Politics
Globalisation and Immigration continue to fracture the landscape of British politics, and much of that in continental Europe as well.
Britain successfully integrated many waves of immigrants in the past because of the strength of its institutions and culture and because no immigrant group ever represented more than one or two percent of the entire population. Few people now even notice the 25,000 Axis POWs who chose to remain in the UK after WW2. However, as the proportions have increased, particularly of groups with cultures very different to the British model, the resistance to integration has risen exponentially on both sides. Thus, we come to the Unmentionable Elephant in the Room of which few dare to speak: -
Half the British voted for Brexit partly because of the issue of Non-EU Immigration. They didn’t want any more immigrants with conflicting cultures from Africa or Asia much more than they wanted to reduce the flow of eastern Europeans from the EU which merely depresses wages a little.
So now we have a weirdly distorted political landscape in which the centre has faded from view and opinions have polarised along strange axes.
The hard left continues its takeover of the Labour Party, having somehow sidestepped the antipathy to authoritarian and misogynistic Islamic culture that you might expect of the left, it has adopted an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic stance to attract the 6.3% Islamic share of the UK electorate. Plus of course the loony lefties also despise the Jews for their generally high levels of material success and intelligence.
The hard right meanwhile continues its takeover of the Conservative Party largely because of the unmentionable Elephant in the Room and the disastrous failure of multiculturalism.
So, politics as usual, with all sides obfuscating their real motives and wilfully confusing culturalism with racism.
Globalisation will inevitably encourage further huge waves of Africans and Asians seeking to emigrate to Europe. Brexit will only stop those using continental Europe as a stepping stone to get to Britain.
Only by withdrawing from the UN Convention of Human Rights as well can Britain regain control of its borders.
Alternatively, we could simply do what Australia and the Visegrád nations do, build good defences and let well briefed border guards sort the issue without resort to legal technicalities.
Magic
After a leisurely summer spent debating the finer points of magical philosophy and belief, a new practical course now begins on Arcanorium College: - One Wand, Three Enchantments.
Participants will attempt to create functioning versions of all four.
Physics
Gödel derived an exact solution to the field equations of general relativity for rotating matter: -
“Matter everywhere rotates relative to the compass of inertia with an angular velocity equal to twice the square root of pi times the gravitational constant times the density.”
My calculations show that an application of this formula to black holes or gravitationally closed hyperspheres of any size leads to velocities at the surfaces of these bodies which exceed lightspeed. This may not matter so much for hyperspheres with surface escape velocities theoretically in excess of lightspeed, but it may add an additional and much greater long-term instability to black holes than Hawking radiation. This matters very much to me as I don't want pesky black holes eventually gobbling up all the matter in a universe otherwise hyperspherically finite and unbounded in both space and time.