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There is an article in the Guardian called Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here's why.

The premise seems to be that government running a budget surplus leads to contraction in the private sector i.e. recession. Therefore, austerity will continue to make things worse for us.

The reasoning is very simple, perhaps simplistic.

You may be objecting at this point: but why does anybody have to be in debt? Why can’t everybody just balance their budgets? Governments, households, corporations … Everyone lives within their means and nobody ends up owing anything. Why can’t we just do that? Well there’s an answer to that too: then there wouldn’t be any money. This is another thing everybody knows but no one really wants to talk about. Money is debt.

I understand that people may borrow money to invest in e.g. a business where they might need to buy machinery and to pay staff before the profits start to roll in, and that hopefully the profits will be large enough to pay back the load and to make a living, but that's where my small brain gives up.

What is the rest of the story?

Also, note the graph of house prices.

Update: here come the sub-prime mortgages again. Only this time we, the public, have to bail out the banks when it all goes horribly wrong. Remember how they changed the law after the last crisis, so that the same terrible fate would not befall the banks again.

I've been singing on the street for tips. I don't make a whole lot, I'm doing pretty good if I can pay for a Starbucks at the end of the day. Sometimes I can buy a bag of rice and a couple cans of beans to cook on my campstove.

Today wasn't looking so good. I wasn't into it mentally and was not making any tips but even so I persisted as I knew that, at the low rate I generally get tipped that random fluctuations are significant.

Then just now, behind Powells City of Books at 11th and Couch in Portland's Pearl District, some joker heckled me the ENTIRE time I was singing - all the way through all eight of my songs.

What he didn't realize is that I am from Kuro5hin.

Right then I earned nine bucks in tips; all day before that I only made $1.35. As we parted I waved my cash in his face then said "Learn to sing Sir, and we could be a duet".

The UK's descent into fascism accelerated today when Home Secretary Theresa May introduced a McCarthyist witch-hunt against "extremists" of all kinds in the public sector.

In other news, David Cameron has positioned the UK as China's best friend in the West ahead of all other countries. He had to promise never to speak to the Dalai Lama ever again though, to be best friends with China

Amnesty International and other groups concerned with human rights issues in China are expected to protest in St James' Park on Tuesday and it is expected that there will also be a pro-China protest.

The Guardian and Channel 4 News each report about a young British mother who went to the "Islamic State" to join her jihadi husband (a former Guantánamo Bay detainee) but changed her mind, describing life there as, "not my cup of tea."

The gangster mentality that she encountered amongst other women and the squalid living conditions that the jihadi wives and children had to endure were not to her liking, so she and the children fled where they were held in Syria near the Turkish border by a gang of smugglers who needed strong convincing that she wasn't an ISIS supporter.

She claims she went there to try to talk some sense into her husband, to plead with him to come home. She wants to come back to the UK, but what fate awaits her?

Last year Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police and policing lead for the government's Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, warned that Britons returning from Syria would be stopped at the border and face arrest.

How could anyone be so naive, at the age of 33 and having had five children? And living in the UK where we still just about have free speech and the freedom of the press? How could you possibly not know what it would be really like? How could you voluntarily take five innocent, defenceless children willingly and knowingly into a war zone?

Female ex-Muslim anti-Islamist campaigner Maryam Namazie writes in the Guardian "Why I speak out against Islamism."

The article is superbly written and makes very clear points regarding the importance of the ability to criticise religion (of any kind) to facilitate social progress.

The complex situation regarding Islamism, Islam, Muslims, Muslim culture and "the Muslim Community" is outlined making clear distinctions between each, and in particular the range of opinions (and beliefs) within them. This contrasts with the (bigoted) simplistic views (pro- and anti-) presented in the Western media and which frequently leads to Islamophobic attacks against peaceful and innocent people.

What is particularly refreshing to see written in main-stream Western media is the following:

The labelling of much-needed criticism of Islamism as antisocial, even dangerous by left apologists sees dissent through the eyes of Islamists and not the many who refuse and resist. How else are we to show real solidarity with those who struggle against the theocracies we have fled from – if not through criticism? The fight against Islamism and the need for international solidarity apparently does not enter into their calculation.

In short: things will not improve unless we are free to talk.

The BBC has a story about children being abused, having been accused of witchcraft, in the UK in 2015.

It would appear that there are significant numbers of people who really believe in witches, witchcraft, black magic and evil spirits here in 2015.

An NSPCC spokesman said: "While the number of child abuse cases involving witchcraft is relatively small, they often include horrifying levels of cruelty.

Small children have been thrown out of their homes by ignorant, hysterical parents, and in some cases murdered.

Of course, money is involved.

...within churches there was often a financial motivation behind accusations.

"The pastor says there's a witch in this church today; looks around and points to a child.

"That means public humiliation for the family. The next step is exorcism which is not done for free. It's a money-making scam."

