paid employment with their parental duties. As a result instead women have traded economic dependence on their husbands for subjugation to state handouts or large corporations. Back in the 70s and 80s many hoped to see a new era of leisure with the average working week reduced to 30 or maybe just 20 hours and extended maternal and paternal leave. However, 30 years of neoliberal policies, heightened competition in the labour market and rampant consumerism, mean without benefits and on typical salaries, both parents have to work 40 hours a week, often with long commutes of 2-3 hours a day, or rely on state handouts. The largest portion of a typical family's expenses go on mortgages or rent and since 1997 house prices in the South East of England have tripled, way in excess of the official retail inflation rate. To qualify for the latter a parent has to claim to have no other source of income (e.g. a spouse's salary). The biggest scam of all is housing benefit, effectively subsidising ripoff landlords and enabling the workshy to afford accommodation in areas of London. Hence the birth rate in the UK is highest in three groups:

  1. Ethnic minorities with a religious and/or cultural commitment to large families, willing to work harder, proactively seek all welfare benefits and sacrifice luxuries for the proliferation of their community.
  2. Workless underclasses who see children as a means of obtaining benefits.
  3. Upper middle classes who can easily survive on one salary and/or employ a childminder.

In the middle are the masses of honest hardworking adults on modest salaries, who simply cannot afford to have more than 1 or 2 children, unless they split up and have children with their new partners, hence the growing demand for IVF. Many educated adults delay having children until they have established a stable relationship and pursued a career, by which time one may have become infertile, but rather than adopt one of the millions of unwanted children born to mothers unable to provide the love and attention all children need, they succumb to biological emotions to further their own kind. Thus IVF is often marketed as means of boosting a woman's self-esteem. The availability of IVF creates an emotional need that could otherwise be met by adopting, fostering or simply looking after nieces, nephews or neighbours' children, but in an increasingly atomised and fearful society we dare not trust anyone else with our children. Indeed the authorities don't trust us to raise children unless we collaborate with a whole bunch of busy-body supervisors (community nurses, social workers, teachers) etc.. Being able to bring up your children as you see fit has now become a luxury reserved for the wealthy and residents of isolated rural communities, for only these groups can afford options such as private education, homeschooling or have access to small rural schools. Everyone else's children are sent to mainstream schools, exposed to thousands of hours of media promoting high-consumption fun culture and, should their behaviour or attitude raise suspicion, referred to child psychiatrists (often mistakenly renamed psychologists) and labelled with ADHD, OCD, depression or autism spectrum disorders or simply given anti-social behaviour orders. In short even if you do have biological children, they are not really yours as the corporate establishment through its media and education systems guides their development. Recently primary school teachers have become concerned that children start school without being toilet-trained first ( see Head Threatens to Ban Pupils Who Are Not Potty-Trained). Some parents responded by claiming toilet training was the responsibility of social care workers. Why have children at all if all you can do is let the state and big business bring them up? If you want loving offspring who respect you and may care for you when you grow old, you need to spread your love and values, not your genes.

Categories
All in the Mind

On The Laws of Probability

Every day we experience hundreds of near misses, accidents waiting to happen unless we take the right precautions and pay constant attention to all potential dangers. Yet the human brain can only actively focus on one event at a time, switching our attention to monitor the progress of other concomitant events. Some of us can switch between events better than others, but then some key tasks require much more intense concentration. The slightest momentary distraction can have unplanned consequences, like forgetting to close upstairs windows before leaving the house, leaving a frying pan on a stove unattended or as happened to me the other failing to check my rucksack still lay neatly between my feet in a crowded pub in central London during a recent Drupal meetup. Not only was my rucksack discretely lifted, but it contained my trusty laptop and my passport, renewed only last October. CCTV footage was unavailable as cameras had been turned off the previous day, Easter Monday. As I don't own a car or a house, this was pretty much my most valuable possession, without which I can't work as a Web software developer. Little did the thief know how important this object was to me personally and while others can tactfully express their commiseration, the pain remains. I had to bite the bullet, metaphorically speaking, and enact plan B. Get a new laptop and restore it from scratch. Luckily Apple's OS X's Time Machine came to the rescue. I was minded to buy a cheaper alternative, but to get up and running and avoid missing another day's work, I had to choose the more expensive route using funds I had set aside for something else. I hope someday soon, we can do all our work from a tablet with mission-critical data backed up remotely as envisaged by Google's up and coming Chrome OS, but alas network coverage cannot be guaranteed. On many other occasions, I had left my laptop temporarily vulnerable to smart thieves, in offices and even in bars while someone else kept a watchful eye, yet it had never happened. I had assumed among colleagues and friends, I would be safe. The conclusion is simple. If something can go wrong in theory, sooner or later it will go wrong. That's the lesson Japanese nuclear engineers had to learn in Fukushima. The chances of getting my MacBook back are exceedingly remote. Lies, damned lies and crime statistics. While the occurrence of burglaries has decreased mainly due to better surveillance technology, thieves have simply adopted new techniques. Smartphones and laptops are easy to carry away and sell. Many thefts simply go unreported, because victims know there is little the police can do. How can anyone seriously believe the oft-repeated claims about declining crime rates? In just 5 years in London, I've witnessed one murder and two burglaries first-hand.

Categories
Power Dynamics War Crimes

Let’s Disown Tony

Has anyone actually read Tony Blair's much publicised memoirs. Well within 3 months of the book's release and despite all the media, half-price copies were on display on Waterstones. Don't get too angry with this guy, for he has only ever been a politician in the sense of a polite public relations guy. He liberated Kosovo from Serb nationalists only to put in place a bunch of Kosovar Albanian gangsters, still supervised by NATO troops. Then in the wake of 9/11 he supported the liberation of Afghani women and the hunting down of Osama Bin Laden. Nearly ten years later Osama Bin Laden is still at large, Afghani women are still subject to Sharia law and Afghanistan is still plagued by civil war. But our multinationals gained privileged access to the world's largest supply of lithium. Tony went on to campaign for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein evil regime. Over one million deaths and $3 trillion later, Iraq is still quagmire, but our multinationals gained easy access to the world's cheapest oil supply. Libya has oil too ( see Libya, All About Oil), but only a small malleable population and a leadership willing to do business with the West. So in 2008 Tony flew out to cut a deal with Muamar Gaddafi. Three years later his successor, David Cameron, decides to support military action to overthrow Tony's friend and let in another bunch of gangsters willing to do business with BP Amoco.

