I have a vision of a common humanity, and certainly we live in a strange and dark time for such a vision. A global elite of fewer and fewer people with capital and power concentrated ever more intensely into their hands has declared open shooting in what is emerging as a global civil war. In this war, I stand firmly on the side of the 99%.

When faced with such stark establishment, when we are all marginilised, it's easy to slide into a general distrust of everything established. This is corrosive. In particular, it worries me that because we (a) live in a technological society but (b) most people are excluded (through lack of education or interest) from a real understanding of what underpins our lives, then anti-political-establishment (good) and anti-economic-establishment (good) is fusing with anti-scientific-establishment (bad). Why bad? Because science is the highest pinnacle of human knowledge ever achieved. Unlike previous thought, it relies on being able to change your mind in light of new evidence, rather than fashion, authority, or (purely) intuition. Come the revolution, I would hope for a humanity that reached for the stars. But that could only happen for a humanity that understood what stars were, and how to get there. And that requires relying on evidence, mathematics, physics and biology. These, too, are our weapons against those who would manipulate us, rule us, blind us.

We have an intellectual responsibility to be proportional. If there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, we have a duty to check that evidence first, and mainly, and offer the critics as much time as they deserve. Since this amounts to #1.9% of the community, devoting an hour to global warming means the sceptics deserve about 68.4 seconds. Vaccines have been established by mass double blind trials and ongoing live data. Studies displaying autism and vaccines as correlata amount to 0.00003% of the total, and both were later withdrawn. I think you can guess what I intend as a proportionate response.

The third biggest killer in the West is medical mismanagement - shocking, tragic, and one must be vigilant and suspicious. But medical progress means we live longer and better than ever before. Baby, bathwater, goodnight.

For the last 34 years or so, we've seen the capitalist establishment transform from a cold-war, Keynesian apparatus with some degree of social welfare into a hypermonetarist, ultra-militarised servant of the superrich, with a pronounced hostility to anything that stands in its way. For years, rich people have been annoyed by a model of society whereby people can access services paid for by their taxes. 'We could be selling them these services', was the thought. Still, the fact states had centralised into rich honey pots was also a sexy prospect - the superrich are not interested in saving the tax payer money either. In the UK, a cursory glance at the history of PPP and PFI demonstrates this amply. Via the mass media, inculcating a dogma of selfishness into the popular consciousness has the benefit of being an apparently universal ideology that, indexed to the reality of extreme inequality, tends to only actually benefit the organised ruling class, whilst tending to fracture all other people meaning no recognition of common interest for the majority thus infected. Whatever your creed, the ruling classes of today have forced class warfare upon you. The superrich have declared all relations of kindness and compassion are now enemies of the state - whether secular welfare or even religion. (Note that, in the US, it is the most dogmatic and virulent conservative Christians who give the most to the poor via charity, but it is also the same group that tends to support the policies that ensure there are poor people). The superrich have declared war on all of us. It's now up to us to respond.