I believe that climate change is happening and that humans are mainly responsible because of greenhouse gases (GHGs) we're putting into the atmosphere. But the number of people who believe this has been going down, it seems - in the US, 20% less think the planet's warming than did so two years ago. (And that's before you've asked them whether they think it's natural variation.) Concern about climate change has, unsurprisingly, been affected by the economy, as the HSBC climate confidence monitor shows. (Opens PDF.) In this survey, people in the UK are the least concerned citizens anywhere in the world; we're second only to the US in thinking there are higher priorities for public spending - odd when you consider the level of state welfare we already have compared to other countries surveyed. There may be high scientific consensus - not so in public opinion.

Three communities I've come across in the last few years have made me see language and order in a new way. Two I've read about - Peruvian potato farmers and Balinese rice-growers. The other - Mutawintji - I visited as a tourist on an Outback safari before the PhD started. I'll get all my caveats out of the way: no in-depth knowledge of any of these; it'll seem like a pretty functionalist argument; I know almost nothing about anthropology. Given that…

Last night, BBC2 aired The Price of Life, a documentary examining the NHS’s purchase of a new cancer drug. Myeloma is a cancer of the plasma cells. A US company, the Celgene Corporation, holds the patent on lenalidomide (Revlimid in the US.) People survive for an average of just over a year longer than they might have done without it.

In the programme, Adam Wishart follows a number of patients awaiting a decision from NICE, and several other players in the health market: the chair of the NICE committee making the decision, an NHS fund manager, and the head of Celgene.

We’re present at a NICE committee meeting where it’s decided the NHS can’t afford lenalidomide. There’s a specific money limit per year for treatment at certain points in life, based on Qalis - a combination of economic and social value. This leads to a specific cost limit, and this drug is too much. By the end of the programme, this situation has been reversed – back to that in a moment.

Just found this essay from 2006/7 - it's a nice insight into the weird contortions that occur when government encourages large corporations to have a go at policy, and will do as a blog entry while I try and remember how to write. My personal favourite is the "clone town britain by design" plan - see below. If I was writing it today, I'd probably put more emphasis on who wrote the most stunningly obtuse lines - since it's easy to read this stuff as the Voice of Capitalism rather than someone in a quango with an Open All Hours mentality. (One line I haven't used here, from the same report: among the benefits of luring Tesco into your regeneration area include offering unemployed locals 'the dignity that comes with work'. Clearly, the writer had never worked in a supermarket. I lasted two weeks.) But it's right to wonder - why on Earth would governments get so swoony over Tesco et al that they let them do this stuff?

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In New York, only a day after the towers fell, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani counselled his trembling constituents to 'show you're not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.' When the world's people asked how they could help, he said, 'Come here and spend money.' Shopping became a patriotic duty. Buy that flat screen TV, our leaders commanded, or the terrorists have won." [Levine 2005[1]]

Tackling social exclusion is the new main task for retail planning policy-to provide access to shopping for all." [Nick Raynsford, Planning Minister 1999 to 2001, speech to British Council, quoted in Wrigley et al 2002 p.2110]

Introduction

Business in the Community (hereafter BitC) is a Department of Trade and Industry funded QUANGO, with charitable status. According to its website, it "inspires, engages, supports and challenges companies to continually improve the impact they have on society."[2] In 2002 and 2005, they produced research to support a project called 'business investment in underserved markets.' This essay presents some of the key assumptions of this research. The aim here is not to examine the empirical accuracy of the research's claims - that topic is far too big to shoe-horn in here. Instead, I want to illustrate just how far UK governance has moved towards embracing a consumerist view of social progress. The research has very idiosyncratic blindspots and emphases that provide a sometimes startling insight into what happens when government policy and corporate thinking come together. Four 'transformational' pilot projects have been identified, based on the recommendations of this BitC work. Again, I haven't covered the results here; but it is worth noting that BitC do have the government backing needed to attempt their version of regeneration, at least on a small scale.

Note: this is a long, rambling entry that swings from naval gazing to some interesting stuff on global energy futures.

