Filed under: London | Tags: ATP Festival, British Summer, Gigs, Speed the Plow
Hark the herald angels sing, the darkness is receding. After a very cold and dark English winter, there dimly shines a light at the end of this seasonal tunnel. We over in the windy isle are now on the home-stretch toward summer. HALLELUJAH!
It is hard to feel happy about life when you only have 5 hours of daylight, and those five hours can only be glimpsed through the shuttered windows in a ground-floor office of an advertising company.
But daylight savings is here now, it stays light until 8pm at night, is sunny when I wake up, and life is good.
And the coming of summer heralds several things, not the least of them CONCERTS! (more…)
Filed under: Activism, Economics | Tags: agribusiness, farming, food, neoliberalism, raj patel
“The British National Grid, the UK’s electricity transmission system, distributes over 60 gigawatts of power at peak demand, between 5 and 7 p.m. In order to make sure that there’s enough on tap, they monitor consumer demand. The bane of the electricity companies are the ‘TV spikes’. These are surges in demand that happen in the advertisement breaks during, or after the end of, popular TV prograsmmes. This is whern the audience gets up to make a cup of tea, and the electricty needed to boil water causes a massive and synchronized increase in the demand for power. The TV spike is biological (people are thirsty), its cultural (tea is, as we saw in chapter 4, a very British drink), it’s about the space in peoples’ homes (the TV is in the lviing room, the kettle in the kitchen) and, clearly, it’s a social phenonmenon, with large numbers of poeple watchign the same thing at the same time.
This is odd, because we’d like to think of our choices as more individually spawned, as products of a kind of liberty. Yet this behaviour is nothing if not collective, as millions of people herd at the same instant from television to kettle and back.” – Raj Patel, “Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System.”
The above is an excerpt from an absolutely fascinating book I am reading at the moment. The food system is not something one normally thinks about, so divorced are we from the methods and means of production. We in the urban centers construct idyllic myths about the farmer and his wife, struggling on the land, carrying their crops to the local market on the back of a tractor … and on that farm there was a cow, e-i-e-i-o.
This couldn’t be further from the truth, and once again, Raj Patel points out how the move to capital market liberalization has benefited a handful of multinational corporations, while those in the Global South have suffered the consequences, and all in the name of ‘consumer choice’.
