This NYT piece by Nicholas Kristof is good enough to drag me out of blogging semi-retirement, which means too good to only click "Share" and send to Facebook. There is no way this can be repeated often enough to get the message across - the US does not have the "best health care in the world", far from it. Saying if it ain't broke don't fix it is only clever if it ain't broke!
My ex-father-in-law, Lisle Carleton Carter, Jr., passed away on the 10th of September. It had been many years since I had seen him, but my son was very close to him. Lisle was not only a person who I really loved and admired, he was just generally a remarkable man, a polymath, in that he was a leading academic administrator, a former government official and a lawyer until his retirement some years ago. And also a poet and a patron of the arts and many charities. He will be missed and mourned by many. His many achievements are featured in this editorial obituary in the Washington Post.
This Huffington Post article by George Lazoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics, is very long and a hard read, but worth it. Although he is focusing on a scathing critique of, and offering a cogent alternative to, the way the Obama administration has failed to sell health care reform, along the way he makes some really razor-sharp points about what is wrong with the current system. I think everyone in favour of health care reform (or insurance reform if you prefer) should read this article as a guide in how to discuss it, not just with those who agree, but especially with those who disagree.
On the 18th of July, a great friend of mine back in Minnesota passed away. It was not sudden or unexpected, and from the descriptions on the web that I have been privileged to read, it was one of the most peaceful and beautiful deaths you could hope to have, given old age and disease and an imperfect world. Gerry Bretzke was a member of my church in Minneapolis and also the small spiritual study group ironically called The Initiates. The picture above, of about half of the core members of the Initiates, is an old one, from soon after I emigrated to the UK, or maybe just before. Gerry is the guy in the middle, in the feed cap, with his arm around me. The guy on the right end is George Tofte, who passed away a few years ago.
Michelle Goldberg, author of a recent book on reproductive rights "The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World," has an article in the LA Times that summarises the complex arguments made in her book. Both address the conundrum that the world faces twin crises in its demographic future: soaring birth rates globally, with the great majority being amongst the poorest members of the poorest countries, and plummeting birth rates in several leading developed countries, notably Italy, Japan, Spain and Russia. It may seem crazy to assert at first that both problems are the result of women's lack of reproductive and economic freedom, but the arguments are pretty strong. This book is in my Wish List. Here's an excerpt from the article:
Some social conservatives are using the threat of rapid First World population decline to argue for restrictions on women's rights. But that gets it precisely backward. In developing countries, lower social status for women is associated with higher fertility, but once societies become highly industrialized and women taste a certain amount of freedom, the reverse is true. Fertility is reaching dangerously low levels in countries where social attitudes and institutions haven't caught up with women's desire to combine work and family. When faced with men who are unwilling to share domestic burdens, inflexible workplaces and day-care shortages, many women respond by having fewer children or forgoing motherhood altogether.
This is definitely the longest I have gone without blogging. Also the longest I have gone without a holiday. The last time I was abroad was Thanksgiving 2007. The only trip I took in all of 2008 was a one-day trip to Portmeiron, not even staying overnight. I am determined not to let 2009 go by the same way. I just got back Friday evening from a six-day trip to "the North" (where we do what we want!) I have reviewed and journalled the trip in more detail at Deborama's Kitchen, so check it out there. Part of the reason I didn't travel is that last year everyone in my far-flung family was in a state of flux. My older younger sister and her husband, one at a time, have temporarily abandoned the family homestead in Gulfport and set up house in Kansas. This has left my aged Ps behind in a little duplex bungalow they built mainly for them. So now my younger younger sister, an academic in Hattiesburg and her husband, a realtor, are buying a second home in Hattiesburg and moving the aged Ps there. My daughter has split with her ex-partner, father of grand-daughter Savannah. My son is still with his partner, who graduated last year from her PG Architecture course and got a job in her field - just as the property market crashed. My son's company was sold and he was offered a less attractive job than he had, but of course he's going to take it for the stability. But no benefits, no holiday, and the stability is not real stability, as nothing is these days. Both my kids have two extra sidelines for income: Aimee is a web designer for her main job, and also teaches web design and is a photographer. Carey works for an online game company, and does painting and web design free-lancing. I am so proud that I raised two smart, hard-working, creative and above all resilient kids. And like all parents and grand-parents, I pray things don't get too much worse before they get better. I have been meaning to do a blog on here called "The Fifteen Year Depression of 2008 - 2023." I would say keep an eye out for it, but it may not happen. (The blog that is; I am pretty sure about the depression.)
