Useless, jobless men – the social blight of our age

(article from London Times)
The benefits system has produced an emasculated generation who can find neither work nor a wife
by Camilla Cavendish

Of all the government adverts that have swamped our radio stations these past few years (must be a quick saving there for the Treasury), one of the most irritating was the jolly woman asking us in a sing-song voice if we had remembered to report changes in our circumstances. Like hell. Every time I heard the ad it conjured up a vision of a lonely official waiting in vain at her desk for people to come in and sign away entitlements to which they feel, well, entitled.
This pathetic advert seemed to me to epitomise the politicians’ total loss of control over the monster that is our benefits system. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) presides over a system so complex that it has to issue 8,690 pages of guidance to help its staff to apply its 51 different benefits — the product of the ever more precise targeting of benefits to particular groups.
In the years of plenty, it was easier to placate and complicate than to simplify. Every new benefit and its separate computer system was just bolted on to the mainframe. But the result is that Britain has more than twice the number of sick people as France. The potential for playing the system, defrauding the system and falling foul of the system is enormous.
So in declaring war yesterday on both poverty and the benefits system, Iain Duncan Smith had it right. If the Government is going to make real inroads into the deficit it will have to tackle the nearly £200 billion welfare budget, which is a third of government spending. This week’s £6 billion of cuts was only Round 1: £6 billion is only 1 per cent of government expenditure, so this was a warm-up. Round 2 will need to take on the DWP leviathan.
But the argument for welfare reform is not just one of affordability. In too many cases, welfare has entrenched poverty. Mr Duncan Smith is one of the few politicians who really understand the poverty trap. Gordon Brown made life more bearable for many people on benefits, but he also made it harder to escape from them. Get a job tomorrow earning between £10,000 and £30,000 a year and you’ll take home only 30p out of every extra pound you earn after the first £10,000. Twenty pence will go in income tax, 11p in national insurance, and 39p in lost tax credits. Add in the loss of other allowances (housing benefit, council tax benefit) and you may find it simply doesn’t pay to work harder. Our poverty trap is deeper than that of most other European countries. That is a strange legacy for a government that wanted to make work pay.
The fear of losing benefits — of not being able to scramble back on to the lifeboat if you fall off — is a huge disincentive to change your circumstances, let alone report them. One in seven working-age households is dependent on benefits for more than half its income. More than half of all lone parents depend on the State for at least half their income. William Beveridge would be horrified to discover that the safety net he designed has become a trap, creating generations of worklessness and dwindling self-esteem. It is also creating a glut of unemployed, unwanted, unmarriageable men.
These men were overlooked during a decade of prosperity that did nothing to change their lives. At the beginning of that decade, 5.4 million working-age adults were claiming out-of-work benefits. The same number were still claiming just before the recession struck. Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006. These people stayed put in the Welsh valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.
The problem affects the whole of society because of the striking correlation between male joblessness and single motherhood, particularly in the old industrial cities. In Liverpool, male unemployment rose from 12 per cent in 1971 to 30 per cent in 2001. In 1971 11 per cent of families were headed by a single parent; by 2001, 45 per cent were. Similar patterns can be seen in Birmingham, Strathclyde and Newcastle. The epidemic of male joblessness after the collapse of manufacturing industries coincided with an increase in female employment and welfare support to mothers who found that they could manage alone.
Overlooked by society, irrelevant to employers, unwanted by women who can raise families on benefits without their help, the man who has no work or a series of short-term jobs is a problem. Without steady work, he will struggle to acquire a family: unemployed men are less likely to marry or cohabit than employed ones. Without a stable relationship, he is less likely to grow into a good family man and raise good sons. The taxpayer has become the father: one in four mothers is single and more than half live on welfare. A lot of these women describe the real fathers of their children as “useless” or worse. The men have no role.
In the worst cases, the State has helped to create a class of jobless serial boyfriends who prey on single mothers on benefits. When two of these men moved into the flat that Haringey Council had generously provided for Tracey Connelly, Baby P’s mother, the little boy’s fate was sealed. They killed him. Other such men appear in bit parts in tragedies such as that of Shannon Matthews, abducted and drugged by her own “family”. The welfare system has helped to deprive these children of the most effective check on abuse — the family.
Robert Rowthorn, Professor of Economics at Cambridge, has shown that female and male worklessness have been going in opposite directions for 30 years, well before this latest “mancession”. His research suggests that half the rise in lone parenthood in the past 30 years may be due to male unemployment. He believes that governments must start to focus on these men, and question the feminisation of education and the workplace. It is no solution, he says, to say that women don’t need men or that men should become more female. Nor is it any good waiting for economic growth to dig them out of poverty. Those men need a chance, not a benefits system that undermines them.

