barrels, kilos and comments

A very interesting comment on an even more interesting post.

Hmmmm, I might do sum fag-packet sums of my own . . . .

I love booze

And so does the New Humanist, apparently. Its pleasant to hear something good written about drugs and their incredibly liberating effect upon the human condition:

"What he was after was a certain type of unrestrained but civilised conviviality. The kind of generous and sociable cheerfulness that only alcohol can engender through its sacred ability to suspend or abolish the inherent tension of having to spend time among other human beings. Liberality was the key and a parsimonious hand with the bottle an enemy ranked alongside pretension or the tendency to bore."

Lets face it, nothing makes you friends like an evening in the pub in an extroverted and profoundly garrulous frame of mind. God I could talk the hind legs of a weasel when I'm well oiled.

Addition:

I don't suppose anyone's interested but my favourite tipple is Mount Gay Eclipse. No, its not a steamy bisexual videotape, its actually the mellowest sipping rum money can buy. Nothing needed to enhance the experience except a couple of lumps of ice.

Word.

anyone else interested in the parliamentary review of the professional lobbying industry?

This inherently undemocratic industry is the lucky subject of a Parliamentary Inquiry in which anyone with the right money can buy access to anyone in power. I would like to observe that the profiteering industry is quite separate from the semi-democratic right of the elctorate to petition their MP, something that is a step on the road to Direct Democracy.

Anyway, I would like to draw attention to this report of the day's session at the inquiry from the splendid bunch at SpinWatch.

Martin Chalk is an ignorant fuckwit

I didn't know who he was either. Apparently he's an environmentalist airline pilot who wants the 3rd runway at Heathrow to be built. His arguments are flawed and he is massively ignorant of the facts of emissions reductions. So why did CiF give him a podium for his ignorance?

So I could shoot him down, of course!

one step closer to Direct Democracy

As an earnest advocate of DD I love this. Please sign up peeps, together we can actually take control of this godforsaken corruption-and-genocide-fest back from the dirty politicians.

. . . . . . . you what?

John Hutton has dealt the government's attempts to limit climate change a significant blow by announcing his intention to make nuclear produce significantly greater proportion of the country's electricity than at present. Despite there being little to gain, in terms of carbon emissions from an expansion of nuclear, despite the clear and damning ethical reasons not to expand nuclear, despite the utterly unfeasible economics of nuclear generation that will leave the tax payer footing £billion clean-up bills, despite the absurdity of pushing this technology over truly renewable ones that will generate for millenia- not just for a few decades, despite the shortage of uranium reserves and despite the fact that new plants likely won't be generating for a decade- leaving us with continued rising fossil fuel generation for another ten years to add to the existing carbon emissions . . . . . there's so many more reasons not to do this.

So, so wrong.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor

He's insane. Completely gone with the pixies. A gibberer. Rossinisbird knows it too. So does Justin Keating. Why the Guardian is giving a podium to this fundie I don't know because whilst his Church obstructs life saving scientific research on the grounds that a ball of 16 cells is 'a human being', it is simultaneously busy sabotaging rational efforts to prevent the spread of AIDS. Which makes them complicit in murder. Which doesn't sound like a morally defensible position from which to lecture others on the morality of their actions.

Cnuts.

electoral reform might be imminent

As my dear readers will likely know, I am a big advocate of electoral reform. Apparently it might actually come to pass. Awesome!

I just renewed my Green Party membership

I don't agree with all of their policies, such as their bizarrely extreme firearms policy (specifically CJ500 (iv & vi)), but of all the political parties the Green Party is by far the most likely to bring about beneficial change to our sordid little world, not just our country.

Q - Why isn't the government pushing this technology?

"Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, one of Britain's leading marine energy experts, estimates that the Pentland Firth alone could generate up to a quarter of Britain's electricity – more than is now being provided by all the country's nuclear power stations – making the channel between Orkney and the north Scottish mainland "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy.""

A - Because they're incompetent sociopathic wankers so wrapped up in their post-Imperialist ideological clusterfuck and in trying to convince themselves that the UK is still a world power that they are emotionally incapable of doing anything other than royally fucking other people's countries up at the expense of our own.

Word.

sick

Just sick.

catastrophic wind turbine failure

Pretty cool.




I found it here. Sadly the chap appears to have posted it in association with negative comments about wind generation, emphasising that turbines can only generate within a given window of wind speed. As if that made climate change, rising fuel bills and energy insecurity worth tolerating.