For over 20 years, I have supported the campaign to close the School of the Americas in south Georgia. All the while, there was this other military academy of torture that was even worse, that was probably the source of much of SOA's curriculum and that I had never even heard of. The author of this article, himself a "graduate" of the SERE, surmises that military interrogators would think something along the lines of "I survived waterboarding, so it's OK to do it to this guy". Well, I remember a top Pentagon / DOD official actually articulating that argument, with no apparent recognition of the essential sickness of what he was saying. The thing is, both SERE and SOA, and also the "hazing" in military academies (not just in the US, despite what David Morris thinks - there is an ongoing scandal in the British Armed forces involving suspicious deaths of young recruits in training) are symptoms of the whole military culture that allows them to happen. That is not going to change by closing the schools, by presidential edict or by legislation. Not that I know how it can be changed. I thought bringing women into the military might help, over 30 years ago when I still had my idealism, but that theory has been quashed by the evidence at Abu Ghraib.
Andrew Rawnsley of the Observer has a great comment piece decrying the easy cynicism of the pessimists about the upcoming Obama presidency. There are even some who glibly claim that they're sure to be disappointed by his inaugural address, what with his overblown reputation for oratory and all. Although, I read somewhere else, and it's more convincing, that all he really needs to do in the current feverish and desperate climate is step up to the microphone and sneeze and the speech will be acclaimed in history. So, who you gonna believe. Rawnsley identifies one definite strength that the Obama team can use, quoted in the title above, and attributed to an unnamed official in the Brown government.
Sir John Mortimer, celebrated barrister, playwright and novelist, died 17 January, 2009. He was best known as the creator of the popular crime series Rumpole of the Bailey, featuring Horace Rumpole, a figure only slightly autobiographical, as he never aspired to, let alone attained, anything like Mortimer's own achievements. He was also the author of the Paradise Postponed series, which was made into a great TV series, Voyage Round My Father and several other popular plays. As a barrister, he had a long career during which he also published books on the law and defended free speech in high-profile obscenity cases.
Andrew Wyeth died yesterday at the age of 91. Revered and reviled in almost equal measures, there was a time when the controversy of Andrew Wyeth's art was the biggest thing there was in American art, and some of his paintings, particulary "Christina's World" have become icons of the American image. But I reckon that somewhere under the huckster, the hen-pecked husband rescued by a woman from a domineering father, the rock-ribbed Pennsylvania Republican, the remote and fastidious realist, what we really had was a Zen master with an inherited gift. At least that's what I think when I see a painting like this one.
I was sent by my old DS comrade Dan a story from AlterNet, the title of which is The Right Wing's Latest Argument Against Public Health Care -- We'd Like It Too Much. Very good article, and I agree with everything in it except the first three words of the title. It's not "the right wing", whatever that means in America, that's opposed to universal health care. That title, and the mindset behind it, is all down to the regrettable flip side of the mostly wonderful American tendency to focus on the future: their astonishing ability to wipe out the past. And especially that maddeningly ahistorical quality of youthful American radicals to wrongly interpret their own history, forget, ignore or deny huge swathes of it, and reinterpret everything every few years, with often comical effects. No my dears, I love you all passionately, but you don't know half the time who your friends are, who your enemies are, or what you are fighting for. You wouldn't know an authentic right-wing American if one infiltrated your organisation (and I assure you, one has) and the opposition to universal health care? it is the unholy alliance of insurance, big finance and big pharma, and therefore the entire infrastructure of global capitalism, and therefore your boss, and therefore all your co-workers and essentially you yourself. Yes, you cannot so much as draw a paycheque without making a huge contribution to this behemoth which has a strong vested interest in keeping you just barely well enough to work, in terror of illness and incidentally, of "big government", and vulnerable and malleable. Your mother and father and sisters are very possibly staunch opponents of "socialised medicine", even as they struggle through life underinsured, overmedicated and lied to at every turn. The one or two authentic "right-wingers" I have known were just as likely to be in favour of "socialised medicine" as opposed to it. The concerns of the right-wing in the US, given that there the mainstream would pass as the right wing of any European democracy, are mostly to do with such relatively arcane issues as racial purity, draconian anti-crime and anti-immigration policies, and ruling the third world in a harsh and unflinchingly imperialistic style. The endless dominance of capitalism they either take as given, or believe in a Nazi-style state control, which would include universal health care, along with forced sterilisation and euthenasia of the "unfit". So not really comrades, are they? But pretty sure to latch onto a popular and naive group working for universal health care. Apart from these few quibbles, the article itself is good though. If only it had said "Big "Health-Care" Industry's Latest Argument ..."
