Nanu Nanu

A friend of mine spent some time on a yacht with Robin Williams, he told stories with hilarious voices and faces... all the time, until she wanted him thrown overboard.  He was clearly an unusual man: prodigiously talented with a mind like lightening and always unstill.

The press agent releasing details of his death said "He has been battling severe depression of late".  There has followed much discussion on the nature of depression or bi-polar syndrome as it often called.  There has been talk of his addiction issues.   I hope Mr Williams' untimely death gives us some time to reflect on the nature of madness and morality.  

Madness is a way of thinking that one would not wish upon one's own worst enemy.  It may appear selfish, but it is not self interested.  It's rough being crazy. 

Madness and immorality are hard to tell apart.  We all have a tendency to be wilful and selfish, we all need some rules to regulate our behaviour.  We all have a tendency to get lost in the moment and ignore the bigger picture.  How do we know when someone around us is suffering mental illness or just plain insensitive?

How do we know if we are crazy?

We don't.  This may be why the Old Testament common to Muslims, Jews and Christians states that 

"pride is the beginning of sin".  We need humility to allow for the possibility that our thinking is faulty.  

Robin Williams knew that his thinking was faulty, his comedy was always tinged with tragedy.  He was acutely aware of the idiocies of the human condition and played the failures of hubris with a lightness that left us feeling tender and forgiving of our own.  It is a source of great sadness that he could not be succoured by his own message.  

Palestine: When to lose is to win

Most everybody I meet is currently vexed by the Israel - Palestine conflict. There is endless talk of ceasefires and, more helpfully, solutions. The solutions fall into two broad categories:



1) Hamas must stop launching missiles at Israel from the Gaza strip. Time will pass and the Israeli's will trust the Palestinians enough to ease then end the siege of Gaza.

2) Israel must stop besieging Gaza and let a free flow of goods, services and terrorists into its country. Time will pass and the Palestinians will not be so angry that that they lob incompetent missiles toward Tel-Aviv


There are grander versions of these solutions: Palestinians accept new Israeli borders, Israel mollifies Palestinians but they are essentially variations of the above. Neither is likely to happen.

The Palestinians have a claim on both the occupied territories and Israel itself that they are unlikely to renounce, the Israeli's know this and are not going to facilitate Palestinian retribution in any way. The two state solution continues to fail.

News Bunny's specialist subject is "the bleeding obvious". The bit missing from this story is war.

There was a war and the Palestinian's lost. Someone needs to tell them. When you lose a war, the winning side get to run your country. They can annex your country or they can colonise it. Someone needs to make the Israeli's step up and do this. As Israel and Palestine are adjacent the obvious answer is to annex Palestine. This is consistent with the Greater Israel policy of the Zionists.

Of course, this is where the problems for the Israeli's begin. The country is a democratic ally of the west, particularly America. It will be very difficult for them to run an explicitly apartheid state for any length of time. There is a fine Jewish tradition of tolerance and humanism that would probably give the vote to all adult nationals within its borders voluntarily. Alternatively there would be an extraordinary weight of international pressure and opprobrium if the Israeli's renounced democracy in favour of theocracy.

The Americans don't really believe in theocracy. For all their God fearing bible belt tub thumping, America is as much an idea than a country. The idea is that you cannot be persecuted for your religious beliefs. This is fundamental to American DNA. Most of the rest of the world has eschewed theocracy too, although a perverse alliance with Iran is possible, I suppose!

Let Israel win!



We'll have more of these... List of Arab members of the Knesset

Global Warming - Solution or Delusion?

News Bunny's claims to be too sick to write were scotched when I noticed a posting from him on a mutual friend's Facebook site: "Apparently I just got an fb message through to Obama about how to save the world. Now! That's What I Call Social Networking".

Naturally, my initial reaction was fury that it was indolence, not illness that had sidelined the hypochondriac commentator. On closer inspection I could not help but be intrigued by the substance of his missive. I sallied forth surreptitiously to my friend's warren to hear of the great works he was doing and the global reach that he had clearly found.

With ears erect and nose moist it had been a long time since I had seen the buck look better. I walked over to review the work that was esconsing him on-line. You can imagine my disappointment when I saw the screen logged in to www.play-the-field.com chatroom, with my analytical master attempting to charm the fur off a variety of doe's..

"News Bunny, my friend, you're better than this!", I interrupted as he swivled his chair and failing to hide his last contribution from my horrified gaze: "Babe, I'd coarse you down the deepest hole..." I searched vainly for saltpetre and offered to brew some dandelion tea while asking what had become of the erudite blogger I knew and loved.

