Morts Musings

I saw this article the other day, and although it’s a few weeks old, and made me think back to all the news articles, which were about this time last year, claiming that there would be a shortage of hire vehicles during the summer season due to the rental companies not being able to afford new vehicles for their fleets.

So, with the news that one of the UK’s largest van hire firms is set to renew 20,000 vans, a third of its fleet, in the expectation that the economy has/will pick up to an extent where the expense is justified, one has to feel that, assuming the money men at Northgate have done their jobs right, this has to be a good sign for the wider economy. Afterall, 20,000 vans are not going to come cheap and, even if the vehicles which are being replaced are so clapped out that they can’t be rented anymore, the implication has to be that the firm thinks it will need a capacity significantly greater than the 40,000 vans which it would have left.

A lot of Northgate’s business traditionally comes from businesses in construction and manufacturing, as opposed to private customers, so the firm’s commitment to renew their fleet strongly suggests that they have confidence in these sectors to flourish over the next twelve months, and if that’s the case then that would certainly be a good sign for the wider economy; particularly when one considers that the construction industry was one of the areas hit hardest by the recession, and the resulting crash in house prices.

Only time will tell whether or not it’s an astute move which will leave them well placed to profit from any recovery we see this year, but they’re by no means the only company to demonstrate optimism over the economy’s near future, and quite often the economy seems to function as much according to expectations as because of any real monetary factors, so, although my tendancy is to be wary, overall I’m thinking that the signs for recovery are looking hopeful.

According to this article in the Telegraph, this year is the London Marathon’s 30th anniversary, and it’s looking pretty certain that the total cash raised for charity, by the event, is going to top the half billion pound mark.

It’s actually a bit of a fund raising phenonomen, Marathons in other parts of the world don’t have nearly such a strong philanthropic ethos as the London Marathon, which has had charitable status since before it’s first race was even run, & is now the world’s biggest annual one day charitable fund raising event. Last year’s participants raised £47.2 million, & it’s expected that the 2010 London Marathon’s 36,000 runners will raise at least as much, if not even more!

This year there are a whole host of charities helping to organise runners, and their fund raising, for example Oxfam have a London Marathon page which offers help, and related events, for runners, & even goes so far as to provide a post race massage for those who are raising cash for them.

Marathons, as a sporting event, are actually a relatively recent invention. When the modern Olympics were established in 1896 the organisers wanted an event which would tie the games with their classical Greek counterpart, &, with those first games being held in Athens, the idea of an event inspired by an important episode in ancient Athenian history obviously seemed the way to go.
The historical derivation comes from the Battle of Marathon, which was fought between the Athenians and the Persians, in 490 BC, during the first Persian invasion of Greece. The Athenians won the battle, and, in the process, also halted the Persian invasion, that much is historical fact.
However there is also a legend that, following the battle, the soldier Pheidippides was ordered to return to Athens, with news of the victory, as quickly as possible. The story tells that he ran all the way back to Athens, without a break, burst into the Athenian Assembly, and managed to gasp out news of the victory, before collapsing and dying.
There’s a fair degree of doubt over whether this part of the story is true. Various Greek writers give differing names for the runner, plus it’s also recorded that the Athenian army forced march back to the city, on the same day as the battle, to guard against the possibility of a naval assault by the Persians. Details which seem to cast doubt on whether there ever was a Pheidippides, or whether such an epic feat would be required to deliver news of the victory to his countrymen.

In any case, the most likely route from Marathon to Athens was calculated as being approximately 26 miles, and this was the distance which was set as the length of the modern Marathon race. During the early years the exact distance of the race was left with the organisers of each individual Olympics. The modern distance of 26 miles 385 yards only became a standard from the 1924 Olympics onwards, although it was first used during the 1908 London Olympics, on which occasion the extra 385 yards were added to the course to ensure that the finishing line was in front of the Royal Box, in the Great White City Stadium.

Firstly, and most importantly, if you wish to make a donation to help the survivors of this terrible disaster, be careful which organisations you donate through; there have already been reports of fake web sites being set up by contemptably sick b*stards who are trying to profit from the earthquake. Well known charities, like Oxfam, have their own Haiti Earthquake pages and are probably the safest route for those who wish to help by giving an online donation.

I first caught news of the Haiti Earthquake late on Tuesday night while catching some headlines on the BBC before going to bed. Even at those early stages it seemed clear that the damage caused by it, and it’s aftershocks, was going to be immense, but over the last couple of days, as more and more news has filtered out of the impoverished Caribbean nation, the true scale of the devastation has started to become clear. It beggars belief.

