 The Labour Party in Scotland, partly in response to needing to differentiate themselves from the UK party in the context of devolution, adopted a position against the renewal of Trident and in favour of nuclear disarmament.
In 1999.
Yes indeed. And there have been no debates on Trident in particular or nukes in general at any Labour party conference, Scottish or otherwise, since. Even the reflex of declaring a degree of “independence “ from the Westminster party line is nothing new in and of itself. We've already had the “New” Clause Four earlier this year...though that seems an aeon ago now...
So while there was nothing new in principle in the party effectively confirming what was already “policy” in principle, there was a good deal of difference in the context of the debate, and maybe even the meaning of its result. And again, a reflex that has been exercised with an immediate electoral objective has a historical significance, perhaps, that is the opposite of the intention of its shakers and movers.
First of all, as things stand, the number of elected representatives from the party in Scotland who will have a vote on the matter when it comes up for actual debate in yer actual Parliament is...well..one. Secondly, although his vote is welcome, as things stand Jeremy Corbyn is in no position to whip the rest of UK Labour Party into the No lobby with anything more substantial than Ken Dodd's Tickling Stick. There is simply no doubt that when the renewal of Trident is voted on, the vote will be an overwhelming majority “Aye” including within the Parliamentary Labour Party.
So why does it matter? Why is there any difference between a heavily symbolic vote in 1999 and a similar vote now? Well, first of all, there is actually going to be a bill in the parliament of what I'm increasingly coming to think of as The Continuity UK. Second, the SNP were in nothing like the position they are now in either legislature in 1999. Third, the CUK Labour Party is now (sort of) lead by a sincere unilateralist for the first time since Michael Foot. (Though the Scottish Party, which is about to become Unilateralist, isn't ...Confused? You won't be after the latest episode of SLAB!)
It would be easy, under the circumstances, to dismiss this weekends vote as an empty gesture. I don't quite think that's true. I don't think the labour Party (both branches) are now in the traditional policy making position of the Liberal Democrats..that is, confident in the expectation of never actually being able to do anything about making their high-minded policy into actual...well...policy with actual...well...consequences, some of which are going to be hideously complicated.
And this is partly because the SNP are themselves going to have to get themselves beyond symbolism when it comes to “reserved” matters like welfare and taxation as well as defence. Let's be honest, the SNP, who are never going to be in a position to run the UK are not untainted with empty symbolism possible with no prospect of power or responsibility. For one thing, there are going to a package of powers, and Iain Duncan Smith telling Mhairi Black this week that the Holyrood can always raise taxes to offset UK cuts..is not the first or last to come up with that particular game of “Call My Bluff.”
And he's not entirely wrong, either. The SNP government in Holyrood are nothing if not cushioned both by the ineptitude of their local opposition and their doubt very irritating posture of moral superiority on questions of little reserved matters like taxation, welfare, immigration, foreign policy, war etc etc etc all of which would become much more tricky and much more live issues were there to actually be a credible left-wing opposition in either polity, Not-Quite-Scotland
or the Continuity UK.
Like everything else right now, however, I think the real meaning of the event of the Labour Vote this morning is historic rather than immediate, of tectonic rather than “political” significance. Little by little, the UK as we have known it is ceasing to exist. And it is the emergence of a Scottish left opposition that will bring something like the Scotland most Bella readers voted for last year, slowly, messily, unpredictably...through a form "independence" ...into being.
There is nothing about this morning, however, that alters my conviction that in one shape or another "independence" is the predicate and not the consequence of change. And that, unfortunately, it almost certainly has to come first
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Monday, November 2, 2015
Not Quite Meaningless
Sparks on the Page
 
Some people’s hearts beat faster when handed a bursting bouquet of flowers. For others, it’s chocolate. But for me, it’s metaphors. When I read one, something inside alights, as if a spark flew off the page. There’s a sense of surprise and also recognition, as if I’m simultaneously seeing something new and also recognizing something I’ve always known.
Gertrude Stein once wrote about the difficulty of writing in a period of late language, when readers have inherited so much good writing. It seems to me good metaphors are a way to address this late language problem.
A metaphor consists of an object (A) and an image (B), likening A to B, with B heightening the reader’s sense of A. “Simply stated, a metaphor is a riddle, since if the object is clear, the reader always asks how is A like B,” writes Stephen Dobyns in Best Words, Best Order. And who can pass up a riddle? Before you know it, your mind is scrambling to find the answer. To write a successful metaphor is to engage the reader and enlarge the story. Metaphors “float a rival reality,” writes James Wood in How Fiction Works. “Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or the story.”
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Europe almost banned the thing that made Monet’s and Van Gogh’s paintings so vivid
Europe almost banned the thing that made Monet’s and Van Gogh’s paintings so vividby Kabir Chibber |
The blood reds and sunset yellows found in some of the greatest paintings ever made are, of course, down to the deft touch of the masters. And a highly toxic chemical called cadmium.
