The Work Foundation, an NGO at the confluence of internationalism and economism, has issued a press release titled, “UK must attract more highly skilled migrant workers”:-

Katerina Rüdiger, author of a new report, ‘Towards a Global Labour Market?’, says: “Global firms need more global people — not just to fill shortages, but for the sake of enabling firms to innovate.

“... At present, despite the hype, numbers are relatively low — only 167,000 high skilled workers came to this country on official figures from 2005. Politicians need to actively make the case for highly skilled migration. The new points based system in the UK will not be enough on its own. Talented people want career opportunities, the chance to expand knowledge by working with the brightest and best, good salaries, and the creation of diverse and exciting cities.”

This is the enemy in smooth and self-confident action.  Elsewhere on the site, in its advertising blurb to the Rüdiger report, it urges “policymakers” to:-

... do more to ensure the UK remains an attractive place for highly skilled migrants to want to come.In knowledge intensive sectors, human capital is as, if not more, important than labour cost.Highly skilled migrants are vital for organisations to be able to innovate, to gain ‘an international outlook’ and get round the problems of a purely native labour supply.

“The problems of a purely native labour supply.”  Quite outrageous.  I have searched the full report, and the “problem” is described there in the singular, and is an ageing native demographic.  But that’s not really it, because the report plainly states that the cause of skilled labour shortages in “IT, science, healthcare and technology fields” is the government’s success in promoting Britain “as a location for foreign investment”.

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You will find four radical resolutions at the end of this article, all of which were submitted to, and the first two of which were passed by the Washington State Republican Party 2008 Convention to become official Washington State Republican Party positions.

The status of these resolutions and their titles:

Official WSRP Position: Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives
Official WSRP Position: Repeal the 16th Amendment
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the Federal Reserve Act
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the 17th Amendment

The story behind their respective fates is illustrative of how the political process works at the state level.  I’m going to go into some details that may seem self-indulgent but they are also illustrative of what it actually took to get the first two resolutions adopted as official policy by the Washington State Republican Party.  Think of it as a flavor of war story.  The devil is in the details…

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BY Tomislav Sunic, and first published in Chronicles in March 1999

From Italy to France, from Germany to England, the post-World War II generation is now running the show. They have traded in their jeans and sneakers for political power. Thirty years ago, they rocked the boat at Berkeley, in Paris, and in Berlin; they marched against American imperialism in Vietnam, and supported the Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, and his “socialism with a human face.” They made pilgrimages to Hanoi, Havana, and Belgrade, and many of them dressed in the Vietcong’s garb, or Mao’s clothes. A certain Bimbo named Jane Fonda even paid a courtesy visit to North Vietnam and posed for a photo-op with her rear on a communist howitzer. This generation protested against their wealthy parents, yet they used their fathers’ money to destroy their own welfare state. A burning joint passed from hand to hand, as Bob Dylan croaked the words that defined a generation: “Everybody must get stoned.”

This was a time which the youth in communist countries experienced quite differently. Prison camps were still alive, deportations were the order of the day from the Baltics to the Balkans, and the communist secret police—the Yugoslav UDBA, the Romanian Securitate, the East German Stasi, and the Soviet KGB—had their hands full. European 68ers did not know anything about their plight, and they simply ignored the communist topography of horror.

Back then, the 68ers had cultural power in their hands, controlling the best universities and spreading their permissive sensibility. Students were obliged to bow down to the unholy trinity of Marx, Freud, and Sartre, and the humanities curriculum showed the first signs of anti-Europeanism. Conservatives concentrated all of their attention on economic growth, naively believing that eliminating poverty and strengthening the middle class would bring about the renaissance of the conservative gospel.

Today, the 68ers (or “neo-liberals” or social democrats”) have grown up, and they have changed not only their name, but also their habitat and their discourse. Their time has come: Now they hold both cultural and political power. From Buenos Aires to Quai d’Orsay, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to 10 Downing Street, they sit in air-conditioned executive offices or in ministerial cabinets, and they behave as if nothing has changed. Perfectly recycled in stylish Gucci suits, wearing expensive Bally shoes, sporting fine mascara, the 68ers pontificate about the global free market. They have embraced their former foe, capitalist entrepreneurship, and have added to it the fake humanistic facade of socialist philanthropy.

