10 Reasons Why The New Provisional Laws Won’t Work

Last week, the Irish government made the announcement that they would be introducing new laws to deal with the massive amount of deaths on our roads. At first glance, a positive turn of events. They went about it by bringing in new rules for provisional drivers; no longer would the Gardai turn a blind eye provisional drivers alone in the car (technically illegal) – said drivers would now face prosecution and fines of up to 1000 euros for each offence…

…all of which sounds fine and dandy until you consider the following:

1: Driving alone with a provision licence has been, for all intents and purposes, completely legal for decades. To turn this on its head is a lovely idea, but in practice makes little sense.

2: The Irish driving test system is a shambles of a mockery of a parody. Drivers may have to wait up to fifty weeks – just shy of a year – in order to take a test in centres that routinely have pass rates of less than 50%.

3: The test itself is totally impractical. It is based almost entirely on the use of the car’s mirrors, each of which must be checked roughly every ten to fifteen seconds throughout the duration of the test. NOBODY actually drives that in real life, since doing so would be dangerous. You concentrate on the road ahead and use the mirrors when you need to. It’s common sense.

4: The (as-yet unenforced) rules state that all provisional drivers must have a licensed driver in the car with them at all times. They must be sober, and have had a licence for over two years. Now, I ask you; what bloody difference does it make to your driving if the passenger has their licence or not? Are they going to give you pointers?? Regardless of licenced / unlicenced status the person in the car with you, you are still responsible for their safety – for their very lives – and should act accordingly.

5: The idea that drivers on provisional licences are more dangerous than those with full licences is a myth. True, the vast majority of deaths on our roads are caused by young men in fast cars, and they tend to fit the age group for people for provisional licences. But one statistic does not necessarily correlate with the other. In my personal experience, L drivers have a tendency to be cautious and tentative with their vehicles. I am much more wary of the fully licenced people, some of whom have a total disregard for common sense on the roads. Over the bank holiday weekend alone I saw two incidents that boiled my blood: First, on a country road, a car tailgated me for about 1/2 a kilometre before overtaking on a corner, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oncoming car. Second, on a motorway, a car overtook me and continued out of sight doing at least 140kmph. Neither of these cars had L plates up, and, we can assume, had drivers that were fully licenced.

6: There are simply not enough Gardai visible on the roads to get people to slow down. Fact. They can issue all the appeals and warnings they want, but if they are not out on the roads, nobody will listen.

7: I am one of those people who depends on my car for work. As a musician (and on a provisional licence), I need to bring my gear around to wherever I am playing, which means I need my car. The new law would mean that if I was to continue working, I would be breaking the law every single night I worked.

8: The Irish public transport system is a joke, monopolised from the off and left thereafter to fester. I could regale you for hours with the horror stories of people getting buses and trains around the country. Lost luggage, standing room only on long journeys where you have paid for a seat, drivers shouting at passengers, strikes happening at short notice, late buses, buses not arriving, buses driving straight past their stops, etc etc. And by the way; I booked a trip to Latvia over the weekend, and get this: It is costing me less to get there and back than it would for me to make a return trip to Dublin from Cork on the train. True story. As long as the government refuses to get address of the cesspool of idiocy and laziness that is the Irish transport system, we cannot blame people for getting into cars and driving, full licence or no.

9: But the best bit is yet to come: The new law was announced on the same day that Fianna Fail decided to accept a huge salary hike that had been recommended to them by an “independent study”. That’s right; in a country where in the last year, the water in Galway had human faeces floating around in it, where the health system is utterly overwhelmed on a daily basis, where the communications infrastructure remained years behind almost all our European counterparts, where death rates on the roads were catastrophic, and where Bertie Ahern himself was almost thrown out of government for shady financial doings, the government saw fit to substantially elevate the salaries of everyone.

10: And it gets even better. The government couldn’t even get the distraction right. The very next day after it was announced, its introduction was put back until the new year. The phone-in radio shows were a delight that day; one Road Safety Authority spokesman went on the radio at 1 in the afternoon, talking about who the law would save lives. At about 2 o’ clock, the RSA revealed across the media that the law was being put back until the start of the new year. And here’s the punchline – On the following Sunday, it was announced that the law was being put off until next June.

People are calling for the head of the Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey. But I say, fair dues. He did his job; he bought enough headline space to offset the impact of the Government’s disgraceful pay hike. And he too got his reward – Dempsey now has an extra 15% added to his already substantial paycheque. And if he is forced to leave government, he will no doubt have a golden handshake extended to him – one that befits the circumstances of his resignation.

Al Qaeda Are In California!

Fox News, the bastion of conservative media in the States, has claimed in news reports that Al Qaeda may have been responsible for starting the fires that have ravaged California in the last week.

This statement was based on a news article from an Arizona newspaper published four years ago. Fox’s bare-faced claim that the article was only a few days old has been refuted repeatedly by many more respectable news sources. The fact is that the initial fires probably occurred as a result of the intense heat of the region; heat that, to some degree has almost certainly resulted from the global warming that Bush refuses to address.You can view an analysis of this erroneous report in the video at the bottom of this page.

US politics and media is turning into an Orwellian nightmare. As Bush, Cheney et al begin their all-too-familiar threats on Iran and its nuclear policy, the sympathetic media outlets pump up the scare tactics to justify the government’s actions.  The occupation of Iraq has fallen out of favour in the US mainstream news. The administration is seeking to divert attention from the horrible mess they have created there by finding a new terrorist threat right next door! The verbal fireworks of warmongering are again being used to suggest a Manichean, black and white situation: You are either with us or against us in your opinions about policing the world; you either support good or evil.

