"The Chainsaws, the Chainsaws - they cut down all the trees. The Pixies, the Pixies, trashed their JCBs." 1

1. Do or Die, Issue Ten

"To attempt to seriously change the world is to put realismin the attic" 1

1. Do or Die, Issue Ten

"God save our yobs, we've demonised our future. Hoodies, yob, youth" 1

1. ???

"Everything that lives is holy but most of us are trying to escape our beautiful world." 1

1. William Blake

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger; it works the same in any country" 1

1. Hermann Goering.

"A nation that oppresses anther cannot itself be free" 1

1. Karl Marx

"There is no Wealth but Life" 1

1. John Ruskin.

Peak Oil

"The 1970s saw the first and second world oil crises. What we are talking about now is the third and final, crisis." 1

1. Chris Skrebowski, ???

We're animals ina zoo

"It's like we're animals in a zoo...It's not that we're not surviving. You kow animals in a zoo often adapt and they live long lives. And, suprisingly, if you open the gates they often prefer the zoo, because that's where they've been born. But that doesn't mean you have a full accopunt of what an animal's life can be like, if it's fully thriving as the species can." 1

1. Peter Kahn, ???

"Correlation ain't causation" 1

1. Unknown.

"Follow the money: A scientific consensus should be treated with scepticism if the consensus happens to suit interestes of the rich and powerful."

"Thw collapse of the global market place would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime." 1

1. George Soros.

"It's not about how much more we can give, so much as how much less we can take." 1

1. Vandana Shiva, July 2005. Ecologist.

As good as it gets?

No man "comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted or spurred to ride him" 1

"Under capitalism the strong are booted and spurred to ride the weak" 2

"In truth, the capitalist democracies of the 21st centuary perpetrate a double fraud...partly because the inequalities that are inseperable from capitalism are bound to spill over from the economy into the polity, and partly because the citizenry does not, in any serious sense, control the political class that is supposed to be its agent."

1. Richard Rumbold.

2. David Marquand, 27th June 2005. As good as it gets? New Statesman.

Social Justice - Equality of opportunity and personal responsibility

"If we are serious about equality of opportunity, he contends, we need to be serious about eradicating, all the influences that social class, race and family background have on life chances...Taking equality of opportunity seriously actually invloves keeping outcomes within a narrow range...In policy terms this would entail a huge expansio of schemes such as Sure Start...childcare...education...public health initiatives...food...capital grants to young people and a universal basic income." 1

1. Martin O'Neill, 11 July 2005. Only fair, New Statesman.

"Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa’s problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people’s lives." 1

1. Monbiot, 09/07/2005.

Opposition unites, proposition divides.

"Be quick to learn and slow to judge" 1

1. Unknown

"It's ok to take a step backward when you'er standing on the edge of a cliff" 1

1. Unknown.

"what sort of world is it, he asks, where we are told to believe that 'bombing is security', tht 'racism is crime fighting', that 'sweatshops are efficiency'? 'When things are this absurd' he says, 'we forget what evil is'. 1

1. Reverent Billy, June 2005. The Ecologist.

"We subsidise every cow in the EU by $2.50 a day and force the vast majority of peasants in Africa and Asia off their land to live on less than $1 a day." 1

1. Ziauddin Sardar, December 2005. Terrorists R US, Adbusters.

"the ledger is not complete until all the externalities are published" 1

1. Todd Boyle Deceber 2005, Adbusters.

"One day, I went fishing with Dad. As I was walking along behind him I was dragging my spear on the beach which was leaving a long line behind me. HE told me to stop doing that. HE continued telling me that if I made a mark, or dig, with no reason at all, I've been hurting the bones of the traditional people of tht land. We must only dig and make marks on the ground when we perform or gather food." 1

1. Galarrwuy Yunupingu, son of the Austrailian Aboriginal artist Mungurrawuy

"We the people must win control f society's most powerful means of expression. Without the ability to share our ideas and opinions, we cannot debate issues of make informed decisions." 1

1. Adbusters, Let's fight for a new human right

"[For the] Zapatistas...solidarity meant people making their own revlutions in ways which were relevant to their own lives. They argued that the fight for a new world, which would embrace the dignity of all, would need to be plural and diverse. Indeed was a fight for a world in which many worlds were possible." 1

1. Days of Dissent, The emergence of a global movement.

"False common interests weaken us, blur things and benefit the opponent - this is why they should be separated by space time and form of action." 1

1. Days of Dissent, We will disrupt this conference.

John Gray - ideas

"What does economic development mean at a time when the way of affluent societies is ceasing to be sustainable? IF scarcity of energy is going to shape our future, should we not be reinventing our cities as places of high-density living, where people can live o nfoot? Does a middle-ranking country such as Britain need a new generation of nuclear weapons?" 1

1. John Gray, 6 June 2005. NS, Essay.

Millennium Assessment

http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/Article.aspx?id=60

Ecological Politics

"...questioning the desirability of continuous economic growth, and the idea that nature is a resource that can be "conquered". Ecological ethics invovle the reduction of human impact on the planet and its resources, a balanced economy instead of a growth based economy, and support for individual creativity, craftsmanship, local cultures and cooperation in place of conformity, homogenity, mass production and competition. A new Ecology Party would work for a change in value...to work with the grain of the natural world, instead of against it as at present." 1

1. Aidan Ranking, May 2005, The Ecologist.

Can't eat money

"Only when the last tree has died and
The last river has been poisoned and
The last fish has been caught,
Will we realise that
We cannot eat money" 1

1. 19th Century Cree Indian

Work less, live more.

Politics

"Science has become politisised and politics have become comercialised" 1

1. Unknown.

Work play balance

"legislate to put employees family lives on a par with their health and safety." 1

1. Peter Wilby, 4 April 2005. Maternity leave: an employer writes, New Stateswoman.

Green Belt Movement in Kenya

"I used to say to the women, "If we say we are too poor to take care of the environment then it will only get worse. We have to turn it around and push poverty back. Planting trees breaks the cycle:when we can give ourselves food, firewood, and help to nurture soil for planting and clean water, then we begin to roll poverty back.""

The World Bank and International Monetry Fund may insist that internaional trade is the exclusive route to prosperity, but [Wangari] Maathai has proven that it's self-sufficiency on a micro level that is more efficient and sustainable." 1

1. Nicola Graydon, March 2005. From Tiny Seeds, The Ecologist.

To save Africa we must listen to it

"Two opposing narratives inform our understanding of Africa. The first tells of a continent undeveloped and underpopulated until Europeans discovered it and opened it up to trade and the benefits of science and civilisation. Until outsiders came, sub-Saharan Africa had no writing and no wheel. Its inhabitants belonged to thousands of ethnic groups which, outside the West African Islamic kingdoms, ruled themselves according to custom. Once colonial rule had been established, Africa's population leapt from 120 million in 1880 to 165 million in 1935. With the benefits of peace, stability, western education and science, it rose to 330 million by the 1960s. The colonialists left Africa's economies in reasonable shape, but after independence they sank back into anarchy and poverty. The cause: tribalism and corruption.

The other narrative goes like this: the continent flourished until Europeans started prowling around its coasts in the 16th century looking for loot. The loot they found was human - slaves - and over the next two and a half centuries, millions of Africans were ripped from their land and shipped across to the Americas to labour in mines and on plantations. That impoverished Africa and made Europe wealthy. The slave-trade wealth was invested in Europe, creating the industrial revolution. This in turn gave Europe a further advantage over Africa and a sense of superiority which Europeans interpreted as racial. That gave the impetus for imperialism and colonialism. Europe carved up Africa so it could more easily exploit Africa's mineral wealth and cheap labour.

Then, after most of Africa won political independence in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe kept its former colonies dependent and continued to manage the international trading system to its own advantage and against Africa's. As part of the cold-war divide, appalling dictators were propped up because they were "our" dictators. Furthermore, the western powers bound Africa's economies to them through loans that in time became unpayable, at the same time giving a pittance in aid to individual African countries. Those loans, this narrative says, are modern slavery. The thread in the cord that binds Africa in poverty and weakness is made in Europe and it is strong and long-lasting." 1

1. Richard Dowden, Monday 14th March 2005. To save Africa we must listen to it, New Statesman

Polititions

"Polititians can use laws, institutions, example and persuasion." 1

1. Richard Reeves, 21 February 2005. NS Essay.

Capitalism and greed

To papaphrase Michael Moore (badly), "one of the flaws in capitalism is greed. The greedy man will sell you enough ropre to hang himself."

Progress

"The past decade has brought the lowest inflation, interest rates and unemployment for 40 years and an unprecedented preiod of uninterupted growth. Yet mental health has declined sharpely. More than two million Britons are on antidepressants, half a million on Class A drugs. Binge drinking, and what Fromm called "acts of destruction" - violence, self-abuse and vandalism - have reached record levels." 1

1. Neil Clark, 14 February 2005. How we forgot the art of loving, New Statesman.

Torture

"We could introduce torture trading within the torturing community. Thus we could give a country with high torture requirements the opportunity to buy torture credits from a country with low torture rates." 1

1. Mark Thomas, 31 January 2005. New Statesman.

Immigrants

"What I would really love is for there to be a general strike of all first, and second-generation immigrants. The whole country would close down"

Testing Sensitivity

To illustrate how sensitive we can be in certain areas try exchanging words. Finding an article on women and try replacing the word woman with the word Jew or black. Would this article be acceptable now?

Thanks to Marina for that one.

Ecological Debt

"Ecological Debt is the debt accumulated by Northern, industrialised countries on account of resource plundering, unfair trade, environmental damage, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit waste. A particular and interesting aspect of it is carbon debt, as a consequence of greehouse gas emissions." 1

1. Alier, Simms, Rijnhout. Poverty Developement and Ecological Debt.

Luck

"The IRA's warning, after the bombing of the Conservative Party conference in Brighton 1984, that "we only have to be lucky one; you will have to be lucky always" has a new and more acute meaning in the age of new-style global terrorism." 1

1. Anthony Giddens, 10 Jan, 2004. New Statesman.

Bad Taste

"People buy "bad taste" because they are insecure about there own preferences." 1

1. Stacey.

Work

"I don't know how people find the time to work full time" 1

1. Nick.

Gardening

"Every person needs to have a piece of garden, however small, to keep them in touch with the earth and therefore with something deeper in themselves..." 1

"The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which joins one family." 2

"There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job, that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth everyone." 3

1. Carl Jung.
2. Chief Seattle.
3. Rudyard Kipling, 1911. the Glory of the Garden.

Why are you here? To be with friends.

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" 1

1. Freud.

Consumerism

Anything can be consumed; religon, protests etc.

Talking about conflict between economy and environment in Tasmania, "this issue will only be resolved once both sides stop looking at it as a battle, and treat it instead as a shared campaign for a shared future." 1

1. Paul Kingsnorth, December 2004. The Ecologist, Global Rescue.

"The one resource the developing world has in abundance is people. So why are we promoting systems of agriculture that negate this advantage and which seem bound to contribute directly to further human misery and indignity" 1

"Globalisation of responsibility" 1

"Industry without art is brutality" 2

1. Prince of Wales, 23 October 2004.

2. John Ruskin, ???

"Your hammer will always find nails to hit." 1

1. BENOIT MANDELBROT, 20 December. The Edge.

The Worlds First Multinational

"Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional way of life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these complaints were made against the British East India Company in the 18th centuary." 1

1. Nick Robins, 13 December 2004. New Statesman.

Short Term Profit

"Edward Goldsmith of the International Forum on Globalization provides an instructive apocryphal story of two friends who both inherit a 10,000 acre tract of forest. Friend one leaves his 10,000 acres in its pristine state, friend two sells the trees to McMillan Bloedel Corporation who cut them all down. He then sells the mineral rights and the topsoil, he fills the resulting dank hole with toxic waste. He then constructs a shopping mall and theme park. Friend one is labelled as a waster, friend two boosts GNP by $1,000,000s runs for office and becomes a senator" 1

1. Goldsmith and Mander 1996:15.

FOE Founder David Brower

"Think globally, act locally" 1

"We do not inherit the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children [and]...we're not just borrowing from our children, we're stealing from them - and it's not even considered to be a crime" 1

1. David Brower

Value of Nature

The value of the services that nature provides to humanity for free has been put at £18 trillion per year, nearly twice global economic activity measured by GNP. 1

1. Costanza et al in Nature. 1997, Vol. 387 pp253-260.

Development

The developing world and the over-developed world.

EDO and War

"EDO are proud sponsors of war and oppression all over the place. They might argue, as others have, that if they don't do it someone else will. This logic has yet to save a heroin dealer from being convicted." 1

1. SchNEWS 477, Friday 10th December, 2004.

IF

If you can keep your head when everyone around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you... if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you and make allowances for their doubting too... if you can wait and not be tired of waiting or being lied about don't deal in lies, or being hated dont give way to hating- and yet dont look too good nor talk to wise... If you can dream and not make dreams your master... if you can think and not make thoughts your aim... if you can meet with triump and disaster and treat them just the same... if you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools and watch everything you gave your life to broken and stoop and build it up with worn out tools... If you can take one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss... if you can force your heart nerve and sinew to serve its turn long after you're gone and then hold on when there's nothing in you except the will which says to them " hold on"... If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue or walk with kings nor lose the common touch... if neither foe nor loving friend can hurt you... if all men count with you but none too much... If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distant run, Yours is the earth and every thing in it and which is more...

YOU'LL BECOME A MAN MY SON!

by Rudyard Kipling

Compensation Culture

"In opposing our mythical compensation culture, Sunderland and Letwin are creating something much uglier: a risk culture. They are glorifying the risks which the powerful impose on the weak." 1

1. George Monbiot, 16/11/2004. The Myth of Compensation Culture, www.monbiot.com.

Planning

Plan monitor and manage or predict and provide?

Against Progress and other Illusions

"In the minds of believers we can overcome the laws of nature; science can make us gods. Nothing that humans do however, can prevent the earth returning to equilibrium." 1

"The human animal may yearn for peace and freedom, but it is no less fond of war and tyranny. No scientific advance can alter the contradictions of human needs. On the contrary, they can only be intensified as sciense increases human power." 1

1. John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and other Illusions.

Phychoanalysing Polititians

"Adopting a ready-made political role, one that all but crowds out any other aspect of yourself, provides identity, company and a pastiche emotional life. Because you expose your artifice only it feels phychologically safe." 1

1. Derek Draper, November 2004. My Generation, New Statesman.

"The system which governs our economic lives, which we call capitalism, is itself is a limited resource. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme. Let me try to explain this.

It is a built on a system called fractional reserve banking. Almost the entire money supply – generally, depending on where you live, between 90 and 95% of it – is issued not by the state, but the commercial banks. It is issued not in the form of notes and coins, but in the form of loans. Between 90 and 95% of the money supply, in other words, is debt.

To pay off the debt that is issued today, the banks must issue more debt tomorrow, and so on and so forth. In a world which is not based on material realities, the world which might exist, for an example, in a computer model, it could expand for ever. But in the real world, the supply of money is linked to material realities called collateral: the real wealth which gives the loans meaning, and without which the whole scheme would be exposed as a fraud. Eventually the amount of lending must inevitably exceed the availability of meaningful collateral, for the simple reason that the material world is finite while the possible issue of credit is not. That is the point at which the whole structure comes tumbling down." 1

1. George Monbiot, 06/10/2004. No Longer Obeying Orders.

Myths and facts

Myths

"there is no limit to human potential" 1

"the assumption that industrial and post-industrial development will automatically distribute wealth, rather than concentrating it" 1

"the resources required to bring this utopia about are infinite" 1

Facts

"At any rate of use, non-renewable resoures are, by definition, depleted" 1

"Beyond a certain rate of use, renewable resources are depleted." 1

"Beyond a certain rate of exploitation, renewable resources become non-renewable resources." 1

"The earth’s capacity to absorb pollution is limited." 1

"The system which governs our economic lives, which we call capitalism, is itself is a limited resource." 1

"The people who get hit first and hit hardest by any one of these realities are not the rich but the poor." 1

1. George Monbiot, 06/10/2004. No Longer Obeying Orders.

Europe and the US

"Rather than whinge about how horrid Bush and his cohort are, Europeans should accept US ideology and power and forge a real European identity and foreign policy as a counterbalance." 1

1. Lellouche, ???

Church of Satan

"Nine Satanic Statements, which include "Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence", "Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek" and "Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification"." 1

1.. BBC News, October 2004.

Speed, Time and Experience

"The machine city is pre-occupied with output; a future state. Speed is an attempt to beat time and bring the future forward. It reinforces our future-oriented 'mode of becoming' because the focus of the jorney is the activity (which we are rushing to. Speed also destroys the opportunity to experience the immediate environment at the immediate moment and divorces us from place." 1

1. David Engwicht, 1992. Towards an Eco-City.

Monoculture

"Mono-cultures, for example single crop farms, are inherently unstable. They must be sustained from the outside with massive supplies of fertiliser, water and pesticides. Ironically the farmer is fighting against nature's attempt to reassert its diveristy." 1

1. David Engwicht, 1992. Towards an Eco-City.

Forum Theatre

Theatre should bring about social transformation, and it should be "a theatre as politics rather than political theatre" 1

1. Liza Ann Acosta, 2001. Review of Augusto Boal's Legislative Theatre.

Planet Under Pressure

"Food: An estimated 1 in 6 people suffer from hunger and malnutrition while attempts to grow food are damaging swathes of productive land.

