Mystery Of The Missing Clocks

From a thought-provoking blog on Truth by David Edwards of Media Lens:

"The truth peeks out at us from the most unexpected places. It can be seen, for example, in the empty spaces where one might otherwise hope to find a clock in shops. The average retailer doesn’t approve of customers clock-watching - they might realise they have something more important to do and cut short their shopping trips."

Edwards goes on to explore the importance of self-awareness and meditation later in the Cogitation, a refreshingly spiritual tack in what is normally an entirely political blog.  Or maybe it's just an example of how the personal is political.

Elsewhere Edwards refers to Chomsky's point that Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 would not have become literary classics if they'd criticised our society, rather than that 'reviled enemy', the Soviet Union. On the subject of literary classics, I'm just re-reading Jack London's White Fang and The Call Of The Wild in a Penguin Popular Classics edition which features a two-page bio of the author that makes no mention of his revolutionary socialist politics nor his third most important novel, The Iron Heel. That is the kind of airbrushing out of history that Chomsky and Edwards are talking about.

FoE UK abandoning opposition to nuclear power?

Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, has published a revelation that Friends of the Earth is seriously considering abandoning its decades-long opposition to nuclear power, according to FoE’s head of policy, science and research Mike Childs. Now that George Monbiot and James Lovelock have gone pro-nuclear, I was worried that this was another anti-nuclear stalwart doing an about-face. On closer reading, however, the interview does not reveal anything like what Lynas claims. Moreover, on the same day, FoE announced that Britain’s energy future lies in renewables and energy saving, not nuclear power.

Lynas was high in my estimation, as I'd just read Six Degrees, and found it readable and well-argued, well-informed but not too technical. Not any more.

Still, technical confusion abounds: comments on Lynas' blog and elsewhere refer to Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) technology and how it may provide a solution to the problem of existing nuclear waste.

Cultural and atmospheric pressure

Culture is a collective force that presses down on the individual from all sides. In that way it is like atmospheric pressure. The key features of atmospheric pressure that I want to compare with cultural pressure are that it is very heavy but you don’t notice it and that it is crucial to life. The key contrast is that cultural pressure is entirely man-made and can therefore be changed.

1. Atmospheric pressure is 15 pounds per square inch at sea level but as it’s just normal you don’t notice it. But you’d soon notice if you had to carry a few extra 15lb weights on your back.
2. Atmospheric pressure is crucial to life because without it the air is too thin to breathe.  On Mount Everest, for example, which is some 8,000 metres above sea level, mountaineers need bottled oxygen or they would asphyxiate.
3. Human culture goes back thousands or maybe millions of years to the dawn of human evolution, some one million to five million years ago. It weighs a ton, but as it is as normal as the air your breathe, you hardly notice it.
4. Like atmospheric pressure, human culture is crucial. Without the accumulated knowledge and culture of our billions of ancestors we couldn’t farm, cook or even speak. We’d barely know what to eat as our instincts are almost defunct.

But here’s the rub. Although necessary our culture is oppressive.  It embodies features like sexism, racism and militarism, which contribute to human suffering. It is only when you start thinking critically about it that you notice how hard it bears down and how hard it is to shift it. In free-thinking Western societies it appears to have no resistance – like air at sea-level – yet it bears down relentlessly. It is man-made so it can be changed. The first step is to acknowledge it is there, rather than ignore it, as we tend to do with atmospheric pressure.

Failed UN response in Syria

Johan Galtung, interviewed on DemocracyNow! 17 April 2012, suggests the way to peace in Syria is to establish a federation government, with peacekeeping forces from Islamic countries. This is one of the most helpful commentaries on Syria that I've heard. (I'm swayed by Johan Galtung's reputation as a principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies.) What Johan Galtung is saying here is that if the UN removes Assad and has nothing to offer instead but the probable dictatorship of the Sunni majority, the UN won’t get a ceasefire. 