I just couldn't resist reproducing this gem from Ken Silverstein:

Is there any way this country can officially disown Anthony Blair? Those of us who were never fooled by him now have to watch as he cashes in on his time as Prime Minister in ways which are actually shaming. His dishonesty, his lack of embarrassment and his greed are all so great that it is now possible to imagine him ending up munching gonads on I'm A Celebrity, perhaps trying to restore his fortunes after yet another failed property speculation.

I had to watch the ludicrous transformation of this man, who to my personal knowledge did not know in 1997 that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, into a supposed World Statesman, the victor of Kosovo and the scourge of Saddam. These two wars, one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle. But how can they now, after Mr Blair's trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory?

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

The Bankers are bankrupt and so are we

Today over a hundred thousand demonstrators will descend on Central London to protest against cuts in public spending. I can sympathise for I've joined many similar protests‚ defending the rights of ordinary working people and against wanton waste and wars. Why should ordinary people suffer because politicians and bankers have wasted billions on wars and billionaire bankers continue to reward themselves huge bonuses? Unfortunately many have misdiagnosed the problem. While undoubtedly many welfare dependents may suffer hardships as a result of cutbacks and some public sector workers will lose their jobs, we do not suffer from underspending on key public services such as health and education, but from huge waste on unsustainable bureaucracy financed mainly by a non-productive tertiary sector, offering services that nobody really needs. Demonstrators will be entertained by the spectre of a former New Labour cabinet minister and now their leader, Milliband, claiming we can keep spending as if there were no tomorrow. Few will dare challenge the previous‚ administration‚ on their grotesque overspending, fuelled by an economic boom based on property trading, banking, lobbying and media, and worse still their bail-out of the very bankers who caused the mess in the first place. In 2008 the country stood on the brink of financial collapse as banks could no longer sustain such a level of bad debt, i.e. debt on loans to people who could never repay. Throughout the late 1990s and early 20 zeroes manufacturing industries continued to close as retail outlets and other services expanded. New Labour oversaw more than a decade of private and public waste. Ordinary folk were urged to indulge in cheap holidays abroad, large plasma TV screens, more cars, electronic gadgets, boozing and gambling. While New Labour monitored and regulated the habits and behaviour of private citizens, it deregulated the hedononism‚ business and let bankers offer loans to those who could never realistically repay. At the same time despite official declines in unemployment, millions remained dependent on a multitude of benefits. In 1997 John Reid responded to demands for the re-nationalisation of the railways by simply stating "We can't afford the projected cost of £20 billion". Since then the government has not only spent more on subsidising private rail companies but has also squandered billions on PFIs (Private Finance Initiatives) to build new hospitals and schools, which the general public do not even own. Inflation-adjusted public health spending has doubled, but the quality of health care has seen no measurable improvement as the NHS is overburdened with the side-effects of hedonism and, dare I mention, unsustainable levels of net immigration. Politicians‚ on both sides of the House continue to talk about economic growth and none more so than Ed Milliband. Yet by growing demand for consumer products and promoting a non-productive service sector, we simply increase the country's reliance on global markets and imports. If the world economy as a whole proves unsustainable and, as recent events in Libya and Japan should surely remind us, energy becomes more expensive (i.e. a higher EROEI = Energy Returned On Energy Invested), we will find it much harder to readapt to the real world, where we need to be largely self-sufficient in food staples and material resources and can only provide for the weak and elderly through hard work. Our current model of development is entirely based on marketing and thus dependent on a plentiful supply of cheap human and material resources. However, as China and India grow and demand a larger share of the world's finite resources, their labour will become more expensive. Why should we rely on outsourcing menial office tasks to India and production to China, Vietnam or Indonesia? Why should their labour subsidise our consumption?‚

Practical Solutions

  1. Phase in a 30-hour working week and give people more flexibility. This may be bad for business and economic growth in the short terms as some of the best workers will be able to work less, but it will encourage a wider section of the population to aspire to high-skill jobs.
  2. Cut all child benefits after the second birth (i.e. allowing for twins, triplets etc.). If couples choose to have more children, they should not expect the state to subsidise it.
  3. Remove all NHS help for IVF and facilitate adoption when couples are unable to have children naturally.
  4. Cut all forms of unemployment benefit after 1 year, unless a person has a genuine disability preventing work. After this period, the out-of-work will be employed on the minimum wage in a vast range of environmental and social projects for up 30 hours a week.
  5. Reward housewives or househusbands who choose to stay at home to look after their children until the age of 14. There are also plenty of new remote working opportunities allowing parents to work part-time if they so choose. Couples could be granted 20 hours of parental time a week deductible from their income tax. The tax system should clearly encourage small two-parent families, in which at least one parent works.
  6. Raise the minimum wage for antisocial working hours. We do not need to shop 24/7.
  7. Treat mental health as primarily a psycho-social issue rather than a medical issue. Cut NHS spending on the promotion of mental health issues and address the very real psychosocial causes. Reduce dependence on psychoactive medicines.
  8. Encourage school leavers‚ uninterested‚ in academic subjects or hard sciences, to undertake vocational courses in practical trades such as plumbing, building, farming‚ mechanics etc. There is no need for 40%+ of school leavers to go to university. We should target further education spending on the 10 to 15% who can make a real difference.
  9. Provide special bursaries for degrees in hard sciences, medicine and engineering.‚
  10. While immigration would naturally fall as a result of declining domestic demand for superfluous consumer goods and services, we should ensure migration is both manageable and socially responsible.
Categories
Power Dynamics

Forerunners of Modern Globalisation

Homo sapiens sapiens first evolved as a distinct species at least 120,000 years ago with some recent finds in the Middle East dated as long ago as 200,000 years ago. On that time scale, the Neolithic agrarian revolution, which took place in most parts of world between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago and only reaching some locales such as Australia with European colonisation, is fairly recent. Prior to the agrarian revolution, communities had a much more direct relationship with their natural surroundings, were largely nomadic hunter-gatherers and so intensely involved in precuring food for their extended families that they lacked the technological means for more advanced forms of political organisation that could subdue other populations.

