Belief seems to be essential to all peoples, even if it comes in the form of unbelief. Modern religions, like secularism and scientism, are belief-systems too because their supporters believe in their own views, contrary to other people’s experience.

The problem we have in our scientific age is that our brains have become so big we mistake them for our minds.

The brain is a fantastic tool, like a hammer, a wheel or a knife. Since the European Enlightenment, we’ve been taught to identify with it completely. The result is that most developed humans are trapped in their own heads. Their worldview is limited by what the brain can do and what it perceives.

Thus everything perceptible beyond the brainview is dismissed as “myth”, fantasy and primitive. Richard Dawkins, riding on a reluctant Darwin, is the high priest of this message.

The alternative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, writes about “extended mind”, showing us the obvious fact that our minds extend well beyond our heads. It doesn’t take much introspection to arrive at that result.

We call explorers of our extended mind “mystics” — folk with their heads in the clouds. It’s a term of abuse to scientists. Yet mystics are scientists too, working in areas designated untouchable by the materialists.

Religion is man’s response to the mystical message — that which lies beyond the cage of our brainview. Religion, like philosophy, has followed science slavishly down its tubular path. It has become an artificial construct, dependent on a narrow slice of experience and much wishful thinking. A dramatist’s creation, not a God’s.

The mystic knows “God” as the sea of awareness that lies at the heart of everybody’s consciousness. We all rise and fall within it, and share its characteristics — even its immortality.

We can be made to believe anything, but only through direct experience can we “know” the truth.

Organized religions have caused more violence than almost any other aspect of human life. They are the economic and political exploitation of who we really are.

True mystics are always peaceable, because they “know”, not just “believe”.

Easter symbolizes the rebirth of life in the northern hemisphere. It’s not a subject to squabble over, but to “know”.

John Evans

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein

Recent Related Stories
What is Christianity?

The UK Daily Telegraph’s economics editor, Edmund Conway, writes today about a whisper that an unnamed agency is set to cut Britain’s sovereign credit rating. Given the S&P reduction in Spain’s rating just days ago, it has the ring of truth.

In the event, it would put up the interest paid on “gilt-edged” government bonds, and filter through to almost every part of the economy.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling yesterday gave a blank cheque to the entire banking system. When you consider that Royal Bank of Scotland alone has liabilities of £1.8 trillion ($2.7 trillion), Will Hutton’s jibe that Britain is “Iceland on Thames” hits home hard.

But what is Gordon Brown’s current state of mind? He has a fragile ego at best and apparently needs to believe he leads the world, despite everything he has done in the UK over the past 12 years collapsing around him.

Psychologically this is the danger zone. Politicians often retreat into their bunkers at this point, surrounding themselves with smiling head nodders and sychophants.

He may not even be aware that one more mistake could plunge Britain into a hole that will last a generation. That error may already have been made in the form of Brown’s blank cheque to the banks.

Our Moneyizor site is asking the question, “Should Brown be placed on suicide watch?”

It is not an idle question in the circumstances.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
Is socialism the new quid on the block?
Public failure and Superdemocracy
A real-time slump is not like the history books

It’s true, there is some good news out there on the economic front at last, albeit thin and technical.

Dark clouds ahead — Image Syntagma Photographic

The rate at which banks lend to each other, LIBOR, is slowly reducing. The three-month rate declined from 6.21 percent mid-week to 6.16 percent yesterday. It is but a trickle of liquidity, but enough to wet the lips.

Then there is the halving of the cost of credit default swaps (CDSs), which provide insurance against bank defaults.

End of good news.

Tuesday is apparently “D-Day” when all the Lehman Brothers chickens cluck home to roost in the form of CDSs against loans falling due. Someone has to pay up, and it will be American taxpayers in the case of AIG, the world’s largest insurer.

Even more ominously, Fathom Consultancy and Capital Economics are predicting that Britain is heading for an unprecedented deflation, possibly matching Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. An inflation rate of -3 percent is a very real outcome of recent events, overtaking the scale of the last time this happened in the 1950s/60s when it was but a fraction of -1 percent.

Japan, the world’s second largest economy, is still suffering the effects of that disastrous period, so this is not going to be pleasant.

Such desperate times are almost always ushered in with bad decisions by the policymakers. And so it is in the UK.

Gordon Brown’s response to the collapse of the British financial system is firstly, to blame the world — especially America — instead of himself, despite the fact that his own institutional invention, the Financial Services Authority, couldn’t spot snake oil if it fell into a vat of the stuff.

Then, Brown’s Attleeish instinct was to nationalize essentially-solvent banks while calling for a new Bretton Woods “global solution.”

