Technology « Talking Bollocks

Posts Tagged ‘Technology

Oct

Brooklyn Space Program

Categories: Technology and The Future
Tags: brooklyn space program, helium balloon, iphone, Jonathan Trapp, space, Technology, the alps

Recently I have started to think that innovative technology is really starting to pick up the pace. An article in The Economist this week talked about the fact that consumer goods used to be derived from military technology and sited The Internet as an example. Now, it says that consumer goods are leading the way. And some of this technology is giving individuals powers that only large companies or governments would have had in the past.

In September 2011 American Jonathan Trapp tied helium filled balloons to an arm chair and crossed the alps. The E also mentioned that a guy from Brooklyn as sent a video camera into space using helium balloons and tracked it after landing using an iPhone.

Jul

Spirit of the age

By jonesxxx 2 Comments

Categories: Art, Books, computers, Culture, Fiction, Film, History, Music, Politics, Science, Science Fiction, Social comment, Technology, The Future and Thoughts
Tags: 1969, alternative universe, Analogue, Astronauts, “Bullshit baffles brains”, “computer person”, Batman, big bang, Blade Runner, bloatware, Bongs, bright future, Cape Canaveral, Captain America, chaos theory, Closer Encounters Of The Third Kind, Computer books, computers, consultants, cultural icons, Dark Star, Donald Fagan, faith in science, forbidden planet, fractals, Hawkwind, Hollywood, hope, IGY, Intel, kpmg, kung fu, lord of the rings, marketing, Marvel comics, memes, Michael Moorcock, microsoft, minicomputers, moon landing, Netware, New Riders, Omni, optimism, OS2, outsider character, PDP11, personal philosophy, Phillip K. Dick, price waterhouse, Ray Bradbury, rocket kits, RSTS/E, Science, Science Fiction, Silent Running, Silver Surfer, space program, Spiderman, spirit of the 60s, Star Wars, sub-conscious, suits, Tangerine Dream, Technology, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Hulk, the Matrix, the young, virtual reality, William Gibson, windows

"What a glorious time to be free"

When I was a kid I was into the space program. I stayed up late watching the moon landing and I dreamed that, one day, I would watch a launch at Cape Canaveral in Florida. I bought all the model rocket kits and was a bit unique in this respect as most kids of my age were into football or kung fu. In the evenings I would stay up to listen to the “Bongs” of News at Ten to see if there was an item on the space program. Gradually, after 1969, the space program lost momentum and fewer and fewer bongs included astronauts. The public had become blasé about space.

No matter, I had discovered Science Fiction. I started on Marvel comics. The outsider characters were my favourites: Spiderman, The Hulk, the Silver Surfer. I graduated to the novels of Ray Bradbury, Michael Moorcock and Phillip K. Dick. I eagerly devoured the meagre diet of Science Fiction films which were screened on British TV: The Day The Earth Stood Still, Silent Running and Dark Star. I was regarded as a little eccentric by my peers. One guy told me that I could see a brick and think it looked like a space ship……and I could.
I listened to Hawkwind and Tangerine Dream and subscribed to two magazines: Omni and Analog. These ran Science Fiction stories alongside the latest thinking in science and technology. I discovered the wonder of fractals and read about memes, chaos theory, alternative universes and virtual reality.

In 1977 Star Wars and Closer Encounters Of The Third Kind were released and at last we had big budget films with fantastic special effects. Science Fiction was suddenly popular.

I studied computer science at school and got a job as a computer operator working on minicomputers known as PDP11s running an operating system called RSTS/E. Our first machine had 96K of RAM and the disk drives were the size of washing machines and held 40 megabytes each. Locked away in machine rooms with computers the size of wardrobes I was pigeon holed, not as a “techy”, but as a “computer person”. Nobody knew what we did and nobody set any rules. We dressed how we wanted, we worked how we wanted and we had a lot of fun. Moving to London I discovered an obscure science fiction book shop in Denmark Street called Forbidden Planet.

