What would you do with £20million?

In September, Pope Benedict XVI will pay a state visit to the United Kingdom. The cost of the visit will be at least £20,000,000, not including security. This is a staggering amount to spend in order to welcome the head of a state (the Vatican City) and head of an organisation which have been responsible for:

1. opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of AIDS
2. promoting segregated education
3. denying abortion to even the most vulnerable women
4. opposing equal rights for lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people
5. failing to address the many cases of abuse of children within its own organisation.
6. rehabilitating the holocaust denier bishop Richard Williamson and the appeaser of Hitler, the war-time Pope, Pius XII.

 -- as well as resisting "signing many major human rights treaties and [forming] its own treaties (‘concordats’) with many states which negatively affect the human rights of citizens of those states."

Several groups have joined together to organise a protest against the Pope, on Saturday 18th September at 1.30pm, at Hyde Park Corner, London. For more information, see Protest the Pope.

Another website to check out is 20million.org, where you can see other people's suggestions of what they'd do with £20,000,000 and submit them yourself, if you are on Twitter. Some examples:

1. 
   
   
   rmc47 http://20million.org - If I had #20million... I'd spend it on educating people about scientific principles, and how statistics works. 03 Sep 2010 from TweetDeck
2. 
   
   
   SimonCarpentier http://20million.org - If I had #20million, I would invest in renewable energy, technology, and alternative transport 03 Sep 2010 from web
3. 
   
   
   kalpana_s http://20million.org - If I had #20million, I would start developing a literacy programme that works in favour of African countries! 03 Sep 2010 from web
4. 
   
   
   Joeyfr88 http://20million.org - if I had #20million, I would donate it all to mental health charities. 03 Sep 2010 from Twitter for BlackBerry®

-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl



This isn't a matter of the Pope being allowed to visit the UK as a religious leader, which of course he is entitled to do, but of the type of head of state whom the British government thinks it is appropriate to offer a state reception to.
There is a lot more information available at the links above if you're interested in having your say on the issue.

Welcome to the Age of Austerity

David Cameron says we are entering an Age of Austerity. Grant Shapps, our Housing Minister, says we are entering an Age of Aspiration.

Austerity + Aspiration = Asperity, defined by dictionary.com thus:

1. harshness or sharpness of tone, temper, or manner; severity; acrimony: The cause of her anger did not warrant such asperity.
2. hardship; difficulty; rigor: the asperities of polar weather.

— Welcome to the Age of Austerity

We're still on hiatus, though we are accumulating ideas for more posts and hope to reboot the blog once we're no longer busy with moving and its aftermath.

Meanwhile, I'd like to direct you to a blog called Welcome to the Age of Austerity, recently started by a friend of ours who works in UK local government. It's about government, society, and the economy of the UK under its new coalition government.

Not Dead.

As you've probably been able to tell, things have been very quiet at Not Powerless. In the case of my co-contributors, this is because they have become very busy with work. In my case, it's because I have developed a chronic pain in my right shoulder that leaves me unable to write more than a few sentences.

But rest assured that we will be back. We all have posts in our heads we want to do, and we are plotting them and writing them and storing them up for a rebirth.

So stay tuned.

On the pointless embrace of mandatory flowers

In less than a week's time it will be Valentine's day, that most manufactured of holidays, when we are asked to buy flowers and chocolate and dinners for our partners - mostly by the people selling flowers and chocolate and dinners.

But to put it bluntly, if your partner doesn't know you love them by now, you've got bigger problems. And any romantic gesture done on the 14th is diminished: did you buy those flowers out of love, or out of habit? Isn't it frankly demeaning to be told how to conduct our love lives by a bunch of advertisers?

So how about, this Valentine's day, use the money you'd spend on dinner and flowers to donate to the Red Cross to help in Haiti.

Of course, the difficulty with saying "I don't want to do anything for Valentine's day" is that neither side wants to make the first step. So to help matters, avail yourself of this handy and to-the-point e-card:

I love you. I know you love me.



Don't get me anything for Valentine's day, help the people in Haiti and donate to the Red Cross instead.

Use the following convenient form to send it:

Recipient email address:

Your email address:



(The email addresses will not be recorded in any database or passed on to any third party. The site uses them to send the card, then forgets about them.)

(Forward this via twitter and and reddit and delicious and and and and to free more people from the pointless embrace of mandatory flowers.)

