Has no meaning in the UK - it does not signify either that the product labelled can be recycled or that it was made with recycled material. The label is left on some products sold in the UK if they might be exported but it is certainly possible that this will make British consumers think products and producers are greener than they actually are…

For all The Wire’s air of worldly cynicism and its ‘tackling the big issues’ the characters are often cardboard, the situations cliched and its treatment of the issues superficial. Its framing of the war on drugs in the Baltimore projects for example suggests that it is a battle between good cops, drug peddlers who are mostly amoral or evil and a corrupt system wedded to drug money that fails to support the cops. There is in what I have seen so far little discussion of the folly of tackling the drug supply problem without in some way dealing with the demand for drugs and the environment which fosters it. Season 2 seems to be even more one-dimensional in its treatment of people smuggling/trafficking.

Then again, I find it difficult to point to any television series outside of The Sopranos and the first season or two of Lost which I have found truly satisfying lately so maybe I am just expecting too much…

I wish there was an easy way for me to share and automatically update my list of podcasts and my recently watched movies (though I haven’t seen much recently that I liked except The Hustler which I thought was fantastic). I’m off to see Wanted shortly which I imagine is pretty rubbish but I’m not expecting much…

First and most obviously, the best way to combat global warming is for gas/petrol prices to stay high - high enough that the environmental impact of using the stuff is roughly proportional to its price.

Second, there is a lot of manufactured concern about house price falls here in the UK but the only people who benefit from super-inflated house prices are retirees who sell up or speculators, while the rest of the country has had to set aside a steadily increasing portion of their incomes to afford to get on or stay on the property ladder. If we weren’t spending so much on our homes we could afford more genuinely productive or stimulating spending.

Third, people are expressing concern that the credit crunch, petrol “crisis” and other factors might lead to (gasp) an economic slowdown - that is, that the economy will not grow as fast as it has for the last decade or so. Does nobody remember recessions? Those are what’s worth worrying about - when the economy actually shrinks (and by the by maybe a little shrinking in the economy would be good for the environment anyway). We’ve had more than a decade of steady growth and (for most) rising incomes. UK inflation between 3% and 4%?

On the left, there is concern that inequality and (relative) poverty have not budged much since Labour came to power, but that’s only a reflection of the speed with which the rich have gotten richer (a global trend). Labour could have done more, true, but according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies:

Taking the period 1996–97 to 2006–07 as a whole, incomes have grown fastest
at the very top of the income distribution, as they did in the period of Conservative
government that preceded it. However, income growth as a whole has been more
equal under Labour than under the Conservatives, with income growth around
the 15th percentile of the distribution stronger than growth in the bulk of the
distribution higher up (though still slower than income growth at the very top of
the distribution).

As for income redistribution, over the period of the Labour government:

the income distribution became more equal between around the 20th and 90th percentiles, but it has grown more unequal at the very top and the very bottom.

And might I just add to this Panglossian picture that there have not been any terrorist “spectaculars” in Europe or North America in the last three years (knock wood!), and that Western casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraqi civilian casualties have been steadily declining (though Afghan civilian casualties may be rising).

Health minister: We should “constantly inform the public of the facts” of the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Macmillan: “Expectation of life 73 for smoker and 74 for non-smoker. Treasury think revenue interest outweighs this. Negligible compared with risk of crossing a street”

With this from Yes Prime Minister:

Jim Hacker: “Humphrey, we are talking about 100,000 deaths a year.”
Sir Humphrey: “Yes, but cigarette taxes pay for a third of the cost of the National Health Service. We are saving many more lives than we otherwise could because of those smokers who voluntary lay down their lives for their friends. Smokers are national benefactors.”

Mind you, at least in the UK at £79 the DS is actually more expensive than an XO (the “one laptop per child“) would be (if we could buy one), and of course it lacks a keyboard. But doing all that on something that was designed to play simple games would certainly be good for one’s geek cred.