On the other side we have two blogs from an old friend of mine – Orla’s Camino dealing with Orla’s plan to travel the Camino de Santiago despite some recent personal issues. It certainly makes me feel like travelling to Europe to live for a bit was not that big a deal! Here is her other, quite cool cookery blog which is also worth a look – I quite like the Naan Bread recipe she has.

Anyway, all three are definitely worth a look!

This line from the Economist in an article about how ‘green’ policies have become (at least in rhetorical terms) mainstream made me smile:

The shared level of commitment and wonkiness is, in its way, inspiring (though it must be a bit dispiriting for the Green party, which to stay distinctively unelectable has had to move towards a thoroughgoing social-justice agenda funded with tax increases no-one else would touch)

This is a really good graph showing how much the PIIGS economies owe to each other and to Britain, France and Germany. Really scary to see how much of the debt is owed even within Europe.

This Der Spiegel interview with Col. Gaddafi throws up some truly mad lines. Personal favourites include a strange burst of what appears to be sense (or at least a technically accurate statement):

I don’t think that Ahmadinejad means the violent destruction of Israel when he says this. I think he is thinking of a new democratic state structure to replace the current state of Israel — on the territory of what is geographically Palestine. No one is talking about throwing Jews into the sea.

but he quickly runs back to his regular self when talking about Angela Merkel

She is a strong personality. More like a man than a woman. But I have never had a conversation with her

and possibly the most revealing insight ever into somebody’s personality:

SPIEGEL: Where do you get your facts? Do you watch television? Do you read books?
Gadhafi: I get most of them from the Internet. I constantly sit at my computer

…. Gadaffi is basically an internet troll cast as world leader? The more you think about it the more sense it makes….

It’s completely barmy as you can imagine.

Some of the touches, like Kim Jong Il’s son having ‘mickey mouse’ ears are nice nods to real world events and definitely add to the strangeness of the episodes. Anyway, I’ve put up what I can find off youtube so enjoy:

A recent example of the danger of the ‘victim’ narrative has been seen following the earthquake in Haiti. I do not think it is unreasonable to point out that at least part of the reason the damage was so extensive was down to Haiti being a non-functional state. Yet, Haiti’s political situation seems largely to have been ignored in favour of narrative about the ‘victims’ of the earthquake. Obviously, there are issues of time and what one can focus on, but I suspect what would help Haiti more than aid is a genuine discussion as to how Haiti could be made ‘to function’, something that the ‘victim’ narrative really cannot deal with.

The relevant part begins at 1.50 minutes into the video:

As an aside, anybody know how I can embed videos in a way so that it could begin at the point I want? Tried to do so but don’t quite understand the suggestions online.