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Showing posts from August, 2011

Use a land tax, and not a water cannon, to quell the riots

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The riots and its causes are of course complex, but underneath the many social and individual issues lies a simple, yet subtle, economic truth. Because our economic system has no capacity to value our marginalised youth in the same fashion it has no method of valuing  nature and our natural assets except in a way that exploits them for private advantage of the privileged few. In my view the problem is natural assets, namely access to land, natural resources and intellectual assets that are the essential bedrock of income creation and economic success for any young man or woman. We live in a society that has created an economic and legal system that allows a very few (mostly old people), both in this country and abroad, to own all the natural assets that people need. This system has subtly evolved over many years and been adopted across the world as it benefits those with the greatest power to effect legal and economic change, while at the same time being complex enough to obf...

A word from a very wise old farmer on Bovine TB

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What a wonderful chap - so much wisdom that ties in with the best scientific knowledge on the matter (deliberately forgotten or suppressed by our industrial farming lobby and DEFRA)

The Great Badger Swindle - Why industrial farming wants to blame the badger for Bovine TB

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The badger debate has been around for a very long time, over 40 years, but behind the simplistic headlines that badger lovers and farmers are at loggerheads is a much more complex and subtle story, a story full of intrigue and vested interests competing for economic advantage. A whole generation of farmers and ‘country people’ have grown up being told badgers are the main problem, but have forgotten the basic epidemiological science of bovine tuberculosis (bTB). The farming lobby have found it much easier to blame badgers than address the fundamental problems of cattle farming and the poor practices that have led to the epidemic of bTB in the British cattle herd.” A History of Cattle TB. bTB was a dangerous disease and could infect people, mostly  through drinking milk. The introduction of pasteurisation effectively stopped the disease being transferred to humans. Over this time strict controls on cattle movements and herd quarantine ensured a reduction in bTB across the ...