Water: By 2025, two thirds of the world's people are likely to be living in areas of acute water stress.

Energy: Oil production could peak and supplies start to decline by 2010

Climate change: The world's greatest environmental challenge, according to the UK prime minister Tony Blair, with increased storms, floods, drought and species losses predicted.

Biodiversity: Many scientists think the Earth is now entering its sixth great extinction phase.

Pollution: Hazardous chemicals are now found in the bodies of all new-born babies, and an estimated one in four people worldwide are exposed to unhealthy concentrations of air pollutants.

And underlying all these pressures is a seventh - human population." 1

" How many of us can live at northern consumption levels, and what level should everyone else be expected to settle for?" 1

"How can we expect poor people to respect the environment when they need to use it to survive?" 1

"And how can we act when sizeable and sincere parts of society say we are already overcoming the problems, not being overwhelmed by them?"

"The challenge we face is not about feeling guilty for our consumption or virtuous for being "green" - it's about the growing recognition that, as the human race, we stand or fall together." 1

"Living within the planet's means need not condemn us to giving up what we now assume we need for a full life, just to sharing it." 1

1. Alex Kirby, 01/10/2004. Planet Under Pressure, BBC News Online.

Corporate Free Press

"Power without responsibility, influence without accountability: 'the corporate free press' is an oxymoronic disaster for justice and freedom" 1

1. David Cromwell and David Edwards, 20 September, 2004. The editors are unrepentant, New Statesman.

Ideas

"Ideas are far morepowerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?" 1

1. Stalin, ???

Economic Equality

"No citizen shall be rich enough to buy anothr and none shall be so poor as to be forced to sell himself." 1

1. Rousseau, 1762.

Freedom

"The English people believes itself to be free, it is gravely mistaken; it is only free when it elects its member of parliment; as soon as they are elected, the people are enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such use of its freedom that it deserves to lose it." 1

1. Rousseau, 1762. The Social Contract.

Frozen Food

When you factor in the cost of freezing food, is frozen food the most expensive?

"the more powerful the government is, the less people take the personal responsibility" 1

1. Pat Murphy, 11 September, 2004. Locus Online, Global to Local.

"When you're a net importer or IP, there's no good economic reason to treat foreign ideas as sacrosanct property. Indeed, piracy and successful induustrialisation go hand in hand." 1

1. Cory Doctorow, 10 September, 2004. Global to Local, Locus Online.

Permenant

"Nothing is permenant" 1

1. Unknown

House of Commons

The house of commons is a house of "representatives". There are a lot of people representing middle aged men, who is representing everyone else?

Management Structure

In a pyramidical organisation, there's only so muc people can focus on.

"It [money] has value only as long as we collectively believe it does...the 70s raised the same doubts about money that the eighteenth centuary raised about religon." 1

1. Slater P, ???

"If we hurt what we take to be outside us, we hurt ourselves." 1

1. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, GreenPrint.

Philisophical Guerrilla

"The philisophical guerrilla should identify contradictions and push them into their opposites. Capitalism promises prosperity yet millions particualry in the developing world live in poverty. Despite wealth millions of others feel their lives to be pointless and boring. Despite freedom of choice we have little say in decision making. Despite the 'free market', multinationals call the tune. To achieve short term economic 'security', we are destorying life. Contradictions can be made more obvious and the owners of 'the mental means of production' put on the defensive." 1

1. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, GreenPrint.

Vote Green

"Vote Green, but don't just vote..." 1

1. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, GreenPrint.

Power

"We had better aim not at seizing power but at eroding, undermining, democratizing, decenteralizing and distributing" 1

1. Dave Dellinger, ???

Protection of Democracy

"Contradiction of how an institution as profoundly undemocratic and heirachical as our present army is supposed to defend a democratic system." 1

1. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, GreenPrint. Talking about Peter Tatchell's book.

Women

"Women constitute half of the worlds population, perform two thirds of its work, receive one tenth of the worlds income and own less than one hundredth of the worlds property." 1

1. Cynthia Cockburn.

Education

"The education system looks more like a grand and pointless intelligence test to separate the managed from the managers."

1. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, GreenPrint.

Community

"Soap operas about neighbours and community are billion viewer substitutes for real communities and real contact with ones neighbours." 1

1. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, GreenPrint.

Environment

"The environment is the base of all economic activity, and if we destroy it we destroy ourselves." 1

1. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, Green Print.

Freedom

"The kindest slave owners were really the most cruel because there slaves were less likely to seek freedom" 1

1. Oscar Wilde

You become what you hate

"You become - if only in part - that which you fought against. It is not inevitable, but only progressive and radical thinking protects you against peril." 1

1. Darcus Howe, 16 August. The hierarchy of skin colour presumes that Caribbean folk are at the bottom of the pile, New Statesman.

To Quotation or not to quote

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." 1

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ???

Me or you

"For the last 200 years philoposhers and poets and men of letters have said, 'Look inside yourself, understand yourself, focus on your memories,' I am saying 'No, look at other people. Find out what other poeple are like, they ar emore interesting than you. Try and help them. Inspire others and you will feel inspired yourself.' 1

1. Dr Theodore Zeldin, July 2004. Richer not happier: a 21st-century search for the good life, RSA Journal.

Money

"How you spend your money is how you vote on what exists in the world" 1

1. Vicki Robin, ???. ???.

New Curriculum

"Topics would include serving others; understanding and managing your feelings; maintaining your health; the appreciation of beauty; love, family and parenting; money and housing keeping; work; mental illness; political activity; and philosophical and religous ideas." 1

1. Richard Layard, July 2004. Have we solved the economic problem.

Boundaries

"Boundaries are always to an extent arbitary, but that does not make them any the less necessary in the maintenance of a civilised society." 1

1. Theodore Dalrymple, 9 August 2004. A nation of paedophiles, New Statesman.

Action

"The best way to inspire people to act is to provide them with the visible results of their actions." 1

1. Alex Greenwood, 26th July 2004. A subculture in the cybersalons, New Stateman.

Language

"When a language becomes extinct, a whole way of seeing the world dies" 1

1. Germaine Greer, 2004. Whitefella Jump up, Profile Books.

Individuality

"Does individuality exist in a world of peer presure, fashion and trends." - Unknown

Freud explains depression as "anger turned upon the self."

Democracy

"Governing a complex society needs technical expertise, but technical decision making conflicts with increasingly participatory and even populist politics." 1

1. Daniel Bell

Scale

"Things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale" 1

1. Richard Feynman

Blair and the War in Iraq

"It is not questions of good faith that matter, it is competence. In the use of intelligence, in diplomacy and in the absence of sang-froid that is required to take the most serious decision to go to war, this prime minister has been found wanting". 1

"The decision to take his or her country to war is the gravest that a prime minister can make. It puts at risk not only the lives of the country's troops, to say nothing of the lives of foeighn nationals, but also the country's future security and internaitonal good will... For Tony Blair now to say that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power borders on frivolity." 2

1. John Kampfner, 19th July 2004. Blair is weighed in the balance and found wanting, New Statesman.

2. He got it wrong, 19th July 2004. The New Statesman.

Market Economies

"The tragedy of market economies is that they have to create problems and needs, or their gears will gind to a halt." 1

1. Jonathan Rowe, July/August 2004. For the Common Good, The Ecologist.

Evidence

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" 1

1. Deep Sea Fish Farming, July/August 2004. The Ecologist.

Imigrants

"Imigrants are just following there wealth" 1

1. Unknown

Burqas

Women are frequently judged by men on their appearence. Wearing a burqa takes away the ability of someone to judge a woman on her appearence. This can be empowering for the woman.

Green Party Core Values Statement

"The values of caring, co-operation, nurturing and sharing must be encouraged to replace the values of competitiveness, domination and aggression which have characterised our society for so long." 1

1. Unknown.

Small is beautiful

"Schumacher wanted what he called 'intermediate technology' - technology that people could control, understand and fix themselves. He argued for human scale development and economics that kept the profit of work within the community, and that the giganticism of the multinational company was fundamentally flawed because it was out of proportion to the human scale. The only way to solve the environmental crisis was to go small." 1

1. Alan Shepard, May 2004. Is small still beautiful?

Hope and Faith

"As long as we have faith we have no hope. To hope we have to break the faith" 1

1. Arundhati Roy, April 1999. The Greater common good.

Contradiction in Conservation

There is a "contracdiction between cultural and ecological conservation" 1. No-one bats an eyelid when curry becomes the national dish of the UK, but it is a disaster when the grey squirrel moves in on the native red.

1. Adrian Rankin, 14 June, 2004. Escape from UKIP, New Statesman.

Trickle Up Economics

"After 'trickle down' (or so the Tories said), in which the more wealth for the rich helped the poor, comes 'trickle up'. If there's less poverty, the rich pay less tax (or so labour says)" 1

1. John Kampfner, 15 June, 2004. Politics, New Statesman.

Israel and Queers

"Israel: stop persecuting Palestine. Palestine: stop persecuting queers" 1

1. Outrage! slogan.

The Third Way

"...the disappearance of socialist utopias, globalisation, the development of a service economy and ageing populations. In the face of these, the First Way - classical social democracy, based largely on Keynesianism and traditional statism - has become largely obsolete. The Second Way - Thatcherism or free market fundamentalism - proved a disasterous alternative. The aim of Third Way thinking - revisionist social democracy - is to create policies for the centre left that respond to these changes." 1

1. Anthony Gidens, 7 June, 2004. Did they foul up my Third Way, New Statesman.

Emotion and Logic

Emotion gets in the way of rationality. If someone is being emotional then they are not being rational.

Ownership

"Ownership is theft" 1

1. Unknown

Why don't people feel connected to the environment?

Because they don't interact with it?

People spend hours on their computer, TV, indoors.

There is no local community.

"If your only tool is a hammer every tool looks like a nail" 1

1. Unknown

Democracy and Money

"democracy is impossible in the presence of capitalism or, for that matter, any system which permits the concentration of wealth" 1

1. George Monbiot, May 2004, The Democracy We Never Had.

Camera

"The camera may not lie, but we do to ourselves" 1

1. Lindsey Hilsum, 17 May, 2004. World View, New Statesman.

Wealth and Population

"Those who spent the 1970s and 1980s campaigning against overpopulation were lamenting not the evident surplus of white intellectuals, but the abundance of impoverished people with brown skins, [however,] human wealth has long been a bigger environmental issue than human numbers. The citizens of the United States, for example, each use 88 times as much energy as the citizens of Bangladesh." 1

1. George Monbiot, 15th May 2004. Just Fade Away, Spectator

House Building

'Just as new roads contribute towards congestion, building new houses will have the same effect - increasing demand...the government should be managing the demand for houses, rather than using short-sighted, and unsustainable, "predict and provide" policies' 1

1. Rob White, May 2004.

Convienience

Is your convienience at someone else's expense?

Money

"Money and the complex system that makes it work is a man-made product that we invented and yet, like Frankenstein, it has us all in its grip." 1

1. David Boyle, Associate of the New Economics Foundation.

Slow Revolution

Live your life slowly, appreciate, savour and experience everything that you do.

Time

"Time is not money, Time is life" 1

1. Micheel Ende, Momo.

Reality

"It is easier and less costly to change the way people think about reality than it is to change reality" 1

1. Morris Wolfe, PR consultant.

Ideology

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually, the slaves to some defunct economist" 1

1. J M Keynes.

Subversion of Advertising

I shop, therefore I am...(manipulated)
Don't blame me, I wanted to be 17 bicycles.
GOD bLESS AMERICA

Peace

"The first casualty of war is the truth." 1

"There is more receptivity for voices for peace when emotions are not involved in the name of nationalism, ethnicity, [class,] or religon." 2

"How many people's deaths in war a you prepared to accept so that you can sleep in peace?" 3

1. Ippy, December 2003. Knowledge is Power, Peace News.
2. Beena Sarwar, December 2003. Getting our Issues "out there", Peace News.
3. Jan Melichar, Winter 2003. War is Peace, Peace Matters.

Planned Economy and Market Economy

The main difference between a planned economy and a market economy is how the government intervenes - directly or indirectly.

Socialism

"[John Rawls said] deprived of knowledge about their own talents and abilities, [most people] would choose to live in an egalitarian society[...]The fear of being poor will outweigh the desire to be rich." 1

"The personel is the political" 1

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." 2

1. Andrew Heyward, 2002. Politics.
2. Karl Marx.

Politics

Politics isn't about me winning or my party winning, its's about people world wide, and the planet both now and in the future winning.

Revolution

So far in history no violence or war has ended violence and war!

Do you ever have the right do kill someone?

Have any of the people advocating violent revolution experienced violence first hand?

Resorting to violence shows that you have lost the discussion.

Majority Rule or Individual Rule?

"In 1962...Anthony Sampson portrayed this country as governed by a hereditary ruling class, for the most part educated at a few public schools and Oxbridge colleges, cut off from ordinary people and wholly unsuited to wield power in the modern world...now 40 years on...Sampson has produced a new book...today's meritocracy, which is the product and beneficary of that capitalist triumphalism, is enslaved to it money and soul...He used to be quite fond of arguing that the old aristocracy was particulary unfit to govern a modern society precisely because of aristocrats' snobbish contempt for trade. Now he has come round to the view that such ambivalence about money would be the ruling class's saving grace." 1

1. Peregrine Worsthorne, 26 April 2004. In sickness and in wealth.

Virtue Ethics

"One of the classic questions of philosophy is “what should I do?” However, from the earliest times some have argued that this question is less important than the question of what kind of people we should be. If we can become better people, they say, then good actions will follow naturally." 1

1. Rick Lewis, 2004. What is Virtue?

Our thoughts of Freedom are our cage

"As long as we think in terms of freedom, democracy and rights we will remain trapped in some version of our mournful melancolic paradise and continue to engulf others within it" 1

1. DR David Gamez, 2004. Pax Americana.

Potential of the Masses

"A more radical analysis of the potential of the masses is offered by Baudrillard, who suggests that they resist any attempt to control or oppress them through sheer inertia" 1

1. DR David Gamez, 2004. Pax Americana.

Just War and the Spread of Utopia to other Counties

"We can either fix problems with the spread of utopia to other countries, prevent the spread of our utopia to other countries, or give up on the idea that our society has achieved utopia and attempt to resist it...When spreading utopia to other countries using war, the war can only be considered just if a number of conditions are obtained prior to the first intervention:

1. The intervening country has to demonstrate that it has already achieved utopia within its own borders (Sweden or Denark are good examples of this).
2. The invading country has to demonstrate a respectable recent track record in achieving utopia by military force.
3. The intervening country must set out a detailed plan prior to invasion that explains how utopia is giong to be achieved with military force...including number of people likely to be killed...and a timescale foe the reconstruction of the country.
4. The intervening country must set aside a realistic amount of money for the realisation of this plan.
5. The intervening country must consult this plan as far as possible with the citizens who will be affected and with advisors from other countries, the UN, NGOs etc.
6. The intervening country must make a commitment to educate the population in the utopian (capitalist) way of life for as long as it takes to convert them to this way of thinking." 1

1. DR David Gamez, 2004. Pax Americana.

Fair Trade in the UK

"Later this year, the Soil Association will launch an 'ethical trade' certification scheme that will apply fair-trade criteria to British farmers and processors. How much do they contribute to the local community? How fair are the prices that they receive, the contracts that they award or the wages that they pay?" 1

"Supermarkets sell four-fiths of [organic] produce; imports though falling, make up roughly 56 per cnet. As has been noted frequently, food that has been airfrieghted across the globe may be free of chemicals, but it hardly carries a clean bill of environmental health." 1

1. David Nicholson-Lord, April 19, 2004. the food revolution that lost its soul.

Greens and Socialism

"The Green Party's Manifesto for a Sustainable Society incorporates key socialist values. It rejects privatisation, free-market economics and globalisation, and includes commitments to public ownership, worker's rights, economic democracy, progressive taxiation, and the re-distribution of wealth and power. The Greens have produced a re-green synthesis integrating policies for social justice with policies for tackling global warming, envrionmental pollution, resource depletion and species extinction." 1

1. Peter Tatchell, 19 April, 2004. NS Diary.

Labours Environemntal Policy

"The whole thrust of the government's envrionmental policies at present is to minimise their effect on the majority of voters." 1

1. NS Leader, 19 April, 2004. Do they really want to save the world?

Friendship

There are two types of friendship. Friendship that benefits you (selfish friendship) and friendship that doesn't benifit you (selfless friendship).

