When cities die

Years ago, I was reading the ice climber Will Gadd's blog. Will had a post linking to photos of Detroit where nature was reclaiming parts of the city where people had basically left. I was so impressed by the photos I wrote a brief post myself linking to the same material. That was in 2007; since then I think the emptiness and devastation of parts of Detroit has become quite well known. I've even seen it used as a back story on some cop show where one of the "urban explorer" got bumped off for reasons I no longer recall. I remember hearing that some in Detroit are really quite annoyed now about the stream of journos and photographers who arrive from around the world to see the 'ruins' of a city where I suppose many hundreds of thousands do still live.

Anyway, today's Slate Culture Gabfest discussed a recent piece in the NYT Magazine called "Jungleland" on what's left of the 'Lower Ninth' in New Orleans. Slate hadn't got all their links up when I first checked out their show page, so I just went to Google Earth to get some idea of where the Lower Ninth is and looks like (I've never been to New Orleans). On the satellite imagery things look quite normal from some way above: lots of houses are visible, some parks etc. It just looks like many other spacious spread out American suburbs. But going to Google Maps and using Streetview, the desolation of the area is starkly apparent. Many of those roofs visible from above are on abandoned and derelict houses. Some people have rebuilt and are living there, but most of the houses were simply washed away, some of the inhabitants with them, and there's just scrub and rubbish left behind.
View Larger Map This is 2403 Flood Street, I've chosen it completely by random after clicking up and down various roads in the district. Spin around using streetview and you'll see the one little white house there, shiny and new with what looks like a wheelchair ramp outside, and then its surrounded by something that is going back towards wilderness, but as the Slate discussion revealed - its not even 'natural' wilderness, as the area is becoming dominated by mono-cultures of invasive species.

It is one of the saddest things I've ever seen.

Things I didn't know before today #3: Antifa Hairdressers

Did you know that Vidal Sasson, the hairdresser, was as a youth in a militant, British, Jewish anti-fascist group call the 43 Group that used go and smash up far-right meetings in London and fight Moseley's re-established fascist group? The group operated in the immediate post-war years and was comprised of Jewish ex-servicemen, by the sounds of it - armed with knives, knuckledusters and the like, they were pretty serious:

"We're not here to kill," a former The 43 Group veteran recalls, being told on that occasion: "We're here to maim."

Male hairdressers tend to have a reputation for being effeminate or camp, but any macho types tempted to mock should be careful just in case their hairdresser is also a no-nonsense street-scrapper in the local Antifa cadre.

Modern Life is Rubbish

Is it a good thing, or a bad thing, that last night I felt the urge to actually look up on Wikipedia who Cheryl Cole is? Now I know. I just don't care.

Halt! Or you will be merchandised!

I was looking at toys on the Sainsbury's website today and was rather surprised to see a range called HM Armed Forces. If you don't believe me, their own website is here, they have a not very good blog here and of course, a (pretty tacky) youtube video:



Thanks to having little kids, I've started paying attention to toys again in recent years. It has struck me that when I was little there were far more realistic 'war' toys around than there are now. My Action Men of the late 70s/early 80s were dressed in the UK uniforms of the time and armed with contemporary weaponry. One was in olive drab and DPM and armed with his SLR so presumably was going to play his part in stopping the Russians getting to the Fulda Gap; another was in all white, had skis and a white SLR so seemed destined to clash with the Spetznaz in a defence of Narvik along side his fellow RM Arctic Warfare Cadre. The last one, most obviously of all, with his all black uniform, H&K MP5 and gas mask was going to go through windows to neatly double tap Libyan terrorists. This was clearly all good educational stuff for a young lad. The Action Men of now are like comic book heroes who seem to fight wars in day glo colours on jet skis of no obvious military utility.

