Layer 544 . . . The Buzz, The Waltz and the Human Condition

Lying in the blazing September sun this afternoon in my fabulously comfortable rocking sunlounger I felt more relaxed than I've done in years, or perhaps decades. Is it any wonder when the past six summers, at least, have been so bad, or simply non-existent? We now know that this change for the worse in our climate is down to a shift in the position of the Jet Stream, which may or may not have something to do with global warming. Either way, it's been fucking frustrating.

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In the Guardian magazine today there's an article written by Decca Aitkenhead under the title, The Buzz.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/sep/07/how-the-vibrator-caused-buzz

It seems there's a film that's about to go on general release called Hysteria, which "tells the true story of the vibrator".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria_%282011_film%29

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFy6cfPmjd4

The vibrator was invented by respectable Victorian doctors, who grew tired of bringing female patients to orgasm using their fingers alone, and so dreamt up a device to do the job for them. Their invention was regarded as a reputable medical instrument – no more improper than a stethoscope – but became wildly popular among Victorian and Edwardian gentlewomen, who soon began buying vibrators for themselves. For its early customers, a vibrator was nothing to be embarrassed about . . .

100 years ago women didn't have the vote, yet they were going to a doctor's office to get masturbated.

In 19th-century Britain, the condition known as hysteria – which the vibrator was invented to treat – was not a source of embarrassment at all. Hysteria's symptoms included chronic anxiety, irritability and abdominal heaviness, and early medical explanations were inclined to blame some or other fault in the uterus. But in fact these women were suffering from straightforward sexual frustration – and by the mid-19th century the problem had reached epidemic proportions, said to afflict up to 75% of the female population. Yet because the very idea of female sexual arousal was proscribed in Victorian times, the condition was classed as non-sexual. It followed, therefore, that its cure would likewise be regarded as medical rather than sexual.

The only consistently effective remedy was a treatment that had been practised by physicians for centuries, consisting of a "pelvic massage" – performed manually, until the patient reached a "hysterical paroxysm", after which she appeared miraculously restored. The pelvic massage was a highly lucrative staple of many medical practices in 19th-century London, with repeat business all but guaranteed. There is no evidence of any doctor taking pleasure from its provision; on the contrary, according to medical journals, most complained that it was tedious, time-consuming and physically tiring.

Hmmmm.

If the story of the vibrator tells us anything it is that men have been determined for millennia to deny the most obvious truth about women's sexual requirements. Explanations for this collective denial have ranged from profound fear of female sexuality to sheer laziness. Either way, Maines says, "The constant from Hippocrates to Freud – despite breathtaking changes in nearly every other area of medical thought – is that women who do not reach orgasm by penetration alone are sick or defective." Western society has steadfastly preferred to pathologise around 75% of the female population as frigid, hysterical or, as the Victorians liked to say, "out of sorts", than acknowledge the inconvenient truth that coitus might not be entirely satisfying to women.

 http://www.sonyclassics.com/hysteria/

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZAxFLaXT_M

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Take This Waltz

Take This Waltz is the title of one of the tracks on Leonard Cohen's superb 1988 album "I'm Your Man". It's also the title of a film written, produced and directed by the multi-talented Canadian Sarah Polley, which has recently been on general release in this country. The film had an absurdly bad review by one of the Guardian's film critics, who gave it one star out of five. This man, who shall remain nameless, appears to be a complete cretin.

 

Cohen has written many songs that deal with frustration and longing, including "I'm Your Man" in which he recognises that people regularly cope with a host of unsatisfied desires and fantasies. With brilliant tongue in cheek humour Leonard declares that whatever it is someone might want, he's the man to provide it. It's only a chat-up line, of course: Len's too much of a realist to imagine that any complex human being can truly be satisfied for very long. The point is, so what? Only romantics go around imagining that things can be otherwise, even if some people pretend that all's well in their life by keeping schtum about their frustrations and their usually unspoken willingness to compromise and settle for safety and security when life with a particular partner turns out to be less than ideal. Buddhists recognise that the greatest causes of misery in life are unsatisfied desires and attachment.

