William Shepherd

In 1214 the English Barons assembled at the Abbey of Bury ‘under cover of going thither to do their devotions to the body of St Edmund which lay there enshrined where they uttered their complaint of King John’s tyrannical manners’. In the following year...1215...Holinshed’s Chronicles tell us that the Barons ‘began to make war against King John’. The ‘chief ringleaders of their power’ were ‘Richard Earle de Bigot and G de Mandeville Earl of Essex’.

After the Barons captured London the rest of the nobility left John complaining that he had ‘made them subject to Rome’. This was the year of Magna Carta but there is little evidence in Holinshed’s Chronicles that Runnymede had much effect on the pattern of events because the next year...1216...the Barons appealed to the French for help.

The resulting alliance of the Barons with King Philip’s son Lewis prompted John to ask the Pope to have a word with the French King to warn him off. On the face of it this does not seem a very smart move. This was the same Pope Innocent that in 1209 had ‘determined to deprive John of his kinglie state and had absolved all his subjects and vassals of their oaths of allegiance made unto the same king’. And this was just the half of it. When Popes write Bulls half measures are not where it is at. Holinshed continues his report.

‘...and after deprived him by solemne protestation of his kinglie administration and dignitie, and lastlie signified that his deprivation unto the French king and other christian princes, admonishing them to purse king Iohn, being thus deprived, forsaken, and condemned as a common enemie to God and his church. He ordeined furthermore, that whosoever imploied goods or other aid to vanquish and overcome that disobedient prince, should remaine in assured peace of the church...not onlie in their goods and persons, but also in suffrages for saving of their soules...’

Whatever passed between Philip and the papal legate Cardinal Pandulph in 1216 obviously failed to have the effect John desired for shortly afterwards Dauphine Lewes landed at Sandwich and set up camp. This was enough to put the wind up John who scuttled off to Winchester three days after Lewes sets foot on the Kentish shore.

However Winchester seems to have imbued John with the Spirit of King Alfred because after a few weeks he decides to fight back against his enemies and sallies forth to take on Lewes...the French upstart who dares to champion the English Pretender Arthur. ‘Having gotten togither a competent armie for his purpose, he brake foorth of Winchester, as it had beene an hideous tempest of weather, beating downe all things that stood in his waie...and thus the countrie being wasted on each hand, the king hasted forward till he came to Wellestreme sands, where passing the washes he lost a great part of his armie, with horses and carriages, so that it was judged to be a punishment appointed by God, that the spoile which had been gotten and taken out of churches, abbies, and other religious houses, should perish, and be lost by such means togither with the spoilers.

Quite what John had in mind is not clear from the accounts I have consulted. Perhaps he needed to give London a wide berth once the Merchants and Moneylenders had gone over to the French King. Nor would John have been the first or the last king to be hiding from his creditors.

But whatever the reason for dragging the whole army north to Lincolnshire this bold outflanking movement...though reminiscent of the campaigns of Hannibal and Alexander...failed to achieve its objective. If you are a king it is not good public relations to lose your army in this manner. You are seen as a loser abandoned by the gods.

John himself seems to have taken this view because although ‘...the king himselfe, and a few other, escaped the violence of the waters, by following a good guide,’ he was not in a very happy frame of mind for ‘...as some have written, he tooke such greefe that he fell into an ague, the force and heat whereof, togither with his immoderate feeding on rawe peaches and drinking of new sider, so increased his sickness that not able to ride, but was faine to be carried in a litter...the disease still so raged and grew upon him that through anguish of mind rather than through force of sicknesse he departed this life.’ Such is the fate of kings. But note that remark ‘as some have written’.

Holinshed also tells of another theory about John’s death...much to Shakespeare’s delight who makes it the basis for his treatment of King John’s death. Here is Holinshed. ‘There be some which have written, that after he had lost his armie, he came to the abbeie of Swineshead in Lincolnshire...a moonke...being mooved with zeal for the oppression of his countrie, gave the king poison in a cup of ale, whereof he first tooke the assaie, to cause the king not to suspect the matter, and so they both died in manner at one time.’ And you thought Al Qaeda invented suicide bombers.

So to 1218 and some good news for English supporters. Holinshed again. ‘...when it seems that a new supplie of men was readie to come and aid Lewis, Hubert de Burgh, captain of Dover Castle, attacked the French fleet at sea...in the end the Englishmen bare themselves so manfullie, that they vanquished the whole French fleet, and obteined a famous victorie’. Echoes of the Spanish Armada three centuries later. Now you know what I know.

Another gorgeous day on this sliver of land between the English Channel and the North Atlantic Ocean. This could be the reason Europeans are gung-ho for the Carbonista Nonsense while Americans regard Kyoto as a lot of hooey. Summer on America’s East Coast has been wet and miserable with New England suffering its worst flooding in decades after it non-stop rain in May and June. Last week New Jersey and Maryland were deluged by some slow-moving thunder storms and on Sunday a foot of rain fell on Washington. Flash floods and mudslides closed roads, railways and the underground while floods swamped basements and caused power cuts. The US National Archives and Smithsonian Museums had to close and the storm knocked down a large tree in front of the White House.

The rains came from a long weather front draped down the eastern states as a steady stream of very moist tropical air from the Bahamas met cooler drier air to the west. The weather front stalled as it ran parallel to the jet stream... the ribbon of air sweeping overhead several miles high...and so the storms inched forward painfully slowly. It is no wonder the Climate Changelings shifted tack from Global Warming to Abrupt Climate Change. Even PT Barnum would have been hard-pressed to sell Global Warming to folks with flood waters lapping round their feet.

My library session was booked for 1030-1130 which gave me a five hour session after getting up with the sun at five. I devoted the time to Cultura’s accounts. I keep a pretty good tally in my head but with five weeks in Sweden ahead and £300 of translator payables coming due while away an accurate count of the State of the Kitty was called for.

A hundred pounds of Good Yacht Guide orders...from New South Wales and Mid-Lothian...came in this week to keep matters on an even keel. And I can set my clock by NCAB who pay on 30-days to the minute which is nice in a customer. We never got off the hook with our Norwegian midsummer problem...NCAB Sweden even picked up some flak from NCAB Norway...but we got the OK to send in our £250 invoice today. So all’s well that ends well.

PCHut has been down to three computers for the past week. Today for the first time capacity shortages caught up with le propiéteur. Sandra was at my computer when I arrived to clock on at a quarter to twelve. So I jumped at the excuse to treat myself to egg & chips at Strand Cafe. At midday the customers at PCHut indulged in some musical chairs so by a quarter past...or ‘after’ as the Americans say...I was in business posting blogs and deleting junk mail.

Yesterday I sent Dele Oguntimoju a paper for the Real Nations Forum entitled States, Nations & Diasporas. Today I followed it up with another entitled Village Trusts for Angela Bates’ Real Communities Forum. John Papworth emailed back an enthusiastic endorsement of the first paper which puts him back in my good books. The two papers started life as the Rye’s Own article that ran into a Coleridge Moment. This article was then recycled into a couple of this week’s weblogs before re-emerging as the Ugly Sisters. I would like to think they improved as they matured.

I am having another go at the Scots in these articles of mine. But I have good reason. Not even Horatio Nelson is immune to their stealthy takeover of English public life. After all what could be less Scottish than Nelson...despite his dalliances with a lady by the name of Hamilton. It now transpires that the man at the top of the column in Trafalgar Square overlooking the goings-on in Whitehall is Scottish. Nelson’s statue is made from Scottish Craigleith stone. A large supply has just been sent south for use in renovating the column. Och ‘n aye ‘n Auld Land Syne.

Down south at Southwark Crown Court two customs officers have been jailed for their part in an alcohol and tobacco smuggling scam. Their job was to wave smugglers through dockside controls at Dover. Meanwhile up in the north-east Newcastle City Council has been rapped on the knuckles for flying the European Flag without planning permission…technically it’s an advert. You couldn’t make it up. By the laws of the land only National Flags can be hoisted up the country’s flagpoles without planning permission. With World Cup fever at a pitch before England’s quarter-final match against Portugal on Saturday perhaps some Europhile might like to test the law by challenging the flying of the Flag of St George. There must a million on them south of the Tyne and east of the Severn.

By the end of this century Village States will have learned how to protect them and theirs from Commercial, Administrative and Personal Interests. They must also learn to differentiate between personal possessions, private property and common wealth. This is where Civic Wisdom starts. R.H.Tawney sought to persuade the Labour Party to adopt the idea of Improperty. He almost succeeded. The Atlee and Wilson governments discriminated between Earned and Unearned Income...squeezing the latter until the pips squeaked. But they never took onboard the theories of Henry George that lay behind Tawney’s thinking. Real Property escaped and no liens were lain against the profits derived from public licensing of development...and the unearned windfall profits...and local corruption...that followed in its wake. But the concept of Improperty is crucial in dealing with Personal Outsiders.

The retired desk officer from the Stupidity Services or the Merchant Banker day-trading in government-commissioned lethal weaponry from their homes in Islington or Chelsea might like a second home in a quaint historic country town but why should they be allowed to let it stand empty? Tawney discriminated between Working Capital and Idle Capital. Ownership of a second home involves the legalised theft of a Village State’s housing stock from the Common Wealth of local families. It is a problem the world over and getting worse as the fat cats lap up the cream so that real property in prime locations becomes the speculation of choice for the rich...and the collateral desired by the bankers in their never-ending quest for risk-free placements of their credit creating commercial banking mechanism.

In fact this is part of a much broader mechanism that sanctions the theft of personally managed Common Wealth by means of the maldistribution of money and credit. But locality has the means to fight back against this legally- sanctioned looting by Outside Interests. The Norwegian Parliament has responded to their second home problem by applying the Tawney Criteria. In tiny fishing villages along the Norwegian coast from Bergen to Tromsö good tenants are like gold dust to the property owning class hundreds of miles away in Oslo...and local rents are extremely reasonable. The reason? Second homes are forfeited if they are not occupied. An empty house represents Idle Capital.

A Village State’s Common Wealth is by its nature unlikely to sit idle. But it has problems of its own. Over the years philosophers and radicals have remarked on the problem of the Competent Receiver. It is the same problem for the trustees of the Church Commissioners and the National Trust as it is for a political party intent on reclaiming private property for We The People. Eventually the Labour Party settled for the British National State as the Competent Receiver for the Common Wealth of the United Kingdom. It came to be known as Nationalisation.

This solution might have been suitable for the dying days of empire. But there is little reason to assume it is right for all times. Future generations might choose to legislate for a Programme of Localisation. Some day there might be sound arguments for King Charles III to instruct the National Trust, the Church Commissioners and the Ministry of Defence to settle their property on Local Village Trusts. Each generation makes its own choices. There were some within the Labour Movement who agreed with Francis Bacon that ‘wealth be like manure...best if it be spread’.

Internationalists believe that power should be drained away from Nation States into some world governing body. Trade Unionists want the power nexus to be in a place where it can do battle with the Money Power. Anarchists seek for power to return to the individual citizen. Syndicalists want individual power held in common. Party Politicians in Westminster and Central Bankers in Threadneedle Street have the quaint belief that the nexus of power resides with them and wish for this power to continue to accrue to them and theirs...while the flows to rival centres be stopped up.

In recent years political debate about the Nexus of Power has been stifled. Attempts to discuss derivative subjects like Secession and Cantonisation, Property and Money or Livingry and Killingry have been sidetracked and trivialised by the private agendas of Commercial, Administrative or Personal Interests seeking to control the power flow. So Feminism is deployed to thwart a new generation’s attempt to fight for Global Justice. So a War on Terror is created and Global Warming invented to remove the threat to Piped Energy of a pipe-free energy infrastructure. So it goes on.

Structure determines behaviour and power flows only one way at a time. The structure of power relationships determines the direction of the power flow within an organisation. The struggle to control power has obscured the purpose of wielding that power and the effects of the scale and pace of the power flow on an organism.

One day subjects like Social Morphology and Structural Sociology will be on the agendas of Curriculum Committees. Conferences about Making Local Government Local will be reported in the media. Books will be published on Village Democracy and The Wealth of Villagers. Scale and pace will take centre stage as academics and politicians deconstruct such long-abandoned orthodoxies as Big is Best...for Capital...and Small is Beautiful...for People. Better policies and recipes will emerge from the structural rearrangement of human affairs. But until then Real Progress will splutter to a halt and the Adventure of Civilisation will be subverted by the forces of Death and Destruction.

Sir Halford Mackinder was a geographer at the London School of Economics in 1906 when he wrote a short book entitled Democratic Ideals and Reality published after the Kaiser War in 1919. Mackinder was guaranteed a bad twentieth century press once Hitler’s Nazis latched on to his ideas and set off on their quest for Lebensraum by way of Mackinder’s Heartland.

Mackinder’s thinking is first-rate but like everyone else last century he failed to anticipate the Reverse Colonialism that crept up on the old imperial powers at the end of the 20th century...something that fails to fit with any Nazi or Zionist chosen race theories. India provides a good example of the new world we inhabit.

Two thirds of India’s population of 1100 million live in 638365 villages...some very remote and without water or electricity. yet at the same time there are 25 million Indians living around the world in the Indian Diaspora. Two million of them live in this country. Hundreds of them are millionaires and a couple are billionaires. India has eighteen official languages and 1600 regional dialects but fifty million Indians speak English and this is likely to rise to seventy million quite soon...overtaking the English-speaking population of these European offshore islands.

In cricket test matches one of the questions asked is whether Our Indians...like Monty Panesar...are better than Their Indians. Heathrow to Mumbai is looked upon as domestic travel by many Indians...and there are suggestions that if Shakespeare were alive today he would be writing Bollywood scripts. There are successful Indian populations all over the world...in America, South Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean...tied together by family links, mobile phones, the internet, Bollywood, cricket and travel. But the capital of this Greater India is London not Delhi.

Statecraft needs new words to deal with this new world...or wordsmiths to breathe new meanings into old words. We should start with the word State. Any group can get together and call themselves a State. Historically the word has been reserved for City States like Firenze, Bruges, Hamburg or the City of London...a state within a state if ever there was one. People with shared interests preferred to see themselves as Tribes where there were blood ties...or as Guilds and Livery Companies where bonding took some other form like shared work skills or common trading interests.

It is ironic that in 1776 a group of Freedom Fighters...they would be called Terrorists or Insurgents nowadays...in the thirteen breakaway English colonies of Virginia, New England and the Carolinas were the first to register as the United States. When the League of Nations collapsed in the 1930s the only collective name available was the United Nations. But this is not a good name for a league of states bound by a treaty of confederation ruled by a Gang of Gun Runners. China along with the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council...America, Britain, France and Russia...top the league of Global Armaments Manufacturers...and Killingry Exporters.

Outsiders arrive in our towns and villages in several guises. Commercial Outsiders like Tescos are the most obvious Outside Interests threatening a small town. But Administrative Outsiders like District Councils also pose a grave threat to a locality because of their presumptuous claims to rule over the people who live in small Town States within the geographic area of their administrative jurisdiction. However there is also a third category who we can call Personal Outsiders who come to the nicer small town in pursuit of their own selfish interests. Perhaps the most obvious sub-group in this category are the Second Home Owners.

George Bernard Shaw...a key contributor to The Fabian Papers in 1884...always insisted that Socialism is Equal Money. For Shaw dividing the Economic World into a Public and Private sector was a rhetorical device that obscured reality. Shaw understood that the Man on the Clapham Omnibus had his own meagre supply of Personal Possessions and was regularly being ripped off by the rich and powerful with their Private Property and the One Pound One Vote theology with which they sought to legitimise this wide scale theft of the Commons by enclosures, clearances and other legal trickery. Shaw called this third category of property Common Wealth.

The Common Wealth of a particular group of people might relate to a particular place and could be looked after by people in some other place. But this is only a weak tendency. The largest Hedge Fund in the world is run by a civil servant from a small office in Oslo. The Norwegian Government set up a savings fund so that the descendants of today’s two million Norwegians could enjoy the fruits of the natural mineral resources being extracted from the Norwegian North Sea. The Scots could have done the same had they focussed their considerable political skills on breaking away from their union with England...as Vermont is intent on seceding from the other American states.

But instead the Scots have allowed themselves to be deluded into believing that a few million feuding Catholics and Presbyterians from north of the border could wield long-term power over England’s forty four million Elizabethan Subjects by means of a decade of ineffectual and unprincipled rule from Labour Party headquarters in Glasgow and Dundee. The Indians are taking a different route by becoming an economic superpower. As a white middle-class Englishman I have little doubt which side my bread is buttered.

