Blasting the cobwebs of history?

The saying goes; "those who forget history are bound to repeat it," and i know there's something at the edge of my consciousness that just refuses to go away or clarify!

Something various parties (judging by the amount of column/pixel inch coverage) due the rapidly approaching election seem to have forgotten - even when those inches refuse to add anything towards a good sound-bite. Whichever hue of government comes in there'll be a surprising development (whether home or abroad) that will mean a sharp decrease in our security and so our already harshly trammeled privacy, more regulation adding to the over burdened law books, more (but at least greener) taxes to ensure that the children's children children might have a hope of staring up at a clear cloudless blue sky without the fear of been burnt to death by the combination centuries concentration of pollution and more activity from our star.

But there'll be so many laws that the conservatives (barring a major upset in the prediction stakes) will have to repeal in relation to the few the labour government actually allowed that it will be the 3rd to 4th year sitting that we'll see how "fundist" the righters will be once they finally oust the young pretender in favour of someone more frightening than tebbers ever was in his prime!

Ah yes, the one thing history teaches us is that regardless if there's the poll-upset to unseat all poll-upsets and either the liberals or greens manage to get their hands on the mace, in the end we'll still be at the whim of global trade routes, traders and financial centres - otherwise known as jungles.

XXV

Blagging the hack

It would appear that the us is conducting two differing types of reactions to unauthorised intrusions from unauthorised personnel into sensitive areas of power.

On the one hand we have gary mckinnon with (all those years ago) his search for ufo's and those hiding them, who has been hounded by the american justice department for peeking (and hence showing up the lack of security) into the drawers of nasa the pentagon..., and on the second hand two people (tareq and michaele salahi) who fooled security to enter (what should have been) the most secure conscious dinner/party room on the planet, well perhaps apart from the one surrounding laden.

Maybe we'll see if the same or similar rules apply and with so many of the "great and good" gathered in one place providing such a security target, to show how dim a view such behaviour is viewed in, whether the pair will be dragged into the spotlight of incarceration until admitting their "obvious guilt" and showing up the general incompetencies surrounding the security involved with the protection of vips for the next decade or two will probably slip into the "whatever happened to" department.

Predictions

The ability to predict, like alchemy, is something of a holy grail which has been sought all throughout the recorded mists and depths of hoary time; after all he (or she) who could predict the future as well as changing crabby dirt into the most precious of gold, would control the reins of power and have an easy life - even if having to watch your back for the knife.

Sadly, the ability to predict the winner at the 15.10 race at kempton by taking a wild guess based on whether a horse has a particular letter in its names; but you have never seen a race, let alone any of the horses in the race is the same as predicting when/if/how/why you will fall in/over/out (whilst wondering what those effervescing electrons actually do whilst cascading down the pathway towards that ethereal social meme) of love and predicting (for a year) all of the world's lottery games lottery numbers correctly.

Now where did i put my 50 year predictions... oh bugger!

All thoughts

All thoughts, whether skipping around a meadow under a lightning-tornado-rain sodden ridden sky or the thoughts/image of blood spewing from someone's decapitated head by a passing helicopter as they practice acrobatics helter-skelter down a skiing slope; are all images and thoughts which are put down and filed away for potential future use, under the headings of you never know.

But many of them are simply that, idle thoughts and will eventually dissipate to the back of a filing system, or (if you've got a dreadful memory like mine) dissipate from mind and may at some far flung time in the future when only a smidgen of a sliver of the original thought will remain, and be forever lost as to its relevance. In many respects having that occur i believe is a very good thing, at other times it could be viewed as bad. Imagine remembering everything you've ever thought about whether for a fleeting second to that opus taking chunks of years at a time.  It would be the equivalent of never deleting anything (files, programs, data) from a hard drive whilst adding to it daily and expecting it to still work flawlessly and as speedily as the first day you brought it, 20 years later.

