Then on Saturday 15 November I'm speaking at ORGCon 2014. It's mostly about digital rights but I'm speaking in a session about surveillance called Nothing To Hide, Nothing To Fear. Alongside me will be Erin Saltman (Quilliam Foundation), Güneş Tavmen (Turkish Internet rights expert) and Eleanor Saitta (nomadic hacker, artist and designer).
Next day it's We Do Not Consent, Defend the Right to Protest's national conference. This is the biggest gathering of people spied upon so far. I'm on a panel with Rob Evans (Guardian investigative journalist and author of Undercover), Dave Smith (again) and Jenny Jones (member of GLA and its scrutiny committee the Metropolitan Police Authority). In other sessions there are dozens of voices worth hearing; Carole Duggan, Kevin Blowe, Marcia Rigg, Ewa Jasiewicz, Owen Jones and many more. Tickets are only £5 (£3 unwaged, £10 'solidarity price')
Some of the women survivors of long-term relationships with undercover police are back in court next week. Although very similar things happened to them all over a long period of time - hence suing the bosses for the strategy of psychological and sexual abuse, rather than the individual officers - only incidents that occurred after the Human Rights Act have a human rights claim in UK courts. So this case just involves three women who had long term relationships with Mark Kennedy.
The rest of the claimants do have the same human rights regarding privacy and freedom from degrading and inhumane treatment, but would need to have the money to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Remember that next time you hear Tory clamour - now a manifesto pledge for 2015 - to repeal the Human Rights Act. It wouldn't be withdrawing human rights, just ensuring that they're only enforcable for the rich. (Although as of last month they are talking about withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights entirely.)
When the Human Rights Act was introduced, the government spotted that state espionage will often breach human rights, and relevant cases under the Act might involve very sensitive, even life threatening information. To deal with this, they set up Investigatory Powers Tribunals. These are bullshit Stalinist secret courts that the claimant is not allowed into. The state presents its evidence, the claimants don't see what the state has said to see if its true (or see what is true but ahs been omitted). The claimants are not there to cross-examine anyone. The judge then makes up their mind and says who has won, without giving any reasons for their decision. There is no right of appeal.
In cases of genuine secrecy with lives on the line you can imagine how such measure might appear necessary. But in the case of environmental activists it's nonsense. More, the case of Mark Kennedy, who hired Max Clifford to repeatedly sell his stories to the Daily Mail, could scarcely be less secret. Yet in January a judge decided that the womens' human rights claim should go to a Bullshit Stalinist Tribunal.
It is not about the interests of national security. It is plainly an obstacle being used by the guilty to avoid accountability. Yet again we see state powers enacting a double injustice - committing a gross offence against citizens, then when it is caught it tries every trick available to deny them justice.
Next week the Court of Appeal will hear the appeal against the decision to go to the Bullshit Stalinist Tribunal. It is the last chance to ensure press and public scrutiny of Mark Kennedy’s
police commanders over Human Rights Act abuses.
The support group for some of the women, Police Spies Out Of Lives, has called for a picket on the opening day:
- Royal Courts of Justice, The Strand, London, WC2 (Holborn or Temple tube)
- Tuesday 15 October, 9am-10am
There is more info and explanation about the hearing in their press release.
The 'Where We Stand' statement by the eight women in the Police Spies Out of Lives case is an absolute must-read.
The group finally set up social media this week, so you can keep up to date with the cases by following them on Twitter @out_of_lives or liking them on Facebook at facebook.com/policespiesoutoflives.
I've been following the undercover policing scandal closely since it began and, as longer term readers may suspect, I've got a personal interest in it. I was close to Mark Kennedy for many years in his Mark Stone guise, and I was one of the people who did the investigation that unmasked him.
I've not gone into it much before in public. That has, in part, been to do with the integrity of the writing; I want the commentary to stand on its own merits, to be based on facts and reasoning that anyone could arrive at, rather than based on any emotional drive or undisclosed information. But it's also partly it's personal; having had your life and the lives of those around you so horrendously intruded upon, there was a powerful initial need not to exacerbate that feeling. Additionally, I didn't want to look like a self-publicist or do anything to overshadow the court cases being brought by women who'd had long term relationships with these officers.
As time's gone on the personal shock has waned but the scale of what we know has grown. Everything we know about Kennedy is still true, yet his actions have become just a tiny part of the
greatest scandal in British policing history. It's a story of huge
abuse of power and resources, dozens of psychologically and sexually
abused women, abandoned children, rigged court cases and the probability of hundreds, even thousands of wrongful
convictions.
There is a growing band of us who suffered this stuff who are co-ordinating and agitiating for justice. Jason Kirkpatrick is an anti-capitalist activist based in Berlin. He was also friends with Kennedy for years. Since discovering who his friend really was he's been travelling around with a camera, tallking to other targeted activists, academics and politicians, trying to find the truth and get some answers.
He's coming to the UK next week for 'sneak preview' screenings of his forthcoming film, Spied Upon, and I'm speaking with him. He'll be showing about 40 minutes of the material he's got so far, talking about the film and having a discussion with the audience after.
This isn't a mainsteam media endeavour. It's an activist filmmaker, portraying the activist perspective. This also means it's got no funding, so if you'd like to see the film finished and have a few quid, he's just launched a crowdfunding appeal.