It's a strange and not pleasant coincidence. I don't blog about India all that much, and just a few days after I did, all hell broke loose in Mumbai. And what's really strange is that a friend of mine was over there (possibly, I hope, just leaving as the attacks began) on his second trip to the country. I will be worried until I hear from him. I can't remember exactly the dates of his trip and whether or not Mumbai was on the whirlwind itinerary (I think he was there to interview prospective students at the University where he lectures.) The latest news - the breaking of the siege at the Jewish Centre. A lot of the UK media are unashamed about concentrating first and foremost on the question of how many victims are British, and only delving into the main story as an afterthought. (But the BBC coverage is good, both depth and focus.) US media are worse, and don't seem to pay it all that much mind. The international (US-owned) company I work for has hundreds of employees and contractors and clients there, but not a peep on the intranet, although they meticulously tracked the hurricanes in Texas and Florida and took up collections for the victims.
No, it's not a story about call centres, far from it. This New York Times article is about the astonishing reverse-migration of US-born men and women of Indian extraction migrating "back" to India in search of their fortunes, or just a more comfortable or exciting way to make a living. There are some fascinating insights and great quotes in this short article:
Prior to living in India: My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. ... It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.
My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen. ... Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Or the culture shock of servitude: a child’s horror at reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India. My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities. But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.
Living in India today:
At first we felt confused by India’s formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to “S&M conferences,” only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing. Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for another man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting. We learned new expressions: “He is on tour” (Means: He is traveling. Doesn’t mean: He has joined U2.); “What is your native place?” (Means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn’t mean: What hospital delivered you?); “Two minutes” (Means: An hour. Doesn’t mean: Two minutes.).
Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt. India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
Yet in the longer run the chances of better transatlantic co-operation may be greater than they seem at first sight. The reason is simple. For both Europe and America the long-term outlook is quite bleak. Global acceptance of American leadership has diminished both because of the Iraq war (and Guantánamo) and because of the rise of emerging powers with different ideas about how to order the world, some of which carry a whiff of 19th century great-power rivalries. Today’s Europe has little military clout, and is in demographic and (relative) economic decline.
A lot of articles on the economy and on the new administration coming to the US in January 2009 all take as a given that the power of the US, and indeed of "the west," is definitely on the wane. Some put the high-water mark back as far as 1948, although I would disagree with that. I think 1989 has at least as strong a claim. But there is no argument at all that the eight years of the Bush administration hastened the end for America, and a surprising number of pundits agree with me in pointing to Hurricane Katrina as the smoking gun that proved it to be so.
Jack White of The Root says, "Thanks" to white America for voting for Obama in such large numbers and even adds, quite graciously, "we couldn't have done it without you."
Heather Wood Rudulph of the Huffington Post says thou shalt love Michelle Obama. I already did, so I'm cool. Yeah, she does gush a little. But you know what? she's right. In the same HP, an old interview with the president-elect from 2004 is unearthed, which contains some very revealing statements about faith and values. Thanks again to Ashley for sending me the link.
Miriam Makeba, the pan-African activist and musician known as "Mama Africa" and the "Empress of Africa", died of an apparent heart attack following a concert Friday in Italy. A friend of Nelson Mandela, and one-time wife of Stokely Carmichael, a protege of Harry Belafonte and a mentor to many younger performers, she was connected to everyone in African politics, civil rights and music. Many younger Americans were first introduced to her as part of Paul Simon's Graceland tour in 1987, at a time when she was still officially in exile from her native South Africa and from the US for her controversial political actions.
