We handle our knowledge, or lack of it, through the use of the internet and through the use of sophisticated news reporting and information sharing. However there is so much to know that you cannot get all the knowledge and asking someone on the internet is not as reliable as asking someone in a village, because usually you know how far to trust a fellow villager, and that village has to come into frequent contact with you. You mostly have no idea about whether the information you can get on the internet, including information on this blog, is reliable and true.

That problem faces every organisation as well as every person. The usual official answer to this problem by the government is to set up a system under which its forces of law and order can intercept communications to gain information and to rely on spies and informers. Hitler did this, having a network of people who reported any malfeasance, and Lenin and Stalin did this too, sending millions to prison without trial in the most cruel conditions imaginable.

If any of these undesirable politicians were running a nation today he would doubtless obtain powers to monitor the use of citizens of the internet, to see what they are looking at, and to read emails that people send to each other. The would probably come up with a piece of legislation as the Communications Data Bill, which would provide the government with all the powers it needs, were the bill to be enacted. After the dreadful slaying of a soldier in Woolwich there are calls to bring the bill into law. Somehow, the authorities seem to think, that such a law would help them in their desire to protect us from terrorism.

In truth we are in very little danger from terrorist attacks today in the developed world. The forces of law and order have reasonable control and in events of last Thursday are fortunately very rare. We are in danger of sacrificing our freedom. Each year more laws are enacted which curtail our freedom; each year the judicial system becomes less tolerant of acquitting those you may possibly be innocent and more tolerant of convicting those who may possibly be guilty.

Perhaps as a society we have passed the high water mark of freedom and now have to watch the tide roll out taking many of our precious liberties with it.

I am not sure that the Dalai Lama is right; we do live in the present but have to plan for the future and although we might live as though we will never die, we all know that we will die.

This is not surprising, but simply a dilemma. We cannot dwell in the past, because the past does not provide a proper perspective of what happens now; living in the past is like losing sight in one eye, as the old Russian proverb says. But living in ways which ignore the past, as the proverb continues, is like losing sight in both eyes.

So we must live in the present and in the future, understanding the past as part of our experience of living. That way we should maintain our sight in both eyes, whether they are myopic or otherwise imperfect.

What did astonish me was to learn that Amazon had received a government grant from the UK for £2.5 million. I really fail to understand why governments should provide grants of any description to multinational corporations. There are better ways to waste tax payers’ money that giving some of it to Amazon.

Much of the United States suffers from extreme weather events and much of it suffers from extreme natural events, like earthquakes. Humans are an ingenious species and can form settlements in places that are less than perfect for habitation, but do so at a cost to the environment.

The more we learn, the more we spoil and the more dangerous we make our life on this planet. We multiply voraciously. We race to survive in conditions here we put our survival at risk; the greater the risk that we create for ourselves the more ingenious we have to become to mitigate the risks we create. Where we cannot know something, because it is too complex for us to know or because we have not learnt the knowing of it, we have no choice but to guess, and many of our guesses are too optimistic: we believe that everything will come right in the end, but fail to understand that the end is not a desirable consummation.

In 1973 I visited Pere Lachaise cemetery on the outskirts of Paris. It was a long metro ride on a hot Sunday afternoon. As I entered the cemetery a one armed attendant accosted me. He asked me to but a map of the cemetery, which showed where famous people were buried. He told me that if I bought the map to would help support the cemetery. I looked around at the acres of graves and tombs, and knew what he meant.
I asked him where Jim Morrison was buried. He said, I think, in the sixth or sixteenth quarter. I found the place, where there was a new grace compared to the tombs and headstones that surrounded it. The place was easy to find, because on the walls of tombs were chalked arrows and the word “Jim”. The grave was covered with shells and letters; a young and very bpretty girl girl was crying by the grave having put a small posy down. There was a simple stone plaque bearing the words

Douglas Morrison

James

I never saw the Doors perform; I think that in any event their best art was in their albums, not in their performance, and that those albums sounded best when played in mono, as much music does.

The Doors were I think the only major group of the sixties that never had a bass guitarist. Mostly the bass was played by Ray Manzarek on a keyboard. Manzarek is famous for composing the opening and closing bars of “Light My Fire” which are instantly recognisable after the first two notes (you don’t have to even listen to bar to recognise it) but I enjoyed his diversion into Chopin’s Polonaise in “the Hyacinth House”.