In Sarah Polley's film a character called Margot is the one who's frustrated. In a neat role-reversal she's married to a steady, down to earth, practical, decent, domesticated guy called Lou, who's trying to write a book that consists entirely of recipes for cooking chicken. He spends his days cooking chicken in various ways, and writing up his food experiments. Whenever Margot gets bored with the travel guides she's trying to write and approaches Lou for some diversionary cuddles or sex he's invariably "busy" and not interested - even in bed.

Margot and Lou have an apparently wonderful "best friends" kind of marriage in which they regularly play affectionate little games and say "I love you". Lou's not exactly a physical kind of guy, and so he's perfectly happy with the marriage. Margot thinks the world of Lou and yet . . . she's bored. And frustrated. She knows she needs more. She wants sex and she wants passion, excitement, novelty. And true intimacy. Somehow "love" is not quite enough.

She also wants someone whom she can talk to, share thoughts with and explore ideas with. When she and Lou go to a restaurant to celebrate their 5th anniversary she suggests they might have a conversation. Lou's response is, what for? Isn't the point of going to a restaurant to simply enjoy good food and wine? Surely they can have conversations any old time? If only.

The film reaches its true climax with a long, circular tracking shot that cleverly reveals a series of episodes in Margot's future life with a new lover, whilst "Take This Waltz" plays as its soundtrack.

At the conclusion of the film it's not clear whether anything is resolved, other than Margot realising that there's more to life than coupledom, and maybe it's the journey that's important rather than finding a destination, or a refuge, or security, or any kind of permanence. It seems that Lou has also realised that he's better off alone than married to a woman he knows he cannot satisfy, no matter how kindly and decently he treats her. He is what he is. And she is whatever she is. Lou somehow seems to have discovered his niche - he's published his book and is contracted to write a sequel - with another 50 chicken recipes. Whilst Margot might just be back where she started - on the road to finding herself - but at least with an awareness that this is what she's doing, and what she needs to do. Which seems like a very Zen thing to have learned.

All in all this is clearly an "art" film, as we used to say, which is the antithesis of the standard Hollywood model with its fast-cutting, all-action, easy to follow story line about nothing very much, and unlikely to provoke any thought or reflection. Sarah Polley is a true artist who paints with long, slow takes of the camera and leaves plenty of time and room for contemplation, connection and consideration. She highlights several key aspects of the human condition, but doesn't tell us what to think about them and doesn't point to any simple conclusions. Her characters and relationships are complex, multi-layered and ambivalent. This is not a romantic movie. And there are no solutions to the human condition.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/19/take-this-waltz-review

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yPzc_REvhU

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Leonard Cohen and his wonderful band are playing at Wembley Arena tonight and tomorrow night.
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Layer 518 . . . Feminism, Burchill, Friendship, Pampering, Whining, and Masters of the Media Universe

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Julie Burchill has always been a loose cannon - a kind of anarcho-feminist. Recently she popped up (again) in the Observer with this interesting column on women, men and friendship:

Spare me from the whining women who are giving feminism a bad name

The 'girls' night in' antics on Celebrity Big Brother highlighted all that is wrong with female friendship

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/29/julie-burchill-female-friendship-feminism

I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, but I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women, usually when I failed to respond to their advances. 

There are aspects to broad-bonding that make me feel I'd rather be a surrendered wife for an evening than have a girls' night in. At least you'd get some proper sex out of it.

"Pampering", for a start. When did women whose looks are not their living start conducting themselves like the simpering inmates of an Ottoman empire seraglio? Tellingly, spending a huge proportion of one's income on preening oneself for men's approval ("I'm doing it for me, not for men" – oh, give it a rest, you lying cow!) as a leisure option has gone hand in hand with the rise of ceaseless recreational moaning about men, and if I thought that I had to spend three-quarters of my time and money turning myself into a hairless, poreless living doll in order to get someone's affection, I'd probably resent them too. 

But the cult of pampering – like fashion – is not a thing that straight men make women do. Straight men couldn't care less – they generally just want women to have a wash, bring beer, show up and strip off. Women do it to themselves.

Sadly, a lot of what passes for feminism these days is just moaning about men, congratulating ourselves on nothing in particular, and mocking them for being big kids while doing everything we can to keep them that way.

But moaning about men doesn't make you a feminist – it just makes you a moaner who can't get along with men for reasons that are probably at least as much to do with your failings, flaws and foibles as they are with some imagined horridness on the part of men. 