National ID Cards

"A national ID card program will actually make us less secure" 1

"Security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails" 1

"It will be forged. And even worse, people will get legitimate cards in fraudulent names" 1

"Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes" 1

"The main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database...Such a database would be a kludge of existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it...And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen and the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down until it's restored?" 1

"What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that." 1

1. Bruce Schneier, April 15, 2004. Crypto-Gram Newsletter.

Animals and Humans

The relationship between a human and an animal is the same as the relationship between a human and an adopted baby.

Free will of Children

"As parents claim the credit if their child succeeds and professionals say there's something wrong with the family if the kids do badly [what are the] implications of not trusting children to exercise free will" 1

1. Suzanne Moore, 12 April 2004. NS Essay.

Slow Food

"By 'slow food'...I mean food that is authentic, that had been grown and prepared using methods that are local, organic and sustainable." 1

1. Eric Schlosser, April 2004. Special report on slow food, The ecologist.

Fast Food

"Fast food is indeed factory food, perhaps the most heavily processed food on the planet, and the low-paid workers who defrost, reheat and reconstitute it have jobs as boring, highly regimented and strictly supervised as the workers in the 19th century textile mill would have had." 1

1 Eric Schlosser, April 2004. Special report on slow food, The ecologist.

Victims Licence

"We must never forget the appalling crimes from which they draw their [victims] licence. But if we really wish to ensure that it 'never happens again', we must judge people by what they do rather than by who they are." 1

1. George Monbiot, 13th April 2004. Victim’s Licence.

Finance Rules Politics

"Financial speculators establish the limits of political action: if a government steps over the political line and "loses the confidence of the markets", the economy collapses, and the government soon follows." 1

1. George Monbiot, 6 April 2004. Jump on our Bandwagon.

Coporate Advertising Tactics

"The sugar industry has learned the tricks of the tobacco industry. Confuse the public. Produce experts who disagree, try to dilute the message, indicate that there are extremists like me involved in public health." 1

These are also the tactics employed by the oil industry.

1. Professor Phillip James, 5 April 2004. Quoted in SchNEWS Issue 448.

Independence of Advertising

Companies shouldn't be allowed to advertise their own products as they are biased. Advertising should be independent. For example the Which? magazine.

Stimulating the Economy

Fashions allow for more products to be sold. They stimulate the economy.

Wars use up your weapons, requiring new ones to be built, stimulating the economy.

Quality verses Quantity

Houses and antiques were built for quality. Their value increases over time.

Most goods today are built for quantity. This has led to a reduction in quality. The value of goods built for quantity decreases over time.

What if everything was built for quality?

The manufacturing, mass production sector would shrink. The repair sector would grow. Repair is labour intensive and more jobs would be created?

Citizen's Income

Share basic needs as a right. Private enterprise can be used for anything else.

The minimum wage works against citizens income.

"If work was that good, the rich would keep it for themselves." - ???

Keynes and Economics

Keynes argued that you need governmet intervention to guide the market.

Keynes proposed a single nation independant currency to replace the gold standard. The dollar standard as a replacement to the gold standard gives the USA an advantage.

Economics is irrational as humans are irrational.

The system doesn't work, but we can make it work.

European Union

The bigger the EU gets the less consensus and more majority voting we get, hence the more unhappy people.

The single currency and European constitution reduce our 'policy space'. That is our ability to make fundamental changes to the way the EU runs.

"Europe...has been a success in almost every respect [socially and culturally] except the political." 1

1. NS leader, 26 April 2004. On Europe, vote, vote and vote again.

Schumacers Law

Wealth obtained from a finite resource must be used to make you independant of that resource.

Using finite resources as income is a recipe for disaster!

Richard Lawsons 3 axioms

1. You cannot expand forever in a finite space.
2. You cannot take forever from a fintite resource.
3. Everything is inter-related.

Needs

Basic (primary); air, water, sun, food, shelter, energy, waste disposal.

For a community (secondary); transport, communications, market exchange.

For a bigger community (tertiary); currency, financial services, market.

quaternary; arts, science, philosohphy.

Maslovs hieracy; physiological, safety, love, esteem, self-actualization.

The world should be needs led not finance led.

Ecology and Economy

Ecology is hte place we live, and economics is the management of it.

Funding of Politics

Politics should be funded publicly. This would make it impartial.

Eugenics

"According to Darwin, the mechanisms of the natural selection are thwarted by human civilization. One of the objectives of civilization is somehow to help the underprivileged ones, therefore to be opposed to the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest...Eugenists thus propose to promote actions to balance effects of natural selection mechanism loss within civilizations." 1

1. Wikipedia, April, 2004.

Monetry Reform

"Public credit, as measured by the proportion of publicly created money in circulation, has fallen from 20 per cent. of the money supply in 1964 to three per cent. today...Increasing the proportion of publicly created money should be used to cut the costs of, and to boost the quantity of, public investment...and this can be done without any impact on inflation." 1

"Why should polititians and economists endlessly claim that a carefully calculated supply of publicly-created money would be inflationary, yet, inconsistently, do not extend the same logic to the private banking sector, which creates virtually unlimited quantities of money [through interest baring loans] all of the time." 2

1. Prosperity UK, November 2003. New EDM calls for money reform.
2. EDM 323.

Blair's Labour

"In opposition, new Labour emphasised the need to reinvigorate the relationship between state and citizen. In practice, it has largely accepted the redundancy of political action in favour of economic action. It has convinced itself that in an individualised and consumerist age, the state must remodel citizenship according to market mechanisms. What the citizen should get from state, the government has decided, is the sleek delivery of the private sector. But in trying to consumerize politics, it has pulled the rug from under those who still want to act as citizens and to participate in remaking their political community." 1

"[The government] has, in effect equated economic efficiency with social justice. The state's old role of providing collective insurance against poverty and or misfortune has been usurped by the market. As long as people can find work...they can buy their own protection against old age and short periods of unemployment." 1

"The historic goal of social democracy, to make the markets the servants of the people has been inverted." 1

"find the right balance between market creativity and the protection of the public domain." 1

1. Neal Lawson and Daniel Leighton, 29 MArch 2004, Burn the village to save the village, New Statesman.

Terrorism

"...terrorism is a great leveller...before September 11th 2001, we lived in a world where American buyers of assets could use what amounted to free, manufactured money. The US was not paying for the wealth it was acquiring; it was just swapping worthless loans at the World Bank and the International Monetry Fund for it. When necessary, it sent in troops to grab assets - again virtually free of change...Al-Qaeda is restoring equilibrium to the market place. If the US wants to own Iraqi oilfields, it is going to have to pay real money." 1

1. Max Keiser, 29th March 2004. Letter of the Week, New Statesman.

"It is so much easier to destory and cause havoc. Yet every stone thrown could have been a brick laid." 1

1. Arnold Wesker, 29th March 2004. Diary, New Staesman.

Marxism

"Marxism offers a classless society in which wealth was owned in common, production was geared towards human need, and the state had 'withered away', allowing for spontaneous harmony and self realization." 1

1. Andrew Hayward, 2002, Politics.

Simultaneous Policy (see www.simpol.org)

There are certain policies that the government would like to bring in (anti-pollution laws for example, but cannot do so, as it would put the UK at a short term competative disadvantage to countries that don't intorduce similar laws. These policies need to be brought in simultaneously across the world, and then no one is at a disadvantage.

There is a Simultaneous Policy organization, with groups all around the world. Each groups is a block of votes in the particular country. This block of votes will go to any reasonable candidate or party that agrees to the Simulatanesous Policies. The candidate agrees to implement the policies when all or most other countries have also got a party in power that has pleged to implement the Simultaneous Policies.

As far as I can see this will need some sort of global decision making organisation with power to "see through" the implementation of the Simulataneous Policies, so why don't they just go for a single policy that doesn't need to be simulataneous, along the lines of, "we want a democratic global decision making organisation with global power"? This organisation can them come up with the policies.

Nuclear non-proliferation

"Those states which did not possess nuclear weapons would not seek to acquire them. In return, the states which already possessed them - the US, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom - would "pursue negotiations in good faith ... on general and complete disarmament". Libya is now in conformity with international law. The United Kingdom is not." 1

" If a nation like Britain, whose prime minister poses as a broker of peace and disarmament, has abandoned the non-proliferation treaty, is installing the capacity to build a new generation of nuclear weapons, has asserted the right to strike pre-emptively and is beginning, in short, to look like a large and well-armed rogue state, then what possible incentive do other nations have to abandon their weapons?" 1

"When your enemies are suicide bombers, and...have no direct connection to a nation state, mutually assured destruction ceases to be a useful threat. Your intransigence merely encourages proliferation elsewhere, and so enhances the possibility that nuclear material will fall into the hands of terrorists. The more we assert our strength, the more vulnerable we become" 1

1. Mark Thomas, 30th Marth 2004. The British Threat.

Marx

"Traditional Marxists argue that politics in a capitalist society is characterised by the exploitation of the proletariat by the bougeoise." 1

"Marx predicted that class expolitation would be overthorn by a proletarian revolution." 1

1. Andrew Hanward, 2002. Politics.

Politics and Private Life

Politics is "power structured relationships, arrangements where by one group of persons is controlled by another." 1

"The personal is the political" 2

1. Kate Millet
2. Andrew Hayward, 2002. Politics.

Politics

"Politics in it sbroadest sense, is the activity through which people make, preserve, and ammend the general rules under which they live." 1

1. Andrew Hayward, 2002. Politics.

Boredom

Boredom is not an activity, but a state of mind. The person who is bored is the cause of the boredom.

"There is no they" - Oliver Dungey, March 2004.

World Bank IMF and WTO

"World Bank and IMF have 1 one 1 vote. 85% majority needed. USA holds more than 15% which is effectively a veto." 1

1. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

Media

"The majority of the media limits our political choices by mis-representing them." 1

1. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

Communism

"With regards to communism, who guards the guards (leaders)." 1

"Communism in its simplest sense, is the communal organization of social existance on the basis of collective ownership of property." 2

1. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

2. Andrew Hayward, 2002. Politics.

Trade

"If we accept that preventing trade with Iraq impoverishes and in many ways threatens life of the people, we must also accept that a global cessation of most kinds of trade would have the same effect but on a greater scale." 1

1. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

Democracy

"The feedback to the democratic party in power is through elections." 1

"Democracy reflects the interests of the majority. What does it do to the minority?" 1

"Democratic restraints stop a democracy attacking people within, but not people/nations outside its borders." 1

"A democracy can be understood as a self refining experiment in collective action." 1

"Democracy has the potential to be politicallly engaging." 1

"Democratic choice is reduced as a result of te constraints introduced by migration of power to the global sphere." 1

"Consumer democracy. One dollar one vote. This is bad." 1

"Representation without participation is clumsy. Partial participation without representation is dictatorship." 1

Marjority democracy or concensus democracy?



1. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

United Nations

United Nations

"The five UN security council members that have the power of veto, the ones that decide how threats are handled are the five nations that pose the most serious threat to the rest of the world."

1. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

Happiness

"The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. " 1

Happiness should be given to others rather than taken for yourself.

1. Martin Seligman

Competition in Society

From an early age competative values are forced onto people. This is done through sports (winning), education (obtaining better grades than you mate). This is bad and in latter life people's competative nature is used to create success at the expense of other people (winners and losers).

Collaboration, team work and sharing should be encouraged, with the problem as the opponent.

"It's not about being right or wrong, it's about working together, sharing information and learning. You asked the question, I answered it. Good team work I'd say. We are both winners, but neither without the other" 1

"Everything is a competition...Evolution is a competition..." 2

Not any more. We have evolved to the top of the food chain. The only competition is against ourselves, which is pointless. We need to move to a post-evolution way of living.

"At present the logic of capital means that an 'advance' has to be implemented whatever its costs, lest a rival company or country develops it first and swamps us with missiles or cheaper consumer goods." 3

1. Rob White, April 2004.
2. James Adams
3. Derek Wall, 1990. Getting There, Green Print.

Localization

"The most obvious benefits of localization are:

(1) It protects local industries and economies from being undercut and undermined by distant competitors and global forces beyond their control.

(2 It prevents land-use systems, which are dependent upon these local economies, from collapsing.

(3) It helps people maintain control over their local natural resources. As George has himself reported, when crops are grown for export, peasants tend to be dispossessed of their lands by large commercial interests.

(4) It prevents wealth being siphoned away from the locality by distant interests or amorphous corporations. The more distant the market, the less the primary producer is likely to receive out of the final retail price and the more is likely to go to middlemen.

(5) It is easier to take stock of the environmental, social and animal welfare impacts of any product if it is derived locally. The UK government recognizes this under what it terms ³informed consent².

(6) It safeguards cultural diversity. Cultures and societies are defined to a large degree by what they produce and consume from the land and resources around them. Globalized trade destroys these differences and leads ultimately to one global McCulture.

(7) It promotes human-scale social structures. Localization rejects economies of scale in favour of economies of distribution, leading to more human-scale corporations and institutions, less division of labour and factory-style conditions. Lots of little brothers, instead of one big one.

(8) Reduced transport. Localization leads to reductions in carbon emissions, pollution and other transport impacts in respect of road and air freight (less so in respect of waterborne goods). In particular it cuts out the absurdity of ³cross haulage² (ferrying separate consignments of an identical product in opposite directions). " 1

"George Monbiot opposes localization because he thinks it will prevent poor countries becoming wealthier . . ." 1

"Localization doesn¹t, on its own, explain how the poorest countries can obtain the resources necessary to bring their standard of living and opportunity up onto a level with ours, even if ours should diminish to sustainable levels." 1

"However, if we accept that localization does not in itself satisfactorily address the issue of inequality between nations, it does not necessarily follow from this that localization is incompatible with a programme that does address this inequality." 1

"Here is a list of some of the main categories of potential wealth transfer from rich to poor countries consistent with a programme of localization;

- Processed materials. A key principle of fair trade is that added value through processing should generally take place in the country of origin of the materials, particularly where it is ergonomically or ecologically preferable (in line with the proximity principle). So coffee gets made into instant coffee in Tanzania or Mexico; timber is sawn into planks or made into plywood in Russia or New Guinea, rather than exported to timber-deficient countries as logs; copper wire could be manufactured in Zambia; West African bauxite could be turned into aluminium in West Africa, with West African oil or possibly solar energy; Third World oil could be refined or converted into plastics in Nigeria or Azerbaidjan, rather than exported as crude. All of this is consistent with localization policies: local industries typically grew up around a key resource, or a happy conjunction of two, such as grass, water power, woodland, iron ore deposits, or coal. George doesn¹t mention this at all.

- Specialist and quality goods. These are goods whose high quality or cultural distinction would allow them to remain competitive even if tariffs were imposed (eg Cuban and Indonesian cigars, oriental carpets, local crafts and textiles, Austrian scythe blades and Ferraris.) George doesn¹t mention this either.

- Tourism. Tourism is becoming increasingly important as a means of transferring wealth from North to South, and is expected to be the world's largest industry bt 2010. . A lot of its effects are extremely undesirable, both socially and environmentally. But an economic system which gave local people greater control over what sort of tourism they found acceptable would almost certainly improve matters. Once again, George doesn¹t mention tourism

- Economic Migrants. If rich people are allowed to travel round the globe for leisure purposes, then why should not poor people be allowed to travel for work purposes? ³Everything has been globalized except our consent² is the opening sentence of The Age of Consent; but George forgets that labour has not been globalized either. The WTO forces countries to open up their borders to goods, but not to migrants . If there were a free trade in labour the differences in wealth between countries would fade away in a very short time ‹ but there would be a host of other problems! To parrot George¹s phrase, there is no argument founded on justice for permitting corporations to sell their products wherever they like whilst preventing people from selling their labour wherever they like. It means that corporations can play the labour market to their advantage, but people can¹t. If justice is your aim, you must either allow free movement of goods and free movement of people ‹ or neither. As the Tupamaros used to say ³Everyone dances . . . or no one dances.²

- Aid. George does mention aid: ³Redistribution is simply not going to happen through aid . . . But even if, in a sudden fit of compassion, the rich world were to start pouring its money freely into the hands of the poor, this would merely trap the poor nations in patronage, dependency and blackmail . . .There has been a great deal of talk within the global justice movement of the need to compensate the poor world for centuries of colonial plunder, slavery and environmental destruction. But some of the proposals raised appear paternalistic: the rich world should forgive the debts of the poor world, or should raise significantly the aid it provides. What better compensation could there be than to permit the poor world to pursue its own path to development, if necessary at the expense of the rich world?² " 1

"Colin Hines¹ book calls for a ³redirection of aid, geared to help the rebuilding of local economies, rather than international competitiveness.² He cites land reform, micro credit , energy conservation, waste reduction, public transport systems, food production on allotments and wasteland and enhanced lobbying power for community groups as being suitable targets for aid. George gives no reasons or evidence as to why aid directed towards the empowerment of local self-reliant communities could not be an effective way of transferring wealth from North to South." 1

"Who will produce all these cheap goods once everyone is rich,? The people of China and Ethiopia ‹ however much money they may claw back from us ‹ can never enjoy the abundance that we do because there will be no further pool of cheap labour to manufacture their shoes and washing machines and answer their telephone enquiries at a fraction of their minimum wage. (but massive increase in living standards there) To become as wealthy as we are in the North, poor countries don¹t simply have to become free from exploitation; they have to have someone else to exploit. The advocates of unbridled trade are purveyors of illusions: the illusion that there are limitless resources somewhere the other side of the blue mountains; and the illusion that one day all the worlds¹ people will be able to enjoy the abundance that comes from exploiting a distant proletariat." 1

"The transfer of wealth from nation to nation, may seem important in remedying global inequalities, but it is far more important to make sure that all people have access to land, shelter, education, health care, shared transport, local food and some imported food for things they can't grow." 2

1. Simon Fairlie, 26th March 2004. Battle of the Manifestos, Chapter 7 debate.
2. Jyoti Fernandes, , 26th March 2004. Battle of the Manifestos, Chapter 7 debate.