It's Remembrance Sunday here in Great Britain. A day for looking at the past, and yet all the poppy-bedecked talking heads on Andrew Marr's show were pointing more toward the future, even when they were referring to the theme of Remembrance Sunday; that's how it is when you perch on a cusp of history, on the Great Divide as it were, where the rivers change directions. Last night, I received another group email from my old DSA comrade Dan F. in St. Paul. I read every word, and it made my blood run a little cold, providing a bracing counterpoint to the overwhelming waves of optimism of the past week. (I must confess, I still leak a few tears of joy and disbelief every time someone says "President-elect Obama" on the TV or radio.) The e-mail had the entire text of this Monthly Review article by Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Depression : A Long-term View". It made me a bit dizzy as well, an effect I last remember for certain that came from reading a dystopian novel by Samuel R Delaney. Remembrance Sunday is about honouring all the dead of the Great War (World War I to modernists), the dead and wounded of all the other wars in between, the survivors and currently serving Forces men and women, in more or less that order. DH and I observed the occasion by watching last night an excellent film of a Pat Barker novel of the Great War, Regeneration. (Every year, I also give a few pounds the Poppy Appeal and then promptly lose my poppy. It's those stupid straight pins. I have a great suggestion for bringing the past into the present a little better and instead of flogging paper poppies with a straight pin, feature optional sticky-back glossy poppies that you can press onto your coat or shirt without making a hole. Just a thought.)
This was last night, outside Ebenezer Baptist Church. From right to left, my son, his girlfriend and a mutual friend. I don't know if the AJC covered this spontaneous street party, but the title link is about the more official Atlanta Dems celebrations.
And here's the story behind this picture, from my son's message to me on Facebook.
You could even post a pic on your blog of me putting the Obama sign on Martin Luther King's grave and talk about how some woman told me it was wrong of me to do it but then thanked me and took a picture. I was confused, but I didn't care. It's what I felt like doing. Because Martin deserved to share in the celebration.
Here is an awe-inspiring photo-stream of pictures from last night. Amongst the show of 31 photos, it shows a vigil at Martin Luther King's grave in Atlanta, a site visited by my son and his girlfriend last night as part of their victory march through their (and my old) hometown. Here is a full text of Obama's victory speech. For the geeks like me, an election map from the BBC. The UK news media is if anything even more wonky about the US election than the US media. It's touching. The BBC and MSNBC maps are all Adobe Flash so I can't paste them into my blog. And let's not forget all the other races! Minnesota is on my mind today. According to Live Blog of the election at the Minnesota Daily (U of M student newspaper) the Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman is still too close to call.
I got up at 1:30 am which was 8:30 pm EST to watch the election. Obama was pretty far ahead even then, and the red states in the south, less Virginia and Florida, came in and he was still ahead. Soon after I started watching, Pennsylvania was called blue, and then Michigan. I finally went back to bed about 4:30, still a couple of hours or more to go before Obama would arrive at Grant Park for his big moment. But before I flagged, I saw the electoral college vote cross the line when California and then Washington came in. Virgina, Florida and New Mexico were all but in the bag. The carousing, the ecstasy, the weeping and hugging, had begun in Times Square, in Grant Park, in Obama's father's village in Kenya, in ex-pat parties in the UK, in the student union at Morehouse College and many other places round the globe. I saw John McCain's very gracious, noble and dignified concession speech and that's when it hit me that change really was sweeping not just the US but the planet. Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe it was a sort of self-selected crowd, but the tearful faces of the Republican faithful seemed to be saying "maybe it won't be that bad, maybe we can stop all the frenzied red-blue crap and get on with it, like he says".
Studs Terkel, another of my all-time great heroes, author of the ground-breaking oral history book Working and Hard Times, passed away on October 31 at the age of 96. If you didn't know the great man, you could do worse than to read "Why Studs Terkey Mattered" from his hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. Or, here's a little sample, from a radio interview:
With Enron and corporate scandals in the news, Studs recalled the 1930s depression: “Things don’t repeat themselves exactly. But we’ve learned nothing from it. Unregulated, free, untrammeled, what’s it called, ‘free market,’ fell on its ass again, as it did then. We’ve learned nothing.”
This just in. This could be one of the most important endorsements so far, mainly because it could tip exactly the kind of people who are still sitting on the fence.
I have had this great blog post about the economy running around in my head. I have the left view, the right view and correct view (maybe). I have how we got here and where we may be headed and what to do about it. But somehow, with reading this cacophony of voices, I am unable or unwilling to add my own. So all I can do is share.
John Cochrane, an economist of the Chicago school, is probably a "believer" and he has the traditional conservative case against the (original) US bailout plan (now largely superseded by events - was it really only a week ago?) but also the most succinct and understandable description of what the mortgage crisis is really about.
