Monthly Archives: November 2006

Environmental politics

Dispelling one airline myth

November 11, 2006 – 7:01 pm

If you force budget airlines to pay the real environmental cost of their flights, the poor will be disadvantaged – unable to make that one trip to the sun that makes the rest of the year bearable: so the story goes.

But new research puts lie to that one – because as we all know it costs plenty to travel, even if the flight costs nothing.

So says a definitive survey:

The CAA will announce that the social profile of air passengers has hardly changed in the past ten years, during which Ryanair and easyJet have grown from tiny operations to become two of the biggest airlines in Europe.
The survey will strengthen the case made by David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, for imposing green taxes on flights.
The CAA wants to dispel the belief that budget airlines have made air travel more inclusive and that raising taxes on flights would disproportionately affect people on low incomes.
Ryanair sells millions of return tickets costing less than £40, but the poor still cannot afford all the other costs of a foreign trip, such as hotels and meals, the survey says.

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Carnival of Feminists

Don’t forget the carnival of feminists

November 10, 2006 – 9:29 pm

… next one is coming up fast on body impolitic. No particular theme – just great feminist posts. Get your favourites in now through the blog carnival form, or by email to kith at spicejar dot org.

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Blogging/IT

Google knows best

November 10, 2006 – 9:24 pm

… the New England Journal of Medicine has proved it. It was applied to a selection of regular accounts of “tricky diagnoses” in the journal, and came up with the right answer in 58 per cent of cases – probably rather better than your average GP.

Which when you think about it says something about the wisdom of crowds – they put value on the links, and Google judges that value, at least in part.

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History

Good and bad history: The curious case of milk and water

November 10, 2006 – 9:19 pm

A bit of good history – the man who watered the milk, and how the court dealt with it in 1822.

But that seems a nice way to introduce a call for submissions, for the Carnival of Bad History, which will be here on November 21. So what’s the Carnival? Going to the source, what’s included are:

* Bad presentations of history – This is the easy one. Review bad historical movies, books and teevee. How anachronistic are those uniforms? How improbable is that alternate history novel? Did kindly frontier doctors really talk like that?
* Bad uses of history – When pundits, politicians, and talking heads get hold of history they often twist it beyond all recognition or justification. Tell us about the mangaled metaphors, unjustified parallels, or outright lies you find in the public sphere.
* Historians behaving badly – Historians manage their share of embarassing talking head appearances, plagiarism scandals, and corporate sell-outs. We don’t want mere unpleasant gossip. Contributions in this category should be of historians behaving badly in their professional capacity as historians.

Should be fun! So send in your posts like that – or take this as an invitation to really vent your spleen, then pass on the link. Please email natalieben AT gmail DOT com.

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Environmental politics Politics

The good, the bad and the rather satisfying…

November 9, 2006 – 12:29 pm

Well, sort of good – an interesting campaign by the Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai to plant a billion trees in the next year. But she admits this is only symbolic – for the scarey figures are down the article:

Over the past decade 130m hectares (3,235m acres) of trees have been destroyed, according to the UN. Reforesting such an area would require 140bn trees to be planted.

Proving that Australia still occasionally manages to display the right instincts, in spite of so many years of John Howard, there’s been an outcry over plans to relocate a salt-water crocodile who bit a man. Well if someone came right into your house, and went thumping around with a big stick, you might be inclined to bite him too. The tourist has been christened “stupid Stefaan”. Apparently he was also bitten by a monkey in India. Wonder why?

Finally: I’m not gloating – well only a little – but Tim Hames has been eating his column – in line with a vow – after, and it now seems pretty certain, the US Republicans lost the Senate as well as the Reps.

But as a recent discussion I heard on this subject went: a brief yippee was quickly drowned by a flood of explanation as to why US military aggression was structural and wouldn’t really change with the politicians.

Still, I think a small “yippee” should be allowed – always nice when the human race on masse displays a bit of sense.

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Blogging/IT

What is the point?

November 8, 2006 – 7:19 pm

I happen at work about an hour ago to have been waiting on the phone, and flicking around idly as one does, I cleaned out my Askimet Spam folder on this site – the usual thousand-odd.

Getting home, I went to the management panel to clean up a couple of spam comments that had snuck through, and there I found, deposited in the past hour, a further 34 spam comments.

Surely everyone must have some form of spam blocks by now? Why do these things keep coming?

Meanwhile, in a lovely triumph of hope over expectation, seen outside Euston station: a “dispenser” of one of London’s proliferation of free newspapers, chasing after a jog – actually running, in the hope of the jogger taking a copy.

Surely the three afternoon papers aren’t going to survive the winter: most of the poor folk distributing them will surely be down with double pneumonia.

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