Home PCs became available and it was possible to create fractal images with the press of a button. Computer gaming got going and the simple text based games such as Advent and Dungeon, which I had played at work, were replaced by full colour shoot ‘em ups.

Something odd was happening: My interests were becoming main stream. The popular media seemed to be mining my childhood for ideas.

In 1982 Blade Runner was released and suddenly all the weird and disturbing themes of Phillip K. Dick were simplified, tarted up and splashed all over the big screen. A fantastic film yet the special effects and the charisma of the actors overshadowed the subtle and mundane realism with which Dick somehow manages to portray the strange and insidious.

In the 80s a wave of technology based innovation ran through finance and banking and governments deregulated. Money sloshed around the industry and fortunes were made. Computers became ubiquitous and as fast as Intel improved the hardware capacity Microsoft bloatware ate it up. People started paying allegiance to software vendors as if they were football teams; Windows vs OS2, Windows NT vs Netware and, these days, iPhone vs Android. Had we all lost the plot?

Publishers such as New Riders churned out endless poorly edited books claiming to teach IT but which were little more than rewritten documentation. Computer departments appeared in book shops. In the early 80s I struggled to find books on operating systems and networking but by 1990 the computer departments in bookshops were ballooning and Foyles devoted a whole floor.

The money attracted Price Waterhouse and KPMG who read a few books on technology, set themselves up as consultants and started selling the bleeding obvious back to customers. The smooth talking suits followed a simple creed: “Bullshit baffles brains” and if there was one thing they knew about it was bullshit.

Hollywood made feature length versions of the old Marvel comic books. Batman in 1989 then moving on to the anti-heroes of my youth, Spiderman in 2002 and the Silver Surfer in 2007.

In 2001 the Lord of The Rings was released. Hold on, this was getting personal. Was nothing from my childhood sacred? It seemed that the very stuff of my psyche was being commandeered by the corporations. The fabric of my personal philosophy was being ground up, digested and regurgitated back at me stripped of subtlety, emotion and meaning.

The spirit of the 60s and 70s was optimism and hope. Science would create a bright future. “Just machines to make big decisions, Programmed by fellers with compassion and vision” sang Donald Fagan belatedly in 1982. I recommend listening to this song and reading the lyrics. The young may get a feel for the optimism of a different age and the old man like to remember.

However, the seeds of doubt were always present and I had picked up on them in my youth. Now the dystopian ideas of Phillip K. Dick were taken up by new authors such as William Gibson and transformed into cyberpunk. In 1999 The Matrix was released portraying a sinister world in which humanity lived unknowingly in a virtual world while their physical bodies lay inert.

The marketing industry got into its stride and started targeting our sub-conscious. We mortgaged our futures to pay for the dreams used to sell deodorant. As Dick had predicted the corporations bent reality to maximise their profits.

This week Hollywood are, again, engaged in recycling cultural icons from the past. A new movie has been released based on the marvel comic book character Captain America. Perhaps, at this time of conflict and economic uncertainty, America is trying to return to its youth. Trying to revert to those days when most of us had faith in science, democracy and the future.

But what does the future hold? What stories or icons or memes of today will Hollywood recycle in thirty years time? Corporations cannot generate art they can only package and sell it. They can only reproduce existing ideas so where are the ideas? The blind optimism of the 60s and 70s is as outdated as the cynical greed of the 80s and 90s.

It’s time for a new direction but our compass is still spinning.

So why do I feel optimistic? Right now we are on the cusp of change. Right now is when the seeds of the future are being sown. I am maturing in years and rather than thinking about spaceships and time travel I find myself speculating about pensions and politicians. I suspect that the young already have an idea of where we’re going.

It would be nice if they shared it with the rest of us.

St Malo Beach

Jun

Helsinki

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

Helsinki Station

On Sunday I flew to Finland. Helsinki? No I went of my own accord. It was never a good joke in it’s original form and obviously my rendition is no better.

