You’re all going to die….

Remember this? From the Independent in March 2000:

“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.”

Ha ha ha…

I’ve been snowed in for three years running…

What about this prediction from the 1982 book Fact or Fantasy (World of Tomorrow):

“From the way in which the Earth moves around the Sun, we have some ideas of the kind of weather that both we and our descendants are going to suffer or enjoy…in general, summers will be less warm and winters more severe. Meteorologists expect the next century to be mostly cold, but the weather should improve in about 150 years time!”

Oh well, that’s nearer reality than this article that ran in the French weekly l’Express back in 1962:

“By the year 2000 all food will be completely synthetic. Agriculture and fisheries will have become superfluous. The world’s population will by then have increased fourfold but will have stabilized. Sea water and ordinary rocks will yield all the necessary metals. Disease, as well as famine, will have been eliminated; and universal hygienic inspection and control will have been introduced. The problems of energy production will by then be completely resolved.”

People and predictions, eh? Especially those scientists…

What about the article in the April 30, 1899 edition of the Chicago Tribune? “Population Close to ‘Standing Room Only’” was its title.

“If the population of the United States continues to increase at the rate that has prevailed during the last twenty years in the year 2000 it will reach so great a density there will be room for an average of only one person to an acre in the vast area.”

Oh dear, tell me more Obi-Wan…the article concludes:

“Deductions must be chiefly speculative, but all that have been made public by the weightier minds turn to the restriction of immigration as the most logical method of imposing a check on an advancement that is fast growing menacing…”

Menacing…sound familiar to you?

Woman ‘deceived females into sex’…?

Incredible! What more can be said? Samantha Brooks, twenty-five, has appeared in court accused of tricking a couple of women into sexual contact by masquerading as a man! Not only that, but, it’s alleged, kept up the pretence with one of the alleged victims for SIX YEARS! 

No!?

Read more HERE and weep.

War and the Food Shortage

“Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only ONE day, of modern warfare.”

Peter Ustinov
Actor, writer and director (1921-2004)

What If Our World Is Their Heaven?

Do you ever wonder when you hear about the poor or underprivileged at home, what it actually means in relationship to the world’s population as a whole?

What I’m trying to get at (I think) is that our view of poverty is benchmarked against the average wealth of the surrounding society. In many societies poverty is so ingrained, so intense that it’s almost in the blood.

In Africa for example: one in six African children dies before the age of five (source: World Vision). Nearly 2 million children under 14 years old are HIV positive (source: WHO). 43% of children in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have safe, accessible drinking water (source: UNICEF).

Now that’s poverty, isn’t it? Agreed, it’s poverty more often than not born of corruption, greed and mismanagement. For Africa, let’s face it, could be one of the richest continents in the world. Instead it is one of the poorest.

Mr. Amoakohene Dennis, of Ghana has this to say on the subject:

“All the ministers and those in the higher positions have swimming pools in their homes. They waste water, whereas the poor people don’t even have access to clean drinking water..”

In the UK we tend to talk about poverty in terms of income:

“Over the last decade, the poorest tenth of the population have, on average, seen a fall in their real incomes after deducting housing costs. In other words, after adjusting for inflation, their incomes are, on average, slightly lower than a decade ago. This is in sharp contrast with the rest of the income distribution, which, on average, has seen substantial rises in their real incomes.”

This might be another way of saying the rich get richer, the poor poorer?

But what does this poverty mean in the UK? Well, according to the UK Poverty Site:

“Many people on low incomes say that they cannot afford selected essential items or activities – but so do quite a lot of people on average incomes; regular holidays are by far the most common ‘essential’ item that children in low-income households lack because their parents say that they cannot afford them; the essential items that are mostly commonly lacking are those which are directly money-related.”

The report then goes on to itemise select “essential items”:

Possessing two pairs of all weather shoes for each adult (as opposed to one pair).
Hobby Activities.
Having friends round for a drink each month.
Holidays away from home one per year.
Money to spend on yourself as opposed to the family.
Being able to afford house contents insurance.
Money for the maintenance of home, internal and external.

