What an unbelieveable pile of crap. How has this story dominated the news for so long? It’s so insignificant as to be a total non-event in my opinion. They had an expense allowance. They had rules. They had an overseight body. They claimed and were told they were within the rules and given the money. Now they’ve got to pay it back because … well, I can only come back to jealousy and envy. They followed the rules, they shouldn’t have to pay it back. If you disagree with the rules, then they should be changed, but people who complied with them should not be forced to pay back what they claimed. It’s a fundamental fule of justice, that changes to the rules should not be retroactive! Not breaking the rules is not grounds for punishment.

Take the case of the guy who’s having to repay £41,000. Now, even if every MP had to repay a similar sum that’s only about £2.7 million. Yes, I say only. The budget of the NHS alone was £90 billion in 2007 and was set to reach £110 billion in two years time. That’s one service the government provides which is over 33 thousand times higher than what would take to give every MP £41,000. And, of course, the £41,000 repay was accumulated over 4 years. So it’s even less siginificant. It would work out to £675,000 a year, or 133 thousand times smaller than the budget of the NHS. It wouldn’t even make a dent in the NHSs £900 million deficit last year.

Lets say the figure for MPs over claiming is actually massive and averages to £15,000 per MP, per year (not the case considering the largest ‘over claim’ is £41,000 over four years, or £10,250 per year). Lets also say we can get every penny of that back at zero cost (impossible) and lets round it up to a nice even £4 million reclaimed. Lets say we then give all of the money reclaimed from the past four years to the education department. The education department gets around £80 billion a year. If we translate that to numbers which can be more easily comprehended, it’s like giving a minimum income worker, pulling in £12,000 a year an extra 60 pence. It’s not going to change anything for that person. They can now afford an extra bar of chocolate. They’ll be thrilled.

Okay, lets say we were even more specific and gave that £4 million to primary schools, which have a budget of £700 million. Now we’re talking! That’s the equivalent to giving our £12,000 a year worker an injection of almost £70! Not life changing, sure, but they’ll be able to buy… well, maybe they’ll be able to replace a broken part on their car which didn’t seem worth it before. Or they might be able to take a loved one out for a nice meal.

Of course, the assumptions made are crazy. There’s no way that reclaiming the money would come without cost. There’s no way that the over claim by MPs is that high. The whole thing is a total non-event. Complete storm in a tea-cup.

Interestingly (or actually not if you’re even slightly clued up on how the media operates) it was actually quite hard to find a web news page that said the £41,000 repay figure even in the same paragraph as the fact it’s spread over four years.

I think the story should have been told as: “Look how many MPs don’t claim nearly any of their allowed expenses! What a bunch of freaks/saints!” (depends on how you want to spin it) Seriously, how many people can honestly say that, if their company was to offer to pay for something that they would say no? How many people, when offered either money for, or money towards their work-related costs say no to that money? I would venture to say very few, and further to venture that the ones who do say no say that because of the difficulty of claiming, not because it’s morally wrong to claim. These MPs claimed when everyone of us would have claimed and we hang them out to dry for it!

Of course, there are those who are arguing that it’s not the money, it’s the principle. These people followed the rules and got money. They were open about what it was being spent on. It’s a fucking disgrace! They should all be strung up and shot! No, wait. Hang on. That actually sounds like reasonable behaviour to me. There’s the guy who had his daughter stay with him. He’s a total fiend of course. We want our MPs to be good family people, but not in a house part paid for by us, goddamnit! We want our MPs to represent us and be normal people and we want them present at Parliament and able to vote on the issues of the day, yet we want to make it so that only the disgustingly wealthy can actually hope to be an MP because we want them to finance their own central London houses!

I’ve heard it suggested that MPs should share bed sits… which is a really wonderful idea. Yes, lets have the leaders of the country hunkering down like crack addicts, four to a room!

I hate the coverage of this story because it is so petty. The premises at work are envy and jealousy. The ones demanding these MPs act like super humans are themselves acting like brats who’ve just been told the kid next door has got a new bike.

It strikes me that this story is being used to try and distract us from the worsening economic situation. For fear that we might notice that the system is seriously broken and we might get it into our precious little heads that maybe it needs changing. Maybe it’s not a good idea to have a system built on growth! Maybe it’s not a good idea to have power and wealth pooled in a very small number of hands. Maybe we should think about doing things differently… no, wait! That guy there claimed expenses he was entitled to, in a way he was supposed to, for things he was allowed! Burn him! Get the mob together and tell them to put down the “We demand change” banners and grab up the pitch forks and flaming torches! It’s witch hunt time!

So, we’re all fairly sure that the current economic crisis is something to do with the banks lending money to people who couldn’t finance their debts. We’re reasonably sure of this because we’re quite certain that the American Sub-Prime mortgage market was where the problems started and that if they’d not lent money to those people then we’d all be fine now and would be enjoying the same level of economic growth as before. How true is all this ‘knowledge’ though?

Money is debt. The available pool of cash with which to do things comes from each of our promises to finance our debts. The money you paid for your house with almost certainly doesn’t physically exist anywhere. Unless you’re in the minute minority of people who paid for their house from their earnings, then you got out a mortgage, the majority of which would have been created ex-nihilo. It exists as a string of 1s and 0s on a computer. As you pay/paid your mortgage off most of the money you gave back disappeared. It had never truly existed in the first place. The only money which didn’t disappear was the interest and the reserve deposit equivalent. That is the amount they have which they can lend from. The ‘real’ money that allows them to make fake money out of nothing more than your promise to repay. Their reserve ratio could be as high as 24:1, they could be able to loan out 25 times the real money they have.

Okay, so the bank can lend out more money than it actually has, but this fake money it creates is destroyed as it’s repaid, leaving only the real money and the interest. At a reserve ratio of 9:1 (as I understand it, a fairly low, reasonably common rate) they can collect interest on a £10,000 loan while only having £1,111.12 of real money. The interest on that £10,000 loan is theirs to keep and they only need to recover £1,111.12 to get their initial investment back, the rest of the £10k will be destroyed once repaid anyway. Of course, that £10,000 loan will be deposited somewhere once the loan’s been used for whatever it was intended for. The £10,000 loan, once deposited, can be then used to make a further loan of £9,000. That £9,000 loan can then be used to make a further loan of £8,100, and so on until we’re approaching £100,000 of loans (and the interest payments on those loans) for a £1,111.12 initial deposit. If there were only one loan made then the bank could only collect on the £10,000 initial loan. However, with dozens of smaller loans after the initial large loan the bank can collect on £100,000. Lending to lots of people wanting smaller quantities makes the bank a lot of money from nothing.

So the banks can make the huge loans that large businesses want, then use those to make medium loans that medium businesses want, then use those to make loans that small businesses want, then use those to make loans that consumers want. All of the loans made with the same initial deposit by the central bank. And the interest collected on all of the loans can then be used to make more loans and collect more interest.

Of course, no bank would get the deposits from their own loan from every stage of this process, but since the banking system is a closed system, it effectively means that, since each bank gets some deposits from every other bank’s loans, it works out to the same thing in the end.

So, the total amount of money in the system and the total amount of interest the banks can ‘earn’ is entirely dependent on the demand for debt. If you can find a way to give money to everyone demanding debt in such a way that you can get your money back in some way, with some interest, then you will. Capitalist greed demands that we do everything possible to get that extra penny of profit. It doesn’t matter if your business model is that you lend money to people to buy houses, knowing they will probably be unable to pay, because you’re gambling that their house will be worth enough to cover that by the time you come to repossess it, you will do it, collect your profit and sleep sound at night. Ethical considerations are not part of a capitalist system.

That’s a lot of explaining to essentially say that the sub-prime market was good for the economy, until the housing market started to shrink instead of grow. Once houses were starting to lose value rather than gain it the system stopped working, the gamble turned sour. Our long, sustained growth period was thanks in no small part to the extra money generated by the sub-prime market. It’s just sad that the means we chose to fend off a small deflationary period will have the effect of causing a massive deflationary period. Cest la vie.

Growth isn’t sustainable. I’ve said it many times within the course of writing entries for this blog, but I feel the need to say it once again. Growth is not sustainable. No level of growth is sustainable. No level of depletion is sustainable. It’s logically obvious that both of these statements are necessarily true. Yet, our culture doesn’t accept that logic. It says that either the conclusion is wrong or that some form of technology will appear to allow us to defeat the conclusion. The amazing tech fix.

We have been lulled into believing in the tech fix because it’s worked for so long now that we can’t perceive a time when human innovation will not provide us with new and innovative ways to continue killing the planet. We even imagine such a situation – where we can’t think of a new way to continue business as usual – as horrific. It would be terrible if we had to deal with the Earth as a partner and not as a slave! Tech fixes have been possible because of easy access to cheap energy. If peak oil strips us of our easy access to cheap energy, will the tech fixes be possible? Probably not if we’ve not done wide scale, serious investment in the alternatives prior to the peak. If, as some people argue, the world has already peaked, then we’re too late. Time to ride the roller coaster.

