Crisis Christmas

I've just spent 4 nights at Crisis Christmas. There were lots of wonderful people, both guests and helpers, and many stories that could be told... but would probably be better face to face. Including a barrel of beer that got "borrowed" from a nearby hotel.

At the centre I was at, there were about 350 guests spending the night, getting fed, and receiving medical care, showers, new clothes, counselling, advice, access to the internet, and so on. This runs on (a) huge numbers of volunteers and (b) fantastic amounts of donations from businesses, starting with a vacant building, down through equipment, clothes, food, all the way down to paper cups.

My main occupation was in the kennels, looking after guests' dogs. Getting my face licked a lot. That symbolises the experience as a whole, maybe. We get as much out of it as the guests do in every way. They entertain, enlighten, love, and support us.

One person was telling me how he became homeless. It's not a difficult journey: his successful business began to make a loss; a failing business leads to drinking and depression, which makes things worse; debt, drinking and depression lead to breakup of long-term relationship; and with that also goes the house. You take that first drink, the rest of the steps follow. We're all closer than we realise.

The volunteers are all kinds of people, all ages, all levels of experience. They gradually become a team. The night-shift team, on from roughly 22:30 to 08:30. The system is organised so that nobody has to do anything they're not up to, and never on their own.

And then, after the last night shift, a massive session from 09:30 to 19:00 in the pub, to get "adjusted" back to normal clock time. The pub didn't know what had hit it....

More credit crunch

Speaking, as I was, of people making noises with their mouths, there was an expert (economist? something?) on radio prune the other morning, explaining the credit crunch and banking, with much patting on the back from the R4 presenter.

Apparently, he said, banks used to be in the business of taking deposits from people, and investing it by lending it out to businesses and people wanting mortgages and loans. But that, he said, is not where the problem lies. The problem is, they've started "speculatively trading with each other". They should stop all this "speculative trading with each other", and get back to the bread and butter of taking deposits and lending out money. That's a pretty accurate quote.

I'd like to ask him a few questions, like, if it was trading with each other that was the problem, how come they ALL seem to have lost money? If one bank lost, why didn't the other gain?

And if they were speculatively trading with each other, WHAT were they trading? Bubble gum cards? Oh, no, wait, it was those loans that you said weren't the problem?

And how did this speculative trading cause the banks to get into this mess? Was it because those, er, loans that they traded, that you said weren't the problem at all, turned out to be worthless?

So you want them to stop this speculation and get back to their bread-and-butter of lending money out? Doh.

Russell Brand again

I've just read his "Booky-wook". Scary stuff!

It makes the Woss+Brand incident, about which I blogged before, a little clearer. Not that that's mentioned in the book -- it happened after the book was out. But the history is there.

The absolutely typical incident, which I've related to one or two people, is of him as a child aged about five, talking to what he describes as a "nice old man" in the man's front garden. He calls the man "warm and avuncular". And when the old man goes into his house for a moment, Russell stamps down all his flowers, the man's pride and joy, and then waits for him to come out again to see his face.

He likes hurting people. You can't really blame the drugs, because he wasn't on them at that stage. Maybe the drugs are because he hates himself so much.

And so the story goes on, hurting friends, hurting women, hurting himself of course, and the general public at large. Cutting himself, sleeping with prostitutes that he despises, stealing.

He's clearly very witty and intelligent. I've heard some of his stuff, and it can be entertaining.

I guess it's the perfect demonstration that insight isn't worth all that much. He comments in the book on the stuff he's done, and his own feelings. He does it in a boastful way, and then points out his own boastfulness, so you think, oh, he isn't really boastful, it's all just self-deprecating. But all that cleverness, all that self-understanding, doesn't help him a bit.

He describes another incident where he's at a recovery centre, and they all get taken off to go go-karting. He says, if you haven't been go-karting with a bunch of junkies, you haven't lived. I grin, and imagine he must be fun, for a moment. What happens is that as soon as they start, he deliberately breaks the rules at the place, so they all get thrown out. How much fun was that?

He then launches into a diatribe about "it wasn't the Geneva convention I broke, just some arbitrary rule" and so on. And he manages to convey the sense that "of course I don't really think that, I realise what a pain in the neck I am and it was wrong to do it". That's the tone of the whole book. But the thing is, even if he understands that and gets it across, he still does that stuff, and probably always will.

