Nine Things We Learnt This Week

Posted on Tuesday, 17 June 2008 by mackthek

1. Margaret Thatcher, rehabilitated?

Scourge of the Left, in an Aquascutum suit

“But this portrayal of Maggie the seductress, ‘twirling through Young Conservative balls in strapless gowns,’ as the Sunday Times gushed at the weekend, sums up everything that’s wrong about the way Mrs T has been repositioned. She wasn’t a harmless socialite, she’s not a style icon; she was a ruthless politician, who looked 80s because it was the 80s.”

2. Wallis Simpson, rehabilitated?

Unfit for a King?

“English Heritage, giver of blue plaques to People Who Matter, is the latest to bitch-slap her corpse. Last week, it denied a request by a member of the public to stick a plaque outside Wallis’s 1930s London home. But Wallis matters. She drew to the surface many of the foul bigotries of the age: xenophobia, ageism, rampant snobbery and a desire for women to be submissive, uneducated, unthreatening little dolls.

[snip]

So why today does English Heritage continue this old, old vendetta? Its official reason is an affair that she allegedly had with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. However, there is no evidence that this actually happened. It is true – and unforgivable – that she visited Germany in 1937 and shook the Führer’s hand. But she did not ‘make’ her husband into the Nazi he became. It was his idea: he wanted to play the King and Nazi Germany was the only country that would have him. Wallis spent her life as a whipping girl for her husband’s failures as king. Nobody could accept that Edward didn’t want to rule us; it had to be witchcraft, didn’t it?”

3. She’s not too fond of slaughterhouses, either.

A cynic might say it’s sick-making

“Few pigs turn their snouts up at the chance to roll around in mud. But Cinderella the six-week-old saddleback has adopted a different motto – four wellies good, four trotters bad – after being diagnosed with mysophobia, a fear of dirt.”

4. Those clever Brits.

“Britons consume about 180 million pints of milk a week. At least two thirds of it is sold in plastic bottles, which began to replace cardboard containers in the Nineties. Campaigners claim that if all the plastic milk bottles in Britain were replaced with pouches, 100,000 tons of plastic waste would be saved from landfill sites every year.”

5. No Comment

“Gynecologists say that in the past few years, more Muslim women are seeking certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.”

6. We need to count the loot.

7. You can also use grapes.

“Illegal ‘tiger bone wine’ is still being made and sold by some animal parks in China, say campaigners.

The Environmental Investigation Agency says staff at two parks offered to sell the drink, made from carcasses soaked in rice wine, to its researchers.”

8. You think?

“Police services covering 87 per cent of Canada’s population reported 892 hate-motivated crimes in 2006, of which six in 10 were motivated by race or ethnicity, Statistics Canada said Monday.”

9. Another reason why same sex marriage is unnatural.

“Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.

While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.”

Filed under: Britain, Canada, China, Environment, Human rights, Islam, Murmurs, Raves and Rants, Saudi Arabia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

