Upcoming Radio and TV

- I'm going to watch this tonight (the replay at 10pm) - the first Eastenders episode featuring an entirely black cast in its 23-year history. I prefer Corrie, but Eastenders gives the Patrick Trueman character good lines. Yesterday, he had "I don't want any of the chocolates, it would spoil the taste of the rum."

- Tomorrow, at 11am, BBC Radio 4, this looks good: "What Happened to the Working Class" - "Sarfraz Manzoor on how Manchester has reinvigorated itself through its working class youth culture."

- Thursday, at 915pm, Nightwaves, BBC Radio 3, they have a programme "devoted to exploring the culture and politics of the creation of the atomic bomb." They will review "Doctor Atomic," a new opera from American minimalist composer John Adams, about the morality of Robert Oppenheimer.

Film Awards Season

- "Hunger" by Steve McQueen won the "Novello" award for best first film at the Baftas. Previously, the film had won the Camera d'Or at Cannes, and the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. It's about Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strike in Belfast's Maze Prison.

- We had a joint social with the Uni of Warwick Young Greens last week, and we went to see "Milk" at the Warwick Arts Centre. I've been to San Francisco twice (1995 and 1997), and it was nice to see a recreation of the 1970's Castro. Sean Penn really disappeared into the lead role, and Emile Hirsch was rather good as Cleve Jones. "I faked a lung disease to get out of P.E. So what? What are you, some kind of street shrink?" "Sometimes." Ben Summerskill, the chief exec of Stonewall, gave a film review in the Guardian. It's up for best actor, best director, best picture, and best supporting actor (Josh Brolin, as Dan White, the fellow city councillor who kills Milk and the mayor) at the Oscars. Click here for a view that says the film sanitises his life.

- It's always interesting to see which films get nominated for best documentary short and feature at the Oscars. The topics this year: MLK's assasination, 14-acre community gardens in Los Angeles, the aftermath of Katrina, and the photographing of people on their way to Khmer Rouge death camps.

Looking Back From 2010

These predictions -- about Obama's future use of technology and consultation, don't sound too far off:

"In a series of appearances broadcast in prime time but circulated beforehand in high-definition video to online supporters, the president called on Americans to log in to my.WhiteHouse.gov, a social networking site built around the shell of his campaign's successful my.BarackObama.com, and submit their ideas on what measures the legislative package should include. Those signing in used an application much like the now-antiquated MixedInk, which combined the attributes of a wiki with ranking systems like Digg or Reddit, allowing visitors to recombine and rank other people's input."

"When, in August 2009, rural congressmen and farm groups complained that their constituents were being disenfranchised due to lack of Web access, the Department of Homeland Security retrofitted hundreds of Hurricane Katrina-era trailers with Internet terminals and deployed them as "Democracy Stations" across the country. Allegations that these stations were more densely distributed in Democratic-leaning areas were largely overlooked amid the boomlet of positive press coverage that week."

Also read: Melding Obama's Web to a YouTube Presidency, NY Times

"Milk" - Warwick Arts Centre - 6th Feb to 12th Feb

Twitter Tweets

If you wish, you can get notification of new posts on this blog through Twitter. Each post is also a tweet.

Twitter played a key role in getting information out to loved ones, and even minute by minute reportage of what was happening, in Mumbai.

Obama's 30 Minute Informercial

If you're interested, here it is. He bought a half-hour on 7 US television networks (NBC, CBS, Fox, Black Entertainment Television, Univision -- the largest Spanish-language network, and MSNBC). 6 hours after its airing, over 320 000 people have already watched it on YouTube. I think it will come to what Dick Morris said back in June: if Obama managed to define himself as the defender of American values and individualism,he would win a landslide.

Chatting About Incineration With Liz

I'll be on the Liz Kershaw breakfast programme tomorrow morning (BBC Coventry and Warwickshire), as a guest to talk about the incinerator.

