Old Sarum

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Feel the ancientness! Just north of the city of Salisbury sits the site of Old Sarum hill fort and castle. From Wiki:

The site contains evidence of human habitation as early as 3000 BC. Old Sarum is mentioned in some of the earliest records in the country. It is located on a hill about two miles north of modern Salisbury adjacent to the A345 road.

Old Sarum was originally an Iron age hill fort strategically placed on the conjunction of two trade routes and the River Avon. The hill fort is broadly oval in shape, 400 metres (1,300ft) in length and 360 metres (1,180ft) in width, it consists of a double bank and intermediate ditch with an entrance on the eastern side. The site was used by the Romans, becoming the town of Sorviodunum. The Saxons used the site as a stronghold against marauding Vikings, and the Normans built a stone curtain wall around the Iron age perimeter and a centrally placed castle on a motte protected by a deep dry moat. A royal palace was built within the castle for King Henry I and subsequently used by Plantagenet monarchs. A Norman cathedral and bishop’s residence were built at the western end of the town.

In 1219, the cathedral was demolished in favour of the new one built near the river and the townspeople moved down to the new city, then called New Salisbury or New Sarum. The castle fell out of use and was sold for materials by King Henry VIII.

Light on Life by BKS Iyengar – Chapter 2: Stability – Part 1

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Extracts from Chapter 2: Stability – The Physical Body (Asana)

It’s a long chapter, so this is Part 1:

Yoga is as old and traditional as civilization, yet it persists in modern society as a means to achieving essential vitality. But yoga demands that we develop not only strength in body but attention and awareness in mind.

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Yoga offers us techniques to become aware, to expand and penetrate, and to change and evolve.

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As you explore your own body you are in fact exploring the earth element of nature itself.

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[One] must do asana not merely as a physical exercise but as a means to understand and then integrate our body with breath, with our mind, with our intelligence, with our consciousness, with our conscience, and with our core.

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Yoga has a threefold impact on health. It keeps healthy people healthy, it inhibits the development of diseases, and it aids recovery from ill health.

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You have to create within yourself the experience of beauty, liberation, and infinity. This is health.

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As long as the body is not in perfect health, you are caught in body consciousness alone. This distracts you from healing and culturing the mind. We need sound bodies so we can develop sound minds.

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Sensitivity is not weakness or vulnerability. It is clarity of perception and allows judicious, precise action.

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The effects of impurity are highly undesirable. They cause us to develop a hard shell around us. If we construct a stiff shell between ourselves and the world outside our skin, we rob ourselves of most of life’s possibilities. We are cut off from the free flow of cosmic energy. It becomes difficult in every sense to let nourishment in or to let toxic waste out. We live in a capsule, what a poet called a “vain citadel.”

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Central heating, air conditioning, cars that we take out to drive three hundred yards, towns that stay lit up all night, and food imported from around the world out of season are all examples of how we try to circumvent our duty to adapt to nature and instead force nature to adapt to us. In the process, we become both weak and brittle. Even many of my Indian students who all now sit on chairs in their homes are becoming too stiff to sit in lotus position easily.

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Does not the American Declaration of Independence talk of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? If a yogi had written that, he would have said Life, Happiness, and the Pursuit of Liberty.

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If you say you are your body, you are wrong. If you say you are not your body, you are also wrong.

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How does one find such profound transformation in what from the outside may look simply like stretching or twisting the body into unusual positions? It begins with awareness.

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The sensitive awareness of the body and the intelligence of the brain and heart should be in harmony. The brain may instruct the body to do a posture, but the heart has to feel it, too. The head is the seat of intelligence; the heart is the seat of emotion. Both have to work in cooperation with the body.

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The duty of the brain is to receive knowledge from the body and then guide the body to further refine the action. Pause and reflect between each movement. This is progression in attention. Then in the stillness you can be filled with awareness.

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When we ask ourselves, “What am I doing?” and “Why am I doing it?” our minds open. This is self-awareness. However, it is necessary to point out that students should be self-aware, not self-conscious. Self-consciousness is when the mind constantly worries and wonders about itself, doubting constantly and being self-absorbed.

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If you do not know the silence of the body, you cannot understand the silence of the mind.

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When action and silence combine like the two plates of an automobile’s clutch, it means that intelligence is in gear.

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The moment you bring attention, you are creating something, and creation has life and energy.

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Extension is attention, and expansion is awareness.