Clip the wings of capital.

Re-branding the Trade Justice Movement

Most people inthe world have begun to realize the need for justice in the trade of physical items (event he government). However the trade in money is far more damaging to the developing world than the trade in physical items! People need to be educated of this. Should the trade justice movement therefore be re-branded to the "monetary Justice Movement"?

Lower Road Speeds

Imposing substantially lower road speeds, (as well as reducing accidents?) would make traveling by car less appealing as journies would take longer. This would move people onto public transport.

This wouldn't have too negative an impact on people who have to use cars (disabled, people living int he country etc).

Corporate Responsibility and Accountability

"The [proposed] Bill would make companies report on their social and environmental impact, and place a duty of care on campany directors, not jsut to return a profit to shareholders, but to care for the environment and society...Companies would be forced to give an accurate account of their behaviour. If their products were driving deforestation in Indonesia, biodiversity loss in the UK, slave labour in Guatemala, or illegal mining inthe Congo, they would have to say so. And once they admit it, they would have to do something about it." 1

Robin Webster, Spring 2004. Shopping the planet wreckers, Earth Matters Issue 57.

Vivisection

"Identical twins often react differently to the same drug, and usually suffer from different diseases. If human twins cannot predict each others' responses, how can we expect monkeys to be reliable models for humans?" 1

1. Ray Greek, March 2004. Cambridge vivisection lab abandoned, The Ecologist.

Military Intervention

"The second argument against intervention is that it will only ever be exercised against the weak. As David Rieff points out, it is impossible to conceive of force used against Russia on behalf of the Chechens, or against China on behalf of the Tibetans." 1

"One choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic principle: 'First, do no harm.' If you can think of no way to adhere to that elementary principle, then do nothing." 2

"...as soon as we accept that an attack by a powerful nation against a weak one is legitimate, we open the door to any number of acts of conquest masquerading as humanitarian action. As Chomsky points out, Japan claimed that it was invading Manchuria to rescue it from "Chinese bandits"; Mussolini attacked Abyssinia to 'liberate slaves'; Hitler claimed he was protecting the peoples he invaded from ethnic conflict." 3

"Surely then we need a new UN charter, not just to save the oppressed from the likes of Saddam Hussein, but also to save both humanitarianism and world peace from the likes of George Bush. We need a charter which permits armed intervention for humanitarian purposes, but only when a series of rigorous tests have been met, and only when an overwhelming majority of all the world's states have approved it. We need a charter which forbids nations with an obvious interest in the outcome from participating." 1

You can always do more though. Sending in unarmed peacemakers, and educators. However, this would be a slow process to bring about change and lots would be killed!

1. George Monbiot, 23rd March 2004. A Charter to Intervene. www.monbiot.com
2. Noam Chomsky, 9th April 1999. Judge the US by deeds, not words. New Statesman.
3. Noam Chomsky, ibid.

Tobin Tax - from http://www.ceedweb.org/iirp/factsheet.htm

A Tobin Tax is a simple sales taxes on currency trades across borders.

- Currency speculators trade over $1.8 trillion dollars each day across borders. The market is huge, and volatile.
- Each trade would be taxed at 0.1 to 0.25 percent of volume (about 10 to 25 cents per hundred dollars)
- This would discourage short-term currency trades,about 90 percent speculative, but leave long-term productive investments intact.
- The currency market would thus shrink in volume, helping to restore national economic autonomy. Nations again could intervene effectively to protect their own currency from devaluation and financial crisis.
- Billions in revenue, estimated at $100 - $300 billion per year, would be generated.
- Revenue could go into earmarked trust funds to fund urgent international priorities.

"MPs and councilors should be forced to ravel by public transport, use the NHS, government schools etc." - Kathleen James

Political Whip System

At national level, you are no longer electing a person, but a party.

The whip system in the major parties forces people to tow the party line (the Green Party has no whi system or equivelant).

Dollar is the main worlds reserve currency

The USA in her unique position as the issuer of the world's main reserve currency, means that her currency has, to date, been protected from the ravages of global and financial markets.

International Economics

"In the textbook model of the internatinoal economey, exchange rates are largely determined by imports and exports of goods and services. Poor countries will import more than they export, and will borrow from abroad to finance this gap. When the current account deficit gets too large, the currency starts to depreciate, increasing exports and reducing imports until a balance is restored.


But under financial liberalisation, through the globalisation process, has meant that exchange rates are no longer determined by the physical movement of goods and services, but by flows of capital...But the implications fo this new paradigm are that imbalances on the trade balance are often reversed through financial crises rather than gradual adjustment."

1. The new economics foundation, April 2002, The United States as a HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Country).

Pricing models

If you can afford to pay, pay, if you can't then its your for free.

Farming, Famine, Feeding the Third World

"There will never be any other industry that can employ as many people as farming". 1

"To be sure, farms need to be run as businesses. The peasant agriculture of Russia was primitively capitalist and worked far better than Stalin's collectives." 1

"The modern business model demands maximum generation of cash and profit, all driven by maximum competition. No one sensible denies that cash is necessary. Profit is not bad per se. Competition is an antidote to complacency. What is wrong is the stress on maximum." 1

Shortfall [of food production] is disastrous, locally and globally, but overproduction runs a close second to it. It leads to a glut. When prices plummet. Consumers might benefit in the short term, but if the farmers go bust, everybody loses in the long run." 1

1. Colin Tudge, March 22 2004, New Statesman.

National Political Issues

"Issues that matter to the people of this country - food, transport and public services, social inclusion and human rights, planning and the environment, asylum and immigration." 1

"The Green Party is committed to accountable and transparent politics," 2

1. Jean Lambert, 17th March 2004, LAUNCH OF GREEN EURO-MPS' END OF TERM REPORT SHOWS HOW GREENS HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE, Green PArty Press Release.

2. Caroline Lucas, 17th March 2004, LAUNCH OF GREEN EURO-MPS' END OF TERM REPORT SHOWS HOW GREENS HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE, Green PArty Press Release.

Al-Qaeda Aims and Objectives

In an al-Qaeda house in Afghanistan, New York Times reporters found a brief statement of the “Goals and Objectives of Jihad”:

1. Establishing the rule of God on earth
2. Attaining martyrdom in the cause of God
3. Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity

In 1998, several al-Qaeda leaders issued a declaration calling on Muslims to kill Americans—including civilians—as well as “those who are allied with them from among the helpers of Satan.”

Al-Quaeda are using globalization to defeat globalization.

Trade

"Whoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world and hence the world itself." 1

1. Sir Walter Raleigh

Supermarkets

"Each year a typical UK family generates 4.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide from their house, 4.4 tonnes from their car and 8 tonnes from the production, processing and packaging of the food that they eat". 1

1. Zac Goldsmith, March 2004, Why I hate Supermarkets, Earth Matters Issue 56.

Food

"Food accounts for 12% of jobs, 12% of household waste, and has a hugeimpact on tourism, and therefore on the ecomony." 1

1. Jenny Jones, Winter 2004, Green Food, Green World Issue 43.

Nuclear

"A nuclear war cannot be won and must neer be fought." 1

1. Mikhail Gorbachev

GNP or ISEW

"GNP is simply a gross tally of the financial value of all products and services bought and sold. There is no account taken of hidden costs, or distinction made between transactions that add to well-being, and those that diminish it:clearing up after major oil spills, or fighting wars, are great news for the GNP, but hardly for human well-being." 1

"The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) attempts to measure the true state of people's well-being by correcting GDP over a range of issues, such as income inequality, environmental damage, and the sepletion of environmental assets." 1

1. Caroline Lucas, Winter 2004, Interview with Caroline Lucas by Derek Wall.

Change

"Be the change you want to see in the world." 1

1. Ghandi

Prioritization of Work

The first time someone asks you to do something. Don't do it on the basis that if its important they'll ask you again.

Exploitation

"It took the exploitation of half the globe to make Britain what it is. How many globes would it take India to do the same?". 1

1. Ghandi

Overconsumption

"Quality of life isn't the same as consumption and that beyond a certain point consumption makes us worse off, not better". 1

Our over-consumption in the UK can be shown by our Ecological Footprint. This means the amount of land needed to produce the resources we consume. There are 1.7 hectares available per person on the planet (is this including the oceans???). The worldwide average is 2.3. The UK figure is about 5, and the USA figure is about 10. (From the 1997 study ‘Ecological Footprints of Nations’ on the website www.bestfootforward.com)

"20 per cent of the Earth's population currently consumes over 80 per cent of available resources. Whilst most Westerners lead lives of unprecedented material comfort fuelled by spiralling consumption patterns, 1.3 billion people exist on less than US$1 per day." 2

"Compared to the average citizxen of India, the average US citizen uses 50 times more steel, 56 times more energy, 170 times more synthetic rubber, 250 times more motor fuel, and 300 times more plastic." 3

1. Roger Levett, 11 March 2004, A rave review from Roger Levett (published in EG magazine), http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1853835110/ref=ed_ra_of_dp/202-1775575-1928651.
2. Earthscan, Tomorrow's World Summary, http://www.earthscan.co.uk/asp/bookdetails.asp?key=1918.
3. Derrick Jensen, March 2004. Most discussion of population misses the point. The earth simply cannot support our lifestyle, The Ecoligist.

New Economics

"Our leaders still treat economic growth as the main and overriding goal for society". 1

"Growth for the sake of growth is the idelogy of the cancer cell". 2

"Economic growth is only worth having if it makes people better off". 1

"Roll back the market as far as it will go" 3

1. Simon Bullock, February 2004, An ABC of New Economics. Change Your World.
2. Edward Abbey
3. Derek Wall, 04 April. Green Party Economics Day.

Loss

"I always drank from that cup as though it were already broken." - Unknown

"Venerate the things and people you love with your caring while appreciating them in the manner that only feeling their loss can provide" - Phillip Moffitt, Paying the Boatman

Fear

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Turn to the lawyers for justice - Stephen grey

When governments are so feeble, unions so weak and corporations so powerful, we should welcome the "compensation culture"

Thirty years of compensation litigation [in America] has forced manufacturers to re-engineer their products and make them the most consumer-friendly in the world.

[In the UK]...the introduction of no win, no fee was followed by the withdrawal of legal aid for most personal injury cases.

Deep Ecology - Stephan Harding and Arne Naess

1. All life has value in itself, independent of its usefulness to humans.

2. Richness and diversity contribute to life's well-being and have value in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs in a responsible way.

4. The impact of humans in the world is excessive and rapidly getting worse.

5. Human lifestyles and population are key elements of this impact.

6. The diversity of life, including cultures, can flourish only with reduced human impact.

7. Basic ideological, political, economic and technological structures must therefore change.

8. Those who accept the foregoing points have an obligation to participate in implementing the necessary changes and to do so peacefully and democratically

Artificially Managed World

The line of thought that says we should increase in numbers, material wealth and ease will lead us to an artificialy managed world.

GMOs

With selective breeding you are still operating within the confines of nature. With genetic engineering there are no limits.

"The biotech companies are not interested in whether or not science is flourishing or people are starving. They simply want to make money. The best way to make money is to control the market. But before you can control the market, you must first convince the people that there's something else at stake [scientist and researchers leaving the UK, or resolving world hunger]." 1

"This new wonder-crop [Chardon LL T25] is coming to us from the test tubes of Bayer CropScience, and will supposedly only be fed to animals- who luckily for Bayer can't say no!". 2

"Today's GM crops and those in the pipline are not intended primarily to raise total output or quality, but to make it easier to mass-produce crops with minimum labour". 3

"Present day genetically manipulated organisms are not intended primarily to feed people, but to give power to the corporations that develop them." 4

1. George Monbiot, 9th March 2004, Seeds of distraction, Guardian.
2. SchNEWS, 12th March 2004, MAIZE OF LIES, SchNEWS Issue 445.
3. Colin Tudge, March 2004, Golden Goose or GM Turkey, Earth Matters Issue 56.
4. Colin Tudge, March 22 2004, New Statesman.

""If we want local democracy, our locally elected representative bodies must be able to levy local taxes to provide the money for the local services that we want" - Muriel Parsons

Israel

"We need to build bridges, not walls". 1

"Israel is the guard dog of America's plans for the Middle East." 2

1. Caroline Lucas on the Israeli wall
2. John Piliger, 22nd March 2004, New Statesman.

Strength of Mind - Aadil Palkhivala

Mental flexibility is so important for our growth, [however if we are not careful] we can find ourselves trapped in a world where everything is relative, all options are valid, and decisions are nearly impossible.

As we learn different truths, we must be able to discern between them and clearly discriminate whether an alleged truth is appropriate for our own practice...This is strength of mind.

"The world is in a dangerous situation...It is not that we may simply blow up the planet with nuclear bombs, strangle ourselves with over-population, destroy natural resources through poor conservation, or ruin the soil and its products with improperly understood chemicals and pesticides... The problem is more basic: the root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive of ourselves as human beings; our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity." - Alan Watts

CO2 Emissions

Together, electricity and heat production constitute the worlds single largest source of carbon emission (39%).

Transport is the fastest growing contributer to global warming, and the second largest source of carbon dioxide (24%).

Rights

Humans have rights. Should the planet, animals and plants not have rights as well?

The need for law

Not all people will act responsibly and in the interest of the whole. Therefore laws are necessary to force people down a certain path.

Do you work for the company or does the company work for you?

EU

The nation state has outlived its usefulness.

EU seeks peace and prosperity through a free trade market.

The main problem with the EMU and single currency, is trying to apply one set of monetary rules to such a large and diverse number of countries.

The EU strives for Economic competitiveness and Environmental sustainability. These two goals are conflicting.

The MEP voting system is a proportional voting system. The UK is broken down into regions.

The EU is well placed to tackled European issues such as the environment, human rights, immigration, travel, how-ever it shouldn't be used to regulate local issues.

Feminism or the other way

There has been a gross sexulisation of popular culture.

The unrealistic, impossible standards of female beauty are a destuctive social control.

Outsourcing

In India a teacher gets paid 35p and an outsourced worker gets £140. This isn't good for Indians as teachers, nurses, engineers, even doctors will inevitably be tempted away from more socially useful emplyment.

There is no reason why an Indian worker, working for a Brisish company shouldn't be protected by British employment law.

Refugees

Prosporous countries such as Britain live off the backs of a new proletaria.

If they were specially lazy, they would have stayed at home. In reality the welfare seekers are far exceeded by the work-seekers.

The welfare state doesn't draw them here, the bouyant economey does.

Illegal migration simply pushes newcomers to the margins of society, and well beyond the reach of any solidarity.

Krugman describes his four principles of research as "listen to the Gentiles, question the question, dare to be silly and simplify, simplify".

Look out for the Black spot!

The mental environment

Social conditioning

"In the end the resistance was known for one thing - they simply would not participate. Not in the 24 hour economy, the 60 hour work week, the flag waving parades, the media mania, the permenant fear, the cheers for troops. And then there was teh mark of course. It crept into daily life until it became a constant reminder that these realy were bleak times. Until one day you no longer knew who was in control, the empire that was everywhere or this invisible revolution." - Adbusters

Facts

"With a twentieth of the world's population, the US produces a quarter of the worlds' greenhouse gas emissions. Emissions are up 14% from 1990 levels and are projected to rise by a further 12% over the next decade." - SchNEWS Issue 443

Now numbering more than six billion souls, the human population has doubled since 1950.

1/5 of the worlds population live in China.

The prison and the cost of holding each prisoner is £24 241.

Home office research shows that in a single year, migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, contributed £2.5 billion more to the economy than they cost in taking up services.

NS - The tyranny of targets

"Audit is an iron cage" - David Marquand

Targets stop you adapting as circumstances change, and they may force you to adapt your practices to the demmands of the audit process.

It is the nature of state employees that they play things by the book, referring decisions upwards, protecting their backs, sticking to establishment procedures. The penalties for unauthorised error are greater than the reqards of inspired sucess. Targets and central controls make public servants more risk-adverse, and less inclined towards...bold inovation.

The biggest threat to our future is not terrorism, but our own dependence on fossil fuels. In other words, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." - Unknown

The battle for the plannet - NS Essay - Mark Lynas

We are now in the early-to-middle stages of the sixth mass extinction to hit the plannet since complex life began 2.1 billion years ago. Species are disappearing at between 1000 and 10000 times the natural bakcground rate.

