Category Archives: world watching - Page 4

On the Altar of Stability

Posted by on July 2, 2011 1 comment

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.

Growth fixation

Posted by on January 25, 2011 4 comments

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.

Signs of the Times

Posted by on January 19, 2011 2 comments

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”.

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.