(see HERE)

“The UK has a higher proportion of its children living in workless households than any other EU country. It is almost twice that of both the EU average and that in France and Germany.”

We are talking about 1.9 million children in total, two thirds of which are in lone parent households. Nine out of ten lone parent families are headed by women, and nearly half of lone mothers are single (never been married).

The Housing Act, places a statutory duty on local authorities to provide assistance to people who are homeless or threatened with homelessness and fall within a priority need group. Included in these priority need groups are pregnant women and people with dependent children. Consequently homeless families, including lone parents, are considered one of the highest priority groups for social housing.

Of the 15,000 households in England accepted as homeless in the first quarter of 2008, half were lone parent households. Of these, 46 per cent were headed by a female and 4 per cent by a male. In the same period in England, 45 per cent of households in temporary accommodation were female lone parent households with dependent children (Source: General Household Survey (Longitudinal), Office for National Statistics; Communities and Local Government).

There is a body of anecdotal evidence in the UK to suggest that a number of single mothers conceived in order to obtain housing and improved state benefits…can that possibly be true, do you think?

So then I read THIS and while I sympathise (I really do), I have to say it’s easy to see why the Aussies nicknamed us “Whinging Poms”. There is in the UK this attitude that Government (really the tax payer) should sort out all life’s problems. Years ago as a young man with a wife and one child, there were NO benefits. No child benefit (it started with a second child in those days). No statutory duty on local authorities to provide a roof over our heads. Nothing. You worked. You paid your way. No credit cards. There was HP (hire purchase) which was too expensive. No housing credits or benefits.

I was lucky I guess because there was work about. I did one fulltime job and two part time jobs, one in the early hours of the morning cleaning in the local school; the other in the evening five nights per week, 7pm to 11pm, with a local pub.

Obviously, there was no minimum wage back then; you were paid what the boss felt you were worth (never a lot as it happens). And I didn’t get to spend a huge amount of time with my family. But I didn’t think of myself as poor – just not well off. Nor did I whinge because I felt the world owed me a bloody living. It didn’t and I accepted that. I stood on my own two feet, owing nothing to nobody.

But time has changed this. We seem to have produced a society that thinks it’s hard done by…

“This isn’t sink or swim economics. I don’t have the choice of sinking. I exist. And so does my daughter. But I don’t have the choice to swim either. If I work, I am in poverty. If I can get work. If I don’t, I am in poverty. My daughter is in poverty. Unless she goes to live with her dad. The poverty could be eased by moving away from the community we are part of, or finding a relationship which will bring financial security.”

Welcome to the real world. One wonders how much daddy contributes to this single parent family? If nothing, why not? And it may come as a bit of a shock but a vast number of people have to cope with this sort of situation – and far worse.

“The only difference between a single mother, and a married one, is a partner. Another adult to earn money, or take responsibility for some of the domestic.”

Exactly. So daddy should put his hand in his pocket and help pay his child’s way. This isn’t poverty. This is Life. And yes, it isn’t easy. In fact it can be bloody hard.

But poverty, to my mind, is where people have to survive on a dollar or less a day, where many children starve or die because of easily treatable diseases, where every year more than six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday…

As young parents my wife left her work to look after our child – so we effectively became a single parent family (as far as income is concerned). The huge initial reduction in income coupled with a robust increase in outgoings wasn’t easy to manage, or afford. But we scraped by, as did everyone else. Children grow up. With luck, life eventually becomes a little easier…

Without wishing to denigrate those living on or near the “poverty line” in the UK, I can’t help but feel many of those Africans who are busy burying their dead children or worrying about where their next meal is coming from, might look on their UK counterparts with intense envy…

In fact Our World might be Their idea of Heaven?

Our Future…

What does our future hold for us? Could it be this –

Or might we be luckier and end up like this -

The choice is yours – what do you think?

Female promiscuity is essential for human survival….

Promiscuous females may be the key to a species’ survival, according to new research by the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool. Published February 25 in Current Biology, the study could solve the mystery of why females of most species have multiple mates, despite this being more risky for the individual.