A week from now I will be in Sweden. My hope is to spend the winter in Lund with a Swedish Filosophie Kandidat under my belt by year end from studies at the universities of Stockholm, Uppsala and Lund over the past 35 years. Other hopes are to get housing and storage organised and to spend time in Tucson and Bogotá. I would like six months of Forward Living Capability in the bank before moving to Lund or Cambridge. But this time I plan to give myself a contingency position by building an investment fund from tithing a fixed portion of my Cultura earnings to my IG-Index account…and spread betting my account balances all the way to the bank.

During my first six months in Lund I will be working as an economic historian researching the banking and financial arrangements of the Hansa by getting stuck into some real documents like the ledgers of the companies trading at Novgorod and Visby. By the time I have completed the last 20 betyg of my Fil Kand I should know whether I am on the right track with my hunch about the root cause of the mechanisms destroying civilisation.

My hypothesis is that things went wrong when Italian double-entry bookkeeping was allied to a Money Creation…and destruction…System in Northern Europe and then got itself incorporated into a Power System by the English adoption of the Dutch idea of the Central Banking Mechanism. These three ideas came together at the end of the 17th Century and have continued to hold sway ever since with the Central Bank of China the latest member of the club.

The focus of my academic research will be the sweep of European financial history from 1100 to 1700 with a focus through the histories of the Hanseatic Towns. What historians call an industrial revolution may be no more than a quickening of the pace of innovation as a technique for money manipulation emerged with the discovery of The Rule of Five…when money is available things happen five times as quickly...and cost five times as much.

Today and tomorrow are allocated to weblogs to allow time on Thursday and Friday for websites. My weblogging is complicated at the moment with several themes running. Magna Carta turned out to be more difficult than anticipated and weblogs on economics, climate and politics have not fallen off the keyboard the way they might.

Before leaving Rye for Purton I finalised my 2005 accounts and filed my tax and working tax credit returns online. Last year’s income worked out at £2400 and expenses were £5145 giving me a loss of £2745. If you are interested in how Voluntary Simplicity works here is my Profit & Loss Statement for 2000-2005 with all figures in £ uk.

Bogotá was on my mind yesterday. I have been steadily removing stuff from the boat since returning to Rye in February. Upon finishing A Flower That‘s Free I placed it in a box acquired to tidy up little things on the boat and placed alongside it Wild Swans by Jung Chang, Julian by Gore Vidal, Masefield Park by Jane Austen, Saigon by Anthony Grey and Chasing Men by Edwina Currie and prepared the package for posting to Mexico City. I could not quite stretch to the twenty five pounds demanded by Royal Mail for air freight so three months from now…God willing…Constanza will be surprised by the arrival of an early Christmas present. Surface Post cost eleven pounds.

Christopher Strangeways is in the vanguard of environmental activism in and around Rye and is the mastermind behind the Rye Farmer’s Market. As he is thinking of entering mainstream local politics by standing for the Rye Town Council next year he has started addressing such local issues as a Town Programme to counter the effects of Global Warming. During a recent e-mail exchange I pointed him to my Climate Blog and he responded by giving me his understanding of what my climate blog was saying.

Christopher picked up on Michael Crichton’s presentation in State of Fear of the idea that increasing concern for the environment since the fall of the Berlin Wall had been orchestrated by those with an interest in creating a crisis to preoccupy The West…and that this Fear Generation had got out of control. I share Crichton’s suspicion about the Fear Factories but Fear Generation being out of control is mine...though not my central idea.

I don't think I suggested that environmental fears were irrational and based on dodgy science…although this might be the case...so I responded to this interpretation of my views by remarking that my principal concern was the extent to which the Climate Change scene was bedevilled by bad science. Everybody was spinning findings that were derived from preconceived prejudices and manipulating public information. For the Environmental Movement this was a mistaken strategy. They should change tack and be seen as cleaner than clean whenever they adopt scientific findings to champion a particular case. Truth will win through in the end. The quality of the science matters.

I was also concerned to see a shift in the way the Precautionary Principle was applied. To do anything just because the situation was desperate begged two questions. Firstly how desperate was the situation and secondly whether what was being suggested would help or hinder. The answers at the moment are that we don’t know whether the situation is desperate…the data is ambivalent, poorly collected and badly processed…and we don’t understand the planet’s climate. So we have no way to appraise the consequences of our meddling.

While in this state of limited knowledge Environmentalists should be sceptical about the Smoke and Mirrors Departments. Bad science is always bad science, every scientist is paid by someone and pipers calling the tune have agendas. In summary I am calling for intellectual clarity. One thing we know little about is Ocean Algae.

For centuries there has been anecdotal evidence that small creatures can sense the approach of earthquakes. But it now turns out that tiny algae in the sea are every bit as sensitive to earthquakes. Studies of recent earthquakes with epicentres close to the coast…Gujurat India (2001), Algeria (2002) and Bam, Iran (2003)…have supplied evidence of a huge surge in Chlorophyll levels just before a quake. It might therefore be possible to programme satellites to flag up unexpected algal blooms and to use this data as the basis for a reliable Earthquake Early Warning System.

The behaviour of algae is important because algae fix half the world’s Carbon. Every year more CO2 is produced than can be accounted for in the atmosphere so the numbers don’t work out. Algae and photosynthesis might explain the missing CO2 and European Oceanographers may have found the missing Carbon Sink and how it works.

Water surging into the open ocean from the Iberian Peninsula pulls Carbon out of the air. Nutrient-rich water from a deep Upwelling near the coast causes a burst of algal growth. When algae are eaten the CO2 they absorb is recycled back into the atmosphere. But some of the water travels hundreds of miles out into the Open Atlantic causing even more algae to grow. In the open ocean the algae simply die and sink taking their Carbon with them. The effect is much greater than was previously realised.

Something else that has been puzzling Ocean Researchers is the way that half the algal species in our oceans need to take in Vitamin B12 from outside in order to grow properly. They do so by means of a beneficial relationship with bacteria. Here is the science. It seems that no algae have the necessary genes to produce Vitamin B12. Those that do not require a supply are like higher plants with an alternative metabolic process that does not need the vitamin.

However algae that need Vitamin B12 cannot make it themselves and must get it from somewhere else. But the numbers do not add up because the amount of Vitamin B12 required to grow the types of algae that do not need the vitamin in the laboratory is much higher than natural levels in the seas and rivers. It turns out that in the natural environment Bacteria supply the necessary Vitamin B12. But this is not a one way relationship. The algae support the bacteria by providing them with Carbon from their own photosynthesis.

What these observations demonstrate is that although algae live by harvesting the sun’s energy through photosynthesis many of them are like animals in that they need another organism to supply them with a vital nutrient. Time and time again as you look at the science it becomes apparent that these are early days in Climate Science. Caution and not desperation is what is called for. Don’t just do something…anything…stand there!

You couldn’t make it up. Today I received a letter addressed to The Occupier, P.O. Box 36, Rye. I sneaked out through the back door of my post office box and beat a hasty retreat to the far side of the kingdom. It was a beautiful day and the sun was beating down on the tourists in Trafalgar Square. After a coffee at St Martin in the Field I headed down Whitehall and through St. James Park to Victoria Coach Station.

A taxi collected me from Swindon Bus Station at a quarter past three and I was playing with Tempe on the lawn of 26 The Close in Purton when John Papworth eased himself off the garden bench at four o’clock to prepare himself for the 5 pm. meeting of the Radcon III Planning Group. I had not been followed. There were no police marksmen positioned outside the house.

There had been some sharp exchanges during the course of the previous two weeks as I accused John of highjacking the proceedings for his Charter of Real Nations agenda which I argued had very little to do with a conference on Making Local Government Local that was supposed to concentrate on the Real Communities Charter. He shot back that until local communities had the benefit of the newfound powers that the Real Nations Charter would give them there was very little they could do with the Real Communities Charter.

I didn’t bother to reply to this as my purpose had been to put a shot across the bows and slow down the Real Nations Juggernaut with its paraphernalia of a new 2006 Declaration of Independence and the 2001 Real Nations Charter worked through five years ago at radcon I…and deepened with practical action to place secession on national agendas at radcon II…to make more room for the Charter 2015 Project and some serious work at radcon III to work through a new Magna Carta.

Dr Aidan Rankin has been reading my weblogs because I notice the Tory Leader David Cameron is thinking in similar terms when he is calling for a British Bill of Rights steeped in English legal precedents instead of being swamped by the Napoleonic Code from Europe bedevilling the present set-up.

Nonetheless my thoughts had been turning to resignation from the Radcon III Conference Planning Group yet again so I thought I would fire off a memo to Anton Pinschof and the rest of the 2001 Radical Consultation Steering Group…Tom Greco, Aidan Rankin, Kirk Sale and Chris Wright…by way of a mid-term report in case the Saturday meeting failed to go my way. As it happened it did so I took upon myself the task of writing the background briefing paper for a meeting in London next month of patrons and officials for radcon III. Here is my pre-meeting memo.

Please regard the radcon flurry as my way of briefing the 2001 Radcon Continuity Group on how things stand midway towards the Five Years On Swindon Conference. My private opinion at the end of 2001 was that there would not be another radcon...without a radcon process...and no mechanisms were put in place in 2001 for this to happen...and the attempt to develop the idea of an Academic Inn Association to take on this task was sabotaged leading to my resignation from the London Academic Inn Committee and predictably to the collapse of the London Academic Inn a year later. The committee has been disbanded and there have been no events now for three years.

My private opinion at the end of 2005 was that what was going to happen at the Five Years On Gathering in September 2006 was another Fourth World Assembly…appropriately The Thirteenth…plus a Book Launch of Village Democracy. I did not believe this Five Years On Gathering would be part of any radcon process...and nor would the Middlebury Institute...dubbed radcon II to avoid a return to the Fourth World Assembly model in September 2006 and because it might have become part of a radcon process once there was a third point on the progress line.

My private opinion at mid-year 2006 is that the Five Years On Gathering seems to be acquiring a third pillar...the launch of an international organisation from Swindon with no understanding of the decades of diplomatic spade work required...while the focus on the Local Communities Charter...despite the imminent book launch...is being lost.

So unless there is an unprecedented change of heart over the next couple of weeks I am now slipping into damage limitation mode...in the hope of taking something useful back from the September Gathering to some future convening of the Radcon Continuity Group. The two best hopes at the midway mark look to be firm plans to set up an Edward Goldsmith Institute for Human Scale Ecology; firm support for the further development of the Magna Carta II Charter 2015 Project and the Resurgence Group of Institutes Development Plan.

The Radcon III Planning Group were also given the glad tidings that Heidi Foster had agreed to help me ensure that there was a bookshop facility from the opening night of the conference on the Thursday evening until the close of proceedings with the Final Plenary on Saturday afternoon. The Post-Meeting Prandials were different this weekend as Adam Crossland invited us all to The Commons just outside Purton where a party was in full swing to cheer off a local group of New Age Land Girls heading for the hills of Vietnam next week on a development aid mission.

King John’s troubles began in 1199 when his father died and he ascended the English throne. Eight years earlier Father Richard had made his son Arthur his heir and successor…to the delight of his mother Constance. But between 1191 and 1199 Richard the Lionheart changed his mind and rewrote his will in favour of his brother John.

We have to suspect Henry II’s wife Eleonor as the prime mover in this. She was the mother of Richard and John and the grandmother of Arthur. John was 32 when Richard died and Arthur was 16…although Shakespeare portrays him as 10…so perhaps Eleonor and Richard reasoned that the kingdom needed a man and not a boy in the hot seat.

Hollinshed implies that The Lady Constance would have ruled in Arthur’s stead and also remarks that John established himself in England ‘thanks to the work of Eleonor’. So there was unlikely to be much love lost between the two fine ladies. Nonetheless with feuding women meddling in the affairs of state, the English Court must have been a place to avoid. And of course altering a king’s will plays havoc with the betting in the City of London. Yet John seemed to have been up to the job. Hollinshed presents King John as a political fixer par excellence…howbeit a failed one. But then all political careers end in failure so there is nothing remarkable about that.

Nowadays disrupting markets by changing a King’s Will would fall foul of the London Stock Exchange’s rules of disclosure and attract the attention of the Serious Fraud Squad. But though Shakespeare’s knowledge of people and power is second to none he had a blind spot when it came to understanding the ways of The Money Power. For an understanding of this we need to go to Shakespeare’s sources...and in particular to the financially astute Hollinshed…for a feel for the wheeling and dealing of the English and French aristocrats and their London backers.

Receiving early warning of changes to a King’s Will is akin to getting transcripts from bugging monthly meetings of the Federal Reserve Board. Doubtless the London merchants had their own Watergate teams in place monitoring shifts in moneylender fortunes. But Shakespeare misses the significance of the £30 000 King John agrees to pay the French King as part of his deal with Arthur. It is there in Hollinshed but went beneath Shakespeare’s radar because The Bard had only a layman’s understanding of money and hence no place for such snippets of information in his power framework. Hollinshed on the other hand realised that money was central to the problems of John’s reign.

Hollinshed sets out his history chronologically dating his entries like a diary. So we know that in 1200 King John ‘now resting from wars with foreign enemies began to make war with his subjects purses at home emptying them by taxes and tallages to fill his coffers’. John also ‘dealt severely with the white monks’. By 1204 John has ‘gathered huge sums in subsidies’. Hollinshed is showing the way things are headed in order to explain the background to the confrontation with the barons at Runnymede in 1215.

Hollinshed portrays John as a skilled political operator juggling his credit cards while robbing Peter to pay Paul. The impression Hollinshed gives is of a politician weaving and bobbing between rival power factions playing one off against the other…a deal here, a deal there…as the bills pile up. In 1213 for instance Hollinshed notes that the peace with France didn’t work because King Philip’s backers had counted on getting back the £60 000 owed them by the French King from the seizure of the estates of the English Catholic Barons who they planned to denounce as traitors.

The Church too is destined to play a key role in the unfolding drama ‘for neither were the bishops, abbots, nor any other ecclesiastical persons exempted by means whereof he ran first into the hatred of the clergy’. John’s problems with The Church start to appear in 1208 when he refuses The Pope’s appointment of Simon Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. Until them the abbeys and churches are tax points ripe for looting. Yet seven years later The Barons complain that John had made them ‘subject to Rome’. The Vatican was playing its own game with European Courts.

Shakespeare portrays the wielders of state power as no different to lesser mortals…wracked by similar personal dilemmas and subject to the same individual choices. In fact Shakespeare invented the Personalisation of the Politics of Large States. The Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s day stood at a crossroads. Size was central to their situation. Behind them lay the personal politics of small Village States. Ahead lay the impersonal bureaucratic politics of totalitarian states with increasing scale and pace leading politics into unknown territory. To right and left were the roads not taken. Hollinshed has a better grasp of this than Shakespeare and understands that it is no longer what governments do but what they are. Shakespeare saw governments as controlled by individuals. He was wrong.

For the Elizabethans the parallels were between Good Queen Bess and King John. But the parallels run true even today. The contortions that Washington demanded of Sadam Hussein or the Shah of Iran are those The Vatican demanded of John and Elizabeth. In modern times David Kelly unwittingly replayed the part of Count Melun with his timely deathbed revelation of a French conspiracy. Courts and governments are brands and the shifting fortunes of their firms at the whim of The Money Power move financial markets. Plus ça change plus c’est le même chose.

Three score years and ten is our allotted span and we don’t really get going until our mid-twenties so 50 years is the best we can plan for. Economics is not good with time. But time is the key because time…not money…is the scarce resource for the little individual. While a graduate student with the System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School in the early 1980s I read a paper entitled Energy: a long wave perspective to the annual conference of the Association of Eastern Economists. The paper was based on some energy system modelling the group were doing. System Dynamic models are good with time…unlike economic models. Economic Systems may have equilibrium states but the real economy oscillates through them and spirals off to new equilibria before the old oscillations settle down.

Real economies are dynamic and not static. The Delay Factors incorporated into System Dynamic models are critical variables. The time factors are often responsible for the real world behaviour the models are designed to create. My MIT work disappeared with my divorce but one of the four energy papers...energy policy...turned up recently. My pet slide in the 1981 Philadelphia presentation included the equation (E = p x e x t). Economic activity (E) takes place when people (p) have the energy (e) and the time (t) to carry it out. This formulation of the economic problem differs from the classical one which ignores time, views energy as a line in the Input-Output Matrix and includes people as a factor of production called Labour…thereby placing it on an equal footing philosophically with Land and Capital.

There is also a crucial difference between Mind Work and Manual Labour. Mind output (knowledge) is not consumed but replicated as it passes from one person to another. Schumacher's Adaequatio Factor and Knowledge Obsolescence should also be factored into the equation. This replication creates islands of Increasing Returns in a sea of Diminishing Returns…and these are central to the theory that Bigger is Better. In fact big is best for capital. And small is better for people. In the real world as economic sea levels fall so islands become continents. Money enters the Pet Formula by way of The Rule of Five as a secondary variable. This encourages The Natural Order as opposed to the classical formulation of the economic problem that has played a key role in Societal Inversion. Reformulating the economic problem more along these lines will be crucial to the recreation of The Natural Order in our societies.

