The watchers and the watched
In his dystopian polemic Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell described the nightmare of totalitarian society. In the UK in 2008 we currently have almost eight million CCTV cameras monitoring our every move, from which lane we drive in to which street we walk down and everything that we do there. The argument for such a [...]
Stay in what’s real
There are times of relative quiet and times of relative busyness in world affairs. At the moment the world is behaving like a child with a behavioural disorder. Ominous clouds appear to be rolling across the horizon from all directions, the structure and shape of our world seems to be under pressure from every conceivable [...]
Roles and choices
Choices are the axis around which a self electing life revolves. We make choices and stand or fall by the positions those choices place us in. It can be seen that the path you have followed in your life has been defined by the choices that you have made. Significantly it may also be seen [...]
In Prison
I went on a young offenders prison visit yesterday. There was so much going on that it could be written about for hours. To keep it concise, I asked one of the prison officers with some twenty years experience what had been the major changes in his time. He said that it was undoubtedly the [...]
Count your blessings
This from the Toronto Star Stuart Laidlaw Faith and Ethics Reporter When you reflect this Thanksgiving weekend on the good things in life, don’t stop there. Take a hard look at the things that make you unhappy, as well. Then compare the two. “It has to be honest,” says Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at [...]
Strange Days
The seminal album by the Doors was called Strange Days. The band took their name from Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, essential reading for the postwar generation who were left decidedly underwhelmed by the path that the world had trodden the previous few decades. They set out intending to ‘change’ things and we [...]
Learning
Manna from heaven is assumed in a materially based world to mean physical food. I have trawled the recipe books, from Ramsey to Ronay, Blumenthal to Craddock and all stops in between and there is none for manna. Different people posit different ideas: herbs, esoteric foodstuffs, specific pastries and sweets but all are barking up [...]
Friends in high places
Perhaps one of the strangest phenomena of the Internet is the idea of hooking up with people you’d otherwise be unlikely to meet. So to all of those who have added me to their friends list and the blog to their fave list, thanks, I appreciate it in some strange way and hope that somewhere [...]
Charlie Mackay was right!
In 1841 Charles Mackay published Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Though its style may seem archaic to the modern reader, its content is utterly relevant, particularly in light of current events. You may think what is happening at the moment is a new departure, yet such folly has been the [...]
A happiness fallacy
Surveying the happiness landscape, there is an obsession that grips a significant number of commentators on the subject and it is the money issue. Distilled into the question, can money buy happiness? To anyone with more than just a passing interest in the state of human affairs it is abundantly clear that this is the [...]