Austerity is Over!! – a Poem

Posted on by Opher

Call me cynical – but I bet austerity will magically life before the next election.

Listening to the party conference you wouldn’t believe that the country is in such a mess.

Nothing is working. There’s pot-holes in the roads, not a library or youth club in sight, crime is going through the ceiling, courts and police are slashed to pieces, schools and hospitals are in a mess, the railways are a mess, we have people driving across the country delivering little parcels, we have creeping privatisation creaming off profits for rich investors, we have nobody to wipe old people’s bums. People have had their pay and pensions slashed. People are struggling on a low-pay economy.

But the pay of the wealthy continue to get their pay rises and bonuses.

It’s amazing how quickly ‘we’re all in it together’ changed into ‘the poor will pick up the tab for the greed of the rich’.

Austerity is Over!!

 

Austerity is over!!

But not for three more years!!

More cuts are coming

Enough to fuel our fears.

 

Hospitals and schools,

The courts and our old folk,

Will be suffering for three more years –

It’s got to be a joke!!

 

They’ll be saving it up for the election.

Then the cuts will magically evaporate.

They’ll raid the old money tree.

Let’s hope it’s not too late.

 

There’s people going under,

Struggling to survive.

Not that the Tories care

If you’re dead or you’re alive!

 

Opher 4.10.2018

Here’s to the end of austerity – a poem.

Posted on by Opher

Here’s to the end of austerity

Here’s to the end of austerity.
They say we’ve had enough.
We were all in it together
But only the poor have found it tough.

They took from the schools and the NHS
But gave to the captains of industry.
The executives all got their bonuses
But there was none left for you and me.

They’ve had enough of cutting
There’s nothing left to slash.
They’ve ravaged every service
And stolen all the cash.

Police and nurses join the teachers
All trying to get by
Under the yoke of austerity;
Under its blue Tory sky.

Austerity has decimated our country
And has brought no end of tears.
I’ll be glad to see the end of this dogma
But we have to wait three    whole    fucking       years!

Opher 4.10.2018

I watched the Tory conference as they ripped each other apart. It was all about Brexit. You wouldn’t believe that the country was falling apart.
Mrs May’s big announcement was that austerity was coming to an end – except we’ll have to wait three years – until we get close to the next election.
Until then they’ll continue slashing school budgets, privatising the Health Service and putting the poor into low pay jobs.
We’ve got a debt to service!
But it’s OK – the wealthy deserve their tax cuts and we don’t want to block the tax avoidance schemes, do we?

Kavanaugh and Sexual Abuse.

Posted on by Opher

In terms of the sexual abuse situation. I can see both sides. Some women, for various reasons, do make false accusations. That is true.

But women have been abused for centuries by men like Bret Kavanaugh.

It has been going on through society. Powerful men have abused their situation. Abusive men have systematically abused with impunity. It was swept under the carpet and even seen as the norm. Abused women were ignored, not believed and even blamed for the abuse they suffered.

That has hopefully changed. Abuse should never be swept under the carpet.

Each case of abuse should be investigated. Each report of abuse should be listened to. IMO this has to be carried out sensitively. I do not say that the people claiming to have been abused should be completely believed. I think there should be a climate in which they are believed and listened to but in which there is the possibility that it is not true.

I also believe that the person accused should be innocent until proven guilty. For people to be dragged through courts without any evidence is simply wrong.

I just want a hell of a lot more of them found guilty – because many of them are.

