I Feel a Campaign Coming On

I feel a campaign coming on, a campaign to tell the world about the truth about Global Warming. The truth is that ‘we don’t know’. We have our suspicions but nothing is certain. I think I may well scream if I read another report stating ‘likely consequences’, ‘possible temperatures’ and all the other vague adverbs around. In amongst all the crap that comes into my work inbox a really good one dropped by the other day with this link, which I should stress is a draft:

http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4007935

I don’t expect anyone to read all this, it being a policy paper. The interesting part (the bits I have read) is Part 1, the introduction to Global Warming. It gives a good overview of what its all about. I’m attempting to write a critique of part of it as someone has requested I do. The bottom of page 18 is really annoying me. There’s an inference that the author suggests should be ignored which I think is rather important.

I’ve just been scrolling through this document and it really is rather interesting. So the introduction has a sentence that makes me irate, but later on Page 22 there’s a rather frank statement regarding the rise in sea levels. Observing that sea levels have “risen by between 10 and 25 cm over the last century” the author asks, “How much of this anticipated climate change can be averted by reducing greenhouse gas emissions? The short answer is ‘some, but not much’”. Even if we achieved the targets set by the non-ratified Kyoto Protocol it would, “reduce future global warming by at most 0.2C.”.

I had never realised that Kyoto was talking in fractions when we’re thinking of whole numbers. 2C warmer is the 22^nd Century scenario. And that’s if we reach the Kyoto target by 2010. The other thing I learned is that warm oceans take up more space than cold oceans of the same mass. Not something I ever thought about, but we’re predicted to have lots more warm water in the future.

So the name of my new party is, “We’re Too Late – Even the Government Says So”.

Time to start building an Ark.

On a lighter note

This is cited as the Worst Music Video ever, but I think that its the best. Introduced by the Jazz Club presenter from the Fast Show its a classic slice of Finnish pop from the 1970s or 80s. The lead male looks not unlike He-Man with a medallion before his 'I am the Poweeer' moment. I think he was called Adam when he wasn't his alter-ego. The lead girl is a bit Kylie before she met Michael Hutchinson and learnt new ways of enjoying the world. The dance troupe are something else altogether.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPnGPIMUnus

I’m bored with Climate Change

Before I start I’ll say, if you haven’t already noticed, I'm a cynic and a pessimist. I’m a cynic because I live in London and the place breeds cynicism. I’m a pessimist because it means that I’m never disappointed. I’m not really a pessimist but I’m more pessimistic than I am an optimist.

Being bored with Climate Change is a very off message comment. I almost feel ashamed saying (writing) it. Its old news now except it’s the kind of news that just won’t go away. Come to think of it it is recorded in the newspapers but as it isn’t even new news how can it be described as news? Still, that isn’t my gripe with it. Here are my Climate Change gripes:

1) Seen it, heard it, experiencing it

Haven’t got the t-shirt but when I buy a hemp one I’ll let you know.

2) Its too late

What’s too late? We’re too late. The scientists are too late.

3) Human Nature can’t be changed

We all know that wars are bad and yet we carry on having them. Through history one of Man’s many defining achievements has been his affinity with war. Its something that we do a great deal of, its something we do well, its something that some of us enjoy a great deal, and we as a collective whole make a great deal of money out of it. Somewhat perversely it also provides the catalyst for our greatest inventions and entertainment. To fight amongst ourselves seems to be human nature.

So for this fight against Climate Change we’re expected to draw together as some kind of homogenous non-competitive happy family and say ‘no’ to C02, to curtail our industrial growth (I’m looking at you China and India) and say ‘yes’, the planet’s health is more important than modernity and all that defines modernity? As part of this mass pissing on bonfires we’re also expected to change radically how we carry out our daily lives, turning our backs on our entire history – no more ‘me, me, me’ and instead ‘oooh, save the planet’.

And we’re expected to do this preferably in the next 8 years (UK government) and at most by 2020. I need to check these target dates, and those of the beached whale that is Kyoto.