Another way to effect the shift to a Cathedral Culture from a Money Culture is to address the problem of short-termism by caring more…rather than less…about the morrow. The shift to shorter and shorter time frames may be a consequence of the maldistribution of money between different sizes of business enterprise? Size matters. The experience of the Prince of Wales Trust would seem to support this hypothesis.

Small businesses grow organically by serving more customers. Big businesses acquire customers by gobbling up other businesses or by selling more products and services to their existing customers. The Diminishing Utility of each accretion is critical to the Junking Up and Dumbing Down that takes place in Overdeveloped Societies. Bullyboy tactics are also deployed to eliminate smaller competitors. Governments with their Laws against Monopolies and their Offices of Fair Trading are not blind to these problems. They even have some inkling that oligarchy and unfair competition are related to scale. But there is no unified Theory of Scale and Pace to support the development of such sensible policies as graduated tax rates targeted at the size of an enterprise.

The rise and rise of Microsoft on the back of its Share Options and rising share price and the Overdeveloped World’s practice of dumping their surplus and obsolete products are two examples of Big Corporation Behaviour. They call it Best Practice. I call it Murder. People die in droves as a result of Big Corporation Best Practice. In the 1960s the British National Coal Board was the largest business in Europe in terms of the number of households dependent upon the enterprise for their livelihood. This was central to the management of the business but cut little ice with the Pension Fund and Insurance Company managers who have been given a private monopoly over the disposition of spare money and created credit in this country.

Instead Stock Markets glorify Market Capitalization and Annual Turnover irrespective of what they are, where they come from and how many people are involved in generating the numbers. Enron provides a clear warning of the pitfalls of this approach. The notion of productivity is crucial but is badly defined, poorly understood and never integrated into any broader theory of Work and Personal Fulfilment. Besides the only legitimate function of financial markets is to match those who want to exchange twenty pounds today with those wanting a pound a year for twenty years. All other trading on these financial markets should be taxed until the pips of these barrow boys squeak.

Microbusinesses also have a key role to play in re-establishing the natural time-frame for human life and human endeavour. The natural time-span for collective human economic activity is a span of two hundred years from the birth of the oldest family relative alive to the death of the youngest child in the family. Inter-generational family businesses are vital to The Good Society. One day William Franklin & Sons Limited will be seen as a model for such businesses...and in particular for the Transition Mechanism incorporated into the structure of the firm.

Hastings Pier…one of England’s last great Victorian wooden piers…has been closed after safety experts said it could collapse. Five metal trusses supporting the privately owned nine hundred foot pier have given way. Failure of one is enough to render it unsafe. A couple of years ago the West Pier in Brighton burnt down after it had passed into private hands. Brighton is where the Rye trains from Ashford end their journeys. Sea Front (below) by Matt Hardman…mixed media 18”x24”…gives an idea of what these piers have withstood over the past hundred years.

I spent a couple of hours with Heidi on the boat yesterday afternoon. I contrive to get my guests to visit at high tide but as Vemara spends twice as much time on the mud as afloat the odds are against me. At the moment our tides are on neaps which means that the highest tides are a week away in either direction and the daily high and low tides are in the middle of the full range…a 2.7 yesterday compared with a 3.3 on 13th June and a 3.3 again on 27th June.

The highest and lowest tides of the year are around the Equinoxes in March and September when they range from 1.7 to 4.3. The highest points of the spring tides…this is what these two weekly high tides are called…occur at midday and midnight with the high tide advancing by about an hour every day to give us the neap tides at six o’clock morning and evening. On most tides Vemara is afloat for at least an hour and a half either side of high tide. Philosophically tides are quite dangerous. They were instrumental in persuading Galileo to the Copernican Cause and look at the trouble this caused him with the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of the time.

I went to Ashford in the morning and called in on Lesley Brownbill on my return to give her the sad news that I may have attended my last ever Ryesingers rehearsal. I am not planning to return from Stockholm for next month’s concert in Camber and hope to be settled in Lund by the time of the Christmas Carol Concert at East Guldforde and the February 2007 performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida.

Next year is an Elgar Anniversary Year so it will be The Dream of Gerontis everywhere. Not one to follow the herd Lesley was looking for something completely different. My suggestion of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio did not go down well. Local people have mixed reactions to Paul McCartney. One of my stories is that my daughter was once employed to paint Paul’s boat.

But the favourite McCartney story in Rye is about the time that Linda McCartney came aboard Barnaby Rudge. As is the way with royalty, during the lads’ lunch break Linda asked one of them what he had in his sandwich. ‘Ham, Ma’am!’ was the reply. Related with relish this story never fails to get a laugh. Decades before the Great Unwashed were taught by Jamie Oliver that you are what you eat, Linda was an Evangelical Vegetarian…which in small towns like Rye means seriously subversive and downright weird.

I love these light midsummer days and was up with the lark at five. By the time I arrived at Jempson's for breakfast at eight my e-mails had been sorted at Meads Books. NCAB came in with a rush job last week just as all our translators disappeared for their Scandinavian Midsummer Breaks and we were still scrambling for someone to deliver 380 words of Norwegian. But at midday Cultura UK (me) put Cultura Sweden (Alan) on the phone to sweet talk the client. A deal was struck so the heat is off. Our normal translator will do it on Monday when she returns to her desk.

While searching for a translator several offers went out to translators registered on a Translators’ Exchange…a very impressive website that seems to works extremely well. But the whole business is crying out for a Union Organiser as websites like this force down wages. Of course with the side effects being the main effects the website probably doubles up as a Singles Agency…much like Friends Reunited…so it gives good value for money to its users.

I posted my Runnymede weblog yesterday almost a week late. I had struggled over it and even after posting it I was still far from happy with my version of events. The more research I did the less sense it all made. So today I shut the cabin door…metaphorically speaking…ignored the beautiful weather and the cormorants, ducks, oyster-catchers, terns, heron and seagulls weaving and dipping around outside…and settled myself down to read Shakespeare’s King John. It made matters worse. So I read the introduction. This added to my confusion so I got hold of Holinshed’s Chronicles…the source for Shakespeare’s Histories. At last some light at the end of the tunnel.

The version of the Runnymede weblog posted last Wednesday assumed Shakespeare’s Histories to be reliable history. This is not the case and King John has been called Shakespeare’s most unhistorical play. John reigned from 1199 to 1216 and even though Shakespeare only concerns himself with the last months of John’s reign he still condenses the months of action into a few days to get his play to work on the stage. In 1213 for instance…according to Hollinshed…John gave his crown to the Pope’s ambassador Cardinal Pandulph who held onto it for five days before giving it back. In Shakespeare’s play Pandulph keeps it for five seconds. Historians hate this sort of inaccuracy.

Shakespeare’s manipulation of historical facts brings out the dangerous similarities between the reigns of John and Elizabeth where for Arthur Elizabethan audiences would read Mary Queen of Scots. An English sovereign…said to be a usurper and a bastard…defies the Pope; is excommunicated; imprisons his rival barred from the crown by a will; the Pope invites another king to invade; the English sovereign urges the murder of the Pretender and then needs a scapegoat; a foreign invasion is attempted…the invaders planning to kill the Englishmen helping them; their navy is providentially wrecked off the English Coast and finally English unity is achieved through the failure of the invasion.

John Masefield pointed out that the great scheme of the play is the great achievement. Treachery is the play’s leitmotiv...with Machiavellian morality-free politics the same problem that Elizabeth was facing in her own day. King John was about Elizabethan Times…and was deliberately crafted to emphasis the Elizabethan parallel. Every deviation from Hollinshed that is not there from dramatic necessity…is included for this reason.

Shakespeare is fascinated by the power of women like John’s mother Eleanor, Arthur’s mother Constance and his future wife Blanche. Arthur is portrayed as being as besotted with Blanche as Henry VIIIth was with Ann Boleyn…before she agreed to marry him…as the Henry-Ann Boleyn letters bear witness. Shakespeare’s complex understanding of the personal power of women in relationship has been analysed by Ted Hughes in The Goddess of Complete Being…his analysis of the last twelve plays of Shakespeare from this viewpoint…although Hughes’ ideas have yet to percolate through into Shakespeare Scholarship. But Hughes deals with only one of the two key aspects of Women & Power. The other related aspect concerns the manner in which women wield power within power systems. Shakespeare has little doubt that their influence can be considerable for both good…Portia in The Merchant of Venice…and evil…Lady Macbeth. King John should feature in any scholarly analysis.

Blanche…who has a minor walk-on part in King John…is given a good one-liner by Shakespeare when she remarks that ‘The Lady Constance speaks not from her faith but from her need’ which gets to the very heart of the drama. Shakespeare uses messengers as a dramatic device to keep the audience informed of the twists and turns in the plot and it is in this way that we hear that the Lady Constance ‘in a frenzy died’. Hell has no fury like a woman scorned...or crossed. Here is Constance’s reaction to the peace deal between France and England.

‘War! War! No peace! Peace is to me a war.
O Limoges! O Austria! Thou dost shame
That bloody spoil; thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward!
Thou little valiant, great in villainy.’

Constance’s real concern is what will become of her once there is a deal between the English and the French. She rightly reasons that her plan to rule England as the de facto Regent of the Realm until the boy-king Arthur comes of age puts her at a grave risk. John also knows that he must square Constance for his deal with Arthur to work. Indeed this is his first thought after establishing the price of Arthur’s allegiance. Here is King John.

‘...We will heal all up;
For we’ll create young Arthur Duke of Britain
And Earl of Richmond; and this rich fair town
We make him lord of. Call the Lady Constance;
Some speedy messenger bid her repair
To our solemnity; I trust we shall,
If not fill up the measure of her will,
Yet in some measure satisfy her so
That we shall stop her exclamation.’

Next Constance has a go at the Earl of Salisbury…going for the messenger because she dislikes the message.

‘Gone to be married! Gone to swear a peace!
False blood to false blood joined! Gone to be friends!
France friend with England, what becomes of me?

Fellow, be gone: I cannot brook the sight.
This news hath made thee a most ugly man!’

So there! Salisbury has a bad play. He goes over to the French in an effort to keep his lands in Brittany only to learn from Count Melun’s deathbed confession that the French nobles had sworn an oath to slay the English traitors once they had served their purpose…except that this like everything else in King John could be more disinformation.

Paul McCartney was 64 yesterday and had his first family with him in Peasmarsh…a few miles from Rye…to celebrate the occasion. Paul’s children met up at the Abbey Road Studios a few weeks ago and recorded a new set of lyrics for one of Paul’s best-known songs: When I’m 64. I thought of writing new lyrics for the song a few months ago. But my idea was to write the song from the point of view of somebody in his or her mid-eighties looking back at the time they were 64. No matter. We can make it a trilogy.

Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio is seriously under-rated and many of the songs he wrote as one of the four Beatles can be compared favourably with the best that Mozart or Schumann produced. The other day I listened again to the lyrics of his song For No One…a poignant love song from the break-up of a relationship…that appeared first on The Beatles’ Revolver Album and was then recycled into another underrated artistic work…this time a film…Say Goodbye to Broad Street. Paul wrote the song in a ski chalet while on holiday with Jane Asher.

The ability to write great songs does not diminish with age but the urge to do the necessary mental and psychological workouts to be able to do so gets harder as you get older. There will be more to come from Paul McCartney now he has broken up from Heather Mills and can start grieving properly for the death of his first wife Linda Eastman several years ago. Bereavement is hard enough without having to do it in the public eye.

My laptop refused to crank up on Sunday morning with a full day’s work planned…so much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. The gods love doing this to me. I took my Apple Mac Mini out from the storage to which it had been consigned since my return from Llangolmen but it too refused to work. My third option was Heidi’s old desktop that has been under the cabin table for the past year or so. It started, went for ten minutes and then gave up the ghost. I decided enough was enough, removed my hard drive and a couple of working DVD Players and threw the remains in the skip. From boom to bust…but at least I have some legroom under the table now. I still have the keys to Clive Ogden’s bookshop so figured I would have emergency back up…something I used yesterday and today.

Last Wednesday NCAB gave us a newsletter to translate urgently. By Friday NCAB had asked for it in Norwegian, Finnish and Spanish as well as in English. Norwegian is causing us problems again…it is boom time for Norway and Norwegian translators. Our regular Norwegian translator has gone home for Midsummer and three other Norwegian translators have turned us down so we are scrambling. Our best hope lies with our Finnish translator who may have found someone. We will know tomorrow. It is irritating as the newsletter is only 380 words.

It has been a cultural few days. On Friday I was at Hastings College in St. Leonard’s-on-Sea for the private viewing of the college students’ end-of-year exhibition. The sheer range of arts, crafts and artefacts on display was what impressed me most. I did not get to meet Françoise but her pièce de résistance…a screen with thirty-six panels of black glass each with its own multi-coloured metallic flashes…was worth the trip across the county.

Saturday was the Ryesingers’ Summer Concert with a rehearsal at 5 pm and the performance in Rye Methodist Church from 7.30 pm until 9.15 pm. This may turn out to be my last appearance with Ryesingers although Princess Ida is on the schedule for February 2007. Hmm! We delivered our best performances on each item on our Mozart programme which is the way one hopes it will be...trusting to the adrenaline to kick in.

In between cultural events I have been writing my weblogs, keeping abreast with e-mails and reading Sarah Harrison’s 1980 novel A Flower That’s Free. This was given a boost on Sunday following the digital disasters of the morning. Being able to think of nothing better to do I took the rest of the day off. No bad thing as it meant Vemara’s engine got a one-hour workout between 1550 and 1650...its first since moving moorings. A birthday greetings card went off to my brother and my son over the weekend. Here is what I had to say.

‘This is the first and last time I can justify sending the same card at the same time to John Clive (62) born 19 June 1944 and Nicholas John (31) born 18 June 1975 because Nicholas will never again be half the age of John...numerologically speaking. If you count weeks, months or days and anything other than years it doesn't actually work out because the first year of our life is year zero. There's something to mull over for a day or two.’

‘And look out John. Nicholas is catching you up. The ratio of the length of your life to the length of his is decreasing steadily. And unless Nicholas gets run over by an elephant…this almost happened before when he was in Africa… the natural order of things is for the ratio to plummet to zero about thirty years from now when the mean average of the biblical three score years and ten (70) and the age of the oldest Englishman alive (110) brings The Grim Reaper to John's door.

Whether or not I'll be there to witness the event is a moot point. We're born with nothing. We go with nothing. So what have we lost? Nothing!’ John responded to my philosophical thoughts with the alternative view that ‘we are born with no memories and die with many memories…hopefully good ones’. Hmm! I know the theory.

Whilst wintering in Llangolman I made it through the long dark Welsh winter nights by watching DVDs of a twelve-part series of The Best of the TV Detectives acquired for the price of a copy of the Daily Express each weekday for two weeks. The plot of one of these dramas hinged on a claim that there was no mobile phone signal. The hero of the hour did his research and at the last moment…with the situation at its bleakest for the poor besieged train driver up for manslaughter…a defence witness was rushed onto the stand. He was an expert on mobile phones and duly explained to the judge and the jury that mobile phone signals are affected by wind and rain.

The strength of a mobile phone signal dips in the rain…and in sleet, snow and hail. The heavier the precipitation the greater the interference. So next time you are on the train tell your caller that it is raining outside as well. This presents an interesting opportunity for a new era of Gentlemen and People Science. Mobile phone networks can replace radar as a back-up to rain gauges…with the big advantage that they record what happens under the clouds instead of guessing that where there are clouds there must be rain like the radar does. But then guessing is what meteorologists do…and climatologists have carried on the tradition.

The atmosphere is a big mystery. The Carbonistas like to push the notion that Global Warming is going to raise the temperature so more moisture will evaporate from the ocean and put more moisture into the air and that this will increase the Greenhouse Effect by fifty percent. Their computer models tell them that a doubling of CO2 in the air will heat the planet by 3 to 8 degrees Celsius. The trouble is when you talk to people who understand things like the scientists at the Center for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate in La Jolla California they tell a rather different story.

A warmer moister atmosphere will create a different pattern of cloud cover. This might dramatically enhance the heating…or it might counteract it. Five years of satellite measurements between 1984 and 1989 established that clouds cool the planet more effectively than they heat it…for now. Clouds remove the heat of a 60-watt light bulb from every six-by-six foot patch of Earth’s surface. These results show that net cloud cooling is four times greater than the warming expected from doubling CO2. Without clouds the planet could be twenty degrees hotter.

