Google – Angel or Devil?

Google claim to be “the Good Guys”. Maybe they are – at the moment. When that amount of power is focussed in one place, you can bet your bottom dollar the bad guys will want a piece, if not all of the action.

At the moment, Google makes so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it. So what it does, is create new little bits to further colonise the web and other communication technologies, so that in a couple of years, when a some nerds from Stanford come up with a “Google Killer” idea, the web will be owned by Google and they won’t get a look in. Google has learned not to let itself fall into the same trap Microsoft did.

If Google were making real things or selling food or any other utility, they would have been broken up into pieces by now, but somehow, we are perfectly happy to blindly let a real Big Brother outfit take over our lives, because they keep telling us they are the “Good Guys”.

If they really are the good guys, then they should stop fiddling about with operating systems and phones and apply their considerable power and inventiveness to the problem of content.

Google is a parasite. It makes its money by exploiting people like me – the creatives, who spend our lives having ideas, using our brains to move the human condition on. Google sucks up what we do, mashes it up and sells advertising on the back of it. It pays us nothing for our work and claims all the profit. That is either theft or slavery. The very word content demeans the work of creative people. The Mona Lisa is content to a web technologist. Picasso and Shakespeare mere content providers. Content is just a nebulous medium that can be focussed by aggregating technologies to sell advertising to finely chosen markets.

I’m beginning to feel a bit jaded about the wonder of the web. No one makes money as a creative person on the web. Certainly not enough to live on. It makes communication faster and easier, but is that a good thing? When I was young, you could send a postcard in the morning and it would be delivered by tea. Isn’t that really enough? we used to pick up the phone and actually talk to people at the other end – wasn’t that better?

I find myself glued to my communication devices these days. The day goes by and I’ve done nothing but blog, sort through spam and obsessively check my youtube and website stats, this because my publishers tell me it’s not enough to have ideas, to write and illustrate and visit schools and libraries and perform at festivals anymore, I have to blog to create and maintain my market. Woah! Isn’t that the publisher’s job? I blog away like mad, but I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference to my market, because I don’t address my blog to my market. If I did, there wouldn’t be any point in writing the books, as I’d be giving all my creative work away to the kids who aren’t the ones who buy the books anyway.

Meanwhile, as you read this blog, you and I are putting a journalist out of business, because you really should be reading carefully considered, well-written work from a paid-for journal and I should not be dashing this off for free, but submitting it to a journal who would pay me for my time and effort.

If Google really are the good guys, they should put all their energy into one project – online micropayments.

I’ve removed creative projects from the web because I did not get paid for them while they were online. As they were free, they took away from sales of real books from which I earn real money. Now I can’t be bothered to work on all the great ideas I have because I can’t afford to do them, because I know I won’t get paid.

If I got a micropayment every time someone looked at one of my projects, then it would become worthwhile to start putting projects together, or it would be worthwhile for publishers to gravitate towards online delivery. The way things are going, in about five years time, there is going to be a blood bath in publishing unless an equitable way is found to pay people for the work they do online. As far as I’m concerned, my good will and the fun of experimentation has worn out. Like everyone else, I need to eat and in this system, that means I need cash, not the promise of a new paradigm in a generation’s time, when I’ll be 90 and having to stack shelves at the supermarket.

I tried setting up a secure area of my site to provide quality content. But I could not guarantee the security of it and I found myself turning into a systems administrator – I shouldn’t have to do that. The business guys will tell me that I should be entrepreneurial and set up my own content delivery business, but then I’d never be creative again – I’d spend all my time employing others to do the creative work, while I did the paperwork and programming. I have a publisher to do that. It’s a weird twisted re-cycling argument that technologists and web business people don’t seem to get.

Since the web began to take hold, my workload has at least doubled. If only my income had done the same. I may have stayed in the same place – I think I’m probably going backwards in real terms.

The internet is turning into a place that is purely commercial, a system for screwing money and free labour out of the plebs, (that’s us) by legal or illegal means. Will we continue to walk blindly down this path, or will we revolt or will the good guys come to our aid and create a future that we might want to be part of?

Double Speak

British Gas are advertising price cuts at the moment. A concerned voice says, “We understand how difficult things have been, so we are making things easier for you by cutting our prices.”

This is not quite true. What they mean is that the price of Gas has come dow to the point where they ca’t justify passing on the savings anymore. Do I want to change to British Gas – I don’t think so.

We had a leaflet through the door for Harry Tuffins, who are taking over the local Somerfield Store. The first hundred shoppers will receive a tin of Cadbury’s Roses for only £1.

Huh!? What they mean is the first hundred shoppers will have the opportunity of purchasing a tin of Roses for only £1 – that is quite different to what is suggested and actually shows a very mean spirit. Many of that 100 may well decide not to take up the offer and so less than 100 tins will be sold for £1.