At long last Terminal Three at Heathrow seems to have been tarted up and there was room to swing a cat. Sadly, there were no swinging cats there, just we motley collection of tourists and jaded business travellers.

I am being too cynical. In fact Heathrow is better since the renovation though I still protest every public space in England being transformed into an over priced shopping mall. The “luxury brands” swarm like bloated maggots around departure lounges though why any marketing wallah should think that having the name of Harrods suspended over a shop selling tatt to the masses would do their brand image any good I don’t know.

I’ve heard stories of luxury brands, such as Louis Bloody Vuitton, destroying their merchandise rather than let unsold items appear on the market at knock down prices and I had imagined that this was driven by a determination to artificially maintain exclusivity. But these days the luxury brands appear to be targeting both the toffs and the chavs and I suspect that in a few years time they will have completely destroyed their brand name. In fact I heard that Burberry have hit this exact problem and are now trying to claw there way back to exclusivity. If they’re not careful it will be Robinson’s Barley Water all over again.

I used to drink RB and had bought it fairly regularly over the years. However, a while back I noticed that they had not only changed the bottle to some misshapen plastic abomination but had also brought in a lot of other concoctions which they are flogging under their brand name. I mistakenly picked up a bottle of some rubbish which proved to be undrinkable. I continued to by the stuff for a while but the plastic bottle somehow makes the stuff irksome and it spends it’s days at the back of the shelf with all the supposed goodness gradually settling out until I notice just how foul looking it has become and throw it out.

I stayed at the Sokoto Presidentti in Helsinki which was satisfactory. The bathrooms have an almost medial appearance with their over engineered shower apparatus but the Spanish restaurant delivers a very good pepper steak and crème brulee.

The Helsinki Natural History Museum

In the evening I stood outside the hotel, my view of the Natural History Museum obscured by an unending procession of tour buses disgorging Japanese tourists. I’d read somewhere that Berliners are up in arms at the number of tourists who clutter up their beautiful city and I sympathise.

Despite the concentration of tour buses at the hotel, Helsinki seems not to suffer the scourge of mass tourism. Wandering the streets in the evening I found them almost deserted. Even at Helsinki Cathedral there were just a few local people sitting on the steps enjoying the evening.

Hypocritically I travel quite frequently and my impression of the UK is that it appears fundamentally different from continental Europe. Northern Europe has a certain uniformity engendered by common street signs for “Centrum”, yellow trams and tall warehouses. Possibly multiple forcible attempts at unifications by megalomaniac dictators resulting in massive loss of life also have something to do with it – Northern Europe has a more communal feel to it.

One evening I visited the Sokos Helsinki restaurant overlooking the railway station for a delicious steak sandwich. From the balcony it is possible to look out over Helsinki station and the trams, one of which appeared to be a travelling bar – What an excellent idea!

Many people in Helsinki ride bicycles but seem not as obsessed with having the right gear as the cyclists in England. The young men seem to be heavy metal enthusiasts and wear jeans, studs and beards. One motorcyclist sported two enormous cow horns on his crash helmet. All a bit Viking which is odd as I am told that their language is unrelated to Scandinavian languages and instead shares it’s history with Hungarian.

About 11pm, when it was still broad daylight, I discovered a video and sweet shop. Numerous videos and numerous types of sweet all in tall jars including the a suspicious brand named Tyrkish Peba. Which I love but which, I suspect, was originally invented as some kind of chemical warfare agent as it is composed partly of Ammonium chloride.

Returning to the hotel I found it overrun by youths who continued to race around the corridors until the early hours creating a sort of carpeted, indoor version of the Bronx.

On the flight home I got talking to a girl who was publishing a book to be named “No Fear” on the changing face of business leadership brought about by globalisation and technology. An interesting discussion though difficult, given the incessant announcement over the tannoy. In an effort to cover themselves and sell us more stuff, corporations bombard us with advertisements and inane safety warnings. We get this on aircraft, on the London Underground and in those imbecilic, and legally questionable, online “agreements”. Corporations will claim that they need to communicate with their customers but this is a very one sided form of communication. I don’t care about the ground speed, the height or their selection of duty free items. I especially don’t care to hear it in multiple languages one after the other at full volume from a loudspeaker positioned 12 inches from my left ear. I sometimes feel like taking a megaphone onto an aircraft and retaliating. I recall a friend who tried this in the back of a taxi once and got thrown out at Trafalgar Square….but that’s another story.

