Over on the other side of the pond January broke the high temperature records. Chicago was basking in temperatures as high as fifty degrees fahrenheit. The warmth and humidity set off thunderstorms and tornados across many mid-west states while winter cereal crops suffered. These conditions spread north to Alaska and Canada and the organisers of the thousand mile Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race were forced to shorten it because of lack of snow. Then on 12th February a surge of Arctic air flooded much of the US and set off a massive snow storm. New York was hit particularly hard and broke its snowfall record with 27 inches of snow in Central Park. A week later many places in the States registered their coldest monthly temperatures on record.

Meanwhile over on this side of the pond E.ON a German energy company that owns PowerGen was caught red-handed rigging an opinion poll in the Oldham Advertiser. The company is so desperate to get some free carbon credits by building a windfarm on moorland near Oldham that it told its employees to act entirely independently and simultaneously by sending a hundred emails n an hour and a half flat to the Oldham Advertiser in support of the sceme. Rumbled they dissembled. 'We unreservedly apologise. Our renewable team wanted to support the project because they believe in it but they used an inappropriate way to do it.' Just so.

A Hedge Fund is a device used by wealthy individuals and institutions to invest cash. Yet another senior investment banker has joined the stampede away from corporate banking into the hedge fund sector. The latest exile is Charles Kirwan-Taylor, chairman of US Corporate Broking at Credit Suisse. These funds are restricted by law to a hundred investors per fund so they set a high minimum investment. We are told that their freedom to invest aggressively at high risk is what makes them attractive to the rich and wealthy. Complete and utter nonsense. These toffs trade at low risk on inside information...otherwise known as tip-offs. Up against the wall with the lot of them. Chuck plans to focus on European equities.

AEA Technology is one of the ever-increasing privatised arms of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Last week the firm was fined £400 000 by Justice Norman Jones at Leeds Crown Court for failing to fit a shield plug to a two and a half ton flask carrying part of decommissioned cancer treatment equipment the 130 miles from Cookridge Hospial along the A65 through Skipton, Settle and Newby Bridge to Windscale. The flask was blasting out 129 million Cobalt-60 gamma rays per second throughout its journey. This is between 100 and 1000 times the 'normal' very high dose risk level. Anyone standing close by would have felt sick inside ten minutes, have a fifty percent chance of dying after an hour and would be brown bread for certain after two hours.

Adrundhati Roy declared to the World Social Forum in Mumbai on 16th January 2004 that we must consider ourselves at war. I think she is right. But for the first time it might be lies instead of truth that is the first casualty of war...at least it could be. Mahatma Gandhi always insisted that satyagraha was a key part of his strategy for ridding the Green Villages of India of the British Raj.

The Peace Parties must always speak truth to power. Let the War Party tie themselves into knots with their convoluted apologies that are not apologies. Being economical with the actualité is what government does…the previous statement being a typical example. Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King would agree with this approach. So would Tom Robbins, one of the four useful things to come out of Seattle…Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks are the others. Here is Tom Robbins’ hero, Switters (sometimes with the CIA), in Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (Random House, New York, 2000, ISBN 1-84243-029-9).

The Devil grows fat on our lies; the more you lie to him, the better he likes it. It’s an investment in his firm, it increases the value of his stock by fostering the practice of lying. Only truth can hurt the Devil. That’s why honesty has been banished from almost every existing institution: corporate, religious and governmental. Truth can be dangerously liberating. Did I mention that the Devil’s other name is El Controlador? He who controls. His other name is El Manipulado’. Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s response was that both manipulation and control are ‘sometimes requisite in order to secure and insure stability and if that smacks to you of the satanic, then I suggest you think of it as using the Devil to further the aims of God’.

In After Many a Summer Aldous Huxley had this to say on that subject: ‘The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people, in a word - these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals’. He expanded on this statement in his book length essay ‘Ends & Means’ (Chatto & Windus, 1966, 344 pages, ISBN 0-70110-799-5). Amazon.co.uk lists it as fiction. We live in interesting times.