Firstly, Jim Bliss has an excellent piece on the absolute culpability of the media in how the relatively minor violent aspects of protests derail the event and its impact in popular consciousness.

Secondly, it seems that the police have succeeded in taking down a site that offered advice to the many who were arrested during that demo. Merrick has explained the situation on his blog, and has joined a number of people reprinting the advice, both to keep it available on the web, and to show solidarity with the protestors. Personally, without the people willing to take to the streets, the near future looks much glummer than it need be. Here is Merrick’s explanation and the original advice:

The trashing of Conservative Party HQ during a student demo last week took a lot of people by surprise, not just the police and public but many of the participants.

Many of them had never done anything like it before. As such, they are largely identifable on the footage, and police have been arresting many.

FITwatch—a site that campaigns about police repression of protest, especially throught the use of Forward Intelligence Teams who film and photograph everything—published some advice to protesters.

The police responded by making the webhost take the FITwatch site down for a year. FITwatch nonetheless remain committed to their work.

In defiance of this censorship, and also to assist with the prevention of people who’d only trashed property from getting arrested, the offending post has been republished all over the internet. The more places do it, the more likeoly it is that the Met will give up and leave it be.

So here it is. If you think it should be in the public domain, please republish it on blogs and message boards.

The remarkable and brilliant student action at [Conservative Party headquarters] Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on ‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.

There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .

This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DONT panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

DONT hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DONT assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal.

Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

This piece by Josh Schrei over at the Huffington Post is one of the best takes on Avatar I’ve read. The basic premise is that the criticisms of the cheesy lines given to the one-dimensional “baddies” altogether miss the reality that their real-life counterparts actually do utter such unthinkable crap, as they destroy indigenous ecologies. It’s a very fair point, quite revealing of how we fail to take on board some of the stark realities that we’re insulated from, but which destroy lives in remote parts of the world. Well worth a read.

Having got past the initial juvenile—and cripplingly funny—bout of gangsta-rap parody, Merricks still fears he “may never blog in another format ever again”. But with gems like the one I’ve embedded below, mercilessly nailing the woeful orgy of confused stupidity that was the European elections—is this such a bad thing?

Top of my current list of things that warrant me doing a Moses on the Red Sea of busyness bearing down on me, to bring my dear readers’ attention to it, is Dorian Cope’s new blog, On This Deity: Commemorating Culture Heroes & Excavating World Events.

Billing it as “an alternative ‘On This Day’”, for a good few weeks now Dorian’s been posting every few days on some birth, death, or other significant event that took place on that date. The focus is on visionaries and radicals from everywhere on that riotous spectrum: from the death of Maud Gonne (muse to W.B. Yeats and bold revolutionary in her own right) to the release of ‘God Save The Queen’; from Oscar Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol to the straw that broke the back of the camel in the way of me writing this, a remembrance of Helen Keller’s death, and a reminder of her radical political views.

Dorian and her indefatigable husband Julian have been staunch and forthright supporters of my writing and publishing since we met in 1996. What makes this much more than an obligatory reciprocation is the pleasure of seeing Dorian’s razor-sharp perceptions and infectious energy, which have inspired me endlessly in conversations over the years, transfer so well to writing. Her posts popping up several times a week in my feed aggregator have the habit of quickly creating a bubble of attentiveness, within which she paints a vivid picture of a moment in radical history. It’s a steady stream of historical nourishment—feast away!

While you’re at it, do read his take on the MP expenses row. Has there been a more just and rational solution to the second home issue than making MPs eligible for Housing Benefit? I think not.

As decades rather than years began to roll by, I sometimes thought that my lack of real comprehension of our financial systems—mortgages, inflation, interest and other such oddities—might be amiss. Surely I should have a good grasp of the basics of the society I lived in? Of course the basic mechanisms seemed clear enough when spelled out. But the “a-ha!” part of me just never got it. I could see how they worked, in a flat, literal sense; but some essential part of my understanding just glazed over and reached for a nice cosy book on occult philosophy.