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“I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people.  I was doing it against my instincts.”

John Lennon, quoted just before his death.

At a brief lull during the Who’s performance of Tommy, [Abbie] Hoffman, who had ingested LSD after working the past few hours at the medical tent, abruptly walked onto the stage and began addressing the crowd from Pete Townshend’s microphone.  He shouted, “I think this is a pile of shit! ... While John Sinclair rots in prison ...”  Alerted to the disturbance, Townshend (who apparently had been too distracted to notice Hoffman ambling onto the platform), snarled at Hoffman, “Back off!  Back off my fucking stage!”  He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling.  As the crowd let out an approving roar, Townshend returned to his microphone to add a sarcastic “I can dig it!”  Following the conclusion of the next song, the short “Do You Think It’s Alright?”, Townshend issued a stern warning to those in attendance: “The next fucking person that walks across this stage is gonna get fucking killed, alright? You can laugh, [but] I mean it!”

From the Wikipedia entry on the Woodstock Festival

During last month, the fortieth anniversary of the Paris student protests, the press was well-populated with articles about the generation of 1968.  I am nearly but not quite one of them and, personally, I’ve found a lot of what was written to suffer from generalisation.  The spirited, no-nonsense attitude of Townshend and the coerced and manufactured gaucheness of Lennon were nowhere mentioned.  But they are both much closer to the world that I encountered as a (very) young man.

One does well to remember that, at heart, the 60s generation as a whole was probably no more interested in left-wing political activism than any other.  Rather, it was caught up in an historical moment in the West so coloured by cultural, religious and political exhaustion, and - something entirely new - so drenched with the images of an inexcusable, far-away war, that millenarianism and rebelliousness were a simple, mechanical response.

Many aspects of it were ineffably silly and lightweight.  But a few managed to turn escapism from the grey reality of our parent’s world into an adventure of self-discovery.  These were a pure intoxication of the spirit, the like of which I have not seen since.

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Two arguments about the maths gap, spotted by John Ray - the first from World Science:-

It’s been a long, sometimes vicious controversy: are boys better at math than girls? Some say they are, because boys tend to outscore girls in math. Opponents blame that on sexist upbringing. 

New studies may be shedding light on the issue. In a nutshell, some of the latest research points to three conclusions that offer something to satisfy both sides but overall paint a bright picture for those eager to see more women enter mathematics and sciences. The key findings: Girls are as good at math as boys given the proper environment.

Males may have an edge in spatial thinking abilities, which are useful in math, evolutionarily speaking, and this advantage may be very ancient.

Deep-rooted though this difference may be, females can surmount it with just a little work.  “The so-called gender gap in math skills seems to be at least partially correlated to environmental factors,” said Paola Sapienza of The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois. “The gap doesn’t exist in countries in which men and women have access to similar resources and opportunities,” added Sapienza, summarizing the results of a new study published in the May 30 issue of the research journal Science.

In it, Sapienza and colleagues analyzed data from more than 276,000 children in 40 countries who took an internationally standardized test of math, reading, science and problem-solving. The data came from the 2003 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment.

The researchers found that globally, boys outperformed girls in math by 10.5 points on average on this test. But this advantage vanished in some of the most progressive and gender-equal countries such as Iceland, Sweden and Norway.

Now that the apparent good news is out, does this mean anyone who dared suggest the existence of natural gender differences in math was being sexist?

Not necessarily, if one believes other studies suggesting sexism isn’t the only reason for the math gap. Some research has attributed that gap to a deeper discrepancy in spatial reasoning abilities. One new study even suggests an evolutionary reason: better spatial reasoning in males might be related to larger range size in their ancestral environment.

This discrepancy may extend all the way down the evolutionary tree to invertebrates, according to the research, which focused on cuttlefish and appears in the May 27 online issue of the research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“Evidence of sex differences in spatial cognition have been reported in a wide range of vertebrate species,” but never the simpler invetebrates, the authors wrote. The investigators found that male cuttlefish both range over a larger area, and have better orienting abilities than female cuttlefish. “The data conform to the predictions of the range size hypothesis,” they wrote.

