Reform UK Politics Now

http://clicks.robertgenn.com/hopeless.php

Monday, 24 May 2010

Vincent, Don McLean, Depression, Keith Wright's paintings and Robert Genn's article

via clicks.robertgenn.com

Make sure you read Robert Genn's wonderful, kind and insightful reply to despairing artists.

Sunday, 23 May 2010

Should you delete your Facebook account? - check out the article from foomandoonian's halfblog

There's actually a website dedicated to helping you find the elusive 'delete' hidden in the unnecessarily complicated settings. You can find out how well you have protected your privacy at Profile Watch. There's also a handy bookmarklet at Reclaim Privacy that will similarly assess your profile. For a laugh, you can also read through some posts of other Facebook users, who probably think they are talking to their friends, not the entire internet: Openbook.

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Are there real reasons to be worried? Well, after Facebook held a developer conference, lots of worried Google engineers left. And Google has hardly earned any privacy gold stars. And then there's Mark Zuckerburg, the man behind the company, with a few thoughts on privacy (taken from an IM conversation when he was creating the service, then called The Facebook):

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Business Insider also has a fascinating expose on Zuckerburg. Decide for yourself if it holds much water, and if you think his character is likely to have improved in the last six years.

It's also interesting to witness how Facebook has eroded the default privacy settings over the years, from friends and family to almost completely exposing everything.

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While most users may not understand/care about these issues, there are plenty who do.

via foomandoonian.posterous.com

Click on link to read foomandoonian's article - at least interesting, possibly very worrying.

Saturday, 22 May 2010

Find Good Food for High Blood Pressure sufferers from around the world.

Choosing food for high blood pressure sufferers need not be a daunting task or a boring one. Tips and recipes from around the world are soon to collect here, so we will have a whole menagerie of cultures to choose from. Heh! Let’s face it! Can you find a better excuse for enjoying the culinary delights of the whole world? Well, ok, there are lots, but at least just drooling over the recipes will make your blood pressure drop a few mmHg. And that’s exactly what I have in store for you in this little corner of delightful indulgences.
Here you are going to find a high blood pressure recipe to suit almost everyone, and if the dishes don`t stop you worrying over your high blood pressure for a while, then nothing will.
Starting with a list, preferably organic, of the main food categories that are known to help reduce high blood pressure, will help those of us who are born Chefs in the kitchen to create new, tasty dishes.
Vegetables
Parsley, Celery , Spinach, Green Cabbage, Broccoli, Carrots (raw), Beets (raw), Tomatoes, Garlic, Asparagus.

These vegetables are at the top of the list of food for high blood pressure, for supporting the cardiovascular system either by their powerful antioxidants or diuretic activity.
Good News! There has been a Scientific Breakthrough in the UK. Read what Professors have discovered about beetroot! They don`t mention antioxidants or diuretic properties, so what is it?....

via highbloodpressureinfo.org

Click on link to read article

Does my mac need more memory? | Macintosh How To

When your computer is running a little bit slowly, how can you tell if getting more memory will help you? Here is a simple way to check whether all the memory you have in your computer is being used.

Go to your utilities folder.
(Click on your desktop anywhere so that the finder is active.
Hold down apple-shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.)

Open ‘Activity Monitor’

Press apple-1 so that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.

Click on the ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using.

There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page outs:’

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have, the higher the better, and
Page outs tells you how many times your computer has had to slow down because it has run out of memory and needed to move some of it’s memory back to the hard disk temporarily to free up some space. (This would be the equivalent of your brain being too full so you have to write your thoughts down on paper to free up your headspace!) This really slows down your computer.

via macintoshhowto.com

Click on link to read article

WORLD TO OBAMA: BAN LANDMINES

via cdn.avaaz.org

Click on link to sign a petition to President Obama to end landmines.

Fundamentalism and no-self

I have read a range of books about Fundamentalism.

The best I've found isn't even ostensibly about fundamentalism - Terry Eagleton's 'After Theory' but the final chapters expose the nature of the beast brilliantly.

For example (p. 219);

The fundamentalist, of course, is not necessarily evil. But he reaches for his watertight principles because he feels an abyss of non-being yawning beneath his feet. It is the unbearable lightness of being which causes him to feel so heavy.

The heaviness of course becomes something to impose on others. It is of course as Karen Armstrong so brilliantly says, a 'lust for certainty'.