When I read a quote by someone (Hazel Henderson, it turns out) saying, “Economics is a form of brain damage,” I realized I wasn’t just being intellectually lazy. (Physical laziness is much more my cup of tea.) I had always felt that to bring myself to truly grok our financial system, I would have to lead my neurons down pathways that would be inimical to their health. Naturally I knew that many fine minds had comprehended it all enough to critique it, and survived without descending into dribbling and hallucinating odd smells. But I realized more and more that I didn’t feel the risk was for me.

This morning, drifting in and out of sleep, I was fixated on the idea that the insanity of economics was being demonstrated with greater clarity than ever before by Gordon Brown. Forget the fact that Brown’s financial “steady hand” is a mere artifact of his dour appearance and recent economic events beyond his control (in 2004 he said: “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”). Ignore the bland salad of jargon that’s used to make it sound like he knows what he’s doing. He’s clearly one of the more retarded specimens. A global crisis caused by excessive borrowing and irresponsible financial institutions? No problem. Let’s borrow even more, and give this money to the institutions!

I know, a Nobel Prize winner weighed in and said that Brown had “defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.” From where I’m sat, it looks like everyone suddenly got freaked by an apparent confirmation of that sneaking suspicion that our entire system isn’t built to last. And their denial was mightily relieved to see someone else—Brown, whose battle with denial was lost long ago—lead the way out of the unappealing corner we’ve painted ourselves into. Not as many people as you’d hope have seen that Brown’s solution is to just slap paint on our eyes.

Well, doing a quick web search for “economics brain damage” to track my favourite quote down, it was a sobering surprise to find a recent item on a “neuroeconomics” study in the Wall Street Journal titled ‘Lessons From The Brain-Damaged Investor’:

The 15 brain-damaged participants that were the focus of the study had normal IQs, and the areas of their brains responsible for logic and cognitive reasoning were intact. But they had lesions in the region of the brain that controls emotions, which inhibited their ability to experience basic feelings such as fear or anxiety. The lesions were due to a range of causes, including stroke and disease, but they impaired the participants’ emotional functioning in a similar manner.

The study suggests the participants’ lack of emotional responsiveness actually gave them an advantage when they played a simple investment game. The emotionally impaired players were more willing to take gambles that had high payoffs because they lacked fear. Players with undamaged brain wiring, however, were more cautious and reactive during the game, and wound up with less money at the end.

Some neuroscientists believe good investors may be exceptionally skilled at suppressing emotional reactions. “It’s possible that people who are high-risk takers or good investors may have what you call a functional psychopathy,” says Antoine Bechara, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, and a co-author of the study. “They don’t react emotionally to things. Good investors can learn to control their emotions in certain ways to become like those people.”

Now, as an avid J.G. Ballard fan, I’m not instantly repelled by the idea of “creative pathology”. And the article balances out in the end with a note that the brain-damaged participants in the study often performed less well in the real world (highlighting the “pathology” inherent in the blinkered nature of many controlled scientific experiments). The authors also remark on the fact that our evolved emotional reactions, especially regarding fear, may be maladapted to the modern world, which has arisen much faster than biology can remould itself.

Still, anyone who doesn’t accept the modern world without question can’t help but wonder whether neuroeconomics may end up undermining the worldview it’s designed to serve. To what extent does the potential “advantage” of brain damage in economic activity point to the inadequacy of our neuropsychology? To what extent does it highlight the inhumanity of economics?

One needn’t be fixated on a static idea of humanity to object to economics; to what extent does economics block us from healthier, more desirable ways of being in the world that have yet to be realized?

In any case, we need more than lip service to the fact that crisis is opportunity—not just a dire situation in need of patching up.

