Cor... ain't it quiet?

Is it us, or has everything suddenly gone quiet on the economic cataclysm front since Obama's Imperial Passage? Sure, we've had plenty of police brutality and slanderous emails to keep our salacious palates slaked, but - erm, hello? The global economy, vanishing up its own backside with a dreadful, schlupping sound? Anybody?

Noooo... It's the elephant in the room. Manuscripts Don't Burn would like to break radio silence following the media fanfare today that - Thank God! - we've finally had a month where we've ACTUALLY had deflation, despite the corporate media and government banging on incessantly about how HUGE the danger is. And we only had to cook the books a bit! Huzzah!

Here's our question: is anybody out there actually experiencing deflation in their everyday lives? Mmm? No. Thought not. Next question: is anybody out there actually experiencing humongous inflationary problems with council taxes, utility bills, even food, whilst their wages / salaries / pensions / incomes remain static, if not falling? Whoa there! Thought so!

Yup, they're lying to us again. And we're swallowing it. Doesn't anybody *read* histories of the Great Depression? We're now heading for the nightmare scenario: falling wages and out of control inflation. God help those of us who have debt.

Bottom line: in order to justify stuffing their pockets with taxpayers money past, present, and future, it's necessary for the Powers That Be to convince us all there's a terrible, terrible danger for life, liberty, and the Safety of the Whole Goddamn World if they don't. And deflation is the bugbear.

Ask any economist who isn't on the payroll of the corporate fascists. A bank is failing? Let it fail. We'll have 12 months economic mayhem as all the banks go bust, then we'll straighten out. But no - capitalism is all about the socialization of the losses of the rich, ie the poor people pay for the rich people's losses by increased taxes. So that's what we're being forced to swallow, like it or not. This way, the agony will drag out for the next 3 years, churning through the real economy, creating massive unemployment, collapse, civil unrest, shortages, misery, and probably down and out rationing, war, and clamp-down. Then, when we finally hit rockbottom and we've finally given absolutely everything we've got to the Corporate Feudalists, and are all much, much, poorer, we'll have a nice decade of austerity and backbreaking work to build it all up again. Lest we forget? Don't make us laugh.

Here's another one, a "Lest We Forget" for the 21st century: BOHICA. Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.

Beware Chancellors saying it'll be over by Christmas! Just as well that nice Mr Obama is such a smiley, smiley man. Lovely. Ration coupon, anybody? Or how about a nice war bonds? Got to do your bit!

Ask Not What Your Banks Can Do For You...

People keep assuming that this disastrous situation is some kind of accident. That our political leaders have somehow been terrible silly-billies and - oops! - accidentally impoverished most of the population of the UK for a generation to come and given all the money to a bunch of cut-throat rich bastards. Whoops! Golly - how silly of them! Can't think what came over them...

This situation is deliberate, and unfolding correctly. Thirty years ago Maggie commenced a great redistribution of wealth in the UK, from the poor to the rich, reversing the more egalitarian redistributions which had taken place since the Second World War. This "great redistribution" has continued steadily since, with each successive government simply being clerks and spokespeople for the big business and landed interests who pushed onwards with this redistribution at all costs. This so-called "collapse" is simply another stage in this process.

We now face a return to the pre-war status quo - possibly even pre-WW1 status quo - of a vastly impoverished majority living lives of indebted indenture in squalid tenements whilst a minority corporacy pull the strings of government and economy. And, to recap, none of this is accidental - it's been happening gradually, over the past generation.

The problem is of course that most people are trying to resolve this situation as if it is some big, silly mistake, some oops-missus accident that just accidentally happens to land BILLIONS of taxpayer pounds in the pockets of the super-rich, at the head of an unprecendented massive transfer of assets (property, etc) from poor to rich.

Let's be clear: we will achieve no solution whilst we treat this situation as an accident. The government, the banks, the corporacy, are managing this so-called collapse in their own interests, and simply foster talk of fixes as a distraction whilst sequential bailouts transfer ever-increasing amounts of wealth into their pockets at our expense.