Mar

We need a vision for a sustainable future

By jonesxxx 1 Comment

This never happened - but something similar did

The crisis continues at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan and today the authorities raised the alert level to 5.

Energy is a problem. The modern world depends on it and obtaining enough of it is difficult and dangerous. Modern economies evolved when energy was cheap and plentiful and energy use comparatively limited. Today the demand for energy is growing and we have no clear idea of how this can be sustained.

Safe alternatives to fossil and nuclear power such as wind, solar and wave are available but the critics claim that these are not enough.

But not enough for what?

It may be true that sustainable energy would not be enough for our society as it is today. Not enough for us to drive our big cars at 70 mph and wreck the countryside. Not enough for a society that insists that it has the right to fly to anywhere on the face of the earth in under a day and then expects facilities identical to those at their departure point. Not enough for a society so materialistic that it cannot cope with the rubbish it produces.

Imagine the world prior to the rise of technology. Imagine a developer expounding the benefits of a hyper-consumerist society such as ours and presenting a vision of such a society. The south of England to be covered in tarmac and traffic. The workforce to sit in uniform air-conditioned factory offices for 8 hours a day getting so little exercise that they are forced to drag themselves to a gym in the evening. Three hour commuting times. Every unique and beautiful location in every city to be surrounded by fast food outlets and frequented by strangers from the other side of the world. From The Houses of Parliament to the Spanish Steps to Patong Beach, all to have their character stripped and replaced with shops selling mugs with pictures portraying how it used to be before commercialisation. Ko Samui becomes Blackpool and our cities become caricatures of themselves.

Now throw in climate change and nuclear accidents and ask yourself would we have bought into this vision if it had been presented to us a hundred years ago?

Given the choice, would we have given up local natural beauty for two weeks holiday a thousand miles away? Would we have given up the character of our local towns and cities for electric windows, flat screen TV and birth defects that nobody talks about?

Are a people ever allowed to develop their own vision of the future or are we slaves to our baser needs for more food, more wealth and more than everyone else? Can we not look up from the trough for a minute to consider where we are going?

Our hyper commercialised system encourages production and consumption above all else. It builds in obsolescence so perfectly that incredible works of technical genius become obsolete after four years not because they are not useful or fail to function but because the manufacturer needs to keep selling more to ensure that the corporate machine continues to function. A whole industry termed marketing has emerged to encourage us to consume and everywhere we look there are adverts.

We sigh and consider that this is all normal. Bollocks it is! Our hyper-commercialised economies have existed for less than a hundred years.

This age will pass.

The question is: what will replace it?

We need to think about where our society should be going. To address climate change we need to change society as a whole and this change can be beneficial but first we need a vision of the future.

Changing society is scorned by the hyper-consumerist tendency. It is condemned as “social engineering” and anti-libertarian. Yet the starting point of all corporate bureaucracy is the “vision statement”. A vision of the future is created and this is followed by a strategy and plans. Democratic governments are then bribed and bullied into facilitating this vision. So we have social engineering already but the driver is profit.

We need to stop fooling ourselves that we can continue to consume and waste while avoiding climate change and nuclear accidents. We need to grow up and take responsibility.

A good start would be a clear vision of our future which is fundamentally different from the hyper-commercialised, energy greedy society which is promoted by the vested interests such as global corporations and lobby group dominated governments.

Critics will argue that society advances randomly and organically rather than in any organised fashion and of course it does. But whenever the human race has achieved anything of worth it has been accompanied by a clear vision that has been shared by the participants. In the 60s and 70s the first series of Star Trek was screened and this promoted idealism, individuality, humanity and optimism. I have always believed that this was the vision that underpinned the moon landings.

