There’s a song I still listen to by an artist called Fish, it’s called “Vigil” from the “Album in a Wilderness of Mirrors”.  I’m watching the news, reading the newspapers and wondering when the truth died and where they buried the body.  I have to say that this song comes more readily to mind these days.  I was having a similar conversation with a friend this morning, so I now I’m not the only one who feels this way.

I was looking at the unemployment figures earlier today, given my current situation they have special resonance now.  The figures are next to useless, people are pushed off onto incapacity benefit or into an unpaid work placement scheme to get them off the figures and in any event if you’ve been there for more then 6 months you don’t count.  The idea that the true figures are far higher than the official ones is not new and I’ve read claims of up to 26% unemployment for the UK.

I’ve been keeping an eye on UK house prices for a while as well, what’s interesting is the changes in prices.  The actual headlines are meaningless as the actual number of houses sold is so low historically and the data includes London, where the prices are buoyant.  As soon as you start investigating the individual regions outside London, a very different picture appears than the headline figures would have you see.  We must also avoid the mention of the word bubble at all costs, even though that’s exactly what the huge rise in prices over the years up to 2008 was!

Oil prices rises are blamed on speculators, greedy schemers out to ruin us all.  But not on a growing demand in the face of a constrained supply.  Not on the ever increasing cost and difficulty of extraction, the increased cost of refining.  Again, smoke and mirrors all the way.

I imagine every reader can add something of their own to this short list above.

It seems to me that increasingly nobody is addressing the truth, just their spin on it.  They construct a strawman of reality and then address it as if it were the world.  Of course, it’s not, and this failure to engage with reality is something we really can’t afford.  Since beginning Buddhist practise, I’m noticing this stuff more and more.  The Buddha reaches to us across 2500 years with a timely warning about our behaviour.  I only hope that enough people are listening.

Well, we thought we’d seen the back of this one when the previous Labour government left office.  It seems we were wrong and the temptation to start snooping and prying has now taken hold in the current coalition government as well.  I know it says 1st April on the date, but this is no April Fools joke.  I wish it were.

This proposal would enable complete and constant interception of all calls, texts, email and web traffic in the UK without a warrant or reason for suspicion.  I’ve gone into the reasons I think our privacy is important before, so it will come as no surprise that I am absolutely against these proposals

There are two petitions I know of about this for people in the UK to try and get it stopped.

The UK government e-Petition. (http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32400)

The 38 Degrees Campaign. (https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/stop-government-snooping)

Here’s hoping we can work together to get it scrapped!

This came through my Twitter feed yesterday and I couldn’t resist opening it, like a moth to a flame.  It seems that a group of British Christian MPs are going to try to overturn a ban on adverts promoting the healing power of prayer.

The football player Fabrice Muamba has begun to make a recovery after his collapse last week and these MPs have decided that as he was the recipient of many prayers and good wishes, this means that prayer works.  Oh, really?  So in their opinions, does this have nothing to do with the prompt actions of the medical staff from both team and the expensive professional medical care he received afterwards?

They then challenge the UK Advertising Standards Authority as follows:

We write to express our concern at this decision and to enquire about the basis on which it has been made. It appears to cut across two thousand years of Christian tradition and the very clear teaching in the Bible. Many of us have seen and experienced physical healing ourselves in our own families and churches and wonder why you have decided that this is not possible.

On what scientific research or empirical evidence have you based this decision?

Let me be clear, having looked at the ASA judgement itself, their position seems to be that there is no evidence in support of the claims of healing. These MPs have got the cart firmly before the horse here.  As the ones making the claims of divine healing, the responsibility is with the advertiser and themselves to provide the empirical evidence of such healing, it does not lie with the ASA.

There have been studies conducted into the healing power of prayer, some even funded by religious groups.  These studies drew a blank, no scientific evidence has yet been found to conclude that prayer has any healing power whatever.  Oddly, some patients got worse, which was put down to a form of performance anxiety on their part.  I think that in light of this, the most reasonable conclusion at this time is that the healing power of prayer has no supporting evidence and is unproven.

“A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” ~ Mahatma Ghandi

I’ve been watching the furore about the upcoming public services reforms and have been signing petitions to try to help stop the gutting of our public services.  To be honest, I can see us being steered towards a system of private health insurance, with all that this entails.  In addition to this, we’re looking at cuts to the availability of legal aid and also cuts to the assistance given to sick and disabled people.

Now, I don’t believe for a minute that the money can’t be found to preserve these things and this whole thing makes me wonder about the commentary this provides on the people running the show in this country.  Let’s be clear, these reforms will hit the poor and sick the hardest and we all know the old maxim that a society should be judged by how it treats the weak and vulnerable.  There are many variations on this theme and in my opinion, the most apt quote is the one above from Ghandi.