We will only resolve this situation once we recognise that the "system" is ACTIVELY BEING MANAGED AGAINST OUR OWN INTERESTS. Tony Benn, bless his cotton socks, once said that the best thing about democracy was that it was possible to change government without bloodshed.

Not this time, Tony. This time, they're even making us pay for our own handcuffs...

Manuscripts Don't Burn is afraid civil disobedience or abject submission are the only "choices" here. Knowing the mindset of the British, we (along with hundreds of thousands of others) have provisionally liquidated our assets and left the country... We see no need to starve in an open prison and be forced to pay for the privilege.

Life on Mars

Quite a remarkable event is transpiring in the British media today. Yesterday evening, a NASA press conference announced they had "probably" found life on Mars. In typical NASA speak, they refused to give qualitative confirmations, banging on about the need for verification, confirmation, more research, more evidence, but as everyone knows, the only way NASA will ever confirm life on Mars is if they actually have a little green guy in a bottle they can shake at the cameras of the world.

So, everyone with an ounce of sense and perception - and a knowledge of how the scientific process actively mitigates against definitive statements - understood yesterday's press conference to be saying: "We think we've found signs of life. We're not absolutely sure, but we're really excited, and we think all other Mars missions should now be dedicated to confirming our findings".

Epochal. World-changing. And completely ignored in the UK (and, indeed, global) media with the exception of The Sun. Not wanting to be a conspiracy theorist, Manuscripts Don't Burn would like to ask: what the hell are the rest of you guys on? We've more than likely just found life on Mars, and you're banging on about Liverpool footballers and Foxy Knoxy's trial?

Congratulations, UK media. You have now achieved a state of permanent irrelevance. Life goes on elsewhere, apace, but not on your pages!

Chronicle of a Rape Foretold: Economic Collapse 2008

It's interesting that the majority of debates on the ongoing economic collapse start from the assumption that the task facing our governments is to manage our economies in the interests of the majority of its citizens, and that their actions and dialectics revolve around the best way to achieve this. And that, poor dears, they've made a bit of a mess of it this time.

A wider perspective gives us no grounds for this assumption. Governments rarely work for the benefit of their populations, but rather for the most effective exploitation of their populations for the benefit of the small minority of the faction currently controlling those governments, unless forced by threat of violence and social unrest to do otherwise. This isn't conspiracy theory; Manuscripts Don't Burn would argue it's the tacit common sense working agenda of the political classes, but one which our corporate- and government-controlled media do not like to see discussed.

The situation we're facing today is planned. It's been in the offing for thirty years; the gradual and insidious redistribution of wealth from bottom to top, reversing the more egalitarian redistributions following WW2 (in the face of the Soviet ideological opposition - however illusory that turned out in the long run). One has only to speculate on the relative wealth of a typical family between now and, say, thirty years ago to realise that today's families are considerably worse off, working harder, and carrying greater debt than our parents' generation. Money is flowing upwards, being concentrated into the hands of a small minority calling itself "big business", who themselves control the governments and electorates via "oligarchical intimidation" (witness Mandy's recent "interview") and media propaganda. The future is one of austerity and indenture for the masses, whilst the elite lounge on their yachts preaching about how it's important for us all to "make sacrifices". Haw-haw-haw.

The goal here is nothing more and nothing less than a return to the pre-WW1 status quo of quasi-fascist social organization, with a vast and easily-exploited workforce providing 99% of the labour in return for 1% of the wealth. Anything else foisted upon us by the mock-discussions in the corporate media is just smoke and mirrors to distract us whilst they rob us of our birthright.