When you listen to what people say, those are generally just noises that their mouth makes while they get on with whatever it is they do. Listen to it if it's informative or entertaining, but never believe what they say about what they think, how they feel, what they're going to do . . . . instead, watch what they actually do. In Brand's case, he went on and f***ed over a bunch more people. Everyone has their act, their "thing that they say", whatever it is: "it was only an arbitrary rule", "you're not perfect either", "capitalism is to blame", "my childhood was abusive", "i didn't mean it", "they deserved it because of that bad thing they said to me". The smarter ones like Brand will say it all in an ironic way, so that you think they really "get" the opposite. Just watch what they actually do in life. Generally, people don't change much and keep doing what they always do.

Charity

This from the New York Times -- a left-wing newspaper (at least on the US's scale).

Liberals push for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals. ((Note from Mike: this is not because they typically have more money -- on average the conservative households have less.))


Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that Republican states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans.

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

Something similar is true internationally. European countries seem to show more compassion than America in providing safety nets for the poor, and they give far more humanitarian foreign aid per capita than the United States does. But as individuals, Europeans are far less charitable than Americans.Americans give sums to charity equivalent to 1.67 percent of G.N.P. The British are second, with 0.73 percent, while the stingiest people on the list are the French, at 0.14 percent.


The article goes on to point out that charitable giving can't quite be equated to giving to the poor, because the numbers include donations to churches (popular with American conservatives) and donations to educational and cultural institutions (schools, museums, theatres, popular with liberals) so it's difficult to tell. But to me, just the willingness to give money away is an interesting statistic... and ...

Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.

Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in conservative states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.

Of course, given the economic pinch these days, charity isn’t on the top of anyone’s agenda. Yet the financial ability to contribute to charity, and the willingness to do so, are strikingly unrelated. Amazingly, the working poor, who have the least resources, somehow manage to be more generous as a percentage of income than the middle class.

Standup comedy

Went to some stand-up comedy with Karen last night.

I have made a determined effort, and remembered two funny bits.

(a) Morph (plasticine character, Tony Hart) ... if you were a little man made of plasticine who could morph his own shape, you wouldn't waste time on all the stuff Morph did, you'd make yourself an enormous ****. [Comedian gestures to indicate making enormous **** out of plasticine....]

(b) Tai chi... why is it when I see someone in a park doing tai chi, it's ME that gets embarrassed, when he's the one doing the silly poses? What's that all about? Tai chi must be the ancient oriental art of "shame wafting"

More about greehouse gases

You may remember a previous post about the impact of coal-mine fires.

Anyway, this is another one for anyone who thinks that global warming is, basically, caused by Americans driving SUVs, or the Chinese building power stations.

Apparently (this is from New Scientist recently) the average American household creates nearly twice as much greenhouse gas by what they eat, as by their car-driving. (Food 13.5% of their footprint, driving 7.3%).

This is mainly because they eat a lot of beef and cows milk (and things made from them). Raising beef is very greenhouse-gas intensive. It's hard to calculate the impact of a food (or any production process) on the atmosphere: you have to consider not only CO2 but all the gases released (eg methane) and their relative impacts. And you have to consider all stages of the process. For example, with beef, you have to consider the methane the cows produce, but also the impact of land cleared to graze them, grain farmed to feed them, fertiliser made to feed the grain, transport at every stage, processing, heating and lighting...

Beef is apparently twice as bad as pork, which is worse than chicken, and all of them are much worse than a vegetarian diet. Livestock, if I understood the article correctly, amounts for about 18% of humankind's impact on greenhouse gases. (I don't know what the other 82% is.) If an American goes vegetarian, it saves more impact than they can save by driving less or driving a more economical vehicle.

So no, it's not all about how Americans have bigger cars than us, or drive further, or have too-cheap petrol, it's more about how they eat mainly beef. As we do.
And, ultimately, about how there are too many humans on the planet.

(And, the part where food gets transported from where it's grown to where it's sold is only about 4% of the impact of the food, so "buying local" doesn't make a huge difference either.)