Category Archives: Politics - Page 3

Student Fees, a few thoughts

Posted by on December 14, 2010 1 comment

Along with the rest of the country, I’ve been watching the student protests unfold across the UK.

As can be seen from both the mainstream media and the Twitter coverage, although in the main peaceful in nature and intent, both protests were marred by a violent minority.  The exact identity of this minority is beyond the remit I will give myself here today, so I must beg the reader’s forgiveness as I dwell no further on this.  I recommend Twitter as well as the mainstream media. Twitter brings a living immediacy to its coverage and imparts facts and information that the 24 hours news doesn’t.  The mainstream coverage is complemented by Twitter, if only because Twitter highlights what’s not being said or shown on TV, this raises consciousness and is of great importance.

I admit to being torn. As someone who’s been through higher education, I sympathise with the students.  As a taxpayer, watching the saga of government spending cuts; and the lengths our officials are going to to disguise the fact we’re on thin ice, I sympathise with the government.  I will also say I’m not sure raising taxes on corporations is workable, they have too many ways to evade it.  If they fled abroad, we could stand lose more than we would gain.

So, it seems we have the dilemma presented by the Government, which horn of the bull do we choose?  Do we raise fees or do we cut elsewhere?  Or do we realise that the range of options on the table were chosen by someone else and we can explore other options.

Let’s try a couple of suggestions.  Perhaps we could seek to reduce the cost of higher education?  That’s not mentioned.  Or realise that a degree isn’t necessary for some jobs, an A Level (or equivalent) will do. Thus potentially reducing the costs to the student and state.  Again, no mention.

I think the most important thing we can do is see and explore, taking to the streets conveys a message, but it’s the tired scripted response.  Riots; more people hurt; more police powers; lots of opportunities for politicians to talk tough on TV;  but no actual progress.

The students have been to University, education and intelligence are the strengths of that path, maybe it’s time to try changing the script and play to those strengths?

As per usual, I only try to provoke the process of questioning, I don’t try to dictate answers.  But I will finish with a quote that sums up my thinking nicely.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)

No Silver Lining

Posted by on December 3, 2010 No comments

I’ve been watching the Wikileaks releases with some interest.  They seem to largely prove that the people who run this planet are every bit as human as we thought they were.  There are few (if any) great leaders and there seems to be a lot of underhand dealing going on.  Not much of this is really a surprise.

The fallout around the documents is far more instructive than the content of the documents themselves.  We are seeing how little regard anyone in power has for any notion of freedom of speech, or for any idea that they should be accountable to their people for anything.  I understand that there are situations in which things have to be kept quiet, but there seems to be a little rebalancing needed here.

Part of the fallout has been regarding the Amazon EC2 Cloud, and this is of interest to me as a self confessed geek.  You see, I’ve never completely trusted the idea of the cloud.  While many people seemed to think it was the best thing since sliced bread, I counted myself among those who looked on with a degree of reservation.  As you may know Wikileaks moved it’s service to the EC2 cloud to help it to stay online.  According to the news coverage, Amazon promptly dropped the service to Wikileaks after receiving phone calls from certain US senators.  This, of course, raises serious questions regarding freedom of speech; questions that are quite rightly being pursued.  But it also confirms my fears about this ‘wonderful’ idea of cloud computing.

You see, I have to make the point that your access to the services and data on the cloud (your data, by the way) is only there on the sufferance of the service provider.  At which point it’s no longer really your data, and no longer your server (it never was).  This means that you’d better have access to local copies of the data and local facilities.

Of course, the above is equally true of any failure in the hosting service or your internet connection.  Let’s face it, if you need to maintain local copies of the servers and data in order to keep things running, then the argument for cloud computing doesn’t hold.  This is part of my reservation about Facebook, it’s a walled garden and I have no easy way of exporting my data out of there.  If my account is closed, or inaccessible then it really becomes Facebook’s data, not mine.  So, by extension any intellectual property I have with a cloud company is no longer in my control?  That’s worrying.

I suppose the cloud doesn’t have such a silver lining after all.