Freakonomics has loads of good stuff; I especially liked Save or Splurge? by Daniel Hamermesh, because of the little vignette about his marriage. (DH and I have lost over a third - a third! - of our retirement fund.)
Recently I joined (under my "work" persona) a website community for IT and banking industry professionals that has an excellent news feed, making me overwhelmed with cluefulness. It's called Finextra and some of the more energetic (than me) members have blogs.
I was crushed to read suddenly of the passing of Paul Newman. What a beautiful soul he was. Such a handsome man, a great actor and patron of the arts, a humanitarian and an all-round great example of how to live. I hope they give him a standing ovation in heaven.
And now I feel really good about my decision to cut off all emails from the profoundly annoying MoveOn.org. (No link; I don't want to encourage them.) I had sent them several thoughtful replies about how all these petitions were really terribly unproductive. Finally I just got tired of being simultaneously ignored and inundated with presumptious emails. Apparently I am not the only one. I like Obama's way* of dealing with them.
Perhaps most telling of his recent frustrations, Obama's mail records confirm that, in April 2008, he replied to a MoveOn.org e-mail entitled "10 Things You Need to Know About John McCain" with the message "Shut up."
* Obama didn't really do this; the Onion is fictional and satirical, for those of you not familiar with it.
What? We still can't say the word "depression"? How about "recession", can we at least call it that? Are we all Keynesians now? The Guardian has a nice selection of comments and insights into the global financial crisis, coming out on the same day that Lloyd's TSB is in talks to buy out Halifax-BOS (both major UK banks and the result of earlier mega-mergers, but in more optimistic times.) But rather than being the thoughts of pundits and economists, these views are from philosophers, artists, socialists and peace activists. Is capitalism done for? Is it even in trouble? Most of the thinkers say no. They are not so positive about the chances of the nemesis known as New Labour, however. Many of them bemoan the undeniable fact that the left does not have an inkling of a reform plan. But still, the analyses are mostly quite spot-on.
Ken Livingstone (former mayor of London) : As a system for the distribution and exchange of goods, you can't beat the market. But the mistake a lot of politicians have made is to think that because the market was good at that, it could be good at everything: it could train workers, create infrastructure, protect the environment, regulate itself. Quite obviously, it can't.
Max Keiser (former broker) : This is not a blip. It's extremely significant. We will see a shift in power away from the US, and towards the developing world - to countries such as Brazil and the Gulf states that have commodities to sell, and to China, where the savings ratio is high. We are going to see a new world order. America as a driver of the global economy is finished.
Shelia Rowbotham (professor of gender and labour history) : The Labour party has always been ambiguous about whether it is trying to make capitalism more efficient, or whether it is trying to soften its harshness. Since the 1970s, the left has been much weakened, as neoliberal ideas became totally ascendent. Under Blair, the idea that the Labour party was committed to any redistribution was pushed to the sidelines. I would like to see a new kind of left - a left that would relate to the present predicament.
Late breaking addendum : Nobel prize-winner Joseph E. Stiglitz has an article on CNN about preventing future financial catastrophes (in the US) through prudent regulation.
If all else fails for the Republicans, they are counting on the tactic of limiting voting by poor and non-white voters. Some bright spark has siezed on the mortgage crisis as a sort of natural selection device to keep people who might want regime change away from the polls. To cut to the chase, some state Republican parties are arming their poll-watchers with list of recently foreclosed properties matched to the electoral rolls, so someone who is, say, dispossessed and evicted from their home in the weeks leading up to the election can be disenfranchised on the basis that they haven't established a new home yet and updated their address. (Some states don't allow you to update your address for quite a long period before election dates, making this tactic so much easier to deploy.) I think the story says it all; there is nothing I can add.
The Guardian's Michael Tomasky is getting really frustrated trying to be fair and balanced about those nasty Republicans. But seriously, it is hard to find fault with what he says. And it is impossible to fight a clean and principled election against people who make lying both a virtue and an art form. Check his points against the Truth-o-meter and see what he means.
