1984

It hasn't happened the way Orwell said it would, they keep saying. Yet:

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

(htp: Mark Steyn)

Soon, I shall wake up and discover it was all a dream.

Fight

James has posted on liberty recently - an issue that underlies and will outlast all the economic turmoil of the recent and soon to come years. The prophets foretold this a century and more ago - the langorous and progressively enfolding embrace of the octopus...

Would it even be possible to hold the American revolution today? The Boston Tea Party? Imagine if George III had been able to sit in his palace across the ocean, look at the security-camera footage, press a button, and freeze the bank accounts of everyone there. Oh, well, we won’t be needing another revolt, will we? But the consequence of funding the metastasization of government through the confiscation of the fruits of the citizen’s labor is the remorseless shriveling of liberty.

Read more from the excellent and usually sharply funny Mark Steyn.

Kill the old

Not my idea; but I saw it as a graffito on the back of a bus seat on the upper deck, where the schoolchildren gravitate - more than 20 years ago.

Now the FT comments on how longevity (plus the old's passion for killing the unborn and preventing conception) is going to ruin us. We think the young are selfish, and don't dare glance at their elders, who imagine they can quit their jobs in the prime of life and live like kings on the backs of their progeny and remoter descendants - or such few of them as the old permit to survive.

As Mark Steyn puts it:

“Over the next decade,” Frau Merkel pointed out, “we will undergo a massive demographic change, and, therefore, borrowing is a greater burden for the future than in a country with a much more continuously growing population, as in the United States of America.”

Translation: America can rack up multi-trillion-dollar deficits and stick it to its kids and grandkids. But in Europe there are no kids and grandkids to stick it to—just upside- down family trees: in Germany, Spain and Italy, four grandparents have two children have one grandchild. The Financial Times noted last week that the demographic death spiral is a far greater threat to fiscal solvency than the present economic downturn. And yet, despite Germany, Japan and Russia already being in net population decline, the G20 had not a word to say about it.

That bill's going to come in, and Herod himself can't prevent it. In fact, he caused it.