Nevertheless, differences in spatial cognition are easily surmountable, if one believes yet a third study, which might help explain why ultimately girls and boys can perform equally in math. Published in last October’s issue of the journal Psychological Science, this study found that malefemale differences in some tasks requiring spatial skills are largely eliminated after both groups play a video game for 10 hours.

“On average, women are not quite as good at rapidly switching attention among different objects and this may be one reason why women do not do as well on spatial tasks,” said the lead author, University of Toronto psychology doctoral student Jing Feng. But “both men and women can improve their spatial skills by playing a video game,” he added, and “the women catch up to the men. Moreover, the improved performance of both sexes was maintained when we assessed them again after five months.”  The game used was a first-person shootemup game, “Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault.”

The game “may cause the expression of previously inactive genes which control the development of neural [brain] connections that are necessary for spatial attention,” said Ian Spence, director of the university’s engineering psychology laboratory. “Clearly, something dramatic is happening in the brain” thanks to the playing.

“One important application of this research could be in helping to attract more women to the mathematical sciences and engineering,” he added. “Since spatial skills play an important role in these professions, bringing the spatial skills of young women up to the level of their male counterparts could help to change the gender balance in these fields that are so important to our economic health.”

And now for the demolition:-

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Three days ago the Guardian ran some knocking copy on the Telegraph’s failure to take down London Assembly member Richard Barnbrook’s blog, which is tucked away in a distant corner of the paper’s website:-

Richard Barnbrook, the British National party’s London Assembly member, has used a blog on the Daily Telegraph’s website to blame immigrants and their sons for knife and gun crime among young people in the capital after a spate of murders.

Under the headline “Blame the immigrants”, the posting on My Telegraph, a platform which allows readers to publish their own articles, Barnbrook claims the perpetrators are protected by a government eager to secure the “Ethnic Block-Vote” and says immigrants “will not be allowed to terrorise our kids any longer”.

“I have had enough of political correctness,” he writes. “I have had enough of people being afraid to actually say what they really want to say. Yes ... it is the immigrants.” He continues: “The real crime is on the streets, and it is the young people who are being attacked every day now by knives and guns. Most of it is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote.”

The Telegraph defended itself by attacking the Guardian mods itchy trigger fingers.  The battle raged back and forth, effectively making it impossible for the Telegraph to take down Mr Barnbrook’s blog unless he goes completely mad.

So, what’s the quality of the material he’s posting?  Well, as yet there are only three offerings on the page.  The first, Tombstone Politics (these MyTelegraph links are very slow to load - please be patient), is a tad self-referential going on reverential.  But if refreshingly sincere is what you want, that’s what you get with this guy:-

Only the dead make the news but there are hundred who are stabbed but only just live.  Their lives are wrecked though in many cases.  This is liberalism…...these are the great values of the left…......they smoke drugs and your children get slaughtered in the streets.  It makes me sick.  It drags me down into tombstone politics when I would rather be building a better society.  It has become so normalised that people think they have to accept it.  Well I am going to change it….I am going to clean up the streets, because our society has had enough of their dirty values, their dirty ideas, and their dirty politics.

I will bring this up in the London Assembly but I doubt those Members will care.  They can’t even bring themselves to call me Richard.  Everyone is on 1st name terms except me.  For me it is Mr Barnbrook like they are talking to their Bank Manger or the man in charge….and thats just it….I am the man in charge….because I get out into the street and meet real people.  I know how awful their lives are.  I know they worry that their kids might get hacked to death for a mobile phone…..I know who people are

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GT sent me a link to the following Yahoo “Green” article today.  It reports the lengths to which people are going now, today, to prepare for the possible effects of a post-peak collapse.