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Overstretching occurs when one looses contact with one’s center, with the divine core. Instead, the ego wants simply to stretch further, to reach the floor, regardless of its ability, rather than extending gradually from the center.

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Always try to extend and expand the body. Extension and expansion bring space, and space brings freedom.

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When there is strain, the practice of yoga is purely physical and leads towards imbalances and misjudgement.

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Your energy extends through the tips of your skin and beyond. This is the secret that martial artists use to generate extraordinary force. They do not punch a brick, they punch through it. Extend the energy of the asana out through your extremities. Let the river flow through you.

Picture from B.K.S. Iyengar – Yoga Wisdom and Practice

More Radioactive Leaks From Fukushima

Posted on by Duncan Toms

TOKYO — At least 45 tons of highly radioactive water have leaked from a purification facility at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, and some of it may have reached the Pacific Ocean, the plant’s operator said Sunday.

Nearly nine months after Fukushima Daiichi was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, the plant continues to pose a major environmental threat. Before the latest leak, the Fukushima accident had been responsible for the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, threatening wildlife and fisheries in the region, experts have said.

The new radioactive water leak called into question the progress that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, appeared to have made in bringing its reactors under control. The company, known as Tepco, has said that it hopes to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown by the end of the year.

The trouble on Sunday came in two stages, a Tepco statement said. In the morning, utility workers found that radioactive water was pooling in a catchment next to a purification device; the system was switched off, and the leak appeared to stop. But the company said it later discovered that leaked water was escaping, possibly through cracks in the catchment’s concrete wall, and was reaching an external gutter.

In all, as much as 220 tons of water may now have leaked from the facility, according to a report in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun that cited Tepco officials.

The company said that the water had about one million times as much radioactive strontium as the maximum safe level set by the government, but appeared to have already been cleaned of radioactive cesium before leaking out. Both elements are readily absorbed by living tissue and can greatly increase the risk of developing cancer.

Tepco said a check on Saturday had found no sign of the leak, suggesting that it began Saturday night or early Sunday morning. The company said it was exploring ways to stop any more water from escaping.

Since the disaster in March, workers have been struggling to cool the stricken plant’s reactors by flooding them with water, which is contaminated with radioactivity in the process and becomes a problem of its own.

via More Radioactive Leaks From Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant – NYTimes.com.

Alan Moore Interview – Economics

Posted on by Duncan Toms

The economic problem is a strange one…

Economics is always strange. You’re not talking about anything that’s actually real. Researching a chapter for Jerusalem, I read a couple of books on economics to see if I could get my head around the facts of the situation. I was astonished when I found out the value of derivative bonds, in 2008. These are bonds that have a value in themselves that were once connected to a real thing, there might have been a bond made for the sale of a herd of sheep, but that can be sold on and they gain in value. The notional value of the world’s derivative bonds was in the region of sixty trillion. Exactly ten times the economic output of the entire planet, which is around six trillion. That means that the gap between what economists and what the world’s economic forces and the banks thought they had to play with and what actually existed was fifty-four trillion. That would seem to me the depth of the hole we are in.

So something has to be done about that. I would suggest beheading the bankers, but while it would be very satisfying and would cheer us up, it probably wouldn’t do anything practical to alter the situation. Behead the currency. Change the currency, why not? It would disempower all the people who had bought into that currency but it would pretty much empower the rest of us, the other ninety-nine percent.

via The Honest Alan Moore Interview – Part 2: The Occupy Movement, Frank Miller, and Politics.

Light on Life by BKS Iyengar – Chapter 1: The Inward Journey

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Extracts from Chapter 1: The Inward Journey:

Most of us think of our “body” as simply our physical form—our skin, bones, muscles, and internal organs. For yoga, however, this is only the outermost layer of our body or annamaya kosa. It is this anatomical body that encompasses the other four subtle bodies, or kosas.

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The demarcation of the different sheaths is essentially hypothetical. We are unique and integral. Nevertheless, in order to achieve the integrity and wholeness we desire, there must be communication from the inner to the outer and the outer to the inner as each sheath blends with the next. Only then are we bound together as one functional human being. If not, we experience dissolution and fragmentation, which make life uncomfortable and confusing.

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[If] you too live and practice yoga in the right way and with the right attitude, far greater benefits and more radical changes will take place than mere physical flexibility.

