Cigarette packaging row: Art entry # 2

Continuing the series on redundant, nannyish consumer advice.

Drink: here.

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Freedom is created by limitation

Seen via "Tom Paine", a discussion piece by Professor Sandy Ikeda on what a free society would look like.

I comment:

Why should we want a free society?

Do people mean by that merely, a society in which my own freedom is maximised? In which case, this has always been achieved - by powerful individuals.

Maybe a better way to approach the problem is to establish limits on the wealth, power and ability to manage public information and communication of those who most want dominance. Perhaps the key to freedom is restriction.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Technology, faux defence and oppression

(Why are the architects of our future Hell so fond of crap rock music accompaniment?)

The Mail on Sunday revels in a whizzy new gadget:

... and then tries to reassure us:

While Black Hornet is a priceless tool in Afghanistan, it is unlikely it could be used on Britain’s streets because of civil liberty concerns.

"Unlikely"...

As Shakespeare's murderous Scottish usurper says:

 ... But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught return
To plague the inventor.

The West has a history of using poor people in faraway places to refine the weapons they intend to use in their main agenda, even though it should ultimately come back on themselves:

Ethiopia, Guernica, Poland, London, Berlin.

Now we have cybersurveillance and Hellfire missiles, purportedly to protect us (the wholly good) from Puritans of a different religion (the wholly evil):

Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, ...your home.

Perhaps the first use will be against a terrorist cell in a remote Northern counties farmhouse; or kidnappers holed up in a tower block; or drug dealers on the Broadwater Farm Estate.

Even without our having to postulate malice, the logic of power is that it must be exercised, and (often incompetently) abused. Look at how our police have employed guns, CS gas, pepper spray, tasers.

But worst of all, civil governance has now entered the Information Age, as Orwell so presciently predicted. Already (I suspect) GCHQ is roboscanning everything you email, phone, Twitter or Facebook;  maybe also the titles of the books you borrow from the library, the programmes you stream onto your laptop or smart TV, your medical records, your movements as reported by your cellphone. If they don't, they could. If they can, they will, one day.

Fifty years after the first publication of "The Making of the English Working Class", E.P. Thompson should be here to write the sequel: The Breaking of the English Working Class. The poor were thrown off the land and into factories and slums, thus snapping not only their rural bondage but the bonds of obligation that also tied their social superiors. Noblesse oblige - but not richesse.

After generations of hard work and struggle there was a brief flowering of post-WWII prosperity and playful liberty. That is coming to an end here - though perhaps it is springing up in the New World of the East.

Now we have millions who are to be managed like useless and potentially destructive pets, and whenever they - or incoming competitors - look as though they may rise, a fresh wave of immigrants is employed to push them down another level.

And, like the micromanaging computers needed to keep the aerodynamically unstable F16 in flight, all this wonderful spying and coercive technology will someday be so useful in maintaining an otherwise totally insupportable social order.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Simon Beck's Snow Art

 

Doing the rounds via email, the intricate temporary-art snowfield images created by Simon Beck. His Facebook page and photo gallery here. 

 

Simon is an English cartographer (educated: Millfield and Oxford) who stays in France during the ski season, but is thinking about continuing his work in Norway.

 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Nick Drew: abandoning nuclear could kill hundreds in Germany

See the fourth and final part of the Denmark/Germany energy series here.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Nick Drew: abandoning nuclear could kill hundreds in Germany

See the fourth and final part of the Denmark/Germany energy series here.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Inside Spain: behind the protests

On World Voices, the Crunch news from a Spain-domiciled Englishman. It made me realise how little I know, and how much I want to. Here's some of my supplementaries:

1. The media in Spain: who and what would you read if as a foreigner you wanted to get at the truth (and what are their hidden biases)?

2. The 15-M Movement: how did it mutate? What are the Movement's personalities, images and symbols?

3. How are modern social media (Twitter, Facebook, iPhone video etc) stimulating and organising people within our democracies?

4. How does (doesn't) the weird party-list-based voting system work in Spain?

5. What are the Spanish Government's work creation initiatives, and do they work?

6. What are the effects of extra tax as experienced by business owners, wage earners, shoppers - and what do they do to get round / deal with it?

7. What are Spanish public servants like, to deal with?

8. What have been the effects of terminating contract workers in the public sector to save money, as a first resort before considering the need for some of the permanently employed?

9. What does  the increasing unemployment look like on the street?

10. How does the modern protest resemble (how is it linked with) political agitation and enmities in the past (cf Orwell in Catalonia)?

11. Who else has noticed the return of the beggars - and how are they different from the cripples and  beggars of Spain decades ago?

12. What is Spain's experience of immigrants, especially from non-EU countries? Are there any attempts to control their numbers? Any tensions, as in the UK?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.