The quake itself measured 7.0 on the Richter Scale, and as such is classified as a “Major” earthquake, while even the aftershocks measured 5.5. and 5.9 on the scale, making them significant earthquakes in their own right. To put things a little more in perspective, a magnitude 7 earthquake is the equivalent of a 32 megaton nuke, 1000 times more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb. In addition, the quake was relatively shallow occurring only 10km below the surface. Shallow quakes are less likely to trigger tsunamis, but also tend to cause more damage in their immediate area, as we’re seeing in Haiti at the moment.
Even in a developed nation, with well constructed structures, a magnitude 7 earthquake would be a serious event, but in a nation like Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, the level of destruction is almost unimaginable! That the quake’s epicentre was only 15km from the densely populated capital, Port-au-Prince, has only exacerbated the situation.
Many of the city’s buildings were poorly constructed leaving them especially vulnerable to the quake, and it appears that many of those killed or injured were indoors at the time of the quake, or close to buildings which collapsed. Even so the death toll is staggering. So far it’s reckoned that 50,000 have died although there are fears that this could rise to as much as 500,000. Half a million people, it’s a simply stunning figure!

In many ways though the quake was only the beginning of the disaster, and looking after the survivors is now the main priority. Many Haitians live on less than a dollar a day, & even in normal times the country is heavily reliant on foreign food aid, but providing clean water, food & shelter for the thousands of, now homeless, survivors is going to be a huge task. Also, with so many dead to recover from the rubble, there’s a massive risk of disease.
Offers of aid and support have been flooding in pretty much since the quake struck, but even so, given the Herculean scale of the task, more help is needed. Most major charities have started appeals, for example Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake donation page.

Even embittered old news junkies like myself need a break from time to time, and over the holiday period I took a couple of weeks off without watching any news, &, I have to say, I feel so much better, not to mention less jaded by the world, for having done so. Still, with the new decade well and truly underway I figured I should, once again, start taking a cynical and curmudgeonly look at what’s going on in the world around me…

One of the things which I’m very glad hasn’t come to pass, was the descent into another global financial crisis, which, for a brief time, it looked like Dubai World’s financial problems might have sparked.

In the end it took a $10bn bail out from Abu Dhabi to save the troubled company, and in return the company showed it’s gratitude by naming it’s latest project, the Burj Tower, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan. The Burj Khalifa, as it’s now known, opened earlier this week, and is now officially the world’s tallest building, beating the previous holder of the title, the Taipei 101, by about 300 metres.

As part of the publicity surrounding the tower’s opening two intrepid base jumpers were granted permission to leap from it’s top in a death defying record attempt. I guess it was only going to be a matter of time before someone made such an attempt, with or without permission, so maybe the owners were just trying to harness the inevitable publicity which such a stunt is bound to generate. However, before would be daredevils start booking their flights to Dubai it’s worth pointing out that the event was strictly a one off, and neither the owners, nor the Dubai authorities are likely to take kindly to further, unauthorised, jumps.

So, the Copenhagen summit is drawing to it’s exciting close when we’re to be treated to the spectacle of Obama saving the world with a last minute agreement which will be met with unanimous, rapturous approval by all 190 odd countries involved, and do enough to tackle the effects of anthropogenic climate change, so that future generations won’t be totally screwed.
Obviously, Obama’s chief sidekick boy-wonder Brown has been in Copenhagen for the last few days attempting to build a consensus, & generally trying to look like someone who’s worthy of re-election, or rather, I suppose that should be election, since he wasn’t voted in by anyone.

In anycase it looks like the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is set to be a massive failure; We’ll probably get some kind of ineffectual, face-saving agreement pulled out of the fire at the very last moment, but the chances that it amounts to anything substantive, let alone does enough to combat the dangers which climate change pose to all of us, not to mention future generations, are in my opinion very depressingly slim indeed.

A big sticking point seems to be the Kyoto protocal; it seems like everyone who didn’t sign up for it wants to keep it, while those who did would rather sort out a new agreement which includes those who didn’t. To be honest I have more sympathy with the Kyoto signatories, it seems stupid to try and insist that a group of developed nations, which don’t include the US, should abide by an agreement when the world’s two largest pollutors, the US and China, aren’t to be bound in the same way; frankly we need them on board if we’re to achieve the kinds of CO₂ reductions which the science suggests are necessary.

Ultimately I wonder if this is where humanity demonstrates that it is an evolutionary dead end; short-sighted greed seems to be stymying attempts at taking longer term action to solve a problem which stands to effect us all, or rather the next generation. The impacts of climate change are already being seen in some of the world’s poorest regions, and yet relatively petty arguments between nations look set to make a farse of the Copenhagen Summit.
Faced with such monumentally selfish stupidity I guess we just have to hope that, against the vast weight of evidence to the contrary, it turns out that the climate sceptics are right, and it’s not going to be too great a problem.
Not a comforting thought at all!