All you can eat data

My contribution to Blog Action Day this year (a day late, for which I apologise) is about knowledge.

Knowledge is food.

The picture above is a genuine poster display from the lift at Caledonian Road tube station. All You Can Eat Data right next to the DEC appeal for famine relief. There is surely no need to ask: 'what the fuck's wrong with this picture'?

Here in England, we are so stuffed with knowledge that the government of the day has had to take drastic action in order to combat the rising obesity epidemic. In an unsurprising act of callous abandonment of their responsibilities, the Con-Dem alliance has advised us to control our calorie intake and move around more. And, er, that's it. Once again, though it's a no-brainer, I find myself on Jamie Oliver's side when he describes Andrew Lansley's so-called plan as "patronising rubbish" which could have been outdone by an 8 year old child. Our hopes - as he says - can only rest on knowledge, on the chance that enough people will find out enough and care sufficiently to make a change. Those bastards in Westminster have no desire to take on their buddies in the big food companies. They have no desire to do anything which would jeopardise their bonanza paydays (although at least most of them used to have the decency to wait until they had left office before creaming a profit for themselves) whilst disgracefully smearing the people they were elected to govern as somehow deserving of their fate because they can't get off their sofas and cook a nice risotto.

What are the options facing us? From the women and children dragging themselves hundreds of miles across arid deserts in Somalia and Ethiopia to find a sip of water and a bowl of rice, while lump-headed hacks persist in their denial of climate change; to the demonised lower end of the 99% trying to bring their families through on a smaller and smaller pot of money; buying the 'value' range and seeking out some decent fresh fruit and veg that's affordable, while seeing the cost of food climbing weekly. To those who form part of the 74% increase in Type 2 diabetes since 1997. To those going to the Olympic Park at Stratford next year who will watch the athletes while eating Big Macs in the world's largest McDonalds. We're all well and truly fucked.

Pissing it away

We live in a country where 23 out of the 29 members of our 'elected' government are millionaires. Is it any surprise that there is bugger-all attention paid to the terrifying demise of the world around us? If ever the phrase 'fiddling while Rome burns' was apposite, surely this is it. We watch our TV screens, our iPods and iPads, our Androids... and we see the utter havoc caused by floods in Pakistan.

We must of course remain optimistic. There is the inherent short-termism of our human race always at the heart of everything we do, but I see only the shadow. Any sense of humanity we might once have dreamed of is slowly but surely undergoing strangulation. What does it matter to some faceless, nameless internet commenter that the scarce resources in the most populous areas of the globe are becoming ever more difficult to find? Why should we give a toss when the people living in less fortunate countries than our own strike out across continents to seek solace on our shores?

At the same time, Francis Maude, George Osborne, David Cameron and 20 others in our 'cabinet' continue to cream the benefit of their inherited property, bolstered by bogus expense claims. None of this renders any action irrelevant of course. It's just that, well...

Act On

Watching Joan Ruddock on the telly the other morning made me realise how far things have come, and how far they have yet to go. Smack bang in the middle of Corrie is an ad featuring (I think) Nigel from Eastenders about the crimes of carbon production. "Does it have a happy ending?" the nauseatingly cute girl asks Nige. Well I doubt it my dear, but let's wait and see. I have dutifully searched online for Act On CO2 and have become enormously embiggened by the whole cromulent process.

Joan is of course relatively close to my heart, along with Ed, and the other cronies who have made such sterling efforts to contribute to carbon reduction measures over the past year. Also close to my heart has been the Climate Camp, embroiled as I was in the protests at Whitehall Place a month or so ago. I was - to all intents and purposes - on the wrong side of the fence, facing the crusties as they sat in their canoes and chanted their slogans, while I fretted about the creature comforts of the SCS and the contract lead. I am following them on Twitter - even to mobile device level - but this is largely so that I can prepare to defend against, rather than mobilising the tent and the Special Brew so that I can join in another swoop. What can I say? I am a whore, like the rest of them. That includes you, by the way.

If we talk about sustainability (for what else is there when asking about climate change?) then we must take a holistic view. We have all (now, I guess anyways) seen the plantations of palm trees replacing the indigenous flora, partly to satisfy our insatiable need for recycled packaging, but mostly to feed our even more vampiric desire to defy the natural processes of life - i.e., ageing. If we can't accept the fact that we as humans are not sustainable, but that life itself must ultimately be so, then we are in big trouble.

The malaise spreads far and wide. Countless millions of tiny plastic bottles, made from a myriad of different oil-derived materials, line our shelves. Waitrose remove the word 'REDUCE' from the sustainable triangle, and even a hint of a drop in production levels causes unprecedented global panic in the 'money markets'.