Even the most casual observer should know that it’s not that simple. That said, however, most casual observers get their information from the major news outlets. And when these outlets are as one-sided as Fox News, opinions can quickly be herded into the good/evil camp.

“Outfoxed” is a fantastic documentary about Fox news and the conservative US media. It is available to watch here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6737097743434902428

TVLinks is Dead

The video website, TVlinks, is no more.

Apparently, the guy who ran it, a 26 year old Englishman, was arrested a few days ago and the site was taken down. It is a sad day for fans of online television everywhere.

However, here are some replacement sites to keep us happy:

http://www.surfthechannel.com/

http://tvunderground.org.ru/
http://www.freetvsearch.com
http://www.craftytv.com
http://www.tvlinkvault.com

Practice Epicurus – 1

Epicurus was a philosopher who lived in ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC. He is famous for having come up with a series of tenets that describe the essentials for human happiness.1: We need friends. We should surround ourselves with them at all times, eat with them, even live with them if possible. He himself at one stage bought a house specifically to do this.

2: We need freedom; that is to say, self-sufficiency. We need to be able to make decisions for ourselves, and be free to depend on ourselves for our livelihoods.

3: We need to contemplate our own lives when we can. Epicurus believed that periodic examination of one’s own life would reveal the rational paths to follow that will lead us to happiness. This should be done in quiet solitude.

Epicurus believed that the importance of each of these was virtually self-evident. We all know in our heart of hearts that money and all financial matters are inferior to these pursuits. However, day to day living made this truth very hard to follow; not because of any pressures as such, but rather because they become so difficult to remember in the face of constant desires created by advertising (yup, advertising was a scourge even in Ancient Greek society).

This seems to exemplify one of the major obstacles associated with any type of positive lifestyle; it needs to be reinforced every day. Practice makes perfect, but even perfection evaporates unless it is polished and renewed frequently. Perhaps that is the benefit of prayer; it reminds the individual every day, or at least once a week, that their life has purpose.

David Lynch, the visionary director of films like Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet practices (note the term “practice”) Transcendental Meditation twice every day, a method which he describes as diving into the unconscious and returning with ideas. The point is that he does it every single day, and has done for the last 30 years.

That seems to be a universal human trait – that in order to maintain something we want, be it a way of thinking, the ability to sing or play music, read or write, whatever – that we need to make a habit out of it. If we don’t, it becomes replaced with the negative habits that cause us to doubt ourselves, to believe that we somehow need more than our friends, our thoughts and our freedom in order to feel happy; and that a product will fill that gap.

Here is the video lecture, “Consciousness, Creativity and The Brain” in which Lynch describes how daily meditation can positively affect every aspect of the person who practices it.

Be Here Now

In Eckhart Tolle’s famous book “The Power Of Now“, he describes how people have lost the art of simply “being”, of existing purely from one moment to the next, without the neuroses of the past and the worries of the future attacking from all sides.

Our society, and in particular, our educational system, has inculcated us with the belief that happiness is always just around the corner, part and parcel of the next class, promotion or pay raise. We never quite get there, of course. There’s always another corner ahead to round.  It’s a recipe for never-ending incompleteness; how many people are totally happy with how they look or how they think? This is heaven for the advertising industry – they always have the snake oil to cure what ails ya’. Indeed, this basic sense of constant individual inadequecy could very well be the core of virtually all of humanity’s ills.

Tolle suggests that all of this results from our perception of time; or at least, what our current social constructions say how time should be perceived. Ancient cultures such as the Mayans believed that time is purely a cyclic edifice, moving through great periods of destruction and creation, but always evolving. Many indigenous cultures believe that the very idea of time itself is futile. In fact , if you really think about it, the whole idea of the past and the future are purely theoretical. We never, ever experience them. We are only ever “here” and “now”. Even the most immersive memories and hypotheses are little more than projections of a mind that can only ever exist in the present. Indeed, Tolle suggests that these flights of the psyche are distractions from “now”, which is what we should truly appreciate.

If we get into the habit of living “now” (which Tolle says can be aided greatly by regular meditation, which is essentially the practice of grounding oneself in pure, unthinking existence), then we can be free of the jealousies and fears that exist only as elements of the constructs of the “past” and the “future”. This is not a new concept; but Tolle has updated it from Vedic scriptures and the Upanishads to be understandable by the denizens of modern society.

If all of this seems like pedantic semantics, remember that modern science seems to confirm many of these theories. Einstein himself was a pioneer of the idea that time was almost as flexible or as static as one perceived it to be. Once, when asked to explain Relativity Theory, he famously illustrated it with the observation that an hour on a bench with a pretty girl seemed like a moment, while a moment on a hot stove seemed like an hour. As Dr. Roy Mathew says, “Einstein . . . added support to the concept that time and the mundane reality are both non-substantial. Time, Einstein showed, was relative and therefore, the mundane world with time as its basis also had to be ephemeral.”

Time is not a mechanical contruct with cogs and wheels. It is as malleable as each individual’s experience of it. We should then, as Tolle hypothesizes, tweak or even overhaul completely that experience in order to filter out the unnecassary flotsam of jetsam of the ideas of past and future. We should end the perception of ourselves as moving towards an uncertain future, carrying the debris of the past. Only then will we destroy the neuroses that emerge purely from these ideas.