While preening on the world stage, he’s not just setting himself up for a fall, but the country too. He’s dragging us all to hell in a Brownmobile.

The present crisis can be traced to a later version of the 1944 accord, Bretton Woods II. George Cooper, author of The Origin of Financial Crises published a brilliantly-argued article on Bretton Woods in the Telegraph this week. Here’s a snippet:

More recently, the arrangement of pegging emerging market currencies to the U.S. dollar has been accurately referred to as the Bretton Woods II framework. … Today’s crisis can, in large part, be attributed to America having accumulated an unsustainable debt load thanks to the fixed exchange rates of Bretton Woods II. We do need a new strategy for managing our monetary system, but the last thing we need is a Bretton Woods III with fixed exchange rates.

Is Brown listening to anyone but the applause he hears ringing in his ears from an international audience of his fairweather friends?

In Britain, we are facing a heavy bout of deflation, with all its miseries, next year and beyond, plus a return to hard socialism for at least a year. To make matters worse, most of our decisionmaking powers will be exported by Brown to yet more useless international bodies. It couldn’t really be any worse — unless we were in the euro.

We are a sturdy bunch in Britain, quite capable of surviving a prolonged downturn with good humour and stoicism. Why should we put up with a return to the depressing Marxism that blighted our land for decades after the war?

David Cameron, where are you? One good speech is not enough. Your country needs you.

John Evans

Related Stories
David Cameron makes a novice of Gordon Brown
The world needs Up-To-A-Pointism
Globalization destroys necessary bulkheads
Bad news is good news for Gordon Brown
The Kraken Wakes
Depression looms like a yawning abyss

It’s been decided. Gordon must go … painfully.

Such is the extent of his crimes against humanity, the nation, the planet, and especially the Labour Party, the biggest jury ever assembled has decreed he must suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Even the political commentators — who are finding it hard to reinterpret the death throes of this man’s career in new and original ways — were virtually unanimous this weekend on his ultimate fate. Only one that I read put up a lukewarm defence: Peter Oborne in Saturday’s Mail. But there was something weary and attenuated about his piece.

For a more red-blooded approach “Pollygate” takes some beating. The Guardian’s Pollygamous lapdancing correspondent (if Richard Littlejohn is to be believed) was immortalized by parliamentary round-robin, when her extended version of the last rites was circulated by email to every sitting Labour MP. Imagine opening an email and discovering a thousand words by Polly Toynbee on your BlackBerry. Spam doesn’t begin to cover it.

Over at its sister paper, The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley patrolled his now familiar beat, Gordon must go … Oh, the tedium of it.

Turning right into the Telegraph offices, even Gordon’s editor for his new book on “Britishness” (Heaven preserve us!), Matthew d’Ancona, gave the old screw another twist, albeit with just a modicum of concern. Heads and brick walls, Matthew.

Melanie Phillips takes up the baton in this morning’s Mail. It’s a war of attrition now. “The strategy is to undermine Brown by withdrawing support on the Labour benches to such an extent that ministers have no alternative but to wield the knife upon the stricken Prime Minister, and put him and the party out of their misery. … [T]he public is simply sick to death of the whole lot of them.”

The Grim Reaper, it seems, in the person of creepy John Reid, who could teach Vladimir Putin a thing or two, is hovering in the background like a Glaswegian Brutus. He may even decide to stand against Brown. What, another Scotsman? He wouldn’t pass the Paxo Test.

This whole scenario is taking on the form of one of Shakespeare’s more gruesome theatrical extravaganzas. Maybe the party should hire Trevor Nunn as a directorial consultant and be done with it.

In keeping with the theatre noir mood music, Peter McKay talks of Viking funerals, and paraphrases the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Gordon thought he could reap Tony’s seed, keep his wealth, wear the robes he’d weaved and bear the arms he’d forged.”

Not so sure about Tony’s seed though.

Back at the now intensely compelling Guardian, Andrew Marr’s missus Jackie Ashley writes, “The Labour party could be on the verge of destruction. Out of money, and facing an electoral smash and a massive factional fallout, it may not survive as a major political force.”

On Gordon himself she reports, “In private he brims with enthusiasm about child poverty, perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone, and the impact of rising food prices in China.”

Perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone? Says it all, doesn’t it? Out of the mouths of babes and Guardian columnists …

The ever-dependable William Rees-Mogg in The Times has, “Labour’s best hope lies with the Palin effect. Gordon Brown is guilty of boring the nation. His party should look to its women to make itself interesting again.”

But where is a Sarah Palin in the massed ranks of Labour wimmin? The Blair babes are like Gordon, ideological nutcases and social engineers working on the principle that they know best how the rest of us should live, despite the deficiencies in their own lives.