It doesn’t make me want to pop in and see what they are like. I know already – tricky deals.

Show of Hands – Arrogance Ignorance and Greed

It doesn’t help much but this song and video help you feel a little better. I heard them on the radio this morning and they said they were into spreading themselves across the internet, so enjoy watching, guilt free.

Arrogance Ignorance and Greed are of course the initials of AIG , one of the financial houses that started the crash.

It made me wonder what ever happened to mutuality? Of course it got sold out in Halifax shares, but surely it’s still a good idea. The Banks have been brilliant nd brainwashing us into debt and mistrust of probity. And to think that Gordon Brown thought his second name was Prudence – Ha!

Obviously the Bankers can’t be trusted anymore, even when they’ve screwed up right and royally they refuse to change their ways. Create new, mutual banks and destroy the smug old syatem.

Am I being pathetic?

I received notification of a page about me on Encyclopedia.com> let me cite them as they suggest I should

“Rayner, Hugh (Shoo Rayner).” Something About the Author. The Gale Group, Inc. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. 13 Dec. 2009 .

While I’m very flattered to be on their site, this is a cobbled up load of stuff from other sources. It’s not up to date and refers to me as Hugh Rayner writing as Shoo Rayner.

Go to their entry on Elton John and they refer to him as: Elton Hercules John 1947-, English popular singer, pianist, and composer, b. Reginald Kenneth Dwight. (I don’t need to cite them – that’s fair usage!) Why Can’t I be Shoo Rayner 1956 – Children’s Author and Illustrator, b. Hugh Rayner, for those who want to try and find me in the future?

I’ve spent all my life being called Shoo. At school I was merely known as Rayner, such were the times and the school regimes. When I was old enough and realised I could, I changed my name by deed poll to become, legally, the person I am. I don’t know this Hugh Rayner. Encyclopedia.com are claiming that he wrote all my books!

I want this stopped or else it will go on and on for ever. It’s probably too late already. I’ve sent them an email, but what[‘s the chances that anyone ever reads anything there, let alone does anything about it.

Reference Information you can trust, they say. Well obviously you can’t. Someone, or more likely a semi-intelligent program has scanned my site, mis-read or mis-interpreted the information and decided it knows best.

Our identity is all we have and Encyclopedia.com has just given mine away to someone else – what’s worse, that someone else doesn’t exist.

Capitalism Is Eating Itself

I never really got the Commies – they seemed to want to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator with, what were once, very good intentions. The milder form, Socialism, seems to be mostly about spite. Capitalism seems to be the obvious way that humans work together and it pretty much delivers what most people seem to want.

When the Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago, the cry went up, “Capitalism has won!” And indeed, it seemed as if it had. Only militant Islam has risen against it since. Capitalism has run amok, given free rein ever since, and we are now facing the consequences.

But I think that this recession is just a warning sign. Capitalism works on the basis of the free-flow of capital. Capital is what pays our pensions. Once, the banks were there to facilitate Capitalism, to help cash move more freely, and to lend and invest in projects that will make a profit, provide work and put food onto the workers tables. Capitalism relies on a free market to work smoothly.

But the basic flaw of capitalism is human nature. There have never been free markets and there never will be. The person in charge of the market is always going to skew it in favour of his pals for the sake of a quick bung.

Since Big Bang, when the markets went electronic, the profit has been in playing the casino, not in owning it. The casino players, (traders) have the technology to know the numbers before the market (the casino owner) can read the cards. You set your computer up to do battle with another computer to see who can trade the fastest. Today, milli-microseconds give the advantage. Trades are done so quickly that as you, a mere mortal, place an order, computers analyse your order, buy stock low and sell it to you high before you have even received acknowledgment of your order. You never get the chance to buy at a fair market price. Penny by penny, they leach your profits away.

When you see bankers getting fantasy bonuses, way beyond any real measure of compensation, you have to ask yourself, “where is all that money coming from?” The answer is simple, from your pension fund! Bank bonuses are slowly leaching out the money from pension funds that are supposed to pay the pensions in the future.

Whereever there is a pot of gold (and that is how a trader sees a pension fund) someone will be planning to steal it. Once, those funds were put into solid company shares. The companies were expected to grow and provide profits. Shares are now meaningless. They are divorced from what they represent – they are traded within the blink of an eye, with no care about what that company or it’s workers mean. Now, a public company has one duty, to make as high a quarterly return as possible. No thought for the future. No thought for sustainability, employment or solid, long-term growth.

