Wealth and Poverty In Brazil

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Income inequality in Brazil – a favela nestles against a luxury high rise development. Thanks to @fascinatingpics on Twitter. Favelas of Brazil. The boundary between wealth and poverty. Perspective. twitter.com/Fascinatingpic… — Fascinating Pictures (@Fascinatingpics) February 20, 2013

Southern Poverty Pimps?

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Buried in this Salon article provocatively entitled ‘Southern Poverty Pimps’ is an interesting indirect observation that promoting tax credits as opposed to a higher minimum wage amounts to an effective subsidy of employers who pay their staff badly by employers who pay their staff well. This raises wider questions – would the UK be better … Read more

The Sad State of North Belfast’s Riverside…

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Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…

The Harbour Commissioners with Sinclair Seamen's Church in the background - two of Sailortown's little visited gems.
The Harbour Commissioners with Sinclair Seamen’s Church in the background – two of Sailortown’s little visited gems.

A bright, cold, day earlier this week saw me head out for a constitutional along what is now rather a pleasant route along the banks of the Lagan past the Odyssey and up to the Titanic Museum. With the hazy afternoon sun making the East Belfast bank of the river look particularly pretty, and the tourist information signs informing me of the Belfast Maritime Trail, I changed my mind and instead turned left at the Lagan Weir and decided to walk to Sailortown and then on for home.

By chance, the next day I had the opportunity to do the same walk a second time in cloudier and colder conditions, when an American academic friend who has visited Belfast regularly for some years told me he had never been in the New Lodge or Tiger’s Bay. A perfect opportunity for a bit of maritime heritage trailing plus an introduction to North Belfast.

My friend lives in Detroit. The urban DMZ feel at Donegall Quay made him feel right at home.
My friend lives in Detroit. The urban DMZ look at Donegall Quay made him feel right at home.

If one is a maritime history buff or a fan of 19th Century architecture, there is enough of interest to make the walk worthwile, but sadly right-of-access issues mean the walking route regularly departs from the river and at times is downright ugly. As I said, there is enough that it still might appeal to tourists with a particular interest in Victorian North British architecture or maritime history, or locals interested in a part of Belfast that was key to its development as a major industrial port, but this walk must be staggeringly off-putting to any run of the mill tourist.

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Steven Agnew cleans Arlene Foster’s clock on gay marriage…

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Well done to Green Party MLA Steven Agnew for setting DUP Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster straight that civil partnerships are NOT equal to marriage and that all religious symbolism or language in civil partnership ceremonies in the UK is banned – by civil law. The scary thing, Arlene is about as gay-friendly gets in the … Read more

Which Angel do you prefer?

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Walking around Sailortown today, I noticed the Flying Angel statue outside the Mission to Seafarers was just about to fall into complete shadow given the tall houses recently recently built directly opposite it on Pilot Street. This isn’t something I pay a lot of attention to, mainly because I pass it too regularly. The last of some glorious late afternoon sun was just catching parts of the statue. From one particular angle, the angel’s right hand seemed to be aflame, a nice visual metaphor of an angel burning with the power to assist.

I took out my phone camera (HTC One X) which isn’t bad but isn’t all that good and grabbed a few shots, one close in, one further back, one from a completely different angle which lost the glowing hand effect but got some of the immediate skyline including the (sadly disused) Franciscan Church of St. Joseph’s just down the street. I wonder which capture people prefer?

Up close and personal? Is the context too limited? Does the daytime moon just become distracting wthout being big enough to be interesting?
Up close and personal? Is the context too limited? Does the Mission’s cross just look like a stray piece of scaffolding or an aerial mast? Does the daytime moon just become distracting wthout being big enough to be interesting? I love the way the flaming hand stretches right out at you, though.

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3830 Write-Up for the ARRL DX CW Contest 2013 – G6PZ (GI0RTN Op) SOABHP

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ImageAnother great weekend of high pace, high power, modern contesting at G6PZ, this particular event being very much a game of two halves.

The first 24 hours were marked by a relatively quiet ionosphere, returning to normality from a late week disturbance, and consequently relatively low energy levels in the ionosphere. That made for spectacular conditions on 80 and 160 on the first night, while 40 remained fair-to-middling, at least from England. The MUF seemed to sort of hover around the 7 MHz mark on the transatlantic path, with sudden rushes of callers from particular regions as the F layer aligned just right – here a burst of W9s, there a bunch of Texans – but even the New England stations were weak at times. N7GP called in to give me Arizona on 160 at 0316 – I’m pretty sure the first time we’ve done that from G6PZ in ARRL CW. The 80 metre four square works great as a receive antenna on 160 when we’re in single op configuration, but top band receive remains a problem on this small plot of land when we’re operating multi-single.