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We too are part of Nature, therefore constantly changing, so we are always looking at Nature from a different viewpoint. We are a little piece of continual change looking at an infinite quantity of continual change. Small wonder that it gets quite exciting. The most important thing we can learn about Nature is the inherent and innate laws by which it functions.

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It is through the alignment of my body that I discovered the alignment of my mind, self, and intelligence.

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I have purposely avoided until now using the usual translation for the non-physical reality as its mention usually stops people thinking for themselves. In Sanskrit, the word is Purusa. In English we can call it Cosmic or Universal Soul. The word Soul usually has such strong religious connotations that people either accept or dismiss it without reflection. They forget that it is simply our word for an abiding reality. It is logical but remains conceptual to our minds until we experience its realization within ourselves.

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Everything that exists in the macrocosm is to be found existing in the microcosm or individual.

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[The] demonstration of one’s spiritual realization lies in none other than how one walks among and interacts with one’s fellow human beings.

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[We] discover ever more self-control, sensitivity, and awareness that permit us to live the life we aspire to, one of decency; clean, honest human relations; goodwill and fellowship; trust; self-reliance; joy in the fortune of others; and equanimity in the face of our own misfortune.

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Self-cultivation through asana is the broad gateway leading to the inner enclosures we need to explore. In other words, we are going to try to use asana to sculpt the mind.

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Breath is the vehicle of consciousness and so, by its slow, measured observation and distribution, we learn to tug our attention away from external desires (vasana) toward a judicious, intelligent awareness (prajna).

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We may say that we want to reach the domain of the soul, but there remains a great tug-of-war. We neither go in nor out, and that saps the energy.

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This process of relaxing the brain is achieved through asana. We generally think of mind as being in our head. In asana our consciousness spreads throughout the body, eventually diffusing in every cell, creating a complete awareness.

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How to keep the brain cells in a relaxed, receptive, and concentrated state is the art that yoga teaches.

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[We] all have access to a space, an inner space, where there is an end to duality, an end to conflict. This is what meditation teaches us, the cessation of the impersonating ego and the dawn of the true, unified Self, beyond which there is no other.

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[A] word or action done to another is ultimately done equally to oneself.

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Spirituality, as I have tried to make clear, is not ethereal and outside nature but accessible and palpable in our very own bodies. Indeed the very idea of a spiritual path is a misnomer. After all, how can you move toward something that, like Divinity, is already by definition everywhere?

Bank funding crisis deepens

Posted on by Duncan Toms

In other words European workers must now be forced to compete toe to toe with Chinese labor costs even though the cost of living in Europe is vastly higher than living in China. Of course the obvious solution to that conundrum is to make the cost of living here more like that of living in China. Which is a simple matter of doing away with workers rights, health care, education and any sort of pension at all. The outlines of a plan emerging here I think.

This is a BANK funding crisis, but it is nations of ordinary people who are being blamed and forced to pay for all the corruption, stupidity, greed and lies which caused it and are still causing it.

via Bank funding crisis deepens | Golem XIV – Thoughts.

Brockwood Tower

Posted on by Duncan Toms

At the south-eastern end of the house is the water tower, built in 1912 by Mr. Coates in order to supply water both to the house and the neighbouring cottages he built around the same time. Like other old buildings this too has a ghost associated with it, which has its origin in the unhappy love affair and the tragic end of a young maiden who jumped off the top, during the time of Lord Chesham. The tower, apart from the water tank at the very top, now houses the biology, physics and chemistry laboratories.

I ain’t afraid of no ghost! Especially not after lunch on a clear, bright day. Here are the views over the school, parkland and beyond.

Debt or Taxes – the battle of our time

Posted on by Duncan Toms

The key is this: by bailing out the banks and the private financial system we are diverting tax and the power it confers from the Nation State and its system of democratic accountability, and instead empowering a system where debt not democracy reigns supreme. As more and more of our as yet un-earned wealth is already pledged to support the system of private debts and private debt-based wealth we find ourselves less and less able to control it or enforce even its own laws upon it. The financial system and those whose power comes from it are increasingly able to disregard any restraining laws. They can incur debts and ignore them forcing others, us, to pay them for them. How? because we have tied our selves to their system and weakened the old system which used to protect us and work for us.

via Debt or Taxes – the battle of our time

Scrap Book: Me and my Dad in the garden

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Here we are, Dad & I in the garden of Boundary House, Broughton Gifford. I’m three and a half. Dad must be just back from work, still in his brown suit and shiny shoes. Check out my red and blue combo with matching wellies! The dry stone walls were all rebuilt around this time and the large slabs were laid as a path through the vegetable garden. Back then our garden ended at the fence behind this wall, with cows or horses coming close to drink at the trough. Later we bought a diagonal slice of the field, extending the garden to the end of the hedge. In the background is the old pigsty and farm buildings we called The Camp. It was incredible! We fixed up the wooden shack and had great fun climbing the walls.

