occupylsx on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free
Wishing everyone a happy new year.
Saturday, 31 December 2011
Magic night last night! - attended Occupy LSX reading of Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol"
And you too are in for a treat because it was recorded for posterity as part of the Occupy LSX Livestream.
Wishing everyone a happy new year.
Wishing everyone a happy new year.
Tuesday, 27 December 2011
Occupy seems to be in Russia (even if they do not choose to call it that).
In Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has rejected calls for a review of disputed parliamentary election results. The contested elections have led to the largest protests Russia has seen in decades, with tens of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg. On Saturday, more than 100,000 protesters gathered in the capital. Opposition leader Garry Kasparov claims the controversial elections have galvanized opposition to the Russian political establishment.
Garry Kasparov, Russian opposition leader: "This is the first time that people have felt that they are the strong. It seems to me that this is a psychological change. There’s not the feeling anymore that there are a few of us and many of them. Now we have many. I believe that these people who come out, they are active, successful people. They need to use the internet not only for preparing these types of events and to organize themselves, but also to propose an alternative to the people in power, that power which is corrupt and incapable of solving the country’s problems."
Putin, meanwhile, has said there can be no talk of review and criticized the massive protest movement for lacking a unified goal.
From Democracy Now!
Well - maybe someone needs to send Putin this:
Garry Kasparov, Russian opposition leader: "This is the first time that people have felt that they are the strong. It seems to me that this is a psychological change. There’s not the feeling anymore that there are a few of us and many of them. Now we have many. I believe that these people who come out, they are active, successful people. They need to use the internet not only for preparing these types of events and to organize themselves, but also to propose an alternative to the people in power, that power which is corrupt and incapable of solving the country’s problems."
Putin, meanwhile, has said there can be no talk of review and criticized the massive protest movement for lacking a unified goal.
From Democracy Now!
Well - maybe someone needs to send Putin this:
Nobody should be forgetting the role that global warming is playing in this.
The International Energy Agency tells us we have five years until the window to avoid irreversible climate change closes. The science tells us that we have five years maximum. You’re saying, "Give us 10."
So what part of "five years maximum" is it hard for our ''leaders'' to understand?
Why all this is important, perhaps the most important thing you will have seen...
There was a news story on Slashdot just before Christmas that the Occupy movement that has managed to mobilise tens of thousands of people across the USA seems to have had little impact in Silicon Valley and the other 'High Tech' enclaves. I can sympathise to some extent with this attitude, if you have skills (as I do) that are at the moment in high demand then you have at the back of your mind 'I will always find something else' even if your current employer runs into financial trouble.
There is something deeper going on here than the grumblings of an increasing number of 'have nots'. What has grown up over the past hundred years or so is an economy based on bigger and bigger corporations with bigger and bigger investment needs which in turn has lead to more powerful banks and financial institutions to supply those needs. The upsides of all this investment is the modern world we now take for granted. Cheap manufactured goods to make our lives much easier than those of our great grandparents were.
There is however a big downside to this abundance. Corporations and Banks have no 'conscience' they are in fact legally obliged to take a course of action that maximises the profit for their owners. The only way for this 'greed' to be restrained is either by legislation (with the corporation equally obliged to try to find loopholes because of its duty to the shareholders) or by the greed of different corporations pulling in different directions. The positive side of the latter is competition that keeps prices down, but only to those consumers who have the power of choice. The darker side of this is a form of open warfare. We see this as all the stupid squabbles over Intellectual Property that corporations waste court time with.
What is more serious is that the self interest in the corporations of keeping things 'the way they are' means that humanity is not getting told the truth that it urgently needs to hear.
The truth is we are running out of time really fast. What I am just skirting over here you can found in detail by Googling for "The crash course".
This video is a very condensed form of the course that Chris gave to the Gold Money Foundation conference:
The simple truth is that we are a world of exponential growth, as our beloved leaders keep saying that growth is what we need to get us out of the current ''temporary difficulties'' with the economy, so that does not sound too bad, does it?
