Shock news as Latest New Director General Forced to Resign

Reeling from the revelations of crass attempts to draw funding from MI5 to subsidise their flagship current affairs documentary programme, latest new BBC Director General Sir Umi’ve Forgotten Hisname called a brief press conference today and let it be known that, as he was so far out of his depth already, he felt he may as well go now whilst he still had his head upon his shoulders. Accordingly he has agreed to leave his post at the end of this month to take up a role as caretaker in the Royal Opera House “Where I still have some contacts”.

The shadowy figure of an Australian prospector was seen shuffling in the background – “Wha-hooo, I’ve struck gold again” he was heard to cry as a new committee was being hurriedly assembled to consider the ramifications of Sir Umi’ve Forgotten Hisname’s departure.

“I suppose we could ask the plumber to step in again for a few months, whilst we find another mug” said the Chair, falling into his usual pattern and attempting and forever failing to produce a smile. He was met with stony silence. Embarrassed, he continued: “Well I thought he was quite good. He fixed my kitchen sink for me, anyway. All right then – what shall we do? Any bright ideas in any of YOUR heads. Huh, any ideas at all?”

The silence became noticeably more hostile and deeply malevolent as the smile still struggled to emerge on his face. It was not an appealing visage. The silence pushed in on him ever more aggressively. Suddenly, he could take it no more and stood up, shouting “Alright, alright, alright. I’ll go as well. Let me tell you, I’ve always hated the job anyway. I don’t need you – the place is still a hotbed of reds, even now we’ve got every one of them gagged. Rupert won’t give me the time of day  and I know that’s because of who I associate with.”

With that, he stormed out of the room as only a spent buffoon can – you want a description? – leaving the silence to gently fester.

“We’re finished, aren’t we?” quietly stated a small, rather offended voice.

“Yes” came a categorical chorus from the other dozen or so bodies in the amorphous sump.

When the Left is Split you still have the Left. Just more of the Right.

Well, the headline says it all, really. Discussion twixt “Two people of the left, showing how the left is split over Hugo Chavez” on Right Wing Radio 4 this morning, pitched calm, rational Prof Doreen Massey against Whining Nick Cohen of The Observer. Whereas she emphasised how Chavez had given the people a voice and created grass routes democracy, Whining Nick said little but projected an ill disguised loathing for the late President, attempting to group him with Stalin, for instance, and showing crass and arrogant ignorance.

Massey’s description of popular involvement in Venezuela made it  sound akin to the inspiration of The Long March and Mao’s communist revolution but, this time, expressed repeatedly through democratic election.

She says Chavez was not the dominant figure, though might have become so – which might have become an issue. Seeing pictures of the enormous crowds of millions in Caracas for his funeral one can understand how deeply his people feel the loss.

The compare suggested that, if the BBC broadcast long, long speeches from Cameron we would decry the undemocratic nature of the process. In Venezuela, however, Chavez was listened to. Here nobody would hear Cameron, no-one would listen. For heaven’s sake why would anyone want to?

Yes you see Whining Nick is by no way, shape or form a left wing thinker. The Observer is a revenue seeking corporatist apologist, indeed more right wing corporate centralist than the “The Guardian”. Cohen is lining his own nest by attempting to disarm collective popular constructivist actions such as Chavez re-directing oil revenues towards the previously downtrodden poor of his country away from the pockets of the very few corporate drivers [Read USA]. What’s possibly wrong with that, Nick, or have you always sat in with the Sheriff of Nottingham?

Needless to say there was no competition. She wiped the floor with him and the embarrassed compare quickly moved on. Glad I heard it – I already had experience of Whining Nick, so had no false impressions, but Massey sounded interesting and a good person to know of.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnj3

Your pants are on fire.

I do still from time to time meet up with Newsnight. I actually like Paxman’s contorted countenance as he grasps with the latest implausible interpretations initiated by some cataclysmically corrupt contributor to the daily dissection of the densest, deepest and most disgusting detritus of our society. Yeah, politicians.

He was not there last night and, instead, it was the prim Kirstywark who does not have anything like as malleable a visage as Jeremy. She has a smile – I think – and a grovel but, sadly often appears to be merely catching up. Maybe that’s just the auto-cue. “I am a Dalek and I must exterminate. Oh, sorry, wrong tape.” Anyway, she’s “good on culture” and does the Arts spin-off section of the programme but gets a couple of nights of real skullduggery each week, doing the main news side whilst J rests in the cupboard, scheming which boil he can lance on his next outing.