As I always say though, wouldn't it be a dreadfully boring world if we were all the same, did all the same things, thought exactly the same, and all wore the same - well that's today's thought; attack of the clones, eat your heart out.

Agreeing to disagree?

Has the art of discussion gone so far out the window that the ability of agreeing to disagree has swiftly flowed out with it?

It would appear so.

If you are constantly informed of another persons point of view, yet don't want to accept their point of view is true because it doesn't coincide with what you believe or want; it doesn't make their thoughts or views false. Just different to yours, and part of the agreeing to disagree process.

We can think of gorbachev and reagan, two past leaders who encompassed distinctly disagreeable extremes, yet managed to agree on many things whilst disagreeing on some fundamental ones.

I wonder if there would be far less hate and violence if more people, who didn't agree, acknowledged and were able to get on whilst still disagreeing?

Who knows, only time will tell.

Bullet-biting

Ah the hunt for the holy grail, of finding other planets we can go (well those wealthy enough and with a sense of frontierism) and colonise to — over time — turn into a dump similarly to the one we're currently forcing a bodged diy work over on.

Maybe, when are able of treating this planet with sufficient care and attention, and are capable of controlling our needs wants and desires, then perhaps (and only perhaps) we’ll be ready; as things stand now it would be a sad day for the universe if we ever made it to the stars without managing to restrict those needs. 

Eventually even a universe wouldn't be big enough.

Humbug

"Bah-humbug, i'm sorry we can't select you."

"But why?  I'm qualified, tick all the boxes, in fact i’m overqualified!  Married!  Three beautiful children!  I-i-i don't understand!"

"Well we've gone through the records and, it appears, that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, called the chairman's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather an idiot, after he fell into a ditch whilst inspecting the village turnip patch!

‘ems

“Like dodgems, people bounce from one side of the track to the other, not really caring why, nor understanding why they continually become unstuck in bogged down topographical detritus.”

Popscinews

In the age of pico-second trades, sound-seconds and the like, it's interesting watching a president take his time in making a decision, get it wrong in any way and it's another couple of nails in his presidential coffin; whilst the media circus continues its exorcist — or is that exocet — foaming.

Could this mean that we have to expect a little bit more than the usual knee-jerk rebound we have become so used to over the past couple of decades?

That would be nice.

But no matter what happens, barring total annihilation, people will do what they feel they have to do when they have been successfully brainwashed into a fervent blood-boiling-revenge-driven-rage.

Red brick, yellow brick

People have some land, bricks, a shack to worry about, too much clutter and the additional responsibility of leases, mortgages, long, short and free to think about without having to concern themselves about rebellion. 

Protest yes, but rebel? 

The courts would take away all their trinkets and leave them with nothing but sand and chalk.

Cut them off at the pass!

So the government (lord mandelson) has decided to stamp on more of the damned ungrateful illegally downloading unwashed, by blatant siding with big corporates (pushing for a non-exec at news corps perhaps) and forcing through legislation which will (eventually) penalise 560 million uk citizens — i am using government & industry methods of calculations here so just bear with me — who are thinking bad thoughts, to recant and think good thoughts; if they refuse, they will have their connections to the greater-net removed and they themselves cast into the outer rings-of-darkness until re-education is certified complete.

Oh dear, and yes i know it sounds as if too many c-movies have imprinted themselves on my impressionables.

Hands up all those (those who remember cassettes as the pinnacle of consumer audio technology) who spent time at college or university and tried out that tape your mate had wittily compiled of the best bits from last weeks top of the pops replete with tiny tv speakers hiss as the music warbled through, or they lent you a tape which had those precious fragments ready to speed into your spectrum where you hoped the head alignments would more or less match?  How many, over the years, found themselves on the hugely expensive upgrade path and stuck with it, and now own your own company, buy a huge number of licenses, and each year are told by your accountant it’d be cheaper going down the open-source route?   All because you had that hands-on positive playful experimental experience, all those years ago.

