To Take Pills First Find Them

David, Lord Owen, a Labour leader that never was after he went Social Democrat long ago, has issued a warning about the EU and the effects that TTIP and other policies may have on our National Health Service.  That is it will no longer be National, be concerned primarily with health or a "service" in the terms we understand it.

A full but readable article is here on the Open Democracy web site to see what he is saying.  It does not make for happy reading for all those of us with the aches and pains and other problems of age and infirmity.  It is bad enough at present.  Local hospitals are no longer local.  National has become international and bad luck the locals.

More to the point funding is no longer funding, it is churning the financial markets to secure returns on investment for corporations endowed with unhealthy titles as Private Equity, Limited Liability Partnerships, Trust Funds you cannot trust and the whole array of financial manipulation in a difficult to understand world.

This is going to become the rule if the EU has its way.  If you want to know how good or bad it gets just look at our rail services and try to find or buy the cheapest ticket.

If we are getting rough rides on the railways it could be a whole lot worse riding the hospital trolleys of the future.

A Future From The Past

The story about the discovery that human type remains from a deep cave in South Africa are said to be yet another group in our distant ancestry, Homo Naledi which is running parallel to that of what the Leadership and Shadow Cabinet of the Labour Party will be like is too tempting a chance to miss for comment.

Both have theorists commenting on their nature, ideas and beliefs and how much they contribute to our present peoples.  Both are groupings who internal linkages are yet a mystery and both may have aspects of their approach to others which cause discomfort.

Intensive paleoanthropology will give some answers but much will for dispute and debate about the reality of their lives and the inner meaning of all their activities.  There may well be a great deal we shall never know or understand.

One group may be closely knit and supportive and be aware of the critical needs for survival in an unwelcome area.  They will have learned key skills and will have a mutual understanding of that which is needed both on a day to day basis and for longer terms.  They will have a clear structure in their group and a set of beliefs to sustain them in the trials and tribulations of existence.

The other may be an aggressive, demanding, individualistic loose collection of beings who feud incessantly of who is superior or inferior, who has the rights to the best that can be got.  There will be internal hostility over beliefs and actions relating to them.  They will expect to have casualties and will often actively welcome them.  Typically there will be little thought given to the future even in the short term.

But which is which?

Royalty

In the well deserved celebration of HM The Queen becoming the longest reigning monarch in our known history there have been many pictures of her as a younger woman in the media.

The previous monarch whose length of reign she has passed was Queen Victoria.  The photographs of her have been from the period when she was in her later years and worn by time and events.

Her youth was before the age of photography.  So, to redress the balance here is a portrait of Victoria of that time.

She too was a lady who knew her own mind and could read the minds of others.

Only A Flea Bite

There is no shortage of theories, beliefs or opinions about how our world will end and mankind be doomed to oblivion.

We have a rich and varied choice and many supporters for each of them however unlikely.

This story in The Guardian I missed, but in Science Daily there is a video on the subject.  It is about squirrels, those busy likable little creatures scurrying about carrying the plague, at least in California, the home of so many theories of doom and destruction.

There have been a small number of cases where humans have been affected but the view at present is that these are rare events and not something to worry about.

But, I ask, what happens if there are genetic twitches either or both in squirrels and their fur friendly fleas?  We have had extensive plagues in the past, could it happen again?

In our present globalised inter connected world where millions travel each day a few fleas here and a few fleas there could be with us all.

Look at the picture above and be afraid.

Very afraid.

A Remembrance

Another part of my past has gone.  It is only a fragment, but still there in the memory. It is the death of Claus Moser, Lord Moser who had a distinguished career and whose life story is in the Obituaries today of at least both the Guardian and the Telegraph.

They are worth reading as they tell of one of our leading figures in the late 20th Century and his time as a child who with his family, refugees from Hitler's Germany, was interned at an aliens camp at Huyton, Liverpool during the War.

This was a classic bungle.  Churchill decided the question of aliens had to be answered by the call "round them all up" and they were installed in housing etc. that happened to be available.  Not long after the Luftwaffe flattened large areas of Liverpool and Bootle leaving thousands of homeless with nowhere to go.

After the War, Moser arrived at the LSE where he studied and then was on the staff for around twenty years, covering the time of my studies there in the 1950's.  His field was Statistics, notably demographic and social statistics in which he was a leading expert.

Then, we all had to do some statistics, like it or not, and in many subject areas extra doses were there as a compulsory element.  So he was a member of staff who could not be missed.  As one of the noisy hearties we were difficult to miss, however much people tried.

It was at a concert that I felt a tap on the shoulder.  It was Moser, who asked about my interest in music.  It was a brief interval meeting in which he suggested that a coming Claudio Arrau recital was something not to be missed.  I went and he was right.

A few months later, when I was in the student Bar he appeared, to tell me that there a few returned tickets available for the Van Cliburn recital in the Royal Festival Hall.  He had astonished the world as a young American, by winning the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition the year before in Moscow.

Half an hour later I had mine and it was another evening to remember.  I never met Moser again, but I am still grateful.  It was quite recently that I found that the Van Cliburn recital had been recorded and a CD was now available so I bought it.

Perhaps tonight, it is time to play it again and remember Moser.

Men And Or Machines

Today was to be a day when I would put aside pessimism and take an optimistic view of the future.