Moving in cycles

Posted by on September 28, 2010 No comments

I’ve been keeping half an eye on the financial rumblings from the Eurozone of late, things seem to be on the move again and not in a good way.  I have to admit that I was less than impressed with the huge bailouts handed out, both there and here in the UK.  The whole thing seemed to be nothing more than a futile attempt to paper over some very real cracks.  It seems that these cracks are resurfacing, and I am having real doubts that either the UK or European leadership can solve this easily.

Speaking of the United Kingdom, we can finally see the beginnings of house price falls.  This isn’t unexpected, it seems to be happening is spite of the ever more frantic efforts of those in power to prop things up.  I admit that it does lead me to a quiet sense of vindication, but not one I take any pleasure from, more of a resigned sigh.

You see, in 2005 I was pointing out that house prices had to come down, and getting sneered at for my trouble.  This was based on history, we’ve had this cycle before and will probably have it again.   Also, the simple principle that eventually people would be unable to buy what they couldn’t afford, with no first time buyers the whole thing had to falter.  It was also on the Taoist principle that when anything is taken to an extreme, it tends to become its opposite and thus things move in cycles.  Before anyone thinks I’m getting egotistical, I have to balance this by saying that I didn’t see the global or national credit crunches coming, but then few did.

This principle of things becoming their opposites seems to be applying to our global system, and especially the idea of growth.  Growth becomes contraction (or deflation if you prefer), but remember, it’s all cyclic.  What this means is that we can expect contraction, but that the down swing contains the seeds of the next upswing.  This is why I think the out and out doomers are wrong in their assessment, there is a lot of talk of “Black Swans” but what about “White Swans”?  In my view, the doomer crowd are not guilty of a lack of analytic skill, far from it in fact.  I have to say that there are some passionate and excellent writers and analysts there.  But I wonder if they neglect their imaginations.  It is a fact that there are a lot of people who doubted things; transatlantic airliners, nuclear power (including Einstein!), there’s a good list here.  They were all wrong, I imagine that the predictions that civilisation is impossible without Oil and / or growth will one day appear on a list just like the one I linked to above.

Unable to see, or unwilling to?

Posted by on August 24, 2010 No comments

I’ve been slowly working my way through Carl Sagan’s book ‘The Demon Haunted World’.  It’s a great book and if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it.

The chapter I’m reading concerns gullibility and specifically mentions a very revealing ruse involving an invented entity called “Carlos”.  The ruse was devised by the Australian “60 minutes” program with the assistance of James Randi.  It was intended to make a point about gullibility at all levels of society, and it succeeded spectacularly.  Parts of the media were drawn in, as was a section of the public.  Statements and literature were created and put out by Randi that made little sense, with glaring errors in them, and they passed without comment.

The part that interests me the most, is what happened when they admitted the deception; there was a small hardcore of people who still believed!  The most interesting thing we can do here is wonder why.  I mean it’s all been admitted, cards laid on the table plain as day, yet still a small number of people believed.  Why?

I think that it comes down to the level of investment that we have as individuals in these things.  A week or two ago, in my “Religion of Society” series I observed that people will defend their position automatically due to the level of emotional investment they have there.  This is true of societies and religions as these are the things you grew up in, they helped shape who you are, and your answers to life’s questions are framed in their context.  This would mean that a change in those areas could involve a lot of effort.  But why should faith healers and other practitioners of pseudoscience merit this level of attachment?

Perhaps here we should consider the role of delusion, the pseudosciences can offer a comforting alternative world view to the conventional.  Perhaps a faith healer’s miracle seems to affirm that God considers you worth healing, that your faith is strong enough?  The Spiritualists and Clairvoyants offer other forms of comfort; against death, the pain of loss and the seeming randomness of life.

These things are comforting, for sure.  But that doesn’t make them correct, in fact some of these things can (and do) prove fatal.  This is all one more reason that I think critical thought should be firmly on the school curriculum.

Religious schools, once again.

Posted by on July 28, 2010 No comments

I had a raised eyebrow moment when I read this report on the BBC.  It’s something that I  freely admit I never expected to hear from a serving politician.

