Visting the Political Madhouse in America

After the craziness of O-Day the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I headed north for a day or two of icy goodness in the tri-state area*. Emerging from the subway car in deepest Brooklyn to the sight of giant rats skating their way across frozen ponds of runoff on the platform, we knew we were in for a fun few days.

A thick blanket of snow still covered the roofs and gardens in the Fort Greene neighborhood where we were staying, home of the historic Fort Greene Park and it's Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, a high column under whose base are buried over 11,500 American prisoners of war held by the British in prison ships during the war of independence, a historic fact no doubt lost on the kids who tobogganed down the side of this Enlightenment-age burial mound oblivious to the potential for disaster should the angry dead rise again a la Ghostbusters 2**.

On Thursday we had lunch at Red Bamboo vegetarian Soul Food cafe, sister restaurant to the one in the West Village, and the Very Understanding Girlfriend was able to satisfy her craving for veggie sugarcane drumsticks and soy barbecue wings***, before heading into Manhattan that night to meet up with some good friends for dinner at the Candle Cafe, producers of one of the cookbooks that I live my culinary life by, or at least that portion of my life that is concerned with impressing people that occasionally come over for dinner****.

Friday saw us take a trip into the bowels of the UN in search of the One World Government and its New World Order, thanks to a good friend who works there. We got to sit in on a Security Council Meeting (very cool), and marvel at the wonders of extraterritorial soil, including the notice in an assembly room that read "smoking is discouraged". I thought about staging a monkey knife fight there on the grounds that while it probably wasn't allowed, there weren't any signs specifically saying so, and as any good empiricist knows in the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary it is completely safe to assume the positive*****.

The other highlight of the day was a trip to 1411 Broadway, former home of the New York Metropolitan Opera Company and location of GB Shaw's 1933 lecture 'The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home", of which I have spoken before. The irony is that the halls in which Shaw issued his polemic against a capitalist system in which the banking class had been allowed to drive the economy over the brink of disaster and into utter financial ruin destroying the lives of million in the pursuit of personal greed, are now the offices of Chase Manhattan bank, which quite recently helped to drive the economy over the brink of disaster and into utter financial ruin destroying the lives of millions in the pursuit of personal greed. Unsurprisingly few****** of the smokers huddled outside the safe confines of their office, unsure of their own financial futures and mistrustful of eager book-clutching Irish visitors, were eager to discuss this irony.

Friday night saw (after O-Day itself) the best part of the entire trip with a visit to the Have' to catch up with our bestest friends Mr & Mrs Inessentials, arjedre and her main squeeze Mr Bill******* at our absolutely favorite restaurant in the whole world, Miya's, home of the most amazing vegetarian sushi ever. Over a sumptuous four hour long dinner, with enough sake to dull the pain of the broken and shattered economy we caught up and reminisced, though to be honest it felt like no time had passed at all since last we met.

And in the end, isn't that really the greatest sign of a true friendship?


* technically we only passed through New Jersey by train, not actually stopping to linger amongst the snow-covered mounds of burning tires and glistening avenues lined with numerous "Friends of ours" in thermal sweat pants advising us to "fuggedabowdid", but somehow I think that if I had said that we sojourned in the bi-state area a different mental image might have been evoked.

** though in truth that mostly happened in Manhattan, but why should the living be the only ones interested in gentrification, the dead can be hipsters too you know. Just ask the Mormons, they manage to find millions of dead people every year who decide to convert to Mormonism - how cool is that? If anybody knows what the one true religion is, it has to be dead folks, right? I mean, they've been to the afterlife, they've seen what's going down, and if they all decide to turn Mormon maybe we should listen to them.

*** Celery is not an appropriate veggie alternative to Buffalo wings. The Very Understanding Girlfriend asks bars with Happy Hours to please take note.

**** Not a huge portion of my life I have to admit, ranking somewhere between that portion of my life spent worrying about whether I'm wrong about all this religion stuff, and the part that I spend worrying about being right but that the Mormons will convert me after I'm dead, and I'll then be barred from atheist heaven or at the very least laughed at by all the cool atheists when I get there. On the other hand, if I do blag my way in after they convert me then I'll be the only person in atheist heaven allowed to have multiple wives. Other then Henry VIII. Yes, he's in atheist heaven, I'm sorry Anglicans & Episcopalians, I don't make the rules, that's just the way it is.

***** Not actually true. Don't try this at home. Always assume the glass to be half empty, and full of poison. The only way to overcome this problem in life is to spend a few years building up an immunity to iocane powder and to never get involved in a land war in Asia.

****** ie, none.

******* whom I had not met before, but is a really cool guy. We all appreciate what you are doing Bill, we know how difficult it can be. They say firefighters are the real heroes, but I think we know differently. Apologies for anyone not at dinner in Miya's on Friday, upon whom this reference is thankfully lost.

Doing more for less

Grrrr. Stupid BoingBoing is at it again, noticing the same memes online as I do and posting about them mere hours after I do. Unfortunately their post is less a commentary and more a re-posting, um, copying, um, outright plagiarism, um, a campaign for open source and the creative commons licensing of Paul Krugman's article.

To be fair though Mr Doctorow did beat me to today's Eircom story*. As I groggily supped my coffee still not full recovered from jetlag (though to be fair I haven't exactly tried) I read through my RSS feeds and thought, "hmm, must blog about this", when I saw in this morning's Irish Times that Eircom (my ISP) will now voluntarily ban customers for life whom the record companies accuse of P2P music sharing.

This will not affect me, for I do not download illegal music. Ever. I have been known to visit the occasional buccaneer's harbour in Sweden in search of US TV episodes that have yet to (or will never) air in Ireland, but music is something different.

I buy a lot of music, almost all on CD, and there are a number of labels that I like (warp, reflex, !K7, Ninja Tune, Planet Mu, Irish labels Alphabet Set and Invisible Agent, etc), and many more individual artists on even smaller labels, and oddly enough I want to try and support these, even though some of them are no longer the smaller operations running on a shoestring they once were (Warp in particular long ago stopped being the small and cuddly misfit that it still likes to pretend it is).

For trying out new stuff I have a monthly subscription to eMusic, for cheap DRM-free tracks from a wide range of smaller and less-commercial labels, and find that if I come across an artist this way that I start listening to a lot, I end up buying their stuff on CD anyway. Getting ready for Bangface weekender this year I have downloaded a lot of Wisp, Noisia and Zomby from eMusic, none of whom I was familiar with until I saw them on the bill.

So downloading music illegally has never been my thing**, but what Eircom is doing still stokes my ire. Eircom has a troubled history, a botched privatization lost a lot of ordinary people a lot of money, and since then it has been passed around from owner to owner, the true red-headed step-child of Irish semi-state bodies. It has no money, and cannot afford to go head-to-head with the bottomless pockets of Big Audio***. What it has done, unlike every other major ISP in the EU, is agree to take the unverified claims of a private company over the interests of its own customers. While not on par with US ISPs and Telcos voluntarily handing customer records over to the Bush Administration without a subpoena, the willingness to sell out their customers to private firms over the threat of further litigation shows immediately whose side Eircom would take if the US put further pressure on the EU to hand over data records on all EU citizens in the interests of US security.

Of course if everybody else's Eircom broadband is like mine, which on a good day can puff its way up with a full head of steam to almost 1.5Mbps, before collapsing from the effort by 4pm and hovering around 450kbps for the rest of the day, wheezing like an emphysemic seventy-year old that still insists on taking a last drag on their John Player Blue before collapsing on the couch for a bit of a lie down in front of the telly, then maybe Eircom are playing a very cunning game indeed. If they don't give anyone enough bandwidth to actually download any files, then no-one can get caught by Big Audio doing naughty things with copyright material.

Eircom obviously just have our best interests at heart all along.

* don't you feel a surge of national pride when not one, but two Irish companies make headlines in an American blog for outrageously abusing their customers. We're number 1! We're number 1! Take that you milk and lead producing slave and prison workers of China!

** basically because I am not a 13-year old with no pocket money but a desperate need to have all the music from High School Musical 23, 'cause otherwise Becky Morgan in 1G will never Friend me on bebo, right, yeahbutnobutyeahbutnobutyeah, that's sooooooooo not fair.

*** I am claiming ownership of this phrase. No Creative Commons exists on that, my friends. Can you hear me Cory Doctorow, can you hear me feckin' now?