So it's interesting that there seems to be a gap in the market now for "realistic" action figures, but with British troops dying almost daily in Afghanistan it does seem very slightly in bad taste. Is the market gap a new engagement with global reality amongst the male, 5 to 10 year old demographic? Or perhaps more like the nostalgia of thirtysomething dads remembering the SLR wielding Action Men of their childhood. The HM Forces do have an enemy character: "the Mercenary", a suitably PC solution for who it is OK to blow away (although look carefully, that's a German rifle isn't it? Hmmm....). I wonder if next up will be a Taliban insurgent figure? If so, we fortunately already have a Harrier available should your infantryman need some close air support. You can also get an HM Forces radio set, although of course to a be like a real HM Forces radio set, it would have to have taken 20 years to procure, weigh a tonne, work considerably worse than the commercially available alternatives and have costed the tax payer hundreds of millions of quid.

But leaving politics aside - what the hell are HM Forces doing franchising their name? Does Her Maj herself get any say? Or perhaps even a cut of the profits? Will the income stream generated from HM Armed Forces Toys be enough to the plug the helicopter deficit in Helmand? I was just thinking recently how smart HM Forces have been lending their assets (from a Eurofighter to a tank regiment) to the BBC in recent years for various episodes of "Top Gear"* but, in effect, merchandising the Afghan war to toy manufacturers does seem like a rather postmodern step.

*and you have to admit, this is one of the funniest and cleverest pieces of TV entertainment in recent years no matter how much I want to loath Clarkson for everything he stands for.

First ice...

If you are a climber in Finland, November is generally a pretty crap month. Dark, dark, dark, cold and wet. Drinking lots of beer is one option to fill the days but it's been chilly this last week and the snow hasn't melted so I thought there might be some ice at Kauhala. There was just enough. A couple of centimetres, but enough to take your weight. Don't swing your axes too hard though as they just bounce of the rock underneath.


But hey, having done the first ice of the season, you have to celebrate. So now I'm having some good beer and watching DVRed last season episodes of Flight of the Conchords on my own. Yeah, I know, wild. It's kinda sad how much fun you can have with some beers and old episodes of Flight of the Conchords. And, did you know that you can write "David Bowie nipple antennae" into Google and get exactly where you want to be?

How great is modern technology?

Armenians: badass killerz or total geeks?

So I'm watching the Shield and the Armenians are back. In the criminal underworld of LA as depicted by the Shield, the Armenians are the 'other', not under control of anyone, not scared of anyone and not really understood by the locals, cops or criminals. If you upset them, they cut your balls off. If you really annoy them they cut your feet off and watch you bleed to death. They play the same role as the Russian Mafia do in many other crime series - an impenetrable and out of control force of berserkers who will do anything to anyone. Most ethnic minorities get their chance to be the bad guys in some US cop drama series eventually, so maybe it was just poor Armenia's turn to be cast as the baddie, but then I also happen to be reading White Jazz by James Ellroy at the same time. Despite being set in a L.A. half a century before the Shield, an Armenian crime family is at the heart of the murder, chaos and perversion once again. It appears there is a meme here and at least in SoCal, the lesson from popular fiction seems to be don't fuck with Armenians.

But then about the same time I was digging on the L.A. Armenian crime scene, the BBC had to come along and spoil all the hardass gangsterism with a documentary about the real Armenia - Armenian: the cleverest nation on earth. It appears that actually Armenians are all totally hardcore... errr... chess geeks.

What we want to know

No blogging this week, sorry. More a case of too much to do, than not enough to say. There is always something to say...

Anyway, below is screen shot from when I started to type a question into the Google search box on my browser. I was so fascinated by the suggestions I never got round to finishing what I was going to do. They're quite nice aren't they? Love (well, ok, sex), family, self improvement and sharing a meal with others all come before money grubbing issues. Is Google revealing a transnational humanity?

Religious law for some

There is a lot of talk on the right, often the American right, about how European states are allowing various aspects of Muslim religious law to be used by Muslim citizens in contravention of national laws - the dreaded Sharia. Criticism is also coming increasingly from the secular left (particularly British-based Iranian communists it would seem!) and the avowedly atheistic. But those who argue that there is a place for such parallel systems in society often cite Beth Din - Jewish law in the UK as a precedent. People argue whether this is a good parallel or not, but listening to From Our Own Correspondent at the weekend, they seemed to demonstrate an alternative parallel - polygamist Mormons in the US.