Houmous

There's a gymball in my bedroom: silver, 800mm wide. Having stared at it for a while, I started to wonder - if the sun were that gymball, how big would the Earth be? A few sums later I got 7mm. Some frantic measuring of dried pulses followed, and a chickpea emerged as the perfect - if slightly lumpy - candidate for sitting on the floor next to the gymball. There it sits still, so every night I can stare at it and mutter to myself, 'that's just stupid.' I include a photo of chickpea on gymball. But photos, this description - they don't do it justice. Find a gymball of equal size, get a chickpea: hold it between thumb and forefinger, having made sure to watch a video of the sun first. (Some would argue 'blue marble' better captures the wonder of it; each to their own.)

Incidentally, you can scale to anything you like at this website. At the scale above, chickpea would be 85 metres away from gymball.

I've also been trying to wrap my noggin around our place on Chickpea Earth. This has included an alarming assault on my sense of Earthly security, such as a list of all the ways in which we might never have existed. Some of these were covered in rather sensationalist tone by Tony Robinson's channel 4 series, 'Catastrophe Earth'. This quote sums up the general approach:

85000 years ago, humans were just heading out of Africa; the meteoric rise of our species makes us feel indestructible. Yet we are more vulnerable than we might care to imagine. We live on a thin crust that floats on a sea of pressurised molten rock and we rely on the proximity of a star to keep temperatures optimal for life. Meanwhile our planet moves through space, which is populated by numerous flying objects.

Dear Mr. President: we are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.

So begins a letter from Project for a New American Century to Bill Clinton, dated January 1998. It's worth going back to this now we're into year six of the Iraq war. The one lesson I learned from the whole saga was this: there's no need for conspiracies. You can publish your intentions on a website, say the opposite in public, and no-one will care. Truth won't out.

In the run-up to the war, Blair and Bush repeatedly claimed that regime change was not the aim, and that - even right up until the last moment - Hussein had it within his power to stop the war. That's what I found most terrifying - listening to Blair parrot Bush, when I could go to a public website and read, plain as day, the neocons' policy for regime change and the reasons for it. Written by the neocons themselves. They haven't even got the shame to take it down.

Just come out of a lecture by Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism. (Note the link to Amazon. Tsk.)

Two things: first, an old friend from Sheffield had a copy of this book. Many years back, one of her friends misread the title as 'Demading the Impossible'. Demading the Impossible henceforth became a formidable superhero of inscrutable powers. There's even a drawing of him somewhere.

Second. A comment from the after-lecture question session: a young man related a recent tale from his hometown. One evening, early but already dark, there was a powercut. Showing no signs of ending, people lit candles, put them in jars and - after a while - started wandering out of their front doors. Chatting ensued. Chatting led to a large fire 'in an entirely inappropriate place'. A large musical band formed. Sometime after the music got going, some people in balaclavas clutching weapons turned up and asked if anyone fancied a fight. There was a thoughtful pause, broken eventually by a guitarist who starting singing, 'don't worry, be happy'. Everyone joined in. The storyteller didn't relate if that included the balaclava people. He ended with the question:

So, when the lights go out, what kind of anarchism will we have?

I had a couple of bottles of wine and a tangled bank of discussion last night with Andy Goldring. One of those ones where notes must be taken - at least on my part, since I got so many ideas from him. The one I want to write about here is Stafford Beer, a plummy, crazy-bearded cybernetician. After his World War Two service he got into cybernetic management theory, consulting for a load of large companies. I'd heard about his attempt to create a cybernetic economy at some point but never followed it up. It's a fascinating chunk of history. The economic system he designed was called Project Cybersyn; there's a website with films from a documentary / art installation about it, which has a wonderful bit of footage from Beer's time at UMIST. It's accessible via one tiny little pink dot - or if you're impatient, the direct link is in the source of the page - I've kindly put it here for you. [update: video is now on youtube here] The silent UMIST audiovisual timer at the start gives it a convincing sense of antiquity. I recommend watching the first five minutes at least.

One day while working in London in 1971, Beer - to quote from the film -

... got a letter that very much changed my life. It was from the technical general manager of the state planning board of Chile. He remarked in this letter that he had studied all my works, he had collected a team of scientists together, and would I please come and take it over? I could hardly believe it, as you can imagine. But this was to start me on a journey that had me commuting 8000 miles over and over between London and Santiago.