What has gone wrong with Britain?
I only vaguely remember the Hong Kong Flu during my teens in 1968-70. It killed more people than Covid has so far. Some services and facilities became temporarily disrupted but societies carried on without much fuss or lockdowns. The virus still exists but humanity has fairly good herd immunity to it now.
This current Pandemic has brought many issues into focus, in part because the now omnipresent media has had so little political or celebrity or sports news to report on.
However, we look at most of these issues the wrong way around.
We do not have a housing shortage. We have a population glut.
We have deliberately engineered this by allowing a net immigration of 300,000 per annum. This suits property owners fine; their properties inflate in value and this effectively acts as a massive tax on the young. Property has become a much more lucrative investment than industry.
Normally a ‘price improvement’ means something has got cheaper. When you hear that ‘property prices have improved’ that means, bizarrely, that they have got worse, i.e. more expensive.
Continual immigration suits the capital owning classes fine, it depresses wage costs, it provides a short-term fix and profit. Continual immigration also suits the lefty liberal faction as well, as it provides a ready source of votes, and issues they can exploit.
Now an entire younger generation faces chronic employment insecurity and accommodation insecurity issues. And what do we fob them off with? The nonsenses of identity politics and faux individualism via consumerism and social media. No wonder we also have a mental health pandemic.
We should supposedly feel grateful for all the care workers, nurses, and doctors we have imported from abroad. Surely, we should feel ashamed that we have deprived poorer countries of these people by importing cheap labour and skilled people more cheaply trained abroad, rather than properly funding such work and training here.
The UK has become absurdly overcrowded, the cities become increasingly nasty and unpleasant places to live, the countryside shrinks, and the physical and psychological environments become degraded. Nobody hitch-hikes or lets their kids outside unescorted, and nobody leaves their doors unlocked anymore.
The current course will not prove sustainable. Economy staff from abroad will increasingly demand parity, and the ecology of these isles will collapse further through sheer overcrowding. I have not seen a Puffin south of Hadrian’s Wall or Anglesey in a long while.
Vast amounts of UK capital now get invested abroad in the sweatshops of the developing world. We should force its reinvestment here to redress the chronically low productivity.
The majority of UK wealth has become either invested in property or offshore. Some might call this a Developed Economy, it looks more like a Decadent Economy.
The Decadence of the UK economy reaches a pinnacle in the financial centre of the City of London. Here the difference between assets and liabilities has become wilfully obscured, and most of the world’s serious proceeds from crime and corruption come here for discreet laundering.
Eventually the real bills will come in for all this. Decadence leads to decay and collapse.
The pandemic has revealed the weakness of UK manufacturing and our dependency on cheap imported labour.
Instead of outsourcing clothing manufacture to third world sweatshops we should develop high tech computer driven looms and garment assembly devices. Instead of exploiting imported field workers in appalling working conditions we should develop artificially intelligent harvesting machines and upgrade people’s pay and skills to use them.
Instead of short-term fixes and quick profits at any eventual cost we should apply our considerable brains to creating an ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable future for this country, and that means selectively De-Globalising it.
Anyway, enough rant for now. Herewith the last in the current series of lockdown beach-detritus creations; Ship eating Space Slugs (originally created to clear space debris from planetary systems, they devoured their creator species and now infect the whole galaxy). Here a Lithonian ship approaches a swarm of them, hoping its warp-lance will prove effective as a giant bug swat and flip them into hyperspace. I make this stuff to amuse my grandchildren obviously……….
Some further speculations on particle and quantum physics and 3-dimensional time: -
1) Imagine that time may have the same threefold dimensionality as space and that the ‘doubly unobservable*’ orthogonal time dimensions have a spatial signature.
(* We cannot even observe so called ordinary time, we merely infer its existence from memory, records, and expectations, we can perhaps infer the existence of orthogonal components to time from quantum superposition and probability in general.)
2) Imagine that the quanta of spacetime can rotate as spinors with various planes about various axes. Let us denote the spatial dimensions as x, y, x, and the temporal dimensions as a, b, c. As the universe has no preferential directions, only relative directions, then we can denote spatial spinor rotation as xy(z) and temporal spinor rotation as ab(c), where the first two letter denote the spinor plane and the bracketed letter denotes the axis.
3) If xy(z) corresponds to the ordinary chiral spin of fundamental fermions then ab(c) probably corresponds to the strong nuclear charge that some particles carry, and which can manifest in 3 ‘colours’ ab(c), ac(b), or cb(a) or their ‘anticolours’ if they spin in the opposite direction. Fundamental fermions can only carry one unit of ordinary spin and optionally one unit of nuclear charge and these undergo spatial and temporal inversion respectively because of their axes.
4) xy(a), xy(b) and xy(c) may represent electromagnetic charge. The fractional electromagnetic charges of quarks suggest that they may possess only one or two of such spins, whilst independent particles such as protons and electrons must carry all three. The spatial dimensions of x and y both lie orthogonal to all the temporal dimensions of a, b, and c. Electromagnetic charge undergoes temporal but not spatial inversion, the spatial orthogonality of the electric and magnetic vectors arising from an electromagnetic charge also seems to fit this model.
5) ab(x), ab(y) and ab(z) may represent particle generation which seems to add only mass. If so, then particle generation undergoes spatial reversal, so either neutrinos act as Marjorama fermions and become anti-neutrinos on spatial inversion, or particles and anti-particles can have generation of either sign. Like ordinary spatial spin, generation spin does not seem perfectly conserved and can presumably interconvert with orbital angular momentum.
6) The waves of twist and anti-twist sent out from the spinor rotations of spacetime quanta may cause the spacetime curvatures of mass and electromagnetism and the very short range strong nuclear force.