By and large human communities kept their distance limiting population growth and conflicts, but traded tools, artefacts and bounties. The earliest human settlers of Europe were not imperialists intent on dominating other peoples or seeking greater wealth for their rulers, but adventurers seeking greener pastures and often responding to regional climatic and environmental changes. Some anthropologists now consider the first waves of Indoeuropeans who expanded from Anatolia or the Crimean region around 7000 years ago to be the first imperialists, who set out to spread their culture on horseback through their mastery of animal husbandry and ability to generate food surpluses and this sustain larger communities. Pre-Indoeuropeans correctly designate the peoples who had colonised the Indo-european linguistic and cultural area before Indo-European expansion as opposed to later waves of migrants such as the Ural-Altaic who rode in from the east. Recent genetic analysis of established communities across Europe has shown how significant proportion of the modern European genome can be traced to a handful of ice-age retreats. The modern linguistic landscape emerged from an interaction between these pioneer communities and subsequent colonisers, but as Stephen Oppenheimer's research into origins of the British suggests, each new wave typically little more 5% to the existing ethnic mix. When pro-Globalists argue Britain has always been of nation of immigrants, they seem to overlook two critical factors, timescale, environmental sustainability and population density. Very early peoples could expand into new uninhabited regions without need for conflicts over economic resources with rival groups and even where other humans had settled in the vicinity, ample space allowed for some peaceful cohabitation and intermingling among groups with similar levels of technological advancement. Comparisons with the world's remaining pre-agrarian peoples may not prove very instructive as they tend to inhabit extreme environments as are usually surrounded by more technologically advanced communities eager to reassign their habitat to other more productive purposes.

Globalisation is simply imperialism on a planetary level, in which old nation states have become little more than regional councils implementing policies dictated by unaccountable supranational bodies. Imperialism means the subjugation of other communities to expand the military and commercial influence of a given ruling class. Historically speaking all nation states, which today form culturally distinct entities, grew out of generations of empire building.

Western European Timelines:
Years ago
20,000 to 11,500 Early Mesolithic with only a few communities in ice age retreats.
11,500 to 7,000 Post-glacial expansion to central and northern European mainly following coastal and river routes.
7,000 to 2000 Gradual expansion of agrarian civilisations and early empires.
2000 to 500 Imperial expansion, nation building, wars, spread of Christianity and Islam and introduction of the feudal system and mercantile networks.
500 to 250 European colonisation of the Americas with outposts in the Africa, Asia and Australasia
250 to 50 Industrial revolution and expansion of great European and North American empires. Consolidation of competing nation states with advanced social welfare structures.
50 to 20 Accelerated globalisation with domination of a US-centred business empire, supported by a huge military-industrial complex and limited national sovereignty, but kept in check by rival regional power centres and national welfare states.
20 to near future Rapid of growth of rival power blocks within the global system and huge expansion of consumption in the world's most populous countries, accelerated pace of migration, disappearance of national sovereignty, increased political instability, early signs of resource depletion.

In the beginning we had small communities around a limited number of extended families. It wasn't until the agrarian revolution that we could produce enough surplus food to enable the development of urban settlements and advanced political organisations. Some such civilisations may have existed as long as 15,000 years ago as evidenced by the archeological finds in South East Asian Malay archipelago, which during the last ice age formed a continuous landmass from modern Java to Cambodia, known as Sundaland. Archeologist Francis Pryor estimates Britain's neolithic population as little more than 100,000 in 4000 BC and Ireland's at around 40,000. In Roman times it barely rose to a staggering 3.5 million, out of an estimated 56 million in the whole Roman Empire, only to decline again to around 1.5 millions in the aftermath the pan-European Justinian Plague between 540 and 750 AD. For 700 years Britain's population fluctuated between around 2 and 8 million before the industrial revolution enabled a huge demographic boom and the excess population could easily emigrate to new colonies.

As recently as 1850 much of Africa's hinterland remained unchartered by European explorers, while to your European the world revolved around their region and nation state with merely tales of remote promised lands. To many French, German and Italian farmers English seemed about as relevant to their every day lives as Latin or Chinese. While the educated classes may have been aware of emerging empires abroad, most ordinary Europeans were only aware of foreign culture through tales from relatives who might have migrated. Indeed the great European exodus did not really get into full swing until the end of the 19th century. In 1850, shortly after the Mexican-American war with the acquisition of California and Texas, the US had just 23 million inhabitants. By 1900 this had soared to 76 million nearly doubling to 136 million in 1940 as Europe plunged into its second episode of mass slaughter of the last century, and most of the rise can be attributed to immigration. Now the US population stands at 320 million. The country may be large, but has ceased to be self-sufficient in non-renewable energy and a net exporter of food (see The Next Crisis Will Be Over Food). Worse still like the UK, the US outsources much of its heavy industry, so much pollution is generated elsewhere to satisfy consumer demand in the US.

My thesis is simple. Nation-state imperialism with rival French, Spanish and British empires has morphed into multipolar globalisation, where US and European multinationals collaborate with Japanese, Chinese, Brazilian or Russian corporations. While the system thrives on consumption generated in Europe and North America, growing demand in India and China means as per capita resources become scarcer capitalists are likely to switch from the current hyper-consumption model, where indulgence is practically subsidised to boost the retail sector, to a more traditional survival of the fittest.

Categories
Power Dynamics

New Labour’s 1997 Manifesto

This is the honest manifesto the Labour Party did not publish in 1997 before its historic landslide win, well it did gain 43% of the popular vote with a 75% turnout.

