As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,

There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.

Thank you, John

Winter

Unloading the camera, I forgot I'd taken this view out the front windows - this is from a fortnight ago, but could have been as recently as last Friday:

It started snowing again on Sunday afternoon, while things were half-melted, and Cat was simply outraged: she was quite fed up with all this snow, this is the South dammit!

Standing around

Driving around Little Rock, I found - to my horror - that I had become more or less inured to one of the (many) things that shocked and disgusted me in this city when I first arrived. In this case, what I'm referring to is the poor bastards employed as living billboards - hired to stand 9 hours a day holding a sign announcing Discount Jewellery Sale Last Days! or Special Underwear Sale Now On, or just Liberty First Tax Services!!

When I first got here, they would just stand at busy corners, holding the signs, then some bright spark got the idea that if they waved their hand, or the sign, it would attract more attention, so now the poor bastards have to spend their time standing, waving and trying to draw attention, and smiling, smiling, smiling the whole time.

Just as a matter of course, I make a point of avoiding firms that use this sort of low-rent, contemptuous advertising, but when I think seriously about it, it makes my skin absolutely crawl. In the richest country in the world, this is the best use they can find for so much labour? I don't know how much these poor buggers are getting paid, but I'm sure it's not enough: they are out there, literally rain or shine, even in the freezing colds and standing ankle-deep in snow.

Hell, I used to think burger-flipping at McDonalds for minimum wages was a bottom-of-the-barrel sort of job, but this stuff has really lowered the standard.

And it also - of course - gives the lie to that ancient canard beloved of the Right, that people will just sit around and do nothing if you pay the unemployed any sort of benefit, however minimal. These people are doing an excruciating, astoundingly dull job in miserable conditions, just to earn some pittance.

I suppose there may be a few people who are suited to this, that this might represent a good job or even the peak of their abilities, but ... one, or maybe two, in a city the size of Little Rock, not the 60 or 80 people who seem to be doing it every weekend (and about half that weekdays I think).

Whiter than this page

Well, still snowed in - it snowed all Monday & didnt stop til yesterday morning. The roads look marginally passable this afternoon, provided we can make it up the slight incline of the driveway, which is still more or less solid snow. Must buy a snow shovel if we can get out (and any are left of course!).

At least it's proper snow this time, not the mostly ice with a spatter of snow on top, that we got last weekend ... much more festive looking, and oooh, soft and clean and inviting ... from inside the windows anyway. Not exactly the sort of weather Arkansas is known for, and the locals are all doom and gloom, worst winter ever seen since 1829 (*cough*cough*). Plus, of course, shows there ain't nuthin' to this global warmin' stuff, it's gettin' colder not warmer, which I've already had 3 times this week, in emails.

Let it come down

Wow, it snowed again overnight, and it's still snowing, quite hard. I can see I'll be working from home tomorrow. There's about 4 inches of snow piled up outside in the driveway already.

R was over from OKC for a weekend visit this weekend - had a game of 6th Edition wherein he massacred me: Note to self, do not charge chariots frontally into hoplites. Just because it sorta worked in DBM doesn't mean it will anywhere else ... which (a) makes sense from the real-world point of view, and (b) what on earth was DBM thinking?

Otherwise, kinda tiptoed around all the things we disagree on, like global warming, and a general hankering to revert to the 50s when middleclass white males had it so good (which inter alia I would say, actually not, but that's yet another matter).

Everything comes and goes

Everything comes and goes

pleasure leaves too early

and troubles leaves too slow

Tough month: it's been freezing cold here, biting in a way that it wasn't in London. And I do mean freezing, quite a few days it hasn't even reached 0C at the warmest point of the day. Last weekend, we didn't go out for 4 days as we were iced in - all the roads were sheets of ice, with a dusting of snow, and the temperature seesawed between 15 & 25F (-10 and -5 roughly). 

It isn't the grim grind of an English winter, even at worst there are plenty of sunny blue-sky days - viciously cold, but fine: but it's decidedly colder. Of course all the locals are shaking their heads and saying, never been a winter this cold before ... as usual. They've also been cheerfully announcing that it means this global warming stuff is just foolishness (gakk).

It, or various medical issues, seem to have left me fairly depressed: quite hard just to get up and keeping going each day.

Cat seems to be feeling a lot brighter than this though - she's just launched into a new project to build a set of compost bins behind the garage, with a raised vegetable garden as the next project after that. She's tearing into that with quite a bit of energy, happily hammering and sawing away in the garage, while wrapped up in many layers of warm clothes.

Haiti, or how to make a disaster

I found this quite fascinating, as a rebuttal of a -lot- of racist cant making the rounds at the moment, about how 'black culture' and 'voodoo' are what makes Haiti so poor:

Why did the political, economic and ecological histories of these two countries — the Dominican Republic and Haiti — sharing the same island unfold so differently?
Part of the answer involves environmental differences. The island of Hispaniola’s rains come mainly from the east. Hence the Dominican (eastern) part of the island receives more rain and thus supports higher rates of plant growth.

Hispaniola’s highest mountains (over 10,000 feet high) are on the Dominican side, and the rivers from those high mountains mainly flow eastwards into the Dominican side.

The Dominican side has broad valleys, plains and plateaus and much thicker soils. In particular, the Cibao Valley in the north is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world.

In contrast, the Haitian side is drier because of that barrier of high mountains blocking rains from the east.

Compared to the Dominican Republic, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture in Haiti is much smaller, as a higher percentage of Haiti’s area is mountainous. There is more limestone terrain, and the soils are thinner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery.
Note the paradox: The Haitian side of the island was less well endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. The explanation of this paradox is that Haiti’s burst of agricultural wealth came at the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils. [...]
While those environmental differences did contribute to the different economic trajectories of the two countries, a larger part of the explanation involved social and political differences — of which there were many that eventually penalized the Haitian economy relative to the Dominican economy.

In that sense, the differing developments of the two countries were over-determined. Numerous separate factors coincided in tipping the result in the same direction.
One of those social and political differences involved the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in France’s overseas empire. The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was in economic and political decline itself.

Hence, France was able to invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island. France imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain.
As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbor during colonial times — and it still has a somewhat larger population today, about ten million versus 8.8 million.
But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic. As a result, Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double the Republic’s population density.

The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side.

In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid- mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.

 This is from Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germ and Steel fame)