Matthew Henry John Bartlett

A sermon from me for St Francis’ day

The top 20 arms-producing companies (excluding China) for 2006, with total after-tax company profit in US dollars: Boeing (USA) $2.2b, Lockheed Martin (USA) $2.5b, BAE Systems (UK) $1.2b, Northrop Grummane (USA) $1.5b, Raytheon (USA) $1.3b, General Dynamics (USA) $1.9b, EADS (W. Eur.) $124m
BAE Systems Inc. (USA & UK) ?, L-3 Communications (USA) $526m, Finmeccanica (Italy) $1.3b, Thales (France) $487m, United Technologies (USA) $3.7b, Halliburtong (USA) $2.3b, KBR (Halliburton) (USA) $168m, Computer Sciences Corp. (USA) ?, SAICh (USA) $391m, Honeywell (USA) $2.1b, MBDA (W. Eur.) ?, Rolls-Royce (UK) $1.8b, SAFRAN (France) $222m. Other well-known companies that are further down the list include General Electric, Saab, Goodrich, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Samsung, NEC. This list doesn’t include suppliers of oil, electricity, office computers or uniforms. Lots more here, if you’re interested [120KB PDF, via Jolyon at Justice.net.nz].

From the ever apocalyptic James Howard Kunstler:

As we discover ourselves to be a much poorer nation, one of my correspondents put it: “the bogus risk-swapping economy must be replaced by a net value-added economy.” That means actually making things, growing things, and rebuilding things, and that can only begin to happen if we do not stupidly sucker ourselves into a war with other nations who are liable to be extremely ticked off at us for destroying the global economy, but also competing with us for a dwindling supply of resources that are not equitably distributed around the world.
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Yesterday I did a couple of hours of garden work, for the first time in years. It was at Castle Semeloff, and it was very good fun. Shane and I dug a garden. I sawed planks for low walls around it. While digging I accidentally killed one or two enormous worms, thick as my index finger. I think they were native worms. They were milky white, with faint tigerish markings. White fluid came out of them when they died, and they had a sort of smaller worm inside them that looked like an umbilical cord. We covered the garden in soil from their old compost bin. It is amazing how coffee grounds and old veges and fish heads turn into nice brown soil in just a couple of years.

My notes from yesterday’s excellent biofuels panel discussion at Dev-Zone

O happy day, the first of the party rankings is in! Last time around was fun. This ranking (best to worst) is from SAFE and comes via Frogblog. I do not know what SAFE stands for, but they are ‘the voice for all animals’.

*tied

I sat on the roof for a while (about here), having gotten a little bored of staring at my computer. There were pigeons flitting about from rooftop to rooftop, and it made me want to know the city like a pigeon knows the city. I wonder if a small transmitting camera could be attached to one. Someone has made a faux-pigeon cam, but it is stuck to the ground. I want to see the crooks and nannies you can only get to from above.

Listen to Jim Anderton on National Radio today

He’s on The Panel (Part 2), and he doesn’t come on for a few minutes – you have to fast forward through Joanne Black discussing the dangers of swollen rivers (unless you’re interested in that kind of thing, and it is pretty interesting – did you know that a doubling of the velocity of a river results in a 60-fold increase in the amount of mass it can move? Amazing. Anyway…)
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How many hectares per person of publicly-owned land are there in Aotearoa?

How many people are involved in the NGO/non-profit sector in New Zealand? (James K knows.) If they were somehow organised into a big meta-organisation, could they agree on anything (such as a set of government or business policy demands)?

Maxim Institute on Give It Up
… and in the Herald, and on Radio NZ news [streaming audio; I start around 13 minutes in. “Matthew Bartlett says he hopes that discussions over tax cuts won’t dominate the election” – ha! brilliant]