I support Ron Paul for President (and I am not even American)

Just wish I was in the US so I could vote for this guy. This is just common sense. If you meddle in other peoples countries they are just going to get really mad. We need to go forward in a spirit of co-operation, not meddling and mistrust or else we are ALL DOOMED.

UK leaders have started making noises like Occupy but it is clear that they are only saying what people expect them to say. This guy is genuine. What he is saying risks making too many enemies for it to just be BS.

Obama has shown himself to be totally ineffective. Not just the US but the whole worlds needs the US to take a new less meddlesome, less profit orientated, direction.




The above is a long video but please watch - even if you are not someone who has the Republican nomination in your gift, if you share it those who can still choose may get to see it and realise it is time to be radical.

I really fear for the world if any of the other bozos get in. We have enough serious problems to worry about in the coming few years.

1. All the easy to get oil/gas/coal is nearly gone. What will the economy be like if we have to rely on water table polluting 'fracking' and super risky deep water drilling?
2. 'Rare Earth' minerals are getting very rare indeed. Some like Strontium, Silver, Antimony, Gold and Zinc are only a decade or less away from being completely mined out. The clue is in the term. They were already rare when the term was coined hundreds of years ago!
3. Much of the fresh water that the increasing population of the world depends on comes from ancient aquifers which only fill slowly over thousands of years. We are using fresh water much faster than the natural cycle of rain replenishes it! In that way it is running out just like oil.
4. Farm land is getting poorer as it is over used and lost to desert. Fertilisers depend on both oil energy to make them and the availability of minerals like Nitrates and Phosphorous. Clever science has done wonders in increasing crop yields but we cannot assume that can carry on indefinitely as the sunshine that grows the crops is pretty much constant. Uncontrolled population growth looks like finding its control in starvation - not good!
5. Oh! And Global Warming caused by burning all that fossil fuel that took millions of years to deposit. That climate change will cause issues such as more farm land becoming useless, more unpredictable weather etc. This just makes all of the above even worse.

You can find much more like this in Chris Martensons Crash Course book and set of Youtube hosted lectures.

War and preparing for war is SO expensive as a planet we just cannot afford it any more. The major military spending like $30 billion by Saudi Arabia just has to stop, right now.

The situation facing the whole planet is really really grave. All those bright minds and industrial capacity that is at present devoted to outrageously expensive ways to kill people (such as single fighter aircraft that cost over a billion dollars each) needs to be turned to finding real and lasting solutions to the very grave and urgent problems that we face.

I turn 50 this year. Retirement is still a decade or two away so I would like to have some sort of viable world to live in.

I think this trouble is coming so soon that it will affect the lives of anyone under the age of 80 - so that is most of us that need to be really really concerned.

What would instil the right sense of urgency? How about if we acted like a massive asteroid was going to hit us in 15 years and we have to work out either how to deflect it or develop large scale space flight to get off the planet? That is the sort of level of commitment I am talking about. Think of Apollo moonshot times 1000.

The world is gathering for the Olympics in London this summer. We have huge stadia ready and waiting. What needs to happen is for world leaders to fess up to their populations just how serious things are and that we use the time between sporting events there to have meetings with as many people involved as possible to sort out just how we are going to cope with the coming changes.

We need to plan for a soft landing. As I have already said war and preparing for war is the fastest way to destroy and use up what resources we have left. Just doing nothing at this stage will guarantee that a fight to the death for what remains is the only option humanity has left.

There is a chance for a much better outcome but we must act now. Governments the world over seem to be choked off from doing the right thing for the survival of their people by the vested interests of profit orientated corporations. This is what the Occupy movement means by the 1% controlling what the 99% needs to.

The choice is stark, we fight for life now, by not allowing people just to carry on in their complacent daydream, or fight to the death a decade or so down the line. Which would you rather do?

If you were the passenger in a car and you noticed the driver was nodding off would you try to wake him or just sit tight and shut your eyes, hoping not to hit anything! We need to wake the general population not through ideological reasons but self preservation. We need the majority to realise just how serious things are as their co-operation will be needed if we are to get through this.

The fossil energy fuelled Industrial Age is over. We have enough resources left (maybe) for a smooth transition to a more sustainable way of life, but not if we get dragged into more pointless wars like Afghanistan, Iraq and the now looming Iran.

My trip to OccupyLSX 10th Jan

Took the Jubilee line down to Canary Wharf for Occupy London to welcome back Parliament with ‘executive pay’ teach out at FSA in Canary Wharf a lively and interesting debate held on the pavement outside the FSA building.