It did not last long when I renewed an insurance and had to suffer the automated diatribes and nattering of the firm I phoned.  It is because everything, or almost, is on computers and they are opponents who do not take prisoners.

This article about finance is from Naked Capitalism, linked from Tax Justice Network and by Nicholas Shaxon, the author of "Treasure Islands" the award winning graphic tale of where the money goes, who sends it there and how they benefit.

Headed "Why Tax Havens Will Be At The Heart Of The Next Financial Crisis" it says that when the next bust comes it will the tax havens that might be the main agency for its world wide transmittal.

An essential reason for this is quite simple.  It is that to secure the best deals in confidence and fast, vast sums are batted about the world between high performance computers working 24/7.

Some of the main entities engaged in this are laughingly called "Trust Funds".  They are also playing games in currency, commodity and derivative trading with huge toxic amounts of debt money  on high leverage borrowing on the asset basis of the money being zoomed around.

Then to see this about the digital capability of the now, never mind the future, that says that the machines and their digital works are bigger, better and a whole last faster than the poor, blinking, sad humans that are supposed to control them is not good news.

When the histories of all this come to be written, who will do the writing?  It may not be the humans; it may be the machines who will have their own agenda.  So what will they say?

It was all down to human error?

Migration - The Beginning

The subject of migration has been difficult to avoid in recent weeks.  The debate on the scale and extent of the present movements and their effects has been a muddle of thinking, largely because so many in power are in a state of denial about the nature of it.

I am the child of many migrations.  In the generation in which there are 32 ancestors only two are from the vicinity of the city where I was born and from which my parents took their identity.  As we moved soon after in the next city there were none.  Further back in ancestry there are others from beyond the Atlantic Isles and let us leave out all the DNA considerations.

This is mentioned, yet again, because too often even to discuss issues of migration is often decried as racism.  Similarly to raise questions of population growth and impact invites the same reaction.  For some reason "sustainability" became a dirty word in the early years of this century.

The present situation may not have been possible to predict in detail a decade or so ago but the risks of a major movement from one part of the world to another was certainly there.  It was always a question of what, which, who, where and when the first mass movements would occur.  What was a higher degree of risk was that Western Europe would be a destination.

Sixty odd years ago I was a younger person with progressive ideas about the peoples of the world and internationalism etc. in that period after World War 2 when in Western Europe many ideas about the relationships between states, beliefs and peoples were formed.  But the world has changed.

One change is that world population has tripled and the demands on resources have more than tripled.  Another is that the expectations of what is basic are far greater, notably in Western Europe and so in the poorer and more unstable parts of the world there is the desire to at least share them.  If that cannot be done in many places the logic is for some people to move to Western Europe.

What follows is that if small minorities from states with large populations move out together with larger minorities from others the result is that in the richer states of Western Europe the inward migration is relatively large for those countries.

Moreover, because of the patterns of tribal and extended families cultures once a few arrive and settle the long run effect is to generate increasing levels of related migration.

In the early 1970's when Idi Amin of Uganda expelled the Indians, one reason was that they had become a growing foreign element that was increasing in this way.  In the UK where many arrived, once established those links to Asia continued and have contributed to later migration.

In the UK there was already a debate about the impact of migration at the time and reservations about such a level.  Edward Heath explained that it was only one family per parish so the effect would be small.  The Indian families did not disperse; in fact they were mostly concentrated into a small number of urban areas as is common with much migration both before and since.

With the present crisis in Syria unfolding, it seems that Yvette Cooper is a devoted follower of Edward Heath in declaring that a quota for the UK means only ten people a town.  If, however, several thousand decided that the attractions of Pontefract and Castleford were preferred, I think she would become aware that it is not as simple as that especially if the racecourse became a tented suburb.

This from Naked Capitalism by Raul Ilargi Meijer titled "The Real Refugee Crisis Is In The Future" linked from Automatic Earth suggests that there is a lot more to come:

Quote:

Europe needs to look at the future of this crisis in very different ways than it is doing now. Or it will face far bigger problems than it does now.

Italy’s Corriere della Sera lifted part of the veil when it said last week (Google translation):

The desperation of millions of human beings, manipulated by traffickers and by terrorist groups is also an instrument of disintegration of the countries of origin and of destabilization of the host countries.

It is estimated that sub-Saharan Africa will have 900 million more inhabitants in the next twenty years. Of these, at least 200 million are young people looking for work. The chaos of their countries of origin will push them further north.

That is the future. It will no more go away by itself, and by ignoring it, than the present crisis, which, devastating as it may be, pales in comparison. Europe risks being overrun in the next two decades.

And as things stand, it has no plans whatsoever to deal with this, other than the military, and police dogs, barbed wire, tear gas, fences and stun grenades.

This lack of realism on both the political and the humane level will backfire on Europe and turn it into a very unpleasant place to be, both for Europeans and for refugees. Most likely it will turn the entire continent into a warzone.

Unquote.

One aspect that does worry me is that in all the discussion and debate both now and in the recent past there has been almost complete ignorance of the history of population movement and forms of migration.

If my male Y Chromosome DNA is correct I might go back to the depths of Saxony or if a period long before somewhere in mid Africa.  But I fear I would not be welcome.

The present crisis is just the beginning.