Of course the fundamentalist is looking in the only place where high degrees of certainty can never be found - in concepts, language, doctrine.

Religion in its true expression is encounter, encounter with the whole that is beyond mind. It is experience not doctrine. It is centred in the now. It is centred in experiences of being beyond the egoic self, experiences of non-being, experiences of the Whole except when we try to imagine as opposed to experience the Whole it isn't!

As the beloved Heschel said concepts are delicious snacks but are no substitute for the real thing - the state of wonderment, of awe, of no-self.

The birds have vanished into the sky,

and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountains and me,

until only the mountains remain.

Li Po (701-762)

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Friday, 21 May 2010

Why Kindergarten children beat Business School graduates at finding solutions | screw work let's play

via screwworkletsplay.com

Doh!

Thursday, 13 May 2010

Photojournalist Jonas Lara locked up for documenting grafitti | Chase Jarvis Blog

[UPDATE: The criminal charges against him have just been dropped and the judge issued a court order for the release of his camera equipment. Good news for sure, but the points remain: 1) we need documentary shooters shooting the entire gamut, legal and not. 2) we need public defenders who understand this need and are prepared to help us defend it.]

This is nuts. LA photographer Jonas Lara has been arrested and faces up to a year in prison for ‘aiding and abetting’ two graffiti artists while documenting their work in February. Lara pleaded not guilty, wisely citing it’s within his rights as a photographer to be at the scene documenting the work of the artists. But here’s the rub: his public defender, David Gottesmann, has so far refused to consider his rights as a photographer as part of the defense.

PDN reports, “When he was arrested,

via blog.chasejarvis.com

Click on link to read article. We are starting to have the same problems here in the UK

Posted via web from Hexham Matters

Monday, 10 May 2010

Fair votes campaign returns to streets of London on Monday | Ekklesia

Campaigners are set to return to the streets on Monday to urge radical reform of the voting system.

Yesterday, a flashmob protest of over 2000 people demonstrated, demanding a firm line on PR, outside a meeting where Liberal Democrats were in coalition talks.

Saturday’s crowd, adorned in purple, the colour of suffrage were joined by similar protests across the country in places such as Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham.

People watching on TV saw the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, temporarily adjourn talks so that he could address the crowd.

The new Take Back Parliament coalition, which includes Ekklesia, Power2010, 38 Degrees, the Electoral Reform Society and Vote for a Change, is hitting the streets of central London tomorrow at 5:00pm.

Pam Giddy, from Take Back Parliament, said: “Voters have seen through the scare-mongering and returned a hung parliament. We now have an historic opportunity to make 2010 our last stolen election, but that decision rests with the politicians.

“We would remind politicians that this is our democracy and our business. Since Thursday we’ve seen something rare in British politics. Politicians have been forced to sit down and work together, and we intend to make that permanent. With PR, we can call time on the Punch and Judy show, and deliver the politics we actually voted for on May 6th.

“Together the Take Back Parliament campaign is reaching out to millions of people online, and taking the call for justice onto the streets. The people want fair votes, and yesterday’s protest was just the beginning.”

via ekklesia.co.uk

Posted via web from Hexham Matters

Saturday, 8 May 2010

Dear Nick Clegg

Don't get taken in - the Tories are cunning as well as implacably opposed to PR.

No PR - no deal.

Full PR is the key to all other reforms.

Those other reforms are worth little without PR.

Don't get seduced.

Good luck.

Roger

Dr Roger Prentice

Wednesday, 5 May 2010

The Independent ask us not to miss this historic opportunity - go for it!

ENLARGE

The Independent newspaper begins its front-page article thus;

For five years this paper has fought for electoral reform. Britain now has a historic chance to end our unfair and discredited voting system for ever

This election campaign has felt almost like a liberation. The prison walls – the stultifying, spirit-crushing assumptions of the long era of two-party politics – have crumbled. The surge in support for the Liberal Democrats has unlocked something precious: a feeling among the public that, for the first time in a generation, a radical overhaul of our political settlement could be possible.
That feeling – combined with the enduring uncertainty over the result of the election – is a tonic for our democracy. The public sense that their vote matters. When one considers that this campaign began against a backdrop of rampant cynicism and apathy, stirred up by MPs' abuse of their expenses, this transformation looks all the more remarkable. And welcome.