Clouds matter…so water is one of the greenhouse gases that Carbonistas have mixed feelings about because it might just play merry hell with their Carbon Story. The H2O molecule has four times the power of the CO2 molecule. So the climate modellers take the only course open to them. They make a stab at it when it comes to clouds. As far as cloud cover is concerned they guess…although it is only the very best scientists that call it that. The rest use words like estimate, parameterisation or approximation. But how do you approximate something you don’t understand? Finger in the wind? Whistle in the dark? It’s a guess. But perhaps the humble mobile phone can come to the rescue.

The evidence is not there yet but the thinking is that if the mobile phone mast is picking up fluctuations caused by wind and rain then it is probably reacting to shifting levels of water vapour in the atmosphere as well. Mobile phone masts might not be the scourge we all thought they were. They could be the leading edge of the War Against Global Warming. Now there’s a thought…and a rather useful one…because collecting scientific date is no simple matter.

It is no accident that so much science is qualified by the term ‘under laboratory conditions’. Operant conditions have a way of playing havoc with the best-laid scientific hypotheses so good scientists always record all of them. Take the temperature-time series to illustrate. You can do one of two things. You measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions.

The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre. In fact as a general statement towns have expanded to overwhelm most of the climate scientists’ data collection points.

Built-up environments are several degrees warmer than similar places without people. On that at least there seems to be a consensus…although I have not delved that deeply and have become sceptical about the idea of consensus. So what does our poor scientist do? He looks for an article in the scientific press with a graph of temperature versus land use. He gets a little hot under the collar when he sees that it swamps any shifts in his own data but he has learnt how you do this sort of thing in college…and besides everybody else does it. It is best practice. So he alters his data.

He has clever names for these alterations like correcting for anomalies. But to you and me what he is actually up to is crossing out the numbers he measured and replacing them with different numbers that he has made up. Now just a minute! What we thought was raw data is now adjusted raw data. And this brings in a whole new question about how the data is adjusted, where that graph came from, what algorithms are being used and the different operant conditions at the graph site and the measurement site. Even something as simple as collecting data is far from simple.

On Thursday I started a piece for Rye’s Own with the working title of The Ambassadors of Rye. I had my Coleridge Moment whilst in mid-flow when Martin Hutchings turned up unannounced to inspect his old boat. As I am considering making it his son David’s new boat once I no longer have any need of a cabin roof over my head in England I welcomed him aboard and invited him below for a cup of coffee...besides the guest is sacred.

However my good manners have consequences as I have now missed the deadline for the July issue of Rye’s Own. But to cut my losses I am minded to introduce the text of the article into next week’s blogs...so expect discussions of Locality & Interests, Structure & Behaviour and Property & Improperty. The current draft begins like this.

‘The Rye Town Region with its seven parishes and eleven thousand souls will one day have its own ambassadors. Diplomacy matters and a Town State like Rye does not need to be a Nation State with a seat in the United Nations before engaging in Foreign Affairs.’ At this point a geographer from the London School of Economics...in a book entitled Democratic Ideals and Reality written in 1906 but not published until after the Kaiser War in 1919...enters the fray with his remark that in politics the future would be Locality vs. Interests. And by this he meant Outside Interests.

It is going to be a busy next few days on the scribbling front. Last Wednesday’s blog was supposed to summarise my recent research into what was really going on when King John signed Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15th June 1215. I posted a few pieces about Magna Carta to the history folder on my Swedish website as far back as 1999. This week I copied the folder to my laptop and started adding new files to it.

First was a talk given by Lord Woolf The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales at Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey on 15 June 2005 entitled Magna Carta: a Precedent for Recent Constitutional Change in which he quotes Rudyard Kipling’s poem on Runneymede. I also found four small vignettes from Dr Mike Ibeji on The National Trust’s Runnymede website about the events leading up to Magna Carta, the gathering of the rebels, Magna Carta itself and the death of John. Then there is Shakespeare.

I have Shakespeare’s King John on the boat and have dipped into it now and again over the past year. As with all his history plays Shakespeare relied upon the second...1587...edition of Holinshed's Chronicles. But he also consulted the fourth edition of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs as well as using a Latin text called the Wakefield Chronicle and the Historia Maior of Matthew Paris for many of the minor plot details in the play.

There is also the interesting matter of an anonymous play called The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England published in two parts in 1591. Some scholars reckon this is an important source of King John...Dover Wilson for instance suggests it is the sole source...but others reckon that Shakespeare's play was the source of The Troublesome Raigne. There is more to good writing than putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. There is good research too.

I was brought up on the edge of Oxleas Woods between Shooters Hill and Eltham Palace. The woods were planted by the English Navy to supply timber for the Naval Dockyards on the Thames at Chatham, Woolwich and Greenwich. My parents bought a house on Crookston Road named not because bankers lived there...as they do now...but because to the architects and carpenters of the English Navy the crooks on an oak tree were the most valuable part of the tree.

The strongest bent grown-wood sections are where the main branches of the oak meet the trunk of the tree. The ever-evolving glue technology may have beaten nature for the moment but nature has a way of having the last laugh so the jury is still out. During the latest Volvo Round the World Race boats for instance chunks started breaking away from the yachts’ hulls. These ocean racing yachts use the latest materials technology and such things should not happen.

The Royal Navy's forestry planning dealt in 200 year time frames. The trees I played in as a child were planted in the 1750s at the start of the canal-building age. As the Royal Navy had a policy of always having twice as much tonnage on the high seas as everybody else in the world combined...an amazingly arrogant ambition...they were doubtless none too chuffed when the pits, mines, canals and railways began putting demand on the country’s timber supplies.

The imperial myth may be best understood from the real histories of the Royal Navy and the City of London. Public policy from Samuel Pepys to the present day...or at least until the Wilson Labour Government started pulling back from East of Suez in the 1960s...cared little for the people of England but was designed to meet the strange needs of these two institutions and their subsidiary companies like the Bank of England and the East Indian Company.

Fear of the English Mob was the only effective restraining factor on the use and abuse of ordinary people before the likes of Charles Dickens and William Wilberforce began to insist on putting morality back into Political Economy in the nineteenth century. It is worth reflecting on this as local people everywhere develop their own local responses to globalisation and the use and abuse of local people for the strange benefits of a new gang of outside interests.

PC Hut re-opened for business today after the proprietor had spent ten days falling frustratingly in love with every Spanish woman in Barcelona under the age of forty...which I am reliably informed is on the Costa Brava and not the Costa del Sol which is Andalusia and not Catalonia. Dear Diary I must swot up on my Spanish regions.

I use the word frustratingly advisedly because Tony Payne has now discovered that if you don’t speak the local language you become dependent upon getting to know women who not only speak English but also feel disposed to do so with you. This lengthens the odds and leaves you a victim of much unrequited love. This type lasts the longest.

Meanwhile in England summer came and went and came back again. The old adage of the English summertime being several days of sunshine and then a thunderstorm rings true. High pressure and sunshine led to high temperatures briefly by day and night. The daytime maximum at the London Weather Centre on Monday was eighty eight degrees Fahrenheit...the hottest temperature recorded on June 12 since 1897. Such temperatures were hardly surprising during Monday as the lowest temperature recorded on Sunday night was a balmy seventy degrees.

But at the same time the weather was already changing to a cooler regime towards the West Country and Wales as a feature known to meteorologists as a short-wave trough approached picking up heat and moisture from the tropics on the way. On its arrival in the West of England this atmospheric weakness...wonderful term...allowed thunderstorms to barge high into the sky as daytime heat forced thermal currents upwards. I read that in the papers so it must be true.

Worst hit by water was the area between the Peak District and the North Yorkshire Moors where summer was ended abruptly by thunderclouds and there was flooding everywhere disrupting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Worst hit by the heat were motorists on the M25...the Great Wen’s Ring Road...who were forced to a standstill for more than six hours in the blistering heat as a Road Maintenance Crew was dragged away from watching the World Cup on their television screens and ordered to re-tar-macadam the road after a lorry had burst into flames.

Only the UK Highways Agency could make this sort of idiotic trade-off. The French would have had Red Adair on call to shove the truck down the embankment and dowse it with foam so cars were moving again within twenty minutes instead of six hours. Goodness only knows how we ever managed to run an empire. Perhaps it’s a myth.

Meanwhile time and tide were reluctant to wait for a man from the Highways Agency to finish his cup of tea. Following behind the trough line were more bearable temperatures as the maritime origin of the air brought temperatures back to a much fresher 63-68F across Wales and the West Country by Monday afternoon.

The Ancient Town of Rye sticks out into the English Channel so its microclimate...like everybody else’s local weather...is quite different. Also the reasons for the differences differ from those of some other places...but the same as some other other places. Rye is strongly influenced by sea breezes. These baffle forecasters because they have a tidal function as well as a diennial function...and the moon’s weekly cycle is not the same as the sun’s.

Sea breezes develop when sunshine beating on land surfaces send huge warm-air thermals into the skies. The air at the surface must be replaced from somewhere and in coastal regions the air employed lies over the sea. This air is cold. I was brought up swimming all year round in Eltham Park Open Air Swimming Baths...the water was always freezing in June and only started to warm up towards the end of July unless there was an exceptional run of hot weather. And the mass of water in the Eltham Pool hardly compares with Rye Bay or the English Channel. Even then water temperature never ventured much above the low seventies.

My mother was one of the all-year-round stalwarts and took a leading part in ensuring that the pool was kept open when the M2 Motorway from Dover to the Blackwall Tunnel was forced through in the 1970s. Mum...bless her...was usually decades ahead of her time. Now all over the country local councils are under siege as they are being instructed by their local voters to refurbish and reopen these lidos built in the 1920s with public money and closed down in the 1970s on spurious health, safety...but mostly stupidity...grounds.

Sea breezes cool the coasts. Thursday 8th June is fairly typical. While temperatures of 68 degrees were being reported by the English Harbour Towns, the English Market Towns inland were in the mid to high seventies. Such differences beg many questions about the raw temperature/time data being used by the Climate Changelings when this type of small-scale local weather pattern has weather forecasters scratching their heads and kicking their computers.

By early afternoon on this particular Thursday while England was basking in almost unbroken sunshine, a ribbon of cloud with light showery rain stretched all the way along the M4 and then into East Anglia. This cloud marked the point where the sea breeze is effectively turned back by the land breezes. Clouds billowed up and ruined the forecast.

An e-mail came in overnight from Adam Crosland to brief me on the changes he had made to the Radical Consultation's profile on MySpace. He also needed some help linking the Gaian Knight image to the the knightly order text on the Magna Carta II website. So I spent an hour figuring things out. The work done over the years with HTML came in handy. My reply included the piece of HTML code used for hyperlinking the image and a piece of text to provide two routes to the Magna Carta blog.

While working on the MySpace site I took the chance to warn Adam that I was hoping for three more images from him very soon for linking in a similar manner to the Declaration of Independence, the Real Nations Charter and the Real Communities Charter. The Chaucer theme worked well for the Gaian Knights so I am hoping for something similar for the Neighbourhood Charter with its links to Charter 2015 Project and Magna Carta II.

This morning I found a second draft of England’s Economic Politics for a new century...dated Saturday 21st May 2005...with two new chapters...Yeoman, Peasants & Artisans and Wessex Real Bank & Riegel Exchange Bank...and three new appendices...Cow Economics, The Wealth of Counties and The Real Bank of Wessex. The word count is up to 97 700 and donation requested is up 50% to £ 7 500. Here is an edited version from the chapter on Time & Money.

In 1995 I started a publishing house and by the end of 2004 I figured that my publishing activities had a sufficient head of steam that it made sense to raise £20 000 of private equity and to do this by selling 8 of the 64 shares in three micro-publishing businesses. I calculated that over 10 years £60 000 had been invested so this would mean that if I got my price...implying a minimum value of a £160 000 for the business...then I would have been adding value at £10 000 a year. Wealth or value is not the same as money. So where had the money come from?

The arithmetic is fairly complicated because 2 man-years had been invested in the Private Papers of Crocodile Uppsala and about £10 000 spent setting up the Linnaeus Journeys Project in the Baltic in 1998. Neither project were considered ready for inclusion in any share issue but the inheritance money had gone into these two projects as well as into the Magpie Sagas Publishing and Rye Maritime Books that were to be included.

Before Connie died I had no doubt that the investment would be recouped many times over. Connie’s death played havoc with my motivation...and complications over ownership have not helped...but for all that this 10-year project represents a typical microbusiness startuing up from scratch with very little money and with inheritances providing a little of the seed capital.

About a third of the money came from Retained Earnings. Connie and I each earned about £1 000 a year more than we spent...though our income and expenditure profiles differed. Connie spent little and earned her money at wage slavery rates of £8 an hour by picking up 12 hours of pottery painting each week. Her rule was also to only put money into her boat that she earned working on someone else's boats.

I earned more, spent more and paid our overheads. My income also depended upon an erratic workload from Cultura. So I had good years and bad years. But over the 10 years between falling in love in 1992 and losing Connie in 2002 my Profit & Loss Statement would have been in the black while my Net Worth was climbing steadily. In practice of course we were being forced to save as we were often broke...although never desperately so. We went sailing each summer for 6-10 weeks...and we were very happy. Work-life balance was as good as it gets.

Another third came from loans and credit cards arranged with the commercial banks. Some new equity money could go to pay down debt but an Individual Voluntary Agreement might be better...it’s a straightforward business decision which may depend upon cash flow forecasts when the Magpie Sagas goes to bookshops in the UK and China.

The final third came from a couple of half-bites into two £20 000 inheritances. One of them came from my parents...but one house does not go far between four boys. This is one of the few times in life when it is useful being an only child. The other legacy came from Connie's parents by way of a divorce settlement that happened to coincide with the deathof her ex-husband's last surviving parent.

Now let me introduce you to a rule of thumb I refer to as The Rule of Five. My experience over the past 10 years is that without money you spend £1 for every £5 spent with money. The other side of the coin is that if you have only your retained earnings to invest and recycle back into your business then it takes five times as long to get to the same place.

When I started publishing in 1995 I expected it to take about 4 years to get to where I am today...ten years later even with money being tight. Had I been setting up the project in a large publishing corporation with a proper budget I would have given it a 2-year time line. With hindsight I reckon my estimates were about right as there is 2 years-worth of work...4 man-years as there were two of us...invested in the projects in the share offer. Working for a big publisher Connie and I would have justified salaries of £25 000 a year. 10 years instead of 2 is a factor of five. So time is not money after all. Money is Time. Less money is more time and more money is less time. It is a factor of five. Hence the Rule of Five.

‘Given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign’. Thus goes the text of the preliminary draft of Magna Carta. Four copies survive, at Lincoln and Salisbury Cathedrals and two in the British Museum. The year is 1215. Sixteen months later King John was dead and his young nine-year old son Henry III was on the English throne.

In Shakespeare’s King John, between Runnymede on 15th June 1215 and John’s suspicious death on 19th October 1216, Queen Eleonor…Henry II’s wife and the mother of Richard I and King John…also dies, Richard’s son Arthur…Pretender to the English Throne…falls to his death from the castle walls trying to escape custody…and Arthur’s mother Constance wrecks the peace deal between Arthur and John and blessed by France and Spain…a deal that includes the lovely Blanche…daughter to Alfonso King of Castille and John’s niece by his sister Elianor. Arthur is as besotted with Blanche as Henry VIIIth was later to be with Ann Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth’s mother.

Standing in the wings at the time of Magna Carta and allied with King Philip of France were the merchants of The City of London . While jostling for advantage and shifting with the moods of the latest perfidy are a bunch of noble cross benchers with their French estates at risk from the royal wheeling and dealing. Behind the scenes of this very European drama lurks Pope Innocent III…represented by his ambassador Cardinal Pandulph…who shuffles back and forth between the royal courts…not to preserve the peace…but to further the interests of the Roman Catholic Church.

For several days leading up to the signing of the Great Charter of English Liberties, John was in negotiation with the barons, the Church and the merchants of London. Signing of a preliminary draft marked John’s formal acceptance. This draft…the Articles of the Barons…listed 49 specific grievances that the King agreed to remedy. From it the full text was prepared in the Royal Chancery...so John got to write the minutes…with some further clauses added.

Here is what Rudyard Kipling…a pretender to the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square…heard whispered at Runnymede.

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take,
That bend so far, but never break,
They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Oh, hear the reeds at Runnymede:
You mustn't sell, delay, deny,
A freeman's right or liberty.
It wakes the stubborn Englishry;
We saw 'em roused at Runnymede!

When through our ranks the Barons came,
With little thought of praise or blame,
But resolute to play the game,
They lumbered up to Runnymede;
And there they launched in solid line
The first attack on Right Divine,
The curt uncompromising "Sign!'
They settled John at Runnymede.

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers.
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter signed at Runnymede.'

And still when mob or Monarch lays
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,
Across the reeds at Runnymede.
And Thames, that knows the moods of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!