Lots of women love to accuse men of being immature when the fellow in question displays a reluctance to "commit" – though what is childish about being self-sufficient and showing understandable reluctance to throw oneself into a smothery relationship with an obviously unhappy fellow human being (because surely only extremely unhappy people look to others for salvation) escapes me somewhat.

As a kid, I grew to define what I didn't want my life to be like by sitting behind moaning women on the bus, hearing them bang on about their aches and pains, both real and imagined. Too many allegedly smart women these days have merely substituted males for maladies and seem hellbent on moaning their lives away rather than changing them.

Einstein said that a definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and I think of this when I hear a friend describing men – yet again – as fuckwits. Look, hon, I want to say, if men don't suit you, go celibate. Go lesbo (but not with me, thanks) but stop moaning!

The older I get, the more I find that the friendships I treasure, which leave me wanting more, are those based around doing specific things – from the living hell of kettlebell classes to the transcendent bliss of learning Hebrew – rather than just sitting around shooting the breeze in a gender-specific environment. Because even the most well-moisturised girls' night in tends to trickle down to a pity party as the years take their toll.

Still, it's just a bit of fun, right? All girls together! Put on the Adele records, break out the cava and let's pamper ourselves stupid. But there will be tears before bedtime, more likely than not, and men for once won't be to blame. The party's over and we did it to ourselves.

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Over the past few years Oxzen has banged on somewhat about economics, finance and banking - subjects not exactly guaranteed to thrill or even interest the average blog reader. Paul Mason, Newsnight's economics editor, has become a particular favourite of this blog for his work on BBC2 and for his articles in the Guardian. How interesting, therefore, to come across this excellent 3-page spread in the Observer Review:

New masters of the media universe

Before the global meltdown, financial news was strictly for geeks and struggled to get on the news. Now, financial correspondents have become celebrities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/29/business-economics-journalists-reporting-celebrities

by Elizabeth Day

Over the last four years, since the global financial crisis was triggered by the bursting of the US housing bubble and the domino-like fall of a series of over-leveraged, under-regulated banks, something curious has happened to business coverage. Where once it was the preserve of financial policy wonks and secretive, high-powered bankers who liked to discuss credit default swaps over breakfast, now it has emerged, blinking, into the mainstream.

We are, it seems, a nation now obsessed by business and economics. In March, the writer John Lanchester publishes Capital, an epic novel examining the fall-out from the economic crash. A six-part docudrama about the city, produced by the team behind the psychological crime drama Luther, is being developed by the BBC.

Paul Mason, Newsnight's economics editor, says: "Our audience research has shown that despite the fact that we've massively upped our coverage of the economy, the audience wants even more. For our audience, who are very professional, Volvo-driving types, they want to see the big business people grilled."

Stories about the economy – the bailouts, the losses, the bankers' bonuses – have jumped to the top of the news agenda, replacing the slots previously occupied by political, sport or showbiz scoops.

For the first time in living memory, business correspondents are basking in the warm glow of the limelight. Every one of them I speak to recounts their own anecdote about the moment they realised their specialism had suddenly become cool.

What has driven this upsurge in interest? There have, after all, been recessions and bank collapses before (albeit not on the same scale). But the current financial crisis seems to have captured the public imagination in a particularly potent fashion.

According to Peston, the answer lies in the fact that we are now faced with an economic implosion . . .

"Suddenly it became clear in 2007, when the markets were closing down and then Northern Rock collapsed, that what was happening in these funny organisations called 'banks' mattered to all of us because, as taxpayers, we're bailing them out," he says. "We're getting poorer as a result of their actions. People just got it overnight, about how important understanding business is."

People have realised that the way money goes round the world really matters.

"As journalists, we had the immediate short-term issue, which was that people needed to understand the recession. But I like to think there is a wider civic issue too, because it's outrageous how long the public at large have been so laidback about understanding what goes on."

"It's like food: we used not to care so much about how it was produced but now we want to know what goes in it. In the same way, people need to understand that finance is about understanding how the world operates."

The desire of vast swathes of the television audience to get a grip on what is happening means there is an ever-more pressing need for a communicator to act as go-between. In the conjoined spheres of business and economics, the role of the correspondent is paramount.