Nice to see that Occupy is starting to have an effect in that MPs and Peers want to side with us against the obscene amounts that company bosses are awarding themselves in pay rises. It is clear that we have a system out of control here.

David Cameron's suggestion that company shareholders have more say over executive remuneration is no good because, as Robert Preston pointed out many shares in large companies are owned by other large companies. The people that make the decisions about which shares to hold and what to do at shareholders meetings are the very sort of senior employees whose compensation packages they are supposed to be monitoring!

Maybe it will take drastic action to fix this. Here's one suggestion, how about banning the practice of allowing one company to own the shares of another. This means all share holders have to be real living people, who hopefully will be more likely to act in the interests of the human race as a whole? If this does not work for the really big multinational corporations, then maybe it is because they are too big?

Later that afternoon I have a nice cup of tea in the Paternoster Square Starbucks. I got a chance to charge my laptop and while I was doing it found a very interesting film that may explain why a small number of 'powerful' people could have caused such a big mess. They are probably psychopaths!



What also was surreal was seeing the hundreds of metal barriers that had been crammed into the square in an attempt to discourage any though of the Occupy LSX camp expanding there. At least it is a nice steady source of employment for a small army of security staff now!

OpenSuSE 12.1 on an EeePC

The January 2012 Linux Format magazine comes with two distros to try, Fedora 16 and OpenSuse 12.1.

I had one of the original Asus Eeepc 701 machines, upgraded to 1G of memory, lying about so I thought I would try it out with both the disks.

First I tried Fedora 16, a distro I have already installed on other machines. It booted from an external DVD drive ok but then I soon ran into a problem as the 800x480 pixel screen on the Eeepc 701 was just not big enough to handle the installation GUI - I just could not see the buttons I was supposed to be pressing.

Moving on...

I am a long time user of SuSE and was in fact one of their first UK resellers back in the mid 1990s. I have more used RedHat (because of the commercial predominance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Ubuntu. I was interested to see how well OpenSUSE was now doing, given that SuSE is no longer part of Novell with the too cosy relationship with Microsoft.

The OpenSUSE install process coped just fine with the 800x480 screen on the ageing Eeepc. The original 4GB SSD which may have seemed generous back in 2007 is now too small to do anything sensible with. Luckily decent sized SD cards are now 'cheap as chips' so I did my install with the root and swap partitions on the original SSD and /usr and /home on a 16GB SD card.

The internal disk is about twice as fast as the SD card slot which is in turn about twice as fast as USB2.0 memory sticks which is the option for even more storage.

The original Eeepc came out before the Intel Atom chip. It is only a 600 MHz Celeron at its heart so is a bit too weedy for playing Youtube videos. However as a general purpose computer it is fine. This was the original netbook remember, it broke the rule that small notebooks had to be really, really expensive (or had to come loaded up with Windows you did not want). There have been better netbooks over the years but you should be able to pick up one of the original EeePCs for next to nothing.

I just thought that people would like to know that a bang up to date 2012 Linux distro works just fine on one of them.

I have also been making some use over the past few days of an even older computer. An IBM Thinkpad T23 running Linux Mint. Although it is only a 1GHz PIII chip it is a nice size for just doing a bit of net browsing in the living room.

The biggest drawback with that machine is that it only has 512MB of memory. For most things this
is no problem but I have found that after a while web browsers can get very large and make the poor thing start to swap.

Guess I will have to do some experimenting on being very frugal with how much information the browser is permitted to cache. On a machine with limited resources too much caching can be a disadvantage, especially if the Internet is so much faster than it would have been when that generation of computer was developed. We have to adapt to changing environments.

The point of this piece?

By choosing your software carefully and having some sympathy for the age of the technology it is still possible to make good use of computer gear that other people stuck in the Windows mindset would just consider 'junk'. This gives you a big advantage. Even a slow computer can be an active part of the Internet and draw from the huge shared store of knowledge there.

Taking the legal battle to the City of London

You will first need to read Scrapper Duncan's blog entry before anything I say here will make any sense. There is no point in me re-hashing all the core information about this.

OK then, for those who did not bother here is a very short precis:
* The City of London is undemocratic in that it's ruling council is elected mostly by corporations, not real people.
* This is in DIRECT CONTRAVENTION of the 1998 European Convention on Human Rights
* We counter this by getting enough actual people to establish that they live in the various electoral wards of the city (you do not have to be a homeowner to vote) so that they can outvote the corporations and force transparency on the City.
* If their registration of voters is opposed there is a full scale class action suit brought against the City of London for denying people their legal democratic rights.