The vision which is portrayed in our media at the start of the 21st century is more Blade Runner than Star Trek. When people do envision a sustainable society they think of earth toilets, marijuana and very little soap. The details of these visions are unimportant. When Martin Luther King had a dream it did not include every legal decision taken in the civil rights struggle. When Churchill spoke of broad sunlit uplands he didn’t mention a national health service. If there is one thing we can say for certain about the future it is that all the predictions will be wrong. Star Trek, Blade Runner and absence of soap are all visions of the future which will not come to pass.

So why have a vision at all? We need a vision, not as a goal, but as a guide. If we develop a shared vision of how our civilisation could live in a sustainable way then we can start making intelligent and thoughtful decisions on working our way toward that vision. Without the vision we merely flounder around grasping at anything which is not responsible for the current disaster. Witness governments around the world turning on a sixpence and becoming sceptical about nuclear power.

So how do we develop such a vision? I suggest that we need speculative fiction. We need novels, movies and TV which portray alternative ways of living.

Hang on, I have an idea for a story………

Jan

Web site Terms and Conditions are bollocks

By jonesxxx 1 Comment

Categories: Bollocks, Commerce, democracy, Politics, Social comment, Technology and Transport
Tags: bollocks, guarantee, instructions, Leaflet, No break of journey is permitted in either direction, railway, SEQ LEGAL LLP, Southern Railway, Technology, terms and conditions, tick box, ticket

Read carefully or you might invalidate the guarantee

Today I bought a plant sprayer. A fairly simple plastic bottle with a plunger to compress air and a trigger to spray a fine mist over plants. Getting it home I took off the top to fill it up and found a 12 page instruction leaflet inside. 12 pages in about 10 ten different languages. The leaflet included a guarantee which was voided if the thing was not used in accordance with the instructions.

All this for a plastic plant sprayer.

This reminds me of an incident in the media last year where a man bought a ticket from one destination to another. The train stopped at an intermediate station and for some reason could go no further. The man got off the train and tried to exit the station to finish his journey by alternative means. The ticket inspector refused to accept his ticket and he was fined for not having a valid ticket. Yes, this happened, and some imbecile railway official was interviewed on the radio and pointed out that the man had bought the ticket over The Internet and had therefore been fully informed of the terms and conditions which state “No break of journey is permitted in either direction”.

The spokesman said that the he must have been aware of this condition as would have had to tick the box indicating that he had read and understood the terms and conditions.

When we make a purchase we are entering a contract with another person or company. Most countries have general laws about sales but often a contract is implied. However, modern technology allows the supplier to write reams of conditions and present them to the buyer at the last moment. The buyer is then expected to read these, consider them carefully and tick a box to indicate acceptance. This is bollocks!

A quick perusal of The Web uncovered a generic web site Terms and Conditions document made available by SEQ LEGAL LLP. The document is intended to for use in in relation to “websites with common kinds of interactive features, such as blogs, bulletin boards, forums and chat rooms”. The document runs to seven pages and the first sentence reads: “These terms and conditions govern your use of our website; by using our website, you accept these terms and conditions in full.”

The process of presenting a person with seven pages of legalistic nonsense just seconds before he engages in an activity has been enabled by modern technology without any thought of whether this is reasonable or even legal. If we accept this sort of bollocks then companies will use it more and more.

It’s bad enough that pubs now have bouncers on the doors but pretty soon you will be required to swipe a card or text a number to signify that you agree to the pubs Ts & Cs.

As for the specific condition of Southern Railway that “No break of journey is permitted in either direction” – this is obvious bollocks. What are we passengers or kidnap victims?

Jan

Wikileaks have opened a Pandora’s box of hypocrisy

By jonesxxx 1 Comment

Hypocrisy Rules

Confusion reigns regarding legitimacy of Wikileaks but they may have done the world a favour by opening a Pandora’s box of hypocrisy over secrecy, privacy and information security.

