The rant in question: “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.” Fucker.
More on ACTA. Scariest part: the whole treaty will be in force once five member states ratify it!
The Randstad as positive example for other dense conurbations. The Randstad (Edge City) is the Dutch name for the western part of the Netherlands, roughly between Rotterdam and Den Haag in the South and Amsterdam and Utrecht in the North. This is the most densely populated part of the Netherlands and the unique thing about it is that the most dense parts are at the edge of this region, surrounding what’s called the Green Heart (het Groene Hart. Instead of huge single core megacity therefore we got several bigish centres growing towards each other, with smaller satellite cities and towns surrounding them. There’s a continuing and decades old struggle between this drive and the desire to protect the agricultural heart of this area.
Obcomix: Paul Gravett: In search of the Atom Style part 1 and part 2.
Something worthwhile at the Daily Mail? Yep! Wonderful pictures of unearthly beauties.
61 N Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.
It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, as they say. But the crime itself was horrible as well, as the report on Trafigura’s toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast makes clear. Just don’t think too much about all the companies handling our toxic waste and where it all ends up.
Scenes from the recession, a series of photos from around the world showing the impact of the recession which only need a black and white filter to fit into a documentary about the 1930ties.
More hopeful: The Activist Toolkit, a Wiki set up by some Aussie activist/socialist groups to share all sorts of tricks and tools.
Ignore the headlines in today’s papers and there are some damn good reads out there, perfectly sized for your coffee break. Grab a nice cup of tea and a sit down and take your mind off it all…
Goth weddings – cool or just horribly tacky? I think we can all agree on which this is:
Click image for more hideous gothery, camo weddings and the ugliest cakes on the planet.
Saltwater Power Could Supply Energy for Most Dutch Homes
A new proposal to improve a 75-year-old dike, the Afsluitdijk, in The Netherlands could make it the world’s leading site for generating saltwater power— a clean, renewable energy source which is 30-40% more efficient than burning coal.
The breakthrough process, which is called reverse electrodialysis, captures the energy created when freshwater becomes saltier by mixing with seawater. Although scientists in the 1950s discovered that electricity could be generated this way, no one knew just how efficient the process could be until a recent study proved that a remarkable 80% of the energy could be recovered.
Unexpected French blogging literary success and supermarket worker Anna Sam speaks up for women checkout operators all over Europe in The Times:
“Something like 400 students graduate with literature degrees every year in Rennes and they pretty much all want to become teachers,†says Sam. “But there just aren’t that many teaching jobs.†Some become postmen, others live off welfare benefit. Many – mainly women – join France’s 170,000 checkout workers.
“Are you in prison?†a six-year-old girl, peering over the till, asked Sam one day.
Not quite. On Mondays Sam would work from 9am to 2.30pm with a 16-minute break. A typical Wednesday shift would be from 3pm to 8.45pm with a 17-minute break. On Saturdays she would work from 9am to 1pm and from 3.30pm to 9.15pm, with 12 minutes off in the morning and 17 minutes in the afternoon. She would scan up to 21,000 products a week, lift 800kg an hour and ask customers for their loyalty cards 200 times a day. At night the beeping of her till filled her dreams.
“There are a lot of health problems in this job – tendonitis, lumbago, that sort of thing. There is a lot of depression as well because you’re completely ignored by everyone: by your managers and by the customers. After a while you become convinced that you’re less than nothing.â€
Sam’s no anticapitalist firebrand – her book’s not Nickel and Dimed, from the extract, but the article’s a great read. I hope the book’s translated into English. I’ll read it.
I’ve been fascinated by ants ever since reading a science fiction short story about an ant-like creature in a despoiled colony desperately trying to write the history of his civilisation in pheromones – I wish I could remember the title – and subsequently discovering Edmund O Wilson’s books in the natural history section of my local library. He explained so much about biodiversity and how the planet actually works; it’s run by and for ants. (This of course was before the hundred-odd years worth of books were sold to finance a ‘learning centre’, or was it an ‘access hub’?) For those who have yet to discover Wilson’s work, there’s an excellent article on ants in today’s Guardian:
What makes ants far more than a scientific curiosity is that this extraordinary collective behaviour from what are, at heart, chemical-sensing automatons, hints at lessons for similar systems in humans too. Neurons are individually relatively dumb but, with billions of them working together in our brains reacting to levels of neurotransmitter chemicals, something creative and remarkable emerges. “Maybe our own brains are using these thresholds,” says Franks. “When you model ants and when you model the brain, there are some great similarities. When our brains are deciding, from visual input, whether to move our eyes to the right or the left, populations of neurons and thresholds are obviously involved.”
So anyway — in 2003, I met a woman online. She was from Western Australia, I was living in Richmond, VA. I ended up selling all my stuff and flying over there to meet her in person. Here’s the story.