Wednesday 9 October, 7.15-9pm Vibe Bar, 91 Brick Lane, London, E1 6QL
£3-8 (sliding scale) at the door. No one turned away for lack of funds.
London Facebook event
Friday 11 October, 7.15-9pm Broadway Cinema Studio, 14-18 Broad St., Nottingham, NG1 3AL £3-6 (sliding scale) at the Studio door, no presale tickets
NOTE: This is a “Private” event, and thus not under Broadway Cinema listings Nottingham Facebook event
Just to point out that I've got a Twitter account, @MerrickBadger.
It has notifications on the increasingly rare occasions when I publish a blog post, plus some personal life idle thoughts, and mostly (so far) it's been political stuff on current events.
There's a wee grey button in the sidebar if you want to follow me.
Analogy of the week has to go to Gary Younge in his piece about immigration and job losses.
Because two things are correlated does not mean one causes the other. Shark attacks and ice-cream sales both rise in the summer. They're linked by the season. But that doesn't mean ice-cream attracts sharks or people react to fear about shark attacks by eating more ice-cream.
This image outstrips another analogy that I found in the new issue of The Land. It's an obscure yet vital magazine. Produced by The Land Is Ours crew, it always gets into the fundamental cogs and gears of land ownership and use. Intelligent, thoughtful and informative, every issue has a number of things that make you want to read them out loud to people. I lifted their article Can Britain Feed Itself? for U-Know.
In the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Blahblahblah, I pointed out that the Chinese and Indian use of measuring 'carbon intensity' rather than carbon emissions was a way of wriggling out of reducing emissions. The current issue of The Land has chewed the pencil and crunched the numbers. Check out these graphs.
Elsewhere there's a discussion about the climate impact of methane. It's a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but it breaks down quicker. The convention is to measure a gas' potency over 100 years. At that level, methane is about 25 times stronger than CO2 [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Chap 2, table 2.14]. Some people are arguing that we should pick a shorter term (over 20 years, it's 72 times stronger), as cuts in methane mean greater cuts in the immediate greenhouse effect.
Anyway, the silver medal analogy of the week comes in a piece about this. The Land's Simon Fairlie argues that the longer-term impact of CO2 is what actually makes it more important than methane, not less. He quotes a piece by Geoff Russell:
a tonne of methane contributes 100 times more warming during the first five years of its lifetime as a tonne of CO2, yet under current Kyoto rules, its comparative potency is set at 21. This is because the relative impacts of ALL greenhouse gases are averaged over the same period 100 years, regardless of their atmospheric lifetimes.
This is like applying a blow torch to your leg for 10 seconds but calculating its average temperature as just 48 degrees because that’s what it is when averaged over 20 minutes, with 20 minutes being used because that happens to be some agreed international standard when measuring heat sources applied to legs. The implication being, of course, that a blow torch for 10 seconds and a 48 degree hot water bottle for 20 minutes have the same effect.
Fairlie then runs with it.
The analogy is potentially illuminating, but it is misleading because the methane blowtorches and the CO2 hot water bottles aren't being applied to anything as sensitive as a leg, but are heating up the atmosphere, as in a room.
Also, it is incomplete because there isn't just one blowtorch and one hot water bottle, there are hundreds of them being brought into the room continuously. Although the blowtorches are individually intensely hot, they go out within a matter of seconds, whereas the hot water bottles keep piling up until their collective heat far outstrips that of the relatively few blowtorches that remain ignited at any one time.
At the point where the heat becomes unbearable, the obvious first course is to reduce the flow of blowtorches into the room. That will be the quickest way of reducing the temperature back to the level it was just before it became unbearable. Reducing the flow of hot water bottles will have comparatively little immediate effect.
But removing the blowtorches won't prevent the hot water bottles continuing to pile up until the heat becomes unbearable again; that will eventually happen even if the flow of blowtorches is completely stopped, and when it does happen it will be much harder to lower the temperature again.
In fact, the shorter lifetime of methane also speaks in its defence. In order to maintain the blowtorch heat, the blowtorches have to come into the room thick and fast. In other words, in order to maintain a given level of methane in the atmosphere we have to keep pumping out regularly otherwise the number of parts per million will fall away rapidly...
On the other hand, if humans stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the burden of CO2 emitted in the 20th century would linger on for several generations.
This means that if the world decided to stabilise greenhouse gases at their current level, we would only need to reduce global methane output by 6.1 percent, but CO2 emissions by anything from 50 to 85 percent.
Any 'targeting' of methane to compensate for the manifest failure to reduce CO2 emissions... would be scapegoating methane to bale out CO2; or put another way, it would be extracting a subsidy from methane emitters for the benefit of fossil fuel users...
Whereas UK and US methane emissions comprise 8 and 9 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions respectively, India's methane emissions, two-thirds of which come from cows and rice, are reported to comprise 35 percent of her total. India, like most poor countries, burns far less fossil fuels per head than the USA or UK, and for many of her poor, a goat or a cow may represent almost the entirety of their greenhouse gas emissions.
Targeting methane emissions such as these to compensate for a failure to reduce CO2 emissions is another facet of the neo-colonialism that has pervaded international climate negotiations.
Dorian Cope has relaunched her On This Deity site! I say now what I said when she did the beta version:
This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. - Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut observed a truth there that all of us who write recognise.