Cadmium pigments have been used in paints since the 1840s, not too long before a series of young artists—Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh, and so on—revolutionized art. The vividness of the red spectrum in their work is partly down to the chemical.
“Any good paintings that have lasted a hundred years, which is from the Impressionist period onwards, if they have a good yellow, orange, or red, they were made with cadmium pigments," according to Welsh artist Julia Brooker. “It has the purity, the light fastness, and it keeps its brilliance the way other colors just don't."
Unthinkable without cadmium.
But in 2014, Sweden—perhaps bitter that it has no artists of its own in the pantheon of great masters—called for a ban on cadmium and its compounds in artists' paints(pdf). The country warned that as artists wash their paintbrushes, cadmium enters the sewage sludge, which is then used as fertilizer, and eventually enters the food chain. (Sweden is not alone in this; the US tried to ban the stuff in 1990.)
Artists were up in arms over the loss of cadmium in acrylic, oil, and watercolor paints. One called it “sunshine in a tube.”
Well, they can all rest easy. In February, the European Chemicals Agency said there was no cause for a ban—it noted that Sweden itself said that only a tiny amount of cadmium in European agriculture stems from artists' paints, so a ban would reduce consumption of the chemical by 0.006% of the total. And last week, the EU finally put the kibosh on a cadmium ban.
“Not only is the change of heart over cadmium a joyous occasion," one paintmaker told the Art Newspaper, "the fact that the artist fraternity is recognized as a community in its own right is an exciting development and one that should help us protect our mutual interests in the future.”
China has created a hotline you can use to report a suspected spy
China has created a hotline you can use to report a suspected spyby Richard Macauley |
Amid heightened sensitivity to cyber attacks and digital espionage, China is going back to basics in its efforts to seek out and stop foreign spies. Citizens concerned that they have encountered a spy can call a nationwide hotline, free of charge, to report a potential snooper to the police (link in Chinese).
The terrorism research center of China's Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a government think-tank, told the state-backed newspaper Global Times that although China is in peacetime, several recent developments have shown that "some countries remain relentless in their targeting of China."
China's government has made its own concerns over spying increasingly evident this year. In September alone, China said that it had detained two Japanese citizenssuspected of spying, and that it had also detained a US citizen. And the government has long been fond of hotlines for turning in strangers, too; earlier this year when Beijing banned smoking in public places, it created one so that citizens could tell on smokerswho light up where they shouldn't.
But how does one tell if they have encountered a real-life spy? Thankfully for some, one Weibo user has posted a helpful list of traits that could help identify a foreign agent. It is unclear where the list came from, but it has been shared almost 20,000 times so far, and is reportedly also doing the rounds on WeChat, China's major social network:
Those eight traits, should you need them, are as follows:
- People who work several jobs, with no clear line of work but are well-funded.
- People who start controversial conversations at gatherings to incite debate, and then pull back to quietly observe.
- Foreign correspondents, missionary workers, and some NGO staff.
- People whose business card has a legitimate job but who actually work for a shell company at odd hours.
- Students who have more foreign studies experience than their age allows for.
- People who like to ask sensitive questions, not only about politics, the military, business, or the media.
- People who regularly travel to specific locations to exchange goods or documents.
- People who throw out reactionary or pro-foreign sentiments at business meetings or seminars.
Students at West Catholic HS design observatory
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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) -- A West Michigan school is bringing the stars to their students.
West Catholic High School is one of the few schools to have an observatory right next to its building and received grant money to buy a telescope a couple of years ago.
Pre-engineering students wanted to take the project even further by designing an observatory.
(The observatory at West Catholic High School.)
"This is a GPS telescope so I can say, 'Let's look at the moon or Venus or Saturn or Jupiter' and it will point directly to the object," said Tim Nawrock, West Catholic High School Science Department Chair.
The images are projected on to the wall for the students to see.
"We did one class last year, two classes this year and the kids seem to really enjoy it, being hands-on in astronomy," Nawrocki said.
Nawrocki said he's giving his students something they won't get in the classroom.
"To be able to look at Jupiter and see the moons around it is, it's something that you don't forget," he said.
West Catholic is refining the telescope, the staff hopes to eventually share it with others, including partner schools.
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subscribe to clothing share. Is that an eco-friendly move
I subscribe to clothing share. Is that an eco-friendly move — or just wasteful?by kwroth |
Q. I recently subscribed to a clothing subscription, where you rent the clothes and send them back for a new lot in a few days – kinda like old-school Netflix DVDs in the mail. I know being fashion-forward is usually not so great (quick turnover, impactful industry), but subscribing to clothes means lots of people wear them vs. buying them, right? Though the service may purchase in bulk at less than ethical prices and discard too quickly? How does this balance out?
Taylor
San Francisco, Calif.
San Francisco, Calif.