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Copernicus’ “Google Doodle” and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

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Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…

Sunday past was the 413th anniversary of the execution of Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake for heresies such as proposing that the Sun is a star and that the other stars in the sky are also Suns, probably accompanied by planets very much like ours). Today, more auspiciously, is the 460th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus. He managed to postulate that the solar system revolved around the Sun, rather than the Earth, while remaining a Chapter Canon of Frombork Cathedral and important local civil servant during the early decades of the Reformation. Gallileo was put under house arrest for saying much the same things less than a century later and 1500km or so to the south. Times change.

It took time for the Reformation to settle into the political and military battle it later became. The Peasants’ War in 1524 encouraged both Catholic and Protestant rulers in German-speaking Central Europe to play a cautious hand and, in almost all cases, co-operate to serve their common interests. The England of Henry, Mary and Elizabeth, however, with its fanaticism of both Puritan and Ultramontane varieties, murderous dissolution of the monasteries, Secret Police and bloody executions of religious dissidents was an unusual epicentre of violent fanaticism in the Reformation’s early decades. But then England had always tended to be a little bit fanatical when it came to religion. Here, alone in the Catholic world, the laity were banned from reading the Bible in the vernacular before the Reformation, the electrifying effect of Wycliffe’s late 14th Century translation terrifying the authorities. The continent-spanning cult of martyr-pilgrimage surrounding Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral also marks England out as an unusually devout country with a history of religious intolerance and brutality by the state. English latitudinarianism and later secularism needed to have Puritanism test itself to destruction during Cromwell’s Commonwealth before it found fertile territory.

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House Prices Rise 43-fold since 1971 – Cui Bono?

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The Daily Telegraph highlights a report by Shetler indicating that house prices have risen by 43 times since 1971. This is over six times the rate of inflation for basic weekly groceries in the same period.

The report comes with the usual train of interesting factoids:

The charity said that the typical value of a house had increased by just over 43 times since 1971, from £5,632 to £245,319.

If a family’s weekly shop had increased at the same rate, it would now stand at £453, which is six times the actual figure of around £75.

Applying the house price rate of inflation to everyday food and drink items means that a bunch of six bananas would cost £8.47, a four-pint carton of milk would cost £10.45 and a leg of lamb would be £53.18, Shelter said.

Another recent Telegraph story pointed out that home ownership in the UK has now fallen to levels last seen in 1987. The level of renting from council and other social landlords has fallen dramatically In other words, the long-term effect of the policy of right-to-buy for council tenants and deliberately stoked house price inflation has been a singificant move of people, especially younger and poorer people, out of the social rented sector and into the private rented sector. As anyone who lives on a council estate knows, that usually means younger families living in identical houses on the same estates as their parents, except at higher levels of rent, with less security of tenure and often with poorer maintenance.

Cui bono is always the first question worth asking in politics. Who has benefited from the shift in housing policy away from being principally about providing a decent home for all towards being principally about providing a high-value asset for home owners?

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Categories UK

Home Rule, Rome Rule and Gay Marriage

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Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…

Last September, Unionists paraded in their tens of thousands through Belfast to celebrate the centenary of the Ulster Covenant. From the days of Lilibullero in the 17th Century, Ulster Protestantism has always had a particular genius for summing up its political causes in easily remembered ditties and catchphrases. Perhaps the easiest slogan to remember of all from that era is “Home Rule is Rome Rule”.

That encapsulated the fears that Irish self-government would inevitably lead to a clericalised, priest-ridden state. Such fears were reasonable given that centralised Papal power, a more modern development than popular understanding remembers, was at its apogee and Ireland lacked the liberal anti-clerical element that kept the Roman Catholic Church in check in continental Catholic countries. Indeed, the reality of the post-1922 Southern state amply vindicated those fears – civil divorce was not legalised until 1996.

That makes the constellation of forces at Westminster that unsuccessfully opposed the introduction of marriage equality in England and Wales this week all the more unlikely. The Roman hierarchies in Scotland and England/Wales have opposed the introduction of marriage equality with a degree of clerical vitriol reminiscent of the days of Cardinal Bourne, while eccentric Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg stated on Radio 4 that “I take my whip from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.”

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