Dorian Cope, however, is one of those people who can do it without so much of the revision and editing, she can just lay it out off the top of her head. Look what happens when she's interrupted on her way somewhere by a randomer who asks her about the MC5.
Dorian is the wife of the indefatigable Julian Cope. As he releases an album more than once a year and has written a swathe of effervescent groundbreaking scholarly books on history and music, it must take a mighty intellect and a bold character to keep up with him at close quarters, let alone to encourage, inspire and criticise as he creates. Dorian does all that and more, so it's long past time that she started publishing stuff herself.
Her On This Deity site marks anniversaries of events in history. And not the history of kings and presidents but the other history, the history of dissent and rebellion. It's got the classic Cope mix of vision, fresh interpretation and an understanding of music as central cultural force and key part of radical history.
Each post is an illuminating piece, but there's a powerful composite message too. As we see that these events have gone on - every day, all around the world, year in year out for centuries - so we realise that the daring, imaginative, revolutionary perspective isn't a wacky sideshow or something reserved for mighty superheroes like Mandela, but that it's something that binds us in the millions and, most importantly, is as real and possible a force for change now as any time in the past.
The internet is a loud and busy enough place as it is, even before we consider the intrusive adverts. Just like the way TV adverts are louder than the programmes, so online ads are more garish and flickery than the pages they're hosted on.
Most people claim not to notice internet ads. But then, most people claim to be immune to advertising.
There is a way to remove adverts from the sites you look at. It's very quick and foolproof. It's also free and there's no catch.
First, stop using Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. It does everything IE does that's any good and more besides, and it's opensource so isn't made by sending all your money to Bill Gates. You can download it free here.
Secondly, install the AdBlock plugin. Alice walks you through how to do it here.
You'll notice a clearer mindset when going online. But more vividly, you'll be amazed what going on other people's computers looks like; a riot of garish consumerist propaganda, especially when they're on things like Youtube and Facebook. You'll then keep asking people if they mind you installing AdBlock on their machines. And then they'll thank you for it.
I recently launched a site devoted to Tom Robinson's pioneering protest song Glad To Be Gay, which made me dig out his debut album Power In The Darkness. With its crackling anger at a chaotic society of rising industrial unrest and insecurity amidst repressive government and the far right shouting loud and clear, it's uncannily appropriate for 2010.
It seems I've timed it well for a rekindling of interest in Robinson's stuff. New Statesman recently listed the top 20 political songs and there, among Strange Fruit, This Land Is Your Land and the Internationale, is Glad To Be Gay. Next month Richard Thompson's curating a Meltdown in London, and for his Evening of Political Song he's invited Tom to play.
That guest spot at Meltdown is something of a rarity. In recent years, as his career as a broadcaster and standard bearer for new music on BBC 6Music has taken off, Robinson's touring schedule has evaporated. So it's a real treat to find out that he's performing a one-off concert at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on his 60th birthday, 1st June.
There'll be an extensive set from Tom and band taking in the full sweep of his career, with assorted guests like TV Smith. As he hurtles towards retirement age he's called the gig - what else? - Glad To Be Grey.
It's more than a pun on the signs of ageing, though. In the mid 90s he often used to say before playing Glad To Be Gay, 'in the black and white world of sexuality, I'm glad to be grey'.
Tickets are £15. You can get them online via the gig's site. If you go in person to any O2 Academy box office and pay cash, you get them without any of the ripoff booking fees.
There'll be support from several of the bands he's championed on 6Music, Chew Lips, Little Comets, Eugene McGuinness and Cosmo Jarvis. The whole shebang'll be hosted by Steve Lamacq.
There are more details to come, and they'll be put on the Glad To Be Grey site, which, even if you're not going to the gig, is worth a visit to see the video of him talking you through how to play 2-4-6-8 Motorway.
When not being a freeroving performance poet or a raging nuisance to carbon-criminals, the estimable Danny Chivers is a proper pencil-chewing carbon footprinter. He wades through impenetrably dull technical reports and unpicks their reliability so we can have an informed guess as to our carbon impact.
That is certainly essential work, but kinnell, I'm glad it's not me having to do it. But anyway, with his wealth of knowledge, he's produced a National Carbon Calculator for the Guardian's site.
Rather like the BBC's Climate Challenge game that lets you run the country while trying to have climate-responsive policies (staying in power and hitting the targets isn't at all easy), only with the workings laid bare, the calculator lets you alter national behaviour and infrastructure and see if things will work out. This lets you test ideas, whether they're your own or those advocated by others.
Danny talks about some of the trickiness in making it, and gives the breakdown of figures in full, so if you're that way inclined you can you can test the rigorousness.
The thing that becomes swiftly, screamingly obvious is that we cannot meet ever-increasing demand. We have to cut consumption.
As boosting economic growth is the top priority of the main political parties, it's not surprising that none of them manage to hit the target of a minimum 80% cut. You know, the one the government is legally bound by.
Having already got the main parties environment people to have a face to face debate, the Guardian got them to directly address the issue of carbon cuts in light of the calculator.
LibDem Simon Hughes tells us that his party want 'a 90% cut by 2050'. Yet using the calculator they only deliver 50%. He pins the difference - almost half the cuts we need to make - on burning fossil fuels with Carbon Capture and Storage technology (which doesn't exist and, the government says, might never), and then manages to do what scientists in the field can't do and pin a precise figure on carbon savings for changes in land use. Wriggle wriggle squirm squirm, look over there everyone, shiny things!