JOHAN GALTUNG: With due respect for Kofi Annan, I think the [U.N. Security Council is] putting the cart before the horse. … [Syria] is run by an Alawite Shia dictatorship, headed by Assad, father and son. It’s a dictatorship. Introduce democracy in that one and let a Sunni majority have the power, it will be a majority dictatorship. The Shias are afraid of it. The Jews are afraid of it. The Christians in Syria are afraid of it. The Kurds are afraid of it. They are scared to death by the prospect of democracy in the sense of the dictatorship of majority. Now, you may try and use a ceasefire, but a ceasefire without any type of solution. And the solution, in my view, would be a federation, a federated Syria. You see, if you have democracy, in the sense of majority rule, in a country with so deep contradictions, with the fault lines so absolutely almost unbridgeable, then the majority rule will be majority dictatorship. And they’re heading in the same direction in Iraq, but there the Shias are in the majority, 61 percent. So then you have two countries—one Sunni, one Shia—neighboring countries. It couldn’t be worse. And this is the outcome of U.S. foreign policy.  ...

The way to peace is a federation, linkage with neighboring countries, peacekeeping forces—not by NATO, anything like that, but again, by Islamic countries in cooperation with UNSC. But first have a solution before you talk too much about ceasefire. People are not giving up their arms if they don’t see a solution. Why should they? They are fighting for their lives, and they are scared to death by what might happen. So you have to be closer to a solution. Put the horse before the cart.

(My edit of the DN! transcript) 

Green Drinks visit the Apricot Centre

15queenstreet has published my blog post on behalf of Green Drinks, a group of green-minded people in Colchester, about our tour of the Apricot Centre organic market garden on Saturday 21 April. It is at: www.15queenstreet.org/post/23483386691

Paul Krugman on Austerity

There is a comparison that politicians continually make, which is that at home we have to balance our books: what is wrong with that analogy?
PAUL KRUGMAN: What’s wrong is that we are an economy, not a family, … your spending is my income, and my spending is your income. And if we all try to slash spending at the same time, the result is that all of our income falls. The result is that we go into a depression, and we end up worse off.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist. Professor of economics at Princeton University and centenary professor at the London School of Economics. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/17/paul_krugman_debt_commission_chair_alan

Watergate and Cointelpro

The Watergate scandal of 1972 is generally assumed to be the classic example of a vigorous and feisty free press defending the constitution and bringing down a corrupt regime. What is still virtually unknown is that another huge campaign of political subversion came to light at the same time. This was the FBI Cointelpro program of bugging, theft, sabotage and political assassination under four presidents.

The reason Watergate was headline news was that one half of US political power, the Republicans, took on the other half, the Democrats. The scandal demonstrates that powerful interests in the US are capable of defending themselves against attack. By contrast, the targets of the FBI Cointelpro (Counterintelligence Program) were leftists, feminists, Communists, the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panther Party. When minority movements without power are attacked, the facts go unreported.

Notes

Watergate

The Watergate scandal began with the burglary in June 1972 of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington DC, which was followed by the Nixon administration's attempt to cover up its involvement, and ended with the resignation of President Nixon in August 1974.

Political assassination

At dawn on 4 December 1969, 21-year-old Fred Hampton, a leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was shot dead in his bed at home in Chicago by armed police.

www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-rutberg/nothing-but-a-northern-ly_b_355670.html

www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhamptonF.htm

FBI Cointelpro program

“The FBI began COINTELPRO—short for Counterintelligence Program—in 1956 to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States. In the 1960s, it was expanded to include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party.” http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

Further reading and viewing

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, concluding chapter.

Video of BBC2's The Big Idea, 14 February 1996, one of a series of thirty-minute interviews – http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4827358238697503# (Start at 16 minutes for section on Watergate and Cointelpro.) 
Where Egos Dare: Andrew Marr meets Noam Chomsky – www.medialens.org/articles/the_articles/articles_2001/de_marr_chomsky.html