Addition:

I am engaged in a dialogue with the blogger in question. Lets see if I can rescue him from his REN status.

the Fed, the state prosecutor and $200 billion

Greg Palast rules.

This guy is a model for investigative journalism. The article is available as a podcast too .

Saudi plan to halt spread of extremism by 'retraining' clerics

My fat, hairy arse.

The 5th Anniversary Of The Iraq Invasion Blogswarm

To highlight the continuation of the Iraqi civil war and associated genocide I would like to draw attention to this Guardian article detailing attempts to quantify the number of innocents killed.

One small point of contention with the article, however: Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg state that the Iraqi genocide is "the worst humanitarian catastrophe in today's world". I disagree. The ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 5.4 million people, mostly through starvation and disease. Johann has been there and returned to tell the tale.

We- the British public- are, however, a little less complicit in the Congolese genocide than we are in the Iraqi one. And therefore I would like to call upon anyone reading this to reject another term in power for the Labour government or any return to power for the Conservatives- both of whom supported the initiation of a war of aggression in direct contravention of Article 3 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The leadership of these two parties at the time should be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, along with George Bush, Dick Cheney and José María Aznar. All UK forces should withdraw from Iraq immediately and any peacekeeping duties that are essential to the preservation of law and order int hat nation should be handed over to a combined UN force whose operation is wholly financed by the UK, the US and Spain.


Addition:

Bush is as blind to reality as ever.



Addition:

This Guardian article illustrates the human suffering caused by our government's actions. Imagine if this was taking place on the streets of Milton Keynes or Worcester or Aberdeen.

greenwash 101

After reading this post from the Lazy Environmentalist I emailed my MP, Alison Seabeck, to petition for her support on the Early Day Motion mentioned. Her reply:

"Thank you for your email. I regret that as a Government
Minister(Whip) I cannot sign EDMs which are used by back bench MPs to
raise issues. Alan Simpson is a powerful advocate for alternative and
renewable energy on Labour's back benches.

I have recently sat on the Energy Bill Committee which discussed a range
of issues including measures which will enable more microgeneration. It
is important though that we encourage the right type of micro generation
in the right places. Too many people have put up wind energy technology
in places where they get very little return.

During the course of the Energy Bill the Minister did announce that
there would be a strategic overview of renewables this summer and that
the issue of feed in tariffs would be included in that discussion. This
is important. They are by no means ruled out and clearly Alan Simpson
is ensuring they remain on the Government's agenda.

Alison Seabeck MP"

Interesting for several reasons: Firstly, her reference to Alan Simpson as "a powerful advocate for alternative and renewable energy on Labour's back benches" is of note because she specifically identifies him to be an advocate. This contrasts sharply with many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party such as Alison herself and particularly the Cabinet, who- if you are to ignore their propaganda and infer their policy objectives directly from their actions- are opposed to any research and development of renewable generation beyond that necessary to appear to be doing so.

Secondly, Alison's role on the Energy Bill Committee is laudable. However the measures she mentions, “ measures which will enable more microgeneration” and “ we encourage the right type of micro generation in the right places”, are problems that have resulted from Labour's own policies on renewables. Their lack of direction on grants for renewable installations has been well documented elsewhere and I will not go into it here. Also, the reason people install inappropriate renewable capacity is because the government haven't shown any inclination to publicise useful information relating to the suitability of the different technologies. Or any information relating to renewables, really.

Thirdly, the Energy Bill itself has been determined to be illegal by Greenpeace.

Fourthly, the issue of Feed In Tariffs should not be a matter for discussion, it should be a matter for immediate action. There are even websites available that explain, carefully and clearly so that even MPs can understand, how to implement FITs.

Time and again I am appalled by the laissez-faire attitude of MPs towards imminent climate change. Ignorance of the facts can't seriously be an excuse for these people and so what is it? Some mass psychosis towards future generations? Outright denial? Any way you spin this these people are perpetuating the status quo that will result in gigadeaths and the end of civilisation as we know it on this planet. They should be removed from power.

They Work For You (supposedly)

The TheyWorkForYou website has a nifty little setup whereby you can have updates automatically emailed to you everytime your local MP does anything vaguely exciting (particularly unlikely for mine).

Anyhoo, I await tales of Alison's stirling work in The House with unbaited breath.

you are here . . . .

