Food matters

     Seeds of Time (2013) Documentary that follows Cary Fowler as he travels round the world  as part of a world-wide seed-saving project. He was one of the instigators of the Svalbard Seed Vault. His message is simple: industrialised agriculture has brought about a sharp decline in crop diversity just when climate change has raised the need for genetic diversity so that crops can be adapted to changing conditions. Besides Svalbard, a project to preserve potato diversity in Peru gets central billing. There are also scenes of conferences, graphics illustrating the loss of seed banks, and so on. This is one of those slow-moving crises that people will ignore until it’s too late.
      Besides the Peruvian potato saving project, the film includes examples of seed saving by gardeners and other projects designed to preserve and increase diversity. Some of the repetitive bits could have been cut to provide more room for gardening, which in pure energy terms is the most efficient method of growing food.
     Unlike industrialised agriculture, a garden multiplies energy. The efficiency of agribusiness is an illusion limited to money. In terms of resources, it’s highly inefficient, because the externals aren’t priced. Gardening is labour intensive, but we get more food energy out of a garden than we put into it. Good thing too, or our ancestors, couldn’t have survived without preserving garden produce for the long cold winter. We subsidise agri-business by underpricing oil, which means we exchange the future of the planet for the present freedom from labour.
     A film both depressing and hopeful, relentlessly earnest, but necessary. Watch ity, and grow beans in your backyard. ***

Encyclopedia of ETs

     Wayne Douglas Barlowe et al. Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979 & 1987) With an introduction by Robert Silverberg. A nicely done survey of 48 extraterrestrials as described by 40-odd writers. Barlowe has done his best to interpret descriptions of varying completeness and vagueness into accurate renditions of their appearance, as well as summarising what the stories say or imply about their biology, social structure, political role(s), and so on.
     Several of them contradict my visualisations (e.g., Dickson’s Ruml, from The Alien Way), others are wonderfully unearthly (e.g., the Dextran). It is after all logically impossible to imagine anything that is utterly alien: all ETs are inevitably extrapolations and interpretations of what we know about life on Earth, and what we can estimate about the physics and chemistry of exoplanets.
      Nevertheless, both writers and artists have tried to convey the sense of the Alien as something other than a human in a weird costume. The notes to the illustrations sometimes come close (e.g., Radiates, starfish shaped beings from Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman, “will join an interlocking wheeling dance”).
      A well done compendium, that any SF fan will enjoy. It should be on the reference shelf of anyone contemplating devising an SF movie or book. ***

Brexit IV: The rats want to leave the sinking ship.

Standard Life Fund, the investment arm of the British-based multi-national life insurance company, has stopped withdrawals from its real estate investment mutual funds.  All of them hold London real estate, whose value is unknown now that Brexit may eliminate London's role as the world's premier financial services provider. If Standard Life's action is the first of many, there will be a world-wide financial crisis. Let's just hope it won't happen, and if it does, that it won't be as bad as 2008.

Related risks: The pound was always overvalued in terms of purchasing power. Anyone travelling to the UK found out pretty quickly that the UK was expensive: A pound spent in the UK bought about as much as a dollar spent in Canada or the USA, so prices were roughly double in real times. Its high exchange value reflected the financial power of London. The pound was a safe haven currency. If it loses that status, the financial crisis will be very bad. "Investors" will try to unload pounds. But the only people who ever wanted them in the fist place were the people who will be trying to get rid of them. So the Bank of England will have to buy pounds, and that means a serious risk of major sloshing of currencies around the world. When currencies slosh around because nobody wants them, hyperinflation looms on the horizon.

Pictures from a road trip.

     Michael Glover. Big Lonely and Beyond (2009) Disclosure: I have several pieces by Michael Glover, you may surmise that I like his work. This self-published book collects 58 sketches and drawings Glover made on several trips across the country. He likes to show us objects in a landscape or townscape, cars, buildings, boats, trains, and so on; and a few people. Glover has a confident line and knows how to use shading to model objects and create depth. His choice of subjects reveals a strong nostalgic streak; he focuses on the effects of time. Well printed, with a brief introduction.
     Glover’s website is www.meglover.ca He paints in a slightly abstract realistic style with strong shapes and muted colours. Worth a look, I think. Anyhow, I like his work. ***

The Years of Bitterness and Pride (1930s Depression photos)

