My goodness, has it been three months?!

Seems so. Well, anyway, here I am, now 39.
Woke at 6am- uggh. Pottered, slept again. Cleared off a chunk of accumulated paper on the desk, and then walked my sick bike to "Bicycle Boutique". At the cash point around the corner bumped into a Permaculture guy and had a chat about writing an Alternative Action Plan and what should go in it etc. Bought an MEN and a Financial Times, before having a veggie burger breakfast at a non-greasy spoon. Brief chat with a couple of other people (Manchester is like that) before schlepping to the Friends Meeting House. Managed to book the main hall and an additional room for Saturday 10th October- more climate change stuff- and also a room for January 20th (for a Copenhagen 'what happened' meeting). Spoke to a guy I see around more and more, who recommended I get hold of a copy of "City of revolution: Restructuring Manchester." So, detoured to Waterstone's, and they had a copy. I also ordered "Guilty and Proud of it."
Bought more ink cartridges, shoes (they look ridiculous because me feet's so big), before bussing it home, via a paneer tikka kebab and the last twenty minutes of the original Taking of Pelham 123 (saw the remake on Sunday with my best mate). Then the gym- on the stepper with the FT- one of my favourite places.
Back here, some desultory work. Read some more Tom Hayden ("Reunion"- very good stuff indeed). Watched an episode of 'Outnumbered' and then did some more work/thinking about Call to Real Action etc.
A long and not-enormously productive ay, but there you are...

Viz 185

God I love Viz. It's one of my guilty pleasures. It will ALWAYS deliver at least one - usually many more - outright belly-laugh.

This issue has Baxter Basics MP fiddling his expenses, and getting his grandmother to save his bacon.

PC Hubble and PC Bubble "they're spoiling for trouble" (I do miss PC Hopper, bent copper!)

Drunken Bakers are as Beckettian as ever.

Jack Black and the Goodwin Manor Mystery is comedy genius "It's gettign a little chilly in here isn't it? Jack, put anotehr wodge of notes on the fire, would you, there's a chap... No, not the tens, the twenties give out more warmth?"

The Modern Parents delivers the sharpest and nastiest laughs, as usual. John Fardell skewers, as usual, eco-hypocrisies.

And Roger's Profanisaurus, well, What Can You Say?

"you can only fuck with the cock you've got"- exclam. Useful get-out clause for men defending themselves against accusations of inadequacy

"jizzabyte"- A unit of computer memory equivalent to approximately 1 million million gigabytes. 1 jizzabyte is defined as the approximate amount of hard drive space occupied by the pornography downloaded by an average teenage youth in a single calendar month.

"face like a rent boy's ringpiece" descriptive of someone who looks life has given them a regular, relentless and vigorous shafting.

A conspiracy against the public

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity."--George Bernard Shaw.

Here's two quotes from slightly different places, that are worth thinking about in connection with each other and the broader goal of helping our institutions respond with the necessary speed and agility to the unfolding catastrophe of human-induced climate change...

"Increasingly, government agencies and other organizations are seeking to apply more participatory approaches to environmental decision-making as part of a wider institutional change towards more inclusive decision-maing. For example, in the UK, policy consultations now often involve stakeholder workshops, and these increasingly take place in the regions rather than just in the capital city. However, there is a danger of growing disillusionment among policy-makers and practitioners who have been involved in such processes that participatory processes are used to reinforce decisions already made, and so fail to realize many of the benefits that have been claimed for particiption. Our study illustrates that there are benefits to genuine participatory processes, and informs the development of best practices for engaging stakeholders in effectively designed participatory processes. In this light, institutionalizing participatory governance takes some power away from central decision-makers and gives it back to stakeholders. Though this may be perceived as risky, it has the potential to give rise to more effective as well as more inclusive decision-making." (1)

[Translation: "at the moment 'consultation' is a rubber-stamp exercise, where you can tick a box that says "I agree" or "I agree even more", but it doesn't have to be like that."]

And the other quote:

"In the deskilling logic, equipment design is left to the technical experts. There is little to be gained by involving technically untrained users in the design process, and such involvement risks politicizing the process. This is the more traditional approach. Salzman (1992) reviewed over 100 U.S. books on equipment design and 100 textbooks used in U.S. engineering design courses and found not one discussion of the possible advantages of user involvement in designing systems. If, however, the rationale underlying design is usability, the design process will be managed very differently."

[emphasis added] (2)

[translation: just like above; "we're the experts and you'll take what you're given."]

This is the dilemma for those who would rage intelligently and effectively against the machine: just how DO you get past the defensiveness of bureaucrats, and teach the elephant to tap-dance?