A few days after the official signing with the parties still gathered at Runnymede copies of the charter began to be issued over the King’s seal for the general information of the realm. This was the signal for dispersal. But this tells only half the story. For more about what really happened at Runnymede visit my Swedish website.

Eighteen months ago I discovered a Rule of Five buried deep within some Economic History Research I had embarked upon. This Rule of Five provides a monetary explanation for the English Industrial Revolution and may one day get the attention of Economic Historians. But don’t hold your breath. These things take time. Old professors must die off before new ideas are embraced. This one’s for posterity. Hello Posterity!

The 35000 word essay England’s Economic Politics for a new century is the size of The Rise & Fall of the Swedish Green Party (1972-1998). The Ivan Illich footnoting approach gives me twelve appendices and another 35000 words. The text is divided into 24 chapters…the Rise & Fall was my model…and three parts…Theory, Reality and Strategy.

The first part discusses the thinking and premises underlying my world view…where I am coming from. The second part offers insights into the Microbusiness Sector. The third part discusses strategy and proposes a grass-roots debt cancellation strategy and a local approach to the Ownwork and Microbusiness Investment problems.

The list of contents looks like this. Prologue. Part I: Theory - Page 5: Orthodoxy & Heresy; Political Economy; Money Talks; Kings; Land; War Business; Debt Laundering; Clean Slate Doctrine. Part II: Reality - Page 19: Commercial Credit; Work Experience; Ownwork; Business; Accounting; Poor or Penniless; Owning & Renting; Monetary Dispatronage. Part III: Strategy - Page 30: Business & Banking; Money & Time; Bankruptcy; Local Front; Slate Cleaning; Bailiwick Bonds; Enterprise Equity; Order of Gaian Knights; Epilogue.

The appendices include Lies & Truth from Mesopotamia and a Clean Slate Handbook. The other appendices are: About the Author; The Artist as a Young Man; Human Ecology; Structural Sociology; The Duke of Buen Consejo; The Royal Prerogative; Tea-Time at Marshbeck; Energy Economics and Prices & Economics.

I need money like everybody else. Drug smuggling would be ideal; time outlay very low; money returns very high. But I haven't got the bottle for it...and the downside is bad news too. I am told there are grants for what I do but 25 years ago I made a decision to ignore them. I was living in America and noticed that the American Alternative Movement came in two flavours...people who got on with it and people who had meetings, formed committees, collected patrons and applied for grants. The world has changed…and donations are not the same as grants.

So on Monday 11th October 2004 I rather boldly added a Request for Donations to the frontispiece of my manuscript that went like this. ‘The first edition of English Economic Politics for a new century by William Shepherd is to be published in Swedish. £ 5000 is required for the translation. To discuss donations contact Academic Inn Books.

Hope springs eternal so there is also a PayPal button on the cesc website…all monies managed by William Franklin & Sons Limited. Patrons can be sent a receipt and may find themselves mentioned in weblogs and dispatches If they prefer anonymity then the modern way is to give interest-free non-repayable loans. I will be dropping in excerpts from the manuscript from time to time…including The Rule of Five. For today here is an extract from the prologue.

‘The job of government is to enable ordinary people to get on with their lives. An underlying theme running through this essay is that government needs to reinvent itself by remembering what it is for. I am wary of categories but in this essay I complain that the microbusiness sector has been overlooked in the growth of guaranteed incomes and is discriminated against in the creation and distribution of money. The biggest challenge government faces is to dismantle the Central Banking Mechanism.

Over the next few decades another key job for government is to remove obstacles to business. But the business I talk about takes place wherever two or three people are gathered together to do good work. This is the only business government should care about...the busy-ness of ordinary people. The rest can and will look after themselves. Real people have moral duties. Judicial persons do not do morality...the notion is ethical nonsense. The legal rights of real people should override those of judicial persons.

Twenty five years ago I read Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller. I don't believe everything I read in books but Bucky did a lifetime of ownwork and knew a thing or two. He had a chapter on Self-Disciplines. Never advertise your work. Turn ideas into working models. That sort of thing. Some had to do with money. His bottom line was straight from our Christian Gospels. Don't worry! Keep working! Be happy! Consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air! The Lord will provide! You find this scary? So do I. It gets worse. For Buckminster Fuller the work of any little individual could be for themselves and for immediate gratification or for everybody and for all time.

God's cosmic calculus provides greater rewards the more your work is for all the people all the time. Meanwhile Providence supplies money on a just-in-time basis...just in the nick of time. Is this Old Nick? Why would a Good Lord do that? When I want my faith tested I'll let Him know. And I wondered why Greek Heroes railed at their gods!

At present the World Population Clock is reading 6521million. One of them has been convicted of involvement in the destruction of the World Trade Center that lowered the count by 2752 on 11th September 2001. Last October two more terrorists were arrested in Sarajevo and in March this year the War on Terror almost doubled its success rate when a man was arrested in Atlanta. Unfortunately his accomplice escaped to Bangladesh where blackmail and bullying…of the government…should get him sent back to the USA.

So there must have been much rejoicing among the Executioners of the War on Terror last week when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came up with their enormous haul of seventeen terror suspects in one fell swoop. Regrettably Suspects is all they are. None of them has been charged. But expect a caution or two for minor firearm violations in a couple of month’s time. I could add the 600 detainees in Guantanamo Bay but nobody gets charged with anything in there. Once in you are there until you commit suicide for propaganda purposes….which at the present rate means there will only be a handful left by the end of the year.

And so to England now that summer has arrived. George Bush had his ninth of September so Tony Blair had to have his seventh of July. Stephen Harper and Bill Blair are basking in the success of their anti-terrorist operation in Toronto…these Blairs are everywhere like mutants from X-Men…so John Reid and Ian Blair must have their own basking opportunity in London. These dated events are useful as patriotic fervour can be whipped up annually without going through it all again. Poppy Day lasted almost a hundred years before anyone felt the need to rebrand it.

But oh dear! The fiendishly clever Al Qaeda has discovered disinformation and has been feeding false information to the Stupidity Services to undermine their operational efficiency and make them a laughing stock. Let Private Eye’s terrorist correspondent W.M. Deedes take up the story. ‘The Prime Minister today defended the invasion of a house in Lansdown Road, Forest Gate, insisting that ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ would eventually be found there. The invasion by 250 crack police marksmen and chemical warfare experts was based he said on ‘foolproof evidence contained in a dossier compiled by the intelligence services’.

‘It may take time,’ he continued, ‘to find the weapons in the house but make no mistake they will be found…unless they have been moved out to a neighbouring borough. Anyway this is a big house…a one-up one-down…and there is even a garden shed at the back. These weapons could be anywhere or nowhere. As I speak officers are in a wardrobe upstairs with a torch. Sooner or later they are bound to find something…unless they don’t.’

The Prime Minister was then asked about the unfortunate shooting of various members of the household during the invasion to which he replied, ‘It is unfortunate that there have been civilian casualties but in the war on terror there is bound to be collateral damage.’ The Prime Minister finally handed out copies of the intelligence dossier which he had printed out from the internet which made the sensational claim that deadly mothballs the size of a marble were capable of killing millions of people in Britain within 45 minutes.'

The trouble is that this is starting to make peace-loving citizens increasingly nervous. In my case for instance I am now bracing myself for a dawn raid on my Post Office Box. “We know you’re in there! Come out with your hands up!” You know the kind of thing. I won’t be charged of course…that is not The English Way any more…but there will be leaks to my friend Paul Ashford at the Daily Express and warnings to choose his company with more care as I have been groomed by a skilled propagandist suspected of destroying private property in Ireland…although John Seymour always insisted that it was the fairies and not the Knights of Gaia that destroyed the GM crops.

Private Eye ended its report by citing the Prime Minister. ‘We had no choice,’ he insisted. ‘We had to invade and we will stay in this troubled borough of East London for as long as it takes to restore democracy.’ This is the tack they’re all taking. And with the Fine Art of Crap Detecting in terminal decline they are getting away with it too. It’s the most awful load of codswallop if you really start to think about it. Here’s a suggestion for Our Brave Boys in Blue.

The next time the Stupidity Services come to you with one of their Nudge-nudge Wink-wink Hot-off-the-Presses Tip-offs from an Al-Qaeda Double Agent in their employ trot along to your friendly neighbourhood magistrate and get yourself a Search Warrant. Then give it to a young eager Moslem policewoman and tell her to take one of her female colleagues along to the address, knock on the door and explain about the anonymous tip-off the police have received.

This could do wonders for Community Relations. Moslems respect women…which is more than can be said for Christians and Materialists…so no harm will come to them. They might even speak the local language. If the clever young ladies play their cards right they will not have to produce the search warrant, or terrorise the neighbourhood, or shoot innocent civilians, or waste thousands of hours of police time or munch their way through a million pounds of taxpayers’ money. George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Blair the author of 1984…born in Bengal India.

My Curriculum Vitae has an entry for ‘Wheelock College, Boston, USA, 1981-1985’ that reads: 1981 Assistant Professor of Education teaching Organisational Development; 1983 Co-Founder and Tutor-in-Residence of Human Scale Institute on Martha’s Vineyard; 1985 Publication of The Ecology of Learning course for teachers and professional educators’. The summer campus for the Human Scale Institute was at Anna Edey’s Solviva Gardens.

Anna Edey was born and raised in Sweden and moved to the USA in 1957 where she raised three daughters and built herself a career on Martha’s Vineyard dyeing and weaving wool from her own sheep and Angora rabbits before the gods took her under their wings and set her to work weaving a web of life. Here is Anna in Growing Edge Magazine.

‘At four o’clock in the morning on the coldest night of 1984, I am awakened by the howling blizzard. To my utter surprise, inside the greenhouse it’s like a balmy night in June. The thermometer reads 13 Celsius. The Angora rabbits are quietly muffling about in their communal dens. Moon and stars shine brilliantly through the four layers of clear glazing. Here among the tall, lush tomato vines loaded with red sweet tomatoes the thermometer reads 7 degrees. I proceed toward the east end, scooping up deep comforting breaths of humid, mild air fragrant with nasturtium, thyme, sage, dill and living earth. At the far end a hundred chickens acknowledge me with sleepy murmurs, cozy at 21 degrees in their spacious quarters’. The insulation comes from the still air between the layers of glazing.

A greenhouse is a hot and sticky place. Light from the sun is absorbed by the dark plants and partially re-radiated as infrared radiation. Not much escapes because glass blocks radiation at the infrared end of the spectrum. This is the Greenhouse Effect and the Earth is a greenhouse…for dark green plants read the planet’s surface and for the glass read the earth’s atmosphere. There are two problems with this analogy. The earth’s atmosphere does not behave like glass and although the Amazon Rain Forest may be dark green the polar ice caps are not, much of the planet’s land surface is desert and semi-savannah and almost three quarters of the earth’s surface is ocean. We are told that 99% of the earth’s atmosphere has no insulating properties, that oxygen and nitrogen have no role and that carbon dioxide alone keeps the earth warm enough for life. Why do we allow ourselves to believe this nonsense?

Nuclear power plants generate steam that turns turbines to produce electricity. So the nuclear debate is not a debate about energy needs but about electricity supply. Electricity accounts for 18 per cent of total energy used in the United Kingdom and nuclear power stations contribute 19 per cent of this…falling to 7 per cent by 2020 as reactors are switched off before they get so old that they break apart from corrosion and spew radioactivity into the atmosphere.

So that’s 3.4% falling to 1.3% of the country’s energy requirements. The Channel Tunnel cables can cope. So what’s all the shouting about? My mind has started to have uncharitable thoughts about the perfidious French and the dastardly Germans. They are up to something and Brits are the fall guys. My headline would be Blair Duped Again.

First the Texans and the Israelis take him for a ride over the Iraq Invasion. Now the European Bank is trying to get its two biggest clients off the hook by flogging Blair a dead nuclear horse. Nuclear power is an archaic technology for goodness sake. It’s more than 50 years old. It has no more place in a modern economy than a horse and cart. Blair must go urgently. He is dangerous to our health. This latest love-in could be the death throes of President Blair.

Renewable forms of energy are almost limitless in their potential. They are flexible and offer good security of supply. Nuclear, by contrast, requires uranium to be mined and transported, produces toxic waste and poses a potential terrorist threat. No one has the foggiest idea of the cost of new nukes, new designs will have to be imported…so much for freedom from foreign control of our energy supplies…and the Ministry of Truth will have to control the whole of Government if real economic appraisals of past and future reactor costs re to be kept as state secrets.

The real opportunity is not renewable technologies but local energy. All the energy we need for a year arrives in half an hour of sunlight…the rest is complications. Cross-channel cables for Surplus French Nuclear Electricity (SFNE) and a gas pipeline from Norway are all the Energy Insurance this country will be needing. All our national utility grids can be dismantled. The English have no need of them. Over the past 14 years Woking Borough Council has reduced energy demand by 50% and made savings of 77% in carbon emissions through green procurement, basic energy conservation, community use of combined heat and power, biomass, photovoltaics and fuel cells. The Woking Strategy is the way forward. Tackle energy locally…town by town, village by village and parish by parish.

Disregard private interests…the personal and the community sectors are more efficient…when working in tandem locally. Get Energy Supply Pricing right…talk to the Danes…and include utilities in your local tax calculations. The job of central government is to stop private interests getting in the way of local investments and to enable local development strategies by shutting down private utilities…tax them ‘til their pips squeak…and phasing out Whitehall and County Council budgets over a single parliament. This is the Labour Party’s back-to-basics way to renewal.

Today I typed “Debt Solutions” + UK into Google and got back 57 600 hits. All these solutions suggest there are plenty of problems. In the 1990s three quarters of bankruptcies were traders...the rest were consumers. This has now reversed. The idea of bankruptcy gets the thumbs down from the wage slaving classes who see it as a trick of the feckless to get out of paying their debts...a fiendish plot open to others but never to them. They have a point.

Fairness matters in a society. But the fact that limited liability companies have been doing bankruptcy for years destroying thousands of honest small traders in the process seems to have been kept beneath the middle class radar. One answer in the UK is to give greater prominence to Individual Voluntary Arrangements ( IVAs )...legal alternatives to bankruptcy which leave you without too much of a stain on your fiscal character. Twenty thousand IVAs got the Stamp of Approval of the English Courts in 2005 and the annual rate for this year is thirty thousand.

Price Waterhouse Cooper have just finished a survey into the motivations of 6500 people who entered IVAs between July and November 2005 and found that 83 percent cited excess expenditure over income as the reason for failure. 56 percent of these legally binding agreements between debtors and creditors were drawn up for people in the 20-40s age-groups. Average debts were £62 000 and were mostly held on credit cards, personal loans and bank overdrafts.

As the law stands...following Gordon Brown’s rewriting of the rules in 2004...the difference between an IVA and a Petition for Personal Bankruptcy ( PPB ) is that the ( PPB ) wipes out your debts immediately and releases you back into fiscal society after 12 months...it also costs three hundred quid to file which is adding insult to injury. This is not quite what the middle classes fear. Try it more than once in your lifetime and you will probably find that the Bankruptcy Courts goes for the job-holder’s feckless view of your character and places you under a fifteen year arrangement.

IVAs on the other hand keep you on a tight rein for five years...and then cancels any remaining debts. I did some work on the history and feasibility of Clean Slate Campaigns last year and was surprised when a colleague assured me that UK law wipes the slate clean after five years with these IVAs. I hadn’t picked up on this...which means the fact must be well hidden. With both the PPB and the IVA you are expected to work hard and do everything you reasonably can to pay off your debts throughout the time you remain under the watchful eye of the bankruptcy authorities.

Choosing between a ( PPB ) and an ( IVA ) might look like a no-brainer if you take the view that with an IVA you live in poverty for five years while with PPB you come out from under in just one year. But I rather like our English version of the US Chapter 11 regulations because it not only addresses the problem of business cycles and temporary entrepreneurial set-backs but also makes it much harder for assets to be legally stolen at knock-down prices.

Manoeuvring hard-working businessmen into offers they can’t refuse is one of the causes of microbusiness failure. It may be legal...and the perpetrators are often admired as shrewd businessmen...but preying on honest traders is wrong and a Sane Humane Ecological (SHE) society would run these Spivs and Hustlers out of town...or in extremis get a rope and hang the bastards. The Good Old Law and the Guild Lore had the measure of the ways of businessmen.

For the country as a whole debt including mortgages...viewed not as debts but investments by the lower middle classes a generation ago...are well over the thousand million pound mark. Contrary to middle class prejudices...and Daily Express and Daily Mail ranting...only £50 million of this is credit card debt and defaults on this chunk of debt have slashed profit margins for the companies issuing the cards from 11 percent to 6 percent over the past five years.