When talking about the current economic crisis, climate change, man’s negative impact on the planet, etc, it is often the case that the truth is massively complicated. Climate change, as an example, requires one to understand compliex chaotic interrelationships across much of the planet. The fact that we still have such poor weather forecasting, even over short time periods, is evidence that the systems are so complicated and chaotic that we don’t yet fully understand them. Explaining to people that past average global warming has caused northern Europe to disappear under two meters of ice is tricky, they can’t accept that a lot of the warmth we enjoy comes from the Gulf of Mexico via the Gulf stream. It seems counter intuitive to them that increases in warming over the planet may cause come areas to suffer from incredible freezing incidents.

Doubt, however, is easy. You pick one facet of an idea and take a liberal sprinkle of misunderstanding, whether deliberate or not, and then package it in certainties. You don’t follow the scientific language model, using qualified and uncertain terms. No, you make use of that scientific language in entirely the wrong way. You nit-pick, you poke holes, you highlight where scientific language makes it seem like there is a lot of uncertainty (it doesn’t matter that good science is full of such language, even when reasonably certain). Doubt is easy to generate, because science doubts itself all the time. The scientific method doesn’t prove, it dis-proves. You come up with how you think things are, what would be the case if they weren’t and then experiment. The experiment never proves that things are a certain way, only that they aren’t. If a statement can’t be disproven then it’s not science, it’s a tautology or it’s non-sense. If you have no criteria which would compel you to change your position, then you’re not engaged in science, you’re engaged in dogma and religion.

Both sides of a debate can often be accused of dogmatic adherence to their personal beliefs. Often it’s the case that they don’t admit what it would take for the other side to convince them that they are wrong. Often they don’t admit to themselves that there’s even a chance they are wrong. They believe they have arrived at their position by examining all the evidence critically, so how could they possibly be wrong?

I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be wrong. I’d love it if someone were able to show conclusively that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. That the nuclear industry is safe. That the economy can grow exponentially forever without negative side effects. That mankind is smarter than yeast. I long for these things to be the case, because it would mean a much, much nicer future to look forward to. Hell, if I’m wrong then there is actually a future to look forward to! Wouldn’t that be great?

One of the essays I have recently been asked to write for my politics degree was titled “Should democracies be concerned about the losers in a capitalist system?” As part of the process I went through in answering the question I asked a few of my non-politics student friends the question to get their views and almost unanimously they answered ‘yes’. Their gut reaction was that we as a society should care about the people who are given the short end of the stick by the capitalist system we have in operation. When I pressed them to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance this caring they were almost unanimous again in their answer: No.

I tried to get to the root of this apparent (well, to my mind anyway) contradiction of opinion. How did they envision the government would help those who lose out if they were not to spend any money on helping. They didn’t want the losers to be helped, just for their to be concern that they were losing out. I was confused. I tried to argue that concern without action was the same as no concern at all. Their argument was that we can be concerned and use that concern to limit our actions and so make sure the losers don’t lose out too much. I asked who was to police this, they didn’t want anyone to. I asked how we would ensure that the losers don’t lose too much, they said we didn’t. I asked who defined too much and they said it was down to the individual. I asked how this was to stop anything. I was missing the point.

I don’t think that concern without any action, limits, etc, is actually concern at all. I think concern without action is simply ego stroking. We can be concerned without acting and so we can feel better about paying slave labour wages. We are concerned after all, that’s enough. We can be concerned without acting to stop mass species extinctions. We are concerned after all, that’s enough.

When a question about change is asked it is almost always limited, qualified, in such a way as to be essentially: How can we change everything without changing anything? For example: How can we make a sustainable society while protecting economic growth? You can’t, sustainable and growing are against one another. If something is growing then it’s not sustainable. The economy is part of society, if it’s growing then society is growing. If society is growing then it’s not sustainable. How can we change everything without changing anything?

How can we cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. Well, economic growth is almost predicated upon the release of greenhouse gas emissions. It almost necessitates the externalising of costs, for example efficient, effective clean up of pollutants. How can we change everything without changing anything?

The question posted by my politics tutors was aimed at generating a discussion between the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believes that society should protect and help people and should use taxation as a method of doing this. Nozick believes we have three rights: Life, liberty and property. Any taxation of the state which is not used to ensure the protection of the first two breaks the third and should therefore be illegal and is immoral.

Rawls wants us to imagine how we would like society to be ordered, but he first wants us to imagine we don’t know what position we would have within that society. As a white, middle-class male I might find a certain way of doing things where women or blacks bore the brunt of the costs of society as fair. However, as a free-floating entity creating society from scratch and destined to be a part of it without knowing what part, would I be so happy with that arrangement? If I might be black then I’ll want a better deal for blacks. If I might be a woman I’ll want a better deal for women. Etc. So Rawls believes.

Nozick believes the state’s only legitimate role is that of protection of our rights. This is legitimately done through the police, to protect our rights against each other, and the army, to protect our rights against the people in other states. Any taxation not for these two purposes is theft and slavery. It’s the state demanding we work for them. If we are taxed at 25% above what it takes to finance the military and police, and we work 40 hours a week, then the state is enslaving us for 10 hours every week, in Nozick’s vision.

In my experience, most people agree with Nozick’s analysis of taxation and slavery, but want Rawls’ society… contradictory.

Right, so you want to remember Jesus, you want to show piety, you want to wear your religious commitment for those around you to see, whatever reason you have for wearing a crucifix, stop. Seriously. If you believe in the second coming especially, stop. When Jesus comes back to Earth do you really think he wants to see another cross? It’s like wearing a sniper rifle pendent and going up to JFK’s kids and telling them you’re wearing the pendent because you want to remember John (stolen from Bill Hicks). They almost certainly wouldn’t be pleased!

Maybe I’m mis-reading Christs pain and suffering, maybe I mis-understand when he asks for the cup to pass from his lips, for his father to make it so he doesn’t have to suffer and die. Maybe I don’t get how wearing the object that killed him is respectful. But if I were Jesus (and I accept that I could never be since I am all human and no divinity) and I were coming back to the planet I’d died a horrible death to save, died for sins I had not committed, died for people who didn’t even accept that I had even lived, the last thing I would want to see would be another cross.

I’ll get around to the actual point of this post now: People like Nadia Eweida who believe that it’s either an important part of their faith, or necessary for a Christian to wear one. I can’t think of many things less true, more intended to spark religious based racial feuds. The purpose of the court cases are for people to shout and cry and gnash their teeth about how this is no longer Our country and is now Their country. We are white, We are Christian, We are people born here with parents and grandparents who were born here. They are not-white, They are not-Christian, They may have been born here, but They don’t have parents and/or grandparents who were born here.

Us versus Them. Classic dichotomy.

The plain and simple truth is that we have no culture of wearing religious icons because of two things: 1) Christianity doesn’t demand we do; and 2) Christianity demands no false icons. If you’re wearing a cross then there is the risk that you are creating a false icon. The cross isn’t what is being worshipped, the Lord is. Wearing the cross takes focus from the Lord, it creates competition and God hates that.

This has only become an issue in recent years due to the way Christians are feeling threatened by Muslims. Muslims have a lot of religious based cultural dress and behavioural requirements. You can more often than not tell a strict Muslim just by looking at them. The same is not true for a Christian. Christians are required by their faith to not draw attention to themselves like hypocrites do. They are commanded to not deny their faith, especially when asked, but they are also commanded to not pray loudly, to not even let the left hand know that the right hand is giving charity. Christianity teaches that being brash and loud about good deeds and about your faith without invitation have their rewards here on Earth, not in Heaven. If you let a lot of people know you’re generous to charities then you have your reward – the admiration of your fellow man. If you let a lot of people know you’re pious and go to church every Sunday then you have your reward – the admiration of your fellow man (taken from the book of Matthew, 6:1 onwards). Christianity doesn’t want its followers to proclaim their faith loudly as the Muslims do.

What am I getting at? Christians should stop court cases such as these. You lose your rewards in Heaven. You lose the credit with God that you’ve built up. You should also stop wearing the cross. Jesus wouldn’t be impressed.

The name of this blog is inspired by Endgame by Derrick Jensen.

Often the premises of the media are shrouded in secrecy. We have to read between the lines to try to understand where the news writers stand, for example. This leads to the right being able to claim the media is left wing, and the left being able to claim the media is right wing. The obscurity of the premises that the media operates on results in this situation. A given media source will be written by a lot of people and so can easily be accused of a lot of different things. A person levelling such criticism is likely to focus on the aspects which support their case and ignore the aspects which don’t. Were the media to put their premises up front and be honest about them then this couldn’t happen. You could argue that given articles operated within different premises, or that many articles did and thus the media was lying about its premises, but you couldn’t make any claim you wanted to about them.

Because we don’t know their premises we don’t know what questions they are asking. Because we don’t know what questions they are asking we can’t know if the answers given to us within their content are actually of any use or not. The formulation of a question is very, very important, as anyone who has spent time on compiling a good questionnaire will tell you. Ask the wrong question, or even the right question in the wrong way, and you get a useless answer. Assume the answer and ask a question aimed at getting it and you might as well not have wasted your time. However, assuming the answer is what happens every single day in the media. Their premises are assumptions they don’t even admit to themselves. These assumptions lead them to answers which leads them to questions. A meaningless exercise.