I have always tried to work to combine words and music in ways that do not depend on singing the words. The Doors suggested that this could be done but ultimately they sang their songs. They did in much of their work put poetry to music, and poetry is compelling when spoken or sung, and probably no other group came closer to achieving a new form of art in rock and roll.

In Cleveland some women are captured and held for ten years as shackled prisoners. The Nazis operated efficient factories of death for five years and for eleven years before that kept prisoners; the principal qualification for being held or killed was a religious qualification. Prejudice is the motivator for fascists.

In the Union of Soviets, from 1920 for nearly ninety years a system of inefficient factories of death operated which managed, nevertheless, to end more lives than the Nazis managed to end, and which unjustly imprisoned millions of people. The main qualification for being killed or imprisoned by the Soviets was thought crime and lack of political correctness. Intolerance is the motivator for the communists.

As in the Cleveland case, these things happened as a result of willing people, just doing their job. The principles were laid down by leadership, but the work was done by more than a million guards, killers and torturers; even in democratic states there is a tendency to falsely imprison people and to torture them; the guards at Abu Ghraid simply did their job, just as those at Belsen and the Lubyanka Building and all the Gulags.

Perhaps if you are a guard or involved in killing or processing prisoners, merely doing your job, you get home after a hard day’s work and nestle down with the television, a newspaper, or play a game of pool and drink a few beers. You have been doing your job, and the work is hard, as all work is hard. You need a holiday, but everyone needs a holiday. And tomorrow you will go to work to process death, torture and degradation, just as you do, doing your job.

The proposition that Britain should have influence in the world seems to be based upon either or both of  underlying propositions

(a) that Britain has more wisdom than the rest of the world and without British wisdom the world would fall into greater folly and

(b) in order to advance the interests of the British people, it is necessary for the rest of the world to be influenced by us.

Let us look at the first proposition. Certainly, it is clear, that the British are no wiser (or for that matter no more stupid) than the rest of the people in the world. Our land is not a haven of economic prosperity, environmental safety and  a marvellous justice system in which the innocent are never found guilty or the guilty are never acquitted; we are a reasonably peaceful place but find the money and energy and cannon fodder to fight wars for which we can find no justification. There are plenty of murders and rapes and burglaries in Britain and at least as many child molesters here than in other places. Of course other places may have more expertise in certain kinds of crimes but Britain is not a haven of law and order.

It is not as though Britain does democracy well; we have an unelected head of state, who is excluded from the rigours of taxation of most kinds; we have an unelected second chamber to scrutinise proposed legislation made up of cronies of those in power and some people whose families have been bastions of wealth and privilege for generations. We have a broken banking system which went out of control because the regulators allowed greed to prevail over prudence.

There are many things that are right in Britain, but it is hard to say that we do anything worth doing better than any other nation, so in these circumstances why should the rest of the world be influenced by a nation that cannot claim excellence in any area in which the rest of the world is deficient? It is not as if the British could claim that when Britain ruled the world, the world was a better place than when Britain did not rule the world.

The second proposition operates as one of self interest: influence is necessary to advance the interests of the British people. There is no reason why any nation should advance its own interests before those of other nations except for purely selfish reasons. Nations, like people, are created equal with but unequal advantages. The weak should be helped by the strong. One nation should not seek to place itself above other nations by “influence”; each nations should use its talents to advance itself, while saving some of those talents for other nations. Influence is not a talent: it is a device and a can be used malignantly and perfidiously, and is more often used in these was than it is used benignly and honestly.

I despair when so much judicial time is wasted on process, instead on being devoted to seeing justice done.

In heard James Hansen being interviewed on the radio by a BBC journalist. She annoyed him (although he kept calm and polite) by picking on very small anomalies in climate change and making inaccurate summaries of climate change statistics and  science instead of concentrating on the big picture. Some people do not have the vision to see the whole picture or the imagination, depending on their point of view or lack of view. Perhaps we can invent the equivalent of spectacles for the intellect for those journalists who cannot see properly or prefer to report about the edges instead of reporting on the whole.