We are all deeply dependant on the "ecosystem services" provided free by the natural world. These include purification and retention of fresh water (and flood control); the formation and enrichment of soil; the detoxification and recirculation of waste; the pollination of crops; the production of lumber, fodder and biomass fuel; and the regulation of the atmosphere and climate.

The destruction of the natural world... is a consequence of...[our] evolutionary success.

The "contraction and convergence" proposal for tackling climate change knits both human equality and ecological survival into an elegant equation. Similary, we can protect biodiversity by stopping habitat destruction and countering the spread of alien species around the world, especially in highly biodivrse areas. And increasing women's control over their fertility is a straightforward way to reduce population growth.

Yet these proposals are so vast and all-consuming as to require a strong and durable consessus before they can be agreed or implemented. Biodiversity protection cannot be bolted on to existing growth-orientated economics. Contraction and convergence would require enormous resource transfers fro rich to poor countries, as teh developed world pays the developing nations not to follow in its own dirty footsteps.

The much-vaunted "clash of civilisations" is at best a distraction, at worst a racist fiction. Preventing the clash between human civilisation and nature is the battle we ought to be fighting.

Is this how to end public service failure - David Boyle

Put simply, "co-production" means that welfare programmes, policing and health need to be equal partnerships between professionals and clients.

End of the sex war - Jack O'Sullivan

"Both sides of the debate" says Coote, "have recognised that we have far more interests in common than in conflict."

Voting

Future generations have no vote.

Foriegn countries have no vote in decisions that will affect them.

The first-past-the-post system still used in local and Westminster elections encourages tactical voting.

Are there such things as human values?

Majority or Minority

Racial and religous majority and minority depends on where you draw the border. There are far more minorites in a world when it is divided into nations.

Would you kill someone for $3?

The number of people living on less than $1/day is roughly 1.8 billion; the number living on less than $2/day is on the order of 2.8 billion. More than 1 billion people worldwide lack access to adquate sanitation, and more than 800 million adults are illiterate.

Power and Politics

Powerful people want to hold on to their power.

"Power tends to corrupt" 1

"The task is therefore not to abolish polititiansand bring politics to an end, but rather to ensure that politics is conducted within a framework of checks and contraints that ensure that governmental power is not abused." 2

1. Lord Acton

2. Andrew Ayward, 2002. Politics.

Selfishness

How do you harness peoples selfishness?

Limbit speaking at Reading Town Hall 2004

In order to stop the shooting and bombing, you have to start the dialog.

If you make something illegal you cannot regulate it.

Politics is a means to an end. What is your end?

Information taken from the "End of Nature" - Bill Mckibben

We are no longer able to thing of ourselves as a species tossed about by larger forces. We are those larger forces...that is what I meant by the 'end of nature.

The most powerful ideology of all is consumerism.

Our oil dependence poses a security threat as well as the environmental one.

Imigrants are part of the solution, not the problem. If you don't like it there is plenty of space elsewhere on the planet.

When we have mastered science allowing us to create life, make planets and bring imortality what differentiates us from god?

"God is dead" - Nietzshe

God never lived.

We, all of us in the first world have participated i nsomething of a binge, a half centuary of unbelieveable prosperity and ease.

What do you do when the past (climate wise) is no longer a guide to the future?

Unless all act together there is little reason to act seperately. - World Watch

Some countries may percieve themselves as potential 'winners' in a climate change.

Even the countries that think they wouldn't mind warming of a degree or two can't endure endless heating.

If the change [climate] is slow enough you can study the problems, determine what the regional impacts will be, and learn how to adjust. - Stephen Schneider

Everything is one

Everything is part of the eco-system. Everything is one.

Science and Technology

We use science to fix one problem and unwittingly create another. We move the problem.

Earths Population

A reduction in the earths population solves alot of our environmental problems.

Is mother nature limiting the size of the human population through disease ie aids, and people choosing not to have children etc.

"The skies and we are weeping together" - Grimm's Fairy Tales

Can you be too politically correct and thus values neutral?

History

We tend to assume that the future will resemble the past.

Structuralism

We cut up the continua of space and time with which we are surrounded into segments, so that we are predesposed to think of the enironment as consisting of vast numbers of separate things belonging to named classes, and to think of the passage of time as consisting of sequences of separate events.

"Light makes potential colors into actual colors" - Aristotle

Family

"All my fathers brothers are my fathers".

Large extended family reduces presure on individuals.

Is it better to live with your family or friends?

Mental Experiments

Count to 1000.

Listen to the pauses in a conversation. Draw the space around an object. Taste the absense of food.

Security and Liberty

Citizens exchange liberty for security.

In the absense of any information there are too equaly likely outcomes, either something is, or it isn't.

There is an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1.

Free choice

People should have free choice unless it impacts on someone elses free choice.

Not all physical action comes from conssious mental action ie. breathing.

"The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" - Mad World

Virtual Reality

When VR becomes indistinguishable from life you will be able to do anything. Then, then only adventure left will be death.

Straw Dogs - John Gray

In Science, knowledge is an unmixed good. In ethics adn politics it is not.

The idea of progress is a secular version of the christian belief in providence.

The aim of life is not to channge the world, but to see it rightly.

Humans can be no more the masters of their destiny than any other animal.

Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith not science.

By submitting to the authority of science we can hope for similar freedom from thought (as religon).

Individual selfhood is an illusion.

According to humanist the earth had no value until humans came on the scene.

Did he jump, or was he pushed by events?

Freud believed that by bringing repressed merories into conscious awareness we can gain greater control of our lives.

The creature..is a collection of competing behaviours.

We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life willing decides nothing ie/ dreams, memory, sleeping.

Sciences' supreme value may be in showing that the world humans are programmed to perceive is a chimera.

Mr Nobody (Rees) a man without qualitis, a person without a sense of 'self'.

We are programmed to percieve identity in ourselves, when in truth there is only change. We are hardwired for the illusion of self.

Self is a still from the film of life.

Humans use language to look back on their lives and call up a virtual self.

The idea that we can rid ourselves of animal is the greatest illusion of all.

Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is a illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrender to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end.

Chuang-Tzu sees human life as a dream, but does not seek to awaken from it. He writes of dreaming he was a butterfly and then not knowing on awakening whether he is a human being who has dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is human.

Which untruths can we get rid of and which can we not do without?

Morality is a convienience to be relied upon in normal times.

Money corrupts everything that it touches.

Money and science is a bad combination, as money demmands return which rushes the science, often compromising safety.

GM foods may feed the poor, but there are better ways to help them.

Like beauty and intelligence, goodness is a gift of fortune.

When we are fully conscious, everything we do will be done for reasons we can know. At that point we will be the authors of our lives.

For Taoists...the freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has choosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as tehy arise.

What was humankinds origonal Sin? Temptation?

How does the suffering of Christ re-deem it?

From what and to what could this infinite whirl be saved?

There is nothing from which to seek deliverance.

Who is the perfect saviour...It is the saviour who shall deliver mankind from salvation - Buddha

Grand inquisitor - Humanity is to weak for freedom, and will worship the provider of ordinary bread. Jesus's teaching amended and founded on miracle, mystery and authority. Men rejoiced as they were led like sheep. And rejoiced as they were freed from the suffering that freedom brought.

Drug use is a tacit admission of a forbidden truth. For most people happiness is beyond reach. Fulfilment is not found in everyday life, but in escaping from it. Since happiness is unavailable the mass of mankind seeks pleasure.

We are inclined to think of hunter gatherers as poor, because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free - Marshall Sahlins

Do you own your possessions, or do they own you?

The move from hunter gatherer to farmer didn't improve quality of life, but allowed more people to survive at a lower level.

The function of this new economey (entertainment) legal and illegal, is to entertain and distract a population which - though busier than ever before - secretly suspects that it is useless.

Religon was church, then politics andnow science.

Future wars will be fought over dwindling natural resources.

So long as the population grows, progress will consist in labouring to keep up with it.

How can we enforce zero population growth without the use of draconian powers (By giving people control of there ability to become pregnant through the use of contraceptives).

Action gives us consolation for our existence.

How can there be any play in a time when nothing has meaning unless it leads on to something else?

If you know what you are seeking you will find what you seek.

Recomended retail price for food to stop the spread of supermarkets.

Make renting cheaper than owner occupying to reduce commuting.

"Learn only in order to create" - Unknown

See beauty where ever you look.

Death

When I die, if I died of natural causes would I want your friends to "cry over spilt milk" and be upset by the fact that I had died?

I wouldn't want my friends to "cry over spilt milk". I would want them to be happy about my life and accept that death is a natural part of it. Also I wouldn't want them to dwell on my death, as, in the whole scheme of things, my life or death is avery small cog.

If I didn't die naturally I wouldn't want my friends to "cry over spilt milk". I would want them to channel their attention and emotions into ensuring that no-one else's life was wasted in the same way.

"If indeed our fear of Death and our desire for Immortality are as unquenchable as Brown rightly points out, then we shall never reconcile with Death, The Immortalist Manifesto argues. But instead humanity will track it down as "the last enemy" to be conquered. Only when Death is vanquished shall we be free from the bondage of Alienation, Repression, and Oppression." 1

1. A reader from Yale, New Haven, USA, June 12, 2002.

Work - TBC - Arguments need tidying up and clarifying

Practice or Policy?
You need practice before you can specify policy. The practice needs to be ongoing to keep up to date.

Saving the Environment or International Development
Environmentally countries need to be able to help themselves. As the saying goes, you can give a person a fish and they'll eat for a week, teach a person how to fish and they'll eat forever. For a country to help itself the people need to be mobilised. If the people are starving, diseased and have no access to clean water this cannot happen. People will quite rightly be obsessed with the day to day activies required to stay alive, rather than the long term future of their country and the world. Therefore, if you want a country's people to look after their own environment, starvation, disease, and water problems need to be resolved first. For these problems to be resolved assistence is required from developed country's governmental, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Until all countries are able to look to the long term, and sustainably manage their own environments, again, it is necessary for developed countries to provide assistence, both through governmental organisations and, NGOs.

Most developed countries are democracies. A democracy represents the wishes of the majority of the people (the "popularity contest" nature of democracy brings into question its very essence, as no government is going to do the "right thing", if it means losing the next election! This forces politics to operate on a very short term basis, when it should be focused on the long term). As the majority of people are either consiously or unconciously selfish (no matter how trivial a problem is, if its your problem, it will always seem far more important than anyone elses), the governments of these developed democracies are forced to focus on national problems that directly effect people, rather than international problems whos effect is too far away to have any physical impact. The government cannot therefore be relied on to do the right thing with regards to other countries and the environemnt, so, we must look to NGOs as the main source of action.

Opt in or out
You can either get out of the rat race and lead a life of contemplation, or enter the rat race and lead a life of action.

Polititians are elected representatives

Do polititians believe that they can make a difference? Or, that through them, the people that they represent, can make a difference?

Schools, morals and values

Should schools teach any morals or values? If so the morals and values of which group of people?

By trying to please everyone you will please no-one.

Should we have schools for specific sets of morals (religons)?

Should the only values you teach be the ones that facilitate learning?

Predict and provide vs Managing demmand

Rather than taking a "predict and provide" approach to a theoretical future demand the governemnt should be managing demand.

Flying

"Flying is damaging and artificially cheap. The external costs - air and noise pollution, climate change, and so on - are dumped on to society." - Unknown

Have you ever fantasized about killing someone?

Don't make the rate of taxation too high. If you set the rates too high, it will encourage tax evasion and discourage hard work and initiative.

"War is cruelty. There is no point trying to refine it. The crueller it is, the sooner it's over." - Unknown

"The damage done to the welfare of other animal species by human expansion is on an incomparably larger scale than anything that is done in scientific laboratories." - John Gray

Prefer collaboration to competativeness, and consensus-building to confrontation.

Nature or Nurture (and chance???)

"No-one applies the blank slate view to animals" - John Gray

Journos and pols face differnet challenges. We pretend to run the country but, in fact, the media have the real power. Indeed, they threaten to put us out of work by "taking over the functions of parliment. We used to reach the people, voice popular demmands, expressing public views, control the executive, and be the opposition. Now the media is all of these." - Austin Mitchell MP

"Man has no nature, he only has a history" - Unknown

Pre-emptive wars and pre-emptive detentions are the products of panic and fear, and these are the enemies of democracy. - Taken from NS leader Feb 2004

Reith Lectures 2004 blurb for lecture 5

When Osama bin Laden declares that the world is divided between believers and non-believers, it is easily to identify the menace of the fanatic mind but, in what other company can we place George Bush when we hear him declare that 'you are either with us or you are on the side of the terrorists'?

Alcohol

"Tired drivers are just as impaired as if they were well over the legal drink-drive alcohol limit". 1

"Alcohol misuse, which costs over £20bn a year". 2

Alcohol and drugs are a major factor in crime.

I don't drink because a connot see any reasons to drink and I can see lots of reasons not to drink.

1. Professor Jim Horne.
2. BBC News website, 15th March 2004, Police to get new alcohol powers, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3510560.stm.

Veganism - The Impossible Quest for Purity talen from http://www.veganoutreach.org/starterpack/beingvegan.html

When you first discover the reality of modern animal agriculture, you might feel compelled to try to root out every single product associated with animal suffering. Unfortunately, personal purity is impossible. All around us are items connected in some way to animal exploitation: organic foods (animal manure used as fertilizer), cotton (animal products in the bleaching process), bicycles (animal fat used in the vulcanization of tires), books (hooves and bones in binding glue), roads and buildings (animal products used in curing concrete), water (tested with animal products, often filtered through bone char), etc. Even many vegan foods result in killing some animals during planting and harvesting.

" Burning bridges with anger" - http://www.veganoutreach.org/starterpack/beingvegan.html

Pain and Suffering

Pain and Suffering and death are all natural parts of life.

Tyranny

"The founding fathers in the USA warned against elective dictatorship, or the tyranny of the majority over minorities." - Dr Fitz-Gibbon with regards to the french banning the musilm headscarf.

Abridged from NS essay - Responsibility - Richard Reeves

"There is no freedom without responsibility" - Michael Howard

Authentic efforts to seek work in exchange for assistence and benefits.

If people don't look after their own health, children or retirement, the state can do little except pick up a few of the pieces.

When do you become a nanny state?

People are perfectly capablel of making choices that they know are irresponsible.

"make the better chioce the easir choice" - R H Tawney

Individuals often dislike there own preferences, for example smoking.

The agument against is along the lines of "Who are Labour ministers to tell us what to consume or how to raise our kids?".

The muscular right-wing philosophy of individual responsibility fails because it assumes that everyone's a heroic rationalist, and the instinctive statism of the left fails because it assumes that everyone is a helpless pawn. The trick is to find a middle way...

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it" - Oscar Wilde

Evil

Does evil go into a person (nurture) or come out of a person (nature)?

Famous Sayings/Wisdom

If something is worth doing its worth doing well.

No pain, no gain.

Never be embarressed???

No time like the present.

Don't be afraid to ask questions.

Do to others as you'd like them to do to you.

Waste not want not.

Stick and stones will break my bones, but names will never harm me.

Judge/measure people against their own values and beliefs.

Do to others as you'd expect them to do to you

Walk the middle road

When we discover that our never ending quest to posses things, and our continual craving for pleasure and security can never be satisfied. When we realize this our external quest turns inwards.

Respond, don't react.

It takes no more than a gentle nudge to push a man over the edge of a cliff, but it is almost impossible to haul him back before he hits the ground.

Emotion Management - Riding the wave - Taken from the yoga journal

The technique, called "riding the wave," employs five sequential steps: Breathe, Relax, Feel (focusing on the wave's sensations and investigating their qualities. What's their mood, color, texture, shape? Where do you feel them most intensely in your body?), Watch, Allow.

"Anger is lightning in a bottle, and the bottle is us" - yoga journal

Sometimes a race is a good day out - regardless of where you finished.

Freuds theory of Phychosexual development - taken from http://www.btinternet.com/~brownfamilywebsite/freud/fixations.htm

future effects from the stages of psychosexual development

The events of psychosexual development will lead to fixations in later life. the different way each person goes through the stages may lead to personality traits. some of these are discussed below.

during the oral stage insufficient breast feeding or too much gratification can cause an oral receptive, oral aggressive or oral retentive trait. oral receptiveness leads to being very trusting and dependant. the oral aggressive trait however, leads to dominating behavour whereas oral retentive people may suck their pens or smoke.

the anal retentive trait, due to strict attitudes towards toilet training, is being obsessively clean, overly tidy, very orderly, controlled, punctual, stingy and possessive. anal expulsive people poorly organised and perhaps aggressive. this trait is due to lax attitudes towards toilet training during the anal stage of development.

problems in the phallic stage can lead to the phallic type which are self-assured, vain and impulsive. according to freud, conflicts can lead to homosexuality via rejection of the gender role.

unresolved issues in the genital stage may lead to inabilities to focus on responsibilities involving others i.e. self-obsessive behavour.

Imigration

No one is illegal.