The problem with exponential growth is that even if the rate of growth stays the same the amount of growth is always accelerating. If you are in a speeding car and the brick wall you are heading for is a mile or so away the fact that the driver has his foot hard down on the gas is not that concerning. But how about if that brick wall is just 50 ft away? We are living on a world of finite capacity. Our now 7 billion population is way above what the carrying capacity of the earth would be without our wide scale use of fossil fuel energy.
The bad news is that there is not an infinite amount of this fossil fuel. In a way that is a good thing because we would inevitably make our atmosphere unbreathable if we did just carry on turning it into CO2!
The other bit of bad news is that with a growing population and growing demands for 'the better life' (who can blame us?) our need for energy is growing exponentially too. However as the amount of fossil fuels on the earth is finite the rate of discovery of new reserves has been slowing down for decades now! The ones that are found and go forward to production are progressively more expensive to exploit. The cost of the energy that is needed for the modern world is always rising.
A few years ago you could dismiss this if you wanted a closed mind as all just theory, but signs of the change that is upon us are now so obvious in our economy that only the truly foolish will continue to ignore them.
What of corporations? As they are obliged to run themselves for the profit motive it is hard to see how they can be expected to start taking that foot gently off the gas and help steer the human race if not away from the danger, at least on the optimal course through it.
What is needed is some other way to organise the human race other than the capitalist oligarchy we seem to have at present.
The Internet gives us the chance to get enough people educated to make 'for the good of all' decision making possible. The danger we are facing is just as real as if there was a comet heading on a crash course for Earth, and the urgency is just as great.
The Occupy movement is proposing we try for a fully inclusive global democracy.
The first stage of this is to make sure that the whole world is made to pay attention long enough from the distractions of football & fashon to realise we have a real and urgent problem here. One grave enough that all the long established vested interests that have kept things the way they are need to be questioned and have the light of truth shone on them.
I think you are probably fed up with hearing politicians say this because their sincerity is dubious but "we are all in this together" - unless you know of any Oligarchs that have built themselves a fleet of space ships! The earth has finite resources, that is a fact, not an opinion.
The idea that we all have to come to the hard choices together and take collective responsibility for those choices is not an ideal - but what are the alternatives?
Have some despotic oligarch make the decisions for you (in their, not your, best interests)?
Just share out the world's resources equally? A socialist utopia but doing it literally would never work (if you disagree with me I would be glad to expand my reasons as another post). We need a system that still motivates people to work but does not create 'non human' entities that do not have the well-being or even survival of the human race as part of their aims!
I do not pretend to have the solution to this, as many as possible of the 7 billion of us should talk about it though, you never know what new, better way, someone is going to come up with!
There is something deeper going on here than the grumblings of an increasing number of 'have nots'. What has grown up over the past hundred years or so is an economy based on bigger and bigger corporations with bigger and bigger investment needs which in turn has lead to more powerful banks and financial institutions to supply those needs. The upsides of all this investment is the modern world we now take for granted. Cheap manufactured goods to make our lives much easier than those of our great grandparents were.
There is however a big downside to this abundance. Corporations and Banks have no 'conscience' they are in fact legally obliged to take a course of action that maximises the profit for their owners. The only way for this 'greed' to be restrained is either by legislation (with the corporation equally obliged to try to find loopholes because of its duty to the shareholders) or by the greed of different corporations pulling in different directions. The positive side of the latter is competition that keeps prices down, but only to those consumers who have the power of choice. The darker side of this is a form of open warfare. We see this as all the stupid squabbles over Intellectual Property that corporations waste court time with.
What is more serious is that the self interest in the corporations of keeping things 'the way they are' means that humanity is not getting told the truth that it urgently needs to hear.
The truth is we are running out of time really fast. What I am just skirting over here you can found in detail by Googling for "The crash course".
This video is a very condensed form of the course that Chris gave to the Gold Money Foundation conference:
The simple truth is that we are a world of exponential growth, as our beloved leaders keep saying that growth is what we need to get us out of the current ''temporary difficulties'' with the economy, so that does not sound too bad, does it?