Sir, the committee is on the line, they're asking for their medal back

Crooked Timber, an academic blog, recently asked a number of authors to critique a few books by Scottish sci-fi author Charlie Stross. Maria Farrell, John Quiggin, Brad DeLong, John Holbo, Henry Farrell and Ken MacLeod (my favorite genre author) each take a particular book and write a short analysis of it, as does Paul Krugman.

Yes, Paul Krugman.

As in, Nobel prize-winning Economist*, Princeton professor and NYT columnist Paul Krugman.

Critiquing the development economics of Stross' 'Merchant Princes' series.

Paul Krugman.

Tadhg and I have an ongoing disagreement over the works of Charlie Stross, or rather, 'work', for Tadhg has attempted to read but one of his books, one of the 'Merchant Princes' series, and couldn't finish it. On that basis I have not even picked it up (as I trust Tadhg's literary judgment far more than his sartorial), confining myself to Stross' Cthulu-esque spy pastiches and harder sci-fi.

Discovering Krugman is a fan not only of Stross but of that particular series causes me to question his whole analysis of the impacts of scale in international trade, as no doubt would the Nobel Prize committee if they were to ever learn of this lapse in judgment. What's worse is that he doesn't even try to hide it, he's actually blogged about his review in the New York Times!

As faux-pas go it is certainly not on par with, let's say, if Wangari Maathai were to do an ad for McDonalds (which she hasn't), but just because you enjoy reading crap sci-fi doesn't mean you should broadcast it to the world. I myself have three bookcases, two on public display and one hidden away in private upon which sit my Charlie Stross, Mary Gentle, Katherine Kerr, David Brin and others. Ken MacLeod makes it to the public shelves because he's a socialist and political commentator, and there are no scantily clad women or blue aliens on the covers of his books. You see I fear that the gravitas of Kropotkin's "Anarchism", Gorz's "Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology" or even Dewey's 'Public and it's Problems" would be diminished by mere proximity to a bikini-clad robot shooting a dinosaur**.

The Very Understanding Girlfriend mocks this foible of mine, urging me to "Reclaim the Shame" and proudly display my geeky taste in trashy books.

To which I say, "Not until my Nobel Prize is already safely in the bag, dear."

* yes, yes. By now everyone who reads my blog should know that while I am fully aware that there is no such thing as a 'Nobel Prize in Economics', as popular culture refers to the 'Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel' as the 'Nobel Prize in Economics' I have chosen to refer to it as such as well in the interests of both brevity and ease of comprehension for the masses.

** no, I do not have any books about bikini-clad robots shooting dinosaurs. This reference is imaginary and for illustrative purposes only.

Never forgetting is our duty and our responsibility

Almost the first act of the new Obama administration was to order the closure of Guantanamo and the secret CIA torture camps. One of the main difficulties the administration seems to face with the planned closure (apart from the fact that the Bush administration doesn't seem to have actually kept any coherent files on any of the detainees) is what to do with the innocent victims that have been held there for the last seven years. The irony is that many cannot be returned to their home countries for fear of torture and persecution by the authorities there, and the US certainly doesn't want to be reminded of its own crimes by offering the detainees asylum itself.

To date only Albania has accepted released detainees, a group of ethnic Uighurs who would face extreme conditions if returned to their native China. Portugal led the way in the EU by offering asylum, but only for a very limited number. The EU met yesterday to decide on a course of action; they have repeatedly called upon the US to close Guantanamo, but again failed to offer any assistance to those held illegally there. Here in Ireland Ciaran Cuffe of the Green Party today called upon the government to accept even a single detainee, but the Minister for Justice has said that they will only do so as part of a common EU approach.

On Sunday evening I attended Ireland's national Holocaust Memorial Day in the Mansion House, as I have done every year since returning to Ireland. The event is a secular remembrance of all victims of the Holocaust, Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, those living with disabilities, socialists, trade unionists, and religious and ethnic minorities, and is an official event supported by the Government. In a powerful opening speech President McAleese highlighted the need to never forget the atrocities committed and never to be silent about other injustices and barbaric violations of human rights:

"Never forgetting is our duty and our responsibility... May the name of the Holocaust continue to disturb the landscape of our thinking and may the seeds of horror which it sowed bring forth a harvest of determination strong enough, tough enough to face down the extremist bigot whose greatest friends are silence and neglect of truth."

Part of the Memorial was to acknowledge Ireland's complicity in the events of the Holocaust. Although neutral and a non-participant in the Second World War, Ireland was very aware of the atrocities being committed against European Jewry and others, but did nothing to prevent it or help those affected. By 1938 the world knew exactly where the campaign of intolerance and ethnic segregation in Germany against its Jewish population was going, and FDR convened an international conference in Evian-le-Bains in France to find a way of helping the thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing and being expelled from their homes. As well as major powers such as the US, the UK, France, Canada and Australia, Ireland attended along with a number of smaller countries. Not one single nation, including Ireland, offered to take in any refugees, and the conference collapsed in failure.

Isaac Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Palestine and former Chief Rabbi of Ireland, knew Taoiseach Eamon de Valera personally and throughout 1938 and beyond appealed directly to him to accept Jewish refugees into Ireland. De Valera refused. The then Minister for Justice Patrick Ruttlege wrote in April 1938, "The Jewish Community in this country should not be increased by way of immigration, except in cases where the immigrant is a definite acquisition to the state", and the Government adopted a policy of refusing almost all visas for Jewish refugees. It was not until the closing stages of the war when the full horror of the extermination camps was public knowledge that Ireland finally allowed a limited number of refugees to settle.

Ireland was in a unique position to offer the persecuted peoples of Europe a safe haven, but by closing its doors it was fully complicit in the genocide that took place.

While in no way can the victims of the so-called War on Terror be compared to the systematic atrocities of the Holocaust, once again Ireland has been complicit in actions that are morally reprehensible and this complicity will bring shame to future generations. The Government's enthusiastic support of the use of Shannon Airport as a refueling stop for CIA and military flights involved in the rendition of detainees to Guantanamo and other torture camps means that the blood of every prisoner is on our hands. It is therefore our moral duty to accept any and all released detainees that wish to settle here and provide government support as compensation for their lives that we helped take away.

I can only hope that the Government ministers in attendance on Sunday listened very carefully to President McAleese's words, and act accordingly.

I have also written today to Green Party Ministers Gormley and Ryan in support of Ciaran Cuffe's call. Given that opposition to the Shannon stopover was an important theme of Green Party campaigning before entering Government, and given the repeated calls from party membership for Green Ministers to be seen publicly to act within the Government on areas beyond the confines of their Ministerial portfolios on issues that align with Green Party concerns, I asked them to support Deputy Cuffe's call at Cabinet level with the greatest possible force and urgency, though no doubt Deputy Cuffe's actions were already approved by both well in advance.

Links
The Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland is an amazing organisation that works to educate and inform about the Holocaust, and supports the organisers of the Holocaust Memorial Day.
Full text of President McAleese's speech

and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done

So today sees the one week anniversary of O-Day, and while the message that has come from all and sundry is not to get one's hopes up too high, that change will be gradual and difficult, with many disappointments along the way, that has not stopped most news outlets focusing (as they do with each new President) on the mythical first 100 Days. Originating with FDR's New Deal agenda in 1933, the parallels with our current economic climate are painfully obvious, and so perhaps more than with any other Presidential accession in recent history its use as a yardstick is appropriate - the country needs to see bold action at the Executive level to encourage equally bold responses on the part of individual citizens.

While I will admit a healthy skepticism of Obama's ability to effect change on the scale and speed required, I have to admit that the accomplishments of the first seven days alone have surprised and delighted me:

1) The order to close Guantanamo within one year along with all CIA torture camps, the immediate review of all current Gitmo cases, and the return of Habeas Corpus.

2) Ending of the Global Gag Rule / Mexico City Rule that banned funding for any organization that even offered advice on pregnancy options that included termination.

3) His first Presidential interview was not on US TV, but held on Al-Arabiya, reaching out to the Muslim world that has been estranged and demonized by eight years of the Bush doctrine.

4) Tackling the economy with his 'American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan' intended to create over three million jobs by investing in America's crumbling schools and infrastructure, in effect a "New Deal-lite".

5) Supporting States' rights over the interests of Detroit and the Oil industry with Obama seeking to allow California and other states impose higher emissions standards than the Federal minimums imposed by the Bush administration.

6) Immediately ordering the halt of any of Bush's 'Midnight Regulations', last minute Executive orders sent by the outgoing Administration after the election that it knew would never get approval from the incoming Congress.