Professor David Pimentel of Cornell University's Ecology Department has calculated that it takes 500 litres of water to produce 1kg of potatoes, 900 litres per kg of wheat, 3,500 litres per kg of digestible chicken flesh and a massive 100,000 litres for 1kg of beef.

A more conservative estimate comes from Beckett and Oltjen of the University of California's Department of Animal Science. [12] In a study partly financed by the California Beef Council, they concluded that wheat production requires 120 litres per kg and beef 3,700 litres per kg.

The 3 most devastating potential problems facing humanity according to World Watch

Aquifer (a geologic formation that stores water beneath the earth's surface) depletion, HIV and shrinking cropland area per person, are the three most potentially devastating problems facing our species.

Why be a vegan - From the vegan society website

Meat and dairy production is an inefficient use of land, food and water, and with a rapidly increasing world population the fact remains that a plant-based diet is the most environmentally sustainable option available.

The vast majority of farmed animals spend their brief lives in cramped, distressing conditions.

The meat-intensive diets of the developed world contribute to global warming, deforestation, desertification and water pollution.

"Quite simply, we do not have enough land to feed everyone on an animal-based diet. So while 840 million people do not have enough food to live normal lives, we continue to waste two-thirds of agricultural land by obtaining only a small fraction of its potential calorific value.

Obviously access to food is an extremely complex issue and there are no easy answers. However, the fact remains that the world's population is increasing and viable agricultural land is diminishing. If we are to avoid future global food scarcity we must find sustainable ways of using our natural resource base. Industrial livestock production is unsustainable and unjustifiable. "

Why Save the Environment?

"Wildlife should be preserved because it is wonderful." - George Monbiot

If we destory the environment then the planet won't be able to sustain human life. This seems selfish, and if humans could replicate what the eco-system does using technology then we could destroy it happily.

Without bio-diversity the planet will become a mono-culture. This would reduce its adaptablility and make it more suseptable to disease, natural disasters.

Courage

Courage is stupidity with a purpose.

Violence

With so much violence in the real world, why do we want to escape to the cinema for more violence?

Aboriginees didn't need to farm. They lived off the land.

Everything is one. The plants, the animals and the rocks.

If you remove selfish interests from group decision making, and make decisions purely on which benifits the most people then you should be able to make unanimous decisions.

Public or Private

Why do you need privacy? Other than to do something illegal, or that people won't approve of or something that you want to keep secret?

Are public companies slow to make decisions, complacent, unresponsive, expensive, when compared to private companies?

"At least when you have public utilities, the money they take in stays in the community. With the private companies, the profits are going to go out of your community...and probably out of your country too." 1

1. Peter Gleick

"Dried tears blown away on the dust" - Unknown

Abridged from The Age of Consent by George Monbiot

Our task is not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it and use it as a vehical for humanities first global democratic revolution.

We will know when our approach is working, only when it is violently opposed.

Key proposals:
Democratically elected workld parliment.
Democratised UN general assembly.
International clearing union.
A fair trade association.

Do not reject these proposals until you have better ones with which to replace them.

If you believe the slogans are a substitute for policy, or that if we all love each other more, there'll be a transformation of conciousness...then I am wasting your time, and so are you.

By breaking the social bonds which sustained local comunities it destroys our geographical loyalties.

Through the issue of endless debt it has given the poor control of the worlds financial systems.

High wages don't satisfy greed, but fuel it.

How can you keep a free society safe without removing peoples freedoms.

Paradox of parliment is that the more the parlimentarians options are restrained (ie by preventing our representatives from taking money from any other sources) the more open our system remains.

Money corrupts, so get rid of money.

The world of friends, enemies and neutrals, which affects you with pleasure and apin, is only a creation of your mind which is a product of ignorance.

The greater the scale on which an organisation operates, the less responsive it tends to be to its customers.

A system based on rules, even the wrong rules is better than a system with no rules at all.

This manifesto is founded on the conviction that one can lead a satisfactory life without having to ruin other peoples.

[Protectionism] has been used to devestating effect in propelling a nation through its key phase of development.

Trade has the potential to be the mechansim for fairly distributing wealth between nations.

The immediate cause of famine is notdrought or crop failure, but lack of purchasing power.

WTO, one nation, one vote, however the topics for discussion are decided by the 'core' members whcih doesn't include the poor nations.

There is no single formula for economic development.

Capitalism is built upon the lending of money at interest. Capitalist economies are driven by the need to repay debt, and survival is dependant on endless growth.

Demurrage - negative interest.

We are not intelligent enough to know the consequences of what we do. We have eaten from the tree of knowlede and cannot go back. We must go forward. Harness technology and society.

Something must be done. I must act.

"My mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and... words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing." - Gerad Winstanley

This shift depends... on your prepardness to abandom your attachment to the old world and start thinking like a citizen of the new: to exchange you security for liberty, you comfort for elation. It depends on your willingness to act.

The state, like a tree, is essentially immobile. While it can expand its access to resources by extending its roots into the soil on which other trees are growing, it must adopt to the circumstances in which it finds itself. The corporations, like omnivorous animals, are mobile. They move from tree to tree, taking shelter in the branches, preying upon both the trees which protect them and the other members of the ecosystem, seeking always the most easily obtained resources. The burden of predation has now become so great that most of the trees in the wood appear to be suffering from what foresters call die back.

Selfish Democracy?

Will people act for the good of future generations on the plant Selfless or selfish?

If people act selfishly the selfish majority will do well at everyone elses expense.

In a democracy, what if the majority is wrong?

Don't tell people what not to do, tell them what to do, the benefits of doing it and the effects of not doing it.

Racial Hatred

The framers of the UN Convention were right in their belief that, of all hatreds, racial hatred is the most dangerous, because changes of behaviour by its victims cannot bring about its abatement. "You are our enemy because of what you are, not because of what you do."

Killing

In the 17th century, men killed in the name of God. In the 20th century, they killed in the name of the people (democracy).

Killing Numbers

The main killing episodes of the 20th century are the Turkish slaughter of the Christian Armenians (one million) in 1915, Stalin's "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" in the 1930s (ten million), Hitler's murder of the Jews in 1941-44 (six million), Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" of 1959-51 (30 million), Pol Pot's Cambodian "killing fields" in 1975-79 (two million) and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 (one million). These are estimates.

Democracy

"If you believe in "rule by the people", you have first to select the people. And the most obvious principle of selection is the nation." - Unknown

Organic food should be for everyone

Organic food is generally more expensive than non-organic due to economies of scale. Rich people should buy organic to bring its price down.

"Perpetrators of violence are often victims of a cycle of abuse with its roots deep in the past" - David Cox

"Differential fees will reflect neither course cost nor the graduate's earning potential, because, in a market, cost is determined by supply and demmand." - Jessica Baily

"It is likely that the collective benefits flowing from a widespread acceptance of certain moral sources allow us to lead better lives than in an atomised world of private morals" - Richard Reeves

As Grayling put it "In humanist ehtics the individual is responsible for achieving the good as a free member of a community of free agents; in religous ethics he achieves the good by obedinace to an authority that tells him what his goals are and how he should live."

"Neither faith nor politics can be simply about believing - it must be about action. Religous beliefs and political beliefs will achieve nothing until people are prepared to act on those beliefs." - Tony Blair

Abridged from NS- The US has rouge leaders, but that does not make it a rouge state - Jenifer Rankin

At first glance the US displays all the hallmarks of the classic rouge state. Its foreign policy is aggressive; it ignores international law; it is relentless in its pursuit of WMDs. Factor in that the president came to power on a minority of votes.

The language of the rouge state...inhibits constructive dialogue.

The shaky way it [USA] divided the world into right and rouge states opend the US to charges of hpocracy.

Critics probably also know which of these 'rouge states' that they would rather live in.

The creation of a safer fairer world will be inaugurated not by naming rouge states, but by reforming states.

We live in a sexualised society.

Abridged from NS, New Science, old myth

A day will come when no one dies in vain. In the past, it was believed that God would bring about this happy state. Revolutionary movements such as communism promised something even more fantastic. By using the power of science, human beings could ceate it themselves.

After all the babble about the irresistable spread of democracy and free markets, the reality is war, protectionism and the shifty politics of secrecy and corruption.

The lesson of science is that death has a vital function in the natural environment. In the only world we know, nothing is immortal. The hope of escaping death comes from religon, not science. Yet science has been appropriated (cryogenic resurrection) to give this mystical hope a new lease of life.

It has long been known that ideas can spread by a kind of contagion...Persecution and war, the power of wealth and the ability of governments to shape the news are only some of the factors explaining why some ideas spread and others do not.

The biblical story of the Fall is closer to the truth. Knowledge is not an unmixed good; it can be as much a curse as a blessing. If the superseded science of the 20th centuary could be used to wage two hideously destructive world wars, how will the vastly superior science of today be used?

Which is the greater leap of faith: to accept that humanity has eaten from the tree of knowledge and must somehow live with the consequences, or to believe that science can deliver humanity from itself?

Laws abridged from NS - People no longer have the confidence to follow their own conciences - Frank Field

Rules are kept by convention, habit and self-interest, and, to a large extent, becuase other people keep them. Once a significant number of poeple start to breach the code with any frequency, self-interest becomesself-centredness and the whole system falters.

Given that we cannot recreate the religous faith of the past, how can we re-establish a belief that rules will be kept? What could be the basis of a new social highway code?

Antisocial behaviour is not low-level crime by another name.

Antisocial behaviour arises because the people who should naturally stop it - parents - cannot or will not act.

How can we restore the principle of communities/self governing communities?

The gateway to each benefit should be signing of a contract between claimant and society.

"In a more religous time," Shawcross wrote in Deliver us From Evil, "it was only God whom we asked to deliver us fro mevil. Now we call upon our own man-made institutions for such deliverance."

We live in priviledged times. We can buy virtually anything even if it is at someone elses expense.

"There is life in everything" - unknown

With regards to donations Andrew Carnegie asserted that "the man who dies rich dies disgraced".

Means Testing

"Means Testing has eroded the incentive to save" - Patrick Hosking

The war on Terror

The war on terror, like the war on crime, can never be won. However it has been marketed as a war with a start and an end. It cannot be sutained indefinately with the prospect of victory. It must be sustained some other way. Fear.

"To claim we face a significant risk is incapable of disproof, but all too capable of proof. No one can ever say "the terrorist war is over"" - NS leader - When it's right to be fearful

Expect little and you'll not be dissappointed.

In a multiculteral society of contradictory religons the law cannot be determined through religous belief.

"Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance...thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste...if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare." G K Chesterton

Martin Niemoller, the german pastor : "First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist... Then they came for me. And there was nobody left to speak out for me."

"I'll believe it when I see it" so many people say. Why not, "I'll see it when I believe it?" - Robb Tracy

"Nowt so queer as folk" - Unknown

Public or Private Health Service?

Our current 'two-tier' health service allows queue jumping for the wealthy.

Social constructivists have argued that there is no such thing as natural; it is always a social construct.

"No-one ever puts flowers on the grave of a flower" - Tom Waits

"In journalism, death trumps life" - Timothy Garton Ash

Will people work for the common good?

"Life after capitalism ... as long as incentives to cheat exist (and they always will) none of our alternatives could be applied universally without totalitarianism" - George Monbiot

"For communism to work, the members of the society either need to be altruistic enough to want to work for the benefit of their neighbors, or they need to be forward thinking enough to see that what benefits the whole benefits themselves. They must be very far-sighted indeed, because large-scale social benefits tend to be more abstract in nature, and more difficult to recognise." - http://www.germane-software.com/~ser/Files/Essays/Communism.html

"If people are basically selfish, then they won't work for the common good, and there will be a tendancy to freeload or otherwise take advantage of the system." - http://www.germane-software.com/~ser/Files/Essays/Communism.html

Abridged from Organic Farming Will Feed the World by George Monbiot

"If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world," Steve Smith, a director of the world's biggest biotechnology company, Novartis, insisted, "tell them that it is not. … To feed the world takes political and financial will - it's not about production and distribution."

Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in India, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled their yields by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study in the United States reveals that small farmers growing a wide range of plants can produce ten times as much money per acre as big farmers growing single crops. Cuba, forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has now adopted it as policy, having discovered that it improves both the productivity and the quality of the crops its farmers grow.

Traditional farming has been stamped out all over the world not because it is less productive than monoculture, but because it is, in some respects, more productive. Organic cultivation has been characterised as an enemy of progress for the simple reason that it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by any farmer anywhere on earth, without the help of multinational companies. Though it is more productive to grow several species or several varieties of crops in one field, the biotech companies must reduce diversity in order to make money, leaving farmers with no choice but to purchase their most profitable seeds. This is why they have spent the last ten years buying up seed breeding institutes and lobbying governments to do what ours has done: banning the sale of any seed which has not been officially - and expensively - registered and approved.

Abridged from The Poor Get Stuffed by George Monbiot

Many of those who have begun to understand the finity of global grain production (livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially. This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed the world - has largely been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock) have responded by becoming vegetarians. But vegetarians who continue to consume milk and eggs scarcely reduce their impact on the ecosystem. The conversion efficiency of dairy and egg production is generally better than meat rearing, but even if everyone who now eats beef were to eat cheese instead, this would merely delay the global famine. As both dairy cattle and poultry are often fed with fishmeal (which means that no one can claim to eat cheese but not fish), it might, in one respect, even accelarate it. The shift would be accompanied too by a massive deterioration in animal welfare: with the possible exception of intensively reared broilers and pigs, battery chickens and dairy cows are the farm animals which appear to suffer most. If lacto-vegetarians want to stop the trade in veal calves, they should drink less milk.

"The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians." - George Monbiot

"As I have begun to acquire a better understanding of the material world, I have come to see how liberating the loss of our belief in a Christian (or for that matter Buddhist or Hindu) reincarnation can be. The selfish, individualistic notion of an independent resurrection instead gives way to the idea of a collective reincarnation, as you begin to see how our components are scattered then incorporated, inevitably, into other organisms. To me this is infinitely more reassuring than the awful lottery of the Christian Heaven or the Christian Hell." - George Monbiot

We're Not Materialistic Enough by George Monbiot

Ask anyone what's wrong with consumer society and they'll almost certainly tell you that it has made people "too materialistic". We are obsessed, we're always told, with things, and our material engrossment is killing the environment, our relationships and our spiritual lives. It strikes me that precisely the opposite is true: we are not materialistic enough.

Consumerism demands the fast and careless use of materials. It relies on our detachment from and incomprehension of the material world. Do you know where the components of your TV or your computer come from? Do you even know what they're made of? Have you ever considered how these materials were extracted, which peoples needed be displaced so that their lands could be mined or logged? Can you sharpen a knife? Or are you forced to buy knives with serrated edges, or buy a new one every time yours gets blunt? If the answers to these questions embarrass you, then you are, like most of us, a non-materialist.

Abridged from A Weapon With Wings by George Monbiot

The men who attacked New York and Washington on September 11th 2001 drove one symbol of power into another. The aeroplane, more precisely than any other technology, represents the global ruling class. In the past we raised our eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens.

Last week the World Health Organisation calculated that climate change is causing 150,000 deaths a year. This figure excludes deaths caused by drought and famine, pests and plant diseases and conflicts over natural resources, all of which appear to be exacerbated by global warming. Flying is our most effective means of wrecking the planet: every passenger on a return journey from Britain to Florida produces more carbon dioxide than the average motorist does in a year.

All over the world, the aircraft industry was built by means of government spending. All over the world, it is sustained today through tax breaks and hidden subsidies. Mysteriously exempt from both fuel duty and VAT, in Britain the airlines dodge some pounds10 billion of tax a year.

''Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains'' - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Meaning of life

Do you need a purpose in life? To be done.

Freud believed that sexual instincts and urges were the driving force of humanity's life.

Frankl, by contrast, believes that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose.

A person cannot be changed, but can change themselves.

"Whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither." - Benjamin Franklin

Live to your needs, not to your salary

The more you earn the more you spend.

"How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary." - George Monbiot

Is human intelligence a good thing or a bad thing?

Human intelligence is being used to resolve the problems that human intelligence created.

Human intelligence will probably be the root cause of the extinction of humans.

Humans as a species have been successful. We have multiplied to around the limits that our planet can 'naturally' sustain. More than ever we now need to use our intelligence to create technologies and processes that can 'cheat the system' and support us.

Taken from "Is the Pope Gay?" By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th July 2000

Morality is surely meaningless unless it refers to the impact we have on other people. Interestingly, even the Vatican appears unable to point to any ill-effects of safe sex between consenting gay adults, other than to suggest that its acceptance might "deprave" or "corrupt" other people. What this appears to mean is that they might be led away from the teachings of the Church. Heterosexuality is quite another matter. Reproduction among prosperous people has a demonstrable impact on the welfare of others: thanks to the depletion of resources and the effects of climate change, every child born to the rich deprives children elsewhere of the means of survival. In a world of diminishing assets, being gay is arguably more moral than being straight.

The claim that homosexuality is "unnatural" is more interesting. This could mean one of two things. Perhaps the Pope is suggesting that it lies beyond the scope of "normal" human behaviour. If so, this has uncomfortable implications for an association of old men who wear dresses, hear voices and practise ritual cannibalism.

"Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it." - George Monbiot

Nelson Rolihlahla MANDELA - Abridged from www.anc.org.za

Mandela's words, "The struggle is my life," are not to be taken lightly.

In 1944 he helped found the ANC Youth League, whose Programme of (non-violent) Action was adopted by the ANC in 1949.

When the ANC was banned after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, he was detained until 1961 when he went underground to lead a campaign for a new national convention.

Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, was born the same year. Under his leadership it launched a campaign of sabotage against government and economic installations.

In 1962 Mandela left the country for military training in Algeria and to arrange training for other MK members.

On his return he was arrested for leaving the country illegally and for incitement to strike. He conducted his own defence. He was convicted and jailed for five years in November 1962. While serving his sentence, he was charged, in the Rivonia trial, with sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In prison Mandela never compromised his political principles and was always a source of strength for the other prisoners.

It is significant that shortly after his release on Sunday 11 February 1990, Mandela and his delegation agreed to the suspension of armed struggle.

He was inaugurated as the first democratically elected State President of South Africa on 10 May 1994 - June 1999

Nelson Mandela retired from Public life in June 1999. He currently resides in his birth place - Qunu, Transkei.

After the Sharpeville massacre Mr. Sobukwe told the court: "there will always be others to take our place".

If you could meet anyone who is alive today who would it be?

I would like to meet someone who is responsible for lots of death and destruction, and ask them how killing people is helping their cause.

Is it the content of the lyrics of the sound of the lyrics that matters?

I enjoy must in languages that I don't understand so the sound on its own is enough, if it has a good story to tell as well then thats a bonus.

"All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you" - Gandalf

How to produce apathy...

"Fill their bellies and keep them entertained" - ??? (Not quite word for word. James kept telling me this and it's finally sunk in)

"For the moral Right, the appearance in the mass media of activities it approves of promts the cry 'Watching is a substitute for doing', while the appearance of activities of which it disaproves prompts the cry 'HorrorQ They'll all be wanting to try it at home!" - Matthew Paris

'The explosions in Istanbul are good news for prejudice and good news for George W Bush' - Matthew Paris

Our son of a bitch (abridged from The Spectator, Our son of a bitch, Daniel Hannan)

Despite Bush's post war speach on no-longer supporting evil regimes even if they are on our side, in Uzbekistan we are propping up precisely such a regime. In an eerie repetition of what we did in Iraq during the 1980s, we are supporting a brutal dictator simply because he has had the wit to call himself an opponent of Islamism.

These Regimes must go (abridged from The Spectator, These five regimes must go - and soon, Micheal Heath)

Profound changes in the following countries are needed if the war on terror is to suceed. Terrorism's most brazen patron (Syria), its ideological inspiration (Iran), its paymaster (Saudis Arabia), a critical source of manpower (Sudan), and its most dangerous weapons supplier (North Korea). These are the fronts on which the war must be fought: it's not just terror groups, it's the state actors who provide them with an infrastructure and extend their global reach.

There is no such group as the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people is at least four distinct groups, all of whom have differnet views, and who want power so as to be able to impose there views on the other groups.

The speed of the war on terror (abridged from The Spectator, These five regimes must go - and soon, Micheal Heath)

Forcing the USA to go the extra mile with the UN, allowed the peace movement to change from a "small anti-war fringe" to a worldwide mass peace movement. As every month passed the legitimacy of the war in teh eyes of the public was reduced. Taking a year to amass overwhelming force on the boarders of Iraq may have made the war shorter and simpler, but it also made the post-war messier and costlier., as teh regieme had time to movestuff around, hide it, ship it to Syria, and allow interested parties to mull over tactics for a post-liberation insurgency.

Henceforth, 'engagements in the war on terror will be swift, sudden and as low key as can be managed'.

The far Right and new Left have Globalisation in common (abridged from The Spectator, Who hates the Jews now? Mark Strauss)

"Anxiety over globaisation provides opportunaties for the far-Right political parties to exploit the fears of those who see their way of life threatened by migrants from the developing world, and who believe that their sovereignty is beseiged by regional trade pacts and monetry union. In their war against globalisation the far Right has also found common cause with the new Left."

Touch/contact has been sexualised

Touch/contact has been sexualised resulting in adults experiencing little physical human contact.

Is society any better off now than 10, 20, or 100 years ago?

The divide between the rich and the poor is greater now than it has ever been.

Martin Luther King

"man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love"

"...three evils that had grown out of man's ‘ethical infantilism,’ racial injustice, poverty, and war, which were all intertwined. Nonviolence ‘seeks to redeem the spiritual and moral lag . . . to secure moral ends through moral means.

"Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. That I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind."

Is Science good or bad (abridge from The Times, Mugged by the science mafia, Bryan Appleyard)?

Science is not necessarily beneficial to mankind.

Science is a value-free investigation of the material world.

About all things we regard as most important - love, life, art, imagination, peace, tolerance - science can say nothing of value. When we let it into those areas, the results usually involve millions of corpses!

'Science is a powerful instrument. How it is used, whether it is a blessing or a curse to mankind, depends on mankind and not on the instrument. A knife is useful, but it can also kill.' - Albert Einstein

'How responsible are scientists for the consequences of their discoveries?' - Albert Einstein

John Donne wrote "No man is an Island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main,,, any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

"Fear leads greed" - The New Statesman

Geoarge Orwell pointed out that "people who are tired, demoralised and poor do not want to come home to some healthy grated carrot or rough porridge oats. What they want is something comforting, easy and pleasurable".

Prime Minister or Prime Manager - abridged from the times (It's not so easy, electing the prime manager, John Humphrys)

Elections were once battles between class interests. You recognised which class you belonged to and voted accordingly. Then the middle class expanded, and opinion had to be appealed to as well as ones own interests.

There are now no ideological differences between the main parties, Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem, and politics is about marketing and who can manage things best.

Climate Change - taken from the New Statesman

It is projected that greenhouse gas emissions will go on rising for decades; the IPCC predicts a global temperature rise of between 1.4 degrees and 5.8 degrees by 2100. At the lower end of this scale, large areas of agriculturally productive land will be destroyed; entire countries will disappear through rapid sea-level rise; and entire regions in the arid subtropics will become uninhabitable.

We are "hard-wired" to mobilise rapidly in response to clear and immediate dangers. But as threats become less certain, or causally complex, it becomes harder to find the urgency to tackle them. Climate change, unfortunately, matches our evolutionary weak-nesses. Not only is it complex, ambiguous and inter-generational, but it is largely self-inflicted. The complex causality of climate change also plays particularly strongly to the natural human tendency to diffuse responsibility. This is the "passive bystander effect", after the frequently observed phenomenon that violent crimes can be committed in a crowded street without anyone intervening.

We are all simultaneously bystanders, perpetrators and victims. These internal conflicts cripple our ability to act, and are only amplified by the vast denial of others. We doubt the reliability of our own instincts, and our power to make any difference.

Aids

Forty million people are infected with the HIV virus that may lead to Aids - three million have already died of the disease this year alone.

Used consistently and properly, latex condoms significantly reduce the risk of HIV transmission, but promoting them in some cultures is proving difficult.

Mr Annan said it was unjust that Aids was manageable in the rich world but a death sentence for people elsewhere.

Ghandi

Gandhi said: "To me, Truth is God and there is no way to find Truth except the way of nonviolence". Violence separates people, but the search for truth is a communal enterprise in which we have to work together.

Satyagraha uses nonviolent resistance to make one's opponent face up to the fact of injustice or exploitation. However, while satyagrahis use various nonviolent methods to confront or persuade an opponent - methods like sit-downs and sit-ins, strikes, fasts, demonstrations, boycotts, picketing and non-cooperation (all of which Gandhi used) - they should also be doing constructive work to improve the situation. Every time Gandhi started a campaign against some injustice, he also started constructive schemes to improve conditions.

Albert Einstein said that Gandhi 's great contribution to our time was his determination to moralise politics. Gandhi insisted that you can apply the same moral values to politics, business or industry as you do in private life. Love, truth, nonviolence - all these ideals can be applied here and now to every aspect of life. "It is perfectly possible," as Gandhi said, "for an individual to adopt this way of life without having to wait for others to do so."

Aldous Huxley

Huxley saw that war cannot bring peace, because violent methods cannot create nonviolent results. The act of war helps to legitimize war!

"People love to talk about a war to end war; they do not love to talk about a peace to end war."

'The police act with precision; they go out and arrest the guilty person. But nations and groups of nations act through their armed forces, which can only act with the maximum of imprecision, killing, maiming, starving and ruining millions of human beings, of whom the overwhelming majority have committed no crime of any sort.'

'Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.'

Huxley was well aware that technology was here to stay. 'The question is whether it is to stay as an instrument of slavery or as a way to freedom.' 'Curing the world of obsession with money and power' needs to be done in the modern world; but even a modern hi-tech world can be humane.

'It is enormously difficult to change; but the enormously difficult is not the impossible.'

Ethics of Abortion

Pro choice? The baby doesn't get much of a choice? If a women is raped she doesn't get much choice (in most situations she will have more choice than the baby)?

At what point does the baby become a living thing that you are then murdering?

Are we being too frivalous with life?

Having an abortion allows you to have another child who will have a 'better' life?

The Legalisation of abortion allows it to be a regulated industry with rules and regulations.

"Oil is the devils tears" - The Economist

"One soul, two bodies." - Unknown

"Greed, the desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves" - www.dictionary.com

Imigration

The UK in far more overcrowded than the rest of Europe.

The UK monitors people entering, but not people leaving.

India only allows foreign workers to do jobs where no Indians have the skills.

Tackle the causes of imigration rather than the effects.

Should marriage be scrapped?

Most marriages go through dull or wretched patches and some are a cloak for verbal and physical abuse.

Children brought up in two parent families live longer, happier, more law-abiding lives.

Co-habiting couples on average break up much more than married couples. Why do couples break up?

Don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

“We live in an increasingly interdependent world. Sustainable development in the UK cannot be considered in isolation from sustainable development elsewhere. Our lifestyles have an impact on the rest of the world. … Allowing international inequalities to grow could jeopardise social stability and sustainable development for all of us. “ - UK Sustainable Development Strategy chapter 9: International Co-operation & Development

Question consumer lifestyle.

Goals of sustainability

“development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Bruntland report and Rio Declaration

“Sustainable development's central challenge is to use the Earth's resources much less wastefully and much more fairly” Michael Meacher

Goal of economic growth – to eradicate poverty:

“All States and all people shall cooperate in the essential task of eradicating poverty as an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.” Rio Declaration principle 5

"Rise like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you, Ye are many they are few." - Percy Byshe Shelley

"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied upon, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about. Such is government, such is justice, such is morality." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

From what people say, films, children's toys etc to smacking a child or bombing Iraq, violence is condoned and legitimised.

Political Correctness

Political correctness is sensorship.

The emphasis with political correctness shouldn't be on not saying something, but why we shouldn't say something.

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." - Vidal, Gore

"Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." - Brecht, Bertolt

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

Responsibility

Responsibility isn't black and white. There are levels of responsibility.

responsibility could be calculated by the total responsibility divided by the number of people who could have done something. This results in no-one having enough responsibility to do anything.

You cannot be responsible for something you didn't know about., but ignorance is no excuse.

Pacifism

Violence always leads to worse results than non-violence.

Violence breeds violence.

Using violence against violence doesn't end violence but moves it, from one person to another.

"Hatred will not cease by hatred, but by love alone. This is the ancient law." - Dali Lama

War and violence are unjustifiable.

Talking and listening, then, restraint, then violence?

"How do you stop people from using violence to solve their problems? Give them an alternative." 1

1. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

Energy crops

Growing crops to make vegetable oil that can be used to run diesel cars.

There isn't enough land in the UK to grow enough crops to run the current number of cars. If people didn't use cars as much and relied on public transport there may be though???

This gets us away from using fosil fuels which aren't sustainable.

Teh 10 commandments

ONE: 'You shall have no other gods before Me.'

TWO: 'You shall not make for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.'

THREE: 'You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.'

FOUR: 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.'

FIVE: 'Honor your father and your mother.'

SIX: 'You shall not murder.'

SEVEN: 'You shall not commit adultery.'

EIGHT: 'You shall not steal.'

NINE: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'

TEN: 'You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.'

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matthew 22:36-40).

The yoga yamas

Nonviolence (protecting ourselves and others does not violate this)
Truth
NonStealing
Celibacy/walking with god (When you are having sex, have sex; when you're not, don't. Remain in the present and focus on what is happening right now without obsession - Dr. Usharbudh Arya)
NonGreed

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Does the means justify the end?

You can lie and kill to achieve a good end, but should you do this? Does the end justify the means?

This will only achieve good in the short term (not sure) in the long term good cannot be achieved this way?

You cannot achieve peaceful ends through violent means.

"A purpose which overrides every other consideration is one whose end justifies all means...This is dangerous ground." 1

"the tendency for the means to become the end" 2

1. Simon Fairlie, 26th March 2004. Battle of the Manifestos, Chapter 7 debate.

2. David Engwicht, 1992. Towards an Eco-City.

Jesus died on the cross as a man rather than as God, and therein lies the essence of understanding immanence. His words, "Oh, my Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?" offer testimony that he experienced his agony as a human being. This was his great gift—that a human body in all its frailty could hold the true nature of the Divine. - Phillip Moffitt

Can make more of a difference through life than death?

In Christian teachings, Jesus died on the cross, when he could have avoided it. Could he have achieved more through life than he did in death?

In the teachings of the great yoga masters, our true nature is Brahman, the universal soul, of which the individual soul is simply a part.

"Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter." - T. S. Eliot

In Jesus's teachings, love is at the center of all being—love that is forgiving, unconditional, and not self-serving.

Buddha

The Buddha taught that your true nature is obscured by the veils of wanting, fear, and delusion (or ignorance). He urged that you look at the nature of your mind systematically and observe how these three mind-states condition what you think and value, and how you behave.

The Buddha taught that our true nature is emptiness. ie Self doesn't matter.

Whoever holds a hundred things dear has a hundred causes of suffering...but whoever holds nothing dear has no suffering...they are free from sorrow, free from despair.

You cannot choose your past, but you can choose your future.

"everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." - Viktor Frankl

"without God anything is possible, everything is permitted."- Ivan Karamazov

Clarkes Laws

Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Clarke's Second Law: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God" - Shermer's Last Law

...except by god or by a more advanced eti.

Bill Hicks

"the bad drugs are also the untaxed ones"

There is an absurd double-standard that exists between censoring porn and then using sex as a marketing aid in TV adverts.

"I was crucified, buried for three days, then raised from the dead. I've waited two thousand years to return to Earth. It's Miller Time!"

The medium of television has been hijacked simply as a means of keeping the populace quiet and selling them products.

Coporate manufactured music...sacrificing their dignity and integrity to become corporate puppets. He felt it immoral that idols should be created solely in order to sell products to children.

America took most of the responsibility for arming the world, and was a bully for subsequently beating countries up.

'The United States of Advertising'

Rememberance Sunday - taken from http://www.ppu.org.uk

There is no way to peace, peace is the way.

If at Remembrance time we are to reclaim value from those lost lives, rather than give legitimacy to a system of values which destroyed them, we don’t need to be silent for two minutes. On the contrary: we need to speak up. We need to break up the silent conspiracy which perpetuates the delusion that war, and preparing for war, can bring about peace.

The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers.

"The green party is good for local government but bad for national as they don't have a coherent set of policies" - unknown

This may be true but rather an incoherent set of policies based on something good (sustainable development) than a coherent set of policies based on something bad (money).

If you see a Bulgarian in the street, hit him, he'll know why.

Early to bed and up with the cock.

...no but I've got a photo of general bull.

"Determination to impose fairness and uniformity on everybody has been responsible for the tradgedies of communism and socialism" - Minette Marin

""If people have the power to choose (with regards to local government) they will do things differently from each other, some of them less well than others" - Minette Marin

"Offering power and choice to everybody is at odds with offering fairness to everybody" - Minette Marin

""In school we put lots of emphasis on academic acheivment as a means to economic success, resulting in happiness." - ???

"School should be a more embracing, social experience for children, with education less directed to private ambition and competition and more
towards rounded, personal development." 1

1. Green Party Press Release, 14 April, 2004.

"Winning an argument doesn't always mean you've won hearts and minds" - Unknown

"The only trouble with paradise is that everybody wants a piece of it.” -Unknown

"We say that blood is thicker than water; but it’s not in the Church. It is water, the water of baptism which is thicker than blood, binding us together as members one of another in a fellowship that goes beyond natural ties." - The Rev. Dr Colin Morris

"...the division of the world between, the haves and the have nots, has never been greater. What makes the world a more dangerous place, is that for the first time in human history, the have-nots, are aware of the full extent of their deprivation, and are increasingly reluctant to accept huge disparities in life’s opportunities

There are many reasons for these inequalities, like prohibitive tariffs and subsidies. Agricultural subsidies in the developed world, are for example, a staggering 850 million dollars a day. Arms exports further enrich the West at the expense of poorer nations, fuelling debilitating conflicts with equally impoverished neighbours.