To give a quick summary, as I’m aware that these things do vanish sooner or later:

“Atheists could set up their own schools in England under the government’s education reforms, Education Secretary Michael Gove has said.”

The article goes on to explain a little further, with a further quote from Prof Dawkins:

“I would never want to indoctrinate children in atheism, any more than in religion. Instead, children should be taught to ask for evidence, to be sceptical, critical, open-minded.”

I must say that I have watched the argument over faith schools, as they are something I feel strongly about.  I agree with Prof Dawkins, children should be taught to think for themselves, be shown critical thinking and the scientific method.  Children should not be indoctrinated either for, or against, religion.  Put simply, religion has no place in the school system.

BP, Greed and Humility

Posted by on June 15, 2010 1 comment

In common with many people of late, I’ve been watching unfolding events in the Gulf of Mexico with a sense of growing foreboding.  The plight of the families and communities caught up in this cataclysm is heartbreaking and  images of seabirds covered in oil are distressing.

I’ve been pondering this tragedy and am wondering at the scale of it, a dark stygian cloud seeping beneath the water.  Some say it will spread up the Atlantic coastline, indeed, some rumors say it has already begun to.  This has been likened to an American Chernobyl, I think that’s an entirely justified comparison.

The cost in terms of both the environment and economy is well covered elsewhere, the political row echoes across the Atlantic, and reading newspaper website comments I wonder if many people in the UK can empathise with Obama.  I find myself feeling a deep sympathy for the man, and hoping that he can use this to break the stranglehold of Big Oil and move the US towards an alternative energy policy that includes walkable cities and clean efficient rail.

I was also pondering the effects on the mental level.  We’ve been caught out in our greed, as Peter so accurately puts it over at The Buddha Diaries:

“We have known for at least forty years that this dependency was a threat to our well-being and to the natural environment, but have done nothing to address it. Indeed, the reverse, our demand has only increased, our addiction deepened.”

I agree wholeheartedly.  This has been brought on by our greed, grasping for the things we feel entitled to, without realising that our sense of entitlement will be our undoing.  We have grasped and hoarded with no thought and our “solutions” to the World’s financial mess have seen us grasping at the resources of the future, impoverishing future generations to sate our own appetites.

So, are we Preta, hungry ghosts (speaking psychologically) with an insatiable appetite for a substance or object?  Our greed is forcing us recklessly onwards, as evidenced by internal emails from BP.  I’ve observed that the drive for profits, and damn the consequences, has stored up some pretty alarming trouble for us.  But I plan to cover that another time.

Or can we rise above that?  I believe that answer is “yes, we can”.  We will need to rediscover our humility in the face of nature, we have pushed too far thinking we could beat the odds; we couldn’t, you don’t beat Mother Nature.

I can only see only one solution.  That we must grow into a stewardship of this planet, and learn to use it sustainably; after all, it’s not like we have another.  Some vested interests are going to be severely inconvenienced, and will have to learn to restrain their greed but either we do this voluntarily and get a say in how it goes, or we sleep walk into another catastrophe.

Whats our Karma?

It’s all gone a bit political…

Posted by on May 7, 2010 1 comment

Well, this is interesting isn’t it, we have a hung parliament in the UK, who’d have thought it?

So, we have a possibility for change from a two party sytem to a system of Proportional Representation.  Now, I personally am a fan of P.R., I feel it will enable the political system to better represent the voting public.

The British two party system is a throwback to a previous era of politics in Britain, when there were only two main parties and no credible third.  Of course, that’s no longer the case, so the system as it stands is not fit for purpose.

Proportional Representation will iron out one glaring issue with our current system which is that a party with 26% of the vote (the Liberal Democrats) only got less then 13% of the seats in the Commons, that’s hardly fair play.   It would also make it harder to have one party take the country to war on a conviction, or wreck the economy with nobody in a position to stop them.  Yes Messrs Blair and Brown, I’m looking at you two.

While we have a two party system, we swing between extremes; with P.R. we settle into something nearer the middle way, I think that’s better for everyone.