We must understand that the presence of these things shows our compassion for others in action, to just slash them would be a betrayal of this compassion for others and would also ignore the very real Karmic consequences of this act.  All of our actions have very real consequences, Karma is not a mystical thing and it can be readily observed in action.  The cumulative and ongoing negative effects of these shortsighted decisions will cause an enormous amount of harm to the life of our nation.  It’s not just the person who is refused treatment who suffers, it’s the family and friends, it’s the carers who have to take up the slack.  These effects ripple outward, in the same way that the closure of a large factory (e.g. the Rover plant at Longbridge) has an effect on the local community and the supply chain.

Let’s hope common sense prevails, before we all suffer.

Well, this has been an interesting year, in some senses I’m glad it’s over.  I also feel a sense of some foreboding about next year.  Maybe it’s the darkening nights, the shadows lengthen and grow…

This year saw us take another hit in the financial system, in truth the problems never went away, just glossed over with loads of printed money.  Of course, you can’t keep doing that; as a very wise man said “Ye cannae change the laws of physics!”  How very true, we are about to find this out.

We’ve seen the whole software patents story take turn after turn.  Apple vs Samsung, then Apple vs HTC.  I can’t shake the feeling that Apple might just have entered an arse kicking contest with a Centipede here, but time will tell.  But the interesting one could be Barnes and Noble vs Microsoft, this seems to be a far more interesting story as B&N take aim not at the patents but at the strategy of using them.  Clever, and also something that could be very disruptive.  We have the SOPA act still being fought in the US, this could easily wreck the Internet as we know it and the potential effect of freedom of speech and fair use is chilling.  A short video here explains things.

Finally, the Occupy movement.  This has been fascinating to watch, and eye opening.  In fact, just as bemusingly, the suicidegirls.com twitter feed turned out to have better US coverage than the mainstream media!  Outdone by a softcore porn site, hang your heads sirs, hang your heads. I except Al Jazeera and Russia Today from this, I consistently find some very good stuff on both those sites  Occupy has started to show the hypocrisy at the heart of some quarters of the Western establishment, tactics were used on American and UK citizens that were not in keeping with anyone’s idea of the response of a democracy.  Though the fact that it had to come to this speaks volumes.

For 2012?  Well, I’m not much with the old crystal ball.  But, I’ll give it a whirl.  I see us living more within our means, this won’t be such a bad thing as the alternative simply stores up more trouble.  Better to start now.  I can see the software patent system coming into disrepute very quickly, and I suspect that the tech landscape could look a bit different this time next year.  The patent war is to the death, and I wonder about how the current hegemonies will hold up.  For freedom of speech and SOPA, I recommend paying the Electronic Frontier Foundation (or EFF) a visit and doing some reading to see what can be done.  The internet is not taking this lying down however, and I think that the industry lobbyists and their pet politicians are going have more of a fight on their hands than they realise.

Occupy.. I can see more trouble on the horizon. Especially in the USA, the controversial Detainee Bill promises more grief for the occupiers.  I honestly can’t understand how Barack Obama let this one past him, I can only hope someone comes to their senses while there are still any freedoms left worth defending in America.

Well, it’s been an interesting week.  We’ve had the ongoing story of the occupy protests, which are being very well covered in alternative media.  I recommend monitoring Twitter for this sort of news, you tend to get things that the mainstream media either omit or are simply slow with.

In addition to this we’ve had the drama in Greece and Italy, it could be said that both countries have had their democratic governments undermined by EU interference and I can’t see that ending well.  President Sarkozky was challenged on this by a reporter from the BBC and didn’t give anything like a satisfactory answer.  I think that there is a definite moral hazard involved here, never mind the fact that the Euro is probably beyond saving in its current form.  It’s taken the political class till now to realise what the markets have known all along, as Mark Twain famously said “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”.

So in light of all of the above it’s easy to get very bearish in sentiment.  The easiest way to counter this sentiment is not to take it too seriously, I have a running joke with a friend that I’m “putting on my bear suit” whenever I read that sort of content.  But too much of it really does taint the mind and as a Buddhist I have to be mindful and observe my own thought processes.

This is where our mindfulness meditation comes in, I’ve found that the effect of this practise spills over into everyday life.  You become more able to observe your thought processes and to catch yourself thinking things, or taking a partial view.  Through this, I’ve come to realise that things aren’t as bad as they might seem at first glance.

Yes, we face challenges, but there are no doubt opportunities in these times.  I hold the hope that the coming threats to the banking system will see the rise of a new culture of mutuals and credit unions, something to return some of the financial power to our communities.  I see the threats to the notion of globalism as an opportunity to localise, to use our local shops and services.  So this isn’t a disaster, just another chapter in our story, and depending on your point of view it might not be that much of a disaster after all.