London has many homeless, some of them may not be interested in helping with change, but the Occupy movement already has much to thank the homeless for. Many Occupy groups not only 'look after' the local homeless but in return get to learn valuable skills about rough sleeping and surviving outdoors.

If we could organize enough of London's homeless to choose to make their homes in the wards of the City itself, and officially state that they are living there then we can make phase 1 of this plan a reality.

The Occupy movement would have to provide support, for many months if need be. We need to go mobile. Both in the form of traveling soup kitchens so that the street sleepers can at least have a warm meal inside them, and coping for the other end of things, camper vans with toilet and washing facilities. Alongside the bodily needs would be the security that the World is Watching. The UK will be asleep but our American friends will be awake so there would be plenty of witnesses to victimization and assault against the people taking part in this historic action.

It is convenient that the Congestion Charge does not operate at night. What can they do to stop Occupy support vehicles from traveling the streets of the city at night? Declare a curfew?

These are just some ideas, as Scrapper says it is going to take a lot of organizing, and funding. The prize however is that the City is stripped of all its special status and becomes just another London borough. The current system is an anachronism so needs to end.

We really have no more time to humor these corporations any more. With their profit above all motivations they cannot be expected to act towards the goal of the continued survival of the human race. People need to be the ones making all the big decisions.

SOPA - BAD!

As I write this it is the middle of a global Internet campaign to protest about and educate the public about the dangers of the Stop Internet Piracy Law that the US wants to inflict on the Internet.

I am including here a couple of videos that explain the issues.

First with a creative use of sub-titles:



And also one of the many Anonymous information vids:

Richard Stallman was right all along!

An article from OS News states that for years RMS was viewed as a bit extreme by the millions happy to just reap the benefits of the Free Software culture that he started.

Oh how things have changed!

I would URGE everyone who sees the values of freedom and openness that have proved themselves in the world of Software over the past decades to consider joining, and offering any assistance that you can to your local Occupy movement. We need to stop SOPA and PIPA, the chilling effect on the Internet we know today will be global.

There is a new Occupy specific social network called Occupii. Join that or just find one of the many thousand of Occupy groups on facebook or follow one of the many thousands of twitter hashtags depending on your areas of locality,interest and expertise.

Just googling for occupy is a damm good start, come on thats just six keypresses and return.

Why the world needs the Occupy Movement

The public needs the sort of education that the state seems unwilling to give.

Too many people are just sleepwalking between the next football match or episode of Eastenders. The system we have all grown up with is unsustainable.

This is not just some crackpot theory, the cracks are not just showing, they are gaping! 

If we change now the earth has enough resources left for a reasonably 'soft' landing into a new sustainable way of life - but it will be quite different from the current one. We have absolutely run out of time to let the vested interests just carry on caring only about their own profits. The end of the road is here,now, this year. People all over the world are waking up to this reality. 

A key component to this is the end of ever more outrageous military spending. We are getting critical sort not just of Oil but of other raw materials including 'rare earth' minerals. To spend millions, and sometimes billions and the efforts of thousands of skilled people to make things that in the end  just get blown up is just plain nuts on a finite world.

We don't need the threat of nuclear weapons for mutually assured destruction, any conflict over finite resources that risks loss of those resources is a conflict neither side can win.


We will always need armies to protect against groups of people that are evil or just plain greedy. However the AK47 has proven over many years to be a very effective killing machine. Do we really need ways of killing men that are millions of times more costly so that military men have to think twice about deploying them? Eurofighter jets are over a BILLION dollars each! Bigger pieces of military might like warships cost multiple billions. The brains and production facilities used for such folly would be much better engaged in finding alternatives to the fossil fuels that are running out.


If we have more democracy and more emphasis on fairness and conflict resolution the need to fight should decrease.


We HAVE to at least give this new way our best shot. We cannot just carry on the way we are and the alternative is a very destructive global war fighting over dwindling resources, destroying many of them in the process.


Those in power hopefully have the sense,when they see just how many people already know the truth, to see that treating their populations as adults for a change and letting them take responsibility for  what happens to the human race next is the least worst outcome.

It is not going to be easy though, some people when woken from a pleasant dream can be very grumpy indeed. We have no choice but to work for a fairer world, we cannot afford to let it get to a fight as NOBODY will win.


That is the stark truth as I see it.


On the plus side it is more freedom for humanity but with freedom comes responsibility that cannot be shirked. Even if they really, really don't want to we must make everyone face up to their responsibilities as citizens. Everyone must pull their weight from the richest plutocrat to the poorest benefits culture 'reject'.