The problem with exponential growth is that even if the rate of growth stays the same the amount of growth is always accelerating. If you are in a speeding car and the brick wall you are heading for is a mile or so away the fact that the driver has his foot hard down on the gas is not that concerning. But how about if that brick wall is just 50 ft away? We are living on a world of finite capacity. Our now 7 billion population is way above what the carrying capacity of the earth would be without our wide scale use of fossil fuel energy.
The bad news is that there is not an infinite amount of this fossil fuel. In a way that is a good thing because we would inevitably make our atmosphere unbreathable if we did just carry on turning it into CO2!
The other bit of bad news is that with a growing population and growing demands for 'the better life' (who can blame us?) our need for energy is growing exponentially too. However as the amount of fossil fuels on the earth is finite the rate of discovery of new reserves has been slowing down for decades now! The ones that are found and go forward to production are progressively more expensive to exploit. The cost of the energy that is needed for the modern world is always rising.
A few years ago you could dismiss this if you wanted a closed mind as all just theory, but signs of the change that is upon us are now so obvious in our economy that only the truly foolish will continue to ignore them.
What of corporations? As they are obliged to run themselves for the profit motive it is hard to see how they can be expected to start taking that foot gently off the gas and help steer the human race if not away from the danger, at least on the optimal course through it.
What is needed is some other way to organise the human race other than the capitalist oligarchy we seem to have at present.
The Internet gives us the chance to get enough people educated to make 'for the good of all' decision making possible. The danger we are facing is just as real as if there was a comet heading on a crash course for Earth, and the urgency is just as great.
The Occupy movement is proposing we try for a fully inclusive global democracy.
The first stage of this is to make sure that the whole world is made to pay attention long enough from the distractions of football & fashon to realise we have a real and urgent problem here. One grave enough that all the long established vested interests that have kept things the way they are need to be questioned and have the light of truth shone on them.
I think you are probably fed up with hearing politicians say this because their sincerity is dubious but "we are all in this together" - unless you know of any Oligarchs that have built themselves a fleet of space ships! The earth has finite resources, that is a fact, not an opinion.
The idea that we all have to come to the hard choices together and take collective responsibility for those choices is not an ideal - but what are the alternatives?
Have some despotic oligarch make the decisions for you (in their, not your, best interests)?
Just share out the world's resources equally? A socialist utopia but doing it literally would never work (if you disagree with me I would be glad to expand my reasons as another post). We need a system that still motivates people to work but does not create 'non human' entities that do not have the well-being or even survival of the human race as part of their aims!
I do not pretend to have the solution to this, as many as possible of the 7 billion of us should talk about it though, you never know what new, better way, someone is going to come up with!
Monday, 26 December 2011
Ok here is my idea for some nice green fuel.
The worlds Oceans have quite a problem with Algal blooms, great choking masses algae that grow for many miles in places and cut out the light to the Ocean below. Scientists think that these are caused by excessive nitrates and phosphates in the water because of all the artificial fertilizer man puts on the earth. It is a problem that is getting worse. Doing something to help would be worth-while on its own. Doing something that also gets us a large amount of 'green' energy is well worth some thought.
What I am wondering is if it would be viable to lift this nasty stuff from the sea, in much the same way as Oil slicks are dealt with. It could be compressed and dried into fuel pellets that would be the ultimate green fuel. If we make a return to steam powered ships the whole operation could be self sustaining. Ships could burn the very fuel pellets they make allowing them to reach the harvesting grounds and bring back holds full of pellets back with them to burn in power stations on land. This is green energy because the CO2 released is not extra carbon from the ancient times, it is what the algae has taken from the atmosphere just weeks before. If the ash from burning the fuel was not dumped at sea there is the extra advantage that at least some of the unwelcome nutrients are being removed from the marine system too.
Algae grows quickly so I would guess that even a large fleet of harvesting ships would not be able to deplete the resource.
I would be pleased to here from anyone in a position to do feasibility studies of this idea.
A lot of the research on using Algae has been on the holy grail of getting special strains to produce 'green petrol'. My idea is distinctly 'low-tech' compared to this. It would be a great shame if the solution to our impending dire energy shortage is overlooked just because someone cannot see how to extort money from the rest of the world with an Intellectual Property argument.
Sometimes you don't need high tech, just a common sense solution that is technologically within the grasp of any nation.