I may even have to pack away my bear suit!

It’s been a busy few weeks.  As I write, the Greek parliament proceeds with it’s no confidence vote in George Papandreou.  Today has been fascinating, I’ve been watching the G20 coverage on Twitter and it has been very worrying.  I can’t shake the feeling that after all this, they’re back to square one on the European debt problem.  The solution seems to have been to roll the economic tanks onto a few lawns, certainly in Athens, and I think in Rome.  Italy is looking shakier, though storm clouds are gathering over France as well.  This can’t end well, I certainly don’t expect the Euro to survive in its current form and the fight to save it has led to the democratic governments of Greece and Italy being undermined by the EU leadership (i.e. Merkozky).  So this is how democracy dies….

Holding that thought, we find the Occupy movement spreading.  It’s been an the receiving end of some stick in the media and some beatings from the police, but they’re sticking with it, I admire their grit.  It was alleged in the UK media that half the tents at OccupyLSX were unused at night.  This was given some mileage in parts of the UK media that opposes the protests, but I suspect nobody’s thought beyond that.  The tents are allegedly empty at night, which is when you’d expect people who have families to tend to be gone; and  I am wondering about the weekday situation of those tents.  In my opinion, this bit that’s being missed is that this protest involves more than just professional protesters.  It’s involving more of the “average” people, people who can’t always be there as they have jobs to go to and children to care for.  If I were in power, it’s that fact that would be giving me sleepless nights, and setting the riot police on these people isn’t going to do any good.  It’s not going to solve the underlying problems and it will eventually raise legitimacy questions about the current governments.  I’ll leave you to ponder that, as I love to throw questions out there to provoke thought.

But coming back to that thought of Democracy, well, I did tell you to hold it didn’t I?  The Occupy movement seems to be directed by a very participatory democratic process.  This does seems to be working and if it can scale up it could be a major challenge to the current systems of power.  In fact the message that such an event would have for the politicians is “We no longer need or want you, consider yourselves redundant”.  If I were a politician, I might be getting a be worried by this as well.

A final thought.  There is an old curse “May you live in interesting times”, I’m of the opinion that they really knew how to make a curse back in the day….

The Occupy protests are spreading.  This is in spite of quite a bit of silence in much of the mainstream media, who only covered them when ultimately forced to.  I should except Russia Today and Al Jazeera from the above statement, their coverage has been very good.  I’ll chat about my views on the protest movement another time, but something else has caught my attention.

The protest camp in New York made it into the IT media earlier this week.  This was in the form of an article covering their IT infrastructure, which I must give praise where it’s due, seems very nicely put together given the circumstances.  The sentence that caught me is in the above article, it’s a quote from a protester referring to the disappearance of a laptop during a police raid,  and I’ll quote it below.

“We’d love to get an Apple, because a lot of the software we’re used to is on the Mac,” one said. “Linux machines are always nice, given Linux is having the same revolutionary effect on the industry as we are on society, but even Windows machines would be a help.”

The above is quite accurate, GNU/Linux is having a revolutionary effect.  But the thought struck me a little later that this isn’t the entire story, is it?  GNU/Linux is a great system, a colleague of mine was at a presentation given by a Microsoft employee where the MS guy went through the Windows Server 2008 kernel and the Linux kernel.  After 1 hour 45 minutes, the conclusion was that they’re much of a muchness, he had to admit that the Linux kernel is every bit as good as the Microsoft offering.  Of course, with tools like openQA from the openSuSE team, the future is looking even brighter.

So the software is great, we know that, but revolutionary?  I submit that it isn’t by itself revolutionary.  You can get the code to BSD Unix, but that doesn’t really seem revolutionary in the way that is implied above, so what do I mean?  Enter stage left, the GNU General Public License, or GPL for short.

My understanding of things is this.  The BSD code can be referred to as “Open Source”, which means you get access to the source code and can play with it as you see fit to do so. However, you’re not required to give your changes back.  This means that BSD code has found it’s way into both Windows and the MacOS, but they are not required to return any improvements they made on other people’s hard work to the community.

The Linux kernel is under the GPL, which comes with a string attached.  If you modify the program and distribute it, then you have to make the modified source available so that others in the community can do the same.  For this reason, GPL’ed code is known as “Free Software“, it is not “Open Source”.  For a background to how the GPL came to be invented, I recommend “Free As In Freedom” a biography of the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M Stallman.

I’ve come to believe that the General Public license, and the associated “Four Freedoms” (see the “Free Software” link above), have been the thing that allowed the revolution to happen.  Think about it, a license that says high quality software and the improvements to said software are all available freely to everyone.  Individuals, communities and corporations alike.  We can study it, improve it, redistribute it, but not lock it away.