Hazel Noonan (Con-Cheylesmore), the cabinet member for City Services, and the PPC for Coventry North-East, will also be on.

It's hard to exaggerate how much of a mistake a PFI-led incinerator project would be.

- they want to build it on urban greenbelt land ... on a flood plain ... on former allotment lands

- they're assuming that waste will grow each year, but waste in Coventry fell by 1.5% last year, and it's drastically down this year so far

- the council wants to spend an extra £500 000 a year on recycling ... which sounds good ... until you hear that they want to spend an extra £4.5 million a year on incineration

- a PFI project locks us in for three decades at £90 per tonne of waste, and we'll have to keep feeding it and feeding it and feeding it ... diverting money away from recycling projects that could provide much more local employment than a PFI which drains money away to the financiers

- there are better proposals in for the same pot of PFI money, and they don't have a plan B. The plan B that should happen is a Mechanical Biological Treatment plant (MBT). There are 50 MBT plants in Germany. This is not new or untested technology. Here in the UK, Leicester has a MBT which is relatively primative, but there is a better one in Norfolk, and two of them in Lancashire. The Lancashire one works like a coffee percolator on leftover waste (after we reduce, after we reuse, after we recycle), and such a MBT can be built in 2 years ... unlike a long commissioning process for an incinerator.

Mark Easton's Blog

Mark Easton, the BBC's Home Affairs reporter, has had a series of interesting posts on his blog: on the growth, decade-by-decade, of births outside marriage , on heroin, heroin, where's Afghanistan's heroin, and on drug treatment programmes in the UK:

The National Treatment Agency prefer to focus on the number in treatment and the number retained for 12 weeks - the government's measures of success. There is no target for getting people off drugs. [Scott -- with the Blairite focus on targetting, doesn't this say everything, the one thing they haven't set a target for?] If pressed, they will argue that the data shows that those who left drug-free represent 11% of those who were discharged from treatment. That looks a bit better. But do you see what they've done? They have ignored the tens of thousands of people who are in drug treatment but were not discharged.

Jamie's Ministry Of Food

"Jamie's Ministry of Food" .. or ... "How Jamie Oliver Realised How Non-Millionaires in Rotherham Live", Tuesday at 9pm on Channel 4:

"'I've seen kids in Aids orphanages in Soweto with better diets than that,' says Jamie after meeting Natasha, sitting in his Range Rover, clearly upset."

"Natasha's family never cooked, she never went to school much, therefore Natasha is bewildered by the kitchen and recipes if Jamie isn't there."

"She has no car and two kids, while the supermarket is on the outskirts of town and the takeaway is next door. She gets £80 a week and she's drowning in unpaid bills; she's got nothing left to sell, she's crying a lot and the kids want cheese-chips so she's bloody well giving them some."

"She's not a bloody idiot, she's just totally poor with no confidence. News just in: these two things are different."

"'The thing with you, Jamie,' another woman tells him, 'is you live in a bubble. You've got no bloody idea what it's like for us.' Well, if he didn't, it's dawning on him now."

Influences

Jim, Adrian, and Matt, over the last few days, have put together lists of books - on socialism, on environmentalism, on radicalisation -- that influenced them.

I've studied Antonio Gramsci, Ed and Dave's father, Nicos Poulantzas, Robert Cox, Bob Jessop, and Leo Panitch about the state in capitalist society, but I'm not sure how that really affects month-to-month activism.

It helped me to realise that the state isn't some mysterious black box. It's not just a parliament and an army, but education, the media, the church -- the extended state. I can hold my own if we want to have a chinwag about neo-Gramscian organic intellectuals and their role in exploiting the fissures and contradictions in the local apparatus of the state.

But, it's not the language I'd use when I'm drafting up a Green Party ward newsletter.

The one concession to the usual suspects that I'll make is The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson.

What I would consider as radical turning points (whether it's film or video or books or theatre) is that you experience something, and you can't go back. You see things a different way. You have new mad skillz to re-interpret what you've already experienced and what you will experience.