For Labour, Ed Miliband proclaims the glory of electric cars and the wonders of nuclear power, even though these don't make a massive amount of difference. As I've said before, to replace all our outgoing nukes and have a huge (read: hugely expensive) building programme that doubles our nuclear capacity would only give an 8% carbon cut by 2034. A pound spent on nuclear is a pound not spent on technology that delivers swifter, greater cuts.
But these two spinweasels are nothing compared to the Conservatives' Greg Clark, who says how important it is not to have regulation and obligation on this - or any other - issue, and how we mustn't do anything to obstruct what the profit-driven growth-maximising private sector wants to do. He then goes on about watermelons.
The simple fact - so obvious that it is a form of self-deceit to ignore it, as all the main parties do - is that we cannot have infinite economic growth from the finite resource base of a single planet. Even if carbon emissions didn't force our hand, other limits will be hit soon enough, as the looming threat of peak oil makes clear.
Sustainability is pretty much the opposite of economic growth. Certainly, for our industrial culture, it's an either/or choice. This pretence by government and media (why is economic growth always 'good news'?) that there can be some compatibility is like running toward the cliff telling ourselves that the meadow stretches on forever, but if it really is a cliff then carbon capture will grow us some wings. Time to stop running and turn the fuck around.
The thing the Carbon Calculator doesn't have is the cost of any of the actions, either financial or political. As the BBC Climate Challenge game shows, taking action that will seriously reduce emissions will be costly on both fronts.
The politicians surely know about the clash of values, and they choose power over long-term responsibility. And in a way it's understandable - getting yourself kicked out of power renders you as unable to effect change as doing nothing in the first place. However, it leaves us paddleless, and actually denying the need for proper paddles, as we accelerate up shit creek.
Rather than pretending there's nothing wrong and avoiding doing what's necessary, the task is surely to make it become politically aceptable. The only chance of really addressing climate change is to shift fundamental values so that we live within our means, that we take responsibility, that we don't externalise the cost of our luxury on to those yet to come.
That starts with wresting power from the tiny enclosed space of the ballot box, as Danny himself says.
In these days of civil partnerships, equal ages of consent and whatnot it's easy to get the impression that the struggle for gay liberation's over.
But although the cops no longer randomly raid gay pubs for 'yes I'll plead guilty to anything if it'll keep my name out of the papers' arrests, and although there is in fact a Gay Police Association who've marched at Pride in uniform since 2003, a Home Office report of 2005 says homophobia is still 'all but endemic' in the police.
As a Welsh rugby hero can come out to universal acclaim, we forget that in the 1990s a Premiership footballer, Justin Fashanu, was hounded to death.
Incidentally, there are several hundred players in the Premiership. How peculiar that none of them appear to be gay. Or perhaps not. It isn't hard to imagine the response if any did come out. Yet the successful effort to stamp out racist abuse from football crowds shows what can be done, if only we decide that racism isn't the worst oppression and other attacks on basic human rights of equality are worthy our attention.
Still, things are undoubtedly better than they were. The struggles of the 1970s and 80s are being forgotten by those who were there, and many of those too young to have seen it have never been told what it was like.
Back in the 1970s, Tom Robinson was the first gay rock star who was out and proud right from the start of his career. His second single, the bitterly ironic Glad To Be Gay, wasa top 20 hit yet its content ensured that it went largely unplayed on the radio.
We need to remember not only the different political atmosphere of the time, but the power of pop music then and the fear it could invoke. This was the country who, a few months earlier, had totally banned the Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen from the airwaves, even fiddling the official chart figures to make it appear that the song had only got to number 2 when it was outselling anything else twice over.
The Britain that Robinson wrote Glad To Be Gay in was a place where, less than ten years earlier, homosexuality didn't get today's shrugs or approval, it got you several years in jail. His focused venom on a version recorded at an Amnesty benefit in 1979 is due to the fact that, even by then, Amnesty refused to recognise the imprisonment of gay people as a human rights issue.
The song was always about the politics rather than the art, and Robinson has frequently updated the lyrics over the years as new issues come to the fore and old references become obsolete.
The impact of Aids in the 1980s forced a major rewrite. Whilst the virus decimated the gay population, the government stood with its fingers in its ears by until it hit straights. Then the backlash began. The public response was to call it 'the gay plague', with letters pages calling for tattoos on queers' foreheads, and Tory politicians suggesting gassing them as a public health measure.
Robinson's released the various versions of the song on live albums and B-sides over the years. I've just completed a website with all the versions on. The lyrics are transcribed, references explained, MP3s are available for download, and I've done a big interview with Tom about it all too.
It stands not only as a piece of under-appreciated musical history, but hopefully as an important lesson in social and political history too.
A year ago, as Israeli forces rained military death upon Gaza, we blogged, we wrote emails, some of us even took to the streets. And all of it felt futile.
Others, however, were out there. The Free Gaza boat activists had sailed laden with supplies for the besieged Gazans, and many were still there when Operation Cast Lead began.
Sharyn Lock was one of them and, as I nudged folk towards at the time, was blogging from the thick of it. Her writing was clear, intelligent, compassionate and fearless. She wrote calmly, straightforwardly and thoughtfully, yet didn't flinch from her freaked out Western reactions, nor from the duty to stay where she was most needed and report what she saw.