What I am wondering is if it would be viable to lift this nasty stuff from the sea, in much the same way as Oil slicks are dealt with. It could be compressed and dried into fuel pellets that would be the ultimate green fuel. If we make a return to steam powered ships the whole operation could be self sustaining. Ships could burn the very fuel pellets they make allowing them to reach the harvesting grounds and bring back holds full of pellets back with them to burn in power stations on land. This is green energy because the CO2 released is not extra carbon from the ancient times, it is what the algae has taken from the atmosphere just weeks before. If the ash from burning the fuel was not dumped at sea there is the extra advantage that at least some of the unwelcome nutrients are being removed from the marine system too.
Algae grows quickly so I would guess that even a large fleet of harvesting ships would not be able to deplete the resource.
I would be pleased to here from anyone in a position to do feasibility studies of this idea.
A lot of the research on using Algae has been on the holy grail of getting special strains to produce 'green petrol'. My idea is distinctly 'low-tech' compared to this. It would be a great shame if the solution to our impending dire energy shortage is overlooked just because someone cannot see how to extort money from the rest of the world with an Intellectual Property argument.
Sometimes you don't need high tech, just a common sense solution that is technologically within the grasp of any nation.
Friday, 23 December 2011
Welcome to the Revolution!
2011 was the year everything changed.
'Free software has been around for nearly thirty years now and the Linux OS that powers so much of the Internet has just celebrated its 20th birthday. With the exception of a few small protests made by the Free Software Foundation against that pernicious evil of 'Digital Restrictions Management' the success of free software has been by the power of persuasion. One by one 'the geeks' have shown each other that there are better alternatives to paying a fortune for crappy commercial software. I remember when Linux first came really usable, Windows95 had not even been released. If you had a PC the only choices was buggy Windows 3.1 with 8+3 character file names or Linux with X11 that worked just like $20,000 workstations!
Although great strides have been made in Linux uptake (it runs at the heart of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and myriad other Internet age companies) there have also been numerous cases where Windows has survived and had large amounts of somtimes public, taxpayers, money spent on this.
Is there any connection I wonder between the status of Microsoft as a particularly powerful corporation and the dogged insistence that its products still get bought and used? Even when the logical solution would be for the users to choose the best in free software to deploy, and spend the money they would have paid year after year towards further development and refinement.
What I hope to do with this blog over the coming months is to explore how the new free and democratic society that the likes of Anonymous and the Occupy movement are in the process of forming with the Free and Open Source software community.
There is much to share in both directions. Tonight I would just like to leave you with some words from an ex CIA agent Robert David Steele who mentions that the Linux community is an example that the new movements can emulate.
It is a really exciting time with great changes about to happen. Will write again as soon as I can.
'Free software has been around for nearly thirty years now and the Linux OS that powers so much of the Internet has just celebrated its 20th birthday. With the exception of a few small protests made by the Free Software Foundation against that pernicious evil of 'Digital Restrictions Management' the success of free software has been by the power of persuasion. One by one 'the geeks' have shown each other that there are better alternatives to paying a fortune for crappy commercial software. I remember when Linux first came really usable, Windows95 had not even been released. If you had a PC the only choices was buggy Windows 3.1 with 8+3 character file names or Linux with X11 that worked just like $20,000 workstations!
Although great strides have been made in Linux uptake (it runs at the heart of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and myriad other Internet age companies) there have also been numerous cases where Windows has survived and had large amounts of somtimes public, taxpayers, money spent on this.
Is there any connection I wonder between the status of Microsoft as a particularly powerful corporation and the dogged insistence that its products still get bought and used? Even when the logical solution would be for the users to choose the best in free software to deploy, and spend the money they would have paid year after year towards further development and refinement.
What I hope to do with this blog over the coming months is to explore how the new free and democratic society that the likes of Anonymous and the Occupy movement are in the process of forming with the Free and Open Source software community.
There is much to share in both directions. Tonight I would just like to leave you with some words from an ex CIA agent Robert David Steele who mentions that the Linux community is an example that the new movements can emulate.
It is a really exciting time with great changes about to happen. Will write again as soon as I can.
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