Every society has to figure out how to get money into the hands of people who need it and people who use it for the common good rather than for private profit, squalor or extravagance. The history of Clean Slate policies from Babylonian Times to the modern day is a pretty clear indicator that the problem is probably irresolvable in principle. So every few generations it has to be grappled with.

For the past 75 years...the 1930s was awash with monetary theorising...too little attention has been paid to the who-whom issue of money. Excellent work gets done on the money problem every generation or so. The emerging cycle is Unfairness & Inequality, Remembering, War...a surrogate for slate cleaning...Forgetting, Inequality & Unfairness. Repeat ad nauseum while mopping up millions of surplus population...for King & Country. There is a better way.

Inflating the currency masks and mitigates the money problem by reducing the purchasing power of the borrower’s debts. In Human Ecology...published in 1947 and the definitive summary and conclusion from the work of monetary theorists in the 1930s...Thomas Robertson coined the phrase Minor Usury and Major Usury. Addressing the Debt Problem arising from issuing money as debt at interest moves the chairs of Minor Usury on the deck while leaving the Titanic of Major Usury untroubled. This is no reason to ignore the deck chairs. Ignorance is Power to Them. Raising public consciousness of the fundamental flaws in our monetary arrangements yields its own rewards.

My survey of soccer balls for sale in Hastings puts Pakistan’s market share in the town at 0% and not 85%...see the last weblog of May. The soccer balls in Lidls were made in Germany and Woolworths get theirs from China. Aren’t market surveys wonderful? While on the subject let me dispute the claim that David Beckham is the best crosser of a ball England has ever had. He’s good but Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney and Bobby Charlton could all cross a perfect ball into the goal area while moving at speed...and Finney and Charlton could do this from either wing.

England and Germany might meet up in the quarter finals if one wins and the other comes second in the group stages. Both goalkeepers play in the English Premier League and both expect plenty of goalkeeping errors in this World Cup. The special balls made for the tournament do strange things in the air…particularly in wet conditions. The old leather balls I grew up with were like cannonballs when wet and bear little resemblance to the beach balls of today. The state of the ball is becoming as crucial to soccer as it is to cricket. How long before a Football Commentator says: ’Chelsea will be taking the new ball in five minutes’. The World Cup started today and carries on for a month. But you’ll be hearing no more about it from me until England win the tournament or get knocked out.

Thinking about football brings back memories of my misspent youth at Christ’s Hospital. These include many fun-filled hours playing Asphalt Soccer...with a tennis ball. Ian Jones of Maine A was the best stopper of a tennis ball I ever saw and the rivalry between my house Barnes A and Maine A…two houses away…was always intense. They had Sutcliffe and Jones. We had Simpson and myself. We played at every opportunity and in all weathers.

Death has been on my mind a lot this week. First there was the discovery on Sunday that David Goodstein had died nine years ago. Then Susan e-mailed me the transcript of a talk she had given to the Jackson Historical Society about her uncle Jake May, who I remember wheezing away his final days chiselling away at a staircase in Susan’s Beacon Hill house at 26 Garden Street while I was dossing down on her sofa...and hiding from Rachel Kowalczyk.

With this week’s re-opening of my onboard office following the disruption of my electricity supply a new internet-free agenda was cobbled together that includes re-writing my will. The current version is too complicated as it incorporates verbatim the conditions in Connie’s will. Now enough work has been done between Vance Harris and Walker & Walker for me to regard everything as my property and to prepare a new will on this assumption.

My other concern is to ensure that my heirs can find my will when I drop off the twig. So I am thinking of depositing it with some official will-lodging service like a solicitor rather than trusting to my ability to keep it in a warm dry place for the next thirty years...a mean average of the 10 years of the biblical four score years & ten and the 50 years of the oldest man in England who celebrated his 110th birthday this week.

I was also thinking of including some funeral directions to make sure I get a Green Burial under the auspices of the Natural Death Centre founded by my colleague Nicholas Albery. But I am backing off this idea after the Daily Mail reprinted an article on green burials that first appeared in The Guardian. The thought of lying in Tawney’s Wood where John Papworth buried his wife Marcelle now seems more appealing so I will sound John out on the idea of turning his woodlands into a Fourth World Graveyard when I am in Purton in two weeks time.

Finally most of today was devoted to giving thanks for the life of Dr Catherine Elizabeth Hollman at the Parish Church of St Mary and St Peter in the Village of Pett. I last visited the place on foot in the winter of 2005 when I walked all the way from St Leonard’s to Rye for an article for Rye’s Own that has yet to be written up and published.

For many years Catherine was chairman of the Winchelsea Singers who were invited by the family to sing Mozart’s Ave Verum at her Memorial Service. As one of a select group of Journeymen Tenors in the county I was asked to swell the ranks which meant putting on a suit and tie for the occasion. What with the rehearsal beforehand and the reception afterwards at Pett Village Hall I found myself away from my cabin desk from 10.30 to 3.30.

A terrible shortage of money has recently hit Britain’s politicians. Their traditional sources of income have dried up overnight thanks to a change in the climate and investigations by the police. There is only one way they can survive this cruel downturn in their fortunes and that is for the Great British Public to rally round and dig deep for the pounds in their pockets to provide the funds so desperately needed to ensure power to the politicians and not the people.

£10,000 will buy a nice new tie and haircut; £250,000 will buy a new specially-equipped battle bus; £1,000,000 will buy a peak-time TV election broadcast and £2 million will buy a peerage. Please send donations to Party Funding Account at the Inland Revenue. Payments by PayPal should be made to gordonbrown@tendowningstreet.org.uk. Failure to pay on time could result in imprisonment or death. By order: Man of Straw; Leader of the House of Commons; Minister for Lords Reform and Advocate-General for State Funding of Political Parties.

David Goodstein has been on my mind all week. He died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 49 but I only found out about it on Sunday when I inserted the fateful lines in my weblog ‘working partner for the commercial development of a system dynamics model for Canadian printing firms (Interconsult, Cambridge)’ and went looking for a good hyperlink by typing “David Goodstein” +Interconsult +Cambridge +Massachusetts into Google.

The search engine returned with a number of items including The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems Vol 27, No 6 - November 24, 1997 which was given over entirely to a reprint of David’s obituary in the Boston Globe written by Clive Goodacre, chairman of the Bespoke Agency of London and editor of World Graphic Arts Technology.

I remember well the feeling one morning in Welwyn Garden City in 1976 when I turned up for work at Norton Company and walked into an atmosphere of hushed reverence instead of the bustle of a Customer Service Department busily sorting out the problems that had come in by telex overnight. Colin Brooke was the head of Customer Service and the first person I turned to when the Welwyn or Belfast factories missed a delivery to the Rotherham Warehouse for on-shipment to the Sheffield Steel Industry. He had died of a heart attack during the night. He had been his usual self the day before.

It did not matter to me that David had died nine years before. The news struck me as if it had happened the same day...with the intensity of that Colin Brooke moment. I felt haunted all day as the memories of David in my life surfaced into consciousness and refused to be dismissed. These thoughts have taken my mind off my work all week.

With any death comes regret...and guilt. I still have these feelings years later with my mother and with Connie. Then there are others who deserved my thanks but never received it...my primary school teacher Mrs. Norman at Deansfield in Eltham and Eric Littlefield my House Master at Christ’s Hospital...teachers who acknowledged and encouraged me so I became the person I am. These feelings of regret and guilt can only get worse as more and more people who have touched my life take their leave of this life. Yet when somebody goes before their time lost promise is added to the regret and the guilt.

David was a brilliant and charming man who loved his work, his family and the Jewish faith he had inherited. He was a compelling raconteur whether on the podium as the keynote speaker at an international technology symposium, in his living room or in a few snatched minutes by the copier in the hallway. David Goodstein understood Peter Drucker and the Boston Consulting Group, Boston’s Route 128 and California's Silicon Valley long before Wall Street got to grips with what this meant for America.

Already by the mid-1970s David’s radar was locking in on people and technology as the key to the future. He saw that far-flung open networks of cyber citizens would emerge to challenge the closed world of Corporate Man. David did outsourcing and globalisation before they had been named.

David Henry Goodstein was an international information technology executive and strategic consultant whose only formal training was as a computer programmer at MIT. Before founding InterConsult in 1978 he had been a research affiliate at the Visible Language Workshop of the MIT Media Lab. We worked closely together in 1980 and 1981.

When David invited me to join Interconsult he had great plans for what we could do for his firm. It was shortly after my arrival from England in the summer of 1980...with charming Swedish wife and two blond blue-eyed children in tow. Eighteen months previously David had started up Interconsult. He had landed its first big fish in the spring of 1980 with a $39 000 contract from Xerox to report on the future of Computerised Typesetting.

Interconsult was working out of a tiny cramped residential apartment...and a broom cupboard or two along the corridor. I moved the family into a house on Lakeview Avenue off Huron Avenue...a short walk from Harvard Square and the Fresh Pond Reservoir. Interconsult’s apartment block was at the end of my road of Victorian New England timber houses.

I have been a disappointment to many people...it goes with the territory...and I know I was to David who saw in me what he wanted to see and chose to disregard what I was and what I might wish to become. David had grown up in Worcester Massachusetts...Small Town America...so he was programmed to believe in progress and corporations walking hand in hand into a glorious American future. He wanted to sign up...howbeit on his own terms...and he saw my future playing out along similar lines. But he knew little about the things that really mattered to me.

I was recovering from low-level brain-washing after my five-year prison sentence in Europe with the Worcester-based Norton Company. The paternalistic corporations of the 60s and 70s burdened their high-flyers with outmoded expectations. I knew I would only ever be part of their world on their terms...and Hazel Henderson had taught me that it was possible to create an alternative future for myself on my terms.

So the task at hand was to make myself unemployable. Some might call it a Mid Life Crisis but labelling is not explaining...and the age of 33 is quite early to be afflicted. I prefer to believe that I had been educated to live a decent life. I am not sure whether I had invented the concept of A Life as a Work of Art by this time. But I started behaving as if it was my purpose in life. Oscar Wilde would have approved.‘Man’, he insisted, ‘is complete in himself.’

Today on the Steve Wright Show on BBC Radio Two Chris Patten referred to the Thatcher Poll Tax debacle as ‘the biggest cock-up since the Black Death.’ He should know. He was Environment Minister at the time charged with its implementation. He also remarked in passing that Harold Macmillan’s collective noun for a group of ex-prime ministers was a lack of principles…think of a shoal of fish or a pride of lions if you wonder about collective nouns.

After a very soggy May, temperatures are creeping up into the mid twenties. Climate descriptions can be remarkably accurate…with hindsight. Here is what happened. The May rain came from a procession of depressions sweeping off the Atlantic. These were directed overhead by the jet stream…a ribbon of fast winds several miles high beloved by round-the-world balloonists. Then the track of the jet stream began to buckle causing high pressure to gradually build up and drying out the rain clouds. As the high pressure grew stronger the jet stream looped even further around it.

I doubt whether very much of this gets incorporated into those five million year climate forecasting models that tell us we will be hit by tsunamis, inundated by rising sea levels and overwhelmed by droughts and hurricanes. Think of the flow of water round a boulder in a river. This weather pattern blocked out the Atlantic westerlies leaving us with warm sunny weather and gentle balmy breezes. The slow high pressure build-up suggests the anticyclone will be around for some time and may mean there’s a heat wave on the way. Perhaps Ryesingers will perform their Mozart Concert on Saturday 17th June in the Gungardens…strawberries and cream courtesy of the Women’s Institute.

And finally here is the Met’s long-term…two week…Fantasy Forecast. As the anticyclone drifts across Europe it will sweep up hot air from the Sahara. As it passes through Spain and France more humid air will get bottled in underneath and explode into big thunderstorms. So Her Majesty’s Meteorology Office…note the meteor…are predicting dry hot and sunny weather for England’s opening World Cup match against Paraguay on Saturday.

Dave and Tony are vying for the Stunt of the Year Prize. Dave’s ahead at the moment with his Husky Sledging in Norway. But Tony has hit back with Prime Minister’s Question Time…without the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. This latest stunt from New Labour’s Backroom Boys does away with nasty questions from Westminster MPs and vicious remarks…masquerading as questions…from Lobby Journalists and replaces them with real questions from real people. Our Tony Meets The People Online. Whoops! Big mistake! PR Heads will roll for this.

My journalistic heart-throb Sarah Sands had the fascinating job of sorting the e-mails for questions to ask Our Great Leader. But lo and behold the questions real people want answered turn out to be the same ones that fascinate journalists and politicians. This may be no more than a reflection of the fact that all three groups read the same newspapers, listen to the same John Humphries on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and watch or listen to the same Jonathan Dimbleby on Any Questions and Any Answers each week. But this is neither here nor there. Sarah noticed one crucial difference. Real people use more robust language than journalists. Here is one of Sarah’s examples.

‘Whilst I considered asking the Prime Minister if it was politically expedient to think of packing it in, a man sent in a question by e-mail that asked why leaders who have lost the confidence of the people they are supposed to lead prefer to cling to power damaging their party and their country rather than resign?’ Nice one! Obviously this cyber-initiative should go the same way as frog-marching yobbos to cash machines. But don’t hold your breath. Reports suggest that the boys in Cherie’s kitchen cabinet thought it went down rather well with the Great Unwashed. Oh dear!

Trains are very public places. Mobile phone calls can be heard by everyone. Being reminded that you are on the train has its uses. One can forget. But while mobile phone calls are seldom memorable, conversations can be. On my way to Ashford a farmer’s wife from Rye fell into conversation with a Tax Person from Brighton. It seems that Gordon Brown's Inland Revenue has a fiendish plan to recover the billions of pounds showered indiscriminately upon hard-working carers and entrepreneurs (76.66%), poverty-stricken single mothers (23.33%) and identity thieving racketeers from Estonia, Nigeria and Cheznia (0.01%). Clerks are being dragged kicking and screaming from behind their desks and sent to the far-flung corners of the realm to discover why people are not repaying their Working Tax Credit. Here’s the answer. I heard it on the train. The reason is the break-up of households following a breakdown of relationships caused by an inability to repay Working Tax Credit and lots of other debts. Now there’s a surprise.

Britain’s energy future has been transformed by the discovery of an astonishing new fuel, which can be put to a whole range of uses, from heating homes to generating electricity in power stations. A top government scientist explained, ‘It’s black, it comes out of the ground and Britain has billions of tons of the stuff...enough to keep us warm for hundreds of years. What’s more,’ he went on, ‘compared to oil, nuclear power or wind farms this miracle substance is very cheap. ‘We’ve decided to call it coal. It will be extracted from deep holes in the ground by teams of men who will be known as miners.’ I read that in Private Eye so it must be true.

The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today demanded that the United Nations Security Council and Iraq meet in an emergency session, as he attacked plans by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to step up his country’s nuclear programme. ‘We cannot let someone as dangerous and unstable as Blair who is a pariah in his own country resume his nuclear programme,’ explained an Iranian Government spokesman in Basra. [Private Eye]

How long, oh lord, how long before we get an English political party intent on winning enough real political power to shut down the Weaponry Factories and get the English out of Global Money Laundering and Imperial Killingry? Some of the implications of the postings on the Charter 2015 blogsite may be pointing in the right direction…The Knights of Gaia for instance…first published by John Seymour in 2001 in Fourth World Review (Number 112).

Organisation: None whatsoever; Rules: Each Knight makes up his or her own; People qualified to become Knights: Everyone, Anywhere; How to become a Knight: Make the vow aloud in front of at least one other person. Policy: There will be no central organisation. Each local group of knights shall form their local community and arrange to meet locally at regular intervals to plan their campaigns against the enemies of life. It will be the duty of each group to ensure that any atrocity against life in its area be attacked and destroyed. The need to establish national journals of the Knights, or even a world one to keep Knights in touch with each other is evident. And here is the vow.

’I declare that all life is sacred. I vow to dedicate my own life henceforth to defending, cherishing and protecting life on Earth. I hereby declare war on all enemies of life on Earth and I hereby vow to conduct an unremitting fight against them. I will behave with true knightly courtesy to all my sister and brother Knights and give them what aid and succour they need.’ Our Knights might start by de-privatising rain…one of many Commons stolen from us by deceit and deception. Herewith another gem from Private Eye that gets to the heart of the matter.

Water companies were warning customers last night that the reservoirs of money were ‘not as full as they would like.’ Said a spokesman, ‘Normally we have lakes full of cash...buckets full of the stuff sloshing around everywhere ...but this year we’ve taken so much out in dividends that our stocks are severely depleted.’ Customers are being urged to save money and not waste it needlessly on non-essentials. ‘Use as little money as possible this summer,’ reads a nationwide campaign, ‘because you’ll need it to pay your enormous water bill later in the year.’ What to do?