We can engage in these pretend debates as much as we like (should we inflate our savings into non-existence or not? what kind of perpetual indebtedness and indenture do we want? which tyrant are we going to vote for - Mr Bad or Mr Crazy? ooh - the breathlessness of choice!), but we're simply parrotting the intended obfuscations which have been given to us in this distracting, irrelevant discourse. The real business of course continues apace, hoovering up the wealth and leaving us bereft, hyperinflating our currencies out of all value and centralizing the concrete assets - in the form of land and resources - in the hands of the "business" elites, leaving us with nothing but handfuls of worthless paper. There's nothing short of actual violence that we can do to change that, for all our self-important "debating" and hot-air. Witness Greece as a foretaste of what's to come in all Western societies in the coming years, when the security forces use lethal force to stifle anyone who dares protest. These anti-terror laws and snooping bills weren't there to "protect" us after all... who'd'a thunk it?

"The Federal Reserve is utterly terrified." Give us a break - yeah, Manuscripts Don't Burn is sure those private and discrete, unaccountable billionaires are quaking in their boots at the prospect of us having to give them all our possessions AGAIN. Terrified to bits. Wouldn't you be? What a joke.

Angry, us? Does it show?

Thanks to GolemXIV on the next wave of the crash...

Manuscripts Don't Burn hasn't posted here lately, as you'll doubtless be aware - but we'd like to post a copy of a fellow blogger, GolemXIV, from the Guardian website today. Thanks, GolemXIV!

"The point is there is nothing of any consequence the gov or the BoE can do about deflation. The deflationary forces are just too amssive.

Just take a look at the next wave appraoching the beach.

Next year, 09, we get the first spike of the next TWO classes of american mortgages to start defaulting. Sub-prime is almost all through by early 09 but Alt-A and the even more toxic Option ARMs will start to make the headlines.

Nearly 4 Million small businesses in the US have Alt-A and of them 1.2 Million are ALREADY 60 day delinquent. As for the ARMs you really don't want to even look.

For those who don't know ARMs are mortgages where for an introductory period you can CHOOSE how much to pay or not pay all the way down to pay nothing. WHat you don't pay gets added on to your mortgage up to 125% of the loan. Then this new HUGE amount gets put on to a MUCH higher rate.

The market expects massive default rates.

This will mean even more massive write downs. This is part of why the banks have been hoarding all the cash we gave them.

So cutting a percentage point or two or messing about with a couple of VAT points really is about as impressive as getting your todger out, thinking you'll piss on that forest fire inferno and show it who's boss."

Manuscripts Don't Burn has been reading GolemXIV's comments attentively throughout this historical crisis. So far, he's been spot on every time. Interesting times...

The Tsunami Offshore: the on-coming CDS meltdown

The blogosphere has been buzzing the past few weeks with talk of the huge Credit Default Swap tsunami currently being held offshore by the global bail-out. Speculation is that it'll come crashing in shortly after the US elections - the stability of which is the main reason our futures have been hocked.

This morning blogger GolemXIV posted the following summary of where we're currently at on the Guardian website. Manuscripts Don't Burn cannot better it, so with due credit to GolemIV, we'd like to post it in its entirety. You can see the original here.

"We are entering the second and more dangerous phase of this financial melt down. As corporations begin to go down the CDS and CDO's written on their debt will blow up.

"When they do, the holders lose massive amounts of money. They are losing often 90 cents in every dollar. Most of the institutions making these losses are also still highly leveraged. This means a small loss is enough to force them to have to raise more real cash to cover their losses and replace their capital holdings.

"To raise the cash they have to sell assets, call in debts or seek yet more help from the governments.

"Selling assets is depressing the value of those asset types on the market making all the other holders of that kind of asset a little bit poorer. Bringing them, in turn, a little closer to having to sell themselves.

"Calling in debts forces those from whom you call in the debts closer to bankruptcy. This is the situation with Gmac the finance arm of GM. It is virtually bankrupt and may file very soon. To stave that off, Gmac is forcing the GM dealers to whom it has loaned money to pay up. They are starting to go bust. They default on loans and round we go.