The subject matter was so vivid, the number of voices coming out so few, and her talent so great, that she was commissioned to make a book of her writings which has just been published as Gaza: Beneath the Bombs.
In order to assemble it into a coherent narrative she worked with Sarah Irving. Irving's not only an incisive non-mainstream journalist but is also an experienced volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement.
She first went to Palestine in March 2002 as part of a group of international citizens whose presence in Israeli-occupied territories would, they hoped, curb the excesses of the Israeli military. Soon after they arrived, the Israelis launched fierce attacks, massacring Palestinians and shooting unarmed peace demonstrators.
This being before blogging had taken off, Sarah maintained frequent email contact with the outside world. Her reports from Bethlehem - contrasting sharply with the biases of the corporate media - were startling, harrowing and compelling. So much so that I couldn't let them disappear and archived them over at U-Know.
Her writing, like Lock's, is trustworthy precisely because it doesn't have any pretence of objectivity. They lay their feelings wide open; we see any bias plainly, we see why it exists, as they refuse to shy away from emotional responses. How could anyone really be there and really be part of it but remain aloof?
If a writer on a political subject manages to preserve a detached attitude, it is nearly always because he doesn't know what he is talking about. To understand a political movement, one has to get involved in it. And as soon as one is involved in it one becomes a propagandist.
- George Orwell (New English Weekly, 22 Sept 1938)
Yet this is not blindly partisan. The book has an unswerving compassion for all the people recorded in it, Palestinian, Israeli or international. As Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine, says in the book's afterword, it manages to humanise the inhuman.
It is powerful, moving and strikingly modern writing; accessible, warm and humane. It is as much about psychology as physical fact, as much a story of resilience as brutality. Anyone wanting to understand the reality of life in Gaza should get a copy.
The authors are doing readings at bookshops and event around Britain, check here for details. You can also buy it online. If you're going to do that, go to the publisher Pluto Press and enter the code FREEGAZA or ISM GAZA during the payment process, and the relevant organisation gets a cut.
You may not know anything about the issue, but I bet you *reckon* something. So why not tell us what you reckon? Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uniformed, ad-hoc reckon.
Having open-access comments on websites is technically very democratic, except that it allows the quickiest to be heard loudest, and discourages people who don't like being insulted.
George Monbiot lamented the way this fouls discussion, saying that the Guardian environment site is especially bad. I beg to differ. On reading that I went to a random Guardian news article - it was about Michael Jackson's funeral - and found the same level of brazen ignorance and vitriolic venom there. I think perhaps we think comments are worst at the place we read them most.
But the prevalence of climate deniers at the Guardian site made me realise why, conversely, the Daily Mail site often has surprisingly good comments. People go to where they can beat their chests. It is far easier and more pleasing to talk at length about things you dislike than things you like. So, pick the newspaper or columnist most opposed to your perspective and you'll likely be welcomed into the warm bosom of sympathetic commenters there.
Nicholson Baker's fascinating article about Wikipedia talks about vandalism on the site, which is surprisingly low compared to other high-volume open-access sites. Partly it's due to the fact that lots of people are patrolling Wikipedia, but there's something else at work.
Wikipedia's a reference tool, the Guardian is a news site. If you manage to skew the first wave of comments on a news article, you've effectively neutered the ability to debate. Who goes back to a four month old news article to start a discussion? Thus, it's worth the climate deniers while setting up Google news alerts and then rushing to blather loud and long and unintelligibly when something in their sphere of interest is published.
There's no such rush to read a Wikipedia article. Your stupid comment will probably be wiped before many people have seen it, and certainly it won't stand there attracting responses and making you feel important. So, even though Wikipedia is such a popular site, the news services are the main focus for the hard of thinking.
As seekers of knowledge we have a relatively new task. Before the 20th century - arguably up until the internet age - the problem with getting good information was finding where it was. These days, it's right there in front of you, but getting it is about filtering it out from the bullshit.
So, whilst it may appear a bit of an obvious fish/barrel/firearms jamboree to have a blog devoted to stupid things said on the BBC's Have Your Say pages, there's a very profound point being made. It keeps your mind sharp, it reminds you that just because lots of people say something online doesn't mean many people actually think it at all. The blog - newly added to my sidebar - is called Speak You're Branes, named after the segment in the priceless Day Today where a member of the public gives an idiotic vox-pop.
I'm finding that blogs like Speak You're Branes, and the ones like Enemies of Reason and Five Chinese Crackers that take apart newspaper bias and made-upness, are forming a key component of my reading these days. It's almost as if I've got to get some of that attitude on as armour before wading into the news media.
Being able to discern between the various calibres of information presented is the only way we'll make sense of the world. A finely-tuned bullshit detector is the most essential tool of the 21st century.
As the Copenhagen talks to create a successor to the Kyoto Protocol loom closer, the imperative for action grows.
On the 17th and 18th October there will be a mass action to shut down a coal-fired power station in England. Which one? That's not decided. It'll be Drax or Ratcliffe and, with the kind of brazen cheek you normally only get from Class War or Plane Stupid, there's an election going on to see which one people want to hit. At a festival recently I saw a stall with voting cards and a proper ballot box.
There are very good reasons to go for Drax in Yorkshire. It's the largest source of CO2 in the UK. Most countries don't emit as much as Drax.