See also
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant T. Hammond

Footnotes
(1) Foxon, Reed and Singer "Governing Long-Term Social-Ecological Change: What Can the Adaptive Management and Transition Management Approaches Learn from Each Other?"
Environmental Policy and Governance 19 3-20

(2)Adler, Paul "Two types of bureaucracy: enabling and coercive"Administrative Science Quarterly March 1996

You've been framed

You saw it in the later part of last week - the Met getting its ideological retaliation in first, trying to shape the 'information battlespace' by worrying publicly about violence at the Put People First March. (And here's the other Met worrying about climate change).

And then there was the ritualistic distancing by various trades unions types. The fringe benefit for our apolitical friends in blue is that time spent proclaiming your innocence is time you can't spend getting the (metaphorical) boot stuck into the Enemy (blue-eyed bankers, finance capital, the System, greed, Capitalism - choose your abstraction).

That's what they teach you on the first day of Perception Management 101, I assume.

But anyway, two other examples of 'framing' recently - an "obvious" one from the front page of the Financial Times for March 10, about Youtube pulling official music videos from its site:

“I don’t think anyone is going to be happy about this, but there’s general understanding that we all need to work under terms that are reasonable for our businesses and we’re hoping we’ll come to a quick resolution,” Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships in Europe, told the Financial Times.

In a blog note, Mr Walker said the costs would be prohibitive, with YouTube losing significant amounts of money on every playback under the proposed PRS terms.

He said there was also a lack of transparency – PRS was unwilling to tell YouTube what songs were included in the licence so it could identify works on the service.

PRS for Music is a collecting agency that issues “mechanical” and performing licences for music to be used online, or performed or broadcast.

Steve Porter, chief executive of PRS for Music, said the organisation was “shocked and disappointed” at the last-minute notice of YouTube’s “drastic action”. “We believe [this] only punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent.”

Both sides trying to make the other guy the bad guy, obviously enough.

But then, if you really want a master-class in this stuff, get your eyes around this from the latest Private Eye. If it stands up (and Private Eye stories often do), it's delicious...

Wanton Destruction

Take the unhappy heroin addict: he gives himself an injection because he desires the drug, but he also has a desire to be rid of this desire. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt has given such "second-order" desires a central role in his analysis of free will: we act freely, he submits, when we act on a desire that we actually desire to have, one that we endorse as our own. Beings that do not reflect on the desirability of their desires- like animals and, perhaps, our short-run selves - are what Frankfurt calls "wantons."

Holt, Jim (2007) The nannyish state, Prospect March 07

Who will teach me what I must shun? Or must I go where the impulse drives? —Goethe

I can resist anything, but temptation - Lady Windermere's Fan Oscar Wilde.

A crazier notion than that we are more than the sum of our spasms is not allowed much airplay, unless cloaked in some variety of theistic mumbo-jumbo.

See also:
False Consciousness
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (no, not read it yet)

Local government, newspapers and all that

I haven't bought (or read) a Saturday Grauniad for a very long time.

Did so today out of curiosity over its G20 coverage.

I won't buy (or read) a Saturday Grauniad for a very long time. Or a weak day one, either.

But the interview with David "The Wire" Simon is worth a look-see.

Arrogant? Moi?

The collapse of the US newspaper industry has left politicians free to pursue their unethical schemes unscrutinised. "The internet does froth and commentary very well, but you don't meet many internet reporters down at the courthouse," he says. "Oh to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model. To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."

Reading on the Stepper- 26th March

You can plough through a lot in 97 minutes!

Great piece by Diane L. Coutu in the Harvard Business Review entitled "How Resilience Works."
Makes me want to go and read Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" right now.

And this is good- a quote from Karl E. Weick, a prof of organisational behaviour at the University of Michigan Business School. in Ann Arbor "There is good evidence that when people are put under pressure, they regress to their most habituated ways of responding.... What we do not expect under life-threatening pressure is creativity."

Excellent piece by Eli Kintishc of Science Magazine
"Projections of Climate Change Go from Bad to Worse, Scientists Report"
Yup, we're toast.

Heartening, if you want to delude yourself, is
"Vision 2050: A Sustainable future for Cheshire West and Chester"

Personally, when I imagine the future of mankind (sic) I imagine a carbon footprint, stamping on a human face, forever...

I also read Crain's Manchester Business.
All good stuff, with an especially amusing piece on the massive impending bunfith between Peel and Manchester city Council "Saviour's Gateway or Trojan horse?"

And Monday's FT, of which the stand-out piece, amid stiff competition, is "MBA arrogance and the myth of leadership" by Philip Delves Broughton.

And I even worked up a proper sweat for a change....