We’re also meant to do this in an environment which is changing rapidly around us, where fuel prices are going through the roof, and fresh water is becoming a scarcity whilst there’s going to be a big problem with the saltier stuff.

4) We’ll war before we tackle the environment

Frankly I reckon there will be a war before that happens. The good news is that we’re well practiced at war. The bad news is that it isn’t really the answer this time. It’ll help decide who controls the natural resources that are most important (I’m looking at you freshwater), but in the big picture we’ll still all be screwed. Just for the record, I reckon that the war will start somewhere in central Asia and will involve the stans, Iran, India and Pakistan. It’ll be to do with limited water resources as there are only two major supplies in the area (Himalayan meltwater and the Caspian Sea and the rivers that flow from it), and a whole swathe of countries depend on them. And if climate change is going to continue the way it is predicted then these resources are going to be radically reduced.

5) Climate Change is a 21^st Century Millenium Bug

i.e. its all a load of crap. Climate Change (CC) is all a bit of a cult. Dare to say that CC is a myth and that nobody really knows and you’ll be slated as some God-fearing intelligent design believing Texan oil megalomaniac, which is absurd. There is so much supposition in all these dire warnings of what ‘might’ happen in the future if we don’t mend our ways. Articles are full of ‘may’ and ‘could’ but nobody ever says ‘we don’t know for sure’ as that would cast doubt on their findings. And might it not be the case that all these pronouncements of the imminent green holocaust are only coming about because nobody has ever bothered to investigate this part of science before?

Denouncing Climate Change is a Thought Crime.

6) Solar Flares

Blame it on the Sun. The sun is getting hotter, and all the other planets are getting hotter, so it stands to reason that that is why we have global warming. I have absolutely no evidence of this as I have done no research on it but it sounds like a good argument to me. Of course I’ll do some research and probably find out that Exxon sponsored it and then I’ll be torn between the inter-galactic answer and the no less partisan Friends of the Earth conclusion.

7) The need to fear

Its good to be scared: we thrive on it, except we’re a bit short of things to be fearful of. We’ve had in the last century: War, Nazis, War, Communism, lots of wars, Terrorism, Globalisation (how quaint), Millenium Bug, Terrorism, Environment.

[Aside: notice how the anti-capitalist anti-globalisation movements collapsed when we realised that a) we liked the internet and b) cheap stuff comes from China]

We now need to be scared of the environment. How else are the mega-corporative military industrial complexes going to foist new exciting green ways of driving cars. Look, it runs on bio-fuels. No more being nasty to the environment. Hope the factory it came from was green and powered by sustainable sources. Robots do need a lot of electricity.

8) The Earth has a blowing hot and cold cycle

It gets hot and then it gets cold. When it gets hot things dry up, and when it gets cold it gets icy. Not much we can do about it. Maybe this should be slotted in the inter-galactic category.

9) Carbon Footprints

Not something that Father Christmas leaves on the carpet but the big new phrase. I’m terribly worried about my carbon footprint but I allay this fear by fastidiously recycling my newspapers and taking public transport. The irony is not lost on me that my recycling is carted off in a great big diesel powered truck and put on another great big diesel truck and taken to the coast where its put on a great big heavy fuel powered ship and carted off to China to be turned into loo roll in a great big factory powered by a great big coal burning power station and is then put on another great big heavy oil fuelled ship and chugged all the way back to my loo roll holder via more diesel powered trucks before being wiped on my bum, flushed down the loo, processed in a nuclear powered filtration place before being chucked in the sea.

And I only take public transport as I don’t have a chauffeur driven Mercedes to cart me to work and if I could afford a Mercedes I would probably instead have a Hummer just so I could sneer at all the other less fortunates stuck in the bus all thinking what an oil-guzzling bastard I am whilst conveniently forgetting the energy expended in making sure their bums were kept clean and their consciences clear.