Wikileaks have been dispersing information “leaked” by government or corporate employees for years now. However, what really put the cat amongst the pigeons when they released details from thousands of “cables” between United States Embassies around the world. The Americans responded by getting Paypal and Mastercard to stop processing payment transactions for Wikileaks though apparently these companies agreed without any legal intervention.

Meanwhile, the Swedish government is trying to extradite Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange from the United Kingdom under charges of rape. In accordance with Swedish law, the names of the alleged rape victims are confidential but Naomi Wolf in The Guardian is calling for the names to be published.

The U.S. authorities then issued a court order to get details of private Twitter messages for seven people whom they believe to be involved with Wikileaks. The original order stipulated that the court order must be kept secret so that even the people whose messages were being accessed would not be told. Wikileaks challenged this in the courts and we now know that the court order exists and that one of the people being investigated is an Icelandic Member of Parliament named Birgitta Jonsdottir.

A blogger who appeared on Channel 4 News on the 7th January complained that the U.S. authorities were spying on everyone and that nothing was really “private”. A lawyer interviewed worried that journalists were being prevented from defending the anonymity of their sources.

Then we have The Daily Telegraph sting where Business Secretary Vince Cable was prodded into a conversation where he discussed threatening to bring down the coalition. The Telegraph initially omitted to mention that Mr. Cable also claimed to have “declared war on Mr Murdoch”. This last tidbit was later leaked to the BBC.

We must not forget that the debate over information security takes place amidst a climate of fear of terrorism. Under New Labour the United Kingdom suffered more and more intrusive security measures justified by the need to confront the threat of terrorism. Police encourage this hysteria by preventing members of the public from taking photographs in public places.

The rational conclusion from this rumpus is that the concepts of privacy and freedom of information are under strain, that none of our data is secure and that all parties are behaving hypocritically.

However, Wikileaks may have done us all a favour by bringing the arguments to a head and this could be good for democracy if governments acknowledge and address the underlying issues.

The driving force behind the rise of Wikileaks and the challenges to privacy and freedom of information is modern information technology. In the past information has been stored on paper and was therefore difficult to copy and disperse. Though this may have been comparatively inefficient it meant that keeping information secure was relatively easy. Today’s technology allows vast amounts of data to be stored in devices no bigger than a postage stamp. It provides that data can be easily analysed and it facilitates easy dispersal via The Internet.

There are two aspects to the current chaos over information security. Firstly the data is obviously not adequately secured and secondly there is no agreement on what data should be freely available.

While securing information is technically possible, human factors make the process extremely difficult. Further, as data has become so concentrated, once a system is compromised the quantity of information dispersed can me enormous. All this has been known to information security professional for years yet we have not faced up to the fact that our efforts to secure information are not working.

All bureaucracies, such as governments, have a tendency toward secrecy. Rather than selecting information to be kept secret they prefer blanket regulations which keeps everything secret. Following pressure to release information the British Government responded with the Freedom Of Information Act 2000 which allows that some information can be released dependant on a public interest test. This is the wrong way around.

Rather than keeping everything secret and then allowing exceptions we should make everything freely available and only keep secret selected information.

Two things need to happen.

Firstly democratic countries need to define more clearly the information which can legitimately be categorised as secret or confidential and what information individuals can expect to keep private. All other information should then be freely available.

Secondly government and corporations should wake up to the responsibilities that is theirs because they hold vast amounts of other people’s information. This realisation should feed into some high level thinking about how to carry out effective information security and this should put a greater emphasis on professionalism together with standardisation of systems and processes. This will probably accelerate the current trend toward cloud computing.

Greater clarity over the rules on information security together with greater realisation of the challenges in securing that data can only be a good thing.

Sep

Jumping robots, progress? – Toward what?

By jonesxxx 1 Comment

All this modern technology is of course fantastic. iPods, The Internet, GPS. All fantastic.

