What’s in a name?

Google searches for “No New Wars Foundation” and “No New Wars Organisation” only came up with links to web sites I have created.

Phew!  I’ve come up with a globally novel name.

I really should have checked that eight months ago.

Eight months since I thought of the 11/11/2018 campaign – where did that time go?

I only open my mouth to change feet …

I’ve been going to Job Club sessions on a Saturday morning; last Saturday we had Interview Practice.  For this we had to take in a CV and a job advert for a job we wanted and we were each interviewed in turn.

The mock interviews were done by an accountant from Accenture.  After a few minutes my ‘interview’ morphed into a chat about why I want to get out of IT.  I said I am going into conflict resolution, in particular, war prevention.  This got him interested and I got the best part of 45 minutes to explain:

  • why most of the people I knew in IT are now no longer in it because the UK has outsourced the IT industry overseas (hey, guess what Accenture do);
  • how the NHS has wasted £12 billion on NPfIT (National Programme for IT) and CFH (Connecting For Health) because the NHS “knows best” and refuses to use government-mandated (by the Cabinet Office) government best practice methods like MSP and PRINCE2 (he agreed about the NHS behaviour but didn’t know it applies to IT there too);
  • why arming civilian Syrians would create another Afghanistan in that we’d be back in 20 years fighting the people we’d armed (“I hadn’t thought of it that way”);
  • how it is not right for the government of a democracy to use warfare, or worse, arming civilians and generating proxy wars, to cause death as a way of promoting peace when alternative methods of change do exist (“Really?  Like what?”).

Some of what I had to say really took his interest. He asked whether I knew about the local Peace Centre, I told him how I helped with the planning for an event in July, have been researching new contacts for them and just last week spent two days there adding to a briefing paper on extremist violent groups worldwide.  He was most impressed.  I came out feeling it had gone rather well.

Anyway, my good lady wife said to me today “So, are you going to blog about the interview?

Why?

Because it sounds like you did a good job of informing David Mowat of your views.

The interviewer, the accountant from Accenture, is David Mowat MP, the Conservative MP for Warrington South.

And today the EU is debating whether they should be arming the Syrian civilians.  (The US, unsurprisingly, says the EU should dump arms in the region, while Austria and others are saying the EU is a peace organisation and should not be adding to the conflict.)

The Austrian foreign minister has said it was wrong for the EU to be receiving the Nobel peace prize on the one hand and taking sides in the Syrian civil war on the other.

And I’ve just been adding my 2p worth with a member of the UK government.

Oo-er.  I think I’ve just done my first political lobbying.

Manipulation is at stake

I attended a couple of very good lectures on personal and business marketing yesterday by Jonathan Horlock of Home Finder People and sausages were given as an example: “Don’t sell the sausage, sell the sizzle!” — a variation on Elmer Wheeler’s original example which used steak.

An attendee said how he can turn these pink tubes of processed animal off-cuts into a delicious casserole using a Jamie Oliver recipe and in so doing gave an excellent example of marketing: by associating the jamieoliver.com© brand with bangers he magically turned them into a feast.

Like a fully-grown Harry Potter, he cast a spell on us with the invocation Jamie Oliver!

And that is what marketing does: change what we think and feel and modify our behaviour by manipulation using images, associations, tokens and special words of power. We innocent mortals are influenced by these agents of change, the wizards and witches of marketing. They bend us to their will by the power of their minds, by showing us images and by whispering messages to us whenever and wherever we go.

In medieval times, such people with the power to turn milk sour, would themselves be tied to the steak and made to sizzle!

Tag lines and elevator pitches

It is hard to come up with pithy, accurate and succinct tag lines, elevator pitches (yuck) for one’s self.  But I heard a few lines from Tom Tom Club‘s Wordy Rappinghood which goes:

Words of comfort, words of peace

Words to make the fighting cease

 

I like that, for the No New Wars concept.  Maybe with a slight change:

Words of counsel, words of peace

Words to make all fighting cease

 

A bit better than:

Let’s all work to stop new wars starting

Feedback is good, good feedback is great

Having decided to do an Open University degree to learn about conflict management and war prevention, I researched what modules are available and found myself rather spoiled for choice as they include:

  • Introducing the social sciences
  • Law – Rules, rights and justice: an introduction to law
  • The uses of social science
  • Power, dissent, equality: understanding contemporary politics
  • Exploring psychology
  • International development: making sense of a changing world
  • Welfare, crime and society
  • Living political ideas
  • A world of whose making?
  • Making social worlds
  • Europe 1914-1989 War, Peace, Modernity
  • Crime and Justice
  • Business, human rights law and corporate social responsibility
  • War, Intervention and Development

So I enrolled.  Then, a couple of days ago, the Open University had a table in my local library talking about the OU and what one could do.  A nice bit of synergy.  A two minute chat lasted best part of an hour.  One of the professors – a tutor for local students – said her PhD was in war studies.  Anyway, I ran my plan by her and she was very impressed with my plan and approach, which is very reassuring.

I went to a Drupal North West User Group Meeting last night in Manchester and had the chance to talk to a few people who had used a few CMS (Content Management System) products.  I have tried a number of CMS and related products this past few years, for example there’s my own wiki and this WordPress blog.  However, I had already decided to use Drupal for the 11112018 site and was told a number of times that I had chosen the right platform for what will be a complex site, which is very reassuring.