Over 25,000 years ago people were on the move, crossing into the Middle East and into what was to become Europe and stretching our into Asia over hundreds of years. There were few existing people to stop them and why they moved – to find food or safety from climatic conditions – we don’t know…
Human Rights
The odd thing about rights is that they don’t exist until we enshrine them in law – until, in other words, they are given. The history of the world, if there is such a thing, may be described as struggle for rights over the past ten thousand years. A struggle that continues to this day…
Handling the Rich
Someone asked me why rich people go into politics. My answer, that power makes one even more wealthy and is an aphrodisiac for vanity, doesn’t seem quite enough. The financial system we have devised over millenniums does not limit wealth but it punishes penury. This is obviously unfair in the extreme. It seems to me…
Prodigy
I remember as an ignorant 11 year old not thinking Mozart being able to write out a symphony note-for-note after one hearing at the age of 4, nothing special. I have seen many children brilliant performing through the years in music, visual arts and mathematics. Prodigious literary talents are rarer. Alexander Pope was a Latin…
Horoscopes
It is almost the Chinese New Year and like all festival the human brain latches onto it as some moment of renewal and hope. The Millennium celebrations were much the same as people looked back at how far Europe had come in 1000 years. Depending on your definition of far, of course. But astrology is…
The Sun is Shining
but there is frost on the ground and the car is iced over. Spring is not that far away but the winter is still gripping the ground. The bees have survived so far and I am thinking of increasing the hives and taking our first honey this year. These seem small considerations in the world…
No Master
No Master Indeed this is the sweet life! my hand Is under no proud man’s command; There is no voice to break my rest Before a bird has left its nest; There is no man to change my mood, When I go nutting in the wood; No man to pluck my sleeve and say —…
How Quickly We Forgot
The world was going to change. More people would work from home. Growth was not what life was about. Nurses were more important than businessmen and women. Boom and bust is inherent to the system we must change the system. That was 2008 after the latest financial crash and 2019 during the first and then…
How Communities Work
There is a theory, which bears out in some observations, that we make communities by beings elfish enough to give enough ground to make our own lives easier through the density of the skill-sets of the wider population. That is not how community works. That is how nations work but nations are a series of…
Birth Rates
It is interesting, is it not, that Germany had a low birth rate and open sits doors to thousands of immigrants while Britain feels overcrowded and devolves into a deep set racism, and China faces a crisis of a falling population. Why is this a crisis? We can easily see too many people in one…