Wee Boots

Amazing what you can find in a house after 50 years.

Genes

I listened to Start the Week with Andrew Marr this morning. His guests included Steve, my job is to make sex boring, Jones the geneticist. Steve covers the usual ground of how the popular and misconceived view of genes is that they are specific indicators of everything from being shy and retiring to a proclivity for genocide and mass murder. I may exaggerate, but not much.
"In fact", says Steve and in my minds eye I can see a devilish twinkle in his, "they have found the one that makes your ears stick out!" or words to that effect. To give him his due, a true professional, Andy the wing nut only hesitated a demi-semi-quaver before moving on!

Hard Times

One of the songs that popped up around the McGarrigles offerings on UTube was Hard Times, hard times indeed for their family.

I got to thinking about our times. We are about to have a general election (not the 6th of May, Shirley!!!). We think things are bad now, for many of us they are not. In the hard times to come, courtesy of the dreadful Dave and his mates, things will be bad. The little people, the underclass, the people who never saw employment in the Blair/Broon years, yes they are going to be screwed. They were screwed before and Dave, the caring, sharing, compassionate Dave, is happy to see them screwed again! However, the problems we face in the economy, the environment, in the fabric and security of our society, mean that many of us, significant numbers, will be screwed regardless.

Hard times; you ain't seen nothing yet!

Sad

Kate McGarrigle died this week. There is a lovely picture on the McGarrigle's website at the moment.
If that's not enough try this.

Makers and Hackers

I've been reading a bit of Sci Fi including Makers by Cory Doctorow.
Interesting little noodle. Imagine if you made a machine that was a 3D printer eventually the printer would be able to print a copy of itself!

It would, amongst other things, need to run on some pretty amazing gloop.

Then I saw this - Sugru.
It's not (just) that I am a sucker for Irish lasses with enthusiasm and the kind of accent that would make a straight archbishop kick a hole in a stained glass window but I do like the idea of making and mending. Hacking, I believe it is now called. I hope the gloop does not frighten the horses or give wee birds the vapours and cost an arm and a rain forest to produce.
Amen.

Another little cracker

God knows where I picked up the recommendation; glad I did and glad the Library wallahs delivered the reservation in double quick time.
Short and not very sweet, Peace by Richard Bausch. Maybe not your cup of tea; death, deceit and humanity on the slopes of Monte Casino, go on, go on, go on, have a cup!

The sins of the leaders

So Dave you have been caught interfering with the muesli again.

A rare phrase from Polly Toynbee in the Grauniad:-

Cameron is a serial abuser of social research.

As evidence M'lud she offers

In his recent Hugo Young lecture on poverty, Cameron badly misused the ground-breaking work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level. He acknowledged their incontrovertible proof that "the more unequal countries do worse according to every quality of life indicator", but in the next breath he ignored the very foundation of their work when he said: "That doesn't mean we should be fixated only by a mechanistic objective like reducing the Gini coefficient" – the measurement of the inequality that causes social dysfunction, crime, drugs, drink and all the social evils that put Britain near the bottom of the league for civility. But no one could be a Conservative and want to narrow the gap between top and bottom. Instead Cameron said he would seek to "focus on the gap between the bottom and the middle". Leaving the rich untouched is, of course, exactly what his inheritance tax plans do.

I rest my case and for god's sake man, take your hand out of the muesli jar!

Yes... we can!

So, then, Mr O'Bama.
Not much new under the sun.


I guess we are all as Canadian as possible under the circumstances!
There is a link here.

The Terrors of the Night

The Grauniad had a profile of Tony Judt.
This was presented on the same page as Night, an essay by him. In it he outlines his thoughts about the time when most of us fall into blissful sleep. He has a very different perspective of the night and the terrors large and small which he copes with; he suffers from a motor neurone disorder .

I was interested and intrigued and looked up an adaptation of a lecture given at New York University on October 19, 2009 which is to be found at this link from the New York Review of Books; Volume 56, Number 20 · December 17, 2009.
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

The article, a plea not to abandon the benefits of the collective provision by government, concludes with the following:

A social democracy of fear is something to fight for. To abandon the labors of a century is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand. In Orwell's words, reflecting in Homage to Catalonia upon his recent experiences in revolutionary Barcelona:

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

I believe this to be no less true of whatever we can retrieve from the twentieth-century memory of social democracy.

I share the fear that we can so easily dismantle and forget the importance of the collective.
Nevertheless, I believe there are many of us that keep tapping away at the process of creating the commons and demonstrating its benefits.
Good Stuff!