Homeopathic "cure"

Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is an umbrella term for a variety of treatments that fall outside of the traditional medical realm. This includes practises such as hypnosis, chiropractic and homeopathy. I'm not a firm believer in such treatments myself, but the practitioners and regulatory bodies of CAM seem intent on not allowing the scientific community a chance to argue with actual facts.

This is most obvious in the recent libel case brought against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association. Despite not having provided any evidence to prove that their practice works they were allowed to bring a case against Mr Singh for an article against the use of chiropractic for treatment of colic. The fear against legal action that denouncing CAM could bring is, in my opinion, stifling the progressive and active research and publication of evidence for or against such practices.

Luckily there is something we can do. A campaign, named Ten23, has been started to raise awareness of Homeopathic practices and question their place alongside legitimate medicine. The campaign isn't aiming to spread unsubstantiated (or substantiated for that matter) claims about Homeopathy's lack of efficacy, but to merely highlight the theories and reasoning behind such treatments.

Please take a look at the site and sign their open letter to Boots the Chemist requesting that Homeopathic treatments aren't marketed alongside actual medicine.

Sign up here.

Polanski

One of the interesting things to become apparent recently is that quite a large number of people live in an alternate universe where there is one law for the famous and another for ordinary people.

Roman Polanski raped a thirteen year old girl. That his victim was underage at the time exacerbates the crime, but had she been twenty-two year old, it would remain a crime. It remains a crime even thirty-two years later. There are no excuses or mitigating circumstances.

Now that the Swiss authorities have done the right thing and arrested him, a huge number of people from this alternate reality have stumbled into ours and said some rather ridiculous things. The common undercurrent is an indignation that such a virtuoso of cinema would be subjected to something as common as arrest, and a weird paranoia that Polanski is somehow being "singled out" for being famous. It's true that the trajectory of his case has been affected by his fame - but only in the sense that a non-famous criminal doesn't get to escape to France, remaining untouched by the authorities there.

Rape, when committed by someone sufficiently famous, is apparently a mere faux pas, and to arrest Polanski for it impinges on his tremendous dignity as an artist. But there is no way his dignity could be damaged by his arrest, because he already threw it away when he forced himself on Samantha Geimer.

One common apologist tactic is to ignore the fact that the sex was clearly non-consensual and concentrate on the Geimer's age at the time, and to then argue that a charge of pedophilia is unfounded, as Geimer wasn't really a child. But this is beside the point. Let me reiterate: Polanski raped her.

As for the people why cry "hasn't he suffered enough" - the Boston Globe hits the nail on the head, writing: "By reminding us that he lived through the Holocaust and his wife’s 1969 murder, Polanski’s apologists insult other survivors. Being a victim of genocide or violence needn’t engender and never excuses more violence".

Polanski currently remains under detention in Switzerland, though he has just been granted bail. Given that the last time he was granted bail he ran away to France, this sounds less than sensible, though he is being fitted with an electronic tracking bracelet to prevent this from happening again.

What can you do? Well, for starters, don't listen to the apologists, and don't let them spout their garbage unchallenged. If you are a fan of Woody Allen, Whoopi Goldberg, Pedro Almodovar, Wes Anderson, Natalie Portman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Darren Aronofsky, Diane von Furstenberg, Julian Schnabel, Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton, Gael Garcia Bernal or Penelope Cruz (etc) - you may want to reconsider your fandom. Or send them a letter expressing your disappointment.

Top 10 green living myths

With environmental concerns becoming more mainstream, a number of corporations and special interests have cropped up to provide "solutions" that ultimately only benefit their bottom line, but not the planet. They are pushing the recent public fixation on carbon emissions to the exclusion of other issues, like overfishing, deforestation, ocean acidification, and environmental poisons. This has created a whole category of low-carbon products that can be sold to consumers eager to make a difference, as well as potentially creating a very lucrative market in carbon credits. It's much easier and more profitable than, say, not overfishing the oceans or not abusing fertiliser.

Hence, this Guardian blog entry is absolutely worth reading, as it tells you how to actually reduce your environmental impact instead of just wasting your time and money on greenwashed products.

It doesn't only contain tips on what to do, but also lists a number of actions that are ineffective or counterproductive. For example, buying a more efficient car when your old car still works is a very bad idea, since the impact of manufacturing a new car is tremendous. Equally, "green electricity" appears to be something close to a scam, and you'd be much better off just running big appliances overnight.