Now that’s revolutionary!

Well, an awful lot has happened in the last week here in the UK.  At one point it almost seemed that the country was going up in flames.  The recent riots will be the source for many theories and political manoeuvres in the coming weeks and I’d like to get a few of my own thoughts down now that the dust is starting to settle.  I don’t claim that I’m right on any of this, but these are the directions my thoughts are meandering.

The causes of this are no doubt, varied and complex.  It’s not really possible to encircle those who took part into one simple demographic and point the finger there, the people involved came more or less from all over.  So the usual tired old tactic of “blame the <insert group here>” doesn’t really help, not that it ever did.  For my part, I suspect that part of this was fuelled by a feeling of impotence and disconnection from society.  After all, the programs that reached out to a lot of these people, that bled a lot of this pressure off have been cut.  Aspirations snatched away, a route out of the places their in taken, where do they vent their frustration?  Where else is there?  The politicians don’t seem to want to listen, or seem to have any idea at all what life is like outside planet Westminster.  When David Cameron said that we have a problem with gangs in this country, the first reaction I saw from so many people was “Welcome to the real world!”

In addition, we have the ever present celebrity and corporate sales driven culture, pushing all the latest designer goods and “must have” accessories in your face.  Things that you can’t afford, to be honest that you don’t really need, but we’re going to torture you with consumerist propaganda anyway.  So, you have all these things dangled in front of your nose as often as the media can, displayed by the celebrities that we’re all pushed by the media to be obsessed with.  But you have little chance to properly scratch that itch, ever.  This extends into the middle class by the way, don’t be fooled for a minute.  Then the chance comes along to scratch it and scratch it well. Is there any surprise that there was looting?

A few years ago I wrote about the dangers of walling up and suppressing your dark side, instead of acknowledging it and coming to terms with it.  This whole thing seems to be heading into the same sort of territory.  It seems to me that society has created a disconnect in society a large swathe of people with little reason to invest in society.  They see that politicians don’t care and are ineffectual and so don’t care for them. They’re tortured with consumerist propaganda, left with no way of resolving the desires that said propaganda invokes.  Their options for getting out of that trap are ever more limited and so their list of options grows thin.  Then we ignore them, push them aside and try to suppress them.  I’m not surprised there was an almighty explosion of rage.

How is society responding?  Badly, from what I can see.  One of the proposed solutions is to cut rioters benefits, maybe their access to council housing.  I can see the temptation of this path and almost signed the petition myself, but on reflection I can’t see it helping and refuse to sign it.  The only thing I can see that doing is taking the things I’ve touched on above and making them worse.  Throwing fuel onto an already dangerous fire doesn’t seem very helpful to me.  For my part, I suspect that the usual political sound-bites about being “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” won’t work.  A lot of the people in the riots had already been “cracked down on”, you can only crack down so far before it just doesn’t work any more.  How do you crack down on someone who doesn’t care and has no investment in wider society?  At what point do you start looking like the kind of regime that the Arabs have been so bravely trying to divest themselves of?

So what do I suppose might work?  I do often like to end my posts on a question, to try and leave food for thought.  This time I will offer my own thoughts in conclusion.

It’s time to bring these people in from the cold, re-engage with them and give them a reason to give a damn about wider society.  This will be something like opening a Pandora’s box, as it means that we have to take a long hard look at our society and the way we do things, it will probably mean that a fair few cherished attitudes and beliefs will have to change as well.  This will be painful, but the alternative is worse and eventually we will have a pressure explosion that will wreck everything.  How about we take the pressure out before it gets to that?

The News International scandal has been rumbling along for a few days here in the UK, it’s spreading outside our borders as well, this one really does have wings.

It’s quite rightly provoked a storm of massive proportions, one that will leave things forever changed in the UK.  The whole subject of the relationship between the media, the police and those in power is now being opened and there will be many hard questions to be answered in the days and weeks that follow.

One question I have is relating to the scale of corporate power, more specifically multinationals.  As anyone who’s watched the film “The Corporation” will know, they are hardly moral, no matter what they claim.  They are arguably described as psychotic, fixated on one goal and regarding anyone and anything as disposable in the pursuit of that goal.  These corporate behemoths straddle the globe and carry a lot of weight and wield a lot of influence.  In short, they have an awful lot of power, but no democratic accountability; nobody elected them.

So, does the News International storm raise questions about the role of multinational corporations in national politics?  Does it raise worrying questions about the amount of power they wield?  Most definitely in my opinion.  These are questions that we have put to the back of our minds, but the News International situation gives us the chance to turn these questions over and ponder them.  It gives more power to the elbows of those who would raise these concerns and then push for a resolution to them.  I think that’s no bad thing.