So there she was and there was included a theme – “Ten Years After”. Incredibly, ten long and disastrous years have passed since Tony Bliar’s UK mercenaries joined in with Halliburton’s United States backed hostile takeover bid for Ay-rack plc. We’ve all watched as the whole Middle East has festered, from Beirut all the way to Kabul as well as now including Northern Africa, as dictators have been slaughtered almost as carelessly as their general public. We saw the “Shock and Awe” as the United States arms industry held a very public trade show, courtesy of the good people of Baghdad. It was very generous of them to allow their city to be used like that but, hey, Halliburton were offering very good rates to rebuild it later. They’d just take those messy oil wells offa them.

Anyway Kirsty had apparently entertained a rent-a-crowd in the studio the previous night to chew over how they all felt about it now, “in retrospect”. There were no corpses lined up to give their opinions, nor kids from Falluja to display their “Glow-in-the-dark” depleted-life-outcomes. There was no film of the beauty of any “Garden of Eden” now emerging from the grim piles of rubble nor description of any inter-faith and inter-tribal harmony emerging anywhere. But apparently they did talk and agree that Ay-rack still needs a bit of work doing. And, hey, the oil is flowing.

Part two of this fulsome tribute to the Military-Industrial complex, Kirsty proudly told us, was to follow tonight. Apparently with no permission from anyone Newsnight had again Broken the Rules. They just will not learn, will they? This time they had illegally gone to the Crypt, exhumed Tony Bliar and transported him through the darkness to the Newsnight  studio.

Aghast, I sat there, transfixed. They just could not get away with this, I thought. I could see why there was no Paxman present – “for he’s garlic” I grimly smiled “and he’d probably carry an oaken spear”. The face, unclear behind the haze created by his accumulated blood money, showed, however, the remnants of the Cliff Richard choir boy face-paint-by-numbers kit so beloved by Cherry, his grooming assistant. But now it was flaking and, as repayments on his pact were obviously being made, he looked increasingly drained.

Kirsty showed no remorse and kept a straight face. OK, I mean she kept her only face. Handy that, when you’re surely feeling deeply guilty for what you’re undertaking.

“Given” – and I paraphrase her here, as I took no notes – “Given that Iran is the United States worst enemy and given that they certaainly have weapons of masss destruction, could it not be said that what we have achieeved in Ay-rack, which, as we all know is an ineffectual zombie land only fit to export oil to we victors as its people fester in their hovels, ruled by a sectarian despot. Given all that, which you have given us, shouldn’t you just have left Saddam in place?”

The result was terrible. He opened his mouth. And then words fell off his snake tongue. And I could hear once more the sly malplacing of syllables and the twisted misdirection of thought.

In allowing the pretense to discuss the out and out disaster that the initial invasion of Iraq was and the appalling nature of every action since that time having compounded the problem, Bliar was being given a platform to denigrate and evilize Iran. And, of course, Syria as well. This was not a retrospective – this was out and out war mongering.

He started to tell us how awful things had got for the people of Syria, being killed and all that and, yes, his answer was to further arm the rebel mercenaries so as to increase the weight of the siege and the sum total of death and destruction. “I know a good car-bomb manufacturer” his eyes seemed to say. Once again working as sales rep for the arms industry with the sincerity and humanity of a cornered psychopath. Oh, yes, for that’s exactly what he is.

I turned off the broadcast, hoping that this time, when they return him to the darkness, they throw away the key. For that man embodies the essence of evil. The deaths of far too many good people and the suffering of so many more are etched upon his soul.

Green Illusions – Ozzie and the truth that no-one dared speak.

This is a book review, which is not my usual target. And a book titled “Green Illusions”, well, that could be red rag to my bull. I’ve been there before – there was the godawful Mark Lynas so recently, the turncoat who discarded his green mantle to put on a “pragmatic” lead suit, such that he could sleep with nuclear materials and preached how genetic manipulation had overnight changed from demon to saviour. This is clearly what big money can do – change objectivity. And in so many ways, of course.

