'what causes horse-hair to become living things?' (unfeeling oligarchs and their toad-eaters)

sadly today was not leadership wednesday (as previously advertised) where we learn to be leaders (horsemouth will have no problem applying these lessons due to his formidable personal charisma) but group and team wednesday (forming storming underperforming flatlining mourning). pity. horsemouth was looking forward to hearing about foxes and lions and machiavelli and pareto.

william cobbett (rural rides) describes MPs as either ravens or jackdaws, one cackles and one caws, but there's no real difference he says, they are only in opposition to each other to the extent that they sit opposite  each other.

cobbett also (anticipating ivan illich by a century and some decades) takes against the fashion for education as a cure for the ills of the poor (though he does so on the basis of the differing talents of different breeds of dogs, arguing that their differing abilitities cannot be put down to education.   he takes  against 'the monster malthus' who has furnished the unfeeling oligarchs and their toad-eaters with the pretence, that man has a natural propensity to breed faster than food can be raised for the increase...'  there is talk of  surplus population, cobbett's response is to go and verify if this is the case on the ground.  he finds it not so.

horsemouth's father often speaks of both malthus and cobbett approvingly - horsemouth wonders if he has noticed that they are in disagreement. 

a modest proposal on child poverty/ the shortest way with poor children

and today statistics (http://www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/why-end-child-poverty/poverty-in-your-area) - horsemouth's father's pet hate 'there are lies, damned lies and statistics' -   have been published on child poverty.

these give the breakdown of child poverty (after housing costs have been paid) to parliamentary seat and local authority borough. huzzah boroughs in  the seaside towns (bow, poplar, bethnal green etc.) have come top in all the land again with 49% of children living in poverty (horsemouth's former borough hackney make quite a credible showing too). but the point is this is just gives the concentration of poverty rather than the actuallevel of poverty (something quite difficult to assess given the different costs different families face).

however shocking these figures are  it important to realise that a solution is at hand - as the poor are rinsed out from the seaside towns and distributed all over the country (as far away as manchester if one of the offers made to an E15 mum had been accepted) one would expect these percentages to go down and the regional percentages not to rise by so much (just due to the effects of dilution). child poverty is experienced by individual families and individual children and lifting people out of poverty is a difficult business (when one does not want to pay living wages, charge social rents or fund affordable childcare), and yet for these figures to improve not one child will have to be lifted out of poverty - they will merely have had to have been driven out to elsewhere. how can the rich and prosperous city live cheek-by-jowl with such grinding poverty ? ask the bleeding hearts.only due to underdevelopment  reply the rich.