"The politics of happiness" Think-tank report on sustainability & society

http://demos.fi/files/Demos_Politics_of_Happiness_A_Manifesto_Eng_Draft.pdf
Recently, I've been reading Paul Theroux's follow-up to The Great Railway Bazaar called "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star". In it, he retraces the route he took in the Railway Bazaar after an interval of thirty years, across the Middle East, through India to the Far East, then back via Japan and the Trans-Siberian Railway. They are both fantastic travel books; I recommend them. One of his musings that most caught my attention was his desire to travel without luxury. Luxury, he complains, is the enemy of observation - comfort reduces your alertness to the world around you. and besides, he adds, rich people are deathly dull to travel with - all they talk about is how poor they are.

This last observation interested me. It seems to me that as a nation - perhaps as a civilization - we are caught in this trap: we are massively better-off than our grandparents were, and yet we seem more and more concerned with poverty. The idea of 'fairness' was a political touchstone in the last UK election - but when we all have so much, it seems strange that we are so fixated on this concept. Oh, I know, we're all struggling to keep our heads above water - as a wise man once said to me, 'job' stands for 'Just Over Broke', and that's the way it is and will always be... but if I look at the amount of material possessions that I own, I can't claim to be impoverished. And when I walk down the poorer streets round me, the plethora of satellite dishes and heavily modified cars suggests that poverty is not the simple "lack of money" concept we sometimes assume it is.

All of which leads me to the above report. I haven't read all of it - as usual, one of the reasons I'm posting it here is in the hope that I'll get around to reading it thoroughly later - but it seems like a really interesting discussion of the problems of running a sustainable, happy capitalist economy. Here's what core77 had to say about it

The Stake - Burning Issues at Your Disposal

http://stake.quasimondo.com/
I didn't have time to burn Kevin J Anderson's entire portfolio, but it was still very, very satisfying. Just a shame the stats don't feed through to Amazon - 'people who burned this book also burned...'

I found this on worldchanging, via the following, particularly fascinating article - I commend it to you heartily.

Scientific American - Is Religion Good for Society?

I know this is one of our favourite subjects here, so I thought I'd post this article from Scientific American.
Given the subject matter, it's surprisingly brief, mostly (I suspect)
because the research points in all different directions at once:

"independent scholar Gregory S. Paul found an inverse correlation
between religiosity (measured by belief in God, biblical literalism,
and frequency of prayer and service attendance) and societal health
(measured by rates of homicide, childhood mortality, life expectancy,
sexually transmitted diseases, and teen abortions and pregnancies)"

...and then again... "In general, religious people are more than three times more generous
than secularists to all charities, 14 percent more munificent to
nonreligious charities and 57 percent more likely than a secularist to
help a homeless person."

So there you have it: a definite maybe.

SNAIL SHELL SYSTEM (these people are clearly mental)

http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SNAIL_SHELL_SYSTEM/SSS.html
Is it a tent that rolls? Or a caravan that floats? I dunno, but the SNAIL SHELL SYSTEM (only available in capitals) tries to cover so many stools that it's inevitable it's going to fall between some of them. Personally, I'll be putting mine in the middle of a pond somewhere expensive, like Hyde Park.


Created by a group called N55, who seem to have shares in a firm making polyethylene stuff. Other interesting/loopy ideas include ROOMS (which are, um, rooms) and an unstable CHAIR. Crazy? Challenging? Inspired? I dunno, but for my money this is design as a political act, rather than a practical one.

...polyethylene's thermoforming, right?

Places to see before I die: Alang Beach

Ever since I first heard such places existed, the idea of
the Alang ship-breaking yards
has haunted my imagination
(scroll north - it keeps going for a while).
This is where the world's shipping goes to
die: one long beach where vessels are run aground, to be stripped down
and chopped
up by workers of all ages in the most horrendous conditions, using axes
and hammers and their bare hands.
I'm not sure how close I could get, as a westerner - but I'd sure like
to try and see it for myself. The image of this enormous beach,
scattered with these vast steel behemoths shimmering in the heat haze
of a thousand oxy-axetylene torches, while people swarm over them like
ants over a carcass...

Meedja

It occurred to me the other day that the what the media does is to scoop up the edges of society and fold them back into the middle.

Seen while shopping:

A young lady wearing the hajib stocks shelves with women's summer
clothes in John Lewis (big department store). What is she thinking as
she lays out those skimpy outfits that she can never wear? Does she
think about it at all? Or is it just as if she was stocking shelves
with any other product she wouldn't use, like books in Japanese or
men's shaving products?

Pictures of fish?

Well, pictures of fishing, anyway. Design*sponge today had an article about Corey Arnold, this guy who's a fisherman in Alaska and also a freelance photographer. His portfolio is online here - check out the Bering Sea Crabbing folio. Amazing. What a way to make a living.

A scary true story: man hears voices

A friend of mine told me this story. It comes from a Young Offender's
Institute, where she does some voluntary work. One of the inmates (I'm
sure they have a more PC word for them, but I'm going to call them
inmates), a fourteen-year-old boy, came to his mentor in some distress.
"I'm hearing voices in my head!" he complained. Cue panic: a mental
health nurse is drafted in, and they set up an interview with this kid.
Let's call him Sam (I don't know his real name.)



"Sam, tell us about these voices. When did they start?"

"Well, it was the uvver night, I was listnin to these two blokes
chattin', and this voice in my head said, like, 'that bloke's a
tosser'. An' ever since, I can't get away. I'll be, like, sitting in my
cell on me own, and it'll be, like, there. All da
fcukin' time."

"And what does it say?"

"Jus' like, stuff. About me. About wha'ever."

"Does this voice tell you to do things?"

"Nah, like, it's just dissin' people and goin' on, innit."



... so after a bit more of this, the nurse comes to a conclusion:

"Sam, we think we know what the voice is. You don't need to worry about
it - this voice is you. It's called
thinking. We all have it. Doctors call it your inner
monologue, or inner narrative." (or something... I made that bit up.)



Seriously. This child, aged fourteen, had never heard his own thoughts
before. He was scared, really scared, of his own inner narrative. The
idea of an internal monologue, such as the one which is reading this
back to me, was totally alien to him. How scary is
that?



(Apologies for my poor attempt at a teen accent).