Education:
  • We will introduce tuition fees, initially at £1000 per annum, then rising to £3000 per annum, and allow students to repay their loans over extended period of time at competitive interest rates.
  • We will make exams easier to boost pass rates and thus expand the further education market in collaboration with our corporate friends.
  • We will increase class sizes to accommodate more newcomers.
Family:
  • We will introduce working family tax credits and expand a range of special benefits to encourage couples to separate.
  • We will continue the demonisation of fathers, while encouraging loutish behaviour via our entertainment policies..
Economy:
  • We will promote the outsourcing of manufacturing and the expansion of non-productive media, entertainment and banking.
  • We will drive consumer growth by letting banks offer loans to benefits claimants and then bail them out when it all goes pear-shaped.
Entertainment:
  • We will deregulate gambling and promote violent video games as eco-friendly works of art.
Health:
  • We will double spending on lifestyle drugs, large IT projects and management consultants.
  • We will subsidise IVF so single mothers can have children outside of a loving relationship.
  • We will promote early screening of mental health issues, appropriate medication and employ more special needs learning support assistants. Our target is for approximately 10 - 20% of all kids to be labelled special.
Taxation:
  • We will offer billionaire gangsters complete tax exemption.
Housing:
  • We will encourage immigration, leading to higher property prices and rents, and offer landlords special housing benefits.
Race Relations:
  • All opponents of our policies will be demonised as racists, while radical Muslims will be tarnished as terrorists.
Environment:
    We will encourage immigration, emigration, long-distance commuting and consumption to boost our economy, while lecturing the population on climate change.
    Foreign Policy
      We will join the United States in military interventions in the Balkans, Central Western Asia and the Middle East in order to secure control of fossil fuels and minerals and to prevent China from denying our multinationals easy access to resources essential to our way of life.
    Categories
    All in the Mind Power Dynamics

    Ubiquitous Assault on the Senses

    How will future generations view early 21st century Britain? An age of enlightenment that allowed more women than ever to work, redefined loud arguments as domestic violence, exposed childhood sexual abuse and extended the benefits of prosperity to more people than ever. This is the spin of the neo-liberal media, i.e. you've never had it so good or experienced such a wonderfully fair and harmonious society. Surely you don't want to return to the dark ages when parents routinely spanked their children at the slightest hint of disobedience and women were chained to the proverbial kitchen sink? In affluent communities violence has been confined mainly to virtual reality, blasted through speakers in the form of death metal and rap, projected onto mega-screens and translated into a captivating and highly addictive games. We are not just separated from the harsh realities of nature as our forebears knew it, but shielded from the consequences of violent ideation, now a dominant form of entertainment. This genre of entertainment may be likened to less technologically advanced spectacles such as gladiatorial fights in ancient Rome, or more recently boxing, wrestling or fencing, but over the last 20 years we have witnessed the gradual encroachment of war themes into our leisure life It's no longer just war movies, thrillers and video nasties occupying little more than one or two hours a week, but over 80% of the most addictive video games, paintball, Laser Quest and steady repetitive raucous beats and metallic dins accompanying electronic sound marketed as music and played in locales as diverse as sports centres, shopping malls and even offices. Indeed some young people find it hard to concentrate without a continuous blur of discordant noise at work. So paradoxically one may not shout at one's spouse for fear of being charged with domestic abuse, but one may play gangster rap at full volume while washing the car. If one dares suggest first-person shooters trivialise violence, one is soon ridiculed as reactionary and wait for it, against progress. Dare one suggest rap triggers feelings of hatred and intolerance, one is routinely slammed as intolerant of our wonderful cultural diversity.
    So while many of us feel increasingly powerless to change any aspect of our lives, we can only sit back and watch the spectacle of millions immersed in virtual violence in the safety of their bedrooms or offices. Paradoxically many first person shooter fans would be utterly horrified by the slightest hint of real-life gore. Recently an Italian teacher in a farming community arranged for her class to view the slaughtering of a pig. Parents were horrified, how could children learn the truth about meat processing. Sadly many pupils had previously believed meat comes from supermarkets in the same way as petrol just magically gushes from a filling station pump. Did our ancestors dream of heroic battles six to eight hours a day? Did they revel in death and destruction? At stake is the viability of human solidarity for if we dream of exacting revenge against perceived foes in times of economic disparity and limited per capita resources, we are doomed to repeat the worst democidal excesses of our recent history. To what extent is violence an inextricable part of the human condition and to what extent can culture either channel violent urges into socially useful activities or trigger violence in otherwise peaceful individuals?

    I would measure progress, not in terms of material possessions or abstract statistics championed by bureaucrats, but as a broad measure of social harmony, contentment and self-fulfilment, a delicate balancing act focussed on the reduction of conflict and personal suffering, e.g. ambition can drive innovation leading to significant improvements in life, but also cause conflict and selfishness.

    Human beings have a vast array of instinctual behaviours that may be unleashed under certain conditions. Some of our behvaiours require little active thought, either because they are essential to our existence and have been inherited from millions of years of evolution or because inculcated behaviours have become second nature. A healthy baby need not learn to suckle, breathe or even cry in response to basic nutritional needs. By contrast, humans did not evolve to drive cars or type, but many of us perform these tasks with amazing agility. In comparison with most other animals human babies are pretty helpless. Other newborn mammals can walk within minutes of birth. However, many other ingrained behaviours are learned skills building on our intellectual hardware and primitive reflexes, e.g. linguists such as Noam Chomsky believe complex language relies on a specialised brain functions absent in other species, but clearly the exact manifestation of our linguistic abilities depends largely on our environment. Our humanity determines our intellectual potential, while our environment determines how we develop and utilise our intellect. Without applying reason and compassion in the forebrain, a male responding to his innate libido might be inclined to sexually assault any unaccompanied attractive female within easy reach. Were we to let our basest instincts guide our actions, modern civilisation as we know it would never have arisen. The technological progress that helped us expand our food supply, tame nature to meet our needs and lower infant mortality relies on advanced forms of social organisation and co-operation, in which our intellect and sociability prevail over primitive forms of social control.