Credit Crunch 2.0?

Posted on by Duncan Toms

So now we have almost every aspect of the original sub-prime credit crunch reproduced by the same people who did it the first time and were never punished or even rebuked but instead were allowed to reward themselves with millions in bonuses.

So to summarize, MF Global invested in sub prime. Only this time sub prime bonds not mortgages. It leveraged them hideously, pretended it had off-loaded the risk when it hadn’t and then got caught when the value of the bonds went down and counldn’t pay the debts it had taken on using the bonds as collateral. Sorry to belabour the point but I want you to see how this really is subrpime all over again.

And like the original sub prime it means when one bank goes down it leaves all those to whom it owes money, with their own losses.

So now let’s move on from MF Global, because as some wag commented, you never find just one cockroach in a dirty kitchen. Which logic nearly killed a second brokerage, Jeffries. Its stock collapsed on the rumour that it too had bought up lots of European bonds. Jeffries had to take the amazing step of publishing every single position in bonds that it had. Only then did its stock recover.

Since then other banks have been less forthcoming about their exposure, namely Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Only they are not so much suspected of having lots of European bonds themselves as having perhaps provided the one part of the whole sub prime crisis we have not so far mentioned, CDS insurance. Goldman and JP Morgan are among the world’s largest derivatives traders. And they revealed that between them they have sold ‘protection’ on over $5 trillion globally. No one knows how much of this is on dodgy European debt and neither Goldman nor JP Morgan is saying.

In sub prime credit crunch 1 it was AIG that provided much of the short term funding and much of the CDS protection. This time who knows who are the main providers. But one thing you can be sure of, there will have been a great deal of it sold. Because it would have been sold using the same logic which inspired MF Global to buy the debt. The logic which said, these are countries too big to fail so in the end they will be bailed out even if democracy has to be suspended to ensure it. If you believed that logic then you wold have sold CDS protection and pocketed the premium.

So that, I believe is all aspects of sub prime accounted for. You can now see that while sovereign bonds and debts may be the fissile material the bomb itself and its explosive potential was constructed by the banks just as they did last time following the same blue-print and same greed.

And how soon might it go off. For that we end with UniCredit. Last quarter the trillion euro bank suddenly posted a ‘surprise’ 10.6 billion euro loss in just this last quarter! It’s bonds are now trading as junk while it faces having to raise another 51 billion euros to re-finance its debt in just the next year. That, to me spells BOOOOM! It is only the first. It certainly won’t be the last. There will be others and they may be along fairly soon.

Why did UniCredit suddenly make such a loss? What was happening during the last quarter? Well Spanish and Italian bonds have lost a lot of value. what do you think, might UniCredit have been holding a lot of them? Surely not I hear you cry. Who would be so stupid. UniCredit blames the loss on its Kazakhstan and Ukraine units. What would those units have been doing to wrack up such monumental losses? UniCredit is now trying desperately to sell bits of itself.

The banks know what is going on. They each know the risks and losses they are hiding and know if they have them then so do the others. Exactly as in Credit crunch1 interbank lending is frozen with both libor and repo markets in disarray.

I suggest these are the real reasons the banks are in an absolute panic and are shrieking about how the ECB MUST print and print now and why elections and voting of any kind at all must NOT be allowed to upset the smooth imposition of the bank’s required plan. There is contagion but it is bank contagion, its sub prime greed and failure all over again.

Buckle up – Credit Crunch 2

Light on Life by BKS Iyengar

Posted on by Duncan Toms

I am reading Light on Life by Iyengar, slowly and somewhat surely, as is my way. I thought I’d share some extracts and quotes as I read and practice. Whereas Light on Yoga looks in detail at the practice of asana, this book shows how yoga and life are one.

Introduction

When you and I meet together, we forget ourselves – our cultures and classes. There are no divisions, and we talk mind to mind, soul to soul. We are no different in our deepest needs. We are all human

Yoga is the rule book for playing the game of life, but in this game no one needs to loose.