If I were to take the shirt off your back, that's not stealing that's daylight muggery, and would probably leave me with a heart attack and sever ticking off by the law.  If I take your car without permission, that's stealing mixed with daylight robbery, if I get my hands on your hard earned cash as commission or bonus's whilst my action brings down a financial institution, that's just good luck on my part, bad luck on yours. 

But we need public education, because we the public are stupid and never know what's right or wrong unless we have our faces forced into it.  Sort of like t–no i’ll stop right there.  But people are getting screwed because as a population we’re happy getting screwed, because so many of us are screwing everything left, right and centre — good thing for bayonet caps; as that’s where 30 years of me, me, me and markets know best have brought us. 

So as the country with the oldest democratic (sic) parliament goes down the great wall route, let’s hope that it isn’t too long before programmers rise to the challenge and create software that will truly blow a raspberry along with a great big hole through it and keep us out of orwellian brothers clutches, at least for a few more years!

Now where did i put that nice post…

The bloomberg soft shoe shuffle

Michael bloomberg holds an impressive list, a large fortune, rapier insight into making money and is also very generous in his giving to charity.

Generous?  $207mn in giving.

Which works out at roughly a quarter of his annual interest of roughly $1.18bn, on his fortune of $17.5bn — in theory, since it seems I  know as much about his finances as I do about mine, thankfully very little.

But it wouldn’t surprise me he gets a good deal, after all he managed to get new york to change a two year maximum term mayoralty to three terms, a feat he shares with others who hunger after power in less savoury climes, so time will tell, if he not only wins, but how his extended reign benefits all new yorkers.

Green credentials, ha... haha... hahahahaha....

I was so underwhelmed by my previous post on tfl i had to pay the topic another visit, and throw in the local council at the same time.

Over the past couple of days i have been mulling over the transport for londons 2008 environment report".  A report which opened up to reveal a beautifully put together, laden with all the proper buzz words, 30 page report about how green they have been, are being and will be, covering a fully-proofed 365°future.  So green and aware, they even disabled the pdf printing ability, so if you wanted a copy you had to whizz off and order and then wait for it to be delivered by carbon friendly post, hm ok. 

Millions have and will continue to be spent on greener buses, of coming up with wonderful new environmentally friendly ways of scratching their heads, working out how to reduce the impact on the coughing and choking land.

One way, which may save a few hundred or thousand tonnes of toxic emissions daily, would be to have bus drivers turn off their engines when using terminus’s.  Amazing, simple, even easy (you would have thought) to implement — if drivers can remember a whole route then you would have thought that the probability of remembering a command (from the non-driving higher ups) to switch off an engine when at a stand might stick for more than two trips around the route map, in a pavlovian kind of way — something that would, within days, start to improve their monstrous footprint and contribute to a reduction in the city’s level of noise and air pollution — apparently the 13th leading cause of death.

As the tfl energy pledge went on to say: “the initiative encouraged staff to make one simple change to their working lives to help reduce the amount of energy tfl uses…” which is all well and good for head office staff, but it might have proved far more useful had it been applied across the entire frontline operation of their buses division.

And the council?

“Nothing to hear here. Noise, I hear no noise ta-da-de-da.  Just your imagination.”

Hm, still underwhelmed, might have to put an illustration up the next visitation.

Isodopes?

Well if mountain glaciers continue retreating, sea-levels rise and we're all punting everywhere, i do hope we get to use climate-deniers and energy company executives as ballast; and if they prove to be correct they can use those of us gullible enough, to fall for the line climate change, as benches.

Tsk, as if the climate would ever change to severely affect us.

The bad in everything?

Despite most posts pointing to the contrary, I don’t see horrible vileness around every corner or in every situation that flashes before my senses, there’s lots to be happy about, to smile at, to enjoy — despite the newly perched mongers: doom and gloom, even when i’m frothingly aiming at feralality & feralism, because we haven’t emerged (all of a sudden) out of misty depths, from a time that embodied everything that was wonderful and fantastic, a procession highlighted by aimless walks amongst avenues filled with soft-petaled roses, with nothing greater to tax than mind than whether to press — or not — on a grape; but, as any cursory glance through our history readily reveals, there has never been a period when utter peace and limpid harmony reigned over the globe, ever.

