Land

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has just published its first global asessment of the world's land resources.

It finds that most of the potential agricultural land is already being farmed. Of that, 25 percent is assessed as highly degraded, 8 per cent as moderately degraded, 36 per cent stable or slightly degraded and 10 per cent as improving. The degradation takes the form of soil erosion, water depletion and degration, and biodiversity loss.

The dramatic increases in agricultural yields brought about by the 'green revolution' begun in the 1960s have now tailed off and in part the very farming practices introduced by it have themselves resulted in the land and water resource degradation.

Whoso list to hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Debt or taxes

An interesting post by Golem XIV that elaborates a point I made in my talk to the Northern Contemporary Furniture Makers. See the Talks and articles page of this blog.

Transpiration

Egg in the batter, egg in the batter!
We make cake and nothing's the matter.

(With apologies to Maurice Sendak.)


Whether it be Tony Blair justifying military attack on Iraq, the US administration describing the death of Osama bin Laden, or the Metropolitan Police accounting for the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller caught up in the G20 demonstrations, or, more recently, Mark Duggan whose fatal shooting by the police was the immediate stimulation of this year's London riots, the pudding recipe seems always to call for much egg. We are offered copious detail which, usually when things have quietened down a little (it may be days, it may be years) has to be withdrawn. Quite how it got there in the first place is never explained.

Truth will out; but it knows its place.

Junk

In the old days a person's address was usually a piece of public information, and one could send a letter to more or less anyone without thinking one had transgressed basic standards of civilisation. One might not get a reply, or it might not even get read, but that was a different matter.

Now that we are most of us on the internet, knowledge, or, worse, use of a person's email address without their explicit sanction is regarded as the most intimate kind of personal violation, even though an email can be consigned to oblivion with a single jab of a finger, whilst a letter had to be torn and thrust into the fire (preceded of course by an exhaustive risk assessment).

We should take a lesson from the eighteenth century, when they managed to combine a pronounced idea of the Polite with the most pointed kind of personal communication and remark, and decorum and scurrilousness could rub shoulders. It is perhaps because we nowadays have no real notion of politeness that we hem ourselves around with absurd protocols of appropriateness.

Perhaps in these times of unemployment we should all be enabled to recruit the kind of personal 'filter' that royalty has long relied upon: "Her Majesty desires me to convey..."

Sub prime

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/11/buckle-up-credit-crunch-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=buckle-up-credit-crunch-2

Greece and Germany

And this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,769703,00.html

and this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,797584,00.html