    Violence has long been a feature of human existence, but its role and pervasiveness have varied enormously over the millennia. Many anthropologists have observed we are the only animal that wages war against other members of our own species, but disagree on whether tribal warfare first emerged in the Neolithic era as stone-age humans began farming and establishing more permanent settlements around fifteen to ten thousand years ago, or whether internecine conflict has always accompanied homo sapiens sapiens throughout the Paleolithic era. We might consider some exceptions, e.g. a lion may fight a rival over control of a pride and then slaughter cubs that are not their own. However, not only are lions some of the most ferocious mammals, but their survival depends largely on brute force and obedience within a tightly knit community and, more important, on hunting other animals. They evolved to be top of the food chain, not to go forth and multiply and thus dominate through numbers. On the African plains, aggressive predators are in a minority, while the vast majority are mere grazers, browsers or warblers. Violence as a survival strategy only works if your species has a low population and can feed on a much larger number of easy prey. It is plainly foolish to apply human ethics to other species. Lions are born to kill and care only for their immediate family. Notions such as compassion and solidarity simply do not enter a Lion's mindset.

    We descend from a line of vegetarian and omnivorous primates, who succeeded in mastering their habitat through dexterity, cunning and social organisation rather than the exertion of physical force, which was largely reserved for travel, work, foraging, hunting of small animals and occasional defence against predators. Around six to seven million years separate us from our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees, but why would violence evolve as an innate human instinct? First we need to define violence a little more accurately. Many primates do not hunt at all preferring to forage as vegetarians should their habitat provide plentiful food, but we are most closely related to chimpanzees who do not only hunt, but have been observed resorting to violence as a means of conflict resolution and imposing their power on more submissive females. By contrast Bonobos, close cousins of chimpanzees, use playful erotica to diffuse social tensions. Obviously any carnivorous animal exerts physical force to catch and kill other animals. Few animals practice cannibalism except as a last resort in after a natural calamity. However, we do not relate to other animals in the same way as we relate to members of the same species. To a carnivore, other animals are food, not sentient beings. At this point it might be useful to distinguish intra-species violence from inter-species violence. Some would take an absolutist stance against murder of all sentient beings and thus promote vegan pacifism, arguing that human technology allows us to be at one with nature. However, most Vegans in wealthy countries relies on a huge human infrastructure that has completely reshaped our planet and effectively ethnically cleansed whole species from their natural habitats or confining them to wildlife reserves. To enable the apparently peaceful existence of a middle class Western European family with their 4 bedroom house, two cars, household appliances, endless gadgets, holidays abroad and weekly supermarket shopping sprees, we need to inflict violence on a huge scale against the planet's delicate eco-system, something many of us would rather deny. So we might not witness real warfare firsthand, but it is committed in our name so we can drive our cars and fill our refrigerators without much thought as to how that delicious frozen salmon ends up in our freezer. This warfare may not always be waged against non-collaborative communities, but simply displaces traditional human communities and other species in the name of progress.

    In many ways we are slowly emerging from an age of apparent harmony, in which people from different socio-ethnic backgrounds learned to live and work together. Certainly throughout history different ethnic groups have intermingled, but also fought bloody battles. Most of us have enough trouble trying to care for our immediate kith and kin. We can easily relate to our immediate geographic community and if this is cohesive enough, we might help disadvantaged neighbours. Charity really does begin at home. All of a sudden we have been asked to care not just for other members of our ethnic community, i.e. a group of people with a common language, mores and cultural identity, but all 6.7 billion estimated to grace our planet in 2010. As this is clearly impossible, we just pretend to care and look after ourselves, but often seek revenge against rivals by playing victims to justify our selfish actions. In reality while many of us pretend to care about the wider human race and some of us have been known to help strangers in distress, unless we are very rich and/or resourceful, we can only practically look after number one and our immediate family and friends. More important a socially competitive and high-consumption society pressures people to acquire more material posessions for themselves, either through hard work or financial manipulation. As a result millions are so busy struggling to make ends meet in a never-ending rat race, they have little time for others. Philanthropy has become a luxury afforded to the fortunate professional classes with time on their hands, while often members of idle classes prefer to indulge in media therapy (watching TV, chatting on Facebook etc.) rather than help others in their community. And even when people do help others, deep-seated cultural prejudices condition how this is targeted. The idea that billions of atomised human beings immersed in variations of the same global culture will learn to love each other is clearly a myth.

    Postscript

    While the Web is deluged with gamers' rants against any attempt to limit their freedom to indulge and many journalists in mainstream newspapers make a living out of promoting virtual violence as a legitimate genre of entertainment, my thoughts are not entirely unique. An Yugoslav Australian, Dejan, reached similar conclusions:

    Are we becoming a violence obsessed society? I think we are.

    Is it the excitement or the adrenaline rush? Maybe its a product of the life pressures we face today or even a mixture of the aforementioned? Something surely is driving us towards this culture where violence is being glorified and aggressiveness respected. It seems that way. The political sphere, the media and entertainment industries promote this aggressive culture that cant be leading the world towards a prosperous future, quite the contrary. Read full article at http://socyberty.com/society/the-obsession-with-violence

    Categories
    Power Dynamics

    Corporate Mercenaries

    The LM Gang are back, this time advocating, in a new C4 documentary Britain's Trillion pound Horror Story, the privatisation of healthcare and education and downsizing of the rest of the public sector to reduce taxes, the national debt and stimulate economic growth.