     Hiag Akmakjian. The Years of Bitterness and Pride (1975) A selection of Farm Security Administration photographs from 1935 to 1943. The Preface reminds us that the project to document the USA in photographs almost didn’t happen, and that it became one of most thorough and complete records of people and places ever undertaken. The photographers made over 250,000 pictures, all of them archived in Washington. A handful have become visual summaries of times and places that Americans that know of them hope will not be forgotten. But I suspect that we now have a couple of generations of Americans for whom the Depression is at best a remembered emotion passed on to them from elderly relatives, not an historical event.
     Yet anyone who sees these images will, I think, be reminded that economic dislocations engendered by laissez-faire capitalism have long-lasting effects on individuals and communities. I wonder what happened to these people who allowed themselves to be photographed. Some are defiant, some look beaten, some see hope around them. All look damaged in mind and spirit a well as in body. And yet the majority rebuilt their lives.
     There have been many collections of FSA images published. Look for them. They are fierce reminders that economic ideologies that mistake money for wealth and profit as a goal will inevitably hurt people. You can search the collection yourself here.
****

Brexit 3

    UKIP leader Nigel Farage has resigned. Another coward, afraid to face the consequences of his actions. He knows perfectly well that no one can deliver on the Leaver promises.
    Boris Johnson is now a mere backbencher and newspaper columnist, and as such he can repeat his nonsense about the UK's ability to negotiate the same deal outside as they have within the EU, but without the heavy hand of Brussels bureaucracy.
    To keep access to the Common Market will require accepting freedom of movement between the EU and the UK. The UK will lose EU subsidies for its agriculture etc., subsidies that are actually UK money coming back from the EU.
     But worse is that Leave voters will discover that they will not get what the thought they were getting, and will lose a lot what they've become used to. That will cause unrest, to put it politely.

Brexit Vote II

     The fallout continues pretty well as I expected.

      Harassment of immigrants has escalated. The Leavers expect things to get “back to normal”, to quote a woman interviewed by BBC. A young man in Leeds said he expected the immigrants to leave right now. The spin doctors are downplaying the racism in the anti-immigration sentiments, but it’s pretty obvious that race is the reason many Leavers want the immigrants out.
     The leaders of the Leave side always knew that they wouldn’t be able to deliver what they promised. Farage has already said that his claim that 350 pounds going to Brussels every week could be redirected to the National Health Service was “a mistake”. In one interview, he even denied making that claim. BBC News showed a photo of a bus plastered with that claim.
     Boris Johnson has stood down from running for Prime Minister. This supports my suspicion that his support for Leave was entirely a matter of rivalry with David Cameron. I don’t think he expected Leave to win, but hoped to get a strong enough vote that he could challenge Cameron. With a Leave win, he would have to negotiate the terms of leaving. The Europeans have made it quite clear that the best Britain could hope for would be a Norway deal: Accept the obligations of being in the EU in order to get the rights, except the most important one, which is having a say in how it’s run.

     What’s the likely future? A realisation by the Leavers that they can’t have what they thought they would get: jobs, security, control over the borders, well-funded public services, etc. As this realisation grows, “political unrest” will increase. It’s only a matter of time before a Leaver kills an immigrant. There will be a general election. It will be one of the nastiest ever in the UK.
     Northern Ireland will have to reconcile its desire to be British with the reality of losing access to Europe. I think the odds that they will want to join the Irish Republic will increase as that sinks in.
Scotland will play it both ways: try to block the exit, and separate from the UK. For them, it’s a win either way.
     If the Conservatives can get away from their stupid personal rivalries, they could use Scottish intransigence as an excuse to ignore the Leave vote in order to keep Britain united. But I’m not holding my breath on that one. This whole mess came about because of personal rivalries. Cameron wanted to keep the premiership, and offered the referendum to get enough votes to keep it. Johnson and others saw it as a wedge they could use to replace Cameron. None of them, I think, thought the vote could be close. If they had, they would have ensured a super-majority clause (60% or more) in the referendum rules.

     A few commentators have suggested that the Leave vote was as much an anti-government vote as an anti-Europe vote. The government, with the slobbering assistance of the tabloids, has used Europe as convenient whipping boy to explain and excuse the austerity programs they’ve imposed on Britain. Privatisation all over the place, an ill-disguised shift towards becoming a tax-haven, corruption on a scale not seen since the late 1700s, greed, contempt for the working people, all these things played into the Leave vote.

     For the time being, if you have money in Britain, get it out before the pound falls even further.