The stealthy nature of the media’s premises leads to the general public having no idea that there is even a problem. They don’t understand the importance of questions. They belittle the role of stories and narrative. They fail to realise that every news item they absorb is based on assumptions, assumptions which they probably would agree with without understanding why (simple truth is they’ve absorbed the assumption from so many stories that they see it as ‘just the way things are’ and not as an assumption based on nothing more than other’s having made the same assumption).

This blog isn’t claiming to have the right answers and to have asked the right questions. It is simply an attempt to get people who read it to think in different ways, to ask questions about their assumptions. To motivate people to try to find out more. To compel people to find their own questions, their own answers. To help them to open their eyes to the scary reality of the world they live in and ask why, who, how. To get to the bottom of the mess so they at least understand what they are doing to the planet, to children in developing nations, to mother’s breast milk, to their own bodies. If they achieve that level of understanding and then continue to want to carry on with business as usual then they can (how could I stop them?), at least they’re armed with the understanding of what they are doing. They are informed.

I have previously echoed Richard Heinberg’s question, are we smarter than yeast? I’ve also previously written about the problems of endless growth within a finite system. However, these seem to be two of the least popular (according to my Dashboard blog stats) of my entries. I asked myself why and it seems obvious. They don’t have a happy chapter.

Unlike many dire predictions about the fate of all of us if we don’t change our ways, I don’t believe there is a way to continue ‘business as usual’ and save the planet. A lot of the time we are told that if we just recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce and recycle we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse and recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse, recycle and invest heavily in renewable energy then we’ll be fine. Business as usual, no worries. Go back to sleep, we’ve got this one sorted.

Recycling requires energy and many, many things cannot be recycled forever. They stop being able to be turned into new things. Even the best recycling in the world will still require influxes of new stuff, new metals, new raw materials. It also takes lots of energy. Machines wear out and will need replacing. Parts break. These are the constants of life. We might make all of the wind turbines, solar cells, tidal barrages, geothermal turbines we need tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be the end of our resource use. We’d need to replace them as they broke. Even if we could get into a steady state with all of the resources we use being reused until they can no longer be reused, we still need more stuff. Even in a non-stone-age, ’steady-state’ society, there will still be the need for more stuff to be dug out and used.

This is assuming that the people who are investing in these things, the governments that are pushing them, the companies profiting from them, are abandoning growth. They’re not, of course. We can recycle, because it creates jobs, but we must grow. We can reuse to a point, but we must buy new as well, we must grow. We can reduce packaging, but not consumption, we must grow. We can invest in renewables, because that creates some jobs, but we must grow. We will invest in nuclear, because that creates tonnes of jobs, and we must grow. The economy must grow, or it will die. The implication of that statement is that the economy is more deserving of life than wild nature, or humans. The economy is master and we are its slaves. We are well-kept slaves (in the UK, US and other ‘Western democracies’, at least), but we are slaves.

As Derrick Jensen says, what we need are stories. Stories to tell our children, to warn them and educate them. Stories which will warn of the dangers of taking a steady state system and building from it a system based on growth. The stories will need to be better than just telling them they can’t do it, or appealing to the dictates of some deity or other. There will need to be a web of interconnected, self-supporting stories, a culture, which makes the thought of starting a growth based economy repugnant, insane. These stories will need to be supported by stories about the wonder of nature, its beauty and value. They will need to tell of the death of nature, massive, massive death, horrible death which a machine based on growth causes to priceless nature. They will have to make clear that the death causers also die from the very machine they use to cause the death. In short, they will have to be the exact opposite of the stories we now tell, of infinite growth being logical, necessary and good. They will also need to form the backbone of every culture in the world.

Every culture in the world will need the same core cultural stories because if any one decides that growth is okay, or good, then every other will fall before them. A growth based culture isn’t better because it wins cultural battles, it’s just more violent, more efficient at casting people onto the fire to fuel it. Its greed leads to its hegemony. Winning doesn’t make it right, it makes it repugnant.

Tag surfing yesterday I came across a blog entry made by Strategerie, saying nobody is above the law. They had some good points, and made them well.

“Just following orders” was supposedly thrown out as an excuse after the second world war when we deemed it insufficient to justify the actions of the rank and file Nazis. If they couldn’t use it then, we can’t use it now because, as Strategerie says, we’ve all got our own brains and we should realise that certain actions are just wrong, no matter who told you to do them.

Personally I think that anyone who wishes to engage in ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ should be forced to first endure them. If you consider them to be legitimate to use on innocent people (and you have to remember that the people they use them on are only suspects, not convicted of any crime, and are by the definition of our society innocent until we can prove them guilty) then you should consider them appropriate to use on yourself.

I’ve read about half a dozen instances of people who were rabidly pro-waterboarding, pro all kinds of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, who agreed to undergo the process because ‘it wasn’t that bad’, only to come out of it totally against waterboarding. Like the Mythbusters who experimented with Chinese water torture who thought it would be just a bit of a laugh because having a drip land on your head couldn’t possibly be that bad, these people found out that torture isn’t funny.

Torture is not okay. I’ve said this for a long time, in a lot of places. People will formulate all kinds of non-existent scenarios in order to justify torture. One of my most loathed is this one: “You have a suspect. You caught him red handed planting the bomb. The bomb will explode killing everyone in London (10+ million). Is torture okay to get the deactivation code?” Those who fight so hard to justify torture will say: “Yes, because it will (not the certainty) save the lives of the citizens of London.”

Flaw 1: Just because he planted the bomb doesn’t necessarily mean he has the code to turn the bomb off.

Flaw 2: If you have time to get a reliable answer from the suspect then you have time to evacuate the city, or at least start to and save as many lives as possible.

Flaw 3: There is every chance that the code he knows is one which will instantly activate the bomb, rather than deactivate it. It’s what I’d do if I were masterminding attacks (and for one that has a scale of 10 million victims, there is a mastermind) of this magnitude. I’d tell the guy a deactivation code to give him the illusion of control, knowing him likely to get an attack of jitters right after he plants the bomb and possibly trying to ruin my plans. If he then tries to ruin my plan, boom.

Flaw 4: If torture is okay to save the lives of 10 million, is it okay to save the lives of 1 million? 1 thousand? 1? At what point do we stop and say that torture is not okay, once we allow it? 10 million is used because it’s emotive. London is used because of its financial importance. The question is formulated to make ‘no’ as hard an answer as possible, but the lengths needed to make you feel like saying ‘yes’ are so extreme as to make the question almost meaningless. The scenario is designed to chip away at the certainty of conviction that comes with the statement “torture is never okay”. What about Rabidly Extreme Case A? Chip. What about Rabidly Extreme Case B? Chip. What about Extreme Case C? Chip. What about Extreme Case D? Chip. What about Case E? Then enhanced interrogation techniques are okay…

Flaw 5: These criteria of certainty are never, ever, ever going to be met. Even if you catch someone with the bomb, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are the terrorist. Even if their hands are on the bomb there is no certainty, they could have been trying to stop it and the police could have misunderstood in the confusion. The certainty in the example is necessary for the argument to work as we balk at the prospect of torturing innocent people. They need to provide us with a concrete example of a terrorist caught in action, certainly guilty of being a terrorist.

The example is fiction and so to is the idea that torture is okay.

Of course, the terminally clueless will not understand this. People like That’s Right Nate, who believe that television shows such as 24 provide genuine, accurate examples of how torture works. Anyone looking to macho fiction for exemplary material and drawing analogies between waterboarding and having their hair washed probably shouldn’t be someone I point out, since it might only get them more attention and spread their diseased mentality still further. However, I chose that blog post because it seemed to represent the mentality that thinks waterboarding is okay, the 24 mindset that thinks shooting, or threatening to shoot, someone will make them squeal like freshly spanked pigs. But torture is unimaginably repulsive, as Hunter says.

The guy posting that 24 is a good example of torture in action, also seemed to think torture was good because it allowed the war in Iraq. Seriously, what? We went to war in a country with no connection to al-Qaeda because people under torture provided information that there was, and you think that’s an advert for torture? I’d have to agree with Daniel, Bush and Cheney should be tried as war criminals, along with Tony Blair and all other ‘leaders’ who participated in this world-wide disgrace.

Torture is not okay. It does not provide accurate information. There are claims circulating that the torture of Sheikh Mohammed stopped an attack on LA which could have destroyed the Library Tower (more commonly and accurately called the US Bank Tower) in LA. This is strange, since the plot was broken up in 2002, and he wasn’t even caught until 2003. Now, changing history is nothing new, Bush and the neocons were doing it the entire time they were in office. They got very good at it in fact. One of my favourite memories was watching a UK television programme where two Americans were arguing, one a Democrat, one a Republican. The Republican starts to spout off a whole ream of total falsehoods about the second world war and his Democrat counterpart turned to him and said “You do remember we’re in the UK right? These guys actually know their history!” The audience laughed and the Republican was very red-faced. He didn’t try it again after that.