In the end Mr Hansen decided that answering questions about the colour of the deckchairs on the Titanic was not helpful and diverted the interviewer to point out that Canada is negotiating with the European Union to count the emissions produced from the oil mined in its tar sands as being the same emissions as those produced by oil that is drilled in traditional ways, even though the extraction of oil from tar sands produces in its overall emission content at least 20% more carbon dioxide. Presumably Mr Hansen agreed to be interviewed in order to talk about this problem.

The European Union rightly wants Canadian tar sand oil to be designated as “highly polluting” under the EU fuel quality directive, which is fair and logical. Canada, where money now matters more than the environment, wants no differentiation and it looks like that the United Kingdom, to its shame, will support he Canadian view.

Mr Hansen will be meeting Norman Baker, at the Department of Transport to discuss the designation of oil from the Canadian tar sands. Mr Baker is a committed environmentalist and I have a great deal of time for him, not least because he was kind enough to write some nice words about “the Energy Age”. I hope that he will see Mr Hansen’s point of view and come to the right decision.

Mr Baker has always, in my view, shown that he understands the big climate change picture.

The starting point when considering any new government project is to understand that governments like big projects, the bigger the better. They prefer to subsidise acres of photovoltaic panels in green fields that to subsidies two solar water heating panels on the roofs of thousands of homes. They prefer to subsidise hundreds of wind turbines than to subsidise tens of thousands of homes to have their lofts insulated and their cavity walls insulated. They like to build massive Olympic Parks and structures to celebrate the millennium, even though those buildings have limited after the event use and usually end up virtually being given away for free to commercial organisations rather than spend the money doing good in a million small ways. they prefer vanity projects.

This is the philosophy of all governments; that big is better and small is insignificant. That philosophy underpins the high speed rail project; let us all get to Birmingham faster (perhaps by as much as twenty minutes) at the cost of billions to the public purse because…it will be better and bring unspecified benefits.
Of course communications within any nation are important but it is the quality and reliability of those communications that matter, not necessarily the speed. I have travelled on trains in Switzerland; mostly the trains chunder along quite slowly but with great reliability. You can almost set your watch by them, whether there are leaves on the line or not or whether there is the wrong kind or the right kind of snow.

If the public purse is to be tapped by improving the railways then there are more ways to bring economic reliability than building a stretch of track at which trains can travel at very high speeds. Electrification of track has an environmental benefit, because electric engines are lighter and need less energy to pull them along. Building double decker trains also has an environmental benefit in that more people can be accommodated. Making the signalling system robust and less prone to breakdown and ensuring that leaves and snow never disrupt the trains also have obvious environmental and business benefits.

These are small measures; a politician will not be able to proudly boast that he has corrected a million small defects and injustices but he will be able to claim “I built that high speed railway that gets you from London to Birmingham twenty minutes in travel time earlier”.

I suppose that even that twenty minute claim will need revision; the time the train spends travelling may be reduced by twenty minutes or so, but no doubt some of that twenty minutes will be lost by adopting longer check in times. We can no longer run for a train and jump into it as it accelerates (as we could with steam trains) and no longer open the doors as the train pulls into a station and jump out quickly (as we could with suburban electric trains) and I wonder if the check in time for the high speed link to Birmingham will be more than the journey time saved by the link.

The only evidence that this is likely to be the case comes from the reasonably higher speed train that you can take from Kings Cross to Brussels or Paris; there the check in times are about forty five minutes as you have to go through security and passport control. The journeys are much longer than from London to Birmingham and there is a net saving of time. On the new high speed train line there will be no need for passport control, but there might be a need for more security than we have at present.

The National Audit Office is right to question this grandiose and probably unnecessary project. The project may bring jobs in the building of the railway, but any investment on that scale would bring jobs and investing in many small improvements and upgrades to the railways system will bring jobs that last and that will provide employment for many years, not just for a few short years.  When the Channel Tunnel was proposed it was claimed that it would bring great prosperity to the eastern parts of Kent. That never happened. It was a worthwhile project because it developed a new route of communication. Going from London to Birmingham on high speed trains simply enables you t get there faster; the time you save will no doubt be swallowed up in a traffic jam or a bus delay when you get to your destination.