7) Most importantly, and the major topic of discussion for most media pundits, securing the right to use a Blackberry. In my last job it took me almost two weeks for my request to have one to be approved, and I worked for a major Internet multinational. It only took Obama two days! I bow down before the awesome might of the Leader of the Free World.

Not bad for seven days work and a clear indication of the direction and pace in which the Administration intends to move.

January Housekeeping

Stupid Google.

They've finally decided to migrate all Feedburner users to Google accounts necessitating a change in the Feed urls. This was supposed to be seamless, with current subscribers migrated to the new address without really noticing, however (as with most Google migrations) this failed miserably and about 50% of you who do subscribe will need to do so again manually.

Please redirect your Readers to: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/boomingback.

On the plus side, it seems that a few of the Chinese sites that were scraping my content have been lost in this changeover, so not all bad I suppose.

I was there

Back in Dublin after a whirlwind tour of New York and New Haven that capped off an amazing five days in DC.

The night before the Inauguration we walked from Dupont Circle to the White House, and then down to the National Mall. On Dupont Circle there was an actual exorcism taking place, with drumming circles, burning of sage, and chanting to rid DC of the evil spirit of George W. Bush. I was drawn immediately to the giant inflatable effigy of Bush in his 'Mission Accomplished' flight suit, surround by crowds of enthusiastic folk throwing shoes at it. Who would have guessed that throwing a shoe was also considered an insult in non-Muslim cultures? We were able to walk almost right up to the Presidential viewing platform in front of the White House, though I imagine there was intense security all around us that we couldn't actually see. We then went down to the Washington Monument and watched the preparations between there and Capitol Hill. It was bitterly cold, but still the Mall was crowded with others doing the exact same as us. It may just have been a coincidence, but the searchlights over Congress projected an almost perfect Masonic Square and Compass symbol to let everyone know who was really in charge. We finished up with the obligatory visit to the Lincoln Memorial, still open and packed at 9pm.

Tuesday saw us rise shortly after 6 and make our way by Tokyo-packed Metro from Arlington into Foggy Bottom, where we walked back to the Lincoln Memorial and up to the Washington Monument, greeted by dozens of smiling and cheering volunteers who lined the entrances to the Mall and whose enthusiasm was as genuine as it was infectious. The crowds were huge, but not the crush I was expecting, it was almost as if many people had been put off by the predictions of 2+ million and stayed home. We settled in to watch the proceedings on one of the many Jumbotrons, the giant screens that dotted the Mall, and the atmosphere was one of a giant family picnic, albeit one held on a frozen lake with the giant weight of History pushing down upon our shoulders bellowing "You are a witness" in the voice of Morgan Freeman.

Spontaneous chants of "Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, wey-hey-hey, goodbye!" erupted across the frozen grass as George W. appeared on the screen for the first time, and the crowd went wild as Colin Powell, Gore, Carter, Clinton, Michelle, Joe Biden and finally Brack Obama himself were introduced. Rick Warren was less obnoxious than I was expecting, Aretha Franklin's warblings were nice enough, and I couldn't believe the cheers Joe Biden got when he took his oath of office (seriously, he's just the VP guys, what's all the fuss?). Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman et al were nice enough, but nobody was really paying attention. That all changed when Obama got up, placed his hands on the Lincoln bible, and and smiled as Chief Justice John Roberts proved once and for all that Supreme Court appointments should not be for life - seriously, any schoolchild can recite the oath of office, how could the Chief Justice feck it up? As the oath was sworn, and then again when the Jumbotron's subtitles displayed the words "President Obama" for the first time, the crowds went wild, 1.8 Million people for whom this day meant a restoration of Hope.

So what will I remember from the Inauguration itself? Obama being sworn in with his full name, Barack Hussein Obama; the first time the screen displayed "President Obama", his use of the phrase "non-believers" in his speech indicating that religious indoctrination was no longer a prerequisite for political life, and the moment when he said "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals" and the camera cut to a very uncomfortable looking George W. Bush, and finally the return to the rule of diplomacy with the lines "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist". The speech itself was not the best ever, with no moments on par with "Yes We Can", but for the crowd seeing him there was all that mattered. The words of one person stays with me, who said that for eight years they have been told by their government to be afraid, and now they don't have to fear anymore.

Change has come to America, and I was there.

Links
Inauguration photos

The One

The streets of DC are grey and eerie, the only colour that breaks the concrete monotony is the royal Obama Blue radiating out from an endless succesion of posters, badges, buttons, shirts and banners. The city alternates between starkly deserted and overwhelmed by the mass of humanity, with no middle ground. I am informed that DC at the weekend is normally a ghost town, but the added presence of Military Police and desert camo-painted Hummers on every intersection add to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere that the crowds of thousands shuffling down the centre of a normally busy street brings. It is coronation choreographed by Roland Emmerich.

We went into the pre-inauguration concert yesterday, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. the crowd stretched down the full length of both sides of the Reflecting Pool, with a massive overflow area centred around the Washington Monument. Despite the throng of hundreds of thousands there was an incredible party atmosphere, but oddly sober and well-mannered. The concert saw a diverse group of musicians, singers, actors come together in what was labeled as a 'renewal' by Obama, whose short speech was greeted with reverential silence. While there was no mention of the current administration, or the events of the last eight years, Presidents from Lincoln to Kennedy, Eisenhower to both Roosevelts were invoked, like the names of saints called upon to intercede on behalf of the living.

The ceremony and mythology on display was both enrapturing and disturbing. Growing up in Ireland I am unaccustomed to public displays of national pride, for any such demonstration (save at an international sporting event) at home is intrinsically linked with Republicanism and extremest views, in a similar way to the tainting of English nationalism by football hooligans and the far right. In both nations the middle class feels distinctly uncomfortable with public displays of national pride and patriotism.

Not so in America, where national pride is (literally) worn on the sleeve, and national hymns are sung loud and boldly without a trace of cynicism in the eyes of the thousands-strong chorus. The theme of the inauguration is one of 'National Renewal', with the government seeking to rebuild the public's confidence in it as an institution 'of the people, by the people, for the people', and although he is never once referred to, the spectre of George W Bush hangs in the air over every word and every choreographed act of this grand coronation.

This week is in every aspect a grand exorcism, a ritual cleansing where the people and the government come together to atone for the sins of the last eight years, grant each other absolution, and renew a sacred contract with each other. What we are witnessing is the dedication of the Second Temple or the forging of the Davidic Covenant between God and man. A new society is being built and we are writing its Book of Law.

But between the slogans, the flags, the banners, the ubiquitous Shepard Fairey poster in every window and on every t-shirt, the legion of volunteers organising neighbourhood councils, and the unwavering faith and loyalty in the eyes of the masses who have travelled from every corner of the land to be here, we are also witnessing the birth of a cult of personality the like of which the US has never known.

And for this one brief moment in time it is impossible not to be swept along with it.

Links
Photos of the 'We Are One' concert

This is what democracy feels like

Arrived into Washington Dulles airport yesterday at 3pm. Exited Washington Dulles airport at 5pm.

It took almost two hours for the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I to clear immigration, so large were the crowds coming for the inauguration. Despite travelling on a US passport, I was not immune to the 3rd degree response from the men and women of the US customs and border control, and faced a series of questions around my occupation and employer ("It's complicated. Don't you read my blog?", I failed to ask).

The Very Understanding Girlfriend took an hour longer in the 'visitors' queue, which left me standing around the luggage carousel with nothing to do except throw the occasional "hujambo!"* in the direction of the visiting Kenyan dignitaries, including one Auma Obama, grandmother of the President-Elect. I managed to surreptitiously snap a photo or two on my iPhone, overcoming the feelings of disgust and self-loathing at being a dirty paparazzi.

We then met up with our good friend Agent Laroo, who despite being rather pregnant has opened up her house to us for the duration of our stay. Had a great night with her, her husband and their 3-year old daughter before passing out from exhaustion at the respectable hour of 9pm. We're off now to spend the day at the Mall where a massive free concert is taking place.

Its 1C and snowing.

Apparently 'Freezing my arse off' is what Democracy feels like.

* Swahili for "hello!", given the fact that the only other Swahili I know are the words for 'lover' and 'teacher', I thought it the safest course of action.