I found a real science blog- not just one with "science" in the title. Anyway, here's a nice, visual presentation of your place in the Grand Scheme of Things.



Anyway- who wants to hear me bitch constantly about how hard a PhD is and how I've managed to work through 4 defunct HPLC setups in two and a half months? Exactly. No one.

Fucking shite Kontron kit.

Rowan Williams is an idiot

My new favourite blogger has done one of the most astonishingly complete demolitions of the high sky pixie advocate. Its just . . . perfect!

Does anyone live in a village that's short of an idiot? I've got a great candidate for the job . . .

treating the symptoms and not the disease

Citizenship ceremonies for schoolchildren: That's the ex-attorney general's suggestion to improve "British Citizenship".

Firstly- and most obviously: I am not a citizen of Great Britain. I am a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as stated in my passport. If you really want to piss the Irish off after decades of bloody sectarian strife, just forget to include them in a statement about the state of our nation.

Secondly: If you even need to consider proposals to strengthen citizenship then you've been up to some fairly stupid stuff that alienated it in the first place. Examine any policy of the UK government over the preceding thirty years to understand this one.

Thirdly: Centralised diktats intended to improve citizenship are blatantly going to be counter productive. In most humans positive emotions such as loyalty and pride result from positive experiences. Personally, I find such positive experiences to be few and far between. Simple comparisons of our nation's state with others in Europe reveal that we have exactly nothing to be proud of apart from winning the Rugby World Cup five years ago. Our public transport sucks, our democracy sucks, our military are falling apart thanks to poor management and overextension of limited resources, our government are responsible for exacerbating climate change instead of fighting it. We have one of the worst records on tax avoidance and one of the most unequal societies in the developed world. And suddenly, this plutocratic collection of corporate whores and incompetent halfwits wants to lecture us on how we should appreciate them? I find this to be a distinctly negative experience and the last thing I feel for Goldsmith and his war crimes are loyalty and a sense of kinship. The words that spring instantly to mind are "get fucked".


PS:

Do I have to mention Goldsmith's credibility here with regard to his role in the Iraqi genocide and BAE debacle?

I thought not.

Capitalism As If The World Matters

Some quotes from Jonathon Porritt's seminal text on eco-economics.

"'Development without growth' is precisely the kind of talk that sends shivers down the spines of all good capitalists. But the self-inflicted blindness of contemporary capitalism to the laws of thermodynamics is the first and most problematic barrier to reconciling capitalism and sustainability. It is by no means the only barrier."

". . . at the heart of the issue of scale lurks the vexed issues of population growth. Cut it which way you will, growing populations necessitate growing economies to provide more food, more houses, more services, more teachers, more doctors and more jobs. Growth-bound economists and politically correct environmentalists conspire to keep the issue of population off the agenda, obscuring the incontrovertible reality that every extra human being makes it just a little bit harder to find ways of living within the Earth's limited carrying capacity. It would, however, seem unreasonable to lay the blame for this uniquely at the door of capitalism. Religion, ignorance, prejudice and political cowardice have at least as much to answer for."

"Within any capitalist system, to be 'uncompetitive' at either the company level or at nation-state level, is to fail. It is as simple as that. Competition for customers, competition for capital, competition for talent and competition for reputation and brand value: it is competitiveness that sorts out the capitalist sheep from the capitalist goats. Competition has become both dominant and deeply divisive, as pointed out by Tony Stebbing and Gordon Heath:

"Competition makes economies inherently unstable and leads to the extinction of businesses through dominance and monopoly. The wide-spread belief that the competitive process must permeate every aspect of life is damaging the global environment since the pace of economic activity exceeds the capacity to assimilate polluting consequences. Competition drives the rate of economic activity towards the maximum energy and resource use. It is unsustainable because there are no intrinsic controls upon the pace of economic activity." (Stebbing and Heath, 2003)

However, as we have already seen, competition itself need not necessarily pose such a dilemma. In terms of the efficient use of both resources and capital, the challenge to eke out maximum economic value for every unit of energy and raw material is as critical to sustainability as it should be to commercial success. The problem is not competition per se, but the incorrect valuation of resources and inadequate levels of regulation to create a level playing field conducive to sustainability.