If you are living in a connurbation, and not necessarily a large one ... if you are raising children ... if you have skills likely to enhance the prospects for success at the localist level, this is something you should be taking seriously.  Notwithstanding the fact that this time the ramp in energy prices is speculator-driven.
GW

ENERGY FEARS LOOMING, NEW SURVIVALISTS PREPARE

BUSKIRK, N.Y. - A few years ago, Kathleen Breault was just another suburban grandma, driving countless hours every week, stopping for lunch at McDonald’s, buying clothes at the mall, watching TV in the evenings.

That was before Breault heard an author talk about the bleak future of the world’s oil supply. Now, she’s preparing for the world as we know it to disappear.

Breault cut her driving time in half. She switched to a diet of locally grown foods near her upstate New York home and lost 70 pounds. She sliced up her credit cards, banished her television and swore off plane travel. She began relying on a wood-burning stove.

“I was panic-stricken,” the 50-year-old recalled, her voice shaking. “Devastated. Depressed. Afraid. Vulnerable. Weak. Alone. Just terrible.”

Convinced the planet’s oil supply is dwindling and the world’s economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn’t prepare.

The exact number of people taking such steps is impossible to determine, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the movement has been gaining momentum in the last few years.

These energy survivalists are not leading some sort of green revolution meant to save the planet. Many of them believe it is too late for that, seeing signs in soaring fuel and food prices and a faltering U.S. economy, and are largely focused on saving themselves.

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If you read the current version of the Wikipedia article on “The Great Divergence”:

The Great Divergence is the period beginning in the 18th century in which the “West” (namely England, followed closely by the rest of Western Europe) clearly emerged as the most powerful region of the world. In the early 1700’s, many believe, Western Europe and East Asia were roughly similar materially, but coming up against Malthusian constraints (population exceeding food supply) to further growth. Due to the many technological advancements that took place in Europe (including the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen), The subsequent mechanization of many European industries, the wealth and power of the world shifted from Asia to Europe (specifically England). Many explanations have been offered for the Great Divergence. For example, Kenneth Pomeranz, in The Great Divergence (2000, Princeton University Press), emphasizes the proximity of coal deposits and the easily exploitable Americas. Other observers believe intrinsic features of European culture made it destined to surpass other regions, while Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, sees geography, with Europe’s geographical layout promoting competition which led to greater technological advancement, as being the ultimate factor. In contrast, according to Diamond, China’s layout allowed it to become precociously united which removed a major incentive for technological advancement, and allowing China to become subject to a single emperor’s arbitrary whim. In A Farewell to Alms Gregory Clark argues that it was cultural and genetic factors that allowed England to grow wealthy while others fell behind.

Seemingly every cause is listed…. every cause but the one implied by this recent sob story about how a poor unfortunate farmer has lost access to illegal aliens and as a result is turning to machines:

“We always assumed we could find the labor we would need,” said Mr. Bittner, who has managed Singer Farms since 1991. “We’re not making that assumption anymore.”

Mr. Bittner said he was planning to grow blueberries, or tart cherries for use in pies, because those crops could be harvested by machine and did not require migrant workers.

Others managing the fields and dairies of western New York State are starting to make the same calculation. For the last several years, crackdowns on illegal immigrants and the lack of comprehensive immigration reform have increased anxiety among the region’s farmers, many of whom rely on a migrant labor force from Latin America to work their fields. Some have begun making changes in their operations to reduce their reliance on that labor force…

Other farms are making large capital investments in mechanical systems that will allow them to cut their work force significantly. Fewer farmers are willing to buy neighboring properties, a traditional method of expansion for agricultural businesses.

It seems an obvious factor in the Great Divergence was the emigration of labor to the New World.  The unfortunate fate of the Confederate South, importing vast numbers of Africans so as to reduce the incentive to industrialize, is widely recognized as contributing to its inability to win its war with the Union North.

Moreover, the New York Times seems to be telling us that the centralization of land ownership may be slowed down by the emigration of labor.  This, too, would be unsurprising since when labor is more valued, laborers frequently become land owners and thereby become more participants than components of individualistic capitalism.  When a laborer comes to into his own, he is often motivated to apply his “ground truth” knowledge, combined with his new capital, to systems optimizing his labor.  The result:  Yeoman farmer becomes Yeoman inventor.