Mr Dave goes to Washington

Just about to head off to the airport. In DC until Wednesday, New York until Friday morning, the 'Have on Friday and Saturday and home again on Sunday. I am carrying only the essentials (EEE PC, iPhone, Camera, 1933 edition of "The Political Madhouse In America and Nearer Home" by GB Shaw), and should have access to wi-fi pretty much throughout. Even so posting might be sporadic for the next few days, normal service will be resumed once Hope has been restored to the masses.

If you are watching it all on TV, I'm the one in the dark green coat, brown hat and Guinness scarf. I wanted to bring my purple lightsaber so I would be instantly recognizable in any scenes of epic battle, but was reliably informed that the Secret Service would frown upon such things.

Seriously folks, I'm as giddy as an eight year-old on Christmas Eve.

You can find me in da club, bottle full of bub

So, we seem to have arrived at the magical 300th post here on Booming Back. What ever shall we write abut today?

The Very Understanding Girlfriend has a thing about numbers, she gets quite excited about sequences, squares, cubes, primes, and other similar numerical events, in a way that occasionally borders on Rain Man. Given the fact that over the course of our life on this earth together I have appropriated some* of her interests and hobbies as my own, it seems only natural that this fetishistic numerology would rub off on me as well.

Today is the occasion of my 36th birthday. I have not been celebrating it, though I have not been avoiding it, it has been an altogether low-key affair and deliberately so. However it would not be accurate to say that it has not been weighing heavily on my mind. I have come to view my life as being a series of 4 eighteen-year quarters, fixating on 72 as being an average life expectancy**, so today marks the transition from the first half to the second half of my life. I have also officially been an adult for exactly half my life now, so I can be forgiven for having the occasional "well what exactly have I got to show for it all" thought or two this week.

If we were to break my life down into a series of quarterly reports, it might look something like this:

The life of Unkie Dave - Q1
Countries lived in: 5
Languages spoken: 2
Years of education: 14
Years of employment: 2
Stages shared with David Hasselhoff: 0

The life of Unkie Dave - Q2
Countries lived in: 2 (60% decrease over Q1)
Languages spoken: 1 (50% decrease over Q1)
Years of education: 5 (64% decrease over Q1)
Years of employment: 15 (750% increase over Q1)
Stages shared with David Hasselhoff: 1 (not something we like to talk about any more)

So overall Q2 seems to have been a bit of a disappointment in terms of key performance indicators, with only 'Employment' and 'Hasselhoff' showing any improvement, neither of which could be labeled as particularly fulfilling.

With only two quarters of my life to go, it is therefore time for the traditional big Q3 push, where the foundations of a strong Q4 are laid***, so although I have said on many a previous birthday that this will be the year that I figure out what it is exactly that I want to do with my life, I am absolutely positively without a doubt definitely certain that this will be the year that I do so.

maybe.

Happy Birthday me.

* Like Monet, dance music, Apple Macs, writing, her friends, sustainability, vegetarianism, photography, the internet, breathing etc, etc.

** Of course in Ireland it is somewhere between 75 and 76 for a man. Also, both my maternal grandparents are still alive and in their late eighties. My paternal grandparents both died in their nineties, with my paternal grandfather playing golf every day until about a year before he died. I have a paternal great-aunt who is 102, and my maternal great-grandmother (whom I had the pleasure of knowing) died just shy of 100 when she fell down the stairs. All have been completely compos mentis and most had a full head of hair at the time of their deaths. I have never smoked, am an occasional drinker, a vegetarian, walk everywhere, and my BMI tells me I am the correct weight for my height (though not all of it is in the right place). All things considered I should be around and complaining for many years to come.

*** Although given the fact that I am now firmly in the summer of my life (stretching a wafer thin analogy even further, bracing for the inevitable snap as it is ripped apart by its own allegorical tension), I will no doubt instead be selfishly saying "screw the company, I'm taking a little 'me' time", and heading off for a few metaphorical weeks to enjoy the sun, sea and sand before I am dragged back kicking and screaming to the grindstone of my life, where I will sit desultory and dejected, trying to show passers-by my holiday photos and make them jealous that I was on holidays while they were stuck working in the cold and dreary office, mentally bemoaning the fact that my tan disappeared on the flight home and I have nothing left to show for my time away except a gaping hole in my bank account where my life savings used to be.

Take the Red Pill

The tubes are alive this morning with talk of Google in crisis with closures and layoffs, all this at a company that within the last year declared it's advertising revenue to be recession proof.

The loudest voices that I have heard have been from the vast hordes of Jaiku users, who awoke to learn that their service would no longer be supported by the Mountain View giant. Barely one year ago Jaiku was bought by Google, who promptly closed the doors to new sign-ups, though existing users could still invite new users (much in the way of the early days of GMail). The service had been plagued by technical difficulties throughout the year caused by the on-again, off-again migration to the Google Ap Engine, and a fear started to grow that Google were never serious about supporting it as a stand alone product.

Google's MO is to buy a product it likes, strip out the technology (and occasionally people) that it wants to integrate into its other services, and let the rest slowly die the death of a thousand paper-cuts. Very few start-up founders stay within the warm embrace of the Googleplex, finding the atmosphere too stifling and unable to watch the evisceration of their baby. The story of Dodgeball's Denis Crowley and Alex Rainert's experience of life with Google is a now legendary cautionary tale of woe and strife and has caused some to think twice about being acquired - though normally the oodles of money Google throws at you is enough to silence any creative concerns you have. Also interesting to note is the office closures mentioned in the press releases, what Google refers to as "satellite engineering offices", which is Googlespeak for acquired companies, folks who had been bought and allowed to stay in situ, but are now being told move to a proper Google office or leave. Being bought by Google is a very mixed blessing indeed.

Jaiku will now go open source, released into the wild and, in all truth, will be the better for it, as the dedicated community of users will be able to grow it far more than it ever would under Google. I like Jaiku - it is a much more European service than Twitter, has a friendlier atmosphere, and has far fewer of the "look at me, I'm important" egos running around on it (well, maybe it does, but they are all Jaikuing in Finnish so the rest of us don't really notice).

For me the biggest news of note is the first round of layoffs of actual Google employees. Google has spent the last year significantly trimming back its contract staff, but today saw the first redundancies of permanent Google staff with the loss of 100 recruiters. Given the fact that the vast majority of staff in recruiting had been contract staff (almost all of whom had been removed over the last year), the scale of this loss is very significant indeed, especially for what it signals about future Google growth.

The most painful part of Google for anyone involved is the hiring process. All hiring (beyond the most junior positions) is centrally approved in Mountain View, and the approval process is a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare. Each candidate is interviewed by at least 6 separate people, between phone and on-site interviews. The more senior the position, the more interviews - I know of one unfortunate soul who persevered through seventeen separate interviews over a three month period. Each interviewer has to write an extensive report on the candidate, judging their abilities under numerous criteria, and when a local decision has been made to hire a candidate a hiring document containing all the reports from all the interviewers has to be created, along with a full resume, academic transcripts, references etc, and a covering summary that binds everything together. This report can be over 40 pages in length. Once the report is completed it then starts its way through the labyrinthine series of committees that compares each candidate to all other candidates that other departments under their jurisdiction are trying to hire before giving its approval and passing it up to the next committee. The further away you are from Mountain View the more committees a candidate needs to pass through for final approval. Even for some time after the IPO, Larry Page still gave final approval for any candidate, regardless of how junior.

And for every candidate hired, scores more have been interviewed and rejected. The workload involved in the recruitment process is simply staggering. It is the recruiter that marshals this process, collates the information, feeds back to all involved at every stage in the process, and most importantly it is the recruiter that keeps the candidate on the hook throughout the weeks that it may take.

It is highly unlikely that Google will lower its hiring standards at any time in the foreseeable future, so the loss of 100 recruiters does not indicate a change or improvement in the process itself, rather it shows that Google is seriously reducing its hiring numbers, perhaps not even replacing natural attrition, in effect bolting the doors shut until the recession has passed.

And all of this is before Obama stops multinationals like Google using Ireland as a tax haven. Just how deep is this rabbit-hole going to go?

Woke up this morning feeling fine

Today is a good day, in fact a great day. I feel compelled to write about it even though the day's events will be of little interest to anyone who is not me (or possibly The Very Understanding Girlfriend).

The day began with the postman arriving with a present from my sister, a Wattson, an electricity monitor that connects wirelessly to both an external display and your computer and tells you how much power you are using throughout the house and the associated cost at any given time. What I love about it is that DIY Kyoto, the designers, will be releasing online tools that will let you embed a feed from your monitor into any website to provide realtime energy usage data. Being smug and Green has never been so easy.