Conclusion

We’re screwed. Its too late, we’ve missed the boat, and even if we hadn’t missed the boat (which by all accounts we’ll be needing) we would still miss it. There is no way in hell that we are going to achieve the targets we have set for ourselves. This doomsday scenario that the eggheads keep on telling us is incoming will happen, and will happen when they say it will. I just don’t have faith in the human race changing its ways before it is too late. This opinion doesn’t even take into account the opinions of most of the big industrial nations. China is starting to think seriously about its polluted water-ways and lack of drinking water but play this off against the new coal power station it builds every week and the resultant industrial revolution it is undergoing. India too has a rapidly expanding economy. That’s just two countries that are expected to stop right now and think of a green way to do it. I mean come on, its just NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Oh, and if does all turn out to be as threatening as a circus clown (subliminally frightening but overtly harmless) by then we’ll all be tootling about in electric hover mobiles with wind vanes on our heads and at least we’ll be greener, and no harm can really come from that…

Chuck Norris: Before the Beard

Giant Car Bumper Cock

Too much text

There's too much text here, so here's a picture. I googled 'silly picture'.

Coffee without sugar tastes of coffee

Bit of a revelation this: Coffee tastes really good without sugar. Amazing! The best instant that I've found is M&S Fairtrade Cafe Gold which really truly smells like coffee and tastes like coffee. I know I'm getting old now. I like mustard, I like coffee and I don't like sugar (as much as I used to).

Star Wars geekery

There's a Star Wars exhibition opening in London tomorrow for 6 months and I can feel myself being drawn inexorably towards it. I just know it will be full of Phantom Menace crap and stupid merchandise that I will just have to buy. I think a Yoda mug will do. I'm sure George Lucas will try and sell me the new version of Star Wars where they're all in drag except Chewie who's had a Brazilian. Same plot and special effects though.
Peep Show on tonight. Quality.

Rumsfeld Poetry

Why I don't like poetry:

It rhymes, it has iambic pentameter, its written in a stupid way without sentences which makes it harder to read - the only way to read Milton's Paradise Lost is to read it like a normal book without all the verses.

When poetry is recited the reader sounds all maudlin like their cat has just been run over and they're trying not to cry.

I can never remember poems.

They just... irritate me.... But still, here's some stuff from Donald Rumsfeld which works better when written in verse. This I can handle because I know who he is. Poets I can't handle because I don't know who they are. Neither do they. That's why they write poems:

(Lifted straight from Guardian Online)

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

A Confession

Once in a while,
I'm standing here, doing something.
And I think,
"What in the world am I doing here?"
It's a big surprise.

May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

The Situation

Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.

Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Clarity

I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.

And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.

Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

Glass Box

You know, it's the old glass box at the
At the gas station,
Where you're using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can't find it.
It's

And it's all these arms are going down in there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But

Some of you are probably too young to remember those
Those glass boxes,
But

But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.

Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

Firefox add-ons

One of the best things about Mozilla Firefox are the customisation aspects. There are some real beauties in amongst the crap. These are all for Firefox 2.0 – go to Help>Check for Updates to get the latest version.

Then go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ to find these:

Fasterfox: Noticeably speeds up page load times
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269

Google Preview: This is excellent. It inserts a preview picture (thumbnail) of any given page next to the text description in google.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269

Customize Google: This removes the adverts from Google and as the name suggests gives you far more options for how Google works than google does.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

PDF Download: Throws up a box when you click on a pdf icon asking if you want to save or not. Very useful at work.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/636

Webworld

Twitter

Web 2.0 cheerleaders are seeing www.twitter.com as one of the big new things. I signed up to it to see what it was all about and I’ve got to say that it really is completely pointless and not only that but not even interesting or fun. I suppose that it is like some kind of location specific real-time social networking site. You sign in, choose your picture then there’s an email box with a question, “What are you doing right now”. My last post was “Cancelling this pointless program”, then my message appeared with a “posted 5 seconds ago” next to it in a long list of other twitterers’ ramblings on what they are doing. I heard about it through http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/ which is a 3D modelling site associated with London University. They heard about Twitter as there is some way of joining Twitter up with Google Maps and then being able to see the location where people were trittering from. This was the initial attraction but I couldn’t get that to work. You can probably see how quickly the novelty wore off.