You can reduce your water consumption and invest the savings in a water business. You may already have done so. Do you know where your pension funds are invested? Apologists for shareholder profits often point to pension funds and insurance companies investing on behalf of their pension and policy holders as the recipients of water company profits. Why not join with other pension fund holders to put pressure on pension fund managers to invest directly in water instead of indirectly in water companies. Why not get your Pension Fund to buy reservoirs in your county…and give you free water. A Kent reservoir must be a sound investment.

If you are not into Shareholder Activism at least trap every drop of water falling on your home and garden from the heavens above. You have gutters and drainpipes don’t you? Use them to feed rainwater into large barrels and water tanks around your house and in the back garden. Why not build your own reservoir at the bottom of the garden? Call it a swimming pool to get round the planning laws. People swim…and fish piddle…in water company reservoirs.

The truth is that future generations will look upon the idea of privatising water as one of the more bizarre political and economic contortions of our age. You think Welsh Water is a good alternative role model? Nothing is ever what it seems. Dyr Cymru is wholly owned by the not for profit organisation Glas Cymru formed to buy the original water business back from the unwieldy inefficient Utility Conglomerate that Welsh Water had become after privatisation with the usual outrageous price rises…to invest in renewing the neglected water and sewerage infrastructure.

But the Profit Statement and Balance Sheet of de-privatised Welsh Water 2006 bears only a passing resemblance to those of pre-privatisation Welsh Water 1986. Western Power Distribution stripped it of its assets, loaded the water business with debt and offloaded the people before flogging it to Glas Cymru. Welsh Water is an Enron-style outsourcing operation. United Utilities look after day-to-day operations, Thames Water does customer service and a dozen private organisations are into Cascade Outsourcing of capital projects…enriching themselves with contracts.

After these private operators have had their snouts in the trough…’releasing shareholder value’…it matters not a whit whether Glas Cymru is for profit or not. For years profits have been vanishing from the business like leaks from a broken water pipe…and they are still draining away. Private Eye never got close. The real scandal is the looting that began 20 years ago when water prices started to increase without any improvement in service quality. Perhaps it is time to revisit the dodgy dossiers drawn up in the 1980s to steal the Welsh rain from the Welsh people? If compensation is paid for mis-selling pension and endowment policies why not for the over-pricing of water?

A 65-year-old Scotsman with a communist record was found working in the Home Office last week. Mr Reid had no papers and no qualifications but claimed he had been given the job because there was no one else. Mr Reid has had a number of jobs in the last five years since he entered the country from his native Scotland. He once had a temporary job working in hospitals and even had a sensitive post in a defence related office for a few months.

As soon as the mistake was discovered nothing was done…but was done efficiently. Dr John Reid was allowed to continue to come in and work provided he made no attempt to tidy up the mess. ‘We have no idea how many Scotsmen there are in Westminster but estimates suggest anything between two or three thousand or maybe fifteen or maybe none at all. We have no idea about anything’ said a Home Office spokesperson. Alan Johnson is 56.

Private Eye might have made that one up…just…but you couldn’t make this one up. 35 miles away to the east the French have slipped back into their comfortable surrealist world. For French Socialists worker solidarity goes just so far but no further. Back in 2003 fifteen thousand elderly people were killed…allegedly…by a heat wave. In a panic response President Chirac and his Dysfunctional Underlings (PCDU) hit upon the absurd poetry of levying a corporate tax of a third of one percent to fund a two million euro scheme to help the elderly and the disabled.

Business kicked up their usual fuss…extravagant, unfunded etc…so PCDU caved in and compounded their stupidity by abolishing one of France’s eleven annual bank holidays for a Day of Solidarity. You got there before me. Today…Whit Monday…is France Solidarity Day. And it’s working. Solidarity has broken out all over France. Schools and post offices are closed, half of French businesses are closed, Government workers are staying home and SNCF…the French state railway…is running its normal restricted Bank Holiday service. President Chirac’s approval rating has plummeted to an all time low of 17 percent. Even George Dubya Bush looks popular by comparison.

My extravagance needs reining in or I will never leave Rye so I am budgeting £200 for my office and internet expenses in June. This means some careful scheduling. Now that I have a working laptop there is really no excuse for paying £2 an hour at PCHut when much of the work could be done on Vemara. So the plan is to work aboard Vemara on Tuesdays and Fridays, use two hours of free Broadband…plus free laptop time at Starbucks…in Ashford on Wednesdays and Saturdays and take the train into Hastings for Mahavi’s on Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays. Train fares work out at £20 per week while my 18 hours per week of paid internet access at Mahavi’s will set me back £24.

I have been working on two blogging projects over the weekend…the Magna Carta II Project and the Shepherd Blogs for the Website Project. Saturday afternoon was devoted to setting up the Charter 2015 blogsite which now has half a dozen initial postings to give a flavour of what I have in mind…The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; The Knights of Gaia. I have not talked to anybody about this so have no idea if it will fly. It might be another damp squib…like the idea of The Real Bank of Wessex that I attempted to piggyback onto the first Radical Consultation five years ago without success.

On Sunday I got myself into quite a mess muddling up days and dates creating a Microsoft Word database for my 2006 Web Documents. Three volumes…120 weblogs long…will be going up on the William Shepherd website in Adobe pdf format. The problem was that my Welsh weblogs were created on my Apple Mac Mini and converted to Adobe pdf files but while I was in transition between Llangolman and Rye my weblogs were posted straight onto the bloghost. Once I got organised in Rye each weblog has had its own ‘.doc’ document. But we’ll cope. We always do.

Last week I paid £0.80p for East Sussex County Libraries to acquire a copy of The Complete Fawlty Towers from Polegate Library and truck it across the eastern half of this truncated county to me here in Rye so I can take it with me to Stockholm. I have a fiendish plan. The last time I went away to foreign climes it was Hersonissos on Crete and Creaky Tales…an everyday story of boating folks.

This time it will be Sundbyberg and PCHut…an everyday story of an internet café. Tony Payne is ideal as a young Basil Fawlty. PCHut's fictional propriéteur will hate Americans the way Basil hated the Germans. Sandra is a larger than life character already without any fictional creativity…and…well…surely it is time for the Mad Blogger of Carmarthen to be given his chance on the silver screen. Manuel…John Cleese’s Spanish waiter…is missing. Three of the twelve episodes are already plotted and Tony Payne has gone off to the Costa del Sol to come up with more plots.

Helena has arrived in Totnes and is busily settling into the Bowden House Community. We were chatting about life the universe and everything on the phone for an hour over the weekend. If you were to build a replica of the Papworth Farmhouse as an extension tacked on to the present building you would have Bowden House. Replicate a few more times…adding a third storey for good measure…and you get Buckingham Palace. Get the idea? Queen Anne style…very four-square…and run on Tapeley Park principles…at least in theory. Practice is something else.

In the early eighties I was a Special Graduate Student at MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. During my two years as a student much of my waking day was spent in the company of MIT’s System Dynamics Group. The head of this group was Jay Forrester. In his commentary on his background research for State of Fear Michael Crichton remarks that Forrester was ‘one of the must important scientists of the twentieth century’. I had little to do with the great man personally but came to be familiar with his work...and worked closely with Professor Alan Graham and George Richardson. Two entries in my Curriculum Vitae make mention of this brief interlude in my life.

Under Schools and Colleges is the entry: 1980 – 1981; Special Graduate Student; MIT Sloan School Cambridge, USA; System Dynamics & Industrial Dynamics. And in the section on Own Work (1980-2004) under America’s Atlantic Coast (1979-1987): P-E Consulting Cambridge, USA 1979-1985 is another reference to my labours at MIT that goes like this. 'Assignments for a wide range of US clients including managing the European planning cycle and carrying out a corporate integration study in the construction products sector (Norton Company, Worcester); writing a proposal to the US Energy Department on soft energy systems (Technology & Economics, Cambridge); managing partner for project to relate innovation to shareholder value in high-tech high-growth companies (Smith Barney, Chicago); and working partner for the commercial development of a system dynamics model for Canadian printing firms (Interconsult, Cambridge)'.

Professor Jay Forrester was the most influential researcher to model complex systems on the computer. He did ground-breaking studies of everything from high-tech corporate behaviour to urban renewal, and he was the first to get any inkling of how difficult it is to manage complex systems. One landmark essay from Forrester was entitled ‘The Counter-Intuitive Behavior of Complex Systems’. Forrester’s work was an early inspiration for attempts to model the world...particularly the Club of Rome Study from Dartmouth College published as The Limits to Growth.

Forrester was quick to realize that the political voices behind the Club of Rome had a poor understanding of the limits of modelling...and even less interest in the science behind the modelling. They latched onto Forrester’s work because it backed up their pre-conceived notions and political agenda. So Forrester took care to distance himself from the consistent tone of urgent overstatement...bordering on hysteria...of the Limits to Growth book published by Donella and Dennis Meadows from their ivory New Hampshire towers...even though the book was a sexed-up dossier of Jay Forrester’s more technical and conservatively written World Dynamics issued by MIT Publications a year earlier.

Two other giants from the Envionmentalists’ Hall of Fame...Amory Lovins and Rachel Carson...receive a somewhat ambivalent response from Michael Crichton. Amory Lovins became an advocate for Alternative Energy when he authored the 1970s anti-nuclear text Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace...which started life as an article in Foreign Affairs. Michael Crichton sees Soft Energy Paths as a major link in the chain of events and thinking that set the US on a different energy path from Europe...though I would not attribute it so much power and influence.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published in 1962 is a poetic persuasive text that was read with alarm and excitement when it was first published. But with the passage of time the text appears more flawed and more overtly polemical. Crichton estimates it to be about one third right and two thirds wrong. My line would be somewhat different. But I would require that Silent Spring be read in conjunction with an earlier work by Rachel Carson: The Sea Around Us.

I think it unlikely that Rachel Carson would have endorsed the Global Warming by Carbon Dioxide Emissions Hypothesis. Large sections of The Sea Around Us have been airbrushed out of the Climate Debate. Central to the argument in my 1979 unpublished manuscript Green Homes or Blue Moonwaves was Carson’s reporting of the work of the Norwegian Marine Scientist Otto Pettersson. And Carson was also aware of the key role of oceans and algae in the Global Carbon Cycle...something that climate scientists have only recently started to rediscover.

Science has a poor understanding of the behaviour of the ocean’s algae...the subject of a future Shepherd on Climate weblog. Science has similar levels of ignorance about many other variables that might turn out to be crucial to an understanding of local and global climate patterns. Clouds and trees, aerosols and halocarbons, radioactivity and free radicals, solar winds and sun spots are just a few of the subjects on my current research list where I have noticed that good data is absent and well-reasoned hypotheses are thin on the ground.

But as more data is collected and as these specialist subjects are subjected to the scrutiny of Good Science so they will give up their secrets and it will become clearer what role each plays in our planet’s self-regulatory climate system. The natural greenhouse effect at the heart of the Carbonistas’ argument for Kyoto is influenced primarily by water vapour and not carbon dioxide. Does this mean a Khartoum Protocol on Steam Emissions is next on the agenda? Is fear of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to be the harbinger of a New One World Totalitarian Order?

The Adam Smith Institute are telling anybody listening that today is Tax Freedom Day. Her Majesty’s Treasury were goaded into rebuttal mode. ‘Tax credits not included!’ snarled a spokesperson for Gordon Brown’s Fiefdom.

This morning BBC Radio 4 were broadcasting new statistics on AIDs . An estimated 65 million people in the world have been infected with the HIV virus since it was first identified…and 25 million have since died. With the world population at 6,519,891,630 today this means that less than one percent of the population (0.6135%) is HIV positive. 98% of babies born to HIV positive women are virus-free.

The situation in England is six times better than this global average with less than a tenth of one percent of the population infected. The latest figures are 65000 HIV positive and 7000 new cases a year…half homosexuals and half black male immigrants infected before arrival in the UK. The Terence Higgins Trust…a reliable source on homosexual AIDs and HIV…estimates that one in eight sexually active homosexuals in London are HIV positive.

The Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan and Labour’s Overseas Development Minister Hillary Benn have both gone public with their complaints that the United Nations still officially refuses to call a spade a spade and plays down the significance of homosexuals, prostitutes and drug users in the spread of the HIV virus.

Tom Greco and I have known each other for almost twenty years after getting together in Zurich in 1986. Tom has just started writing a couple of weblogs. His technical one Beyond Money may not be to your taste but his more chatty and humorous News and Views is well worth checking out. Several colleagues have questioned my devotion to blogging so an explanation is in order. The best statement of where I am coming from is from this recent exchange with Tom Greco. It was prompted by my dismay at finding that his bloghosts were not offering a RSS feed facility.

'I went to both your blogsites to set up an RSS feed to my personal online newspaper. This means that your blogs would automatically be fed to my own My Yahoo! home page...together with columnists from The Guardian and my Climate and William Shepherd weblogs. Once you have this facility set up on your blog sites people like me can receive your blogs automatically within a few hours of them being posted...and then read them the next time we log on to read our own online newspaper. A Colombian colleague based in Mexico City has done this with my William Shepherd weblog for instance.'

'This is the best way to progressively bypass the edit 'n spin operations of the Politico-Legal-Media Complex that is throttling freedom of speech...and jeopardising fact collection and distribution. In effect each of us builds our own personalised daily newspaper with content from people whose articles, weblogs and insights are worth our attention. It was with this in mind that I suggested earlier this year that John Papworth should send me his Letters to The Times each time he writes one in response to something he reads in the daily press for me to post to a blogsite.'

'This same approach can be used to create an online Fourth World News. Content would be a public version of these personal newspapers based on RSS feeds gathered from approved sources such as yourself. We could also arrange to have the RSS reader with its approved feeds set up on the Fourth World website for FWR readers to download behind a password…given out once they have paid their subscription. As my original Stockholm-based bloghosts did not provide the RSS syndication facility I went searching until I found the Berlin-based operator I use now.'

'So I suggest that you either change bloghost or ask your current ones for the RSS feed facility. It may be an add-on service costing a few dollars a year. This is well worth having as the ability to syndicate in this manner is the key to localising and repersonalising the media. Incidentally I have a second My Yahoo! page for my financial operating arm William Franklin & Sons Limited which brings in feeds for currency rates, share prices and te like in real time.'

Magna Carta II will be a People’s Charter. The idea is to add to each of the sixty three (unnumbered) clauses of Magna Carta I some remarks about the context of the original clause and its relevance to a 21st Century setting and then open up the weblog posting for anybody anywhere to add their comments. In this way an Open Online Conference will be permanently convened on the Local Neighbourhood Charter in the months leading up to the Radical Consultation in September. The job of the conference participants will then be to sift through the internet postings and agree the wording of the charter to put up to the Final Plenary for for its enthusiastic endorsement.

The day the English barons and King John signed the Magna Carta is often regarded as the first tentative step from absolute monarchy to government by the people. Nothing is ever this straightforward but in a recent poll by The Times newspaper a quarter of the five thousand people polled voted the Magna Carta as the most important milestone in English Constitutional history. The event took place at Runnymede an island in the River Thames on 15th June 1215.

But in the 18th century the Vatican started harmonising everyone’s calendar. There were sound reasons for this because the sun and moon were getting out of alignment. In England the loss of eleven days this entailed happened in September 1752 shifting Christmas to just 355 days after Christmas 1751. The complications rippled on for centuries.

In the Gregorian calendar the years 1800 and 1900 were no longer leap years but in the Julian calendar they were. This resulted in the difference between the two calendars increasing to 12 days after February 1800 and then to 13 days a century later. 2000 was a leap year in both calendars. So Old Christmas Eve that was on the 4th January in 1753 is now on 6th January every year and coincides with Twelfth Night.

Be that as it may one way or another in England eleven days have been lost since Magna Carta was signed in 1215. So to avoid confusion about the 800th anniversary in 2015 it makes sense to associate Magna Carta II with the Summer Solstice rather than with a specific date like the 15th or the 26th.

The text of Magna Carta bears many traces of haste and is clearly the product of much bargaining and many hands. Most of its clauses deal with specific…and often long-standing…grievances rather than with general principles of law. Some of the grievances are self-explanatory but others can be understood only in the context of the feudal society in which they arose. Of a few clauses, the precise meaning is still a matter of argument.

Magna Carta attempted to do several things: to define the power of the monarch vis-à-vis the barons; to safeguard the powers of the Church and to codify some of the rights ordinary people enjoyed under Common Law. So it ended up setting down some basic ideas of liberty, democracy and constitutionalism. Many of these have tended to be taken for granted ever since. But for any renewal of theories of governance it represents quite a good departure point.

The document begins with a greeting from John, by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects.

About two-thirds of the clauses of Magna Carta are concerned with matters of feudal governance and the misuse of their powers by royal officials. Many of these clauses can be adapted or updated to suit modern conditions. The scope for extortion and abuse in the feudal system…as in almost any system…was great so governance needed a light touch with rights, duties, rules and regulations applied benevolently.