It seems to me that if an American is a Christian or believes in their Constitution then they must demand to see the people who ordered these actions brought to justice along with those who did the most torturing. Not only to ensure accountability, but to ensure their Christian/Constitutional values are upheld.

Firefly was a television series which was the child of Joss Whedon, he of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a Space-Western, heavy on both space and western.

Firefly was cancelled in the middle of its first season. Following its cancellation it got such a cult following, once it came out on DVD, that it spawned a movie called Serenity which did very well for a spin-off of a television show cancelled half way through the first season.

I’d like to venture my opinion as to why the show was cancelled.

Within the universe of Firefly humans have abandoned a dying Earth and colonised a new solar system. They live on a large number of planets and moons. Before the series there had been a war between two ideologies, one called the Independents and one called the Alliance. Although not much depth is really given about the causes and roots of the conflict, the choices of names gives a good indication about core ideologies of both sides. One wanted independence, the other not so much.

The Alliance won the war (Mal at one point says they won because of superior numbers, although the brief flashbacks of what the war was like also suggests superior technology) and has consolidated its control of humanity. However, we’re shown a number of times that the Alliance aren’t actually that great. They are horribly bureaucratic and controlling at the same time as being quite incompetent and indifferent.

Now, on to why I think the show was cancelled: Daring to imply that conclusive victory doesn’t make you right; Daring to imply that legality and morality aren’t the same; and, Daring to show prostitution as not only acceptable but, with the right legal framework, safe and beneficial.

The Alliance are shown to be wrong about a number of things, for example they allow slavery. Mal, our hero and main protagonist even says in one episode that he was on the losing side but he’s still not convinced that it was the wrong side. He’s our hero and so we believe him. Winning the war doesn’t necessarily make you right. It makes you better at war, which is killing people. We don’t generally consider murderers to be right, except in the case of one country against another, since the murder of enemy soldiers is okay and civilians aren’t our actual targets, really. We were right, despite our decision to fire bomb Dresden (as just one example in many), because we won the second world war.

So long as there is still a fight there are allowed to be opinions other than the ‘official’ one. As soon as conclusive victory is decided then the winners were the ones who were right. Joss says no to that.

Fox, the network responsible for the death of Firefly, are very hawkish. By this I mean they are pro war and seemingly believe that it’s America’s duty to go to war to bring democracy to places which were doing fine until America started to mess with them. To have a show on its own network which implied that winning wasn’t what made your position right is anathema to the Fox network’s dominant values and beliefs. It had to go. Stage one of getting rid of it was not showing the pilot, with all of its character exploration, first. Stage two was moving the show around the listings so it was never in the same place and couldn’t build a following. Stage three was to then complain about its ratings and cut it in the middle of the first season.

Firefly not only dares to follow the losers and make them look like they might have been right, but it also dares to imply that breaking the law isn’t necessarily bad, that legality is not morality. Mal and his crew get away with a lot of crimes, yet they are a moral bunch (maybe with the exception of Jayne). They return stolen goods which poor and sick people need, for example. Mal makes it clear that, although killing isn’t necessarily wrong in his eyes, that there are rules of conduct he abides by (”You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake; you’ll be facing me; and you’ll be armed.”).

Not only are we following a bunch of thieves and murderers, but they have a prostitute on board! And her activities are legal! The winning side not only condones slavery, but it’s okay with legislating for the safety and continuation of the prostitutes business. It’s enough to make Fox pull the plug. Which they did.

I can hear the question now though. If Fox were so against this then why the BDM (Big Damn Movie, Serenity)? Well, Fox is motivated also by greed. If you watch the BDM you’ll probably see that most of these themes are missing from it, or very much down-played. It becomes more a ‘little guy vs corruption and conspiracy’ than ‘winning doesn’t make you right and legality isn’t morality’.

Firefly died because it questions a few of the dominant beliefs of a very right wing station which sadly happened to also be the ones putting it on the air. Not a good combination.

]]> http://therealanswer.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/firefly-an-opinion-about-its-demise/feed/ 0 The Real Answer? http://therealanswer.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/crunchy-crunchy/ http://therealanswer.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/crunchy-crunchy/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:42:50 +0000 Matthew Weston http://therealanswer.wordpress.com/?p=103 ]]>

I’ve just read David Waddell’s very wise words over on his blog about whether debt is good, bad or ugly. He makes a lot of very sensible points about micro scale economics. In his example of Bob and his new sofas, for example, he’s entirely right that if Bob saved, rather than got his sofa on credit every time, he’d be able to buy more sofas in the long run. Bob doesn’t do this and the economy doesn’t encourage him to because of the very nature of our entire society. The short term is more important than the long term. Governments look no further than the next election. Businesses look no further than the next profit report. Individuals look no further than the next pay slip. There are exceptions to those rules, but generally people live pay slip to pay slip, saving and then spending their savings, putting a tiny amount into a pension and then regretting it in the long run. Businesses may have what they call a ‘long term plan’, but they’re usually only very sketchy beyond 5 years, and 5 years isn’t the long term. Governments are seen as over-stepping their legitimacy if they make too many policy decisions which run for more than their term in office. Etc, etc, etc.

Also, Waddell seems to ignore the fact that our currency is now debt. It’s not linked to anything more tangible than the debt we owe to the banks. If we stop borrowing or they stop lending then we’re in serious problems (hey… spooky). Because we can no longer be paid on demand the sum of £5 in gold, and instead are paid the sum of £5 in £s, we now need banks to keep providing easy to obtain debt and consumers to keep taking out more debt than they can easily finance. Bob may be better off if he figures out that saving will enable him to get more, or more expensive, sofas in the future, but for that to work as Bob intends it to work there needs to be enough other people who don’t realise it so the system keeps working and Bob’s money is still worth enough to buy him a sofa by the time he wants one.

He also overlooks the fact that the interest paid on loans made by the banks becomes available for re-lending. So a sea of consumers taking out loans is a good thing for lending as it generates interest which the banks can then lend out to more customers. Since the banks are able to lend many times what they actually have in reserves, and since the interest is theirs to keep, they can get a lot of money for lending from lending money.

It’s a brilliantly subtle system while it’s working. People believe the money they trade for goods and services is a unit of value. They believe it is worth something, because of that belief it is. If that belief disappears then the money they trade actually has no value at all. They can’t trade in the money at a bank for a thing which has value as a tradeable item such as gold, they can only trade in the money for different money. If they don’t accept the value of that money, where does that leave them? It’s in their best interests that they accept that the 1s and 0s in the bank’s computer which represents their wealth has value as they have no other recourse if they don’t. Belief is what holds the entire economic system together. That and the legal system deems it to be acceptable if someone will only offer to repay a debt they owe to you in the legal currency of the country you’re in, whether or not you believe in that currency’s value any more.

Waddell has a good point when it comes to the three phenomena of self-certification, 6 x mortgages and over 100% mortgages. However, once one accepts that money is debt (rather than value) and that the banks hoover up the money supply through interest payments, it becomes obvious why such things started to happen. The system needs larger and larger debts to finance the interest payments on the debt already in circulation.

There is a finite limit on what credit-worthy people can finance and are willing to finance. So they introduce self-certification to allow those who aren’t credit worthy to get into debt. Since this debt is secured against their house, which is going up in value, it doesn’t matter if they finance the debt or default, the bank makes money, the interest gets paid and the loan has created the money it needed to create for the system to work.

The banks lend money to everyone, even those who on paper can’t pay it back, and that fuels further increases in property prices, which helps the banks out because the defaulters’ homes are worth repossessing. Now, the increase in price starts to mean that people who should be able to finance a house can’t. So the bank increases the amount they will lend, because more people buying houses is good for them, both in interest payments and in house price inflation for future repossessions.

When you’re moving house there is almost always something you want to change about the house you’re moving to. Some small or not so small detail which is wrong. Now, if you’re having to give the vast majority of your pay to the bank so they’ll give you a 70 or 80% mortgage then you can’t make that change right away and may never get around to it. Many such changes will increase the value of the home, such as an extension. The bank wants your house to be worth as much as possible and so starts giving out 100% mortgages, so you can spend that 20% you’d saved on your extensions and remodelling. Lovely. However, word gets around that the banks are now giving 100% mortgages, so people stop saving that 20% and just want their house. The banks still want the house to increase in value by the addition of extentions and remodelling, so they up the percent they will loan to the borrower in the hopes that the excess will be used to increase the value of their home or buy some other retrieveable goods. If the mortgage is financed the bank gets its share. If not then its gets its share by repossession. This works so long as the price of houses is going up.

The reality is so stupid that it seems almost impossible that it would be allowed to continue. A bank shouldn’t be allowed to loan out almost $100,000 on a starting capital of only $1111.12 (part two of Money As Debt), but in effect they can. They can have $1111.12 and collect interest on almost $100,000.