"Sovereign nations have been offering themselves as the backstop to every bad debt brought to them. If they don't stop NOW they will find their own debt, sovereign national debt, is down graded. This may happen to US national debt quite soon.

"Once that happens we are facing a Bond market dislocation. After that I won't be writing any more as there will be no point.

"This is NOT a liquidity crisis it is a Solvency crisis. The banks are insolvent. They know it. It is why they won't lend. The only lending they are doing is on the basis of the real cash the governments have injected. The governments have essentially created little banks inside the carcasses of the banks who are still poisoning the financial stream with all the worthless and toxic debt backed paper they refuse to admit is worthless.

"The banks and governments have refused to admit these assets are worthless. Refused to force them out and to take the losses and begin to rebuild.

"All that is happening is the real worthlessness of the paper is leaking out slowly as one entity after another is poisoned and goes under. Basically the stuff is putrefying and leaking out.

"This isn't rocket science. Even though the bankers would like you to think it is.

"Imagine a group of men walking across an ice sheet. They are roped together for safety. Or as the financial world characterizes it - to spread the risk. Great in theory. But each man is carrying an anvil of debt. One man, lets call him Lehman, falls through. The ropes tighten, everybody stops still. No one can move. Lending stops.

"What they should do is collectively put down their anvils and let them slip down the hole Lehman made. Huge losses but the ice is safe, then hole doesn't widen. But none of them will do this. Each is convinced that one day their anvil of debt will turn to gold and they'll be rich once more. So they stand there slowly dragging each other towards the hole.

"As they get pulled closer together, their combined weight threatens to crash the entire ice sheet. The bad news is WE are all living on that sheet."

Economic "Crisis": The Great Redistribution Continues Apace

The current state of the global economy - ie what happens to us all in the West - is only a crisis from the perspective of those on the receiving end. For the powers that be - the big banks, global corporations, and major landowners, everything is proceeding according to plan.

What we're witnessing is a particularly blatant episode in the huge redistribution of wealth from poor to rich which has been going on since the 1980s, reversing the more egalitarian post-war redistributions of the 50s and 60s. The poor are being divested of their ability to buy and hold property at an alarming rate, their "savings" are about to be destroyed by extremely high inflation, future education, welfare, public works, and healthcare budgets have just been spent in advance in the "bail-out", and assets with any concrete value are being placed into the hands of the mega-rich.

The future for most of us is indenture - lifelong indebtedness to the banks in return for a roof over our heads, little different from the indentured serfs and tenant farmers of the Middle Ages.

What floors us here at Manuscripts Don't Burn is the scale of their blatant audacity - not only harnessing the media-government complex over the past 20 years to ensure astronomical indebtedness amongst the population, but then actually forcing them to pay *twice* by "bailing out" the toxic debt which their pea-under-the-stone "trading instruments" have excreted. You couldn't make it up - as Dubya has so famously said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time - and those are the ones you should concentrate on".

Why aren't people rioting in the streets? Our allegedly-elected government has finally admitted it's in bed with big business and working directly against our interests, and we just roll over and turn the telly on?

Thank God at least our governments have been repealing our civil rights and introducing all that draconian "anti-terror" legislation. That way, they can club us down and lock us up when we start protesting at our coming homelessness and hungriness, and it'll all be legal!

Ignorance is Strength, indeed.

Irrelevant diversions as the price of food rockets...

The average UK family is facing a £1700-a-year utility and food bill increase over the past 12 months - that on a £20K gross salary. For most of the population, regardless of what the government says, actual experienced inflation is running at 10-15%.

It's inevitable, we are told. Poor harvests. Overpopulation. Global warming. "The era of cheap food is over." "We all have to tighten our belts and pull together - it'll be like the war again. It's the New Austerity."

Bullshit.

The elephant in the room is that we have food riots all around the world and looming shortages / starvation because a bunch of brokers are being allowed by supine governments to create a bubble in commodities (ie FOOD) to try and claw back some of the money they lost in the subprime fiasco (after they'd been "allowed" to flog off the backup foodstores we'd set aside to prevent this sort of thing happening).