Deborama's Wednesday Website of the Week returns for a one-off engagement. An online friend who is almost diametrically opposed to me politically (but a decent guy) (I could say the same about my sister except for the guy part, obviously) sent me this link : Politifact.com. It includes the invaluable Flip-o-meter and also the Truth-o-meter. It also includes the Attack files and the special Chain E-mails files, with truthometer readings for each item. I am very impressed! How on earth did we do anything before the internet? (We didn't have chain e-mails influencing elections, true enough.)
The only bad thing is I'm not there. Brits and Europeans are still incredibly caught up in the Obama phenomenon. Co-workers ask me anxiously - might he actually win? Could he possibly lose? Is it all about race? (The answers to these questions are more or less the same - how the heck do I know?) Up until a week ago, we had a lot to work with. The first black candidate of a major party, a front-runner. The Bill and Hilary show, now with added Chelsea. Republicans trying to woo Democrats and a Democrat wowing Europe before he is officially nominated. An acceptance speech that was watched by more viewers than the Oscars to finish off one convention and then an impending hurricane that almost derailed the other one. And now we have the glorious soap opera that is Governor Palin. California has the governator. Minnesota used to have Jesse the Brain Ventura. But surely only a state as cussed and weird as Alaska could have this force of nature, shooting (both her gun and her mouth), breast-feeding, beauty-contest winning and marathon running her way through history. I sure as hell would never vote for her, but as long as she doesn't accidentally gain the most powerful job in the world, I love this woman! And, as a follow-up to the life-imitates art thread (Jimmy Smits in a West Wing role prefiguring Senator Obama) has nobody but me noticed the spooky similarities between Sarah Palin and Bree van de Kamp? Or is a subconscious identification of her with the formidable Desperate Housewife what gave legs to the fake pregnancy rumour in the first place? Desperate Housewife runs for Vice President; you can't make this stuff up. She would probably want to change the title to Virtue President.
Courtesy of the Observer / Guardian. A collection of cinema arts, visual arts documentaries, videos of great classical, jazz and folk performances and dance.
The Washington Post is doing an in-depth biography of Obama. This segment, quite long and full of information, covers his childhood and the life story of his parents. I found it very absorbing, the sort of thing you would find interesting for the characters even if Obama himself were a relative nobody.
I am thinking of downloading iPlayer to fill in the gaps created by my crazy schedule vs. the restrictions on recording Freeview (basically the same as SkyPlus, in that you can only do two or three shows that overlap, and since the channels tend to schedule all the good stuff at once, this is a problem.)
A couple of weeks ago, I have discovered a great blogazine, side-barred at Slate, called The Root. And this really excellent article/post, The Audacity of Taupe, discusses Obama as a man of mixed race, and the changing self-image of mixed race Americans over the generations. By David Swerdlick.
Black people can't argue a speeding ticket after sundown, and the only thing in life that white people can't do is use the N-word. To that simple rule, I am now officially adding the M-word. Good news, though—"Creole" has been approved for everybody's use.
It's not looking good for the honeybees. So far, experts have not found evidence of CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) but there has been a massive rise in honeybee deaths this past winter and spring. Honey shortages are expected. But it's more than honey, you know. The shift from food crops to bio-fuel corn and wheat leads to food shortages for humans, but also to pollen shortages, which means bees die off, which means they aren't around to pollenate fruits and vegetables which leads to reduced yields of other food crops. It sets up a feedback cycle, a race to the bottom. The most pessimistic scientist-experts say frightening things, like all the bees could be gone in ten years, and humanity cannot survive ten years beyond the extinction of bees.
You know what they say about "the left" (if such a thing even exists any more, or ever did) : the only time they form a circle is when they're going to form a firing squad. In a way this is the red vs. green battle from the 1970s, but with all the (polluted) water that's gone under the bridge, there has been some shifting. George Monbiot, as lefty-greeny as you can get, made the quixotic gesture of trying to bring some sense into the carbon-reduction, energy crisis, global warming (WE'RE ALL DOOMED!) "debate" and essentially issued a challenge to the boosters of nuclear energy. A challenge that he never expects them to be able to meet. But having failed to pronounce Shibboleth correctly, he came in for attacks. Last week's Guardian had a comment piece by, of all people, Arthur Scargill (I'm ashamed to say, I genuinely thought he was dead.) The title directs itself to Monbiot, and claims that coal is not the "climate enemy" but rather a potential planet-saviour. It is an astonishing piece really, and I am quite glad that Monbiot answered it, because I did think, when he (Scargill) waxed lyrically about all the deep, rich coal under England's green and pleasant, the first thought in my mind was "open-cast". And my instincts were right in this, if Monbiot is to be believed instead of Scargill:
When he speaks of a resurgent coal industry, he pictures deep seams hacked out by grimy workers romantically dying of silicosis. But, with a few minor exceptions, this is no longer how coal is produced in the UK. New research I’ve commissioned, published for the first time here, shows that the industry is planning a great opencast revival.