Faisal Islam agrees: "At the heart of the financial crisis is complexity and people are looking for ways in which that complexity can be decoded. It poses a challenge for journalists because, essentially, complexity has been used and abused by financiers and politicians to mask what they didn't know and we, as journalists, have to explain that.

"We have to get to the bottom of what really happened at RBS or HBOS because the people who caused it really haven't been held to account."

It helps, of course, that many of the disgraced financiers are such extraordinary characters – there is nothing better designed to leaven a dry discussion of off-balance sheet securitisation than a Bonfire of the Vanities-style tale of excess, ego and self-destruction. In the UK, there is Sir Fred Goodwin, the disgraced Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive, who lavished £350m on new office headquarters, enjoyed the use of a private jet and admitted having an affair with a senior colleague in the run-up to the bank's collapse. After RBS's £45bn taxpayer-funded rescue, Goodwin left with a £342,500 annual pension.

In America, there is Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers, modern art enthusiast, real-estate millionaire and a man with a manner so gruff and brutal, he was nicknamed "the Gorilla" on Wall Street.

"It's almost like a soap opera you get locked into," says Jeff Randall. "If I tell the story with dividends and yields, I've lost you, but if I tell the story of Fred Goodwin, it becomes more engaging… There are all these characters who can be power-mad, slightly crazy, venal, weak – all the human foibles – and that would make a good drama, except these people were playing for real and for higher stakes."

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With friends like Facebook…

Facebook's reaction to proposals to tighten up on privacy rights shows its lack of respect for others

by John Naughton

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/29/facebook-data-privacy-rights-regulation

Facebook made this announcement on its official blog: "Last year we introduced timeline, a new kind of profile that lets you highlight the photos, posts and life events that help you tell your story. Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you'll have seven days to preview what's there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else sees it." Note the authoritarian tone: "Everyone will get timeline." Translation: you'll get it whether you like it or not. We will return to this later.

The truth is that companies such as Facebook are basically the corporate world's equivalent of sociopaths, that is to say individuals who are completely lacking in conscience and respect for others. In her book The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout of Harvard medical school tries to convey what goes on in the mind of such an individual. "Imagine," she writes, "not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the wellbeing of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools."

Welcome to the Facebook mindset.

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Layer 165 Gender Politics, The Chinese Model, Bankrupted Practices, A New Idealism, Transition and an Obama Speech.

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Charlie Brooker's article in G2 this week was very funny, as usual, and contained some thought-provoking ideas about the state of the world and the role of men in messing up the planet. It works well as a polemic, and hopefully challenges readers to think about the differences and similarities between men and women, particularly those who supposedly represent us in Parliament.

Presumably no sane person is going to take his suggestion at face value – that men should now step back from running the affairs of the country and hand everything over to women to see what they can do. One thing we have to thank Thatcher for is clearly establishing that the kind of women who manage to climb to the top of the greasy pole are as likely as men to be raving egomaniacs with no ability to direct the ship of state along a course aimed at social justice, sound economics and excellent public services.

Hazel Blears, who wore her usual stupid fixed grin and an idiotic badge saying “Rocking The Boat” on the day she finally resigned this week, brilliantly reinforced our understanding that both men and women in politics are incredibly lacking in anything resembling social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, lacking in decency and even lacking in plain old intellect.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/01/charlie-brooker-women-men-power

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Madeleine Bunting's article today has the strapline, “It's been a truly disastrous week for women at Westminster. How did things go so badly wrong?”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/05/mps-expenses-women-politicians-westminster

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Three Models of Politics.

Timothy Garten Ash wrote an interesting article this week comparing three models of politics – Chinese communism, American conservatism and European social democracy. For Oxzen, at any rate, the Chinese model is now the interesting one – we're already very familiar with the other two. Leaving aside the issue of how the members of the government are elected under the Chinese system – which is the only issue for nearly 100% of western commentators – the really key issue is whether or not the national wealth is held and used in the name of the people, the majority of the population. This of course was the major concern of Marx and Engels.

In Europe and America the vast majority of the nation's wealth is held by a relatively small number of private individuals, either directly or in shares and other investments. As we know, over time the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, especially when the tax system is as regressive as ours. The rich can avoid paying taxes almost completely, and meanwhile a loaf of bread and indeed a TV set are very expensive for a poor person, whereas they cost quite trifling amounts as far as the rich are concerned. 15% or 17% VAT is a huge amount for a poor person, whereas the rich often manage to pay no VAT because they buy things on “expenses”.