It's not global warming, it's not overpopulation. Our governments are allowing private individuals to speculate with the global staple food and energy supply. Irresponsible laissez-faire and lack of planning is the crime, that and the fact that the media are not shouting the truth from the rooftops.

But, hey, this is corporate feudalism - it's cool if people die, as long as the brokers keep making their millions. We can always blame it on global warming and overpopulation! The poor saps will never cotton on till it's too late - then they'll be too hungry to do anything about it.

Buy coffee! Buy rice! Buy wheat! The price is gonna rocket once the people start dropping!

*****

Support material: Truthout.org, "Making a Killing from Hunger"

Jim Rogers on CNBC: Abolish the Federal Reserve and Stop "Socialism for the Rich"

Interesting times bring strange bedfellows: Manuscripts Don't Burn today finds itself standing in solidarity next to straight-talking arch-capitalist Jim Rogers as he unequivocally condemns the appallingly corrupt bailout of Wall Street at the expense of the rest of us. It's clear now that the enormous capital transfer into the hands of the rich and the corporate is damaging the global economy and screwing up life for the rest of us for at least the coming decade, and we need top figures like Jim Rogers to point out the blindingly obvious - the Wall Street bailouts are not capitalism. Capitalism would let the investment banks go bankrupt, would let the recession in as the inevitable part of the economic cycle. The enormous Federal Bank bailouts we are seeing now simply postpone the recession, and exacerbate its intensity, and look like a mad scramble to bailout the rich and the incompetent with money which could otherwise be used to better effect before the shit finally hits the fan.

Strange bedfellows indeed. Manuscripts Don't Burn finds itself agreeing with Jim Rogers: abolish the Fed. Bernanke resign. Let these incompetent parasites go bankrupt. Clear out the dead wood and start with something more responsible - if these guys believe they are capitalists, then let the market deal with them. For the rest of us - the long-suffering public - give us some public banks who we can trust to look after our money.

No to corporate feudalism. No to socialism for the rich.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results of 2008 Election Early

Manuscripts Don't Burn would like to thank our friends at TheOnion.com for this priceless piece of reporting... You keep the flame, guys.


Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Rowan Williams: Media Stooge

The Archbishop of Canterbury has attempted to say something sensible about the status and future of Muslim culture in the UK. Unfortunately, he has said it publicly. About Muslims. Big mistake.

This entire issue is an excellent example of what's wrong with Britain at the moment, and why so much of Britain's government is being carried on behind closed doors. The new reality, it seems, is that whatever you want to do, just do it, but for God's sake don't try and talk about it.

Anyone who wishes to propose mature and serious debate about an issue in Britain has to have an army of spin doctors to couch it in terms which won't send the mass media off wetting themselves in a blind, hysterical frenzy and misrepresent the hell out of whatever was said. So people stop bothering. What *is* the point of bothering? What's the point of trying to talk about things, when the media will just tear you apart and splatter you all over their pages in their hysterical attempts to sell papers. It's what they do.

If it was necessary for the media to roll in the gutter p*ssing themselves and grovelling for our money in order to sell papers, they'd do it. It's nothing to do with news - it's the hysterical production of equally hysterical demand, nothing more. And our democracy has it as a terminal disease. The mass media is collaborating in screwing our country into the ground. Cui bono?

A lot of issues need discussing in modern Britain: global warming, joining the Euro, immigration, corporate corruption, decentralisation, and many, many more. But they won't be. They're perceived by the media as boring, stick-in-the-mud topics which require at least a small exercise of the grey matter to contribute to, and therefore f'all use in selling papers. And in our increasingly uneducated and asinine culture, it's so much easier for the media to scream their heads off with easy-to-swallow knee-jerk meaningless soundbites before tuning into wall-to-wall Eastenders and celebrity dancing / hiking / cooking / what-the-frack-ever programs than actually trying to get people to concentrate on an issue for more than five minutes. Which suits the shadowy backers of the shadowy government which *really* runs the show just fine.

