Now up on Rage Against the Man-chine (great name!) is the Carnival of Feminists No 62. And a superb collection it is too – no sign at all of the summer silly season. I was particularly taken by the post of reflections on feminism from Mecca, and Fannie’s take on sport as acceptable soap opera for men.
But don’t waste time over here – go over there and check it out!
I often have random conversations with people about Australia (somehow my accent is still almost instantly recognisable despite some 15 years of not living there) and people are shocked when I say that the Australian environment has, on a broad scale, at least in the most productive parts of the country, been wrecked. While the human toll of environmental degradation and climate change might not be as large here as in parts of Africa, the overall damage is at least as bad if not worse.
So it is that the government is about the flood with seawater what had been a major wetland area in South Australia – near the mouth of the stricken Murray-Darling system.
Much further upstream, governments have just spent a very large sum on buying a major cotton farm in an attempt to save another seriously threatened wetland, even though there’s no guarantee at all that the plan will work. That’s because while the purchase included its licence for irrigation water, the dam that would supply it is only 18% full, and therefore there’s no water to be had. What’s REALLY obscene about this is that the farm was only developed in the 80s, when the water problems were already all too evident.
But to finish on a slightly positive note, as the New York Times reported it shipping costs are starting to crimp globalisation.
The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.
And the campaigners are battling on – Jim on The Daily Maybe is keeping track of press coverage of the Camp for Climate Action here in the UK.
I’ve just been pointed in the direction of CiviCRM: “an open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. Integration with both Drupal and Joomla! content management systems gives you the tools to connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents.”
Anyone have any experiences to share, comments? TIA
In the Second World War, 22 MPs were killed in action.
Ummm … so how many have been killed in the Iraq War?
(Source: Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain, p. 4)
And no, I know it isn’t an even comparison, but still food for thought.
Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of an Australian comedy that’s just opened in London, Cosi, by Louis Nowra. In the tiny White Bear, but well deserving of a bigger venue.
* An interesting review of Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy, which reports:
For Dolan … “conflict between incompatible models and irreconcilable expectations is the history of marriage.” She rejects the standard story that marriage has moved from “patriarchal to companionate, from obedience to intimacy, from sacrament to contract.”
None of those transitions fully took place, she writes — indeed, they’ve “stalled.” Rather, we have “inherited three models of marriage from early modern England (1550-1700): marriage as hierarchy, as fusion, and as contract. These three models are incompatible and, to make matters worse, each is riddled with internal contradictions.”
* The Telegraph has been indulging in a spot of Australian geneology, reaching the conclusion that the Australian prime minister is a descendant of underwear and sugar thieves and forgers.
* A cycling column is not the place you might expect to find history, but this has some interesting background on how political conservatives have at times embraced cycling. “An editorial in the world’s first dedicated cycling magazine [in France] thundered in 1869: “It supplants the raw and unintelligent speed of the masses with the speed of the individual.””
* And there’s a new theory about why the Mary Rose sank. I’m not sure it really supplants the old ones, but it does add an extra bit of texture to early modern history.
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