The current credit crunch (God I hate that it got called that) was obviously going to happen. The system makes it inevitable. If we have the fossil fuel energy reserves left to claw our way out of the huge hole we’re in then it will happen again, unless we change the way banks and loans operate. We wont change a thing though because we like the illusion of prosperity that the system creates. We like to buy things today that we can’t afford until next year/decade. We like to have businesses able to operate despite losing £75 million in one financial year. We like these things and these things are what the system provides. There is so little real incentive to change the system that it wont be changed. I can even imagine post-crash societies which still operate this type of credit system. We’re short term animals. We like the benefits today and don’t care if it hurts tomorrow. We like it even more when the benefits are today and the pain might not be felt until after we die (see the way we treat the environment, the problems looming with peak oil and the lack of action, etc).

In my youth I was very anti-guns. Guns kill people. The argument that people kill people is stupid. Although it acknowledges that people will kill other people with or without guns, it ignores the numerous instances of people shooting each other by accident (something decidedly harder without a gun). This is especially relevant for children, who are able to get hold of keys, are very inquisitive and boastful, and who are not renowned for their ability to listen to basic instructions or their finesse and subtlety of grip.

It seemed to me that it was obvious that a nation with easy access to guns would necessarily be a nation with very high levels of gun crime and homicide. I looked at America and it was instantly obvious that this was the case. Things like the number of Americans, per day, dying from gun crime compared to the number of people in the UK made the case seem water tight. I was unshakable in that conviction for many years and got into many debates with people about the need for weapons.

Most of the people I argued against believed that hunting was the best and most sure-fire way to win the gun control argument. As a native of the UK, this argument was lost on me. We have no big game. We have no hunting traditions. We wouldn’t have anything worth buying 9mm ammo for, which we would be allowed to hunt.

Then I found out about the gun ownership laws of Switzerland. They have fewer deaths per year than America has per day. For this to be comparable on a per capita basis the population of Switzerland would have to be little more than 825 thousand. It’s 7.5 million. The rate of gun crime in America is around nine times higher. There must be a reason, other than the availability of guns, to explain this difference.

If you look at figures for homicide, America outstrips most ‘civilised’, democratic nations in the world. Compared to Finland, the US has around seven times the gun related homicide rates and twice the overall homicide rates.

Gun ownership is clearly not causing the murder rates, see Lithuania as a country with stong gun controls yet very high murder rate, so the question must become “What is?” And I think it’s clearly cultural. The US is in love with violence. The South Park movie might have its tongue firmly in its cheek when it has a parent saying that “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, so long as people don’t say naughty words” (or something to that effect), but it is clearly exemplified in the shows you can find coming out of the US. Very little swearing of any kind, yet lots and lots of violence.

Now, as I’ve matured, I’ve come to see what the Second Amendment is FOR. It’s not so some stupid Yank can go shoot some animals with a high powered assault rifle. It’s so the government fears its people. As Jefferson said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears its people, there is liberty.” Gun ownership should be about the prevention of tyranny, not hunting, nor defending oneself against ones fellow citizens. It’s about protecting your liberty against your government. You have a right to defend yourself against others within your society, but your gun is not the first or best means through which that should be done, the government is. Your gun’s primary purpose should be the protection of your liberty from tyranny, plain and simple.

Since I came to this realisation I have been in favour of fewer gun controls. The people should be able to buy armour piercing bullets, high explosives, high velocity rifles, assault weaponry, etc. They should because they need it against their government. You don’t need an AK47 to take down game, you need it to take out soldiers who are coming to take away your freedom, your property, or your/your families life. You don’t need high explosives to go fishing, you need it to make the government think twice about sliding into fascism. You don’t need a pistol in your bedside table in case of break-ins, you need it in case of late night Nazi-style round ups of your friends and family.

You need a weapon capable of protecting your liberty from the one thing most capable of taking it. Your own government.

The survivalist angle that you need guns for hunting come the collapse is also flawed. Ammunition has a limited shelf life, primers stop working, without the easy access to the means of maintenance guns stop being reliable, etc. If you want a gun so you can hunt you would be much better advised using the last few years of cheap, easily availability of everything to learn how to make an implement from natural materials and use it to hunt with. That will set you in a much better position to survive than having a static stockpile of ammo and guns.

Even the best, most prepared and most heavily provisioned person can be dropped by a stray/lucky shot. Making a strong point and defending it might be a very civilised way to go about self defence, but a nomadic, light and knowledgeable person, capable of simply walking away into the wilds and finding food and water has a much better chance of surviving the fall of civilisation. A house is a target for gangs looking for food. A shelter which is concealed, made by someone who can, if needs be, leave it at a moments notice and make another somewhere else, is much better.

Democracy, a wonderful thing. We are told this without end from the moment we’re really able to ask the questions. We are introduced to ‘our team’ by our parents. We’re told all the ways ‘our team’ is better than ‘the other team’ and therefore why we should support them. Our team. It’s like football. You support your home team because of whatever reason you choose and you back them to the hilt because that’s the only way you know how.

If your team does something you don’t agree with then, more often than not, you blame that thing on a portion of the team, the scape goats of the team, and life goes on. Your team is still your team, you just wish they’d get rid of all those goats. Then it’d be perfect.

Doesn’t matter which team you support either, this will probably be the way you vote. There are a very small number of swing voters. Voters who don’t treat politics like a giant and very long game of football. But are swing voters really any better than supporters? Swing voters tend between the two main parties, the home or away side. They don’t think, “Hang on a second, not four years ago I was actually for the other side and switched because of a, b and c. Maybe I should look for something else?” No, they go on flicking from Red to Blue Corporate Party, thinking that they’re making a difference.

I’m here to tell you that both left and right wing are attached to the same tired old bird.

Democracy doesn’t work. It relies on uninformed, illeducated, selfish, bitter people to be right most of the time. Taxes are essential for the multitude of things we expect from the government, yet if you put it to the vote, most people would vote down taxes. It would be ‘right’ within the democratic system. The government would then scramble to provide the things that people were still shouting for without the money to provide those things. If, after a few years of this, you were to ask people if they want more or less taxation, they’d again vote for less. They’d ignore the fact that they’d been moaning just a week before about the absense of services from the government and vote with their selfishness.

Civilisation is the bird. It has restricted the choices we have to its left or right wings. Civilisation believes itself capable of flying, but it’s falling.

I’m waiting for the people to start saying that the current financial disaster was unforeseeable. Like they did with the New Orleans levy. Like they did with the Iraqi civil war. It will be on every news network and the good little journos wont point to all of the voices who were crying out against the way we were doing business, just as they didn’t point out the numerous studies into the levy system, just like they didn’t point out the opinions that were bang on the money about the way the Iraq situation would develop.

Vote no one. No one is worth your vote.

It’s obvious when you hold a petri dish up and smear some bacteria on it that, without intervention, one day the bacteria will run out of resources and die. Our minds can comprehend that, despite the tiny, tiny size of the baceria at work, they will run out of food. We can see the full extent of their food, the resource we have given them to survive on. The Bacteria, we have to assume, is unaware that it is in a little biosphere with enough food to last it X amount of time. Once it starts multiplying it has half-X, a quarter-X, one-eighth-X, etc.

We assumes the bacteria doesn’t understand its situation because we imagine that, given the same set of circumstances, we would be more frugal with the resource, aiming to make it last as long as we possibly can. We assume the bacteria is stupid and we are smart. Indeed, when faced with a size of resource that fits into our field of view we can be very frugal, we can ration for ourselves and decide how much to use on any given day with the end goal of making it last as long as we can. When faced with a resource that doesn’t fit into our field of view we act like the bacteria.

It brings up Richard Heinberg’s question again: Are we smarter than yeast?

When you try and make them face the reality of a infinite growth system on a finite world, most people don’t have the head-space for it. You can try all you like to tell them that inifinity inside something finite doesn’t work. You can use the Kalam Cosmological Argument (intended as a proof of God’s/Allah’s existence, but serviceable), which hinges on Zeno’s Paradox to shoot down the idea of infinity within a finite space. You can pick numbers so astronomically huge and depletion rates so tiny and show them how steady depletion at that rate isn’t sustainable, let alone a growth in depletion rate. They tend not to comprehend. Whether this is a case of it being impossible to tell someone something that the way they lead their lives necessitates being counter to what you’re saying, or it’s a case of the failings of the education system yet again, it’s not important. You often can’t explain this in such a way as it passes the filters in place over most people’s minds. Growth is good. Infinite growth is highly desireable. Recessions are terrible. Ever increasing profits are to be rewarded with praise.

“We are imprisoned by our political Hippocratic oath: we will deliver unto the electorate more goodies than anybody else. Such an oath was only ever achievable by increasing our despoliation of the world’s resources. Our economic model is not so different in the cold light of day to that of the Third Reich – which knew it could only expand by grabbing what it needed from its neighbours.

“Genocide followed. Now there is a case to answer that genocide is once again an apt description of how we are pursuing business as usual, wilfully ignoring the consequences for the poorest people in the world.” – Challen, ‘We must think the unthinkable, and take voters with us,’ The Independent, March 28, 2006.