And so democracy dies. Not to the sound of tumultuous applause, but to indifference, and the frantic changing of channels...

...and the lighting of cigars, and satisfied smiles, in oak-panelled rooms far, far, from public view. Nemo custodiet ipsos custodes. And they like that just fine.

The Long Johns - The Economic Meltdown Explained

Manuscripts Don't Burn would like to present the Two Johns with their clear-as-crystal explanation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the results of our latest and greatest attempt to redistribute and siphon money away from the poor and back into the pockets of the rich - and just why the western world is currently on the verge of economic collapse. Well, why shouldn't one laugh? The only other options are far too horrible to contemplate...

The Ethical Chicken Debate

Manuscripts Don't Burn has noticed an appalling amount of condescension, snobbery, and bitterness bandied around the media and blogosphere over the past week on the subject of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver's attempts to highlight the disgusting state of our battery-farmed chicken industry. Clearly there are some deep-seated issues here.

Manuscripts Don't Burn knows several people who live on the breadline and eat mostly processed food - tins, centrifugally-harvested burgers, chicken nuggets, fish fingers, etc, etc. To our knowledge little or no fresh food enters their diet. It seems that this is not untypical.

Given that for a £6 free-range chicken one can feed a family of four for 3 days (roast chicken, curry, sandwiches, soup, in that order), processed food is clearly the more expensive option. So poverty, at least, is not the reason. If anything, a lack of cooking know-how, of confidence in buying and feeding oneself, and a dependency mentality on advertising and the slop doled out in ready-meals and burgers seem to be at the root of the "burger and chips Happy Meal" obesity epidemic which is raging through the poorer sectors of the Anglo-Saxon Empire. To poor to eat? Hardly.

From the price point of view, eating real food is not exclusive or beyond the reach of "poor" people. So Manuscripts Don't Burn would like to humbly request the Blogosphere to please drop this faux "guilt trip" that it's beyond the reach of those terribly hard-up poor people and start helping people get educated about the provenance and consequences of our badly screwed up food industry. The whole idea of "well, we have to have cheap and crappy food available so the poor can afford it" attitude is offensive.

Ban battery chickens. Most of all, ban the gross profiteering the supermarket middleman extort from the chicken farmers, who receive an average of 7 pence on a £2.50 battery chicken, and, yes, we can all suddenly afford to eat meat produced in a decent environment.

And stop the class-ridden snobbery, Britain, for God's sake.

Hysterical Consumption Time is Here Again!

Consumption is the opium of the masses.

Behind it sits a bogus economic system which makes us work harder and harder and waste more of our lives working simply in order to continue to consume.

Without this hysterical consumption our populations could work less than 4 hours a day, less than 5 days a week, and have much more time to spend on the "important" things of life.

The fact is that a population with too much time on its hands scares the hell out of the powers that be. People with time to think might start to question the insane mess we're making of the planet and most of its population in the name of "growth". Consequently prices rise, even staple foods now, and we are trapped more deeply within this inhuman machine. The money spent on war and oppression could easily be used to provide us all with free food and accommodation.

Cue howls of protest from those who cream the profit off the misery of billions - of course they wouldn't want things to change.

Individuals can fight this. Consume less; work less. Ignore advertising. Opt out of this slavery whilst it's still voluntary, and live according to values that have a little more meaning. Forget about the latest overpriced gadgets or redecorating again; spend some time with friends and family.

The system tries to convince us we are powerless to change things: we are not. With little steps we can change the world.

The powers that be are doing a miserable job of managing our happiness. We must do better than this.

Global Warming - Go To Sleep Everyone...

Does anyone else have the feeling we're just fiddling as Rome burns?

