Regressing

Let's hope we don't run out of raw materials.

I've been reading a little of the 1965 book by Graeme Clark and Stuart Piggott, "Prehistoric Societies".

In this book they mention the Ubaid culture of early Iraq - we are talking about 6000 years ago:

"The newcomers in the delta of the Two Rivers had to contend with many difficulties, not least with a shortage or non-existence of the material resorces to which they had been accustomed in their original homeland. They were especially handicapped by the lack of metal and stone...."

At which point the slightly curious may wonder, what do you make things out of when you don't even have stone? I mean, even stone age people had stone, that's why we call it the stone age.

Well, these people didn't have copper any more, and at some stage had to make axes out of stone instead of copper. Any then:

"Instead of sickles with a curved cutting edge made of serrated flint blades, in what was now an ancient tradition, we find sickels made entirely of hard-fired clay. However neither the shaft-hole axes nor the battle-axes can be regarded as functional , but rather as the reproduction of unobtainable and expensive weapons of prestige in the only locally available material - mud"

So there you have it. Items of prestige made out of mud.

Now , I know this is being disparaging towards pottery, which is an important technology. But I've got this vision of someone giving their husband a clay battleaxe, and him replying (and looking like a Sumerian Baldrick) "Oh darling, you are spoiling me, this is the finest mud."

It makes me smile. But there is something slightly chilling about a people's technology regressing in this way.

I just hope our society doesn't run out of raw materials.

Women Of the World

I've sent in my nomination this morning for the "Best Blog by a Woman Lib Dem. I won't say who I've nominated...

But I wanted to mention three blogs from outside of the UK that I think are worth reading:

I would describe Echidne of the Snakes as a well-written American liberal/feminist blog. It maintains a sense of humour, with , for example, Monty Python's "Hells's Grannies" turning up recently. But there's a lot of very serious stuff.

In Baghdad Burning an Iraqi woman, now living in exile in Syria, writes movingly about her life. It's seldom updated, which makes each post a memorable one.

In Eastern Europe Veronica Khokhlova produces "Neeka's Backlog", which concentrates on Russian and Ukranian politics. There was a good piece on Christmas Eve on the risks of coal-mining, with the sombre quote "You better remember football broadcasts from Donetsk. The tracks around the field were packed with wheelchairs."

PS in writing this post I found myself looking at a couple more blogs. One of the stories covered by "Echidne" was the detention, chaining and denial of food of an Icelandic woman blogger , Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lillendahl, when she tried to enter the US. It is enough to genuinely make you decide to go somewhere else for a holiday.... Erla's own blog is here, but it's in Icelandic...

And if you want to read more about Ukranian politics, you can look at the "personal website " of someone once named the "third most important woman in the world", Ukranian Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko. It has quite a nice set of wallpapers!

Becoming A Refugee....

There's a new entry on the Baghdad Burning blog. For those who haven't seen it before, "Baghdad Burning" isn't updated very often, but gives a fairly stark account of life in the Iraqi capital. Or at least it used to. In the previous entry - back in April - the author advised that she and her family had decided to leave Iraq. It's only now that there's a new entry that tells how they left:

....The last few hours in the house were a blur. It was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk- the one I’d used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we’d gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long since been taken down and stored away- but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over- the Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to throw away....

....The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but the environment was more relaxed. People were getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of them recognized each other and waved or shared woeful stories or comments through the windows of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal. Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all equal in front of the Syrian border personnel....

J. frowned and turned down the radio. “The last time this happened,” she said, “the area was raided.

I've been feeling guilty over the last few days - too busy with family, work and ward issues to do any blogging.

In particular, I've not had time to properly respond to those posts with titles like "1001 things I don't like about Huhne now that he's ahead of my candidate in the leadership race" and "Chris Huhne is too dull to be a Prime Minister , unlike uh, John Major or uh, Gordon Brown"

But I've been thinking about Chris' comments in the Question Time debate last week. They were something on the lines of 'In Iraq we are seen by the population as part of the problem, not part of the solution'. A week ago I wasn't quite convinced by what he was saying. But now his comments seem quite prescient in the light of the past few days' disclosures.

I don't have any answers. But for a reminder of what life is like right now in Baghdad, please, please read this from Baghdad Burning.

A day full of dreadful news

Not much to be cheerful about today, bearing in mind the news from Baghdad and the USA.

Tonight I stumbled on a blog, Ramblin' with Roger. Roger's going to give a dollar to the American Red Cross for every person going to his blog before next Monday (they don't even have to read it, though he hopes they do!) .

Have a look, and nudge his counter up by one.

And if you have a counter, maybe follow his example?