"We're all going to hell in a handbasket", the bunny countered as I seived the yellow petals from our tisane. Disappointed by his despair, I suggested News Bunny do something about it. "Make hay while the sun shines. Have you seen the haunches on these hunnies?" His front teeth were twitching in some feral facsimile, I reassured the lecherous leporid that I really wasn't interested. Something in his eyes beseeched me to extricate him from his new ignomony. I changed the subject: "What's this about Barak Obama?".

Oh yeah, Sarah! She's a fox. I mean... I would never... not with an actual fox - modelled for some big fashion house back in the day, palest blue eyes, gamine figure, you should have seen her, way out of my class, but then..." I clicked my fingers to try and bring the hypnotised rabbit out of his reverie , "...so she's in Copenhagen, saving the world like all those pretty chicks do when they get older - Audrey Hepburn and, er, Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn..."I clapped twice in front of NB's nose "so, I'm on-line with Sarah, nothing naasty, just the suggestion of catching up over a green salad and she says she can't do next week 'cos she's in Copenhagen. My first thought is that she's dating some ghastly Danish hog or catching some catalogue work, so I ask her - all casual - if she's off saving the planet and that turns out to be the case. I assume she's hurling petrol bombs from the barracades, hooked up with some tree-hugging terrorist so I throw a bit of advice the lassy's way about how everybody's got this green thing back to front. Turns out the girl came good, got next to the American president and hit him straight between the eyes with a proper perspective. I still don't have a fix on the fox's status but her news was better than sex." I kept my own counsel on the rampant rabbit's new approach to relationships, prefering to enquire what he had ask his ex to say.

"Oh, you know, everyone's got the wrong end of the carrot on this climate change thing. It doesn't make any difference if I leave the heating on full and the windows wide open. It's a supply side problem. If we step out now and set light to the local gas station, it doesn't change the amount of carbon in the atmosphere one microgram, the deisel was destined to be drunk by a dump truck, the petrol poured into a Porsche. Once a barrel of oil comes out of the ground, it is getting burned, by someone, somewhere and soon. The only way to confine climate change is to stop mining the stuff. Eight of the world's eleven largest corporations are petrochemical companies, two thirds of the world's oil comes from eleven countries. That's where your leverage is. If you want to change anything you have to change it there. Six billion people will suffer from climate change, nineteen organisations need to change - shouldn't be too hard to sort it out."

"And you got this message to the President?", I confirmed. "Oh yes, Sarah seems very tight with the powers that be, it's not who you know, you know, it's what you look like - and Sarah looks great"

As Good As It Gets

News Bunny came down with a dose of myxamotosis but hopes that readers will be happy to hear that he is still alive, if not kicking, at this point. Unhappily the hospital does not provide rabbit adapted internet terminals, so readers will have to be content with relays of News Bunny's thoughts through interviews taken by friends and relations.

News Bunny was particularly cheered by seeing the Bank Of England follow his advice to print shedloads of money. As welcome as this is, news of 'green shoots of recovery' seems completely deluded and News Bunny wondered if some commentators had been stealing his medication. Our poorly Leporid explained that two uncomfortable facts seem incontrovertible: exponential growth is an inherently unsustainable phenomenon and climate change is going to be a major feature of the lifetimes of anyone born this century.

With the human population growing at 1.2% per year any economic growth below this figure means that the average punter is getting poorer. Policy makers, journalists and other commentators continue to see economic growth of around 3% as the norm and anything less as some kind of 'problem' requiring remedy. Voters are happy to hear that it is the responsibility of their representatives to make them a little richer every year. News Bunny pointed out that there is nothing in the laws of nature saying that humans have to get twenty times richer every century, as this assumption implies, indeed nature's laws rather mitigate against this as a steady state.

Through a hoarse whisper my favourite rabbit explained the world we have woken into. In California, the leading edge of most trends, one in every fifty homes is in foreclosure. Banks will either charge their customers or taxpayers for these losses. Working people will be encouraged to pay down debt, pay taxes, pay bank charges and spend less. These virtues, inevitably, will put other working people out of a job and some of them into foreclosure. The end of this year will see a surge in UK repossesions as the first wave of redundancy cheques run out, in turn this will kick off a second wave of economic pain. Europe is going the same way and Japan has been in this place since middle aged people were teenagers.

This self reinforcing cycle of falling property prices, falling debt and rising unemployment will continue through the next decade by the end of which climate change will not be a theory but a fact evidenced by rising sea levels. With his nose moist with ardour and his eyes red with earnest, News Bunny proposed that at this point the world will stop bickering about how to share the cost of protecting ourselves from environmental catastrophe and start to divert resources into actually doing so. This may be good for the construction industry but it cannot imply economic growth as it essentially involves rebuilding the house you already live in further uphill. Rich people will still have somewhere to live but they will be much poorer for it. Poor people will die.