    Back in 1998 a post-modern intellectual associated with the former Revolutionary Communist Party, which later became Living Marxism and then just the LM Group and more recently Spiked Online, produced a documentary for Britain's Channel 4, Against Nature, railing against misanthropic greens. They have taken some radical and provocative stances aimed mainly at the thinking left, those of us who are not completely brainwashed by corporate conditioning and actually want to see a more caring, sharing and, dare I say, sustainable society. Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, they have argued that the socialist cause they once espoused is dead and instead they began a campaign against what they considered reactionary forces opposed to progress. To them progress was redefined as the globalisation of labour and consumer markets, rapid evolution of technology to enable constant material growth and the replacement of previous social structures such as families and close-knit communities with a shared cultural heritage with new structures based around life-style choices and special interests. The clique around Frank Füredi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Reviews of Where Have All the Intellectuals
    Gone?, have morphed from extreme proponents of a worldwide Bolshevik revolution in the dying days of the modern era, to extreme advocates of postmodern neoliberal globalisation. Back in the 1970s and 80s, most on the left opposed immigration controls and welcomed multiculturalism because of a basic sense of humanitarian solidarity with the downtrodden, the perceived victims of imperialism and irrational ethnic prejudice. That was my gut instinct until the early years of the new millennium.

    Yet as I try to explain in another post, modern globalisation owes its roots in 18th and 19th century European colonisation and the expansion of the United States as a world power. The left also championed women's rights, another very noble cause, which has arguably been perverted to disempower families, as wel as gay rights, which while removing stigma against natural feelings of erotic attraction towards the members of the same gender, served similar purposes in weakening traditional family units and empowering big business and the state. Thus for many years the disciples of Frank Furedi could pose on the left. When other sections of the left opposed nuclear power and later genetically modified food, the descendants of the British RCP, championed these technologies as a means of feeding the poor.

    As noted elsewhere, former RCPers have become very media-savvy, but we'd be very naive if we thought they had somehow successfully inflitrated corporate media organisations in order to promote a revolution that would see the overthrow of the today's ruling elites. Rather they serve as fifth-columnists embedded in media and organisations appealing to the wishful-thinking left on behalf of a corporate elite who owe no allegiance to the ordinary people of any country.

    Smart propagandists like to build on concerns about a very real problem and then differentiate themselves from other more mainstream opinion leaders to appeal to a disgruntled section of the gullible electorate. If we sum the government debt accumulated thus far and the total commitments for debt repayments, planned public expenditure, the UK public debt is forecast to reach a staggering 4.8 trillion pounds, which as the documentary pointed out could not be repaid if every house in the country were sold at current market rates. This is obviously unsustainable, indeed so obvious that even advocates of unlimited growth admit it. The documentary rightly sheds light on the huge bureaucracy within the UK's public services. Of 9 million public sector workers, only 2 million are engaged in frontline jobs as teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers etc... Instead most sit in offices administering and monitoring others. Many dependent services become self-serving as they only exist to service the administration of the public sector. For instance, an equal opportunities commission does not provide the underprivileged with new opportunities, but merely liaises with other employers and service providers to ensure their client groups are well represented. However, as they're in the communication business, they inevitably require IT, multimedia, printing, catering and transport services and their infrastructure relies on hardware technicians, builders, plumbers, joiners, mechanics and electricians. However, this huge waste of resources is not confined to te public sector. We not only have a huge rise in the third sector of NGOs, charities and not-for-profit foundations promoting this or that agenda, but large corporations, even those with an industrial base, have morphed into miniature states. For all the talk of lean manufacturing and streamlined organisation, most large private sector companies are chock-a-block with non-productive penpushers and people-managers. hile the public sector is undoubtedly inefficient, it is at least in theory accountable to taxpayers. The documentary completely missed the point, why would the government and its corporate masters subsidise non-productive people management on such a large scale? The previous NewLabour government, which ran up the largest deficit in the UK's history, can hardly be accused of not acquiescing to the needs of large transnational corporations. More important before the government began its huge spending splurge following its 2001 re-election, banks had begun lending irresponsibly to millions without stable employment or even on benefits. The UK doesn't just have a public debt, but also a huge private debt to the tune of £1.4 trillion. Most owners of typical 3 or 4 bedroom houses do not really own their homes outright, their bank or building society does. They are in most cases 6 months to a year away from eviction should they fail to honour monthly mortgage repayments. Worst still as property prices skyrocketed in the South East of England, hundreds of thousands took out interest-only mortgages, i.e. for an initial period, usually 1 to 2 years, they pay only interest on their mortgage, but after this period of grace, their monthly repayments go through the roof. Many believed in a era of unprecedented financial growth that 2 years later they would double or triple their earnings and once they were on the property ladder living the middle class dream, life would be sweet. In the end the government had to bail out the bankers, so a good deal of the huge £4.8 trillion debt is actually inherited from the private sector. I would suggest that both the state and corporate sectors wanted to stimulate consumer growth. Miraculously, as NewLabour launched Private Finance Initiatives and continued to transfer public services to private contractors, quangos continued to grow.


    Expropriation

    Most transfers of ownership from private to public and the from public back to private hands disempower locals and empower transnational corporations. In its early stages in a favourable resource-rich environment , a market economy can theoretically reward hard work and let entrepreneurs build communities around the provision of useful products and services. This certainly appeared to be the case in 19th century North America and even in prosperous enclaves of Western Europe. However, such a system relied on a working class willing to let their bosses profit from their labour in exchange for job security. As small companies grew larger to take advantage of economies of scale and drive industrial development, the proletariat became a distinct class whose interests clashed with those of their bosses. Before the emergence of capitalism, most workers were mere peasants tilling a small plot of land and handing a large proportion of their produce to their landlord as rent. Much of the British economy came under government ownership in the aftermath of the Second World War as much of the country's industrial infrastructure such the still important railways, coal mining, steelworks, health system could not operate effectively at a profit. The State left the profitable sections of the economy to the private sector. Indeed much had controlled by huge state interventions, not least through massive armaments contracts. Nonetheless after the austere 1940s, the 50s and 60s saw the longest period of economic and social betterment, as measured by rapidly decreasing infant mortality, the reduced incidence of poverty-related diseases (such as rickets) and full employment. Although the tertiary sector continued to grow, Britain still had a manufacturing base. Most cars, lorries and trains were still made in the UK as was most industrial machinery, coal and steel. While more and more women chose to pursue careers, most mothers of young children were happy to work as housewives. In many ways the 50s and 60s were the hey day of the modern nuclear family with its typical 2.3 children. Social services still played a relatively marginal role and Health and Safety inspectors were few and far between, hence despite apparent technological limitations before the advent of microprocessor-enabled information technology, public sector bureaucracy was a lot smaller.