Ratcliffe is far filthier per unit of energy produced, though. It's owned by Eon, a global giant in carbon terms, the company pushing to build Kingsnorth, the UK's first new coal station in a generation. And frankly their bullshit about how their solar panels make them an 'integrated' power station (contributing a fraction of a millionth of their output) is the biggest load of horseshit I've ever heard and they deserve a big slap for that alone, even before anyone starts saying 'clean coal'.
Either way, whilst the small bands of people doing audacious actions are good it's about time there was a mass publicly announced one. There is no more important element in reducing carbon emissions than stopping coal. If you know that there's no way we'll stop coal by hoping for the goodwill of governments and the energy industry, then you know you've got to do something.
William Morris' 1890 novel News From Nowhere is that thing I have a deep love for - a blunt and blatant rant against a social evil given barely enough fictionalisation to make it something other than straightforward polemic.
In John Waters' Cecil B Demented he has a gang of outlaw film-makers kidnap a Hollywood star to rail against the Hollywood studio system. In Bruce Robinson's follow-up to Withnail & I, How To Get Ahead In Advertising, although the plot concerns a crisis in an advertising exec's life it's really about a broader evil, it's about consumerism.
Morris' conceit in News From Nowhere is to have a nineteenth century man awake in the post-revolutionary twenty-second century.
He doesn't pick on a social evil in the narrow context, but the whole profit-driven, acquisitional, possessive consumer culture. Written a year before Oscar Wilde's magnificent The Soul of Man Under Socialism, it seems very much a companion piece. Big dreaming, deeply compassionate, wildly revolutionary yet profoundly humane.
That it seems so pertinent now could be either depressing (five generations and much of it has gotten worse) or inspiring (a masterpiece dismissed as sentimental claptrap then but is clearly utterly fucking visionary from where we stand now).
This bit hit me right between they eyes. A twenty-second century man explains to his nineteenth century visitor what the problems were back then.
===========
"The labour-saving machines? Yes, they were made to 'save labour' (or, to speak more plainly, the lives of men) on one piece of work in order that it might be expended - I will say wasted - on another, probably useless, piece of work. Friend, all their devices for cheapening labour simply resulted in increasing the burden of labour.
"The appetite of the World-Market grew with what it fed on: the countries within the ring of 'civilisation' (that is, organised misery) were glutted with the abortions of the market, and force and fraud were used unsparingly to 'open up' countries outside that pale.
"This process of 'opening up' is a strange one to those who have read the professions of the men of that period and do not understand their practice; and perhaps shows us at its worst the great vice of the nineteenth century, the use of hypocrisy and cant to evade the responsibility of vicarious ferocity.
"When the civilised World-Market coveted a country not yet in its clutches, some transparent pretext was found - the suppression of a slavery different from and not so cruel as that of commerce; the pushing of a religion no longer believed in by its promoters; the 'rescue' of some desperado or homicidal madman whose misdeeds had got him into trouble amongst the natives of the 'barbarous' country - any stick, in short, which would beat the dog at all.
"Then some bold, unprincipled, ignorant adventurer was found (no difficult task in the days of competition), and he was bribed to 'create a market' by breaking up whatever traditional society there might be in the doomed country, and by destroying whatever leisure or pleasure he found there. He forced wares on the natives which they did not want, and took their natural products in 'exchange,' as this form of robbery was called, and thereby he 'created new wants,' to supply which (that is, to be allowed to live by their new masters) the hapless, helpless people had to sell themselves into the slavery of hopeless toil so that they might have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of 'civilisation'.
"Ah," said the old man, pointing the dealings of to the Museum, "I have read books and papers in there, telling strange stories indeed of civilisation (or organised misery) with 'non-civilisation'; from the time when the British Government deliberately sent blankets infected with small-pox as choice gifts to inconvenient tribes of Red-skins, to the time when Africa was infested by a man named Stanley, who-"
"Excuse me," said I, "but as you know, time presses; and I want to keep our question on the straightest line possible; and I want at once to ask this about these wares made for the World-Market—how about their quality; these people who were so clever about making goods, I suppose they made them well?"
"Quality!" said the old man crustily, for he was rather peevish at being cut short in his story; "how could they possibly attend to such trifles as the quality of the wares they sold? The best of them were of a lowish average, the worst were transparent make-shifts for the things asked for, which nobody would have put up with if they could have got anything else. It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use; a jest which you, as coming from another planet, may understand, but which our folk could not."
Said I: "What! did they make nothing well?"
"Why, yes," said he, "there was one class of goods which they did make thoroughly well, and that was the class of machines which were used for making things. These were usually quite perfect pieces of workmanship, admirably adapted to the end in view. So that it may be fairly said that the great achievement of the nineteenth century was the making of machines which were wonders of invention, skill, and patience, and which were used for the production of measureless quantities of worthless make-shifts.
In truth, the owners of the machines did not consider anything which they made as wares, but simply as means for the enrichment of themselves. Of course the only admitted test of utility in wares was the finding of buyers for them - wise men or fools, as it might chance."
Last week, when it still seemed like Nick Griffin was going to go to a do at Buckingham Palace, the excellent Five Chinese Crackers posted a funny little animation of Griffin and the queen.
It finished with the words 'if you can type, you can make movies. www.xtranormal.com'.
It's a real tin-claim/actual-effect match. I haven't looked at any instructions or anything, and it's quick and easy to make these weird lego-people animations.