High Taxes Forced Michael Caine to Leave UK

'I left the country for eight years when tax was put up to 82 per cent. You didn't get the 82 per cent tax from me for eight years. You didn't get any tax at all from me for the next eight years,' he told the BBC.
'Apart from that, a quarter of a billion dollars of movies were made outside this country instead of inside it which is just from one stupid, loud-mouth moronic actor. Imagine what is happening to companies, proper companies, who then disappear. It's no good.'
The Oscar winner, 77, added he once told Tony Blair 'you can't tax people who have enough money for air fare' because they would just leave.
However, he admitted he would not quit Britain for a second time because he would not want to be separated from his three grandchildren.
Sir Michael, who is worth an estimated £45million, spent eight years living in the U.S. in the 70s after income tax hit 82 per cent but returned when Margaret Thatcher came to power and cut the rate again. 
He is a vocal critic of high taxes and vociferously attacked Labour last year after the top rate was hiked to 50 per cent, threatening to go back to America if they rose any higher.
At the time, he said: 'You know how much they made out of that high taxation all those years ago? Nothing. But they sent a mass of incredible brains to America.
'We've got 3.5million layabouts laying about on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them. Let's get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it on.
'You're saying to poor people "let's tax those rich gits" and I understand that. You slice up the cake, give everyone a chance, but don't destroy the people that are making the bloody cake.'

Trapping Monkeys

We have heard how to trap a monkey. Put a treat inside a coconut shell and cut a hole just large enough for the monkey’s hand but too small for his fist holding he treat. The monkey will be caught because he will not let go of the treat. For us the treat we will not let go is excess government spending requiring constant increases in public debt. But we are smart monkeys so we know that constantly increasing the nation’s debt cannot be sustained and will soon drag us down. The thing is, we are smart enough to see the answer but lack the willpower to overcome our desire for more treats.

Another gem of movie script writing.

From the movie "3:10 to Yuma". The outlaw Ben Wade (Russel Crowe) tells this story to Dan, his captor. "Did you ever read the Bible Dan? I have. When I was 8 years old my Dad got killed over a drink of whiskey. My Mom said we were going to move back East. She took me to the train station, sat me down and handed me a Bible. She said read this until I get back. It took me 3 days to read it. She never came back."

Classroom anarchy, killers in school uniform and how a generation is being betrayed

From the Daily Mail (UK) By Max Hastings
Last updated at 2:02 AM on 29th March 2010

The murder of 15-year- old Sofyen Belamouadden is an especially shocking gang crime because it was carried out in the midst of Victoria station, by boys apparently wearing school blazers.
It is tragically easy to imagine the horrors of life in the sort of classrooms the murderers come from.

We have grown accustomed to the existence of feral children - violent, amoral, unteachable and later unemployable - in many parts of Britain.

It is easy to identify their immediate victims, fellow teenagers who are bullied and occasionally killed. But beyond these, a much larger host pays the price: millions of children who want to equip themselves to lead decent lives.
Indiscipline and violence are viruses, which infect all those around them. In classrooms up and down the land, they make it impossible for many teachers to teach and their pupils to be educated.

Many prisoners, few solutions | The Indianapolis Star

The Indianapolis Star editorial of 20Feb2010 laments The fact that Indiana has one of the highest rates of incarceration. Below is my response.

The public does not want, and does not deserve, to have thugs, thieves and murderers loose in their community. Prisons are not for the inmates benefit...they are for our, society's, benefit. If the prisons are full, build more. If there are not enough judges and prosecuters, hire more. Social programs and rehabilitation should be continued but the truth is they mostly do not work. Public safety should be our top priority.

Heaven and Hell in Europe

In a European Heaven-
• The French are the cooks,
• The EngLish are the police,
. The Germans are the mechanics,
• The ItaLians are the Lovers and
• The Swiss organize everything.

In a European Hell-
* The EngLish are the cooks,
• The Germans are the police,
• The French are the mechanics,
• The Swiss are the Lovers and
• The ItaLians organize everything!

Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

Mahatma Gandhi Quotes:
Seven social sins:
1. Politics without principles
2. Wealth without work
3. Pleasure without conscience
4. knowledge without character
5. Commerce without morality
6. Science without humanity
7. Worship without sacrifice.

War of the Worlds, 1898-2007

Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds opens with a microscope view of a drop of water. We see what appears to be DNA and as the camera pulls back we see bacteria, etc. At the end of the movie the voice-over quotes the following from the original 1898 novel...(the Martians)slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth. For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things-- taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle...By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.


I recall reading that Smallpox alone killed 100 million people between 1900 and 2000.  The Plague in Medievel times killed 1/3 of the population of Europe.


Saw this movie at the theater. Great special effects. The sound the Martian machines make is awesome. That sound was described in the original book (ca 1900). The side plot about the dysfunctional family did not add anything. I was curious to see how Spielberg would do the film. It appears he borrowed from the original book as well as the 1953 film. Gene Barry and his female co-star from he 1953 film make a cameo appearance in this film.
You can read the original book on-line at the link below.
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells: A searchable online version at The Literature Network

The limits of Socialism

I don't know who Dr. Rogers is but this makes sense:
Dr. Rogers is quoted:
"Friend, you cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the
wealthy out of freedom. And what one person receives without working
for, another person must work for without receiving. The government
can’t give to anybody anything that the government does not first take
from somebody. And when half of the people get the idea they don't
have to work because the other half are going to take care of them, and
when the other half get the idea it does no good to work because
somebody’s going to get what I work for, That, dear friend, is about the
end of any nation."

Margret Thatcher (former UK PM) said it this way: "Socialism works until you run out of other people's money."