When I say that yoga saved my life, I am not exaggerating. It was yoga that gave me a new birth with health from illness and firmness from infirmity.

Yogasana brought tremendous brought tremendous physical benefits and helped me to grow from a sickly child into a reasonably fit and agile young man. My own body was the laboratory, in which I saw the health benefits of yoga, but I could already see that yoga would have as many benefits for my head and heart as it did for my body.

You do not need to seek freedom in some distant land, for it exists within your own body, heart, mind, and soul.

Kripalu Yoga Videos

Posted on by Duncan Toms

It’s been two years since I was in Massachusetts to undertake my yoga teacher training. I studied at the Kripalu Centre, who’s approach to yoga is one of awareness, and spontaneity, whether one wishes to teach or practise a gentle approach, moderate or vigorous. Recently Kripalu have put some video yoga classes online for free. It was great to be able to see my teachers, Devarshi, Megha, Coby and Jovina teaching online, and these are very good practices to work with at home.

Here’s Devarshi Steven Hartman’s class:

And a trailer for the course itself, truly one of the best and most profound experiences of my life.

And many other classes and short sessions here

I mean to post some more from the journal and course notes from that month. Here are a couple from early in the course:

Goals of teachers

And one of the more memorable days, the blindfolded meeting of hands

Weekend Walk 32 – Emsworth to Hilsea – Solent Way

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Getting up too late to finish the South Downs Way, I switched to The Solent Way. Stage one of my back to front walk took me from Emsworth near the border with West Sussex to Hilsea in the north of Portsmouth. This was a level walk via Warblington, Langstone, Brockhampton, Farlington and the Hilsea Lines, with a long loop around Farlington Marshes in fading light.

The World Is Drowning in Debt, and Europe Laces On Concrete Boots

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Three metaphors describe Europe: drowning in debt, circular firing squad and trying to fool the money gods with an inept game of 3-card monte.

The world’s major economies are drowning in debt–Europe, the U.S., Japan, China. We all know the U.S. has tried to save its drowning economy by bailing out the parasite which is dragging it to Davy Jones Locker–the banking/financial sector– and by borrowing and squandering $6 trillion in new Federal debt and buying toxic debt with $2 trillion whisked into existence on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

It has failed, of course, and the economy is once again slipping beneath the waves while Ben Bernanke and the politico lackeys join in a Keynesian-monetary cargo-cult chant: Humba-humba, bunga-bunga. Their hubris doesn’t allow them to confess their magic has failed, and rather than let their power be wrenched away, they will let the flailing U.S. economy drown.

Europe has managed to top this hubris-drenched cargo-cult policy–no mean feat. First, it has indebted itself to a breathtaking degree, on every level: sovereign, corporate and private:

Germany, the mighty engine which is supposed to pull the $16 trillion drowning European economy out of the water, is as indebted as the flailing U.S.

Second, the euro’s handlers have already sunk staggering sums into hopelessly insolvent debtor nations, for example, Greece, which has 355 billion euros of outstanding sovereign debt and an economy with a GDP around 200 billion euros (though it’s contracting so rapidly nobody can even guess the actual size). According to BusinessWeek, the E.U. (European Union), the ECB (European Central Bank) and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) own about $127 billion of this debt.

Since the ECB is not allowed to “print money,” the amount of cash available to buy depreciating bonds is limited. The handlers now own over 35% of the official debt (recall that doesn’t include corporate or private debt), which they grandly refuse to accept is now worth less than the purchase price.

From Of Two Minds

Portsea Buildings

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Today I walked around Portsea, between Gunwharf, the university and the naval base. The area has a much less genteel, more rugged feeling than Old Portsmouth but in amongst the council housing and blocks are some interesting old buildings. The area being right next to the naval base was heavily bombed in WWII and before that, the old slums and buildings were cleared. These photos largely focus on those buildings prior to 1900, including St George’s Square, Burnaby Terrace, Queens Street and Bonfire Corner, up against the barbed-wire walls. I didn’t get as far as The Hard, nor the base itself.

This page has some interesting history and photos of Portsea in the c19, including areas cleared of decaying houses.

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this

Posted on by Duncan Toms

Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust. It doesn’t get any more immoral than this.

It probably gets a lot more immoral, but this sure is ugly.

via Did You Hear the One About the Bankers? – NYTimes.com.