Capitalism is eating itself from the inside. When it reaches the outside it will reveal itself as the hollow shell it has become. What can take its place? Don’t ask me – I’m just predicting the cataclysm to come, but be prepared for the new dark ages – your Porsche wont help you then!

Afghanistan – How Soon We Forget The Lessons of History

The British Army has a long an honourable history. We are very lucky to have them. They do what they are told without question, undertaking tasks the rest of us would rather not know about.

The Army has a long memory. How they must have groaned when they were asked to go to Afghanistan. The mighty Russian Army were humiliated there at the end of the 20th century as were the British Army before them, scurrying away with their tails between their legs in the horrific, bloody retreat of 1842. The damage to national pride in those days was palpable. Was this going to be a similar campaign? The Army knew full well what it was up against, but it still followed orders dutifully. The Army has always had a great regard for Afghan fighters. They knew what they were up against.

The problem with Afghanistan is that we have no idea what we are doing there, other than backing up our pals, the Americans. Our reasons for being there change with the seasons. In the summer, the Army were said to be helping create democracy, making free elections possible. The result? Electoral fraud and an unelected President for Afghanistan! All those lives wasted.

We will never win in Afghanistan. The only question is how long we are prepared to continue sending our sons to their deaths.

Foreign armies, politicians and non executive organisations have so distorted the administration in Afghanistan, a stable executive will never be created until all the foreign groups have pulled out. All the executive jobs are done by foreigners. Educated locals have no chance of learning the skills required to run their own country, they are too busy driving taxis to stay alive. By being there we make the place more unstable.

The latest mission statement claims that our soldiers are apparently over there to protect us here – this is self evident nonsense. If we have a problem here, we need to solve it here, not by taking it out on another country, but by having honest dialogue at home – by creating a new identity that we all can belong to – by listening to grievances and making the appropriate accommodations

My father was a British Army Officer. I remember watching him, packing a colt 45 on his hip, as he went off on manoeuvres in Germany during the Cold War. He tried to allay my fears. “Soldiers are there to keep the peace,” he told me. “When they shoot, the politicians have failed.”

This is the same Government that brought peace to Northern Ireland through talk, understanding and the movement of entrenched positions. When any conflict ends accommodations are made through the changing of opinions and the acceptance of other ways of life. Afghanistan will only ever be sorted out by talk, and that is one thing the Afghanis are brilliant at. They have their own system of democracy already – it is called the Jirga – Tribal talking shops. It doesn’t look like our system, but it works if we go away and let them get on with it.

We will never impose a system on them. The Afghanis won’t be told – it is their nature. But by letting them run their own country and continuing to talk to them, we may come to some arrangement of peace for all, and our boys can stop dying needlessly.

If we were true friends of America, we would tell them that this is a stupid war. As their true friend, we should be the voice of their conscience, not their brown-nosing lieutenants, validating bad decisions.

This is our second Afghanistan and America’s second Vietnam. The only way America can win in Afghanistan is to blow the place off the map and every Afghani along with it – unless they follow the example of Vietnam. America is now good friends with Vietnam – not because of their military exploits, but because Veterans, ashamed of their involvement there, have gone back and talked – made new links and offered friendship and help.

Armies are there to show that you are serious and mean to back up your word. War is a bloody waste of time, effort and wealth. It is the employment of words that win the peace.

Financial Experts and Carbon Trading

I nearly crashed the car this morning. I was listening to the radio when a news article about carbon trading came on. The Friends of the Earth claim that Carbon trading is now being wrapped up into derivatives by the financial world, setting us up for another crash.

The Financial expert came on and, with a patronising tone, said the the FOE lady obviously didn’t understand the complexity of financial markest.

What! I yelled at the cows in the field. It’s the Financial experts who do not understand the the financial markets. They have made that very clear. If they had the slightest clue of what they were doing we would not be in the mess we are in now. It’s the financial experts that created the crash and the recession. They are driven by greed and care only to rob those who entrust their money to them.

As for the carbon trading scheme – What a scam! Could anyone think up a scheme more open to fraud? Well, maybe the old milk quotas were as bad – similar scam really.

Why do we put up with it?

Vetting – A Passport For Abusers

There is an immutable law of unintended consequences. The new child abuse vetting laws will, in the end have entirely the opposite effect to that which is intended.

One thing that law enforcement and the abuse industry agree on, is that intentional abusers are clever and single-minded in achieving their purpose.

To stop them we are now going to assume that everyone is an abuser, unless they have a piece of paper that says they are not. Having got that piece of paper, an abuser is at liberty to insinuate themselves into positions of trust from where they will be able to abuse to their hearts content. No one will question them – “They’ve been checked, so they must be okay. Anyway, it’s got nothing to do with me – it’s up to the Government.” Will be the cry of anyone with suspicions.