Today, wars, oppression and economic instability in seemingly distant lands, create economic and refugee problems for the affluent and more secure west. And even this security is now threatened by hatreds that know no border, and terrorism that parasitically grows and thrives on social and political injustice.

Self- interest then, dictates that we redouble our efforts to move to a fairer world. But it would be wrong to look at self- interest alone. The world’s great religions have long reminded us to look in a more enlightened way to the needs of our neighbours and to our common identity." - Indarjit Singh

"A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles." -University of Utah, Bad Mileage

Yesterdays news is todays history.

Voluntary codes are a bad idea. As they are never enforced.

Laws are a better idea as they can be enforced.

Independant monitoring of orgs is essential.

Corporate sponsorship in areas relating to health is a very bad idea.

Permaculture

Current farming methods are minning the soil.

We don't get uncovered soil in nature.

Breast is best

According t the UN childrens fund, reversing the decline in breast feeding could save 1.5 million lives every year.

A bottle fed baby is up to 25 times more likely to die from diarrhoea where water supplies are unsafe.

Boycott Nestle who are the market leader in formulated baby milk and promote it in unethically.

Nestle are trying to get fair trade status for a new product. Do you realise most of Green and Blacks chocolate isn't fair trade? Brands have one good product (Ribena tooth kind) and try to transfer its positive attributes/image onto other unsound products.

The green dictionary is being hi-jacked by non green orgs.

WTO

The main aim of the WTO is free trade. It should be sustainable development.

The WTO is free trade with corporate protectionism.

The WTO should report to a new environmental org, and UN human rights org.

WTO non-descrimination levels the playing field between uneven players.

WTO does have the ability to be democratic.

WTO should be reformed. However the WTO gets alot of its funding from the richer nations, so if the poor countires get the reforms that they want the rich countries may drop out.

Peace clause is set to expire. You can then campaign against other countries policies eg Common Agricultural policy and USA Farm Bill.

Countries don't trade any more. Transnationals do.

If you say something enough times then you'l believe it.

PR doesn't equal actions.

If you don't understand something, then you apply experiances that you've previously had to the situation in an attempt to understand it. ie I don't understand why all of these people have come to this demonstration. I've bribed people to do things before, so they've probably been bribed.

Do people working for unethical companies believe that they are doing a bad thing?

"An uninformed public in a democracy is a sure-fire way to end up with no democracy at all" - Unknown

"The lottery is a tax on fools and the desperate" - James

Alternatively it is a tax on the greedy.

All aboard the road to hell - abridged from the times

The increase in the mobility of the average Briton conceals a growing gap between the mobility-haves and have-nots.

As the number of cars increase there will be more metal in motion making it more dangerous for those not in cars.

As people become more mobile the world becomes full of strangers.

Cars are replacing functional walking, meaning people are getting less exercise and there are less people in pedestrian areas making them less secure.

Less walking means less socializing with your neighbors reducing levels of community.

Policing will become more Orwellian, dependent on CCTV and databases of personal information. This is an in-escapable cost of increased mobility. The alternative is an ineffectual police force.

As we spread ourselves ever wider in our social and economic activities the scope of government must expand in order to keep up with the growing magnitude of problems that require governing. Political authority migrates up the hierachy from town hall to Whitehall, to Brussels and ultimately to unaccountable institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade organization. But trust in increasingly remote and unaccountable institutions diminishes, and the likelihood of individual votes having impact becomes defeated by scale, so fewer people vote.

We need a change in transport policy from the contradictory congestion charges and widening of roads.

Driving a Ferari on public roads is like wearing you best suit for a game of footy.

Start your day by burning the toast. Then your day can only get better.

How to fund Pensions

You can either get people to pay for their own pensions, or get one generation to pay for another generations pension.

The later only works if you continue to raise or lower the retirement age so the pension claiming group remains the same size relative to the working group. If you don't do this then, as the number of people claiming their pension grows so does the burden on the people working (and paying taxes) to support the pension claiming group.

With the former poor people will come off worse, as they cannot afford to put much into their pension, because they need that money to survive.

A combination of the two is probably the best idea then?

Why not work until you can't in a reqarding job. Reduce the working week and increase holiday. Get rid of a retirement age. Combine this with a citizens income.

As a population ages it becomes less capable of supporting itself.

"Don't argue that something is bad, as this puts people onto the defensive, and kills the argument. Instead argue that something else is better. This opens up the argument more" - Oly

Why is living in the uk so expensive compared to developing countries such as India and China - to be done

"The right path and the easy path are rarely one and the same" - Ted Kulongoski

"Ignorance is bliss, but forewarned is forearmed." - Unknown

"Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never harm me." - Unknown

The 20th centuary will be known for the conflict between capitaism and communism. The 21st centuary will be known for the conflict between capitalism and sustainable development" - Morley fund management SRI team

"Freedom and slavery are mental states" - Mahatma Gandhi

The main political parties

The main aim of Labour, Lib Dems and the Conservatives is to gain power and hold onto it.

"Struggle is what gives life meaning, not victory" -Unknown

A person is the sum of all the preivous people that they have encountered.

Put your mind in a different place.

Just because something doesn't feel normal doesn't make it bad.

To love your country is nationalism, to love your country enough to fight for it is patriotism. To love your country enough to round up the foreigners into death camps in order to purify your race is facism.

How can a society based on freedom protect itself with out sacrificing freedom?

It doesn't matter how well something suceeds, its how well it fails.

"Every person has 2 reasons for doing something, the one that sounds good and the real reason." - J P Morgan

You cannot judge people by your standards, you have to judge them by their standards.

"All problems can be solved through death" - Stalin

I am trapped in my mind.

Enjoy the journey, because the journey is life.

"Eat organic and die healthy" - Unknown

Close your eyes and you could be anywhere.

1984

He who controls the past controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.

Slavery is freedom.

If I believe I flew and you believe you saw me fly, did I fly?

Turn the other cheek.

Life is a very simple thing. You are born, you grow, you procreate, and you die. Why do humans make it so complicated.

In the long term, you cannot force people to do, or not do something. You have to educate them and let them choose.

Hate war and you are no different from the war mongers.

Travel is a viscious circle, the more you travel the more you need to travel.

"As a human being you have a right to your feelings whatever they are." - Unknown

Is living at home with your parents/family the solution to travel problems? - to be done

There should be a division between church and state.

At 5.30am on July 16, 1945, at the Alamangordo bombing range in New Mexico, J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb, watched the expanding fireball of Trinity, the first nuclear test. "I am becomine Death, the shatterer of worlds," he said, quoting the Lord Shiva's words in the ancient sacred Hindu text the Bhagavad-Gita.

"Muslims are the new communists" (- Zaid Shakir). They are the new generic enemy.

The day I stop learning is the day I die.

"If you don't start a bad habbit then you don't have to give it up" - unknown

GM food - Good or Bad?

"Farm-scale trials conducted over the last three years show GM crops pose asignificant threat to biodiversity, decimating insect populations and impacting entire food chains, it emerged today." - Green party news release

What is love?

Love is a combination of friendship and time. It has nothing to do with the physical attributes of a person, that is lust.

What is the difference between platonic love and love for your partner? Love for your partner includes a physical attraction.

When you grow old you no longer fit into the societies attractive bracket. The physical attraction element of your relationship is gone. Are you therefore no longer in love with your partner. No, because the physical element to the relationship doesn't matter as much at the mental bit of it. Back to my original question, "what is the difference between platonic love and love for you partner?".

There cannot be such a thing as love at first sight, as you cannot see someone's mind. It should be called "lust at first sight".

The euro is a bad thing - to be done

The euro encourages trade between countries. Trade results in countries becoming less self-suficient...

You have no reason to be angry

Compared to all of the problems in the world your problems are insignificant. So before getting angry about anything pause for a moment and think, "if I'm going to get angry about something I'll get angry about all of the unnecessy killing, pollution, and general injustice in the world. Only when all of these problems have been resolved will I get angry about any of my insignificant problems".

"The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die in us while we live." - Norman Cousins

Public owned or private services?

Introducing competition brings price down. What does it do to the quality of service or product?

A private companies goal is to make money for the shareholders. This must result in a drop in quality.

As with most things we probably want a mixture. Privately run services with some public money.

To apologize or not

To apologize is to let yourself off of the hook and make yourself feel better. To apologize is therefore a very selfish act. If you acted out of order towards another person then they will have realized this. Knowing this, should you apologize? An apology may make the receiver feel better but this is only because they lack the confidence to realize that they were right all along ie. it re-enforces/confirms their postition

Christian contradiction

"For a religon that belives in eternal life, the phrase 'till death do us part' seems a little strange." - radio 4

Pets - The new slavery

No difference between an animal and a human. You cannot own a human, so can you own an animal?

Whats the point in booze?

As far a I can see the only valid reasons are:
You enjoy the taste (no-one enjoys their first pint).
You enjoy the affect (is it worth the hangover).
To expand your mind/make you think differently (Clouds your judgement slows thought down thought).
Drink to escape.

"Geoff Hoon, who like the decapitated chicken fails to realise that he is walking dead" - Jasper Gerard

Iraq as a Flytrap - abridged artical by Andrew Sullivan from the Times

Talking about the American soldiers in Iraq, "if the terrorists leave us alone in Iraq, fine he said. But if they come and get us, even better. Far more advantageous to fight terror using trained soldiers in Iraq than trying to defend civilians in New York or London". "Think of it as a flytrap".

"... a world gone mad, where women aren't allowed to look like women any more; they have to look like pre-pubesant boys with big tits" - India Knight

Capitalism and Shifting to a Post Growth Economy - abridged from a Times article by David Smith about Clive Hamiltons views

Capitalism works by identifying and satisfying needs. By making us want to buy more as consumers, capitalism produces a neat loop wich generates the demand to keep us in jobs as workers.

The overwhelming majority of people in the rich countries have now passed the point where additional material wealth gives them any benefit at all.

We should therefore go post-growth or at least aim for a lower rate of expansion.

Would there not be massive unemployment in a post-growth society? He argues not, because we would all work fewer hours, improving the national work-life balance. In practice it would be alot more complicated and painful than that. The poor without the tax revenue generated by the growth in spending by the rich, would be even poorer.

Homosexuality - to be done

Does enjoying masterbation mean that you are homosexual?

What is the difference between you having a five knuckle shuffle and thinking of a woman and another man fighting your purple headed monster and you thinking of a woman?

Is everyone homosexual, but most people haven't found someone of the same sex that they fancy?

Falling in love with someone because of their appearance is shallow and foolish because their appearance will change. If you take appearance of of the equation, then you are just left with personalities. Although specific personalities are different there is no fundamental difference between the personality of a man and a woman. Therefore if you take appearance out of the equation you are just as likely to fall in love with a man as to fall in love with a woman.

"The only thing that I know for certain is that I know nothing" - Socrates

"For every 5 children killed by strangers, 80 are killed by people they know and 130 are killed by cars!" - Quote from Radio 4

Laws are a bad thing, you cannot force people to do things you should allow them to educate themselves and then make an informed descision - to be done.

The Americans and British forces have saved the Iraqi people from Sadam. Who will now saev teh American and British forces from the Iraqi people - Quote from the Times.

Will the minority always ruin it for the majority - to be done.

There is more truth and honesty in visiting a strip club than in most other aspects of life - to be done.

Is it wrong to stare at a beautiful picture?

What is the difference between looking at a picture of a naked woman, and looking at a naked woman in a strip club?

When is looking at a naked woman art and when is it not art?

By looking at something you are treating it as an object.

Physicaly, people are objects.

Are the women working in strip clubs being exploited or are they exploiting the people that go there?

Is it possible for one person to change any of this and make a difference - to be done.

Why do I continue to work for a corporation that personifies everything that I believe is bad - to be done.

Why does a person do anything - to be done.

Society conditions you in many ways for example what beatiful is, is this a good thing or a bad thing - to be done.

Is it possible for everyone to cooperate for the good of everyone else or does human nature always result in everyone looking out for themselves - to be done.

When one of your beliefs conflicts with another things get tricky. For example I'm a vegetarian and I also think that waste is bad. If a chicken has been killed, if your only choices are to eat the chicken or throw it away, which of your beliefs takes priority? Do you waste the chicken by throwing it away or do you stop being vegetarian and eat it so as not to waste it? - Expand on this.

As the circle of light gets bigger so does the circumference of darkness. - Unknown

The man who is prepared to die will always be your master. - Unknown

An eye for an eye Results in everyone being blind. - Ghandi

More technology more problems - to be done.

The love of mney is the root of all evil - to be done.

Cars

By choosing to drive, you are choosing to put yourself in a position where compared to walking, cycling and using public transport, you are X times more likely to kill or injure someone directly. And you are killing people indirectly through pollution and damage to the environment.

"Over 1.2m people are killed in road traffic accidents around the world each year, according to a report." 1

"Figures from the World Health Organization and the World Bank suggest another 50m people may be left injured by crashes annually." 1

"The report warns that on current trends road traffic accidents could outstrip stroke and HIV as one of the main causes of preventable deaths by 2020...third only to heart disease and depression." 1

"[Cars have an] enormous toll in respitory and heart disease, cancers, congestion, rage, noise, loss of green space and social cohesion" 2

"climate change went from being a risky hypothesis to something that is now, according to the WHO, killing 150,000 of us globally every year...road transport accounts for over a fifth of CO2 emissions" 2

Car's don't give you freedom, they take it away. They're a restiction on movement, and a financial ball and chain for many.

1. BBC website 7 April, 2004. Over 1m killed on world's roads. Facts from WHO report, World report on road traffic injury prevention.

2. David Nicholson-Lord, 14 June, 2004. We need a dose of mass psychotherapy, NS.

Do you have control over your own mind, and if not who does - to be done.

Similarities between the Roman empire and America taken from the New Statesman

Rather than being th eunstopable superpower of our imagination America is in reality rather more like the cumbling Roman empire - over extended with excessive arms spending and inequality and disgruntlement at home.

Anything that takes away free thought is your enemy - to be done.

Globalisation

Should we fear monopoly and not the size or a company?

If properly regulated, trade provides poor economies with a means of achieving growth, thereby supporting sustainable development. However allowing market forces to dominate an economy has serious negative consequences for sustainability. Free market competition results in – some would say relies on - over-production and over-consumption. It widens the gap between rich and poor; and poverty, injustice and excess wealth are all bad for the environment. And it obscures the big picture, since market prices do not reflect environmental damage or long-term supply. - Naomi Emmerson

"The growing US deficit has, since the 1960's been the dominant driving force behind financial globalisation." 1

"The accumulated external debt of the world's richest country the United States of America, is equal to $2.2 trillion. This is almost the exact amount owed by the rest of the developing world, including India, China and Brazil - $2.5 trillion." 1

"While many castigate companies like McDonalds and Nike ... at least they can claim to be producing actual goods...banks and financial institutions are making money in the most unproductive way; by lending gambilng and speculating...[they] make money from money." 1


"Globablisation is establishing a single planetry class interest." 2

"We have globlal problems, so we need a global solution. " 2

"At global level there is no restraint of the ability of the rich and powerful to control the lives of the weak." 2

1. The new economics foundation, April 2002, The United States as a HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Country).

2. George Monbiot, 2003. Age of Consent.

The euro is a bad thing because - to be done.

Our current electoral system is a popularity contest - to be done.

Government of philosophers.

Abolish elections select people at random.

Is religon the best practical joke ever - to be done.

Religons aren't about proving of disproving whether there is a god or not, but about faith.

All religons contain wisdom.

The problem with all religous texts from a single religon is that they contradict each other and that they are open to interpretation.

Heaven isn't a democracy.

Religons bring people together and give a sense of community.

"Religions greatest service over the centuries has been to deliver explanations for the inexplicable. But this function has survived too long. Today it does much more to prevent humanity from gaining knowledge." - Andrian Kreye

"Disastrous Christian notion that humankind was given "domination" over nature, to exploit and abuse as it found convienient." - Mark Lynas

If god is omnipotent where does evil come from?

If we thank god for good we must thank him for evil too.

Demonisation of the opposition. The Devil is in the church. This is seen through the split between the Catholics and the Protestants. If you are a Catholic then protestants have been tricked by the devil.

In schools religon should be taught as part of history.

The whole point of religon is it's implausable. Otherwise you wouldn't need faith.

"For a religon that belives in eternal life, the phrase 'till death do us part' seems a little strange." - radio 4

What is teh purpose of gods life?

If god knows everything the future is pre-determined. If this is so then there is no free will.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God....but with God all things are possible.

"The life of Jesus was an awesome study into sel-destruction." 1

"Where would Christianity be if Jesus had got 15 years with time off for good behaviour?" 1

"You cannot take away a man's god without giving him another" 2

1. Sebastian Horsley, 15 March 2004, A Martyr to his art, New Statesman.
2. Jung.

Should people have total freedom of choice and if not where do you draw the line - to be done.