1) Manufacturing Consent is a documentary about the ideas of Noam Chomsky (notably on East Timor). The War Game is a mock documentary by Peter Watkins about a nuclear bomb dropping on Kent (after a NATO/Warsaw Pact confrontation in Berlin led to a nuclear exchange). I couldn't watch or read news media the same way against after seeing "Manufacturing Consent." I couldn't vote for any politician who supported nuclear weapons after seeing "The War Game."

2) Audre Lorde's non-fiction, notably "Sister Outsider" and "Zami: A New Spelling of my Name" was very influential: "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." I'm not a Caribbean-American lesbian, but Lorde was key in highlighting that class, race, age, gender and even health are fundamental to the female experience.

3) I spent hours in the library at university, looking at the videos of Marlon Riggs (Tongues Untied; Black is ... Black ain't). What is difference? How have African-Americans been represented in media over the 1960's, 70's and 80's - that is, how are racial images constructed in each and every newscast and TV programme? What does being a gay positive African-American mean?

4) Reading about places like China 10 years after the Cultural Revolution or about Iran on the cusp of the Iranian Revolution stand out. "Homage to Catalonia", and its vivid description on revolutionary inspiration and civil war, was an eye-opener.

5) "My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During The Reagan/Bush Years" by Sarah Schulman helped me to understand not just AIDS activism, but activism full stop. She was one of the first writers on AIDS and homelessness in the world. She's written 9 novels (check out "Rat Bohemia"). She disrupted Congressional hearings on abortion on live TV. She co-founded the Lesbian Avengers, as well as the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival.

"A Thing About Machines"

You might want to check out the "A Thing About Machines" audio/visual arts festival in Coventry this weekend. Their focus will be on "musicians and artists using technology and electronic media (but not necessarily digital or “new” media)."

Obama, McCain and Framing

It's all about the framing:

"The Obama campaign just put out an ad called "No Maverick". The basic idea was right. The Maverick Frame is central to the McCain campaign and, as the ad points out, it's a lie. But negating the Maverick Frame just activates that frame and helps McCain."

"You have to substitute a different frame that characterizes McCain as he really is. There are various possibilities. Let's consider one of them. Ninety percent of the time, McCain has been a yes-man for Bush. Think in terms of questions at a debate. If the question is, is McCain a maverick?, you are thinking about him as a maverick, even when you are trying to find ways in which he isn't. McCain wins. If the question is whether McCain is a yes-man for Bush, you put McCain on the defensive. People think of him as a yes-man 90 percent of the time, and try to think cases when he might not have been. This is not rocket science. It's the first principle of framing."

"The McCain campaign has been very active in prepping the press to ask his questions with his frames: The Maverick Frame, the Country First Frame, The Surge Is Working Frame, the Victory Frame, The Drilling Frame, the Change Washington Frame, and so on. McCain can answer questions based on these frames easily and forcefully, as he did at the Saddleback debate, which he won handily."

Stall At LMHR Event In Kenilworth

I spent four hours yesterday at an anti-racism music festival in Kenilworth. Myself, Ken and Tom staffed a stall for the Green Party. It was organised by sixth formers at Castle Sixth Form in Kenilworth. We were lucky enough to borrow a table and two wooden fold-up chairs from a nearby church hall, and just walk across Abbey Fields to the festival site. About 200 young people attended over the 4 hours we were there.

It was good chatting with other attendees, notably the folks from "v" -- about seed funding for volunteering projects in Warwickshire, and how the "v" team in Coventry may be able to help us find volunteers (newsletter editorial assistants, newsletter ad sales people, fundraising event assistants?).

Currently, there are a variety of opportunities for 16-24 year olds through "v" in Coventry:

- helping with an allotment at Henley College
- being an admin volunteer for the "Young Leaders" project at Terrence Higgins Trust
- doing events and fundraising work with the RSPB
- being a befriender at Coventry Refugee Centre
- or being part of Nature Force at Warwickshire Wildlife Trust.