    Proponents of nationalisation or privatisation often use the democracy argument. Thus nationalisation makes an organisation democratically accountable, while privatisation frees an enterprise of the constraints and inefficiencies of state control and places it in the hands of private shareholders. In reality nationalisation merely transfers ownership to the state, which in turn serves the interests of its corporate backers and usually rewards former owners handsomely, while privatisation leads to a temporary injection of capital into the public coffers, but has always transferred ownership to monopolistic capitalists, thus failing to provide any real competition. We could even argue that nationalising loss-making industries did an enormous favour to venture capitalists as they could invest their compensation oversees, allowing other entrepreneurs to acquire the more profitable remnants when the government privatises again.


    The post-war boom would simply not have happened without an advanced welfare state, a healthy and largely contented work force and the survival of strategic energy, transportation and manufacturing industries. Hence even capitalists, claiming to favour a free market, supported nationalisation in the mid 20th century. The Thatcherite revolution practically outsourced most major manufacturing and refocussed on non-productive media and banking, a trend that continued unabated under New Labour. The only segments of Britain's industrial base that remained almost unscathed were the multi-billion pound government-subsidised armaments industry (so-called defence), the pharmaceutical and biotech industries with some niche luxury and entertainment gadget producers. Manufacturing saw a brief comeback in the late 1980s and early 1990s with an influx of American, Japanese and German inward investors. However, by the early twenty-noughties factories resumed closing, replaced only by supermarkets, call centres, entertainment complexes. In 2006 Tessa Jowell promoted regional casinos as a means of job creation and urban renewal in Britain's depressed former industrial heartlands.


    In 1997 I suggested to an acquaintance who worked as an advisor for the Labour Party that he'd better save up for his daughter's university education. "Nonsense", he said, "New Labour would always ensure higher education remain accessible to all". A few months later, New Labour announced the introduction of tuition fees, initially just £1000 a year, soon rising to £3000 and now, under the Con-Dem government to £9000. As a result millions of young workers will either have to accept low-paid jobs to escape repaying their loans, thus defeating the purpose of higher education, or forever be in debt. However, the true cost of higher education actually exceeds £9000 a year, but that misses the point, the whole sector is slowly but surely being primed for privatisation, relying on wealthy foreign students and failing to train the country's future generation of engineers, doctors and scientific researchers, while the relative academic value of degrees has been significantly debased. In the 1970s only 15% of school leavers went to uni, by 2010 that number is nearly 50%. Despite the Blairite mantra of education, education, education!!, class sizes have grown and student behaviour worsened leading hundreds of thousands of middle class parents, including Labour cabinet ministers, to send their offspring to private schools. When they consider the costs of a UK university degree, they might as well use their academic loan to send their offspring abroad. I suspect Indian universities will soon start offering cut-price degrees to the same disgruntled moneyed middle classes who travelled to Eastern Europe for cosmetic surgery.


    The previous government pumped billions into the national health service, insisting all new hospitals be built via PFI (Private Finance Initiatives). Despite the rhetoric the NHS bureaucracy has mushroomed with billions squandered on management consultants (not doctors) and centralised IT projects, as detailed brilliantly by David Craig in his 2008 book Squandered. More disturbingly, vast sums of public money have been spent not on essential frontline healthcare, but on promoting awareness of new mental illnesses and lifestyle-related ailments ( diabetes, obesity, angina, high blood pressure etc..) hugely boosting demand for pharmaceutical products. Amazingly, the new Con-Dem government, depsite a massive debt, has committed itself to maintaining the previous administration's spending plans. In real terms public health spending has doubled since 1997, yet the nation's health patently hasn't as any gains in prosperity have been offset by culture of hedonism and a growing rich-poor gap. Any recent gains in life expectancy have more to do with improvements that occurred 30-40 years ago (i.e. your life expectancy is largely determined by your health in your 30s and 40s) than multi-million pound anti-smoking campaigns. The US probably has the world's most wasteful healthcare system with 16% of GDP devoted to public and private healthcare. This compares with 10 to 11% in France, Canada and Germany and 8.9% in Italy, 8.7% in Australia, 8.4% in the UK and just 8.1% in Japan, while life expectancy is highest in Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Iceland, probably more down to diet and lifestyle than provision of drugs. The US Model is to boost public demand for healthcare services persuading more people that they need long-term medication and cosmetic surgery (not included in the above figures), creating a huge comsumer market. In my humble analysis the UK health system is being primed for privatisation in all but name. It has become such a monster as to be completely unsustainable and the corporate elite will rely on a knee-jerk reaction to reports of waste and inefficiencies to soften public opposition to the removal of universal provision of healtcare free at the point of delivery. Nadeem Waylayat of

    Market Oracle

    has detailed the almost inevitability of the failure of the NHS project ( see

    http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article23744.html

    ), however, he seems to welcome its downfall. I hasten to add, when the NHS collapses, millions will suffer the consequences.


    Martin Durkin's documentary is just the latest salvo in a war against common sense, i.e. a rational world in which education and healthcare serve the needs of taxpayers rather than those of multinational corporations and are not allowed to become unsustainable. Apparently he has the government on his side as they have now allowed the cloning of animals for human consumption and given the green light to transgenic farming and quiely announced the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

    Categories
    Computing

    Old Browsers

    If the main body of this page has rounded corners and subtle drop-shadow effects with a stylish Diavlo font face instead of Arial / Helvetica / sans-serif, chances are you are already using a modern browser. If you see square borders and a default sans-serif font, then you should be aware your browser doesn't support the latest Web standards making the life of Web designers rather difficult. This site looks great on Android phones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, but will look rather dated in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.