So Ozzie Zehner’s tome was like as not a tomb, too, to his youthful environmental credentials, cast aside as he “grew up” into the “real world” and “saw things how they really are”. He probably used to rail on about excess packaging around merchandise, he probably used to eat organic food. I imagine he didn’t have a television and recycled his old clothes. But now, in the clear light of day, he could see his previous naiveté and was writing to correct any misconceptions he had left and help others avoid making the same mistakes.

It carries the subtitle “The dirty secrets of clean energy and the future of environmentalism” which continues to be offputting. Except, well, thing is, I kinda know there’s a whole lot wrong with solar panels. wind turbines and biofuels. All three have oft felt my ire. Like my ongoing tale of the Mexican peasant provided with a brand new, energy efficient stove on which to cook her tortillas and so reducing her carbon footprint – the stove financed, of course, from carbon offset monies. Only now she cannot afford the flour because it’s all being turned into biodiesel. Wind turbines always seem to be engineering feats, concrete sumps and operationally marginal, although certainly the right kind of idea. We have to harness our energy supply direct from solar input – which the wind certainly is. So is solar and yet they only seem economic if they carry huge, ongoing subsidy. In the UK the subsidy is recently reduced although still quite generous but is funded by other users, unable to buy the panels. It is, thus, direct subsidy of the well off by the poor. And in most of the country they are inefficient and soon need replacement – at further great expense.

So slightly less reluctantly I first watched Ozzie give a talk and Q&A session, in which he seemed open, honest and realistic. Easily enough to see that yes he shared my cynicism about green technology but yes he was indeed a reasonably dark green, as I see myself. Committed to developing a sustainable future based upon an objective and realistic appraisal of the current state of play. So I ordered the book – from the library, of course!

And now I’ve read it and it lives up to my expectations. A fine piece of work and evidence, too, of an aspect of character I share less with him. He is an avid accumulator of data. Me, I do that and I research topics well and with accuracy. I smell fraud and misdirection quickly and am usually correct. I really, really want to say “always correct” but do not like to tempt fate! But this guy has independently logged huge catalogues of evidence. One figure is drawn from evidence he derived from 50000 media articles on energy use, to glean a picture of social understanding and fashion.

He told the story of how, when asked to quote to install solar energy panels as part of a green upgrade for a house he had told the client that, really, he’d be better not to. This was because the tall, sheltering mature trees close up to the house would have to be felled, as they shaded the roof space. He was dismissed from the contract! Of course on all sane environmental grounds he was correct but with grants and credos for panel use the modern economy says otherwise.

The first half of this writing is so devoted to pricking the consumerist green bubble – the driver being what he terms productivism – green productivism. With his admirable analytic power, backed with hordes of data this section is very effective. No-one could doubt the strength of his case – and it is both realistic and pragmatic. So wind, solar electric, biofuel and other lesser green methodologies are positioned as providing no solution to present day over dependence on easy and plenteous supply of energy. He then catalogues the well exercised problems of fossil carbon and nuclear, as most greens already can.

In the second half of the book Ozzie, bless him, then gently persuades us all why not to jump off that window ledge. The picture is beak but if we all calm down see, this is the future of environmentalism. Much must change but, hey, we can do it. To find out how, well you must read the book and you could just find that it becomes a central text to your life. Not least because his admirable ability to collect data and information sources is reflected in a comprehensive set of references to support his projections.

http://www.greenillusions.org/

Ten Years After

Was once a heavy metal prog rock band but here it’s a lament to military interventions and yet another milestone. All that time since American President Bush launched “Operation Shock and Awe” as a macabre display to be shown as-it-happened to millions-if-not-billions-of-viewers-around-the-world in live-technicolor by  in bedded, sorry, embedded reporters telling it exactly as the military told them it was to be told from where the military told them they had to be.

Ten years after  millions had marched in cities throughout the planet to say so clearly “No war” and “Not in our name”. Ten years after British Prime Minister Tony Bliar earned his name by fabricating grounds for the conflict and delivering these blatant frauds to the people, the newspapers and, of course, to the British Parliament. Who then were so happy to blindly sanction sending British forces to share in George Bush’s shameful show of Unstoppable Force.