  • 385 ppm: Chronicles of a Sick Planet

    7. "While southern Spain has always been dry and plagued by cyclical droughts, the average surface temperature in Spain has risen 2.7 degrees compared with about 1.4 degrees globally since 1880, records show. Rainfall here is predicted to fall 20 percent from this year to 2020, and 40 percent by 2070, according to United Nations projections. The changes on the Almarcha family farm in Albanilla over the past three decades are a testament to that hotter, drier climate here. Until two decades ago, the farm grew wheat and barley, watered only by rain. As rainfall dropped, Carlo Almarcha, 51, switched to growing almonds. About 10 years ago, he quit almonds and changed to organic peaches and pears, 'since they need less water,' he explained. Recently he took up olives and figs, 'which resist drought and are less sensitive to weather.' Mr. Almarcha participates in a government water trading system, started last year, in which farmers pay three times the normal price — 33 cents instead of 12 per cubic meter — to get extra water. The black market rate is even higher. Still, his outlook is bleak. 'You used to know that this week in spring there will be rain,' he said, standing in his work boots on parched soil of an olive grove that was once a wheat field. 'Now you never know when or if it will come. Also, there’s no winter any more and plants need cold to rest. So there’s less growth. Sometimes none. Even plants all seem confused.' "
    6. "A tanker from Marseilles with 36 million litres of drinking water unloaded its first cargo this week, one of a mini-fleet contracted to bring water from the Rhone every few days for at least the next three months. So humbled was Barcelona when prolonged drought forced it to ship in domestic water from Tarragona, 50 miles south along the Catalan coast, 12 days ago, that city hall almost delayed shipment and considered an upbeat publicity campaign to lift morale and international prestige. The whole country is suffering from its worst drought in 40 years and the shipments from Tarragona prompted an outcry from regions who insist they need it more. For now the clashes are being soothed by intervention from Madrid, and plans to ship water from desalination plants in parched Almeria in Andalusia are shelved until October. But there is little indication of a strategy to deal not just with an immediate emergency but an ongoing crisis. Buying water on an epic scale from France has given the controversy an international aspect as French environmentalists question whether such a scarce natural resource should be sold as a commodity to another country."

    Is Spain's Drought a Glimpse of Our Future?


    5. "Tourists heading to the tropics were warned yesterday that their suntan lotion can kill off one of the main attractions of their holiday - the colourful corals that thrive in warmer waters. Residues from sunscreens that wash off in the sea were shown by researchers to cause coral bleaching, a condition that leads to the death of the organism and the collapse of delicate ocean eco-systems. Chemical compounds that make up the ultra-violet (UV) filters in sunscreens, which are essential to protect the skin against burning, were shown to be harmful to coral reefs, even in small quantities.The researchers called for regulations to limit human contact with reefs where the coral was already suffering from other environmental threats such as rising sea temperatures."


    4. "Wasps used to be an uncommon sight in Fairbanks until two years ago. Then huge numbers of them swarmed on the city, ten times more than normal. The number of stings grew so bad that outdoor school events were cancelled, 178 patients were treated in hospital for stings and two people died. A study now reveals that wasp stings across northern Alaska have increased sevenfold over the past few years.

    3. "Daniel Boone's road is now the Hal Rogers Parkway, named after one of the Kentucky coal industry's closest friends in Washington, a Republican Congressman of 34 years. It passes through a mountain range older than the Himalayas and is blanketed in broadleaf forests rivalled only by the Amazon basin in its biodiversity. But the canopy of trees which lines the parkway as it rises from the bluegrass horse country to the mountains is a trompe l'oeil. The lush forest gives way to scraggly trees along the ridge-line, and behind those trees is evidence of unspeakable ecological violence. In a process known as mountaintop removal an upland moonscape is being created, which is incapable of regenerating trees. As far as the eye can see, the land is grey and pockmarked with huge black lakes, filled with toxic coal slurry."


    2. "Climate change has become firmly established as an accelerant to many of the factors which have put one in eight of the world's birds at risk of extinction, today’s publication of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species of birds has found. Long-term drought and sudden extreme weather are putting additional stress on the pockets of habitat that many threatened species depend on. This coupled with extensive and expanding habitat destruction has lead to an increase in the rate of extinction on continents and away from islands, where most historical extinction has occurred. The 2008 Red List makes grim reading with 1,226 species of bird now threatened, and eight species newly uplisted to Critically Endangered, the highest threat category. Of the 26 species that changed category owing to changes in their population size, rate of decline or range size, 24 were uplisted to a higher level of threat. These include widespread continental species like Eurasian Curlew Numenius arquata and Dartford Warbler Sylvia undata, both previously of Least Concern, and now regarded as Near Threatened in a global context."


    1. "The Living Planet Index (LPI) follows trends in nearly 4,000 populations of 1,477 vertebrate species and is said to reflect the impact humans have on the planet. It is based on a wide range of population datasets, such as commercial data on fish stocks and projects such as the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring scheme. New figures show that between 1970 and 2005, the global LPI has fallen by 27%. This suggests that the world will fail to meet the target of reducing the rate of biodiversity loss set by the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity."

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