Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Redesigning streets for people, an opportunity

May 25, 2007 – 9:06 pm

A new scheme to help local residents redesign their streets for them, not for cars: DIY streets. I hear on the grapevine they are looking for pilot projects…

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An aboriginal reconquest?

May 25, 2007 – 8:04 pm

This article in the Sydney Morning Herald presents a seductive idea, that the Aborigines are reconquerng Australia, starting from the dry centre, where the “whites” are leaving due to the lack of economic opportunities.

It isn’t as simplistic as that; it does acknowledge that the Aboriginal communities do have enormous problems, flowing in part from that lack of opportunity, but what it also doesn’t address is the way the environment has been enormously degraded – mined you might almost say. The water has been used up, the vegetation over-grazed to the point of extinction, the soil eroded.

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A ‘side-effect’ of war…

May 25, 2007 – 3:30 pm

… you might even call it collateral damage.

US military veterans are twice as likely to be jailed for sexual assault as similar non-veterans.

The department of justice says it can’t understand why…

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Fighting to meet in the 19th century

May 25, 2007 – 3:24 pm

I’ve finally managed to get around the London clock with George Augustus Sala, on whom more here and here, and was interested to note (this is 1859) remember, the hostility to any form of women’s organisation that he notes:

I must say that it is a subject for sincere congratulations that there are not ladies’ clubs. We have been threatened with them sometimes, but they have always been nipped in the bud. It is curious to see how fiercely this tolerant, liveral, large-headed creature, Man, has waged war against the slightest attempt to establish a club on the part of the gentler sex. … The Tyrant Man is even, I am informed, disposed to look with jealousy on the “committees of ladies” which exist in connestion with some deserving charities, and on the “Dorcas societies” and “sewing circles” of provincial towns; and all meetings to advocate the rights of woman, he utterly abhors.
(p. 213)

But of course that hostility means there must have been women trying to get together.

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Shakespeare’s problem

May 24, 2007 – 9:05 pm

Heard tonight at a seminar at the Institute for Historical Research: “The problem with Shakespeare is that he didn’t get into enough difficulties.”

To expand: the speaker was referring to the way that we only know about many early theatre men through the messy court cases they got themselves tangled in – Shakespeare didn’t do that, which helps explain why he’s considered so “mysterious”.

(For the record: I definitely belong to the “Shakespeare was Shakespeare” school, although as soon as I find the time – soon I hope – I will be reviewing a book that has an intriguing alternative hypothesis.)

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Triumph for the jury system: Oxford Two ‘not guilty’

May 24, 2007 – 9:02 pm

A jury has found two men who attempted to stop a US B52 flying to Iraq from Britain on a bombing mission NOT GUILTY of conspiracy to cause criminal damage and various other offences.

Their defence was that they were trying to save people and property in Iraq.

The jury was out for only three hours in this, their second trial; the first last October resulted in a hung jury.

There’ll be another similar trial next month in Sudbury.

(That I’m linking there to Stars and Stripes only makes it the sweeter.)

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