Military robot 'hops' over walls

However, despite being a great user of all this stuff and despite having been in the computer industry since 1978 I can’t help thinking that it does not make us any happier. To quote Hermann Hess in Steppenwolf when referring to the radio, these things are merely an “ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities”.
Personally I think that technology probably peaked around 1959. By then we had sufficient technology to ward of the evils of this world and we could have switched our efforts to art and understanding.
But people being people we continue to improve and tweak the physical world only, these days the driver is not curiosity but greater efficiency.

But how much does efficiency contribute to happiness?

The BBC reported today that the American military are beavering away to invent more nutty ideas. This time it’s a little mobile shoe box that can jump over 7 foot high fences. Hooray. Just what we need.
My theory is that they will pack it with explosives and use it for targeted assassinations. Another boom to make the world a better place?

They say that “you can’t stop progress” but “progress” implies a destination. What is the destination that is brought closer by jumping robots?

Jun

Guest Article: A Better Future for the Planet

By hildacarmi Leave a Comment

I would like to invite women to play a significant role in helping to orchestrate a better future for the planet and all who occupy it – humankind and animals alike. All of nature, for that matter.

If we continue to pursue a path of negativity, an apocalypse could be the outcome. To avoid that happening, we need to make more conscious efforts to think, speak and act positively to create a more peaceful, compassionate and harmonious future. By developing a more positive outlook on life we could in the future create a haven on earth.

Well, how can we women play a significant role in making the changes which will improve the quality of life on this planet?

1. Firstly, I think we need to return to the qualities of the goddess. The god, I feel, has outlived its time, a time of wars and destruction, a lack of regard for the planet and an abundance of greed and selfishness.

The god or masculine energy – yang – needs to be replaced or rebalanced by the energy of the female – yin, the nurturing and compassionate.

In order to achieve a balance which could significantly improve the quality of life on this planet these are the changes I would like to suggest.

Bring wars to an end so that we may live in harmony with all of our brothers and sisters regardless of background, nationality, skin colour or status.

Wars have been perpetrated by men since time immemorial and continue in this so called age of enlightenment. With more women in positions of influence in decision making, a more peaceful environment could develop over time, changing future generations of men from a war like to a more peaceful harmonious species.

Another of my suggestions is to have a closer look at the effects religion has had on society as a whole.

Religion is a system introduced and organised by men and if looked at more closely is quite disturbing. For example:

God is portrayed as being male

Woman (Eve) was created from the rib of a man (Adam)

It was the woman (Eve) who disobeyed the word of the Lord and ate the ‘fruit of the tree’ and was cast out of the garden along with the man (Adam).

Men were given the freedom to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ (Genesis 9) whereas the woman was told by the Lord ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you – Genesis 3-16.

As one continues to read Genesis there is little mention of daughters, but sons were constantly being portrayed.

Until quite recently, women were not allowed to be ordained as priests (priestesses?) Even now, the Catholic church continues to forbid women from being ordained. Although religion has been around for a very long time, have we stopped to consider how much or how little it has served us?

Religion over the centuries has been the cause of countless brutal wars and remains the cause up to the present day. Because of our advanced technology regarding the war machinery, far more people are being killed as a result with little regard for civilians. Men’s yang energy is one of the likely causes of this aggressive behaviour.

It is my belief that a good strong healthy seed of spirituality was implanted in each and every one of us at birth, but has sadly been contaminated by religion.

Religion was introduced into our lives at a very early age, either by our parents, our teachers or the church. When we look more closely at the teachings of religion, there is more fear taught than hope.

Fear is one of the most negative of emotions and seems to have a much stronger influence on the minds of young children than the more positive emotion of hope.

As children we are force fed religion and at that early age we are not equipped with the discerning faculties to make the distinction between religion and spirituality. They know of no way of regurgitating the religious teachings as they grow older and as a result they pass the teaching on to their children when they become adults.

Children have a natural tendency to live in the moment, but as they grow older they seem to lose that ability and learn instead to live in fear. Fear of doing or saying the wrong thing and from the religious point of view, there is fear of going to hell.

