Black Hole?

The ingenuity of humankind knows few boundaries, and the very fact that we can observe the effectively unobservable, whether at subatomic or galactic scales, is testimony to that. We can both delineate and explore the invisible and the indivisible, and the emerging news of our finally imaging the black hole at the centre of our home galaxy further reinforces the view that there's not a lot we can't achieve with skill, knowledge and tenacity.

It's particularly galling, then, that we seem utterly unable to fix the eminently fixable and relatively [procedurally-] trivial problems of our economy, climate and health and social care. These things might be huge issues, particularly climate-change, but the mechanics are eminently do-able and don't require any innovation in the true sense of the word. In short, it's mostly down to money management, which is a pretty well-trodden path, and simply requires those who control money and its directions of travel to ensure that it ends up in the right places at the right time.

At the moment, to paraphrase Chomsky, we are in thrall to the market, as if in the service of an abstracted deity. It's time that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand was hacked off and some measure of human intervention - skill, knowledge and tenacity - applied, not just to physics and astronomy, but to the pressing human conditions on our global doorstep.

Neoliberalism is destroying the world and most of its population: what on Earth do the Über-Capitalists think will be left to exploit or consume when the rest of the place is scorched earth and its people have been expunged? It's time they were forced to wake up to the simple facts of life, and that can only be done through common will, legislation and enforcement. The market gods won't be denied otherwise.