Sarah Palin speaks from real experience learned in the harshest of environments. By contrast, Labour females have the odour of insipid British local government hung about them.

Rees-Mogg revisits his championing of Harriet Harman — Labour’s Hillary — but also adds Ruth Kelly to his shortlist who would swing a bit of interest back towards the Labour Party. I agree, but in both cases it would be accompanied by national derision.

The unsmiling Harman is too frosty and way too feminist, while newly-glamorized Ruth Kelly has a most unfortunate accent that drains her presence of seriousness. An election campaign filled with her drone and Labour’s cacophony of glottal stops would drive us all potty.

Sarah Palin is the nearest America has come to finding a Margaret Thatcher. She explodes onto a stage and holds her audience by the force of her personality and the “wow” effect when she articulates positions that resonate naturally in the minds of her listeners.

She probably reminds Americans of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau who spoke with folksy common sense in an aura of spirituality. That’s why she’s beating the pants off wonky, cerebral Obama. It’s the psychology, stupid.

Does anyone imagine Harman or Kelly speaking to the British soul as does the Last Night of the Proms?

Margaret Thatcher did. Sarah Palin does in America.

Janet Daley in the Telegraph nails it when she urges David Cameron to begin speaking for the nation. “Shouldn’t the voters be made to feel that there is a prospective Prime Minister who is not playing this game purely for party advantage and is actually prepared to speak up on their behalf?”

Silence is often interpreted as conspiracy.

Comments are now on.

Related Stories
Gordon Brown and Sarah Palin
British politics back to normal – Regency style
Gordon Brown should emulate Marshall Foch
Gordon Brown – Leader of the Opposition Designate

Politicians nowadays speak to us in code. If you still believe that the vacuous utterances of your average politico are nothing but sad soundbites and sugar, think again. The brew is teeming with cipher messages for fellow conspirators.

Currently it’s the crumpled Labour Party that’s responsible for more encrypted signals than GCHQ. Even the political commentators are picking up this irritating habit.

One of the more popular of the code words now doing the rounds is cojones, which is not a type of Welshman. Both Matthew d’Ancona and Andrew Rawnsley used the new “c” word yesterday.

Cojones, pronounced CO_HON_ESS in its native Spanish, has a lot to do with the driving force behind fighting bulls. And I mean behind literally. To be delicate (as we must on a family website), think of our Education Secretary as Ed Cojones. If I also say, two Eds are better than one, you should by now have interpreted my codified intent.

Not surprisingly, the main target in the cojones wars is David Miliband, that prize chump who bounced across our screens last week, grinning like a clown with a painted-on face, on the back of a dreary article in The Guardian. And, yes, the article was seen as so encrypted you’d need an Enigma machine to work it out.

Miliband is sometimes referred to as the British Obama, the Boy David, Millimetre, and, for some reason, even Millinery Hatband. Oh, I get it!

Milly is the cryptic leader of a putative coup against our Gordon, if the signals are read aright. He even answers questions about his dreary “manifesto” in double-code: “can” instead of “will” apparently carries enormous significance with the nerdy types who watch these things.

Variations on the conditional tense are also a big giveaway as in, “I have always wanted to support Gordon”. Meaning, “I haven’t quite got there yet, and it looks a bit late for that now … but I live in hope [Wink].”

Oh, the chuminess of it all. Such ripping fun all round.

Not so for William Rees-Mogg in Sunday’s Mail. After slipping up last week with “the British Obama”, he really gave the lad a smack yesterday.

“Least of all can one sympathise with teenage rebels without a cause who think it would be nice to be the next leader of the Labour Party. They seem to understand nothing about the depth of crisis in which their party and Government find themselves. Grow up or shut up is the best advice to them.”

Such invective is rarely heard from the Somerset Levels.

Liz Jones, also in the Mail, and not normally associated with the cloak and toothpick world of politics, sweetly writes that Milly could be our very own Brad Pitt. Not William Pitt, mind you, but Brad.

There’s only one obstacle to clear. His wife must look like Angelina Jolie. The fact that Ms Jones sets this hurdle, almost certainly means she doesn’t. That must be a great relief to Mrs Milly. I imagine though that Milly himself has enough vanity to rather fancy following in the footsteps of Brangelina.

I think we’ve squeezed all the juice to be had out of Milly’s cojones for one week. However, we do notice that another bandwagon (Milibandwagon? — ah, the composites available to this man) has begun to roll in favour of the other Miliband, Ed — not cojones Ed, you understand. And I’m not suggesting Ed M. doesn’t have what it takes in the boot.