Known as ‘polyandry’ among scientists, the phenomenon of females having multiple mates is shared across most animal species, from insects to mammals. This study suggests that polyandry reduces the risk of populations becoming extinct because of all-female broods being born. This can sometimes occur as a result of a sex-ratio distortion (SR) chromosome, which results in all of the Y chromosome ‘male’ sperm being killed before fertilisation. The all-female offspring will carry the SR chromosome, which will be passed on to their sons in turn resulting in more all-female broods. Eventually there will be no males and the population will die out.

See HERE for more.

A better, or a Different world…?

So, let’s drink a toast to a better world! It’s what we all most certainly want, isn’t it? And yet isn’t it a nonsense, that phrase…“a better world” – better than what, you might ask?

Your “better world” (the one you just wished for and raised your glass to) is probably far different from my “better world”, isn’t it?

So perhaps we should just toast a “different world”?

One like this, maybe -

Looks just like Arakis…the planet from Frank Herbert’s 1965 book, “Dune”. Herbert wrote the novel in part because of his interest in ecology, and dedicated it: ‘to the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of “real materials” – to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.’

Or perhaps the world we’d wish for is like this –

No? Too much like the one we already inhabit?

Fact is as a species we could prevent overcrowding if we had a mind to. We could change the “environment” in which we live. To quote Quentin S Crisp: “Reproduction, in very simple terms, is a war for resources. Affluent couples are like affluent nations. They know they can secure a bigger share of the world’s finite resources for their children…Reproduction is war.”

Frighteningly true. Our future certainly looks bleak – but we could take action and turn this situation around before it’s too late…although I doubt we have the courage or political will to do so. Instead, we’ll wait for catastrophe.

On the other hand, with climate change, I don’t think there’s much we can do (not that’s going to have a big impact on the situation). If, ultimately, it’s going to get warmer (though this is far from 100% certain), then we should be putting air conditioning in every building constructed. The current high level of winter deaths will fall, if not disappear completely, in time. Colder countries will need to burn less fossil fuels – because it’ll be warmer! We won’t need all that heating, will we?

If it gets colder, of course, we’re stuffed. After all oil is running out. And fossil fuels won’t last forever! This could then be our “different world”  -

What I’ve often claimed on this blog  has been confirmed recently by the British courts: Global Warming is a new religion. See HERE.

‘In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations”.’

“Man made climate change” unproven to the court’s satisfaction is accorded status as a “philosophical belief” system!

Back in 1815, the volcanic eruption of mount Tambora gave us the coldest summer of 500 years! In 1816 the grapes didn’t ripen; there was widespread famine; hundreds of thousands of people died round the world – and we’re only now beginning to realise this! In the past historians assigned these catastrophic  events to the ending of the Napoleonic wars. Now we know different. Now we know that we don’t know everything.

Even one of the world’s first campaigners for “Man made climate change” has recently stated it’s now too late for humanity to do anything to prevent it. To prevent it, he claims, the Industrial Revolution shouldn’t have happened!

 So we can’t do much about the climate, but we can have an impact on our surroundings, our quality of life and our uncontrolled consumerism.

Riots in Paris, again

So, history repeats itself again (seems to happen every two years), and two nights of riots rock the French city (or rather its suburbs).

Don’t hear much about it, though, do we? Wonder why?

You are being WATCHED! So be warned…

“The Shetland Islands Council and Corby Borough Council – among the smallest local authorities in the UK – have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department.”

Ha ha ha ha, money feckin’ well spent, eh? Take a look at THIS and weep! The Shetland Isles? CCTV’s on every damn sheep! Ha ha ha ha…

The mighty Euphrates – is drying up!

Ahhh, sure, the once mighty Euphrates River in Iraq, the bringer of civilization, is fast running dry, its waters used up by Turkey and Syria, Iraq’s neighbors.

“The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, has left fishermen impoverished and has depleted riverside towns as farmers flee to the cities looking for work.”

Ahhh, sure, isn’t it true? The Book of Revelation tells us:

“The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East.”

See HERE for an article and the photographs.

Never mind, we still have their oil, don’t we?