They Don't Really Care About Us

This week news of a 17 year old boy shot dead in Florida by a self proclaimed neighbourhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, entered the UK mainstream news in a big way.
His name was Trayvon Martin.
His crime? Walking 'suspiciously' through a neighbourhood watch area with a hoodie and allegedly "not abiding by the neighbourhood watch rules" as he went to get some sweets for his brother.

George Zimmerman (left) and Trayvon Martin

The first sight I can see on the web of any mention by the UK flagship news caster, the BBC, is on March 19th 2012 (BBC World March 19th) yet this week the UK news has been full of Trayvon, presumably due to Obama's "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon" speech. Never one to miss an opportunity, brand Obama went in to full swing to remind everyone of his connection to his people, and the 'fact' that he is black, according to the one drop rule. Zimmerman however has not been arrested as he was invoking the Florida law on 'stand your ground' whereby you are granted immunity by the law if you use deadly force, inside or outside your home, whilst defending yourself.
That the establishment in North America, as it is commonly known, does not take the murder of young black people seriously, should not be of surprise; Laurie Penny in the Independent hit the nail on the head when she compared the reaction from middle class America to the scenes of young white women being pepper sprayed by the NYPD during the Occupy Wall Street protests, to some other horrendous cases over the past few years in America such as Sean Bell and Ramarley Graham cases.

Thankfully some people in America see it differently and have taken to the streets in protest, a 'million hoodies' march has been talked of which would be something to see. There have been people of all ages in hoodies, from all back grounds, marching whilst scattering skittles, the sweets that Trayvon had gone to buy for his brother.
The people chant his name.
They chant the names of others slain.
Obama, they do not chant your name.
There has been the other side to this coin though with the New Black Panthers offering a bounty of $10,000 for the citizen arrest of Zimmerman. The fear here is that this could lead to more violence and blood shed, blood that will not bring Trayvon Martin back to his devastated family. Despite Obama's comments and all the words written on this so far, it is important that this is not depicted as a race row or racial flash point. Somewhere the discussion must challenge the idea of race and racism being obsolete and nurtured in ignorance. It should be noted that Florida was also the scene of a fatal shooting of two young British men in April 2011. This violence is not a white problem or a black problem, it is a human problem.

Violence will only bring more violence, an eye for an eye mentality will eventually leave us all blind.

What does this mean for us? Nothing on the face of it but then we do have short memories. Last summers London riots started due to the killing of an unarmed man by the police in Tottenham; in England there have been a series of high profile incidents such as the Charles de Menezes case. There is the rise of fascism to contend with (and I do not mean our own governments in this case) such as the EDL, BNP or the Infidels, who continue to prey on the fear whipped up by the mainstream media, of people in towns up and down the country.
We must ensure that the ignorance of the people behind any extremist groups or radical individuals of any ideal, do not secure footholds in the minds of our youth and work hard to repair the damage done by these different parties and foster a culture of peace and understanding, a world where people look not for our differences but our similarities.

Another Drop In The Ocean

First was the not so very public court case between the people of Ecuador and the oil giants Chevron (Texaco) where they were awarded $9.5 billion for damages to the environment and the people's health, now Chevron has had several executives banned from leaving Brazil following an oil leak. Chevron has attempted to play this down as a small incident, specialist Cleveland Jones from Rio de Janeiro State University described the incident as being "far from the coast and of small volume".
In my view any oil leak is too big.

With oil companies more desperate to seek and secure new sources of oil, the number of offshore drilling sites is on the increase. The delicate eco-webs of our oceans are in the balance and it is with great concern we should all view these acts. People like you or I living in Ecuador have long suffered at the hands of companies in search of ever greater profit margins; cancer, miscarriages and birth defects have become a way of life following the failed clean up and pollution of the oil pits in Ecuador.

We have a duty to ensure the world our children inherit is in a better condition to the one we found it in. In the long run it is us, the humans, that need saving, for as George Carlin once said "the world will be fine, it will be here long after we are gone"

Technological Unemployment

Man Vs Machine

Just as globalisation is a fact, so too is technological unemployment. It is all around you and you have experienced it your entire life, you just may have not realised it.

On a recent visit to the local cineworld cinema the man behind the kiosk told me that you can now buy tickets online and get a 10% discount from the usual ticket price, which is now a staggering £9.10! Firstly I was in a little shock at the price of a cinema ticket, they have steadily gone up over the past 12 months. Thank Joe Pesci I had already signed up for an unlimited card.

Now, you have the 'choice' of a self service machine, or a human. The man explained to me that by using the Internet I could bypass him and get a ticket cheaper by ordering from home and picking it up once I arrived, from the self service machine. As if this was not enough he then informed me that as an unlimited card holder I could do the same with this. This totally bypasses the need for any humans to operate the ticket desk in the pursuit of greater profit margins. I took a moment to highlight this to him and I do not think he had considered it until I used the words "technological unemployment". Being a good obedient worker he was doing his job by informing me of my option to avoid a queue and do it all from home, but at the same time however he is contributing to his own demise.

This is not a new experience for me though as anyone who has been to the VUE cinema in Angel, London, will testify to. Inside the VUE cinema you pay for your tickets at a machine at the bottom of the escalators and do not even see a human until you want to purchase a coca-cola or some popcorn. This was a few years ago now, I wonder if they have upgraded the humans to vending machines yet?

The pursuit to increase profit margins continues and one way to achieve this is by reducing the workforce wherever a corporation can. Everywhere you look machines are replacing the need for humans, from the main library in the town to WHSmiths, they have all installed several self service machines and reduced the number of staff required.

Is this a bad thing? Yes and no, no in that technology has raised our standard of living since the very first caveman worked out how to form and use tools, it is just that in today's society, driven by this never ending need for growth, this truth has been distorted. Yes in that the reduction in purchasing power of the people as technology replaces us, restricts the artificial growth that the "expert" economists talk about, and worsens the current economic situation. Machines do not need a lunch break, holiday, sick pay or any pay for that matter, they only require at present a few select specialists to oversee their maintenance. Remember that the construction industry was replaced by the service industry and now both these areas are heavily automated.

This is not something to be feared though, it is something that should be embraced. Technology can continue to revolutionise the way we live, generating abundance in resources for the planets population, through sustainable and renewable means and enabling us to achieve a standard of "civil"isation that we have not yet achieved.

Do not be fooled by Obama, Cameron, Merkel or Sarkozy. The credit crunch is not the cause of unemployment but it is a contributing factor.

Technological unemployment has only served to accelerate the flaws in the system we currently live in and as our technology increases in capability our reliance on human labour will continue to diminish and free us to pursue our lives in a much greater and enriching way.

Terra-ise

Terra at Occupy LSX

"Hip hop isn't dead, it's just moved to the UK" was a comment I read recently on YouTube about a music video by Logic. The song, "For My People" is a great example of the movement going largely unnoticed by the majority of the nation. It is a hard hitting fusion of expressions on the way the world is currently.

Another evolutionary music artist in this scene is Terra 'Graveman' Slim, someone I have had the pleasure of knowing for sometime and someone who makes music that comes straight from the heart. Never afraid to say things how he sees them Terra has made an album called "Evil is the root of all money". Please take some earth time to check out his YouTube site and support an artist making music from the heart and not the usual manufactured pop by government consent.

Music Class Heroes

I have long been asking where the good anti war music artists have gone? Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and various others are betrayed by a generation that today only talk about getting to the weekend and getting drunk down and dirty.

In my younger days I remember telling my grandfather how I would move with the musical times, thinking back I was never really part of the times that I lied in. My music diet consisted of genius such as Hendrix, Dylan, the Zep, Bowie, Louis Armstrong, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson (and guilty pleasures like Diana Ross and Tina Turner) mixed with a a dash of modern elements such as Guns & Roses, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Chili Peppers and Blur. Still, these modern elements did not really serve to protest greatly against the system as they might have. They all shared one common factor, air time on the radio, today the chances of getting airtime for anyone challenging the system is extremely limited.

Have you heard of Bliss N Eso, Michael Franti, Flobots or Lowkey? If you are reading this then maybe.

I think there is a better chance of Jesus returning than hearing any of these artists on mainstream radio, save Michael Franti, who I suspect may have sold out or succumb to the brand Obama lies back in 2008. To get music today that has any meaning, with a greater selection of words than "I got the moves like Jagger", you have to trawl the Internet and find people that dare to buck the trend or party line. Shows like X-Factor have flooded the market with karaoke singers and people too afraid to buck the trend or go against the will of Simon Cowell. Then came Plan B.

In the Independent today music artist Plan B features as his new song 'Ill Manors' does the rounds with a project he hopes will be just the beginning of a plan to challenge the mindsets of people following the London riots last year. This song is receiving lofty comparisons to the late and great Marvin Gaye's "what's going on" and referring to "ill manors" as "the first great mainstream protest song in years" in a blog by Dorian Lynskey. The Independent writer Tim Walker claims that effective protest songs are rare, they are not, he is just looking in the wrong places for them.

To RBE or Not to RBE

At the weekend the local newspaper reported a story on how Vauxhall had won the chance to venture into the future and design a state of the art electric police car. The piece was written by Sophie Scott of the Luton on Sunday. The car itself could be put into action by a police force in as little as 3 years it is claimed.

High tech policing of the future is described by Chief Inspector Mick Trosh of the Association of Police Officers Intelligent Transport Systems with the car able to access the Police National Database whilst mobile and potentially revolutionise policing. It all sounds a bit Knight Rider but without the looks of KITT, however I feel this is all the more reminiscent of the police state that is being ever increased and one for the documentary Suspect Nation by Henry Porter. Police are dealing with symptoms and not the root cause of criminality, the environment.

The main feature in all of this is the fact that the car is electric and the savings to made by police forces if this is rolled out as a concept. The bad news is that this car still relies on fossil fuels and, as the majority of us know, electricity is not a power source of its own accord; it is a by-product. Not only is it running on electricity but it is made from fossil fuel (namely oil) seven barrels of oil per tyre, not to mention the plastic dashboard, seats, steering wheel and Gucci gadgets. Everything in and of the car is made from oil.
In a world where our resources are finite it amazes me that we continue to build these machines with a limited shelf life using old technology whilst the corporations market it as a leap forward in innovation.

It is not and anyone with even a passing interest in history will know this is a deception. Electric cars have been around for over 100 years.

The appearance of the petrol powered automobile killed off the electric car (which held the land speed record at one time) as it was faster and cheaper to purchase. This has robbed us of over 100 years of innovation as the oil companies secured the market for automobiles and their construction. Where would we be today if the electric car had been allowed to be properly developed  for the benefit of humans? Who knows but to get a sense of perception consider the mobile phone.
In 25 short years we have gone from the car phone (because you needed a car to carry the weight of the battery) with a yuppie in a limousine or Porsche 911 and the top down listening to Duran Duran, to a youth in a tracksuit with his hood up listening JLS on his iPhone 4S. Well maybe not the JLS bit but you see the point.

This is why a Resource Based Economy (RBE) is becoming a necessity, it will enable us to make better use of our resources, ensuring that things are built to the best technical specs and with the greatest durability available to us at that time, thus reducing the waste that currently as a society we are drowning in. We must break out of this cyclical consumption cycle not for ourselves but for our future generations.

It is interesting to see the emergency services moving in this direction (the fire service I am sure will get it all wrong) but it is not enough, a total overhaul of our current system is required. If we keep just modifying it a bit here and there then it will continue to be wasteful and ineffective, just not quite as wasteful or ineffective. This slow process of tweaking things could take decades, something we do not have, and is unacceptable when we have the technology to make revolutionary change now.
People will, and do, say the RBE cannot work. The defeatist, 'can't do' attitude is one all who advocate an RBE I am sure have encountered, but do not be deterred or lose faith. To say it cannot be done because something like this has never been done before is the reason why it can and will work.

Remember that mans reach exceeds his grasp. Keep calm and RBE on

Z Day-2012

A year is a long time and a lot can happen.

Since Z Day 2011 there has been the 'will they won't they' of the Greek debt default debacle, Arab Spring uprisings, Bin Laden was found and killed (allegedly) London had seen a million people march through its streets (with several hundred then camping on them) and a riot reminiscent of the 1980's, a tsunami in Japan resulting in a nuclear episode and of course the fall out between The Zeitgeist Movements founder, Peter Joseph and The Venus Projects Jacque Fresco. 

The rift between the two movements has I hope healed some what, but I feel it has gone some way to setting back the good work done up to that point. 

Z Day 2012's main event was this year held in Vancouver, Canada (which was a bit further than my fraudster bank manager would allow me to go) so it was business as usual in London at Euston as people descended from across the country for their latest dose of 'what next?'

There were some exceptional talks, notably that of Cassie Earle and Myles Dyer, plus an interesting documentary called 'Economics of Happiness' which highlighted the problems caused by a society driven by globalisation and continuous growth on a finite planet in a quiet Tibetan town that I am sure many the world over would be able to empathise with.

Cassie Earle's speech was on a subject I feel very deeply about, namely education and the importance of critical thinking and critical education. 

What is it to be a critical thinker?

Critical thinking, I believe, is the ability to take in information, move around it and be able to take it from another perspective then question what you have been told. This is something that is becoming less and less prevalent in society today as the majority of the public blindly accepts what they are told at face value. Kony 2012 anyone?

In Cassie's speech she pointed the finger at what she called 'critical education', the need for open dialectic  conversations that challenge the status-quo. A process where we ensure all voices are heard on a subject, where ideology is not imposed. 

Wouldn't this be a grand world to live in?

Another important point was one of formal education as it stands. Today society believes in something we call 'officially sanctioned knowledge'...i.e if you read it in a text book and have the correlating diploma or degree then of course you must be right and better than the next human.
As Cassie put it "is the shelf stacker in a multinational corporation that builds computers in their spare time more or less capable or qualified than the graduate from a top university?"

Of course it is difficult to say but it could be assumed that the person that spends every spare minute of their own time working building things because they love to do it may well be better qualified than someone with a piece of paper that has set them back £15,000. If you disagree with this view point try looking up Dan Pink - Drive- on YouTube.

Everyone is an intellectual, our problem is remembering or believing this fact. 

Our minds are capable of assimilating vast amounts of knowledge yet generally we choose to waste it. As a society we must regain our sense of curiosity before it is too late, we damage our children by quashing their natural curiosity about the world for a quiet life when they ask 'why'? We should encourage each other to question everything. Question what I am writing, what the media tells you, what your employers and teachers may tell you and remember formal or sanctioned knowledge is not the only knowledge.

Myles Dyer spoke about his exciting new project Universal Solutions Project, which has the potential to aid activists in their quest to educate and inform the masses on a scale not necessarily achievable up until now.

I have always said, and people at work will confirm this, that people do not care about something until it directly affects them (fire service pensions being one example) but unfortunately it is usually too late by this point and usually people fail to see how interconnected these problems are.

What Myles is hoping to create and achieve will get right to the heart of this problem and potentially blow it wide open for us, giving us the tools to help people connect the dots that others seem to do so effortlessly. 

Myles' speech was an exciting moment in the day for me as I got a sense of frustration from some, myself included, that there are still a lot of people waiting for someone else to do the work. Last year at Z Day two important messages were made; firstly there is no point in saving the world if you are not having fun and secondly that if you were there you were an activist and had a duty to get involved in spreading the message and attending chapter meetings etc. 

I do feel the second part, as I have mentioned earlier, has been affected in part by the fall out between TZM and TVP but this should have made no real difference as the problems we all face remain unchanged, if not more pressing as the system teeters on the brink of collapse.

We must not wait for a leader, we have to get up and do it for ourselves. As Jiddu Krishnamurti once said "You, have to be a light for yourself". We must be willing get our own hands dirty.

Since Z Day 2011 I have doubled my efforts and commitments to learning, educating and achieving the goal of a better world. Following this years event I hope I can again double those efforts and productions, like a kind of Moore's Law, or not.

What will you do?