The north is a foreign country...

Ha! Who says the BBC's not metrocentric? Just look at this slightly unfortunate map at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/7691893.stm.



Funny, I could have sworn Cumbria was in England.....

Raaaah!

I curse the morons who can't format. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Edited to add: Actually, they make me giggle slightly. One of them has just spectacularly mistranslated, 'chez ouam' (verlan for chez moi, meaning 'home/at mine') leading to the sentence:

'I'll call you when I'm at Wham.'

Awesome.

Righteous anger, well-managed

• When I was in Togo, I remember hearing on the BBC World Service that Uganda had ticked some development box that meant it would no longer be eligible for some financial assistance (though I can't remember if it was IMF or World Bank or what) and from the tone of the news reports and the commentators, I got the distinct impression this was meant to be a Very Bad Thing. Which I didn't understand at all. What is the point of development if increasing independence from foreign aid isn't progress?
• "Because self-sufficiency is, as Jeremy Seabrook puts it, 'the opposite of poverty,' it makes it very hard for us to tell what constitutes real poverty. For example, a family that grows virtually all its food and barters for much of what it needs but makes a cash income of only $2 per day and a family that owns no land, lives in a shack on a garbage dump and gets all its food from selling things scavenged from that dump (a way millions of people live) and makes about $2 per day are lumped together among the desperately poor, as though their situations were equivalent." (Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance, pp 58-59)
• I paraphrase some development 'expert' on Costing the Earth a few weeks ago, who said that food insecurity affected farmers in the South* more than city-dwellers because they could have bad harvests and their crops could be affected, so the answer was to move all subsistence farmers into cities and waged jobs in the formal economy. Because, what, then food would just magically appear in cities without anyone to produce it and not be subject to drought, pests or disease?
  
• Raj Patel, when asked after a talk whether eating locally meant you wouldn't be able to have coffee or chocolate again, said (again I paraphrase): 'I'm strongly in favour of allowing the people who grow coffee and cocoa beans to decide whether they'd like to trade with us.'

I'm currently reading Mr Patel's book, Stuffed and Starved, and I feel the righteous anger of my seventeen-year-old self welling up inside me. Righteous anger, well-managed, is a useful tool.

I'm also trawling the internet for video interviews with him, as he is wonderfully irreverent and makes frequent use of the oeuvre of John Cleese to explain how world financial institutions work.


* The global South, that is, not the south of England. Though I daresay, until recently at least, you could draw similar conclusions from comparing farmers and bankers in, say, Kent.

Sour grapes for Galileo

I do not, not, not, not, not understand evangelical atheism. I understand atheism (believe what you like, I don't care, I don't even know what I believe) but the Dawkins Witnesses are utterly mind-boggling in their need to get into little cliques about what you (don't) believe and try and get everyone else to agree with you. It's like having all the crap parts of religion and none of the good music.

I realise I speak from the privileged position of having been taught physics by someone who was married to the bishop of Newcastle and thus realise that science and religion are not, actually, incompatible (design an experiment to prove whether there is a g/God, test it under controlled conditions and repeat it at least three times, publish your results in a peer-reviewed journal and then I will believe that science disproves religion ;-) - also, never trust a scientist who believes it is so easy to prove a negative, or makes sweeping, confident statements like 'there isn't a God' without being able to back it up with anything other than, er, their personal conviction), and while I understand why scientists are annoyed at Christianity (it must have been very annoying not being allowed to cut up dead bodies to advance medical science in case they were needed at the Resurrection, or being told that the sun revolves around the earth when it patently doesn't) I think their loathing of religion is based more on a traditional antipathy and (quite rightly) a profound mistrust of Creationists, rather than actual science. Which is, as we all know, a process not a doctrine.

And I really find that advert deeply patronising. I find the Alpha Course adverts quite irritating too, but only in the way I find all adverts quite irritating. And, on balance, I'd rather be told, 'Here is a Bible verse... I am a Christian... Would you like to be a Christian too? Why not go and look at our website if you're interested?' than, 'The clever people say there probably isn't a g/God - now don't worry your pretty little head about it, dear.' And it's not even as if religious advertising is particularly subtle... compared to, say, adverts for all food and cleaning products which tell me that, as a woman, I should basically never eat, or at least enjoy it, but prove my worth as a human being by feeding my man and my children, get so depressed about it I need to frequently binge on chocolate, and can't expect my boyfriend to use a mop to boot...

That said, I do have plenty of other ideas for similar reassuring campaigns to combat the more sinister incarnations of advertising.

• You probably aren't as fat as you think you are. Now, stop starving yourself and have a decent meal.
• Your house probably doesn't smell. Now, stop buying air freshener and open the windows instead.
• Your penis probably isn't too small. Now, go and talk to women instead of buying a new car.
• You probably have enough toys already. Now, go and ask your parents to spend some time with you instead.

Any more ideas???