Whilst I'm sure it'll have great purpose in satire and whatnot, my first impulse was to make it sweary. Let's make computer voice software say the words of Ice-T's Straight Up Nigga and be responded to by a woman saying all manner of filth.
It's really easy, it's free, no catches as far as I can see. Apart from the fact that's it's probably going to be the biggest distraction time-hoover ever invented.
This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. - Kurt Vonnegut
It's a truth that all of us who write recognise.
Dorian Cope, however, is one of those people who can do it without so much of the revision and editing, she can just lay it out off the top of her head. Look what happens when she's interrupted on her way somewhere by a randomer who asks her about the MC5.
Dorian is the wife of the indefatigable Julian Cope. As he releases an album more than once a year and has written a swathe of effervescent groundbreaking scholarly books on history and music, it must take a mighty intellect and a bold character to keep up with him at close quarters, let alone to encourage, inspire and criticise as he creates. Dorian does all that and more, so it's long past time that she started publishing stuff herself.
She's now doing a blog called On This Deity, marking anniversaries of events in history. And not the history of kings and presidents but the other history, the history of dissent and rebellion. It's got the classic Cope mix of vision, fresh interpretation and an understanding of music as central cultural force and key part of radical history.
Each post is an illuminating piece, but there's a powerful composite message too. As we see that these events have gone on - every day, all around the world, year in year out for centuries - so we realise that the daring, imaginative, revolutionary perspective isn't a wacky sideshow or something reserved for mighty superheroes like Mandela, but that it's something that binds us in the millions and, most importantly, is as real and possible a force for change now as any time in the past.
One of the things that surprised people about last year's Camp for Climate Action against Kingsnorth coal power station was the inclusion of miners union president Arthur Scargill as a star speaker.
It's only surprising if you see it in terms of whether one has an affection for coal as a substance. In the broader scheme of things, it wasn't surprising at all. Not only was he there, but he was treated like the genuine folk hero that he is.
Scargill and the trade union movement come from a position that opposes the monetarist ideology, the idea that economic growth should be the prime purpose of society, that wealth and power should be concentrated into the hands of the already powerful and wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
The alternatives - the strengthening of community, social cohesion and solidarity, a localising of life - to the climate campers these are intangible aspirations for the future, whereas the mining communities know them as concrete reality.
The black and white photos of the miners' strike have become blurred into the sepia record of centuries past, muddled up somewhere in our collective memory with the Blitz and the trenches.
There is a generation that has no memory of real trade union social ideals. Just as we have a lot to learn from the Dig For Victory / Make Do And Mend generation, so we must learn from and reinvigorate the trade unions social justice and welfare vision, and nowhere was that stronger than with the miners.
But they too must learn. The future of coal must be pretty much the opposite of its past. Scargill's ideas of 100% carbon capture and making carbon-free oil from coal are impossible pipe-dreams that nobody else, including those working on the technologies, think remotely possible. (Even if it somehow were, burning the coal is only part of the problem, as massive amounts of methane are released during mining).
Just as the airline pilots should drop their lies about climate change and instead be seeking a just transition for their members to a fair society based on what we now know to be true, so the last believers that big coal can sit well with social justice must choose one or the other. To talk, to listen, and for both sides to be ready to shift their ideas is essential to building a mass movement for climate justice.
The Climate Camp has not only done the spectacular protests (and is busy lining up more), but there's now a spinoff project called the Coal Caravan.
From 24th April to 4th May, they'll be travelling from the East Midlands through Yorkshire up to the North East, holding meetings with people in areas that were mining communities, visiting Ferrybridge power station, going to open cast mines and meeting people opposing planned new ones, forging links, educating and, hopefully, heading forward together, stronger.
All are welcome to join for any or all of the Coal Caravan journey.
In writing that piece about Mark Lynas and nuclear power, there was a something he said about the Chernobyl incident that resonated with me.
Without wishing to downplay the tragedy for the victims - especially the 300,000 people who were evacuated permanently - the explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone.
If ever there was a bit to cut from an article - on grounds of flimsiness as a defence of nuclear power, or for unnecessarily feeding into the stereotype of environmentalist misanthropy - it's that one. But it dredged something up for me, I remembered a website I saw a few years ago where a Ukrainian had taken a motorbike trip through the Chernobyl dead zone.
The site is still up, considerably expanded, and it's every bit as enthralling as I remembered. I'm not plugging this as any comment on the wisdom on future nuclear power, just as a bit of mesmerising travelogue and social history.
In the last few years Elena Filatova's made numerous trips into the dead zone. There are now hundreds of photos, needing only a little captioning, yet even in that she provides a great historic and poetic insight.
Usually, when they talk about the dead zone, they talk about area that is 30 kms around reactor.
What about this towns and villages? They are 60 kms from reactor.
The Wolves Land is bigger than many think and it keeps on growing. Now days, it spread on 300 kms from South to North and on 100 kms from East on West.
There are more than 2,000 dead towns and villages within a radius of 250 kms (155 miles) around Chernobyl reactor. Each year I travel, I see more and more ruined places.
This barbed wire marks the limit of the '30km' zone, but according to the site it's over 50km from the reactor.
She visits a sizeable ghost town, Pripyat. One of the spookiest aspects is the Sovietness of it.
Not only are there relics from the Soviet Union, but the accident happened in late April. The towns were evacuated on April 27th, four days before the Mayday celebrations.