I watched a few episodes of Big Love when it started, but found it a bit boring - but I presumed that it was stretching fact to make good fiction. The only polygamists I had heard about were the really crazy ones like Warren Jeffs who married 80 women, lived in a 'compound' and was wanted by the Feds (he got caught and got 10 to life). But FOOC went to Utah (and watch the film clip at the top) where possibly 40,000 people are living in polygamist families. And they're not in the slightest bit shy about explaining how and why they break the law. Nor does the law seem very bothered about trying to stop them, seeming to take the position that there are simply too many of them to prosecute (it hasn't ever stopped the US govt. from trying to prosecute, say, drug users). The polygamists are campaigning to have polygamy legalised - FOOC quotes one sympathetic politician, Ric Cantrell (who appears to be "Chief Deputy of the Utah State Senate"), a Republican, saying:

"Your patriotism is unquestionable"... "and your faith inspiring. You have no hesitation to put God's law above the law of the state with a propensity toward civil disobedience and I find that very American."

Would it be so American if they were Muslim or Sikh or Jewish?

A different kind of hemorrhage

Heard on Left, Right and Center from KCRW: the number of Americans losing their healthcare coverage due to the current financial crisis is 14 000 a day.

That's nuts. Surely this will have to have major implications for future American healthcare policy?

American guns in Mexico

(Photo: ABC News) I reckon the drug war in Mexico was one of last years great non-stories in the media - always bubbling away in the background, some good journalism going on, but generally not getting huge attention. I had heard that most of the guns used by the criminals come from sales in the US, but I hadn't realised just in what huge amounts:

...the arms that cartels can and do buy from the open U.S. market -- completely illegally -- leave Mexico's police force and even its military outgunned. There are nearly 7,000 gun shops along the southern U.S. border, about three for every mile. They sell thousands of hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47s, and "cop killer" guns and bullets that cut through Kevlar body armor. The weapons quickly flow south, again with barely a nod from U.S. Border Patrol.

Can I just run that by any American readers - you can buy hand grenades and RPGs in gun shops? That is definitely a "WTF?" moment. The quote above comes from a very interesting piece at Foreign Policy.com. See this ABC News story as well.

I've just had another thought - watch John Stewart and fast forward to to 4.20.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Strip Maul

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Everyone is doing the "if missiles were being fired from (insert you neighbour here) into (insert your city here), wouldn't you respond?" The Israeli ambassador to Finland was saying this the other day for instance. It's a fair enough question - and maybe the answer is yes. But how does that look from the Mexican government's point of view? "If hand grenades and cop-killing high powered hand and machine guns were flowing into your country from suppliers across the border in your neighbour - wouldn't you respond?"

Things I didn't know before today #2: globalised assassination

Did you know that the actual truck that was used as a truck bomb to assassinate Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005 had been stolen the year before from Sagamihara City, Japan? That's a long way to go to source your truck bomb. For more on the case, the Atlantic Monthly has an excellent article in it's December edition.

Things I didn't know before today #1

There are more Christians in India (2.3% of the population) than Sikhs (1.9%).

This fact was delivered by an Indian Colonel with a moustache as resplendent as only an Indian officer could get away with and therefore I really feel I don't need to check it on Wikipedia. I had always thought that Sikhs were a much bigger part of the Indian population, but this might have been skewed by the fact all the Indians I knew growing up were Sikh. If there is lesson to be learned here, it is probably that one shouldn't base a demographic analysis of the Indian subcontinent on the evidence of your dad's Brummie work mates. But perhaps you already knew that.

Anyways, this factoid is perhaps the first in an irregular series in a you-learn-something-new-every-day vein if a) I remember and b) learn something new once in while.