Further reading

• ‘Money and the Crisis of Civilization’ by Charles Eisenstein
• ‘No Money Down’ by Douglas Rushkoff
• ‘Bring on the Recession’ by George Monbiot
• Hormones ‘may fuel market crises’ (BBC News)

Still, this is just the beginning. As George Monbiot highlights, the economic crash is merely a prelude to the coming ecological crash. Our relief at apparently heading back for business-almost-as-usual may last long enough for us to deny the onset of that, too:

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. [...] The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.

And glancing through the rest of the article, I fear the government’s tough policy on cannabis may be failing miserably. Surely only habitual skunk use on a previously unimagined scale could account for such sort-term memory loss? I guess they’re quietly turning a blind eye. After all, how else could we champion Gordon Brown as a stolid, reliable saviour?

I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London.

And I believe the lesson we learn from the success of the City has ramifications far beyond the City itself—that we are leading because we are first in putting to work exactly that set of qualities that is needed for global success:

• openness to the world and global reach,
• pioneers of free trade and its leading defenders,
• with a deep and abiding belief in open markets,
• [...]

And I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created.

[...]

So let me say as I begin my new job, I want to continue to work with you in helping you do yours, listening to what you say, always recognising your international success is critical to that of Britain’s overall and considering together the things that we must do—and, just as important, things we should not do—to maintain our competitiveness:

• enhancing a risk based regulatory approach, as we did in resisting pressure for a British Sarbannes-Oxley after Enron and Worldcom,

Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, to Mansion House, 20/6/07

[...] in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers, those with ambition, to turn their ideas into reality and make the most of their talents.

Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, to Mansion House, 16/6/04

Of course, no surprises. He was doing what seemed politically expedient. Just as he—and every other politician—is doing now. Throwing money at a creaking system to prop it up, hoping desperately the lynch mob won’t be able to track them down when it crashes even harder.

After Adam Curtis’ flawed but essential BBC 4 documentary on the neo-cons and Islamic fundamentalists, The Power of Nightmares, I was excited to learn he’d taken a similar approach to tackle the relationships between psychoanalysis, advertising and politics in The Century of the Self. I missed it on TV, but just got round to it on Google Video. I heartily recommend it to everyone:

• The Century of the Self – Part 1: Happiness Machines
• The Century of the Self – Part 2: The Engineering of Consent
• The Century of the Self – Part 3: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Head: He Must Be Destroyed
• The Century of the Self – Part 4: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

The final part didn’t send me reeling like the other three, but that’s like talking about a lesser Prince album from the eighties; it’s all fascinating stuff. The basic thread tracks the influence of psychoanalysis (Freudianism and, later, its rebellious spin-offs) on public relations, advertising, consumerism and, inevitably, politics. I knew many of the strands involved, but have never seen them woven together so succinctly.

Especially jaw-dropping for me: learning that Edward Bernays returned from propaganda work in World War I and, thinking that there could be peace propaganda as well as war propaganda, but that the word “propaganda” had too many negative connotations, coined… “Public Relations”; seeing how women were coaxed, first into smoking, then into using instant cake mixes, via the conscious application of psychosexual insights; and realizing for the umpteenth time that we’re being fucked every day of our lives…

The reliably astute George Monbiot stepped up recently to clearly document the argument that Israel’s attack was far from being the expedient defensive reflex we’ve been told it was by “the news”. But his subsequent account of the motives behind it—highlighting neo-conservative American strategies for the Middle East and the domination of Israeli politics by military figures—may be just part of the story.

Via Peak Energy, I came across an excellent post from The Anthropik Network that makes a clear case for these premeditated attacks being strongly motivated by Israel’s ongoing need for clean water sources. Specifically, the motive seems to be to gain access to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, which flows south through Lebanon parallel to the Syrian border, and makes a near-right-angle westward bend about 4 km from the Israeli border. Anthropik contributor Jason Godesky outlines the long history of interest in capturing this valuable ecological resource that Israel has had, together with the ongoing water supply problems Israel has had that make another Litani push very likely.