And so, as with the Catholic Church and many other institutions before, abusers will be protected by the very system that seeks to get rid of them.

It used to be said that it takes a whole village to bring up a child. Well, we don’t have villages anymore. We have given up responsibility for the bringing up of children to the state. The state is to be trusted less that anyone else in this matter. Now, with vetting, we are giving up even more to the state. We are giving away trust and personal responsibility.

The new vetting scheme came out of the Soham Murders. Thanks to government interference through the Data Collection Act, the police did not pass on information about Ian Huntley, the murderer. Maybe with a scheme to stop his sort entering schools in the first place the tragedy could have been averted. But if the police had passed on the information about a known abuser the chances are it could have been averted – that time – but Huntley was on a downward spiral that would have led him to commit an horrendous crime in due course.

The law of unintended consequences came into play.

So, I predict, within ten years we will be having an inquest into:

How could a ring of abusers have infiltrated the Vetting Headquarters and placed a high level worker inside to change data on known abusers?

How the Vetting System destroyed lives and caused the suicides of those innocently mistaken to be someone else and accused of their crimes.

How those cleared by the system still managed to continue practicing their abusing ways because everyone thought they must be okay because they had been cleared.

This is all before we account for the damage that will be done to society. The State has got too large and too intrusive. It’s job should be to facilitate personal responsibility – that is what keeps an eye out for bad behaviour and keeps us all on the right side of the line.

Independant Safeguarding

Oh dear, I’ve been hoping that this would all go away and we would come to our senses, but it seems that I’m going to have to get myself a certificate to prove I’m not a paedophile so that I can still visit schools.

Looking at the the ISA website I found the glaring loophole within thirty seconds.

Apparently, children in schools need protecting from children’s authors, who are accompanied at all times and work with groups of up to 300 at a time.

Those who actually want to harm children do not need to register – indeed it is in their interest not to. If they have a dodgy past they will become a barred person and then will break the law by entering Specific Places and carrying out Specific Activities. However, if they are not checked, they are free to enter private and domestic places and employment with impunity.

Where does 99% of all the damage to children occur? In the home of course, in domestic environments. So the overpaid, quango nonsense is powerless in the one place that real harm to children occurs. The scheme is nothing but a cash-raising enterprise – certainly in the case of visiting authors and those who would pass on their experience and expertise. It’s a tax on those who work with children. Sit back and watch as volunteers disappear. It is totally demeaning to go cap in hand to a faceless organisation and ask to be proved a nice person. Where will the youth workers, Arkelas and Brown Owls come from now?

And what message are we teaching our children? Everyone is a paedophile until proven innocent. This has turned the whole basis of our legal system upside down.

Watch the world of children and adults move further apart. Parents will soon be excluded from entering school premises. They pretty well are already, dropping their children off at the barbed wire security gates under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera. Parents only ever need to talk to schools through the gate intercom. No wonder they never turn up for parent’s evenings.

When do adults and children ever meet? How are children supposed to know what they are meant to grow up to be, if all the good people stay away from them in fear of being smeared. Children now are to be feared.

Who now would help a lost child? The irony is that most of us now would stand back and let a kidnapper take a child because we think we would be accused of something if we stepped in to help.

I was asked for a certificate a couple of years ago by a museum. I said I didn’t have one and didn’t see the point as I’d be on public show all day and all the children would be chaperoned by their parents. They hummed and hah-ed but in the end said okay. When I arrived, the two Gents toilets had been reassigned as one for Men and one for Boys! Nothing was said, but what message does that give? The organisers, of course, will come out with the usual guff about insurance and covering themselves, but what they were really saying is that all men and me in particular are a danger to boys, in particular. Notice that it was okay for women to take boys and girls into the toilets with them…

…Oh dear, didn’t we just have a case of arrests of a nursery nurse up to no good? Wasn’t she a woman? She would have been checked too. Fat lot of good that did! Anyone wanting to harm children will do so. Checks and laws won’t stop them. The laws will only create division in society. Except that children don’t count as society. They are just a nuisance that have to be put up with and hidden away until they are old enough to enter adult society.

I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and pay – I’m fixed up to do loads of visits next year.

I’m not being a good blogger! All this came about from an article in Guardian. It’s great that Philip Pullman stand sup for us like this. Most children’s authors earn below the minimum wage from their writing, so school visiting is often the major part of their income. They will meekly sign up and be done with it.

I’m so used to being treated with suspicion in schools now that it comes as a surprise to be trusted. Last year I went to a school where I was met and showed around the school, visiting all the classes one by one, by two children. The school were so friendly and relaxed, that I mentioned it to them as being unusual. “But, you’re our honoured guest!” they said in surprise. “We invited you!”