The Witchcraft Act 1735 appears to have been written by learned people who took the opinion that Witchcraft was an impossible crime and so it outlawed the pretence of witchcraft. The law was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. Finally, this was replaced in 2008 by Consumer Protection Regulations.

So there you have it.

Lately I've been working on some goofy projects like WZBlue, my gtk+ lobby monitor for Warzone 2100. But there's other projects I'm having trouble getting any momentum going again. Two good examples are my packrat package manager, which has stalled, and NEXUS, which I want to add ignore support to, but haven't had the drive to actually complete that work. I simply seem to not give a flying fuck.

I don't seem to care much about my normal projects anymore. I enjoy working with GTK, my latest pet, but I'm in the process of learning C++, which knocks the steam out of any C-based GTK+ projects I might envision. I already know C very well, so I'm expanding to be able to read and write C++ as well.

I'm always tired from the still-untreated chronic exhaustion, and coupled with this severe lack of motivation, I find myself watching south park all day and sleeping constantly. I haven't done much coding beyond my little WZBlue project in the last two months.

A couple months back, I wrote a crude AI in Javascript for "High Oil" Warzone 2100, called RatBot, but it's not done and has some strange and rather severe bugs I need to work out. For one, it performs far better in non-networked skirmish than multiplayer, which really, are the same thing, except skirmish has no networking. I've ran into such severe bugs, I kinda stopped working on it altogether for a while. I think of all the projects on the table, that's the one most likely to get me working again.

I'm not a depressed person, I've never been diagnosed with depression, and it usually takes a decent sized reason for me to get all depressed. They've tested my thyroid, it came back normal. No anemia, or sleep apnea.

What am I going to do...

Right-thinking Tory Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Freudian-Slip has announced today that the decent, honest, noble, compassionate Conservative Party would like to encourage the poor to work as hard as the Chinese and Americans.

How they'll achieve this is novel and exciting.

A previous Labour government introduced a system of Tax Credits for people in work with families (i.e. children to feed) but on low incomes which, without the tax credits, would mean that they were in poverty. So, the idea is it pays to work hard.

Note that we are talking about tax credits - a rebate of some of your Income Tax (a tax discount) - not a hand-out for "scroungers."

This is the good part. Those intellectual giants of the Conservative Party reason that, if they abolish Tax Credits (which are only paid to those on a gross annual income of under £16,500 or $25,000) those people will be so motivated and empowered that they will move into better-paid jobs!

“There’s a pretty difficult question that we have to answer, which is essentially: are we going to be a country which is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard? And that is about creating a culture where work is at the heart of our success.”

Hunt also suggested in the interview that those reliant on tax credits and benefits lacked self-respect. “Dignity is not just about how much money you have got ... officially children are growing up in poverty if there is an income in that family of less than £16,500. What the Conservatives say is how that £16,500 is earned matters.

Meanwhile, in this brave, new, flexible and empowered labour market of short-term and zero-hours contracts, hard-working Britons are so scared of being off sick at places like Sports Direct that they're being taken away by emergency ambulance.

Work harder for your crumbs, plebs.

Disclaimer: I've never voted Labour (or Tory) in my life. But I do always vote.

The inexorable rise of property prices in the UK, especially London, due to a lack of supply of new builds, buy-to-let investments, the selling off of social housing and large numbers of new builds being bought by foreign speculators is finally causing the torches and pitchforks to come out.

In places like London, it's becoming nearly impossible for a "normal" person on an average income to live since renting even the smallest of properties (e.g. a studio flat or a room in a house share) is out of reach, Forget being a teacher, nurse, police officer or fire fighter and living there. It's just not going to happen. Social housing has mostly gone, so the poor renting privately are finding their monthly rents doubling over night and having to leave.

The good Christian Irritable Duncan Syndrome brought in cuts to housing benefit just to remind the poor, sick and disabled that they're a filthy burden on the rest of us. And they can jolly well cut back on food and heating to pay their rent.

So some "motivated" protesters have got out the torches and pitchforks and completely got it wrong.

You couldn't make it up.

What a miserable society it is that can't look after its poor, sick and disabled. Let the bleeding hearts amongst the Little People look out for them, we'll just take our money away and laugh.

Mind you, the other side have got a new leader and they're thinking about changing things.

The BBC has an article about ex-Muslim Britons who are being persecuted for becoming atheists.

The persecution often comes from close family and friends.

Ayisha (not her real name) from Lancashire was just 14 when she began to question Islam after reading the Koran. She started rebelling over wearing the hijab, but eventually decided she wasn't a Muslim and the situation at home rapidly got worse.

"My dad threatened to kill me by getting a knife and holding it against my neck and saying: 'We might as well do it if you're going to bring this much shame to the family.'"

He used to beat her so badly that eventually she called the police and he was convicted of child cruelty. Ayisha hadn't anticipated the shock of being immediately cut off from her mother and siblings.

Many of the victims are young, vulnerable and powerless. The local authorities where the victims live are often wary of offending Muslim culture and belief which may have hindered efforts to help people in this situation.