Complaints about administration of The Good Old Law were rife long before King John came to the throne with abuses aggravated by the difficulty of obtaining redress. One of the things Magna Carta does is to set out the means for obtaining a fair hearing of complaints against the king and his agents…and against lesser feudal lords.

The first clause in Magna Carta concedes the freedom of the Church and its right to elect its own dignitaries without royal interference. This was a reflection of a dispute between King John and the Pope over Stephen Langton's election as Archbishop of Canterbury. It does not appear in the Articles of the Barons and it was a moot point whether to include it in the Magna Carta at all. Here is the translated text of this clause from the British Library website.

‘First that we have granted to God and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.

Magna Carta’s final clause also concerns Church matters. It goes like this: ‘It is accordingly our wish and command that the English Church shall be free and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever’. Future weblogs will discuss clauses about debts, merchants and the City of London ( 9,10,1,13 and 41) and those that seek to codify conflicting rights regarding the use of rivers and woodlands ( 33, 44, 47 and 48) and all other clauses deserving of a place in Magna Carta II - the sequel.

In January 1979…27 years ago…the American-backed Shah of Iran was forced into exile. Later that years Ayatollah Khomeini called the US the Great Satan. This was the signal for the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran when 52 hostages were taken and held for 444 days. Perhaps it was no accident that this is .666 of 666 days.

In April 1980 the Americans tried the Rambo approach and sent the helicopters in to rescue their hostages only to scurry back home with their tails between their legs and eight servicemen dead. After this the stand-off continued until November 1986 when the Reagan Administration was all but engulfed by the Ollie North Affair and the Iran-Contra Scandal involving the sale of arms, bibles and birthday cakes to Iran and dodgy goings-on in Central America in return for freeing hostages in Lebanon. Nobody has ever really got to the bottom of all this.

Next in July 1988 a US warship shot down an Iranian airliner killing all 250 onboard. They did this by mistake…but friendly fire it was not. Officially Iran and America were still not on speaking terms. Anything official was passed through Swiss diplomats. The name-calling reached school playground level in January 2002 when George Dubya Bush declared in his State of the Union address that Iran…along with Iraq and North Korea…were an Axis of Evil.

This War of Words escalated further this year when Iran’s newly-elected President Ahmadinejad reminded America of Iran’s long-standing policy to destroy Israel. Americans are unpredictable when rattled so this name-calling must be reined in. Cold War era brinkmanship is bad news when Russia and China are big traders with Iran.

That is the background. Events started hotting up on Bank Holiday Monday. I was chatting to the boss of Mahavi’s …an Information Technology lecturer, fluent in four languages and brought up in Tehran. He was in a state of shock after watching Iranian Television in his lunch break with its official announcement that Iran had exploded a nuclear device. Returning home to the boat in the evening after two days in West St Leonard’s I found that the rain had got into my electricity supply and tripped the switch so I missed the BBC News. No electricity meant waiting for the morning papers where I assumed the Iranian atomic bomb test would be front page news.

Instead the most I could find in Tuesday’s newspapers was a couple of column inches tucked away on the inside pages of The Times reporting that Iran had ‘said it had conducted research into nuclear fusion, which can be used for nuclear weapons.’ Sadat Hosseini of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation was reported as saying that the first research was done five years ago but that was it. Unusually for The Times the piece was not sourced…no (AP) or (Reuter).

The next mention in The Times were two further column inches on Wednesday under the headline Iran nuclear talks agreed. It seemed that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany were to meet the next day in Vienna to discuss a proposal to end the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme. These few lines were sourced to China’s Foreign Ministry by way of Foreign Staff at The Times...an improvement of sorts.

Finally on Wednesday evening the BBC admitted something was afoot when reporting that the US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice had offered to enter into talks with Iran. An Iranian Spokesman promptly let it be known that ‘given the insistence by Iranian authorities on continuing uranium enrichment, Rice’s comments can be considered propaganda moves’. Just so. But after 27 years of belligerence I would say that Bush’s Neocons are rattled.

A notice in the Times…by-lined Associated Press…reports President Uribe’s re-election in the most peaceful election in Colombia for more than a decade. He is the first incumbent to be returned to office in more than a century so he must be doing something right. He won an impressive 62% of the vote and his re-election seems to buck the trend of left-wing leaders taking office in Latin America. Perhaps we are witnessing a shift in the zeitgeist with London’s Victoria & Albert Museum even opening a Ché Guevara Exhibition next week…although to the wry amusement of Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein and a friend of the exhibition’s curator, his name has been removed from the guest list causing him to wonder whether Guevara himself would have been barred.

However of somewhat greater interest to the male half of Colombia is the Football World Cup starting next week. On this side of the pond the Great Unwashed are decking each other and the halls and bonnets of their homes with the flag of St George. But spare a thought for the dark underbelly of these global spectaculars. Pakistan produces 85% of the world’s soccer balls…and it’s done like this…one stitch at a time…like here in the City of Sialkot.

Noam Chomsky has been pointing out that the United States of America meets all the criteria for a Failed State. Here are Noamsky’s seven solutions: ‘Accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; sign and carry forward the Kyoto Protocol; let the UN take the lead in international crises; rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; give up the Security Council veto and have ‘a decent respect for the opinion of mankind’ as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree; cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending’. How about generous helpings of motherhood and apple pie for Cloud Cuckoo Landas well?

One of Washington’s little private jokes is the biblical verse etched into the wall of the main lobby of the Original CIA Building. It is from the Gospel according to Saint John…Chapter 8 verse 32…and reads: ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ Omitted is the proviso: ‘but keep it to yourself and on no account tell the people. To do so constitutes a federal felony punishable by lethal injection’.

I spent most of the Bank Holiday Weekend in West St Leonard’s. It was the first time I had been to the Bexhill end of St Leonard’s west of Marine Court and was pleasantly surprised to find myself in a world I never knew existed. I even ventured as far out as Crowhurst. My hostess for the weekend was Françoise de Naillat…l’artiste de verre. I earned my keep on Sunday by helping her clean up assorted boxes, crates and fused glass works of art in her garage.

The first evening in town I went with Françoise to see the Da Vinci Code…she for the first time and I for the second. And yes...Audrey Tautou was as big a treat on the silver screen this time as the time before. Am I the only person who enjoys seeing good films more than once? My argument is that the first time I am focussed on the ‘and then…and then’ while on subsequent viewings my attention is caught by other things. And with a good film these other things are the artistic things that tend to pass you by…or get taken in subliminally…the first time around.

Another first was Hastings College. Martin Hutchings…Connie’s husband for 15 years…has finally escaped from her shadow and struck out on his own artistically. He invited me to a showing of some of his work on exhibition for a couple of days. So I dragged Françoise along…en route to the Coach & Horses for a jug or two of cider. Below is the sort of thing Martin is into at the moment. But tomorrow who knows? Unlike many abstract artists Martin at least knows how to draw…my minimum criteria if I am to take the work of such artists seriously.

David Cameron is busily neutralising the drawing rooms, common rooms and dining rooms of Left-Liberal England . Without being tribal Labour supporters, those who would call themselves progressive or vaguely Left-of-Centre do not form any great electoral bloc. But they are opinion formers. And when they shift others shift with them. They were in love with Tony Blair but the affection is not transferring to Gordon Brown. For the first time in two decades it no longer feels awkward for someone to admit to being a Tory.

Few of these people will in the end vote for David Cameron but they are not struck on Gordon Brown either. Gordon Brown just does not get the juices flowing in Harrogate, Hampstead or Hay-on-Wye like Tony Blair. Smart Left-Liberal England’s love affair with New Labour is evaporating and there is little doubt that the picture David Cameron and his acolytes are painting of the latest Tory leader has made him hard for Progressives to hate. He is de-Satanising their political world and airbrushing out the knee-jerk Left-Liberal link between Thatcherism and Toryism.

However it is not all sweetness and light in the New Model Conservative Party. A socially conservative alliance of Tory MPs that goes by the name of Cornerstone…is busy flexing its right-wing muscles. This from them: ‘the idea that we can parachute insubstantial and untested candidates with little knowledge of the local scene into key seats to win the confidence of people they seek to represent is the bizarre theory of people who spend too much time with the Pseuds and Posers of London’s Chichi Set and not enough time in normal Britain.’ Ouch! It can only get worse.

Until now I have remained in semi-detached mode vis-à-vis the Radical Consultation with my role limited to attending half a dozen planning meetings, throwing out a few ideas, putting my foot down on occasions and giving generalised moral support to John Papworth who has been organising the work. However I have taken on the tasks of making sure the radcon III websites are ready for the brochure launch in The Ecologist and for having a Local Charter ready by mid-June so the Conference Steering Group can put their names to it.

Much of today was spent with the Conference Websites. Here is a short version of the e-memo that went off before I rushed off to catch the 1750 train to West St Leonard’s: ‘I have integrated the various radcon III websites and web addresses. This is our Web Project holding position for the next few weeks to give us a breathing space to develop the two main sites which are www.radcon3.net for older more books, print publishing and academic papers oriented people…and www.myspace.com/rad3con ...for young people more into music, media, festivals etc.

The Pentagon has started to express alarm over ‘the rapid pace of China’s military expansion’ by giving dire warnings that ‘Beijing is intent on projecting its missile, naval and aircraft power far beyond its shores’. It’s been 50 years since the Military-Industrial Complex dished up The Yellow Peril for breakfast. Perhaps budgets are under threat from the rising power of the Political-Legal-Media Complex (PLM). Perhaps it is concern about their street-cred in the wake of recent Mesopotamian Adventures. Anyway according to the Pentagon China is spending two or three times more on defence than they are telling us. For decades the Pentagon and the CIA told us the same about the Soviet Union during the Cold War but none of it turned out to be true. So a heavy dose of scepticism is in order. But for what it’s worth the figure being put around for Chinese defence spending is $100 billion next year.

This recent dodgy dossier on China’s military spending is an annual event which gives America’s Generals a chance to frighten the politicians with their latest news of nuclear arsenal upgrades and China’s latest purchases of killingry from Russia. The message the Pentagon wants to get across to the Hawks in Congress to pass on for PLM Massaging is that ‘the lack of transparency and the scope of the Chinese arms build-up is evidence of Beijing’s desire to interdict at long ranges aircraft carrier and expeditionary strike groups that might deploy in the western Pacific.’

Once the reality on the ground has been defined it is just a few short procedural steps to bills for the US Congress …and the US tax-payer. ‘An immediate American pre-emptive response is vital to our national security!’ ‘America must have a deployment capability between Mainland China and Taiwan…though not before our marketing boys have done their stuff and sold killingry to both sides. The last place any sane American should want to place an expensive US Pacific fleet is between warring Chinese factions in No-Man’s Sea.

One of my many unpublished articles is entitled The Royal Prerogative which begins with a short history of the English Commonwealth which goes like this. ‘In England the royal prerogative is the way centralised Government bypasses Parliament. These princely prerogatives are what Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army left in the royal domain after grabbing the things that mattered for their Short, Long and Barebone Parliaments.

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 and was elected to represent Cambridge City in the Short Parliament of April 1640. He continued to serve in the Long Parliament convened in August 1640 and took a leading role in that parliament's refusal to bail out the bankrupt King Charles I, eventually stripping him of his power, taking control of fiscal policy and placing the army and navy under parliamentary control. Within two years a Civil War was waging throughout the land with families divided and royalist Cavaliers and parliamentarian Roundheads at daggers drawn.

Out of the skirmishing the Puritans emerged victorious, cut off the king's head and after an interlude with the Barebones Parliament appointed Cromwell as Lord Protector of England ruling with the help of a single-chamber parliament. It was not long before the expense of a standing army and the cost of the trade war with the Dutch brought Cromwell to his knees too. Nations need finance as well as firepower if they are to undertake glorious action. Cromwell died in 1658 and two years later the monarchy was restored.

The immediate legacy of the English Civil War was a constitution in which the King in Parliament was the glue that bound together the monarchy and the three branches of government: the legislature, the administration and the judiciary. Before the English Civil War the princes did not rule unfettered. There was a written constitution imposed by provincial barons on King John at Runnymede called Magna Carta. But mostly the princes were constrained by the unwritten Common Law and the rights derived from it upheld by a semi-independent judiciary’.

There will be more about Magna Carta…and the sequel Magna Carta II which Charles III, King of England, will be signing into English Law at Runnymede at the Summer Solstice of 2015…800 years on…in my weblog on 15th June. I am proposing that radcon III draws up a draft of Magna Carta II and a Declaration of Intent.

The case for Global Warming does not hinge on a tenth of a degree Celsius or a few experts quibbling over the technical details behind a graph of carbon emissions. What the Carbonistas need is something with emotional impact. Tsunamis fit the bill. So their present case hinges upon the sea-level records. It won’t last. Their case will shift again when the scientific community refuses to kow-tow to their paymasters by permitting misleading use of their data. But it has served their purpose well. Truth after all is not where it’s at. With the Fear Factory perception is all…from a Goebbel‘s Primer.

So the Climate Changelings are shining their spotlights on helpless, victimized, impoverished people being flooded out of their ancestral homelands. They talk of the terror of sea levels rising precipitously…and inexplicably…with no conceivable cause. They tell of extraordinary events and unprecedented happenings affecting the entire world in recent years. Something unknown is causing sea levels to rise and threaten innocent men, women and children.

The idea is that if a convincing record can be shown of rising sea levels then the Carbonistas will be on very strong ground. When the public and the policy makers commanding the public purse strings…insurance companies for instance…see the damage that has been done and the costs they might incur…and here the computer modellers come into their own…they will spend money to solve the problem and scan the horizon for someone to blame for the mess.

Grappling with problems is not what action-oriented types do. They define, act and solve. They get it sorted. Then they look for someone to blame…and somebody else to pay the bill. So not only is the sea level data important to the Carbonista’s Bait & Switch Strategy but the fact that sea levels are rising around the world must be beyond dispute.

Unfortunately that’s the rub. There is considerable dispute about sea level. It is not simple at all. You cannot just put a mark on a dock at high tide, measure it year after year, watch it go up and publish your findings. One of the core concepts in the measurement of sea levels is the geoid…the equipotential surface of the earth’s gravitational field that approximates the mean sea surface.

Then there are the complexities of glacio-hydro-isosatic modelling and the eustatic and tectonic effects on shoreline dynamics. Even with some rudimentary grasp of these subjects there is still holocene sedimentary sequences and intertidal foraminifera distributions to master. And when that is done waiting in the wings are the carbon analysis of coastal paleoenvironments and aminostratigraphy. Sea level is not simple.

Were this enough to determine the precise scientific nature of sea level data, a consensus about this data might be feasible even if some agreed to disagree. However there would be many different hypotheses about the causes of any drift or sudden shift in the data pattern. But unfortunately for the Carbonistas this is likely to be the wrong consensus.

One of several places around the Indian Ocean decimated by the Boxing Day Tsunami was The Maldive Islands. But it would be quite wrong to think that the inhabitants of these islands had been sitting on the beach for the past few decades waiting for the tsunami to strike. They had arranged for a team of Scandinavian researchers to study sea levels in the ocean around them. The scientists found no rise in several centuries…and a fall in the last twenty years.

Michael Crichton started his research for State of Fear...published in 2004...in 2001. At that time I was reading through Tom Clancy’s published works and was somewhat alarmed to notice that many of Clancy’s plots turned up in the real world a few years after he had seemingly invented them. I had two conspiratorial explanations. Either Clancy was on a retainer with the CIA or Mossad were reading the plot outlines he sent to his publisher.

Crichton and Clancy plots have wheels within wheels and move rapidly between different pieces of the action before bringing it all together in one hectic final sequence. Their plots are full of outrageous and improbable coincidences and...as in the old Westerns...the hero comes through unscathed while the baddies and the secondary good guys go down like flies. That’s not a problem for me...it’s the nature of the genre. But one of Crichton’s subplots worries me.

The Island of Gareda is one of the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea north of Australia. Here the Pacific Plate slides under the Ontong Java Plateau resulting in the Solomon Trench...a huge underwater feature that curves in an arc all along the northern side of the island chain and is an active geological region with a deep trench. Along the length of the trench are undersea volcanoes with lots of slope debris and therefore the potential for undersea landslides which displace enormous volumes of water very quickly...the most common way a tsunami is formed.

In Crichton’s book the really really bad guy heads up a global environmental organisation. The underlying action that provides the fiendish plot for the novel involves three earth shattering natural disasters...each timed to take place on the first morning of a conference on Abrupt Climate Change...a lightning-induced flash flood in Yellowstone National Park, an enormous ice floe breaking off from a glacier in Antarctica and...you are there before me...a tsunami activated by giant Hypersonic Cavitators placed on the seabed off the Island of Gareda.