Monbiot goes on to tell about a proposal in the Welsh assembly to require a minimum distance from any new open-cast mine to any residential area, and although it doesn't seem a very great distance (half a kilometer), if adopted, it would "sterilise" any proposed new mines.
This means that they could no longer be dug. The pits are viable only if they are allowed to wreck the lives of local people. Even before a lump of clean coal is burnt, its extraction trashes the environment.
Scargill's and Monbiot's otherwise fascinating articles both end with some strange arcane business about a "duel" where they will each be sealed in a room with the poisonous substance of their choice, which I found totally baffling. I guess you need to have a penis to really understand how some things work after all.
The Orwell Prize, in association with the Orwell Trust and others, have begun a daily blog of George Orwell's diary entries in real time but 70 years later. It just began a few days ago (9 August) and not much "has happened" yet (he is in some sanitorium in Kent), so it won't take you long to catch up. The diaries were kept daily from August 1938 until some time in 1942, so they cover the period of his recuperation (partial) after being shot in the neck in Spain, his sojourn in Morocco, and his thoughts on the coming of WWII and the first two years of that conflict. And as with any blog, you can interact and leave comments and read those of others. Or you can just go for quality over quantity and stick to Orwell.
I shouldn't gloat. Some years ago, I refused absolutely to shop at Whole Foods. It wasn't just the high prices that later led to the nickname of "Whole Paycheck"; it wasn't just the unnecessarily vicious anti-union attitudes of its founder and management. It was these factors combined with the threat it posed to my most beloved of institutions, the new-wave consumer-owned food co-op. Eventually, it came to a point where it wouldn't matter any more. Co-ops had shrunk in number, but those that survived generally gained in strength. A lot of this was down to a tipping point in consumer preference for organic and artisanal foods, especially amongst the economic upper-middle classes. This benefitted both Whole Foods and its major competitor Wild Oats, as well as Fresh & Wild in the UK and food co-ops throughout the US. In the past year or so, Whole Foods has acquired both Wild Oats and Fresh&Wild. Almost exactly a year ago, Whole Foods, with great fanfare, announced its opening of the first UK outlet, in London, natch, in Kensington, natch. Just in time for the so-called "credit crunch". Last week, Whole Foods announced that it had lost $18 million in its first year in London. Of course it could have been expecting losses in any case, and on such an expensive piece of real estate, with British shoppers not being in the mood for costly food-shopping experiments, it should have expected the near disastrous results. In the US, when the overall profit slump triggered a share sell-off the next day, Whole Foods laid most of the blame not on its ill-fated expansion into the UK, but on the costs associated with acquiring Wild Oats. Well, maybe. Now Whole Foods is pursuing a brilliant strategy (in the US only I presume) of sales, discounts and budget-related customer education, trying to reverse its "Whole Paycheck" image. As I said when they opened the London branch, we'll see.
From the Onion : Recession-plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In. Some likely candidates for the 2008 bubble: undersea mining rights, postmodernism, illegal immigration futures, "widgets" or fairy dust. Anything really, as long as it can create massive, unsustainable debt while triggering a burst of good old recession-busting spending. One of the experts cited in the article, who works for a prominent bubble-based investment firm, reminds us that "the American economy cannot exist on sound investments alone." How very true.
There is a lot of Obama blogging going on, and the media is in a tizz. I will post far less than I have read. The best is still this pre-hysteria piece by Gary Younge, a Guardian columnist whose task it is to interpret American politics and society for the chattering classes of Britain (and he does it pretty well, too.)
Two articles from The First Post answered a question that had been nagging me. He is lurking in hotels, under threat and mainly failing completely to bring peace to a region that he formerly inflamed. I have one word to say about Mr. Blair: hubris.
, featuring Horace Rumpole, a figure only slightly autobiographical, as he never aspired to, let alone attained, anything like Mortimer's own achievements. He was also the author of the Paradise Postponed series