Coventry Telegraph Coverage - Plastic Bags

Plastic bags account for just 0.6 per cent of the city's domestic waste. The council needs to emphasise not just a plastic bag ban, but to reduce our consumption overall:

Coventry Green Party spokesman Scott Redding said:

"Plastic bags are more symbolic than anything. They might make up a small percentage of waste but cutting down on them might get people thinking in a different way."

"What's more effective is to get across the idea that plastic is oil and we should cut down on our use of plastic, full stop, by using glass bottles instead of plastic."

"Right now, the council is shying away from trying to reduce people's waste overall. They want to up the household recycling from 25 per cent to 50 per cent but they're taking 12 years to do it. In terms of non-plastic bag waste, they're setting their sights lower than they could."

Iain Dale's Top 20 Green Blogs

It's raining blog lists, hallelujah, it's raining blog lists. It's a bit surreal to come ahead of George Monbiot.

"Top" 20 Green Blogs For 2008

Jim Jepps, over at The Daily (Maybe), compiles a list of "top green blogs" each year. He was kind enough to include me in the top 60 in 2006, and the top 20 in 2007.

Here's his list for 2008, with myself at #14.

On the right hand side of the blog, you can vote for the "best of the best" of Jim's top 20. Vote early, vote often! [edited to add - this was meant as a quote from Al Capone -- Jim says that, in theory, you can vote again, but it will substitute your 2nd choice for your first; the javascript might not be sophisticated enough to handle you voting twice, so once is best]

1. Two Doctors
2. Bean Sprouts
3. Green Girls Global
4. Kitchen Witch
5. Ruscombe Green
6. Peter Tatchell
7. Barkingside 21
8. Earthpal
9. Greenpeace UK
10. Stuart's Big Green Spot
11. Flesh is grass
12. Gaian Economics
13. Johnny Void
14. Hooray!
15. Jenny Jones
16. Philobiblon
17. Ecostreet
18. Hippy Shopper
19. Transition Culture
20. Alice in Blogland

YouTube Roundup 5

- Andy Atkins, the new executive director of Friends of the Earth

- It's worth checking back every few days to look at Barack Obama's YouTube channel. They put up their TV ads, general campaign videos, and campaign videos specific to certain state-by-state races.

- Solar power projects in Burkina Faso (Christian Aid)

Batman And America's Vigilante Violence

Andrew Neil is onto something ...

"Batman is really an allegory for America. He thinks he stands for truth and justice but his penchant for vigilante violence is deeply suspect as a means of spreading these virtues (think of G Bush's invasion of Iraq) and actually attracts the sort of evil he is meant to be destroying. The Joker is obviously al-Qaeda and you are given the strong impression that he wouldn't exist if Batman wasn't there in the first place. Batman is not averse to beating a confession out of the Joker (Gitmo, Abu Ghraib). Batman wins in the end, but since most of Gotham (Baghdad) is trashed in the process - even the city's biggest hospital gets blown to smithereens - you wonder if it was really worth it."

YouTube Roundup 4

- "I really really wish aviation emissions could be / Somewhere else / Than here" - Razorlight

- Pretty much what you need to know about vegetarian Indian cooking.

- Preparation for the anti-G8 protests in Japan.

- Utah Phillips (1935-2008)

Musicians Visiting Prison

"When we go in to those places, it's very energising for us. We don't go in to do prisoners a favour: how smug would that be? We're actually appreciative of them giving us some of their time. At the moment I think it's one in four of us knows someone who is in prison. That is something that society is going to have to deal with. If we can do anything to encourage people while they are in there to believe that there is some alternative when you come out, then that has to be a good thing. Let's face it: but for the grace of God any one of us could be in there."

Video: Billy Bragg's Jail Guitar Doors campaign