There are resources which are termed as ‘renewable’. The tag is often used interchangeably with ‘infinite’, but a lot of them aren’t. Trees are often called renewable, but they are certainly not infinite. They are renewable so long as they are used at a rate which they can recover from. Since we are losing over 2% of the forest cover of the planet each year, it’s not extreme to suggest we are using trees at a rate greater than they are replenished. We live in a growth-based system. If we are deforresting at a rate of 2% this year, then next year we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.04%, the year after that we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.08%, 10 years after that we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 2.54%, in a further 10 years we aim to be deforresting at a rate of 3.09%. That’s with the ’stable’ growth that most governments want of 2% per year.

If you change that to the more optimistic growth desires of large companies, who want to grow as much as possible but we’ll cap it at 5% instead then 20 years after that 2% starting point you’re at 5.05%. Of course, when you’re talking about organisms which need other organisms around to make their next generation then you’re talking about a much more complicated system, but if the rate of tree reproduction could be kept constant while this rising number of tree destruction continues then 20 years after the start of the 5% growth chart you’re left with about half the trees you started with. Small percentages result in a depletion that is horrific.

No one is really willing to accept that they may need to be paid less and less each year, mother culture has promised more and more money each year. No one is really willing to accept that they may need to have fewer and fewer things each year, mother culture has promised more and more things each year. The argument often spewed by those on the other side of the fence is that I just want to make you all live in caves again. That’s not really accurate. I’m saying one day we will probably be living in caves again, maybe not in our life time, but within the life time of our traceable children. I’m suggesting we might want to make that time as far off in the future as we possibly can. I’m suggesting we might want to control the decrease in resource use rather than have it dictated to us by the planet.

I’m only suggesting that people start to ask the questions, start to debate what needs to be debated. I’m also suggesting that a lot of the standard discourse around these issues is fog, smear, smoke blown out by large companies to hide the reality, to cloud judgements.

Where I to tell you a tale of someone being robbed, would you say anything like: “Well, they were asking for it. I mean, look at the house they live in. And why buy a huge TV anyway? A black and white TV would have been just as good and no one would have stolen that. Also, what’s with having glass all over the house? That’s just like asking someone to break it and steal stuff.”

No? Why not? Would you not, instead, say something like: “Robbers are jerks, fuck. I’d hate that to happen to me. I hope they catch whoever did it!”

If I were to tell you a tale about someone being hit by a car that mounted the kerb they were standing on, would you say anything like: “Well, it was their fault, walking along a street like that. They should know better than that really. They should stay away from areas where it might happen, then they’d be safe!”

No? Why not? Would you instead say something like: “Dangerous drivers like that should really be kept off the roads, they’re a total menace!”

Both of the above situations are intended to illustrate two points I want to make about rape. Why are the women held to be responsible for it? There are a large number of occasions where statements like “why was she wearing that?! I mean, come on, that’s almost like asking for it,” are seen as perfectly valid, even though the statistical impact of clothing on rape instances is negligible. There’s no evidence, other than anecdotal, which actually supports the theory that conservative dress actually diminishes the likelihood of being raped.

Also, there’s the fallacy that being in the wrong place is the woman’s fault. They were there and so being raped was the logical outcome. Statements like, “Well, what does she expect, walking down a dark alley alone at night?” are held as valid.

Clothing and location are very low on the order of contributing factors to rape. The biggest contributing factor? Being in any form of a relationship with a man. Never is it suggested that a woman doesn’t see or speak to her father or uncle, for example. Never is it suggested that a woman isn’t left alone with her brothers or any male relative. Yet, compared to clothing and location, these factors are much higher on the deciding factors of rape instances.

What am I getting at? The ‘advice’ isn’t worth the breath/paper/bytes it’s given with. It doesn’t actually address the problem. It doesn’t actually give real advice.

Men rape. Women are raped. The difference there? Men are the active ones, women are the passive ones. Actions or inactions on the part of the women are much less effective than actions or inactions on the part of the man. If we are to stop rapes it’s not the women we need to be telling and lecturing and giving advice to, it’s the men.

Advice we could give men? How about:

• No means no.
• There is no cause/reason/excuse to have sex with a woman who isn’t happy about it. This isn’t limited to situations where they say no. It includes situations where you have any ground to believe that the woman is uncomfortable.
• Not having sex should be your default. If the woman doesn’t seem interested then not having sex is the answer. If the woman seems uncomfortable then not having sex is the answer. Having sex should be an active decision involving both of you.
• It is not unreasonable for you to make sure sexual activities are with the consent of the person you are with. It is not unreasonable for a woman to say yes today, no tomorrow and yes the next day. Yes today does not mean yes at any other time. Yes now does not mean yes in an hour’s time, or the next time that night you have a hard on.
• “Why don’t you come in and have a drink?” does not imply sex. It implies a drink, but doesn’t even guarantee that much.
• An uncomfortable look means no. No means no.
• If she’s unhappy then it’s not a good time to have sex. If she’s drunk it’s not a good time to have sex. If she’s on drugs it’s not a good time to have sex. If she, in any way, seems to not be interested then it’s not a good time to have sex.
• It’s her body. It’s her body. It’s HER body! Not yours.
• She has the right to take back her yes. At any time. At any point. If you don’t listen then it’s rape. You are a rapist if you ignore so much as her negative body language. You can be inside her and she can withdraw her consent. She can take back her yes at any moment and it is your responsibility to listen to that.

Rape comes about because society doesn’t acknowledge a woman’s right to her own body. It doesn’t acknowledge that she can say yes or no at any moment. The biggest instance of this, the most disgusting high profile instance of this attitude that I know of is the case of R v A. The Labour government (they have done some good stuff, but then, you churn out that many laws and some of them have to stick) changed the law on evidence in a rape case so that the woman’s sexual history was inadmissible. The reason being two-fold:

1. If a woman said yes yesterday it’s irrelevant to today, she can still say no, the same applies if she said yes to someone, a group of someones, a legion of someones, she can still say no to you.
2. Rape cases were invariably turned on their head so the woman had to defend themselves from accusations that they were a slut when that is actually not relevant to her ability to say no.

However, in R v A the House of Lords said that the woman’s sexual history can be relevant to the case, and so ignored the law. They allowed a man to use the fact he’d had a sexual relationship with the woman in the past to be used as a defence. I’ll have to repeat that, they allowed a man to use the fact he’d had a sexual relationship with the woman in the past to be used as a defence. So the fact that she said yes at some point in the past was relevant to her decision today. The House of Lords effectively told all women, “Hey, if you’re think you might not want to have sex with a man, at any point in the future, ever, then you must never say yes. Saying yes at any point will allow him to assume you’re saying yes whenever he wants you. Your consent last week has an impact on our consent today and next month…”

Rape is something that is done to a woman (sometimes a man, mostly a woman). The raped are not responsible for being raped any more than the burgled are responsible for being burgled, the mugged are responsible for being mugged, the defrauded are responsible for being defrauded, etc. Yet the discourse of rape is such that one would be forgiven for believing that it is, or at best that the majority of people believe it is.

The media is, to a large degree, responsible for peddling this delusion. They never question it, only promote it. They could promote the idea that men shouldn’t rape, but instead they promote the idea that women should be responsible for not being raped.

Having read the FAQ page for COyou2, and having seen the side pannel of on of their pages advertising COyou2 Petz, I am almost certain this is supposed to be a spoof or satirical website, possibly even some kind of study in how amazingly stupid people can be.

I am unsure if there is actually a product to be bought. I am a little wary of providing my name and e-mail details. After all, I’d not sign a book which had “signitories of this book are morons” at the top of the page, and that does seem to be the implication of ordering a catalogue.

“The fact is that big businesses simply can’t afford to make the same sacrifices we can as individuals. We rely on them to make the huge profits that keep our economies alive. [...] BHP recently committed 0.2 per cent of their net annual profit to reduce its emissions and now reimburses its staff for half the cost of energy-efficient light bulbs in their home!” – FAQ page for COyou2

I don’t rely on them to make huge profits, and neither does anyone else. Some people may rely on them to make reasonable, sustained profits, but huge profits are what they want, not what is relied on. It’s also not desireable. Huge profits means huge exploitation. Reasonable profits imply reasonable exploitation, sure, and I’m not supporting that, simply pointing out that some people think it’s good.

I personally don’t think that 0.2% of their profits being devoted to reducing emissions is actually worthy of an exclamation mark. I think it’s worthy of derission and ridicule for being a pathetic and lousy amount. 0.2% is possibly as low a figure as they could possibly make it while still having the money actually buy anything at all. 0.2% is possibly even a government mandated amount.

Like beauracracies, the economy started as a tool for the use of people but has expanded to become something people are supposed to be enslaved to. We can’t possibly ask companies to not exploit people, because of the economy. The economy is more important than those people. We can’t possibly ask companies to take realistic, decisive, sustained action to prevent anything, because it might be bad for the economy. The economy is more important than animals or humans or the planet we live on. We can’t do anything to change anything if the change has even the slightest negative impact on the economy, because the economy is too important for us to risk anything happening to it. The Earth, on the other hand, that can be sacreficed at every turn, at ever step, because it’s not the economy and we don’t rely on it. Right? … Right?