Capitalism claimed that communism and socialism are not only undemocratic (which of course they don't have to be – Britain could elect a communist or socialist government if we had a mind to) but they also promote a very inefficient way of running an economy (i.e. through state intervention and state ownership) or of running an individual business enterprise. Prior to 2008/9 this claim was never queried. We've now woken up to reality.

China now has the fastest growing, or the slowest declining, industries, a vast amount of national wealth held in cash in places like the USA, a thriving mixed economy, and a population that's clearly becoming wealthier and better educated at a tremendous rate. America, meanwhile, is seeing its major corporations, its banking and finance sector and its biggest mortgage companies go completely kaput and therefore in need of state takeover. America is willy nilly starting to emulate the Chinese model.

America is a huge debtor nation. It owes the rest of the world incredible amounts of money. America is also seeing its people declining into poverty at a tremendous rate, and has an education system that's in continuing crisis and offering a poorer quality of education with each passing year. The same applies to Britain, of course, since we've been copying the American model, though not to Germany and France, which, though they have centre-right governments, maintain a commitment to social democracy, fairer taxes, state intervention in the economy, and high quality public services.

Prior to the election of Obama, America couldn't even claim that it has a proper democratic system for electing its political leaders, since we all know that Bush stole the first election and won the second one on the basis of people's ignorance and fear, thereby becoming the most shameful and hated president ever, not just in his own country but around the world.

Which of these political and economic models are the developing nations likely to look to as models for their own development? We can already see that in South America there's a real chance that social democratic and indeed socialist ideologies have taken firm root, since those countries have historically been the biggest victims of the USA's imperialistic Shock Doctrine and neo-conservative ideology, they've taken very careful note of the spectacular implosion of capitalism, and also the fact that capitalist countries are only managing to keep some sort of status quo on the back of vast injections of public wealth into their economic systems.

In other words, the only way the USA and Britain, and others with similar systems, have kept from falling into total chaos is by using ordinary people's wealth, and their future wealth, to prop up a corrupt and spectacularly unfair economic and social order. Meanwhile the fat cats keep their riches, increasingly move them to offshore tax havens, and don't pay a penny to atone for their greed and their catastrophic ruination of an already bad and incredibly under-regulated system. It seems we can't touch these criminals because they worked within “the rules”.

What I find really interesting is the fact that in the USA and Britain there's virtually no chance that our politics and economics will change to the point where we commit to emulating the socialist model, since the power of capital and the power of the current social and political establishment is so strong, and the population so brainwashed. Therefore these countries are locked into a system that can ultimately only lead to their continuing decline. The USA might at present be adopting the practices of the Chinese, but their fat cats will ensure that there will be a return to conservatism and full-on capitalism as soon as practicable. Ditto lapdog Britain. Unless we do something about it, of course.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/03/china-democracy-europe-united-states

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The Transition Movement

Madeleine Bunting wrote an interesting column this week, in which she said,

Beyond Westminster's bankrupted practices, a new idealism is emerging.

Progressive politics will take root from the rubble of a Labour defeat. The Transition movement is giving us a glimpse now.

Something remarkable has happened. Politics has become entirely unpredictable. Suddenly all manner of political reform is back on the table, a new urgency has been infused into tired debates about political disengagement and apathy, and radical reforms are being proposed to reinvigorate the hollowing out of political institutions.

New Labour, which built its fortunes on "there being no alternative", is now being forced into the humiliating circumstances of having to find one.

Let's sketch out how that might develop, and offer . . . a first draft of what a 21st-century utopian politics might look like.

It will be hard to mourn the defeat in 2010 of a political party that lost its moral bearings in its bid to woo middle England, slavishly reflecting back what it believed this narrow constituency wanted to hear. It won ballots by flattering and indulging a mythology of the good life as individualistic aspiration and material enrichment, and never challenged the multiple erroneous assumptions on which this was based. On the two vital progressive issues of its age – inequality and the environment – it wasted a crucial decade and squandered parliamentary majorities on contradictory and inadequate gestures.