Secondly, our pieces by Fernando Marti and Ala Ebtakar arrived from the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco via FedEx this morning in perfect condition. We've been waiting for these since September and they are even more amazing (and larger) than I remember. I'll put up some photos when we get them up on the wall.

Finally I had a call with the mortgage company just before lunch. We've been on a two year fixed rate mortgage (at 4.59%), and have been very concerned what was going to happen at the end of February when the two years are up, given the volatility of the lending market. I had assumed that we would switch over to the standard rate (currently at 4.24%) which would have given us some monthly savings. However it turns out that Dave C, our friend and former mortgage broker, managed to secure a plan that now switches us over to a Tracker, which is set at 1.25% above ECB (currently at 2.5%), so today would work out at a rate of 3.75%. This is big news for us, for not only are Tracker mortgages as dead as the dinosaurs and impossible to come by now, this will mean huge monthly savings in our repayments.

Also, I finally finished "Omnivores Dilemma", so I can stop worrying about every bite of food I eat and take up worrying about politics and the economy once more.

All in all, today was a very good day.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here

I admit that your existing situation is not a very promising one. Your proletariat is unemployed. That means the breakdown of your capitalist system, because, as any political scientist will tell you, the whole justification of the system of privately appropriated capital and land on which you have been working, is a guarantee, elaborately reasoned out on paper by the capitalist economists, that although one result of it must be the creation of a small but enormously rich propertied class which is also an idle class, living at the expense of the propertyless masses who are only getting a bare living, nevertheless that bare living is always secured for them. There must always be employment available; and they will always be able to obtain a subsistence wage for that labor.

When that promise is broken (and never for one moment has it been kept right up to the hilt), when your unemployed are not only the negligible five per cent. of this, eight per cent. of that trade, two per cent. of the other trade, but millions of unemployed, then the capitalist system has broken down; and your most pressing job is to find a better one.

Thus spoke George Bernard Shaw in an address to the Academy of Political Science in New York in 1933.

The Very Understanding Girlfriend arrived home shortly before Christmas last year with an amazing present for me, a 1933 edition of "The Political Madhouse In America and Nearer Home" by Shaw. Delivered originally as a lecture in New York by the then 77-year old during the darkest days of the Depression, mere weeks after the inauguration of FDR and well before the birth of the New Deal, it is one of those cyclical works that can be read with as much meaning today as in its original context.

As we prepare for the Inauguration of Barack Obama next week, the parallels between our current situation and that of 1933 are obvious and everywhere, with Obama openly calling for a new New Deal, in defiance of every Republican politician since the latter days of the Nixon administration who have worked ceaselessly to dismantle the last one. Although an Obama administration will still be flawed, and a disappointment to countless numbers, it signals the defeat of the neo-liberal agenda.

Even if this defeat is temporary, it is still a singular moment that I will remember throughout my life, and thus in celebration of my 36th birthday The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I will be traveling to DC to witness this event in person, with my copy of Shaw's "Political Madhouse" firmly grasped in my hands.

I happen to live in the shadow of Shaw's birthplace, and it is a long shadow that he casts indeed.

"America is always talking about its Constitution; but as it is also always amending its Constitution, it looks as if that Constitution were not quite so perfect as you seem to suppose"...

...And what does it amount to? A great protest against the tyranny of law and order. A final manifesto from the centuries of revolutionary Anarchism in which the struggle went on against governments as such, against government by feudal barons, by autocratic Kings, by the Pope and his cardinals, by the parliaments which have gradually ousted all these authorities, each of them in turn being used to disable the others in the glorified cause of what people call Liberty, until, having destroyed the king, the barons, the Church, and finally all effective parliamentary governing power, you found yourself hopelessly under the thumbs of your private racketeers, from the humble gunman to the great financial magnate, each playing for his own hand without status, without national authority or responsibility, without legal restraint and without any sense of public government. You have perfected a Constitution of negatives to defend liberty, liberty, liberty- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness- against the only checks on anarchy that could secure them, and fortified it by a Supreme Court which dealt out nothing but prohibitions, and a political party machinery of legislatures and senates, which was so wonderfully devised that when you sent in one body of men to govern the country, you sent in another body of men along with them to prevent them doing it. In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at their mercy, and no public responsibility.

And to symbolize this state of things, this defeat of all government, you have set up in New York Harbour a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete this monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell "All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

-"The Political Madhouse In America And Nearer Home", Bernard Shaw, 1933, p17-19

That's all that we live for

Well, I missed the market at Ranelagh again this weekend, but this time I didn't even make it up to check if the market still exists or not. However this gave me an excellent opportunity to check out local, non-organic vegetable options and see how they stack up to chain-store bought organic produce.

I wandered down this morning to Evergreens, an actual fruit and vegetable shop on Wexford Street, that sells pretty much nothing but fruit and vegetables. Trying to buy only seasonal Irish food with a few out of season and some imported, I ended up with the following:

In Season
beetroot (3), carrots (6), kohlrabi (2), leek (1), onions (4), parsnips (2), potatoes (2.5Kg Maris Piper), sweet potato (1)

Out of Season
aubergine (1), broccoli (225g), peppers (2), spring onions (small bunch), tomatoes (4)

Although none of the food was organic, all the seasonal vegetables were Irish and much of it was traceable to the farm of origin, for example the potatoes were picked on January 2nd on the farm of Peter Keogh & Sons, in Oldtown Co Dublin, less than 20 miles away from both the shop and my house.

The total bill came to just under €15, for (hopefully) five nights' worth of dinners for two people, which compares very well to the €10 for smaller amounts of organic veg purchased from M&S last week.

But, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we'll see how tasty they are in comparison to their organic counterparts over the next few days.

The irony of this weekend was that I missed the organic food market because I spent most of Saturday and Sunday at Green Party meetings. Saturday saw a one day members' conference on the current economic difficulties, and I spent Sunday meeting with a candidate in the upcoming elections. The members' conference saw all the current Green Ministers take questions for three hours in a town hall setting, followed by a number of presentations from a number of green economists (such as Richard Douthwaite, co-founder of FEASTA and author of 'Short Circuit') in the afternoon.

The session with the Ministers was quite good and provided an insight into the budget debacle, but I was annoyed that when several speakers asked about the upcoming rerun of the Lisbon Referendum, none were acknowledge by the panel. Even when Patricia McKenna raised the issue again at the close of the session not one minister even acknowledged that aspect of her question. It was pretty obvious that they had all agreed to avoid the subject completely, even to the point of answering questions about the weight of books children had to carry in their school bags in preference to identifying their positions on the Lisbon rerun.

More annoyingly, in Sunday's meeting with a candidate and their election team, a senior party official called the Lisbon issue "dead", that as a result of the economic downturn nobody was interested in it anymore and the referendum would be passed by a huge majority. They also alleged that only one speaker (Patricia) raised the issue at Saturday's meeting, whereas anyone that was there saw that it was still an issue on the minds of many party members.

I am increasingly finding myself on the fringes of the party, as it moves more and more to the right and is in danger (as one member suggested on Saturday) of becoming little more than the environmental wing of Fianna Fail, and I am not alone. Although many speakers from the floor on Saturday raised the themes of Social Justice and Workers' Rights, it was clear that these are no longer the issues foremost on the minds of the party leadership, who are focused on pushing the message of a Green Economy as the solution to our current financial crises.

The more time I spend involved in Party politics, the more disillusioned I get with the whole political system. I am constantly reminded of the old Grocho Marx attribution, "I would never be a member of a club that would have me as a member".

Light one candle for all we believe in

Went into a candlelit protest last night organized by Amnesty International, in memory of all the victims of the current conflict in Gaza and southern Israel.

Billed as a 'non-political' protest calling on both sides to end their actions, and for the Irish and US governments to acknowledge their own responsibilities, it was held at the entrance to Stephen's Green in bitterly cold temperatures that did nothing to stop people turning up in their hundreds to express solidarity with the victims on both sides. Members of the public were encouraged to light a candle and add it to an ever growing spiral of light, one for each victim so far, although to be fair it is hard to express solidarity equally when between 600 and 800 Palestinians have been killed and less then 15 Israelis have died.

By the end of the evening over 600 candles had been lit and the crowd was at least a hundred larger than that over the course of the hour long silent event.

Very dignified.