Mankind lived for hundreds of thousands of years without economies. We wouldn’t last a year without the biosphere that supports us. But, maybe the economy is like Pandora’s box and can’t possibly be closed? Once it’s there it’s too important to lose? Once we have an economy, we no longer need biodiversity in our biosphere, because the economy replaces it?

Nope, the economy should be a tool. We should treat it as something to serve us, not something we must serve. It should have always been setup as such, but for some reason[1], we’re slaves to it and that is the way it is designed. The discourse of our society doesn’t even acknowledge the possibility that the economy is a tool. The economy is alive and hungry, and must be fed. It only eats lives, they’re cheap, right?

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[1] A reason that’s not too hard to work out, honestly. Power, those with it wanting to keep it.

So, I recently got directed to this site. Basicly it’s a ‘new innovation’ aimed at one of the ‘major emitters’ of CO2. Breathing!

As the site hypes, each of us are responsible for approximately 1 kg of CO2 per day, 0.38 tons a year! Multiplied by 6.7 billion, the site tells us, and you have a lot of CO2 being emitted. Now, I’m all for population reduction, as anyone who has read my blog will no doubt be aware. However, saying we need to be responsible for capturing our own breath with some gadget is just ludicrous.

1 kg of CO2 per day to continue to exist? I think we can afford that one, thanks. 700,000+ kg of CO2 from one company’s unhealthy snack foods per day?[1] That we can live without. The CO2 emitted by short-haul flights we can live without. The CO2 emitted by long distance commuters we can live without. Breathing is actually vital.

COyou2’s little device is such a waste of effort that I can’t imagine it being for real. I looked at the site and my first thoughts were “Oh, satire, how cute.” However, some people seem to be taking it seriously, so I’m worried that they’re actually a real company selling actual products to retards. Even if one were to accept that the CO2 from breathing were a problem worthy of innovation, this device doesn’t look comfortable. It would be a gadget which you might use once or twice and then just leave alone. Almost certainly causing a net increase in CO2 emissions.

I think one of the major gripes I have with the site is the contained implication that governments and business are doing all they possibly can, so much so that your pesky breathing is now a big enough contribution to CO2 emissions that you’re irresponsible for not capturing your own CO2. As if any part of that were even skirting the truth, or could even see truth with a high powered telescope.

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[1] Walkers’ crisps, a UK based company, sells over 10 million bags of crisps per day, each bag responsible for twice its weight in CO2 emissions.

Legal aid cases have never actually been the plum cases. A barrister has, for a very long time, been able to get substantially more money from doing jobs other than legal aid jobs, because of restrictions placed on the pay awards by the government. However, a lot of them saw the benefit of doing legal aid work and so did it alongside their ordinary practice since it is essential in our legal system that people should have adequate representation in court in order to defend themselves.

Laws as so complicated, the interactions between laws especially, that trained legal assistance is necessary in almost all legal matters. Because they are necessary and their job difficult to get into, they are able to charge a premium. Add to that the Labour government’s ability to pass laws like they are going out of fashion and you have a situation where more laws are on the books so more offences are being committed and so more representation is needed. The legal aid pool doesn’t grow in a concurrent way and so less money is available each year for each case.

Barristers operate a ‘cab rank’ principle, the first barrister available takes the case. They can only turn down a case if the fee is not sufficient for the task they are being asked to perform (or if it contradics their moral or ethical code). In a recent case that was abandoned because no barrister would take it the reason was because, once they’d added up the number of hours they would have had to put into the case and divided it by the “generous” amount they were offered for the legal aid job, they were expected to do the work at a rate of around £4 an hour, less than minimum wage.

Legal aid is vital. Cutting it is like admitting we don’t actually give a damn about justice (I know we don’t, but lets not be so brazen about admitting it, please?) or the right to a fair trial. We have trial by media anyway. There’s no smoke without fire! We cry foul when people are found not guilty because we are so certain they were, the papers and news told us they were guilty, so they must have been.

I’m sure the CEOs of major corporations would be thrilled if you said to them, “Right, while you make this product, rather than being paid 400 times the average wage of your workers in the UK (3000 times the wages you pay in a lot of the poorest countries), how about you get paid the same?”

As an aside, is the job a CEO does really worth 400 times that of the people on the bottom of the ladder? Really? If the CEO took the day off, would that impact the state of the company the same way as 400 average workers taking the day off would? No, so he’s not adding the same level of value as 400 workers. If the CEO stopped doing his job, would it take 400 standard workers to replace him? No, so he’s not doing a job so big he would need to be replaced that much. If he decided to work an extra day’s worth of work, does the companies profits sky rocket? No, so he’s not actually adding much value at all. It strikes me that CEOs have managed to create this club where they get astonishing levels of pay for a level of work that isn’t concurrent with the value they add to the company. If CEOs have to fire a handful of people to cut costs they should be made to take a 5% pay cut as well. In many big companies that 5% pay cut would be the same as getting rid of 20 people. There is nothing a CEO, a footballer, an F1 driver, etc does that is worth that level of money.

Unsurprisingly I am opposed to ID cards. Shocking, I know.

ID cards as being pushed on three main fronts: They will help the fight against terrorism, they will help the fight against crime, they will help prevent and return illegal imigrants.

The terrorism point is my favourite. It uses the public’s ignorance against them something cronic. Almost all of the terrorists involved in the recent terrorist attacks on the UK, Spain, America, etc, have had perfectly valid ID which they left in places they hoped it would get found. They are not like ‘old skool’ terrorists who wanted to plant their bomb and scurry away before it blew up. They are martyrs, they know their bombs will explode with them attached to them. They want that to happen, so who they are either isn’t important, or is very important because they have composed messages to be found once they are done.

The fighting crime point is also quite high in my list of amusing points. They have said, on many occasions, that this will not turn into a case of ‘papers please’. The police will not be allowed to ask you for your ID card during their routine stop and searches, so what’s it going to do for the fight against crime? Oh, of course. The lines about it not becoming a case of ‘papers please’ is just a smoke screen so they can get the cards in place. Once they’ve spent billions rolling out the system, forced everyone to pay hundreds of pounds for the right to be stamped like cattle, they’ll then realse! Oh my god, you know what, these don’t work as tools to fight crime unless the police can ask to see them! Convienient, the opposition will want to cry, but they will quietly allow the amendment because billions have already been spent and the cards are already in place.

Illegal immigrants do not, on the whole, get jobs with reputable businesses. They get jobs at very low rates of pay for businesses which are happy to exploit them. These businesses don’t care now if the person is illegally in the country, what difference is an ID card going to make? There are already in place perfectly viable and useable methods of checking if a person can legally work in this country, the businesses which employ illegal workers are the ones which don’t care what the check returns or don’t even bother to do one at all. There is enough undercover footage of people making it clear that they can’t legally work in the UK and these people being totally unconcerned for this to be considered fact. If the police can’t stop you and ask to see your ID, so how are they going to be able to use the system to find and deport illegals?

The police will eventually be given the power to stop you and ask for your ID card. The majority of people in this country don’t care about that though. They’ve no experience of being harrassed by the police because they’re white. ID card stop and searches will provide yet another reason to stop minority groups, to ask for them to prove their right to exist.

No computer system is perfect. Biometrics are not perfect. What happens if your details are lost or stolen? Can someone tell me how I can get a replacement retina and set of fingerprints please? Once your information is lost there are no ways of changing it. There already exists the technology to clone finger prints, if everyone in the country is on the database then there will be even more reasons for people to develop this cloning technology for all biometric data. Once you’ve lost control of your biometric identity, what then? When the technology is the sole arbitor of your right to exist freely, what happens when someone cracks the database and changes your bio-scans to their own? When your ID card says you’re not you, how do you get your details back? What happens when the more mundane happens and the biometric scanner returns a false when it should have returned a true? How long does that follow you for?

ID card supporters have ignored all of the questions and jumped on a knee-jerk billion pound bandwagon. It’d be sad if it wasn’t going to cost me a large amount of money.

I’ve read it over and over again. I have heard it time and time again. “Nuclear power is the answer!”

I want to just say at the start here: If you have arrieved at nuclear power as the answer, then you’re asking totally the wrong question.

Nuclear power is arguably even more dramatically wrong than squeezing out the last drops of oil, coal and gas from the planet and burning them all. Although one could form a strong argument that enslavement and potential explosions from fissile material stored incorrectly aren’t as bad as mass extinctions, mass starvation and billions of climate change refugees.

The end product from the nuclear process is horrific. Really horrific. It not only requires intensely specialist skills and equipment to deal with safely due to it’s deadly-dangerous, few-seconds-exposure-and-dead-on-the-spot nature, but it also requires long term care. Thousands of years after we have made use of the last dibble of power possible from the nuclear process our descendents will be training nuclear waste management professionals to deal with the waste of a process they’ve never benefited from.

Nuclear power is slavery. The master (each of us) takes the good stuff (the power) and the enslaved (our children and our children’s children) pay for it with sweat and danger and never see any reward. They are forced to taking care of the cheque because the cost of not doing so is higher still.