News Bunny was exhausted by this explanation and I crept away as his heavy lidded eyes closed, however he called me back as I turned the door handle to leave. "Tell them there is no 'recovery'" he implored me "This is as good as it gets". Carrying an untouched tray of tired lettuce leaves out with me, I left News Bunny, hoping that 'recovery' was still on the cards for him personally, at least.

Spies Are Human Too

The function of a news blog is to provide a forum in which a commentator can rant about the difference between their perspective and that of mainstream media. Newsbunny shall fail this remit today.

The day began with the former head of MI5, a British Military Intelligence Service quoted as saying "It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state."

Stella Rimmington's stunning outburst, in Spanish newspaper, La Vanguardia, of all places, came a day after publication of a three-year global study by the International Commission of Jurists documented the use of fear to introduce measures inconsistent with established human rights.

In the fifteen minutes that it took for me to get out of the house last Thursday morning, BBC Radio Four's Today programme treated us to the Bishop of Durham defending Darwinianism, a discussion on the limitations of freedom of speech that contained a question on whether incitement to hatred differed from incitement to violence and followed with a general discussion as to culpability of individuals, bankers, regulators and government following the resignation of Sir James Cosby.

Some of may be financially impoverished by the recession, all of us will be enriched by the rebirth of humanism.

News Flash

There was no news on Monday. Top story was that a bank made big losses. This is not news.

Sick Software

On the 15th April 2002 our esteemed Prime Minister, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published a report that he commissioned Derek Wanless to produce about the NHS. The thrust of the report was that the British public health system needed lots of money if the health care experience was to rise above that of treatment at a second world war field hospital.

The opposition had all of twenty hours to digest the document before Gordon Brown announced that in line with the report's recommendations the NHS budget would rise from about £2,000 to £3,000 per year per taxpayer over the next five years and a 1% would be added to taxes to pay for this.

These figures are rounded but, it's not hard to see a problem here. One extra per cent isn't going to yield an extra £1,000 in taxes unless the average punter is earning £100,000 a year on average, which we're not.

A fifth of this extra £40bn was earmarked for improving the IT. This budget has since risen by half as much again, much of the project is late, the local hospital of my childhood has been piloting the multi billion new patient record system and issued a statement of misery yesterday.

Andrew Way, chief executive of the Royal Free Hospital said patient bookings took four times as long to complete, the system made it difficult or impossible to invoice other parts of the NHS for treatment, forty new staff had to be employed and he had had to apologise to the doctors, nurses and administrative staff because the system had caused so much hassle and delivered so little.

Some time around the turn of the millenium my, then, wife walked into a lamppost. She wasn't looking the other way, or talking on her phone, she just didn't see it. Startled and feeling too vain for frames and too squeamish for contacts she forced herself into the local opticians. They gave her the standard test and sent her straight off to hospital for more extensive tests. The local hospital, in turn, sent her to Moorfields Eye Hospital in Old Street and within a week she had been assigned a specialist consultant and sent for an MRI all for free with no forms to fill in, banking convenants or negotiation with insurers.

A week later she returned to discuss the results with her consultant. There was a long delay before we were ushered into his room. He explained that she had experienced a micro stroke and the MRI would show if she were having many more. The treatment would be predicated on this and the balance of cells and nutrients in her blood. Unfortunately, they had lost the MRI pictures and they could not take any more for several months (she was no longer an emergency). An absurd scene ensued in which a technician and I described what we could remember of the pictures when they first came out to the machine and the consultant chose a course of treatment on that basis.

The girl is still alive but it wasn't an ideal approach. I was delighted when I heard that the NHS was getting a proper filing system but increasingly dismayed by the desperately predictable blunders that they have made throughout.

Throwing £8bn at some international consultancies is rarely the best way to solve anything (I work for one). There is lots of software and lots of software developers able to improve bits of the NHS. There is a wonderful standard for getting different bits of software to share information devised by our very own living saint, Tim Berners-Lee.

Software is best written iteratively, in which a second generation adapts to the way that the users have adapted to the first version. The NHS could have provided a set of standards that all suppliers had to follow and let the individual trusts, hospitals, departments do their own thing in their own time at a fraction of the cost. Over time a standard approach would emerge with variations, some of the variations would turn out to be the basis of the next big thing. If this sounds familiar it is the story of the desktop software industry so far and has proved so successful that nature has stolen the idea and called it evolution.