Wherein, needless to say, lies the rub. While Cameron and Brown fall over themselves (actually, Brown probably falls over himself more - slap me!) to crow about their cuts, pay rates at executive level continue to be 'sky rockets in flight'. None of us can swallow that.

Poor game

Thanks to just about every football pisstaker for this picture.

As my contribution to this year's Blog Action Day, which is focused on poverty, I thought I would write about something close to my heart - football. Specifically, the obscenity of footballers' wealth and the almost insuperable differences between their lives and not only those in the Developing World, but even the ordinary fan who pays through the nose to watch them and their pony trickery. I have blogged previously about Anton Ferdinand's taste in watches, and am more or less constantly amazed when I hear that someone can possibly be earning £100,000 (or is it even more these days?) in a week. I know that, in the way of these things, we should always strive to take a positive direction forward, but I hope my innate cynicism will be forgiven.

Poverty is, as any self-respecting A Level Sociology student will tell you, a relative concept. Liz Jones wrote (surprisingly well, I thought) in the Mail on Sunday at the weekend - I was early for the supermarket opening and happened to pick up a copy in the cafe where I was waiting for it to open, OK? - about Ethiopia, and a bleak picture she painted indeed. If one were to compare the current fears of the man on the Clapham Omnibus about the value of his 3 bed semi in Surbiton, or his winter break in the Alps, such a story truly throws these things into sharp perspective.

In these historic times, we are seeing many very strange things. A man who made a fortune selling video games pays £18,000,000 for a trip into space, the Formula 1 circus stages a night-time Grand Prix in Singapore with a carbon footprint akin to a sasquatch with elephantiasis, and of course, Manchester City are poised to spend countless millions on buying every player on the planet while the rest of the developed world is at real risk of losing their livelihoods and the developing world continues to try and survive on handfuls of rice. Or worse.

With the supposed demise of the fat banker, it is in the football world that the most egregious expenditure is now taking place. Football has not been particularly good at the PR aspect of charitable work with the poor. The various organisations that run the game are really not doing enough. The campaign recently launched by FIFA for the South Africa World Cup - '20 Centres for 2010' aims to raise $20,000,000 for 20 football centres across Africa by 2010, with FIFA and its sponsors donating $500 for every goal scored during the World Cup qualifying matches, and the fans also able to give as they see fit. Nice to know that the England/Kazakhstan match will have raised $3,000, while the parsimonious Taffs contributed a big fat zero. When set next to the mind-boggling sums currently being shovelled into the banking system, $20,000,000 is - almost literally - nothing. Even when set against the ludicrous fee paid by City for Robinho, it isn't a huge amount either.

The English FA is even worse. When I was searching through their website for the Social Responsibility section (not easy to find, let me tell you - try it for yourself) I was a little surprised to find a piece about sailors from HMS Endurance helping out some children in Ghana. I'm not sure what that has to do with the FA. Uefa yielded nothing, I'm afraid to say, so I gave up.

Mostly, it seems that individual players have done more than the organisations, and especially when those players - such as the great George Weah and Nwankwo Kanu - have themselves been personally enriched by the game, but still remember their roots. Otherwise, when these megastars reach the end of their illustrious careers, we have the choice of listening to them drone on at Half Time, or of going to their themed bars on the Costa Del Sol.

So, where do we go from here? Would I recommend that any footy fan who would like to see the game do more in the cause of fighting poverty and its causes drops a few quid in the FIFA bucket (no doubt, in reality, there's some sort of credit card arrangement, but you know what I mean...) when they squeeze through the turnstiles in Minsk? I don't think so.

My advice? Carry a banner which, despite your gut feeling, doesn't say Sack the Board or Lynch Ashley, but instead says something along the lines of Eat The Rich.

Waiting

Thanks to www.jaunted.com for the image above.

I have been suffering from writer's block over the past week or so, and offer my apologies for the lack of posts. The block was brought on by two things:

1) World events were developing so rapidly that most of what I was writing was immediately subsumed by the tide of reality.

2) Work has been insane, with the instigation of the new Department of Energy and Climate Change having a major impact on my brain and body.

I can't see either of those things easing off any time soon, but I have been determined to contribute to the Blog Action Day on poverty taking place on October 15th, so I am preparing a post for that now. These are apt times to be talking about poverty, sad to say, as are all times.

But please excuse me first while I take some duck tape and lash it around the mouths of Sirs Bono and Bob Geldof.

Toodle-oo.