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• Pue’s Occurrences | Historian Brian Hanley on Today’s Strike

  Brian Hanley, author with Scott Miller of The Lost Revolution has some thoughts on the issue of whether those working in universities and colleges should join the strike today and provides his own thoughts on the matter. There is also a good discussion in the comments section.

  I personally am fully in support of the strike on the 24th and would hope that most people, including post-graduates, will respect the pickets. I am less concerned with the impact that the budget may have on my wages than with what the government’s strategy symbolises. In my view it is an attempt to make the majority of the workforce pay for a crisis that was caused by bankers and property developers. There has been a year long media offensive to promote the idea that ‘we’ lost the run of ourselves during the years of the Celtic Tiger, along with a highly effective campaign to divide public and private sector workers.

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• Slum-TV DIY Media in the heart of Mathare - Indymedia Ireland

  Slum-TV is a dynamic group composed of young men and women from 16 to 32, working from a tiny office in the heart of the Slum. They have one film camera and one computer. These lack of resources are called challenges, never problems. In spite of the rationing of electricity, members still produce up to 12 newsreels and soaps broadcast in the open air every two months. Members of Slum-TV get expenses and a stipend towards living costs based on what they have contributed to Slum TV. They own it, they run it. The members get to decide what they make. They have had a policy- up to now- that the funder doesn't decide their content and have been successful in sourcing that money.

  Slum TV - Paula Geraghty from DCTV on Vimeo.

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• Glen Newey | Rectification - London Review of Books Blog

  Glen Newey looks at the calls for rectifcation of Thierry Henry’s handball in France’s World Cup qualifier against Ireland last Wednesday. He says that calls for a rematch shouldn’t stop with Ireland’s claim against France. Why not go all the way back to England World Cup win over Germany in 1966, which was won thanks to a ‘non-goal’ prior to the one that is so often shown on telly. Only problem with that is, not only are all of the players past their prime, some of them are dead.

  Philosophical theories of justice generally assign an important role to rectification, the putting right of past wrongs. Thierry Henry’s handball in France’s World Cup qualifier against Ireland last Wednesday has offered a mass exercise in rectificatory justice, with many in the Republic calling for the game to be replayed. The Irish know what they’re talking about, having recently had to take the Lisbon Treaty referendum to a replay in order to get the right result. FIFA has spoilsportingly turned down the Irish FA’s pleas. The iniquity is blatant.

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• Thinking Allowed | White Collar Crime 2 - The Regulators

  Laurie Taylor continues his excellent Thinking Allowed series on white collar crime. As a former professor of criminology Taylor brings a professional interest to a fascinating topic and in this edition looks at corporate crime and the regulators who are supposed to police it. In the first part he asks why so few prosecutions occur as a result of negligence leading to work related deaths and in the second he looks at insider dealing and other forms of corporate fraud. Taylor wonders towards the end, as he moves from the modest offices of academic criminologists to the glossy offices of the Financial Regulator in the City, why there is no moral compulsion to seek convictions for the crimes that are clearing being perpetrated.
  
  Thinking Allowed - White Collar Crime Part 2

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• Terry Eagleton on Walter Benjamin | Waking the dead

  "There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. Napoleon will be squat and Einstein shock-haired to the end of time. Nothing in the future can alter the fact that Benjamin himself, a devout Jew, committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 as he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. Short of some literal resurrection, the countless generations of men and women who have toiled and suffered for the benefit of the minority - the story of human history to date, in fact - can never be recompensed for their wretched plight."

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• Labour’s plan for ‘John Lewis’ public services | The Guardian

  Labour respond to the Tory's suggested changes in the running of local authorities, schools and hospitals with a partnership model that would let staff and users have greater control.

  "Public sector bodies, which would also include leisure centres, housing organisations and social care providers, would be allowed to take control of their own affairs if staff and users voted in favour.

  According to a senior adviser, the government wants to resuscitate some of the ways services were run before 1945 when local communities were far more involved."

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• Greater equality and better health — Pickett and Wilkinson | British Medical Journal

  In 1996, when discussing studies of income inequality and health, the editor of the BMJ wrote, "The big idea is that what matters in determining mortality and health in a society is less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth is distributed. The more equally wealth is distributed the better the health of that society."1

  Since then, the "big idea" has been widely tested. More than 200 peer reviewed studies of the association have been published. Income inequality has been variously associated with lower life expectancy, higher rates of infant and child mortality, shorter height, poor self reported health, low birth weight, AIDS, depression, mental illness, and obesity. In the linked meta-analysis, Kondo and colleagues further assess the association between income inequality and health.

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• Income inequality, mortality, and self rated health: meta-analysis of multilevel studies — Kondo et al. 339: b4471 — BMJ

  "The results suggest a modest adverse effect of income inequality on health, although the population impact might be larger if the association is truly causal. The results also support the threshold effect hypothesis, which posits the existence of a threshold of income inequality beyond which adverse impacts on health begin to emerge. The findings need to be interpreted with caution given the heterogeneity between studies, as well as the attenuation of the risk estimates in analyses that attempted to control for the unmeasured characteristics of areas with high levels of income inequality."

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• Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

  "Imagine, if you will, a world in which Hitler's glorious master plan had instead ended in ignominious failure, and the Allies had somehow emerged the victors," the show's creator, Leonhardt Riefenstahl, said during an appearance on Entertainment Heute Nacht. "It would be as if everything we know to be true—the fall of Russia, the invasion and surrender of the American continents, Heinrich Braun-Hitler's consolidation of the various conquered states in 1973—had never even happened."

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• FT Energy Source | Did oil cause the latest recession? IEA weighs into the debate

  Though it’s universally viewed as a crisis of the financial sector’s making, several voices (notably James Hamilton) have argued the recession that began last year had a lot to do with the sharp rise in oil prices over the preceding months and years.

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