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 software 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 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.

The recent events in Greece have been an instructive lesson in how far our so-called leaders will go in the pursuit of their globalist dreams.  I’ve made no secret of my views, views shared by an increasing number of people now, that Greece is bankrupt.  Not only that, but that this contagion is far from contained and has already spread to the rest of Europe, maybe further.  The writing is, in my view, on the wall for the way our society currently works.

The idea of having it “contained” is impossible, the unsustainable way things have been run for quite some time means that we are staring at the end of the road.  Financially we are all bankrupt, accounting trickery aside, we are also running short on Oil and other resources.  The so-called “contagion” is in fact our collective Karma, it is the built in consequence of years (decades in fact) of short sighted behaviour and can’t simply be contained and more than gravity can be ignored.

Our leaders are trying to keep “stability”, they are trying to maintain the status quo in a world where the only thing that you can bet on is constant change.  A moments thought will reveal to you the long term chances of that being successful.  The Greeks were first, but more countries will be sacrificed on the altar of stability, to buy a few brief moments of respite.  Money is being printed and loaned, strategic oil reserves tapped and used; but both these things are only temporary stopgaps.  What when the currency is debased?  What when the reserves run out?

I’ve said before that we need to change the way we live and the way our society works, the situation that confronts us is quite survivable, but not with the status quo.  The powers that be will attempt to keep things going this way for as long as they can, but it will fall apart.  Along the way a lot of things will be sacrificed on the altar of stability.

You know, I didn’t think I’d ever write this but I really must applaud the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “Who are you and what have you done with the real Richard?”

I may not agree with some of the content of the religion he espouses, but I must applaud his recent article in the New Statesman.  But not for the reason you think.  I am neither pro nor anti cuts, but rather I take a middle ground that regards the cuts as a tragic nessecity.  From my point of view, to be pro or anti cuts, well, you may as well be pro or anti gravity.  The state machinery has enlarged beyond the means of the country to support it, it really is that simple.  The government blames everything on the New Labour years, but the responsibility for what happens from now is theirs and I’m hearing buck passing.  As for the left themselves, I hear a lot of reactionary shouting but what could (or would) they do that was any different?

My concerns are similar those of Rowan Williams, things feel stuck.  There is nobody who seems to be able to articulate a clear vision, those in charge just seem to be bumbling through.  There seems to be nothing orchestrated to protect the most vulnerable, but also where cuts fall they are likely to fall in the wrong places as middle managers seek (perhaps, understandably) to protect their own positions.  It seems that the axe is falling, but in the wrong places.  Further to this, I humbly suggest that what’s needed is a pair of Bonsai shears not a woodcutter’s axe.

Finally, it seems that the Archbishop himself has come under attack for involving himself in politics.  Those who attack him should really take a clearer look at things.  Our politics has been shaped, from it’s earliest days by religion.  The values espoused by a faith, its morality and its ethics have a very direct and fundamental bearing on the local politicians and some of our greatest political figures were influcenced by their faith.  The political opposition seems tongue tied and an awful lot that needs to be said was not being said; our politicians don’t want to face a few very unpleasant home truths.  I suspect, neither do the rest of us, but that’s a post for another time.  At a time like this it does need somebody who isn’t enmeshed in party politics and special interests to speak up, somebody exactly like Rowan Williams.

I’ve been watching the news in the last day or so with a sense of foreboding.

It seems our economy has missed its growth target, cue various politicians and media pundits talking earnestly about growth.  This is the mantra that has underscored the last few decades, and I recommend Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” if you want a little background to our fixations with growth and consumerism.  It’s 20 minutes long, and I highly recommend it.

There is a lot of talk of getting back to growth and not much mind room being given to the question “What if we can’t?”  I’ve talked about this before, but let’s make one statement: “Within a finite system, infinite growth is not possible.  Sooner or later, you will hit the edges of the system and stop”.  That’s not politics, it’s not economics, it’s basic unalterable mathematical fact.  We have finite space and resources on Earth, and we have to make do with what we have.  We must live within our means.

Given that the rest of the world is growing, what happens then?  Well, we in the west will inevitably see a lowering of our living standards.  Though that’s a very negative way of looking at things, it is maybe fairer to say that living standards will begin to balance out globally.

This isn’t optional long term, and will not only mean less plastic junk to buy and fewer expensive luxuries.  It will mean a return to mending and making do, we might even see the return of television repair shops, we certainly won’t be throwing the old sets away!  Speaking as someone who is refurbishing an old laptop and installing Debian Linux, rather than buying a new one, this sort of thing is deeply satisfying to do!

This will, ultimately, see the dawn of the Steady State Economy, I can’t see much of an alternative no matter how much I look.

One final thought that occurs to me comes from a time when I expressed the above opinions in a forum.  I was quickly met with the comment “It’s funny how everyone wants to force people to do things”.  I feel I should preemptively clear up a possible misunderstanding here.  The above isn’t about what anyone “wants”, we can argue and protest; shout and rage; scream and fume; reality simply is.  You can’t beat the maths, but if accepted in good grace, things could still be pretty good.

Today, I read the news that a gay couple have won a court case against the proprietors of a hotel. The proprietors are a devout Christian couple who denied them a room for the night after they had previously booked it.  The whole thing has been covered to death in the UK media, so I will simply refer you to the media coverage for the in depth details, Google News is your friend.

This really does seem to have been portrayed as a victory for Gay Rights legislation against religious doctrine, but I’d like to suggest a different take.  My take on this comes from a secular humanist perspective, and I should point out that this is in fact a case where secular law delivered a rebuke to a faith based morality.

This is something that I perceive as a sign of the times, and it was inevitable with the tensions in certain areas between secular law and religious doctrine.  I have to admit this walking this line is going to be difficult as both parties are standing up for something they believe in passionately, but I consider that ultimately the rule of secular law will eclipse religious objection; it has to for our society to work.  There have been claims that Christians are a persecuted group, that their rights are infringed.  I imagine we would hear the same from any religious group.  My response is : “No, you’re just being asked to abide by the same laws everyone else is”.