You can visit the Amnesty Ireland site to find out how to take the following actions:

1) Email the Israeli Embassy to call for an end to the unlawful targeting of civilians in Gaza

2) Call on Hamas to cease firing from behind residential homes in Gaza and stop the unlawful targeting of Israeli civilians

3) Call on the US Embassy to recognise the responsibility of the US Government

4) Call on the Taoiseach to use all diplomatic measures at his disposal to end the crisis

Links
Photos
Amnesty Ireland

Ice, Ice, baby

Its been pretty cold these last few days, nothing like the record lows in the UK, and certainly nothing like the icy winter chill that has millions across Europe in its grip, compounded by Gazprom's arbitrary decision to cut off Natural Gas supplies to most of Central and Eastern Europe.

Nonetheless it has been cold enough to freeze rivers, lakes, the seashore (in places) and the odd water feature or two that still dots the urban landscape. I got up this morning to take a walk and try and photograph some of this before it all melted away, but was alas a day too late.

Still, it was nice having the Iveagh Gardens to myself this morning, and I put a few of the photos up anyway.

I've also been using Picasa 3.0 (beta) for the Mac. I've used PicasaWeb (rather than Flickr) for some time, but the lack of a Mac version of the desktop application meant that I was stuck using iPhoto for arrangement and viewing. Released just before this week's MacWorld, I''m pretty happy with Picasa so far, though I haven't really used too many of the features save the integration with PicasaWeb and Blogger. I'm in the process of transferring all my photos from my MBP to my iMac, and I have found that Picasa is much faster and more responsive than iPhoto.

All of this is good news as I try to do something a bit more creative with my photos. Not sure what that is yet though, but when I am, its comforting to know that I can do it quicker.

Its also very sad that I find that comforting.

Go East. This is what we're gonna do

A quiet day today, especially after yesterday's epic trek to this island's very own Mordor*, spent mostly installing software on my new iMac.

Software installation is a pain, especially with a substandard broadband connection; to download all the relevant updates to the preinstalled software and OS (about 800Mb) took just over two hours, and installing about 70% of Logic Studio (about 30Gb) has taken a further five hours. This has not given me much time today to do anything more exciting than sit at my computer and feed it a seemingly endless supply of install DVDs.

Of course I did get a chance to catch up on some more reading (almost finished 'Omnivore's Dilemma') and employed fewer RSS filters. While reading of the devastating news of Dell's 1,900 redundancies in Limerick (about 2/3 of it's workforce there) I was actually shocked by the following line:

Established in Ireland in 1990, Dell ... is the country’s biggest exporter and second largest company. It accounts for approximately five per cent of Irish GDP and last year contributed €140 million to the economy of the south west in wages alone.

I have written at length already on what a nonsensical measurement I think GDP is, and how its use as a measurement of wellbeing in a country is highly suspect, but all the same to have one company account for 5% of it came as a bit of a shock.

It was also a shock, although much smaller, to realize that there was tech manufacturing of that size still happening in Ireland. Multinationals have no interest in national or regional development, and will always go where wages are cheapest and labour laws are the most relaxed. Now that Poland and the other accession states are in the EU, Ireland is no longer as attractive as a cheap door into the EU, PCs can be 'assembled' in Poland just as easily as Ireland to qualify as products of the EU and avoid import duties, and it was just a matter of time before Dell, Intel and the others started to roll their wagons East.

So what does that leave Ireland with? Call centers and tax breaks.

And once the tax breaks run out, or Obama stops US companies funneling their money through the books of their Irish subsidiaries and availing of our low corporate tax rates, Ebay and Microsoft will suddenly remember that Polish people learn French in college too.

hmmmn.

Still not doing so well on the "be less cynical in 2009" plan. Never mind, it's early days yet.

* Once the dark Lord Sauron was defeated, the ring dropped in the fiery depths of Mount Doom, and Frodo and his chums flew first class back to Hobbiton, I wonder did the local authorities in Mordor go on an expansive rebranding exercise, trying to create investment opportunities and attract tourists, putting the recent "Difficulties" behind them? Perhaps they built a new theatre, set up an ice hockey team, launched black taxi tours of the Black Gates, put a giant Ferris wheel beside Barad-dûr or maybe came up with a catchy and inspirational slogan like "Mordor, not as likely to kill you as before".

** In Dell's case Poland will be the destination of choice, though probably for no more than 10 years before the wages rise, government tax breaks run out and the infrastructure in a given African nation*** rises to the point where its economically viable to locate and Michael Dell learns the Polish for "I'm sorry, but I have a duty to my shareholders"

*** Or possibly Mordor, depending on how good their marketing is.

UnPatriot Games

(or 'There and Back Again')

I am writing this post on my nice shiny new iMac, purchased today in an act of extreme unpatriotism that would no doubt cause Brian Cowen to rest uneasy in his grave, if not for the fact that (when last checked) he was still alive and well and mismanaging the affairs of this green and pleasant land of ours.

I have been waiting to get a new computer since August, holding off as most Apple buyers do until his Steveness drops a few 'Booms!" at the MacWorld Keynote and Apple unleash their latest and greatest machines that will no doubt cause heartache in the souls of all early adopters that still foolishly buy first generation Apple products within a matter of weeks of their release. Like me.

But this year, Apple's last at MacWorld, saw nothing emerge from the bowels of 1 Infinite Loop, save software that nobody wants, and a unibody 17" MBP with No Removable Battery that is surely the most blatant built in obsolescence Apple have tried to get away with since the iPod. Not even the long expected iMac refresh materialized, and so fed up with waiting Vladimir and Estragon-like for an upgrade that may never come I decided to get off my backside and do something about it.

In another country.

I wanted to get the current 24" 3.06 ghz model, available from the Apple Ireland online store for €1,919. Alternatively you could also travel 100 miles north and across the border to Belfast, where the exact same model, shipped from the same warehouse in Cork, is on sale in the Apple Store in Victoria Square for £1,359, or about €1,500 at today's exchange rates.

Yes, that's right, the same computer sold directly by the same company and shipped from the same warehouse in Cork costs over €400 less in Belfast. UK VAT is currently at 15% compared to the Irish rate of 21.5%, but this difference alone cannot explain the wide disparity in price north and south of the border.

So ignoring Brain Cowen's declaration that heading North to shop is 'unpatriotic', I grabbed an 11am train to Belfast for €30 return, walked the 5 minutes to the Apple Store, picked up my aluminum bundle of joy and was back on the train home within 40 minutes - I didn't even need to spend any Sterling.

Real patriotism would be having the guts to tax the rich, take the burden off the poorest in society, and attempt to reduce the artificially high cost of living that has plagued this country since the Euro changeover.

Until that happens all I can say is "Go North, young man!"

Still worth a kin's ransom

As I worked my way through the second section of "Omnivores Dilemma" this morning, so far examining the Organic food industry in the US (and today it very much is an industry, just as mechanised and conglomerated as its non-organic counterpart), I realised that the fridge was empty and it was my turn to cook tonight. Seeing an opportunity to kill two metaphorical birds with one allegorical stone, I shuffled into town to buy some Organic vegetables and add some fuel to my own local vs Organic produce fire (which astute readers will remember I have been stoking for almost two days now. Quite a conflagration indeed).

Limiting myself to mass market supermarkets, who in recent years have hopped wholeheartedly on the Organic bandwagon, I ended up in Marks & Spencer, and bought 150g of Green Beans, 500g of Parsnips, 1kg of new Potatoes and 350g of mixed Broccoli and Cauliflower, all certified Organic and about enough to form the basis of two days' dinners for two people for just over €10.

Not one of the items came from Ireland.

Given that it was Marks and Spencer this is to be expected, as their range of Irish produce is very poor, but surprisingly few of their items came from their home base in the UK either. While the parsnips and cauliflower came from the UK, the broccoli was from Italy, the potatoes from Israel* and the beans all the way from Kenya. Of course if I was limiting myself purely to seasonal vegetables, their origins may have been different, but I was specifically looking for food labelled 'Organic'.