A. Dearest Taylor,
You know how in futuristic dystopian movies, fashion expression is the first of our privileges to go? Goodbye, individual style, hello, utilitarian jumpsuits? This is usually presented as a bad thing -- the loss of our freedom, etc. -- but I confess part of me wouldn’t mind a jumpsuit edict. It would certainly simplify the complicated, environmentally taxing, globally significant task of getting dressed every morning.
Without the mandated uniforms, we’re left to navigate the cloudy waters of fashion on our own. We do know that clothing has a major impact on the planet: Fiber production iswater- and energy-intensive, manufacturing is highly polluting, labor is linked to human rights abuses, and Americans’ “fast fashion” consumption is hugely wasteful. So anything that might reduce the flood of clothing flowing through our closets sounds like the greatest idea since sliced bellbottoms. But is bringing fashion into the sharing economy really the answer?
There’s lots to love about the idea of rotating pieces of clothing among a group of subscribers. Instead of 10 people buying the same top and letting it lie fallow in their closets most of the time, one top can do the job for those 10 people. Presumably, that means one-tenth of the resources, pollution, and waste. The clothing comes right to your door, which should represent a better deal, environmentally, than multiple shopping trips: Delivery routes are often more efficient than individuals driving to and fro. And maintaining a warehouse of stylin’ duds is less resource-intensive than lighting, heating, and cooling a series of brick-and-mortar boutiques. If you’ll allow me to conjecture a bit, this kind of clothing subscription might even enable increasingly efficient urban living -- dramatically smaller mounds of clothes means less physical space needed for storage means more tiny, cute, resource-sipping apartments.
But as you point out, there are downsides to this “Netflix model” of fashion, too. For one, clothing subscriptions create more packaging through repeated shipping -- a cycle of cardboard boxes or plastic bags that we don’t have when people are shopping in the traditional way. You have less choice about where your clothes are coming from, so it may be harder to avoid manufacturers who are contributing to human rights issues or pollution in third-world countries. And then there’s the matter of cleaning these items. If companies must dry-clean that rental LBD every time it changes hands (whereas dress owners can employ greener laundering methods or at least wear it a few times between dry cleanings), then that represents a big jump in the use of volatile chemicals. Pee-yew.
Like so many of our thorny environmental dilemmas, this one doesn’t have a clear answer. I don’t know how this all shakes out, and as this interesting piece on Netflix and the sharing economy shows, hard data on this topic is scarce. I did pose your question to Elizabeth L. Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, and she shared a few musings of her own. “The problem is that [these services] require people to get new items of clothing every month, not on an as-needed basis,” she said over email. “Maybe the impact is mitigated a bit by sharing a garment, but the total number of new garments members ‘consume’ is going to go up dramatically. The sites create a lot of demand for new clothes, and members are complicit in that -- even if a few other people have worn the same dress.”
Taylor, I encourage you to ask your subscription service some nitpicky questions. How many “uses” does each jacket or sweater get before it’s retired? Is said jacket thrown away, or donated/recycled? Where does the service get its clothes in the first place, and do they offer sustainable and/or ethical options? How are returned clothes cleaned?
You should also think about how this service relates to your personal dressing and shopping habits. The average American buys 64 garments per year; if you’re on the shopaholic end of this consumption scale, and a clothing rental subscription will actually cut down on the clothes you wear, it might be a good bet. If you’re the type who still clings to her favorite outfits from high school (babydoll dresses are coming back, I just know it), this sort of thing could actually increase your fashion footprint.
In short, Taylor: I’ve given you some homework. Take a closer look at your service’s practices and your own shopping habits, and I think your answer will become clearer. As for me, I’m waiting for the season when jumpsuits patched together from worn-out, organic jeans are the next big thing.
Trendily,
Umbra
Umbra
Leave it to Scotland to discover that whisky can help clean up radioactive waste
Leave it to Scotland to discover that whisky can help clean up radioactive wasteby Aamna Mohdin |
Who knew whisky could be so useful?
Researchers from the Environmental Research Institute in Scotland are hoping to clean up toxic waste at the infamous Dounreay nuclear site using biosorption—where biological materials use their metal binding capacity to absorb radioactive isotope. In particular, researchers are testing out waste coffee grounds, seaweed, and crab shells to absorb strontium—and the grains left behind after making whisky.
Dounreay was used to dump radioactive waste, which stopped following an explosion in 1977. The explosion is thought to have worsened existing issues of contamination. The situation was so dire, in fact, that in 2011 the Scottish Environment Protection Agency had abandoned its goal of removing all radioactive contamination on the north coast of Scotland.
Mike Gearhart, who leads the Dounreay Shaft and Silo project team, told the BBC: "We are pleased to be working with ERI to identify a sustainable solution that can be sourced locally," adding, "We still have a number of issues to address but results to date have been very promising."
Biosorption has been used to extract gold and silver and used to remove metals that present environmental risks such as copper, arsenic, and mercury from water waste. Researchers are comparing the ability of natural material to remove non-radioactive strontium from waste with the range of commercial adsorbents currently used.
Read this next: Why did the Queen use whisky instead of champagne to launch her new warship?
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