    Modern browsers such as recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 9 support CSS 3 meaning effects that previously required a complex maze of background graphics and endless hours of testing of different variants of major browsers can now be achieved with a few lines of code.
    Newer browsers also render javascript much faster, making it easier to develop Web applications that look and feel like native applications.

    Still using Internet Explorer 6?

    Here are just some of the reasons you might want to upgrade:

    • It does not support W3C standards.
    • It is not compatible with CSS3 and only partially supports CSS2.
    • It has a very low score in Acid 3 test.
    • It is insecure and slow.
    • Several movements against this browser have sprung up: IE Death March, Dear IE6, Stop IE6.
    • Google has officially stopped supporting it in its Web applications.
    • A funeral has been celebrated
    • Microsoft has discontinued support, focussing on its next generation IE9
    • The browser lives on in intranets reliant on dated and inherently insecure Active-X technology and unpatched versions of Windows XP. IE7 was released in early 2006.

    We strongly recommend that you download one of the following browsers:

    Bad Boy Browsers

    When the Internet took off in the mid to late 90s, most sites were, by today's standards, rather basic pages, often handcoded and uploaded via FTP.  Tim Berners Lee invented HTML as a medium for linking a web of related text documents. Indeed the image tag was added almost as an afterthought in HTML 2. However, as the World Wide Web expanded, the two main browsers of the era, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, added a plethora a style tags and designers began to use tables, originally intended only for tabular data, to implement complex pixel-perfect designs. By the late 90s most commercial sites were a maze of nested table, tr and td tags with reams of inline style information. When Internet Explorer won the first round of the browser wars, its quirky implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) HTML 4.0 and CSS1 became the de-facto standard and Microsoft didn't see fit to update its IE6 browser released in 2001 until 2006. While innovative in its time, IE6 is simply ancient in terms of Web evolution. HTML is only 17 years old and IE6 over 9 years. For more advanced behaviour Microsoft introduced its own proprietary scripting language, Active X, integrated with its proprietary operating systems Windows 95/98/200/XP. While this faciliated the development of Web applications and their interaction with native WindowsTM programs, it was a security nightmare outside firewall-protected intranets. As Web usage expanded exponentially post 2002 with the advent of broadband services, demand grew for better integration of images, audio and video as well as cross-platform Web applications, but mainstream browser technology clearly prevented further progress without resorting third-party plug-ins such as AdobeTM
    Flash or more recently Microsoft Silverlight. This means not only purchasing proprietary software (Adobe Flash Studio, Illustrator and/or Photoshop or M$ Visual Studio), but also hiring expensive AS3 developers instead of letting a Web designer accomplish the same ends. While such third-party solutions can provide impressive results for some games and special effects, they are not integrated with other Web standards such as HTML, CSS (Cascading Style-Sheets), Javascript and the little-known SVG standard (Scalar Vector Graphics). It has largely been the open-source community, the Mozilla Foundation and more recently a rather ironically, Apple Inc., to insist on Web standards for multimedia. HTML5 now supports not only more advanced style effects, but also video, audio and canvas elements enabling videos, sound clips and vector-graphic animation to be embedded into your browser natively and directly manipulated by Javascript. Recently we've seem huge gains in browser performance with Chrome, Safari and Opera regularly claiming the top spot with Firefox 4 catching up fast. Even Microsoft, with its new IE9 browser (only compatible with Windows Vista and 7), has shifted its focus from Silverlight to HTML5.


    For once we have good news for Web Developers and bad news for vendors of proprietary solutions.

    Categories
    Power Dynamics

    Migration Myth Busting

    It looks like the globalist growth lobby has been busy copying and pasting its Migration Myths all over government-sponsored Websites and many run by spurious NGOs. Hint if someone is providing information free of charge in a glossy format, it's probably not very reliable. As always first-hand fact finding goes a long way. I live in a small single room in London, am not entitled to housing benefit as I have a job and my kids do not live with me. I've visited many former council estates around Inner London and my observations on the rapid socio-ethnic transformation should surprise no-one with their feet firmly on the ground

    Government Migration Myths exposed

    Original source: Fear of Migrants: a Myth

    Myth: Official reports are objective.
    Fact: Government-commissioned reports select skewed statistics to suit their agenda.
    Myth: Objective population realists suggested 98% of all new jobs go to immigrants.
    Fact: As stated above, around 50% of new jobs in the UK as a whole go to immigrants. In London that percentage is bound to be significantly higher, but in the UK as a whole recent immigrants still account for fewer than 20% of the population. More important, many natives have lost their jobs and are simply not re-employed.
    Myth: Immigration does not boost unemployment within the indigenous population.
    Fact: Only as long as continuous economic growth can keep producing new jobs. (See next item).
    Myth: Economic and population growth are good
    Fact: We live on a finite planet with finite resources. The UK is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Indeed England alone is now more densely populated than the Netherlands. To sustain London's population, we need on area of land larger than the UK. The UK imports 40% of its food, most of its manufactured goods, is now a net importer of fossil fuels and exports pollution created by domestic consumption.
    Myth: Unsustainable migration has not caused a housing crisis in London.
    Fact: Most indigenous workers in London commute from the home counties or beyond and have been effectively priced out of London. For someone on the min wage, an average rent of £150 - £200 per week is simply not affordable. People can only afford to stay in London in acceptable accommodation on low wages if they receive housing benefit, i.e. if they are subsidised by other tax payers...
    Myth: Population realists are racists:
    Fact: Any peaceloving human being abhors racism, but the consequence of more unsustainable growth will be internecine warfare... The country is hugely indebted and entirely dependent on services nobody really needs.
    Myth: There is a skills shortage...
    Fact: Only a small minority of newcomers can offer engineering, IT and medical skills. Most offer the kind of skills that use to be very common in the UK before the demise of manufacturing and the rise of a benefits culture. Anyone can serve lattes.... provided they have sufficient food and shelter. Maybe newcomers can fake smiles better... There are 8 million Britons of working age not in employment or education. An estimated 5-6 million of these are perfectly capable of working, if motivated and trained, and coming off incapacity benefit.