The 'FoodMiles' of my dinner is one of the major factors in the local vs Organic debate. Modifying the helpful (and just for fun, not really and truly scientifically accurate) FoodMiles carbon calculator found at OrganicLinker to reflect distance to Dublin rather than London, arbitrarily using a country's capital city as the port of origin, and assuming the produce arrived by plane given its shorter shelf life due to the lack of preservatives, we get the following results:

Beans: Nairobi to Dublin = 4507 miles = 356 kg carbon
Broccoli: Rome to Dublin = 1182 miles = 93 kg of carbon
Potatoes: Tel Aviv to Dublin = 2501 miles = 198 kg of carbon
Parsnips: London to Dublin = 291 miles = 23 kg of carbon
Cauliflower: London to Dublin = 291 miles = 23 kg of carbon

for a grand total of 693 Kg of carbon to get the food to my table, as opposed to roughly 2.5kg of carbon it would take to throw them all in the back of a truck and drive them from Denis Healy's farm in Wicklow to the Farmer's Market in Ranelagh.

According to the calculator at Responsible Travel my dinner is the carbon equivalent of five flights between Dublin and JFK. So basically it is more sustainable for me to take the Very Understanding Girlfriend to New York for dinner tonight than to shop in Marks & Spencer.

She might not buy that, but it's worth a try.

* One of the ironies in the fabulous world of the potato is that (according to the Very Understanding Girlfriend) Irish people do not like the taste of Irish potatoes. Coincidently English people do not like the taste of English potatoes. We therefore export almost all of our potatoes to England, and most potatoes in Irish supermarkets actually come from England. Perhaps this is our revenge for the Famine.

Harmony and understanding

As the situation in Gaza deteriorates further I am reminded of a CNN special report that I saw an ad for while travelling, simply entitled 'Jews and Arabs; Why don't they just get along?'.

Ah, journalists; The solution to, and cause of, all of life's problems.

I was born in the south of Spain, near Cadiz, and spent my formative years in Morocco. Moorish architecture and culture form my earliest memories, and have held a strong fascination for me all my life. In December 2005 The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I fulfilled a long ambition of mine and took a trip to Granada to visit the Alhambra, the 14th century hilltop palace of the Moorish rulers of southern Spain. The city was empty of foreign tourists, and at times we seemed to have the Alhambra to ourselves. The snow covered mountains, the freshness of the air and the clear blue skies that seemed to go on for miles all added to the sense of majesty that the palace commands.

One of the most amazing things about Moorish Spain was the religious tolerance most of the Sultans practised, with Muslim, Jew and Christian living and working side-by-side. It was one of the true golden ages of humanity, where art, literature and science all flourished. It is one of the great ironies of history that this golden age was brought crashing to an end in 1492 with the capture of Granada by the Catholic rulers Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile and Aragon, who expelled the Muslims and Jews and initiated the Inquisition as Christopher Columbus was preparing to set sail on his monumental voyage. In a very real way this golden age of religious harmony ended with the birth of America and the dawning of modernity.

Maria Rosa Menocal has written one of the best accounts of the culture of this golden age, 'The Ornament of the World - How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain', and its definitely worth reading if only to see how once everybody did just "get along".

I've also got round to uploading some pictures of the Alhambra, a task made more difficult by the contrast of Granada's clear blue December skies and our own miserable blanket of overcast greyness.

Links
The Ornament of the World
My photos of the Alhambra

Food, glorious food

Went in to Ranelagh this morning to do our weekly vegetable shopping at the Farmers' Market at the Multi-Denominational school, when to our shock and horror we found the gates locked and nobody about. Frankly the market has been on its last legs for some time, reduced from its bustling heyday of three years ago to little more than a single vegetable stall and the occasional pasta seller. However that hasn't bothered us as it is Denis Healy's vegetable stall that brings us back week after week.

The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I are in the middle of a book swap. I have given her Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved' to read, and in return I am working my way through her copy of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma', by Michael Pollan. Patel's book charts the politics behind the world food trade, how WTO policies and big business have devastated small farmers throughout the world, and tries to figure out what drove South Korean farmer Lee Kyang Hae to kill himself in protest at the WTO meeting in Cancun in 2003. In contrast Pollan's book focus on the local, rather than global, trying to trace the origin of the food he himself eats as an American.

Although TVUG had been recommending it for some time, I had put off reading 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' as I thought there would be too much overlap with 'Stuffed and Starved'. In fact although I am less than a third of the way through it's actually proving to be the perfect companion piece, and a number of thoughts have occurred to me at this stage.

The first is that US agriculture is unlike any other agriculture system in the world. It is a highly industrial process, with all aspects controlled by three or four giant corporations. To all intents and purposes there is no longer such a thing as a small US farmer, in the same way that there is in Ireland, Mexico, or South Korea, and its demise is something that has been deliberately engineered.

Farm workers have traditionally been a vocal social group, often allied with labour unions and quick to show authority their displeasure. The Irish Farmers Association is, perhaps, the strongest representative body in the country, capable of organising mass protests the size of which other groups can only dream of. They have the ability to shut down the center of Dublin at will to make their point, and frequently do. While not at the level of passion or desperation as Lee Kyang Hae, the IFA is a powerful voice in Ireland and the government listens closely.

This used to be the case in the US as well well into the 1970's, and was a source of concern for the proto neo-conservatives, who set about systematically reducing the power of the farm movement by drastically reducing the number of farmers. With increased dependence on fertilizers, high-yield grain and mechanization more food could be grown on less land, and with less people involved in the process. The government supported this with grant programs introduced by Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, designed to lock farmers into a spiral of overproduction by guaranteeing minimum prices for certain produce like corn and soya. With surplus product flooding the market because of overproduction, farmers became trapped in a cycle dependant upon government subsides for subsistence as their produce now somehow cost more to produce than it was actually worth on the open market as a direct result of that government encouraged overproduction. Paradoxically the only way to survive was for farms to get even bigger and produce more, at an even lower cost, just to bring in the same income levels. The era of the small farmer was over, and the era of industrialised agribusiness was born.

A consequence of the death of the small farmer and the industrialisation of agriculture was the fact that the US food chain resembles nothing else on earth. Pollan goes into a great detail about the corn industry, the main ingredient in almost everything eaten by the average American consumer. Not only is it broken down into additives and preservatives that are in every item of processed food, replaced sugar as high-fructose corn syrup in most beverages, and forms the building block of almost every part of a fast-food meal, it has supplanted grass as the main feed for livestock, and in particular cattle.

Cows are not meant to eat corn, their stomachs cannot digest it properly. It is, however, an amazing source of carbohydrates that cause a cow to bulk up quickly; a grass fed cow hits a suitable weight for slaughter anywhere from two to four years, but a corn-fed one reaches an ideal weight within fourteen months. This process has a terrible effect on the health of the cow, with chronic liver disease endemic in corn-fed cows. In fact, if corn-fed cows were not slaughtered by the time they reached 18 months old, most would die anyway from organ failure. Cows do not want to eat corn, and have to be trained to do so. This happens in giant industrial structures called feedyards, essentially battery farms for cows, where they are penned in concrete yards standing inches deep in their own manure while they are fed a constant diet of corn-based feed to bulk them up. So toxic is this environment, particularly their own filth, that the feed contains two main antibiotics that the cows must constantly take to prevent infection and death.

As cows have been bred to be able to digest corn more easily, their stomachs have begun to produce more acid. This has had two significant effects on our own environment. Firstly more acidic stomachs produce more gas that the cow's system cannot cope with, and must be expelled through belching. I used to laugh when I heard people say that cows were a significant contributor to greenhouse gasses, but the fact is that US corn-fed cows do produce significantly more emissions than non-corn fed cows, and since the 1970's the increase in US cattle numbers has had a measurable effect on climate change. Secondly the stomach acidity of these cows is now similar to our own; bacteria that enters that cow from the filth and manure they stand in is no longer killed by the high acidity, and enters the food chain. As our own stomach acidity is similar, it too is unable to kill off the bacteria. Due to the constant presence of antibiotics in the cow feed, and thus in the average American meat eater, antibiotics now have less affect on combating these bacteria, and thus we see outbreaks of highly resistant E.coli, something that was virtually unknown before the dawn of US industrial agribusiness in the 1970s.

Aside from corn, the other main ingredient in American food is oil. Following on from the end of the Second World War, the American chemical industry was retooled to supply agriculture, through the creation of synthetic nitrates to act as fertilizers and the development of petroleum-based pesticides, and now 60 years later US agriculture is so intensive that it cannot survive without it. Pollan estimates that to grow a single acre of corn in the US now requires 50 gallons of oil, between fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, harvesting and transportation. A single corn-fed cow will have consumed 35 gallons of oil in the 18 months of its life before slaughter. Given the dependence of the US agricultural system on corn and its necessity in all forms of processed food that are the staple of the US diet, it is easy to see the war in Iraq and the quest for oil as a fight for food - without a steady supply of cheap oil the US will literally starve to death.