What was a cut-purse?  Nothing but a pickpocket with knife, whom we now label muggers that are now, sadly, just as happy confronting you whether you’re paying attention or not, in a general air of merry-making bloody-mindedness, ensuring you know that you’ve been done

A highwayman?  A man or men on horses who would hold up your carriage, shot your driver, rob your jewels, your mistress, and if your loot was heftier than a silver purse (or was that a sow) would use your carriage as the getaway vehicle and all with the use of pistols.  Today, we call them car-jackers, who’ll not only rob you of your car, but your shopping and if your unlucky enough to have baby onboard, then poor baby too.

You were also more likely to have your money fleeced in a local protection racket, a business deal, gambling, investing in tulips with scant recourse for any return except revenge on a field of valour in a duel that had already been tampered with, whilst sexual mores had the tendency of landing you with either a child or a pox.  People were likely to die if wounds became infected, of a childhood illness, women in childbirth, of a fever...

The explosion in population’s due, in no mean part, to the explosion of ‘biotics, better and varied foods, cleaner water all increasing the survival rates in many parts of the world of not only the young and the old but of everyone.

Don't forget it wasn't exactly hundreds of years ago that children were sent into mines or mills to work from the age of six.  The elderly would be shuffled off somewhere to die of malaria and those in-between caught in some continent waging war or off conquering lands by evicting the former tenants.  So despite things not been as "perfect" as we'd like, there’s only ever been a few, who have ever had life that easy, I suppose they would (by todays standards) be the multi-billionaires.  The multi-millionaires would be the scrooges and his peers, and those non-million anything would be the tiny tims, olivers, cooks and chimney sweeps coughing up their last bit of ragged bloodied sputum, before been slowly broiled after getting wedged and left forgotten, in some two-up during mid-swing.

TfL and eco-green

TfL's green credentials: ha... haha... hahahahaha....

More funds

We need more funds to stop us becoming obese, to stop us over-eating and killing ourselves; please stop and think of the children, and donate your hard-earned money, so we can help prop up local candy stores and stop anyone else from gorging themselves on all those bad calories; which you know — in the end — will be better for us, better for them, but more importantly better for you!

Yes, carbon tax trading. 

Soon to be followed by a whole new raft of the-really-decent-thing-to-do-climate-bonus levies.  Of course it’s really nothing but a nonsense.  Another money making scam that ensures the only real change to the status quo, is the one leaving you lighter in the purse. 

At this very moment, every house or community could have solar, wind, geo, biomass energy systems installed that would cut their dependence on fossil fuels and so their emissions.  Not only that, it could even furnish stakeholders with a small steady profitable stream of income, as they pump any excess back into trimmed down national energy grids.  The acreage is available, people want it, efficiencies would improve over time. One glaring thing which could be a reason the full thrust into this land of energy independence is chugging away slower than a eurostar during a french farmers strike, is politicians and industrials haven't quite finalised how they are going to make the people & communities, who produce their own power and energy, pay "that damned levy" to make up for the global billions they stand to lose; as peoples shackled dependence on external energy sources, production, transmission routes start to diminish over months and years. 

I suppose its something that would be viewed with the same level of sneering as an uprising demanding the removal of vat on everything, with a clause inserted, insisting that moody recreationals be made mandatory — just to help us feel that little bit better about the whole thing.

But i'm sure somewhere along the line, they'll find a way.  Especially if a company like royal dutch shell, that made $3.2 billion (net profit mind not gross), still finds the need to cut 5,000 jobs for "productivity" sake, what hope will there be for small energy producing stakeholders once the fossil-giants and poketpols swivel benighted sights on them?