You know, scribbling about British politics can get very complicated. Come back David Cameron (currently in Cornwall), all is most definitely forgiven.

Oh, and bring Occam’s razor with you, along with that big pile of psychology books.

Despite the spate of negative results in referendums on aspects of the European Union, the EU Commission and its heavyweight political supporters have not given up on their main aim: to convert the EU into a single country.

The currently proposed constitution — now called the Lisbon Treaty — would turn a grouping of nation states into a legal entity in its own right with the power to sign international treaties on behalf of member states and the right to overturn any nation’s laws. It includes an embryo army poised to requisition the forces of any EU country worth having, a flag, a “national” anthem, a passport system and the beginnings of a diplomatic corps with its own embassies around the world.

All it needs is a name.

The European Union is largely operated for, and on behalf of, Germany and France, the two original founders. What they want, they tend to get. In the treaty after next, assuming they find a way to browbeat Ireland into accepting most of the Lisbon Treaty, the question of the name of the new country of Europe is sure to figure. What might it be?

It would have to satisfy the egos of the Germans and the French and be mildly acceptable to the rest. One obvious name stands out: Frankia.

France was originally named after the Germanic tribe, the Franks, which gave us Charlemagne and other worthies of the “Holy Roman Empire”. It’s a name that would flatter both Paris and Berlin, and emphasize their status as joint controllers of the new European empire. The former French currency, naturally, was the franc.

The British would hate it, of course, and, assuming Labour governments are a thing of the past by then, would probably withdraw.

But would, say, a David Cameron government have the moral force to renegotiate Britain’s terms along the lines of an association agreement? Matthew d’Ancona has an excellent “testing the waters” piece in today’s Telegraph on what Cameron can expect on becoming PM in two years from now. One of his most important points is that serious challenges bring massive opportunities for radical change.

Cameron will certainly be faced with the kind of economic reconstruction that Margaret Thatcher tackled so fearlessly in the early 1980s. She succeeded in transforming Britain from basket case to Anglo-Saxon Tiger in less than a decade.

I’m not going to recite my own shopping list of what a new British government needs to do, as it’s way too long. But lancing the European boil is absolutely essential for British independence and for unity in the Tory party. It would also allow the country its familiar role as a freebooting trader again, free from the paralysing regulatory environment and toxic cost base spewing out in all directions from Brussels.

Frankia, in any shape or size, is no longer in Britain’s national interest. David Cameron may just become the saviour of the nation, a Winston Churchill for the 21st century.

Today, for some reason, I’ve been reviewing how I consume news and commentary, both on- and offline. It must be the persistent wind and rain outside.

This is not going to make a long article, so I’ll get straight to the point.

I live in England where, contrary to Robert Scoble, we have a superb selection of national broadsheet newspapers, plus a dubious pot of red-top tabloids that entertain us from time to time with their wild excesses — though none quite as bad as some in the U.S.

I find I tend to consume hard news — like “Obama wins primary”, “Brown reneges on solemn promise” — on TV rolling news programs, principally the BBC’s News 24. Never for more than 20 minutes, though, because nothing is more life dehancing than watching the same clips over and over — unless they’re about you, of course.

Tech news is best read online. Techmeme, TechCrunch (and the other Crunches) and Robert Scoble put the print press in the shade. It’s very much a case of deja vu if I glance at the technology pages in The Times or the Guardian. In fact I think they source a lot of their material from the tech blogosphere too.

Here at Syntagma Towers we only buy the print version of The Daily Mail because it loses a lot of its visual value online. It’s more of a magazine these days, so you need to have it in your hands for maximum impact.

I read the American press online, which means The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It’s so much simpler than buying late print versions flown over.

I also consume the British broadsheets in pixel form. Unmissable commentary in large blocks of text does not require a paper version in an age of big screen monitors.

The Telegraph is the first port of call, with its brilliant array of journalists : American Janet Daley (who, annoyingly, is rarely wrong about anything) ; International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose commentary on the credit crunch is required reading — oh, and I knew some of his relatives in Oxford. Charles Moore can be relied upon to throw fresh light on any subject, and Jeff Randall is a one-stop-shop for untangling what’s going on in the business and political firmaments. Add Matthew d’Ancona’s take on politics and the paper really is de rigueur for anyone interested in the world we think we live in. Not forgetting Simon Heffer, of course. That’s quite a galaxy of stars.

The Times (London) ditto. Anatole Kaletsky’s macroeconomic pieces are perfectly read online, as are Matthew Parris’s musings on politics and everything that moves.

So, a newspaper nut like me only reads one paper in its native print version. What does that say about the future of print?

Keep the aspidistra flying folks.