So now, at this distinctive historical distance, all our media and politicians have been full of analysis. “In the light of what happened at the time and since have we in Britain got the gall to say any bit of the sordid, despicable affair was worth the outcomes”.  Hundreds of thousands have been killed,  it has replaced despotic leader with, er, despotic leader (in training) and left physical and social scars which may well never heal. The town of Fallujah, for example, who’s very name should be carved into Bliar’s soul – how dare he be so callous just for his own, personal, financial gain?

OK, I maybe drift from the text chosen by our purveyors  of potted government agenda, aka the public media. Most of them provide a very balanced, this way that way report, where one Brit or American life equates to a thousand Iraqis and physical damage on the ground is just a trivial repair job scenario. “Oh, that’s cool, Haliburton can repair that.” “Yes”, they admit, “it’s gone on longer than we predicted and it’s a lot messier but, hey, it’s Iraq we’re talking about. What would you expect?”

John Lloyd, writing in that formerly radical left wing but always demurely titled “The New Statesman” so leaving the room for right wing resurgence, thinks it was all – at the time and subsequently – worth it. Choosing pieces of the record to suit his thesis he ignores the drastic realpolitic of the time and the manner Hussein and Iraq were used as  pawns by the major powers, who smiled sweetly as they propped him up with armaments for oil. Yeah, we showed him how to gas the Kurds and provided him with the tools to do it. Then, after coaxing them into invading Kuwait – a very small but strategic part of the landmass that we kept separate when we drew the boundary lines on the maps after the second world war ended – we used our massive military force to drive them out again. Remember, or look up, “The Road to Bazra”.

For most of the ten years until the Second Gulf War there were heavy, debilitating sanctions on the Iraqi people, as well as the US/UK patrolled “No-Fly Zone”. The sanctions led to terrible death tolls arising from scarcity of essential foods and medicines, and doubtless other such commodities. A figure of over 600000 is generally accepted for child deaths alone during this period.

After his sychophantic denialism – “Bliar didn’t really know there were no WMD, Bliar just thought Saddam Hussain was an horrible person and hey maybe they might have picked the figures that looked best but, look, you’ll see, in two hundred years they’ll look back and agree with me”. – Lloyd ends curiously:

“For the left, the responsibility to protect should be part of a progressive view of global problems. That the principle has become synonymous with a kind of refurbished imperialism is a sign of decadence”.

Now I don’t know about you but there’s no way I can draw any coherent view of his understanding or any useful message from that.

1. Protection. Protection? Who ended up protected by this lunacy? Protection is forming a shield, protection could be providing support, protection is giving people a voice and not ignoring them and starving their country, protection is not promoting despotic leadership by supplying them with armaments, protection is not demoralising a whole population with shock, awe, depleted uranium bombing, white phosphorus bombing, ruthless military occupation, protection is not ruining water supply, electricity supply, transport infrastructure and a large part of the built environment.
2. So that all this happened is a sign decadence snuck in, eh? If the left hadn’t taken their eyes off the ball, maybe this decadence could have been excluded from the party, is it?
3. This “resurgent imperialism” was totally not in the ball park then, when you backed the mission. You still think it was legitimate to devastate essentially just to correct earlier cock-ups? You think this can become a tidy liberal mechanism. Maybe give it a few tweeks? So the Libyan catastrophe well, that was cool, was it? And now?
4. And as for Syria – oh yes, you mentioned Syria. “More thought needs to be given to how it might work in Syria”. Nearly two years in and you say that? With the “rebels” recently obtaining their own air force, complete with planes? Bit late for thinking, isn’t it?

I think we have a new journalistic form. You and Mark Lynas, probably others but I do try to avoid this. I’ll call you “The Woolly Right”. Fascistes dulce.

How do you price the tonne of carbon that, once burned, tips the balance and triggers catastrophic, irreversible global warming?

[I wrote this a couple of years ago for The Ecologist. They didn't use it but, hey, I still like it. It was a valid question and emphasises the position of inevitable no return we seem to be sailing through with total disregard as "our" attention is sharply focused on the quick buck......]

For one tiny moment this can be taken as a serious question. Well, it’s written dead pan and uses all the right words. The English makes an apparently rational question. And you wrestle, you struggle, get thrown to the floor even , before you smile wanly, “Oh, it’s a joke”. Like, did the last one to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power station turn out the lights?