Joost

I reckon Joost is going to be the “Next Big Thing” so unless you subscribe to HolyMoly or read the Guardian geek pages on Thursdays you might not have heard about it. Holy Moly summed it up best. It is Sky Digital on your PC for free. Yes, it is online TV with no fees. Unlike YouTube I see that Viacom have just signed on to supply material. The guys behind Joost are the guys who created Kazaa (the peer to peer software) and who then went on to write Skype which they then sold to ebay for a crazy amount which is how they must have financed Joost.
I can’t say that I’ve actually used Joost a great deal due to time constraints but it has a great interface, is really user friendly and seems to have some good channels too.

Swingball close-ups

James Brown plays Swingball

Wow, this looks fun!

Swingball: Not much fun

I found this 1970s swingball instruction manual. See how the happy families are enjoying the thrill of swingball. What I particularly like is the picture in the bottom right corner. Two kids in school uniform playing in a cold rainy field in a caravan park which, by the look of it, is closed for the winter. And is that the Godfather of Soul James Brown at the middle bottom?

From a Bygone Age

The one and only Bobby Davro, from a time when he would go head to head with Russ Abbott!

Its the white trainers and the toothy grin that does it for me

Eighties sexpot


Surely these bears are ill advised

Note the hint of 'a bit of length' just peeking to the right of his neck. He's a pretty smooth kind of a guy.

I'm sure our celebrities are far more media-savvy now but there was a time it seems in the mid-eighties when the cheesy pose was the be all and end all of publicity. Nothing quites beats the addition of a hand-scrawled signature, and with an insincere 'With Love' homily... well, what can I say? I found these nuggets in the attic this bank holiday weekend. Father Christmas saw fit to pass them on to me quite some time ago somehow knowing that I would one day truly relish their true beauty.

(This being blogger these pictures will either appear above or below this post. There was a time when I had worked out this idiosyncracy but I can't quite be bothered to experiment today. No, they've appeared above).

Evening Standard

You know those Evening Standard boards that tell you the headlines. Perhaps they might entice you in to buy the new 'quality' ES rather than reading the free one with the same news. Anyway the print on those boards. Look how its hand-crafted by skilled craftsmen. Except its not. It might have been one day but its printed now. Look closely - all the 'a's and the 'e's are the same. So that pisses me off every time I see one. Its like, we'll pretend we're the old ES that had news and a Stop Press column on the back page and the wrong angle. But we're really the new massively loss making ES with no news about London and plenty of crap about women's fashion.
One more thing about the boards. The message on them is always negative. Often its negative and fatuous. Often it is not news either.


Then there's the freesheets. That Murdoch one is preferable to the Associated News one only because the typeface is easier. They're both shite. What really irks me every evening when I get off the tube there's some poor chap in a silver cagoul proffering me with this shitty excuse for loo roll. I don't want to be nasty to him but please leave me alone. If I wanted to read it I'd pay for it.

Rant over.

Thailand last year

I took this panorama last year thinking that one day I would find the software that could stitch it together. Turns out that Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 has something called PhotoMerge. Its pretty cool.

Cool Posters on the way to work this morning

Google

The be all and end all of internet searchery...

Its not you know. Have you noticed how so much of google is advertising? At the same time have you got this feeling that Google are slowly insidiously taking over the world? That's because they are. So they've got Google Earth – which is great – and Google Video/Youtube, and Gmail which isn't as good as Yahoo! Mail, but they're no better, they've got Flickr. They've got Blogger and Sketchup too. That Google desktop manager. I installed it on my work pc but I wouldn't put it on my home one. Its a security risk. It indexes your files to make it easier for you to find stuff, so far so what. But where does it put the index of your files? On a Google server that's where. I know its only an index but still, I wouldn't knowingly give my bank statements index to the world's biggest search engine to keep safe.

There are search engines called meta-crawlers. I don't what that means, I imagine that sand people live in them, or worse. Meta-Crawlers are dead clever. Instead of just looking on one search engine when you type something in, they look on all of them at once. There's metacrawler.com This searches Google, Yahoo!, MSNSearch and Ask. The problem is that it tends to throw up the top 10 most popular choices from each site at the same time, which means there are lots of identical results.

But there's a very old free program that I hadn't used since 2001 called Copernic Agent. Here it is. This searches 10 of the biggest search engines, except Google, then filters everything nicely for you.

As I do lots of research as part of work, I'm finding loads of stuff that just isn't on Google.

Very handy.

9/11 End of the Conspiracy

My work has been a little dull of late which means I’ve been spending more and more time perusing the internet. Of course being in a work environment means that I don’t have free reign, and so I have to stick to sites I regard as work safe – the Guardian and Wiki and so on. I also have to steer clear of video and pictures. Today there was an article regarding the every growing 9/11 Truth Movement, the BBC documentary demolishing it last Sunday night, and an internet film called Loose Change which has been viewed 4.7 million times on Google Video/Youtube.

Personally I think that the whole 9/11 conspiracy things is a load of bollocks. I accept that there are lots of weird coincidences and some proof which seems pretty convenient and that the US response at the time was frighteningly cack-handed. If you don’t know them, the main conspiracies are that:

1) The twin towers were brought down by a controlled explosion

2) WTC 7 (a 40 storey building that collapsed later in the day) was brought down by a controlled explosion

3) The Pentagon was not hit by a hijacked plane but by something else – a cruise missile.

4) United 93 was shot down.

5) 4000 Jews were told to not to go to work that day

6) and so on

I had a good look into this, and luckily being the cynic that I am I managed to extricate myself from the quagmire of supposition, misquotes and selective evidence before it completely drowned me. And why? Anyone with a brain knows that using the internet to self-diagnose a personal illness is madness. Similarly, the internet is the biggest game of Chinese Whispers ever. Yes there are reputable sites and reputable news sources, but in the same breath there are all the rantings of the insane and righteous and believers ad infinitum. To think that by using the internet of all things to glean any information for anything so un-cut and dried as 9/11… that’s how easy it is – I almost went on a rant there out of the blue on the random rantiness of the internet.

My point – it almost got lost there – my point is this:

1) Governments are completely inept at just about everything they do. We have the Civil Service and they are fucking useless. So any suggestion that Bush and Cheney and Co could organise something like that is madness.

2) There have been no whistle-blowers from a cast of thousands

Enough of my ranting, here’s the evidence:

Conspirators:

http://www.911truth.org/

http://www.loosechange911.com/

People with too much time on their hands

Against

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

Everybody else. Not the nutjobs.

A 9/11 Conspiracy Post from The Grauniad today

... The conspiracists seem to have an alarming amount of faith in their government. Considering their record at governing the US and Iraq to all intents its been one cock-up after another. And yet these inbreds apparently organised 9/11 and kept it secret all this time. Governments in general are absolutely hopeless at just about everything they do.

As for 9/11: So What? So George Bush organised 9/11(do you realise how stupid that sounds)? Or was it the Military-industrial complex? Did it have something to do with JFK's murder, the Mafia and Roswell? Maybe Anna-Nicole Smith found out the truth and was murdered!

But come on, we all know that the BBC documentary was paid for by Halliburton and Mi5 wrote the script. It too was a conspiracy, a conspiracy to cover-up the other conspiracy to expose the cover-up of the first conspiracy, or was there a conspiracy before that?

Finally, were the Embassy Bombings and the USS Cole blown up as part of a conspiracy by the neo-cons to get Clinton out after Newt Gingrich failed? And were the Madrid and London bombings instigated by the CIA to prove that Al-Qaeda really do exist? Or they were just copycat killings right?