Perhaps the most revealing fact he quotes regards the vastly disproportionate distribution of water in the region:

At present, Israelis receive five times as much water per person as Palestinians. In Gaza, the disparity is even more striking, with settlers getting seven times as much water as their Palestinian neighbors. Stated differently, on average, Israelis get 92.5 gallons per person per day, while Palestinians in the West Bank get 18.5 gallons per person per day. The minimum quantity of water recommended by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization for household and urban use alone is 26.4 gallons per person per day.

Godesky seems to take a “cultural materialist” view on matters, noting that while religion is frequently cited as the source of conflict, more often it is just an excuse used to take action necessitated by more worldly concerns: usually, land and resources. I tend more towards a kind of “chicken-and-egg” approach, and find such reductionism useful to a point, but only to a point. Any reduction begs a question, and while worldly action demands that we stop asking questions, pick a side, and do something, writing is a space where we can keep asking questions. Like, why the gross disparity in allocation of water? Sure, plain old greed and perceived superior worthiness weigh in heavily. Though I do wonder about more emotional and spiritual motives, such as those embedded in the Lord’s images in the Torah:

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey…

Exodus 3:8

It’s too painful now, I suppose, to hear the Lord saying, “Sorry, maybe I forgot to mention the fact that there’s bugger all water.” Israel’s done wonderful things with the little water there is, but at the expense of its neighbours, and probably for the most part thanks to the economic subsidies it receives from the USA, and the precarious energetic subsidies it (and the rest of us) receives from fossil fuels.

In any case, it’s clear that Israel is correct in saying that it’s fighting for its existence; it’s just severely misguided, in the public arena at least, about the threat it faces.

Without the Litani, Israel’s water crisis will deepen; the very survival of Israel is at stake. Either Israel will seize the Litani, or it will perish. Historically, Hizb’allah has been primarily a nuisance to Israel, but never a genuine threat to its survival, unlike Israel’s lack of access to the Litani.

Jason Godesky

This adherence to an image from the Torah, to the concretized vision of a Promised Land abundant in actual resources, surely gives pause to anyone serious about Judaism’s injunctions against idolatry. By “serious about”, I mean serious enough to not take the injunctions wholly literally, at face value (an act of idolatry in itself, I suppose). Douglas Rushkoff is deeply serious in this sense, and critiques the literalism of Zionism in his excellent book Nothing Sacred:

Biblical warnings against the false gods of state abound. The first thing God says to Abraham in Genesis (12:1) is, “Get thee out of thy country.” The sad irony underlying the current Jewish obsession with territory is that the religion itself was founded on the disengagement from the land. As twentieth-century reformer and social activist Rabbi Abraham Heschel explains in his many books on the subject, “Judaism must be a religion which sanctifies time more than space.” For example, after escaping Egypt, the Torah’s Israelites spend forty years in the desert. They are not wandering aimlessly, but following a cloud of smoke as it moves back and forth across the flat earth. Wherever the cloud stops, the Israelites place their holy ark. This becomes the new Holy Land for a moment; then the cloud moves on. The Israelites must endure this process for four decades. Why? To learn, before they get to Canaan, that the Promised Land has nothing to do with a specific place. In stark contrast with the pagan, land-based religions from which Judaism was created to distinguish itself, for the Israelites sanctity is in the moment. (p. 166)

In a world where millennia of monotheism have severed us psychologically from natural matrix that sustains us, leaving us belatedly flailing in the ecological corner we’ve painted ourselves into, we have much to recover in re-absorbing the pagan impulse to divine deeper relationships to the biosphere. But in a world also facing severe instability, with populations shifting rapidly even before we face the surely huge upheavals implicit in climate change, we may have a lot to learn from Judaism’s rootless roots. Perhaps we can find primal common ground between pagan rootedness and the flexibility of Jewish “disengagement from the land” in the roving animism of hunter-gatherer societies. Not, of course, as another idealized model or goal; but as a source of inspiration among the many ways we have adapted, as we face the future’s essentially opaque and ever-shifting demands.