One of the larger myths is that you can simply pack radioactive waste up and hide it away harmlessly. You can’t. One major reason is that it’s still capable of creating a very powerful explosion if the containers are not separated properly. The separators degrade as they absorb the radioactivity (as is their job) and must be replaced, so you can’t just leave it all and go ‘ho hum, that’s sorted then’. Also we have to keep a lot of the waste in pools of cooled water, which means that energy produced by future generations has already been ear-marked for use on something we have extracted all of the benefit from.

The injustice makes it hard to fathom. How we treat our descendents at the moment is shocking. It would be many scales of magnitude worse if we not only sucked the fossil fuels dry but then also hacked out the uranium and used it all up as well. Every structure which supports our way of life is based on short terms, quarterly profits, yearly profits, the next election or our five year aim. None of it even thinks about the long term. No company is going to stop making their vast profits today because of damage that they’re doing if they can externalise the cost of dealing with that damage. The nuclear power industry does this. They don’t have to deal with their own waste out of their own pocket because they know they just need to hold the country they’re in to ransom. You deal with it, we’re done. If you don’t then, well, you don’t really want to know what then.

The nuclear process is not clean, don’t for a second believe anyone who tells you that it is. In fact, I have taken to laughing in the face of anyone who says that to me in person. The process releases various gases that are much more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide and some of which degrade over time into carbon dioxide, so you get a surge of high power greenhouse gas followed by a sustained period of less potent greenhouse gas. It also uses oil in the process of mining, processing and transportation.

And to those who might suggest thorium as a less nasty way of generating nuclear power than uranium I have this to say:

* We have no thorium reactors in the world that currently work as the theory intends. There a couple that have been shown can potentially work, possibly, maybe, but they are not being used as thorium reactors, they are being used as normal reactors because the thorium reaction process has a great many bugs to solve before it is commercially viable. Indeed, it is arguable whether it is possible to actually make it commercially viable at all.

* Thorium reactors take a long time to get up and running. A long time. From my research it’s time measured in decades. So even if we were to decide on thorium reactors we may not have time from our current energy sources to actually get enough reactors up and running and make the change over smooth.

* Thorium still produces deadly-dangers, long-lived end products. They are still deadly to anyone who spends a hand full of seconds in their presence and they still require the enslavement of future generations into waste management. Nothing you can do will change that, it’s a fact of the process.

* Finally the maths do not make sense. There is quite a lot of thorium available, which is its major attraction. There’s many times more thorium available than there is uranium. However, if you take into account the whole fuel cycle, from construction of the reactor, to processing the raw material, to safe storage of the end product, to deconstruction and safe storage of the radioactive elements of the reactor at the end of its life, the whole process uses more energy than it makes. If you start to put into the equation the harder to access thorium then it’s many orders of magnitude worse. Indeed, some of the proposed thorium fuel sources require more energy to mine and process than they produce, not even considering every other stage of the fuel cycle.

The reason we are likely to get nuclear power is that it creates many more jobs than renewables do. Sorage and management of the waste employs people, the nuclear power plant employs people, the transportation system required to bring the mined and processed material to the plant employs people, the mining and processing employs people. Maintainance of the wind turbine/solar grid/barrage/etc employs people, transporting the parts employs people, producing the components employs people. I think this quick comparison shows the difference in the number of employees necessary in each process. Shipping parts in the renewable process isn’t steady like shipping the mined and processed fuel is in the nuclear process. Maintaining the fields of units doesn’t require as many people as maintaining and running a complex power plant. Etc.

Nuclear power also has a much more powerful lobbying body, as there is (arguably) much more money to be made in the short term (the only term that matters in capitalist society as can be easily seen from the fact that we even have to discuss nuclear power).

And as a final thought, the tailings from the mining processes for all forms of nuclear reactor technology are themselves poisonous (as are the tailings from all mining operations, but radioactive tailings have an added kick) and are allowed to sit around so they can pollute rivers and other sources of water. The mining companies have promised to fill in the mines after they have finished with clay and the tailings they have extracted, but have yet to actually do this anywhere.

The framing of the discourse of our mass media makes it so most people don’t know enough to arrive at the right questions. The discourse is such that these questions don’t actually make it into the core premise of the reporting, leaving people with nothing but the wrong questions and thus the wrong answer. If every time someone suggested nuclear power as an alternative they were made to explain their position on the enslavement of future generations there might be some sensible debates. If every time someone suggested we need to secure our energy supplies and so need to build nuclear power plants they were asked how relying on other countries (since the UK has no uranium of its own to mine and use) is securing our energy supplies, we might have a sensible debate on the matter. If every person who suggests nuclear power were faced with the impossible to answer questions, the impossible to ignore reality, there might be hope for us.

We’re living on a very windy, wave battered island. We should make use of that. NIMBYs should be given a choice, wind power or no power. Neither isn’t an option, unless they want to disconnect their electricity supply they should be forced to accept that some places are windier than others, some places are better sites for wind farms and so some places must lead the way and have those farms built. We need some form of energy and we need to all take it on ourselves to see that the energy we get is as sane and responsible as possible.

Is a two party system really the way to achieve the best in terms of democracy? When those two parties represent totally different ideologies, and core beliefs I can see it working in a very binary way. Not that it’d be very democratic, just that it would be better than the situation we find ourselves in now, where the only wiggle room between the two parties, the only place to slide a piece of paper and say “verily, these are not the same party” is the colour of the backdrops. Do you like your representative to favour red backdrops or blue backdrops?

Sure, the Conservatives might vote against the government on some issues, but that’s politics. You can’t say “We agree with what this government is doing, it’s all great” because that’s exactly the same as saying “why vote for us, there’s no difference between what we want and what they want”. You have to provide the counter point, the argument, as to why the government is wrong in what they are doing. When pressed on why they were against the government’s plans more often than not the answer is because of minor details in the legislation. While I fully accept that minor details can create big problems and that the details need to be right, the answer which is given isn’t “we disagree with the need for X” it is “we’d do X different in minor ways”. That’s not a choice, especially for people who don’t care for X in the first place.

A two party state is a lack of democracy by virtue of the fact that it only has three choices. i) Pro-government, ii) Pro-opposition, iii) Protest vote. The system favours the government, since many people either believe that it’s better the devil you know or that things aren’t that bad under the current guy. This has given rise to the belief that oppositions don’t win an election, governments lose them.

A while back I heard about the “vote no one, no one would vote for you” campaign and thought it a terrible idea. The main reason I thought it was a bad idea was because abstaining doesn’t make a point. It’s counted as a lazy/apathetic person (recently you could also be accused of happithy, being too happy with the way things are to bother about the elections). This might be the reasoning behind some people not voting, but most people I speak to who don’t vote have reasons along the lines of “they’re all lying scum, why should I vote for any of them?” It’s not that they’re lazy, it’s not that they are apathetic (and it most certainly isn’t because they’re hapathetic), they just don’t see a choice they want to take from the limited stock on offer. They don’t want to vote for a minor party, since the minor party has no chance of securing power and they’re sick of the crap which the main parties are constantly engaged in.

Watching PMQs it’s easy to see why people don’t like politics. It’s all so scripted and fake. The PM has the questions before they’re asked, knows who’s going to make comments against his policy and who will support his policy. He arranges for some little lacky to stand up and ask him a positive question so he can look good and has had his script writers working on his answers to the opposition for as long as they could. Nothing is left to chance. It’s the same as the visits he makes to various places, where he turns up in a throng of people, all Labour activists, all asked to attend and look enthused. Fake.

The media has stopped calling politicians liars where ever they can avoid it. They opt for the word ’spin’ instead. The PM’s Spin Doctors. It’s lies. They’re liars. If you told someone a lie and when they called you on it you said “no, it wasn’t a lie, it was spin” they’d either clock you one or say it was a lie, since that is what spin is.

Why is there the need for spin? Is it because politicians are lying little weasles who wanted power for themselves and never had any intention of using it in a positive way for the community? Is it because 24 hour news coverage means that decisions must be made quickly and decisively in the glare of media attention, then defended whether or not it was the right decision? I think we’re seeing quite a few examples of this in Brown. He takes a few days to make big decisions, which is a really good thing. Big decisions should be taken with care and care requires time. However, Brown gets crucified for it, characterised as indecisive and bumbling by a media who waned the answer to the situation on the day the situation broke. They hate having a story open and running, it needs to be packaged and complete so they can bring in their experts to analyse it and the talking heads to debate if it was right or not. They don’t want to keep reporting the same story day after day since it makes them look bad. They can’t have that so they victimise the PM for taking his time and trying to get it right. I’m not trying to say he does get it right, but taking his time and gathering data is a much better way to get the right answer than to make a snap headline and then try to find out how it will work later.

In a two party state both parties move to cover the centre ground. That doesn’t mean moving to the centre of the political spectrum, but the centre of the general opinion of the country, so the UK’s centre ground is slightly right wing, while the in the US the centre ground is even further right, making their ‘leftist’, ‘liberal’ politicians seem to be the same as our right wing politicians. Parties move to the centre so they have access to the greatest share of votes, because all a politician cares about is being re-elected. Every decision they make which will see the light of day is about securing them another term in office. Many (I’d say every, but how would I prove it?) decisions that wont make the light of day is about self interest.

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill