A glimmer of light

This has been a good week.
Parliament decided it did not want to join America in bombing Syria.
MPs are horrified by the cruelty in Syria, but don't think the response to military violence should be more military violence.
We are starting to see the light.

Thinking outside the bomb

Labour and the Conservatives say we must continue having submarines armed with nuclear missiles on patrol at all times.
The Liberals are the only ones saying: Let's find a better way of keeping us safe.
Subs with nuclear missiles are the answer to the question: How do we prevent Russia from bombing us? 
As the only countries which go to war these days are America and us, having a re-think seems a sensible idea.
Does anyone seriously think today that Russia or China is likely to start bombing us? Terrorist are likely to bomb us; other countries are not.
The two countries which are keen to get nuclear missiles are North Korea and Iran, both of which are more likely than the rest of us, to be attacked by another country.
If we were realistic about this, we should sell our Tridents and our submarines to North Korea and Iran and spend the money on terrorist-prevention instead.
This is no more stupid than spending £20 billion to prevent something which was likely 50 years ago but isn't now.

Killing people

I am fascinated by the shouting going on over drones and gas.

Drones are OK because we are flying them and we are killing bad guys with them.

Gas is not OK because Assad may be using it to kill the rebels.

Ordinary people are not allowed to kill other people. Governments are allowed to kill people.

To explain this conundrum to us, governments and the media talk of honour, duty and our boys when talking about the people they train to do the actual killing and evil, barbaric and terrorist when talking about the people they send our boys to kill.

When we come up with better killing technology, drones for example, that is giving our boys the equipment they need.

When the bad guys come up with better ways of killing: gas in Iraq and Syria, nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, backpack bombs and crashing planes from the fundamentalists, we cry foul and run to the United Nations.

If you believe that killing people is an acceptable way of solving problems, don’t be surprised if your opponent takes the same view. How either of you does the killing is irrelevant.

We are good guys and whatever we do is honourable. They are bad guys and whatever they do is evil. We have been told this by our betters since the days of the crusades.

I am astonished we have not found more civilised ways of solving our disputes in all that time.

I am equally astonished that we, the public, still buy this nonsense.

Don't buy, rent

More evidence of the rapid changes in the game.
Adobe, the people who make very expensive software for designing pages or manipulating pictures, will no longer sell their software in shrink-wrapped boxes for you to install on your computer. Instead, they will rent you access to the software in the cloud for 20 or 30 dollars a month.
This follows the lead of Microsoft, another purveyor of expensive, shrink-wrapped software. They are now offering Office 365 which you can use, in the cloud, for a modest price each month.
There are clear advantages for companies and individual professionals. You don't need to manage installations, updates and crashes. You can pay for it as day-to-day expenses, rather than a big licence fee now and then.
Google are to offer a music-streaming service. Why buy, collect and store music when you can play what you want whenever you want it. Play lists instead of LPs or CDs.
Apple, who introduced adults to digital music, are considering the same.
And BT are offering Premiership football, which used to be something the broadcasters had to themselves, following the lead of Netflix who commissioned a series with a star, which, again, used to be something only the broadcasters did.
All this is possible because we live in a connected world, where you can get what you want when you want it. And there are many more people offering it than there were in the old world.

Power to the people

Ecotricity, the company from which I buy my electricity, have just put up two wind turbines at Ballymena in Northern Ireland which will be used to provide power to the Michelin tyre factory there.
This is what people did 100 years ago. The Lots Road and Greenwich power stations in London were built in the early 1900s to provide power for trams and underground trains.
There was no National Grid. If you wanted electricity for your business, you had to build a power station.
Over time, we built bigger power stations to provide power to whoever needed it and now, it is apparently the Government’s responsibility to ensure that we have enough generating capacity to keep all our fridges and iPads running.
Ecotricity are not just making money from supplying electricity, they are looking to find better ways of providing it. The wind turbines at Ballymena follow a couple Ecotricity put up in Dundee for the Michelin factory there. They say that delivering electricity to a specific business is more efficient than adding that capacity to the grid.
Good for them. We need new thinking in this business. Instead of calculating how much electricity we are using, how much we might use in the future and building gas or nuclear stations to deliver that, why don’t we work out how to use less electricity and how to generate some of it ourselves?
The ARM company which makes chips for mobile phones and tablets, got rich by producing chips which needed less power than those produced by Intel. A government would get lots of green points if it told manufacturers their fridges and TV sets had to use 30% less power by 2015 or else.
And it is possible to build houses which use next to no electricity for heating or cooling. Why not make this part of the building regs?
It is also possible to generate electricity from the daylight which falls on glass. Tiny amounts so far, but I’m confident that clever youngsters can work out how to generate enough power in our own homes to run the energy-efficient devices we will all have if the government takes my advice.
We don’t need more power. We need to work out how to use less.

Mutton dressed as lamb

Life is simpler if you are a veggie.
Mutton dressed as lamb, horse masquerading as beef, doesn’t matter at all.
What surprises me is that people are surprised to find that the stuff in ready meals is not what it says on the packet.
Processed meat has always has been made from the bits you cannot sell as ordinary meat. Sausages, kebabs, burgers, pies. Who knows what is in them?
This has been going on since butchers began. Sweeney Todd used customers instead of animals in his pies.
And what you do and don’t like to find on your plate varies from place to place. We like horses and dogs so we don’t want to eat them, in other places they don’t mind eating dogs or horses, but they would hate to find pigs or cows in their pies.
I became a veggie late in life with the help of my children and an American taxi driver.
My children, with the clarity of young minds, made me think about what I ate. And the American taxi driver told me we were raising our cows badly long before mad cow disease became news over here.
Maybe this latest media frenzy will make one or two others think more about what they eat.

Why don't we do it ourselves?

George Osborne is getting it in the neck for not getting Britain’s economy roaring ahead.
But is the Government the only agency which can sort it out? I thought we were a light-touch, small government, fast-on-our-feet sort of country. Shouldn’t entrepreneurs, banks and other bright sparks be doing things which make them rich and us successful?
In China, the government directs everything and jumps on people who complain.
In the UK, the Government lets businesses direct lots of stuff - trains, electricity and gas, waste, and now, schools, colleges and hospitals. And we can, and do, complain all the time.
Why can’t we get ourselves out of the recession without the Government’s help?

Us and them

Our politicians and our popular press just don’t get Europe.
They see it as foreigners interfering in our affairs.
Germany, France and the other people who do get Europe see it as a terrific opportunity to do things together, rather than separately.
Our lot see it in terms of ‘What’s in it for us?’. The enlightened majority in Europe see it as ‘What can we do for all of us?’
Cameron doesn’t want Europe doing things for us, yet he goes to the G8 summit and says G8 must do something to deal with multi-national companies dodging tax. Isn’t this something Europe could do more effectively than a single country can do on its own?
It’s fascinating. The arguments being used for the UK breaking away from Europe are exactly the same as the arguments the Scots are using for breaking away from the UK. But the UK going alone is seen as good whereas the Scots going alone is seen as bad.
I like change. I want the Scots to try it on their own. I’d love the Northern Irish to do the same.
I’d like England to be a full member of a federal Europe.
According to the politicians, I’m in a minority. Am I? Maybe a referendum would show there are more like me.