Can you picture the scene in the TaiPei Community District Power Station, boiler number 7b, when they come to stoke up for the mid-evening power rush. “Hey, here comes that tonne, comrades. You know, the one which is going to tip the atmospheric balance and give us catastrophic global warming. Do any of you know what we paid for it?” “No comrade, but I do know that that water wasn’t coming in through the door five minutes ago.”

Of course there’s no such point. If there were, how could we ever determine it? We may deal in generalities easily and in gross quantities. We know what goes into the equation but not what comes out.

So there are three trillion tonnes of Carbon di Oxide in our atmosphere to which we add about 0.5% (15 billion  tonnes) each year. This is net, as twice this is actually released. Some is fixed to vegetation, some more is dissolved in water, maybe some becomes shellfish and more ends in the soil. It’s released as forest clearance, slash and burn, by agriculture, by fossil fuel use and even by our collective breathing – there’s six million gone to six billion of us in a very short time!

Carbon, once burned, sits in our atmosphere as an invisible record of our use of the energy it once stored. Ask a school kid about it and the answer will include the carbon cycle and climate change. How the breakdown in the former leads to the latter. They’ll give you the solution, too – let the cycle be restored, so’s it works again properly. But how? In detail they are unclear but many will tell you to “plant trees”.

But “No” we say. “That’s too simplistic.” What we must do is “use the market to propel people into situations where they voluntarily refrain from carbon burning through the application of the Principles of the Open Market”. To me this does seem a little questionable. The market has driven us all to the brink of disaster, where all our basic manufacturing and trading systems are in chaos and countless lives in ruins, yet this is still where we place our faith. It’s like asking a rapist for first aid or the burglar to put money on the meter before he leaves. No, it’s not going to happen.

So, maybe for inspiration, I turned to read. “The Forest Carbon Conundrum” a headline cried. “Allowing forest carbon to be traded freely alongside other carbon would send the carbon price tumbling”, it said, “by 57%”. Not 58% or even 55%, you note, and  “some 82% of deforestation  could be avoided”. But then it was less clear because, if you provided less “forest carbon credits”, you  would “end up reducing the amount of continued deforestation by just 16% – an unacceptably small target”. This certainly spells out the nature of the problem most clearly. In a word “Sophistry”.

In real terms money is a measure of force. So the strong accumulate money; those with a position of strength or who maintain a monopoly on a vital resource have strength and so control the allocation of finance. When it comes to it, if the moneyed wish to burn carbon, then, like Nero in ancient Rome, they will ignore all the problems around them and continue in their actions. Yes and he allowed Rome to burn so the analogy is good!

There seems to be no reduction in the rate of increase of atmospheric “greenhouse gases” . Detailed reports from groups such as “Climate Action” [Climate Safety - in case of emergency… 2009] show the alarming evidence of this reality. They issue the standard pleas to reduce carbon use and detailed pictures of the newly revealed summer ocean at the North Pole. If we price carbon burning high in some parts of the World, carbon is burned elsewhere. Economics makes fools of us all. What’s needed is to frame systems that carry us beyond the constraints of classical economics and into a wholly new mind set of sustainability and regeneration. This has to be proactive, setting real goals and defining the methodologies to get there. We’ve known this for thirty years and more and many of us are deeply frustrated, not by the lack of progress but by the appalling regression we have been witnessing.

Yes, planting trees does work. Moving to restore the lost half of the Global forest would cleanse the atmosphere beautifully – the sums add up! Small groupings such as “The Global Restoration Network”, “The Earth Restoration Service” and, of course, “The Society for Ecological Restoration International” provide expression of this, as deeply concerned, highly informed and motivated people have gathered to express modes in which we can avoid having to price carbon but simply work to build new social landscapes, where mankind and Earth can indeed interact in a sustainable manner.

There’s little point in putting a price on that tonne. If we ever got there, the price would have been too high.

 

Missing puzzle pieces?

Reblogged from Biomedical ecology and other sciences:

The headline shouted:

GMO:  Food?

“Our immune system looks at that gene sequence that is supposed to be food and says “I’ve never seen that sequence ever, it does not exist in nature , it’s foreign”.  It creates an inflammatory reaction and attacks.”

Arden Anderson, PhD, DO, MPH in the documentary “Genetic Roulette”.  [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/ ]

To which I responded:

Read more… 1,534 more words