Writing – how and when

Posted on by Opher

Writing – how and when

Ideas come and ideas go.
I find that I am often inspired by something, and that could be anything from a TV programme, news report, photo, memory, song or talking with someone, or else they come out of the blue. When I get an idea I want to write it straight away. It is almost a compulsion. But usually this is inconvenient. If I don’t capture it then it is often gone forever. Sometimes I can return to an idea and recapture the feel and enthusiasm, often I cannot.
I take to walking about with a notepad and collecting my ideas. That usually works. I sit in front of the TV with a notepad near by. I have another at the side of the bed. Sometimes I have a few poems on the go and sometimes one will spark up and generate a few straight off. I often work from my notes. Though I sometimes find that when an idea is ‘fresh’ in my mind the whole piece flows out on to the page and is bright and easy. If I have to note it down and get back to it then it is sometimes clunky and does not flow.
I get bored easy and like to keep a few projects going simultaneously so that I can move between them as the mood takes me. At this moment in time I have eight writing projects for books and I am reading two books. It is somehow compartmentalised. I can do that with rewrites or factual books, anecdotes and poems – if the concept is already there or the pieces are short and self-contained. I could not do that with a novel. That requires complete focus and attention and all of the capacity of my mind. I hold a novel in my head like a huge jigsaw puzzle.
The idea for this piece for this piece of writing came to me yesterday evening just as I was going to bed. I jotted it on an old envelop which I discovered this morning. I had already forgotten about it.
The things that inspire me are varied. They could be something beautiful or something that has moved me. They could be ideas. You can see the range from a look through my blog or my books. I write about what I am interested in, what angers me, or what fills me with despair, or what I find humorous and intriguing.
Writing is fulfilling for me. It is a compulsion that I find is necessary for my sanity. It gives me great pleasure. I also write as a means of communication and to change the things I am appalled by. By sharing we grow, we understand and we impact on the world around us.
I believe we can change the zeitgeist and make the world a better place.

Human evolution – It was the cows wot done it!

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Human evolution – It was the cows wot done it!

As hunter/gatherers our diets were varied but dependent on the success of the hunt. We needed the protein from the meat but hunting was precarious and difficult. Life was hard and lived on the edge. There were times of famine.
Then we had the brainwave of farming. ‘Why go off hunting the buggers when we can capture a couple and breed ‘em up so that they’re easy to get and always available’, and ‘Why go out gathering the stuff when it’s hard to find and spread out? Why not sow some seeds and get it all to come up in one place and there’s lots of it?’
Intelligence is wonderful.
But even that did not solve our problems. The crops grew in season. There were gluts and shortages. Storage was hard. The pests took their share. There were still periods of starvation.
We had evolved to digest milk as babies but lost the ability in adulthood.
Natural selection weeded out the starving.
But now there was milk available and you could make butter, cheese and yoghourt if only it didn’t make you sick and you could digest it.
There was a mutation in a gene for lactose tolerance. It enabled adults to digest milk. The ones with the mutated gene had added nutrition through winter and their survival rates rocketed.
They were selected.
Nowadays we can see the prevalence of this gene. It is throughout populations in Europe and Asia.
It is an example of human evolution.
The Sci-fi novels assume the big evolutionary changes will be in intelligence. There is no reason why it should. It will only be beneficial if it gives a clear advantage. The most likely evolution in humans will be a mutation that affords resistance to a disease. Intelligence will count for nothing.
We owe our present success in temperate regions to cows and milk. It is the cows wot done it!

Human evolution and skin colour.

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Human evolution and skin colour.

As we migrated out of Africa a mere sixty thousand years ago we hit a problem. The sunshine and hence UV light was greatly reduced. We needed that UV light in order to make Vitamin D. Without vitamin D we got ill. When you are living on the edge any small advantage becomes crucial.
In strong UV Light the black pigment melanin provides protection against skin cancer.
We all stem from Africans who had black skin.
Outside of Africa black skin was a disadvantage. A mutation occurred that reduced melanin and resulted in lighter skin that upped our vitamin D production.
Pale skin was selected in subtropical regions.
It is interesting to observe the way natural selection has occurred to optimise protection against skin cancer and vitamin D production. I tropical regions with harsh UV the skin colour is black. In subtropical regions with less intense UV it is brown and in temperate regions it is very pale.
This is a good example of changes in the ratio of genes in a population and hence evolution.

Time to make up your mind – a poem

Posted on by Opher

Time to make up your mind

What sort of world do you want?
How are you going to vote?
Time to make up your mind!

There are fascists on the streets,
Fake news on the web.
Time to make up your mind!

Men abusing women
Cops shooting men.
Time to make up your mind!

Kavanaugh an abuser?
Trump a lying fraud?
Time to make up your mind!

Brexit a disaster?
May a weak fool?
Time to make up your mind!

Greedy, selfish executives
And A/I on the wind.
Time to make up your mind!