At first glance, Ghost Town seems like a normal town. There is a taxi stop, a grocery store, someone's wash hangs from the balcony and the windows are open. But then I see a slogan on a building that says - "The Party of Lenin Will Lead Us To The Triumph Of Communism"......and I realize that those windows were opened to the spring air of April of 1986.
It is safe to be in the open air in Ghost Town. It is inside the houses where the real danger lies.
Taking such a walk with no special radiation detecting device is like walking through a minefield wearing snowshoes.
People had homes, garages, cars, country houses, they had money, friends, relatives cats and dogs. People had their lives. Each in own niche. And then in a matter of hours, their entire world fell to pieces.
After a few hours trip in an army vehicle, they stood under a shower, washing away radiation. Then they stepped in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no dogs, no money, no past and with a very doubtful future.
Inside a school building there is the added eerieness of discarded toys and other childrens items
There are hundreds of little gas masks, a teachers diary and a last note saying that their walk on Saturday has been canceled due to some unforeseen contingency.
This is the highest building in town. On the day of disaster, many people gathered on this roof to see the beautiful shining cloud above the Atomic Power Plant.
She goes to the top herself and the power plant is clearly visible.
Away from the town, she passes through villages, towns and vast areas of reclaimed wilderness. The modern maps don't show the roads or deserted villages. Consequently, she doesn't know the names of many of the places she finds. Some of the larger towns have big concrete signs as you enter, but smaller places have metal signs with the placename rusted away.
Along the Ukraine/Belarus border area, the towns are not only often de-named, but you don't even know which country a town is in.
We are on the border and the sign welcomes us in all fifteen languages of former republics of Soviet Union
In one village she see a monument, a grave of the unknown soldier from the Great Patriotic War (known to us Westies as World War 2). How odd for a monument to spend its life unseen and unvenerated, stranger still that it's an unknown individual who's become part of a wider monument, an unknown town.
On previous visits she left a few logs across roads to see if anyone moved them. returning several years later they're in place, meaning nobody else has travelled the roads in the meantime.
Year after year it becomes more difficult to reach those distant towns and villages of Chernobyl; roads overgrown, trees falling and bridges collapse.
Nature is relentless at reclaiming the land. In some hundred years all signs of humanity will be gone from here. Radiation will stay long after that.
She's compiled pictures from several visitors into a book called Pluto's Realm. Proceeds go towards buying supplies for the few people who still live in abandoned villages in the dead zone.
It is really Plutonium that will reign here for thousands of years. It is extremely toxic and highly chemically reactive, half-life of Plutonium-239 is over 24,000 years. Plutonium is appropriately named after Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld.
The pictures here are a tiny fraction of what's on the site and by no means the most remarkable. You can spend hours being spooked, thinking about time, nature, industrialisation, politics, resilience and more.
Whether runaway climate change is avoided is largely down to the policy decisions taken now and in the next few years. We cannot afford to wait for miraculous technological breakthroughs but must work with what we’ve got.
The debate on climate change is surrounded by hype and vested interests. Technologies are being considered not for their effectiveness but for their profitability. Some proposed solutions would actually lead to an increase in emissions. Many would bring about great social injustice.
Beyond that, the promise of a future technofix is being used as a stalling tactic by those who want to keep on burning fossil fuels.
Technofixes are very appealing. They appeal to leaders who want huge projects to put their name to. They appeal to governments in short electoral cycles who don’t want to have to face hard choices of changing the direction of development from economic growth to social change. They appeal to corporations which expect to capture new markets with intellectual property rights and emissions trading. They appeal to advertising-led media obsessed with the next big thing, but too shallow to follow the science. They appeal to a rich-world population trained as consumers of hi-tech gadgets. They appeal to (carbon) accountants: technological emissions reductions are neatly quantifiable, if you write the sum properly.
Technofixes appeal, in short, to the powerful, because they offer an opportunity to maintain power and privilege.
The report investigates the large scale technologies that corporations and governments are putting on the table, including hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, agrofuels, electricity from nuclear, solar, water and wind, as well as a range of ideas to reflect the sun’s energy or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It finds what works, what doesn’t, the present state of these industries and where they’re heading. It explains why, even though many of the technologies do work, the corporate-capitalist model cannot deploy them effectively, and it goes in search of more realistic and socially just solutions.
It’s extensively researched, as we wanted something that was properly referenced and scientifically rigorous as well as politically focused. We were sick of seeing things that only talk about the carbon emissions and the financial cost without mentioning the social justice aspects or the problems with a wholly techno-fixated approach.
It’s big and hefty enough to be comprehensive, yet short enough that people will actually get round to reading the whole thing.
You can order a hard copy for a fiver or download it for free from Corporate Watch
As so often with early records of a band's career, the recorded stuff doesn't properly capture their live prowess. They are one of the great live bands to see, absolutely mesmerising. Sensitive yet epic, brooding, tender, mysterious, searing, captivating. Imagine if Tim Buckley was writing and playing in Placebo and you're more or less there. Now add a cello.
This new single keeps me coming back over and over, while it's on it makes the world just stop.
Gorgeous, compelling visionary stuff, it's playing live where they really take off. They're doing a one-off gig on Tuesday 14 October at the Scala in London.
Ticketless tickets are 8 quid. If you want actual paper tickets, they're a tenner each from the Scala.