What it palpably failed to grasp was how crucial political reform was to regenerate progressive politics. A party that had been professionalised and managerialised in the 80s, not surprisingly, did not understand how to respond to people's appetite to participate, and author their own lives. It only knew how to manipulate and manage public engagement, and earned deep resentment for doing both. Only out of the rubble of defeat in 2010 will a new progressive politics begin painfully to emerge well beyond the bankrupted conventions of Westminster politics.

If you want to catch a glimpse of the kinds of places outside the political mainstream where that new politics might be incubated, take a look at the Transition movement. Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, was one of the first to spot its potential when he described this young and fast-growing movement as "absolutely essential". Other politicians have been similarly intrigued, and last year The Transition Handbook came fifth in MPs' list of summer reading. It isn't hard to see why politicians are so interested. The Transition movement is engaging people in a way that conventional politics is failing to do. It generates emotions that have not been seen in political life for a long time: enthusiasm, idealism and passionate commitment.

Within three years it has gone from an idea to having 170 towns, villages and cities signed up as transition communities, working in 30 countries, and thousands more all over the world using the transition model. It is viral, catching on faster than its founder, Rob Hopkins, can track. Its message is that peak oil and climate change demand dramatic changes in the way people live, and, given that no one has the answer, communities themselves must start working out how that change might come about. It offers no answers, no solutions, only some tips in a handbook for how to get started. Transition lays the challenge squarely at the door of everyone. This is too big and difficult for government alone to tackle, too overwhelming and depressing for individuals to face alone.

Transition is rooted in a new politics of place: geography matters again as people look to the community immediately around them to devise the solutions for sustainability and resilience. At one level it works as a way of regenerating social capital, building up relationships with neighbours, working out how to collaborate again on common interests – community gardens, recycling, waste and strengthening the local economy. At another level it is about educating people about the challenges of peak oil and climate change, but the mobilisation and consciousness-raising is directed towards optimism and hope, not despair: how can this community use its skills and imagination to build its future?

The result is a proliferation of experiments, all of which are charted on their wiki websites: the collaboration is both local and global. Communities in Somerset can swap ideas and get inspiration from Brazil, Australia or the US. It's a world away from the smooth presentation of party politics, and transitioners are quick to point to the disclaimer on their site – they have no idea if the movement will work. They're organising local food festivals now, but tomorrow it could be community renewable energy. The emphasis is always on conviviality and enjoyment; on learning skills that have been lost over the last few decades – how to cook, grow food, repair and make things. Scotland has funded several transition organisers to work across the country. This is an unusual thing: local grassroots environmentalism that is full of hope for the future.

Their meetings don't have agendas or presentations – Miliband came to their annual conference recently as a keynote listener. They use what's called open space technology, in which everyone brings their ideas and everyone participates. Humble, self-organising, the movement owes much to the idealistic thinking of the early 70s. This is a time for revisiting those alternatives, which have been so contemptuously dismissed for a quarter of a century.

Part of its growing success is how it meets several needs simultaneously. It tackles social recession – the sense of disconnection and fragmentation of community – at the same time as it collaborates on the huge behavioural change that will be required for a low-carbon society. The latter is far more likely to come about in the context of personal relationships than as a result of discredited politicians dictating change. It is fulfilling an unexpected appetite for political engagement at a time of widespread disillusionment with the conventional political processes.

Hopkins is emphatic that transition groups refuse all political affiliation; they must build alliances to work across all parts of their community. But it is intriguing to see how the movement is experimenting with the sorts of ideas those in conventional politics are talking about – localism, decentralisation of power to communities, an environmental politics that is utopian and hopeful rather than gloomy. Of course detractors can point out its wholemeal worthiness, but it is stubbornly swimming against the tide of pervasive political pessimism, and given the unpredictability of the times, who knows where it will end up?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/reform-transition-a-new-politics

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The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, was on Thought for Today talking about the Middle East, Obama's speech and destructive emotions – instinctive reactions to fear - flight and fight. Nation States' powers of destruction grow ever greater. Everyone needs to raise their levels of social, emotional and spiritual intelligence.

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Barack Obama made a great speech in Cairo yesterday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/04/obama-muslim-world-new-understanding

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/04/barack-obama-speech-islam-west

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8084352.stm
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