It really is a once in a life-time chance to get a modern system based on real democracy.

Dr Steven Ford for Hexham - vote tactically for the rest of the UK!

Let's do it!

Click HERE to read the Indy article.

The Independent ask us not to miss this historic opportunity - go for it!

ENLARGE

The Independent newspaper begins its front-page article thus;

For five years this paper has fought for electoral reform. Britain now has a historic chance to end our unfair and discredited voting system for ever

This election campaign has felt almost like a liberation. The prison walls – the stultifying, spirit-crushing assumptions of the long era of two-party politics – have crumbled. The surge in support for the Liberal Democrats has unlocked something precious: a feeling among the public that, for the first time in a generation, a radical overhaul of our political settlement could be possible.

That feeling – combined with the enduring uncertainty over the result of the election – is a tonic for our democracy. The public sense that their vote matters. When one considers that this campaign began against a backdrop of rampant cynicism and apathy, stirred up by MPs' abuse of their expenses, this transformation looks all the more remarkable. And welcome.

It really is a once in a life-time chance to get a modern system based on real democracy.

Let's do it!

Click HERE to read the Indy article.

What is the real challenge as we vote tomorrow?

OUR CHALLENGE: Only one thing matters in how we vote tomorrow.

It is this - how do we get rid of the stinking old party system that has brought this great country to its present state?

Do you really think the Tories or Labour (or the Lib Dems) are going to change their age-old habits? The Blair/Brown crew are as opposed to Fair Voting as Cameron.

Hexham has the chance of a life-time to elect a real representative for the constituency - vote Dr Steven Ford.

If you don't have a great Independent candidate then vote Lib Dem - to wait another half-century for a chance of getting real democracy in the UK will be horrific.

Monday, 3 May 2010

'Dave' Cameron is descended from King William IV (Daily Mail) - will he continue the tradition of screwing the middle classes as well as the poor?

David Cameron (left) is descended from King William IV

Indeed, his wife Samantha is aristocratic on both sides of her family.

Creative director of the upmarket stationery company Smythson of Bond Street, she is a direct descendant of Nell Gwyn, mistress to Charles II, and her stepfather is Viscount Astor.

Meanwhile, 'Call me Dave' himself comes from a family which makes the bulk of the British landed gentry seem positively nouveau riche.

Cameron is William IV's great-great-great-great-great grandson, which Debrett's says makes him fifth cousin, twice removed, of the Queen.

As Patrick Cracroft-Brennan, of the guide Cracroft's Peerage, says: "Mr Cameron is the most aristocratic leader of the Conservative Party since Alec Douglas-Home."

But as well as being impeccably connected, David Cameron is also extremely wealthy. Sunday Times Rich List compiler and wealth watchdog Philip Beresford has valued the Tory leader for the first time.

He says: "I put the combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30m plus. Both sides of the family are extremely wealthy. They certainly have no need to worry about poverty or paying school fees."

via dailymail.co.uk

It shouldn't matter that Cameron has this dubious lineage but the fact of that matter is that the Tories as well as Labour have transferred most of the wealth of the middle classes and poor to the mega-rich does indicate that he is the last person to clean up UK politics.

"In 1976, excluding property, the bottom half of the UK population owned 12% of the marketable wealth; by 2003 that had fallen to just 1%.
In the same period, the share enjoyed by the top 10% rose from 57% to 71%.
Even when property is included, the bottom half of the population still only owns just 7% of the country’s wealth."

Heartening isn't it!

Source -
http://www.respublica.org.uk/articles/spend-investment

Which is why we ask Hexham to vote Dr Steven Ford and the UK to vote Lib Dem.

What will you do to stop the sinking of the SS UK-Titanic?

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In Hexham and the UK we don't want the deck-chairs re-arranged as the ship goes down - we want a whole new system.

Where did Blair & Brown get the rotten values that have almost sunk us - from the Tories of course.

Vote for Dr Steve Ford in Hexham - and the Lib Dems nationally.

Meet Dr Steven Ford - will Hexham choose a candidate with proven service to the Constituency?

Steven Ford was a much-respected GP in Haydon Bridge - serving Hexham people for more than 20years. He is an Independent - free from all of the Labour-Tory-Tory-Labour tribal garbage.

Vote Ford for a new, clean, ethical representation for Hexham.