This is probably a judgement that most people would arrive at instinctively anyway. Populist interpretations of evolution, from Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley onwards, have accustomed people to the idea of nature being 'red in tooth and claw', with all life forms engaged in endless titanic struggles to ensure 'the survival of the fittest'. So what could be more 'natural' than the history of humankind (both before and after the Industrial Revolution) being cast in the same metaphorical framework? This rationale of social Darwinism has been taken up with unbounded enthusiasm by the politicians and academic economists most centrally involved in the neo-liberal revolution of the last 25 years. When all else fails, it has provided at least some flimsy justification for patterns of irresponsible and uncaring corporate and political behaviour that prioritise competition over everything else, characterised by folksy phrases along the lines of 'Its a jungle out there', 'Its a dog-eat-dog world', 'Let the devil take the hindmost', and so on.

So it often comes as a bit of a blow to them when this interpretation of evolution is revealed as a complete fabrication, a socio-political distortion that tells us much more about Britain during the mid 19th century than about the evolution of life on Earth. What we now know is that individual organisms in a mature ecosystem go to great lengths to avoid competition by specialisation or by developing their own differentiated niches. Resourcews are often shared with frugal efficiency. Territorial animals actually avoid fighting if at all possible, relying upon complex behaviours and rituals that stop short of actual conflict. This has all been formalised by ecologists in what is known as the competitive exclusion principle': The occupant of any niche excludes all others by virtue of specialisation, and therefore avoids competition and possible extinction.

Beyond that the work of scientist such as Lynn Margulis and Janine Benyus has revealed fascinating patterns of mutual interdependence and elegant symbiosis. The great biologist Lewis Thomas is quoted as saying:

'The urge to form partnerships, to link up in collaborative arrangements, is perhaps the oldest, strongest and most fundamental force in Nature. There are no solitary, free-living creatures; every form of life is dependent on other forms' (Thomas, 1980)."

MSM Frenzy - "Evill Colombian terrorist group sought uranium for 'DIRTY BOMB'"

But they forgot to mention that you can't make a dirty bomb out of ordinary uranium. Funny how this small detail was ommitted from the frenzied reports portraying two of South America's leading, populist, progressive leaders as supporters of terrorism. Idiots!

Left I rules.


Addition:

Greg Palast rules too.

"religious guilt"

Its amazing what you can blame on religion: war, crime, misogyny, repression of human rights, etc.

Now you can add 'bad sex life' to the list.

I had intimate encounters with several girls of a sky-pixie-fan persuasion when growing up. As a randy teenager it was always rather frustrating being turned down for reasons of religion. I always thought it was an enormous cop-out (possibly one of the reasons for my deep-seated hatred of religion?). I now firmly believe that parents should teach their children all about sex and leave it up to the child to decide when they need to gain any direct experience. Trying to control my development into an adult through direct repression always backfired with me and made me all the more determined to expand my knowledge of forbidden pleasures such as smoking, drinking and girls' naughty bits.

If you can raise a well balanced child with a broad set of interests and pastimes and help them to understand the pressures of modern society then they are going to be far better placed to deal with the advances of randy teenagers or their own hormonal urges than a child who has been repeatedly told that such things are evil and to be suppressed and resisted at every turn. Human beings are human beings, the better parents understand this and treat their children accordingly the better society will become.

Australian Green Economics thinktank

The introduction at the head of this page outlines what anyone with ambition to change the political landscape for the better must understand. It should be of particular relevance to the Green Party of England and Wales, who cannot seem to shake off their single-issue party image. I'm not saying they are a single-issue party but I'm saying that's what the Sun reading majority perceive them to be, if they think about them at all.

Moses was high when he "received" the ten commandments

This is just beautiful. Whether a historical figure called Moses existed or not it seems that religions haven't changed their approach to divine revelation over the ensuing millenia- anyone else hear that story about an Opus Dei chapter in the US doping new recruits with mescalin to induce visions?

corporations which avoid paying tax should not be entitled to government contracts

This simple rule would enrich the Whitehall tax coffers by billions. Prem Sikka rules.

was anyone else aware that when the Exxon Valdez ran aground its navigation radar was turned off?

Greg Palast rules.

Wikileaks returns

After a US Federal judge ordered the site shut down it is now back again thanks to objections from various public interest groups.

selling out the UK

In a monumental fuck-up from the Labour government the Guardian reveals how three PFI companies have moved their assets offshore, including ownership of the new Treasury Building and the Home Office.

So, not only will the tax payer be responsible for paying far over the odds for these buildings, but they will now not benefit from any tax return on the enormous profits these companies will reap from the tax payer either. Nice.