It's already too late, guys. Those of us debating here on CiF are the tiny, tiny minority of the planetary population who even think this thing is worth talking about. Most people don't give a damn - and half of those that do are so damn terrified they just stick their fingers in their ears and sing LA-LA-LA over and over again.

There is no "solution" which we have an earthly chance of getting in place in time. We can talk about them, but it's all just hot air (pun not intended), and the climate will continue to change as it already is. Food prices are already rocketing in this part of the world from the dismal harvest this year, caused by no winter, no summer, and now - 7 months of almost constant rain and counting. It's 15 degrees C in the middle of winter, the fields are full of weeds and the bugs ain't dying...

Governments are already in crisis management. The other day here in France the national TV station's weather report said the half year rain was great for the planet cos we need loads of water, and we shouldn't worry about the unseasonably warm temperatures cos it means we don't have to use our heating as much - and that is good for the planet. You have to grin - it keeps everybody's spirits up.

The simple fact is, if things continue the global climate is going to change in completely unpredictable ways. It's no good saying "hey, I live in Europe / North America / whatever so it's just going to get warmer / wetter / nicer and I'll be fine". No one knows how individual areas will be affected - it's effectively a complete lottery. The atlantic conveyor could shut down and Europe freeze; rain and sea level rises could turn your home into a swamp; drought and warming could make your country into a desert. We're just going to have to wait and see.

The one thing that appears certain is that we're heading for a period of tremendous uncertainty. That means instability. Which means violence, whether in the form of hugely restrictied civil liberties as governments struggle to cope with famine, disease, flood, whatever; or violence in the form of forced migrations, invasions, wars, the usual shebang.

Eventually, when things settled down again, and millions or billions of people have died, the human race will find those parts of the planet which are conducive to our survival. Who knows where they will be... could be more or less anywhere.

The main problem with all these shenanigans is the speed at which they're going to happen. They've already started, although we in the West have been largely insulated from them in our cosseted free speech zones, up till now at least. And they're going to get significantly worse in our lifetimes. On the plus side, as the effects of climate change kick in, it's likely to impact our ability to cause continued damage - cities will be flooded, countries will dry out or depopulate, populations will die - and our "carbon footprint" will dwindle quite nicely.

On a mathematical level, it's all very neat, really. Things will balance out. It's the human story behind the narrative where it's going to be shocking. At some point, this rather unpredictable game of Russian Roulette is going to require we all put the gun to our heads and see if we win or lose - the best we can do is to keep as aware and adaptable as possible to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Of course I could be talking bollocks. I really hope I am, actually, but having read the evidence, looked around me, and studied human history and our traditional response to large-scale problems, I'm not hopeful. The best response right now is to join the chorus of head-in-the-sand naysayers and scream "it's never gonna happen..."

Who knows, if we all shout loud enough, maybe whatever God is up there will take notice and have mercy... You never know...

Now where did I put that violin? ;-)

This is the Neeeeeeeewwwws!

Disappearing Madeleine? Mohammed's Teddy Bear? Dead Darwin in Panama?

The reason these story's are inflated to fill the obligatory news slots in the media schedules is because they are CHEAP. In the constant drive for efficiency and economy, saving money and resources, real news has now become too expensive to report.

The same thing is happening all across media-land. Rather than make proper TV programs, it's much, much cheaper, and far less difficult for today's clumsily marketing-educated media studies graduate darlings, to stick a bunch of people in a room and film them arguing. Cue the birth of reality TV.

Today's schedule: some unknown woman crying on telly and saying how it's all gone wrong; some program telling you your house is too dirty / clean / large / small / badly decorated and you need to buy product X or be socially embarrassed forever; a bunch of no-hopers eating crap in a field somewhere foreign; and of course sport. And the weather - but not very accurate, cos we can't afford a satellite feed every day. Why bother investigating stuff and being creative when people will just suck up this crap instead?

The media is gradually vanishing up its own bottom. One day there will be a loud shlurping noise, a nasty smell, and an empty page where the news used to be. But it will be CHEAP.