I speak of no one ‘brand’ of religion, but religion across the board.

2 While we are considering change, why not abolish marriage altogether. Give couples the choice, without denying them any possible benefits, to consider a binding contract for a specific length of time which can be renewed when they come to the end of the said contract.

I see marriage as a form of slavery – ‘my’ husband, ‘my’ wife! One should have the freedom to live and love without the feeling of ownership hanging over one. Let me quote this passage which is a part of the marriage ceremony: ‘until death do us part’. This is another stumbling block in a marriage ceremony. We have to remember that nothing is permanent, including marriage.

One can put one’s best efforts in trying to maintain a happy, peaceful and loving marriage for as long as one can, but nothing remains static. Everything around us is changing all the time and so are we humans. Marriage is no exception.

It would be an ideal situation if both parties in a marriage changed in the same ways and at the same time and remained compatible. This, no doubt, happens, it seems, in some cases but obviously not in all as we see from the increasing number of divorces year by year.

It is no less an insult on the part of politicians who try to bribe couples to stay together by offering monitory incentives. Whatever the incentives I think it is a grave insult. We have to think of the impact on children in a family where there is no love between partners but constant conflicts.

What I think, is for us to recognise our strong procreative instincts. One of the most powerful instincts in most women is to have a child. In men their most powerful instinct is to ‘sow their seed’. The institute of marriage, organised by religion, has created deceit in men who lie to their wives about their movements when the need to ‘sow their seed’ becomes pressing.

Children are extremely delicate creatures who need as much quality of life as possible in their early childhood. Having to adjust to both the male and female energies at such an early stage of their development cannot be easy for them.

As the female energy is all encompassing – loving, gentle, kind and nurturing, children thrive better in such an environment without having to adjust to the male energy which tends to be more destructive.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do not hate men. On the contrary, I cannot begin to think what life would be like without them. But we have to recognise the difference between the male and female energies and allow our children to benefit from them at the appropriate times.

We have to think of the impact of our behaviour on our children. Perhaps it would be better for couples to separate amicably for the sake of the health and well being of their children than to stay together in a loveless atmosphere, shrouded in continuous conflict.

Contract unions between consenting adults could replace marriage.

In the first instance, couples could elect to stay together for a specific length of time, eg seven years, under a legally binding document. At the end of that period, if they were able to maintain a strong loving relationship, they could consider renewing the contract, the length of which could be agreed between them.

We all know of the seven year itch. After a period of time the itch may become unbearable, in which case the couple could decide to live apart and not renew the contract. The children would remain the responsibility of both parties even in this situation.

In some African tribes, children of both sexes are brought up solely by their mothers until about the age of seven when the male children are sent to live with their fathers in order to learn male skills.

This seems like an excellent arrangement as both male and female children benefit from the female yin energy in their formative years, not only from their mothers, but from all females in their environment.

Although this system is unlikely to be replicated in our sophisticated western society, there is much from which we could learn and perhaps a modified system adapted.

3 The next change I would like to see are women reclaiming their bodies.

We read about women in developing countries who are encouraged or, more likely, forced to abort female foetuses. This is not acceptable.

Women should retake control of their bodies and not be influenced by their partners or parents. To abort a female foetus simply to perpetuate cultural demands, in favour of a male child, in order to carry on the family name, or to be able to fight for their country as adults, or for whatever other spurious reason, should not be allowed to continue. This sort of pressure and procedure can create untold damage to a woman’s psyche.

Men have both the X and Y factors in the sperm and are therefore responsible for determining the sex of the foetus. But it is the woman who bears the foetus and should be the one to make the decision as to whether she wishes to bring the gestation period to its normal conclusion or to abort the foetus. This should be wholly the decision of the woman.

If this trend were allowed to continue, future generations of men will be deprived of females with which to procreate. What then? Let us be a bit more far sighted and stop this unacceptable trend in its tracks.

- Hilda Carni

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