27.9.2018

It seems to me that we are not very good at making up our minds. We tend to vacillate. We get caught up in the mood of the moment, to go along with the flow.
There is so much going on, so many issues that need addressing. There are so many problems and so many fools, manipulators and self-servers who would love to convince us that they have the answers.
They don’t have the answers. I think they are using us.

Humans and why we’re not evolving.

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Humans and why we’re not evolving.

It is unlikely that we are evolving much at present. We have removed most of the selection pressures that cause evolution. Our amazing brains have produced science and technology that have removed much of the Natural Selection that operated on our populations in the past – at least in the developed countries and increasingly in the undeveloped ones.
We have:
Killed off predators
Conquered most diseases that would previously have killed us off before we had a chance to breed
We have improved sanitation and clean water
We have gained a secure food supply.

All that is killing us off early is war, accidents and selfish greed.
95% of us survive long enough to have children.
However there is some evolution. The fact that some people choose not to have children while others have many will, in time, skew the numbers of genes in the population. Is it a worry that it is the least intelligent and least educated that are reproducing most? Probably in the long term, if it is a trend that continues. Education is probably the answer to that one.
But this state of affairs is a blip. It will not last. Soon the selection pressures will return with a vengeance. Our numbers have grown out of proportion and our intelligence will not outdo the threats.
Overpopulation will lead to war, food shortage and disease. Probably a new virus will emerge to which we have no resistance. Only those with a mutation that provides immunity will survive – or maybe nobody.
Science has demonstrated that 99.9% of all animals that have evolved have passed into extinction.
The only difference between all of them and us is that we will be the first to do it to ourselves through our own greed, arrogance and foolishness. So much for intelligence. Without other qualities it counts for little.
So will we evolve? Be a blip? A tiny layer in the strata of time?
Time will tell.

Evolution within Humans.

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Evolution within Humans.

Up until recently in was easy to see evolution at work on human populations through natural selection; there was high mortality, selection of those who survived, our gene ratios changed.
In Shakespeare’s day, four hundred years ago, only one in three babies survived long enough to reproduce. There was a huge mortality rate. The ‘unfit’ were weeded out through disease, bad conditions, lack of sanitation, malnutrition, violence or mere bad luck. To survive you needed the right genes and the wit to be in the right place and do the right thing.
Nowadays 95% survive. The ‘unfit’ (and I use that term scientifically, not unkindly) are not weeded out. Health and Safety, medicine, sanitation and cleanliness have created a situation where nearly everyone survives to have children.
So is evolution no longer occurring in human populations?
The answer is probably ‘not much’.
What is clear though is that because infant death is no longer prevalent we are increasing in numbers at an alarming rate. For now the selection pressure is off. At some point it will come back on and our numbers will be drastically reduced.
Maybe it will be a virus?
What will the future generations of humans be like? Who will have evolved to lay claim to the future?
We can but hope.

The Evolution of Humans

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The Evolution of Humans

Hominids first evolved out of ape-like creatures in the Rift Valley in Africa only 7 million years ago. There have been a multitude of species of subhuman apes. Modern man with his brain-size and thinking power only evolved a mere two hundred thousand years ago. That is the blink of an eye.
The sub-human hominids all died off but for much of our short history we shared the planet with another human species. The Neanderthals, wrongly represented as brutal cavemen, had bigger brains than ours and were probably more intelligent. They certainly had culture and made tools. They were wiped out quite recently. We don’t know if that was through disease, climate change, competition with us or differences over religion. Maybe they came up against an early form of ISIS and were just too kind and nice?
It is a great shame that there aren’t other species of intelligent humans surviving to this day. It would have taken the wind out of religion. It’s hard to be the chosen species when there are more than one intelligent hominid species. But then I suppose the religious manage to do just that on a tribal basis they would not have too much trouble finding blame with another species. They would proclaim that they were the true chosen species made in god’s image and start a crusade or jihad.
It is only sixty thousand years ago that we migrated out of Africa (and now we’re doing it again) but look at what we’ve done!! We’ve gone from a handful to 7 billion in no time at all.
That is scary.
We think we are here forever. We think we have removed selection and are immune. We are arrogant enough to think that we can do anything and survive.
But can we?