While the Irish meat industry is significantly different to its US counterpart, recent pork and mad-cow scares show that we are not immune to cost-cutting practices that put the consumer at risk. This is only one of the reasons that I am a vegetarian; unless you physically hunt and kill your meat yourself, you have almost no idea what has been done to it in the name of profit. But of course vegetables are also the subject of numerous profit-driven measures and that is why the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I always try to buy organic.

We are not alone in this health drive, and numerous supermarkets have responded to consumer demand and have large organic produce section. However if you take a look at the shelves in Tesco or Marks & Spencer, you see that almost all of the organic produce has travelled many thousands of miles to get here, from Spain to Argentina, Israel to Kenya, and you have to start to question the carbon cost of such transportation.

The Local vs Organic food debate is a difficult one to address, and that is why being able to source all our vegetables from a supplier like Denis Healy, where the majority of his produce is grown in Wicklow, less than 50 miles away, is such a boon. Eating local produce means having a seasonal diet and getting creative with your cooking (there is only so much kale and turnip you can take), but a few good cookbooks can make a significant difference. Healy has stalls at most of the Irish Farmers' markets, so although it looks as if the Ranelagh market may have breathed its last, we still have many other options available.

It just means having to make more of an effort.

Links
Denis Healy's Organic Delights
Find your local Irish Farmers Market
Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved' site
Michael Pollan

My Favourite Cookbooks
The Cafe Paradiso Cookbook (Ireland's best veggie restaurant)
Candle Cafe Cookbook (my favourite vegan place in NY)
A World of Vegetable Cookery (best all-round book on basic dishes for every conceivable vegetable)

Is mother proud of Little Boy today?

I woke up this morning with every intention of heading into town to join a protest in solidarity with Gaza that I saw advertised on a poster yesterday. Normally I notice posters only after the events advertised have transpired so that my life becomes a succession of missed opportunities for gigging, protesting, or discovering my inner salsa dancer. At the start of the year (two whole days ago) I made a conscious decision to become more informed about what was going on in my own city, and get involved, rather than spending most of my time reading about skulduggery in far off countries and doing nothing tangible about it.

Gaza has been on my mind a lot since the bombing started last week. As the first news reports started to trickle in, the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I were sitting down for lunch with a few friends, two of whom I last saw in Turkey on their way overland to Syria. Although I had known one of them for many years, I had assumed his partner was Scottish, but as I found out over dinner in Istanbul she was in fact Palestinian, and had moved from country to country as a young girl and only settled in Scotland very recently. Although we didn't talk much about the attacks on Gaza last week, we did all arrange to go in to see 'Waltz with Bashir' in the new Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield before New Year's Eve.

The film was easily the best film that I saw all year, breathtakingly drawn with a soundtrack at times haunting, all serving to strengthen the message of horror and disbelief that filmed interviews alone may not have conveyed. Most of what I know of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refuge camps comes from external sources writing 2nd-hand accounts many years after the fact, so to hear the direct accounts of those associated with the massacre was something new, and disturbing, and was the first time that I have heard something akin to regret and guilt from Israelis associated with the horrific events.

This is not to say that this was the first time such feelings have been expressed, far from it, for there has been and continues to be a strong anti-war movement within Israel, and government policies towards the Palestinian Territories are the subject of frequent open debate within Israel itself. This is highlighted throughout John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's recent book "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy", wherein they contrast the vigorous critiques of government policy that appear in Israeli newspapers with the unilateral support it receives in US papers, and the fact that any criticism of Israeli government policy in the US often results in the critic being labelled anti-Semitic.

Within the US the subject of Israel is one that is entirely black or white, with no shades of ambiguity. Everything Israel does is right, and anyone who criticises their actions is obviously racist. This can be seen clearly in the response of both the US government and media to the current Gaza crisis. I watched both the CBS and NBC main news broadcasts last night, with NBC highlighting rockets damaging Israeli homes without mentioning the scale of Palestinian deaths, and CBS doing likewise and placing the story after news of Obama moving to DC two weeks early so his kids could start school on Monday - the deaths of 400 people in the last seven days is less newsworthy than two young girls starting in an elite private school. Bush, as would be expected, gave blanket approval to the actions of the Israeli government, viewing everything in the absolutist eyes of the war on terror, equating 4 Israeli deaths to those of 400 Palestinians and placing the blame entirely on Hamas. Of course every death is completely unacceptable, but the simple and obvious fact is that the Israeli response is completely out of proportion and nothing can justify it.

So why didn't I go into the march today?

I spent some time this morning reading the reports of last night's march to the Israeli embassy, where pro-Hamas and Fatah chants reigned out into the night and Israeli flags were burned, and quite frankly I felt uncomfortable with the thought of being associated with that. The US is not unique in seeing everything in black and white, and all too often disapproval over the actions of the Israeli government gets mixed up with the denial of the right of the State of Israel to exist at all. Many of last night's marchers were calling for the destruction of Israel, and that is something that I refuse to be associated with, even tangentially by marching in the same demonstration as even a small group of such protesters.

I am a strong supporter of Israel. I spent most of my time in University studying its ancient history, and journeyed from the Dead Sea and Ein Gedi to the Golan in the north and the borders with Syria and Lebanon, and the experience is something that affected me greatly. Travelling before the second intifada I moved freely through Jericho and other parts of the Palestinian Territories and I saw two nations at peace with each other, genuinely trying to find a solution that offered the fewest compromises for both sides, allowing each to retain its dignity. Spending the night on the roof of a hostel within the old city of Jerusalem near the Tower of David, hearing the bells of Christian churches compete for attention with the cries of the Muezzin a few hundred yards away from the faithful praying at the Western Wall is a memory that will stay with me forever, with its sense of peoples divided by faiths, but united by Faith. Definitely an odd memory to cherish for a cynical and rabid agnostic such as myself, but there you go.

But supporting a country is not the same thing as supporting a government (or succession of governments), and the callous actions of a government that starts a war and takes 400 lives to bolster its credentials before an election is something that should not be countenanced no matter what the historical circumstances.

I did not, however, have the strength of conviction to demonstrate against such actions today for fear of being associated with extremists.

600 people turned up today. One even tried to set himself on fire. I stayed home and read a book.

Not a great way to start a year of Doing.

Links
Waltz with Bashir
Mearsheimer & Walt's "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy"
IndyMedia report on Friday night's protest

Too Much|TI Snow

Shortly after Christmas I received an unexpected present in my inbox from Renus*. A while back we had talked about getting together for a bit of jam, but never got round to it, so I was really quite pleased to see a few guitar tracks that he had been working on arrive unannounced in my inbox, and for the opportunity thus presented to tinker around with them on a few new toys.

The good people at Futuresounds had a demo-model sale in the run up to Christmas, and I picked up an Access Virus|TI Snow that seemed to have been used maybe twice in its life before I got my happy little paws on it at a hefty 35% discount. The Virus is a great synthesizer with more features than most soft synths, made all the more fun by the presence of many knobs. No softwear can ever replicate the true joy of knob-twiddling. Lacking a keyboard, it is designed to be used with an external midi-keyboard or run directly from your computer, but why I picked it up was because it is a perfect companion to the Tenori-On, taking 4 separate layers via midi and allowing you to take full advantage of the Tenori-On as an interface while using the much richer sound banks of a full synth. All of this and it comes with a rather tasty messenger bag that fits both the Snow and a Tenori-On (or eight bottles of beer if you are not on music duty).

My problem with music-making is that I get so wrapped up in messing about with hardware that I rarely bother to actually record what I am doing, or try and form it into any sort of semblance of a track. By sending me through a pretty catchy guitar riff** Renus threw down a "get off your backside and do something" gauntlet, and I spent a happy few hours actually recording my less-than-expert knob twiddling and sent the results winding their merry way back to him.

It's still what I would call a work in progress, the result of a few hours work and a desire not to detract from the main guitar track itself, but I'm happy with where it is right now. Unfortunately as the bulk of the work was done between Christmas and New Year's Eve, it doesn't count as this month's attempt at creativity, but it's a start.

Too Much (Unkie Dave Mix) by UnkieDave

* He who created his own multitouch interface from paper and cardboard. Damn his talented hide.

** So catchy that I couldn't sleep for two nights because the damn thing kept looping over and over in my head every time I closed my eyes.