We’ve been predicting it, and now it appears to have happened. After Cancún, Anthropogenic Global Warming is generally expected to have oulived (by far) its fifteen minutes of fame, and will be quietly dropped by Western governments; so quietly, in fact, that they’re hoping we won’t notice. So much for the “greatest moral challenge of our time”.
But nature abhors a vacuum, and those behind the AGW racket, politically and financially, have not gone away. Like the shape-shifters of Greek and Norse mythology, the same movement behind AGW is about to be re-branded—this time, as biodiversity.
I was fascinated to read a comment on the Delingpole blog from poster hro001, detailing the creation 0n 11th June this year by the UN of the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Their website is here. Following the link to hro001 (Hilary)’s blog, you can read chapter and verse on the creation of this new body and its aims. It makes eerily familiar reading.
Its various roles will include carrying out high quality peer reviews of the wealth of science on biodiversity and ecosystem services emerging from research institutes across the globe in order to provide gold standard reports to governments.
See what I mean? There’s plenty more, and I encourage you to pop over to Hilary’s place and read it for yourselves. All the familiar rubrics are there: a veneer of scientific respectability (indeed, if you’ll forgive two Latin phrases in one sentence, a modus operandi of argumentum ad vericundiam); a presupposition of a problem (diminishing biodiversity) and a guilty party (mankind); biodiversity “tipping points”; punitive economic measures aimed at reducing the damage, and even (how’s this for chutzpah) proposing biodiversity offsets.
Biodiversity offsets!!!
I’ll predict that, as they are using life sciences as their vehicle (as opposed to physical sciences with AGW) their core scientific thesis will be much harder to disprove this time round. Maybe it’s a personal prejudice, as my own background is in physical science, but I’ve always found biological sciences a bit more nebulous, less rooted in mathematics (except at the molecular DNA level). After all, if they’re claiming it’s getting hotter, and everybody can see outside their windows it’s freezing, there’s only so long you can go on using excuses like weather versus climate, mitigating effects of the Gulf stream, La Niña, and so on and so on, before the theory crashes and burns. Try disproving the assertion there’s less biodiversity now than there was thirty years ago. No, in biodiversity I believe we will see post-normal science come to its fullest flower.
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
They will run out of money first. We can only hope.
OZ…well glad you are now officially in the anti biodiversity camp I posted on this a few days ago but not specifically the UN conference. I need to up my game because I have a few ideas where this is all leading or what is really happening.
Walt will the end be when they have to start repeating conference venues, with the words oh no not the Maldives again.
Damage control to save government pensions invested in environmentally-responsible trusts is what this is. This is a pathetic panic-level drill to save a burning house with spoonsful of water.
Hope the dope armies in Mexico don’t decide to engage in a major Cancun binge of kidnapping to diversify their portfolio. Anyone here want to post ransom for Gore?
Crownarmourer, they should be forced to have their conferences in Little America, Antarctica or Mongolia in February.
Crown, no — more likely to be ‘we *did* Corfu three months ago, and my wife is very fond of Hawaii’.
If anyone ever suggests Toledo, Ohio, then we know that they’re not just messing about but really mean business. And that’ll be trouble.
Walt, you’re thinking along the same lines that I am!
So biodiversity is just a politicized but seemingly non-political echo of the Left’s assumptions about society: that ‘diversity’ is good for its own sake, without any need to inquire into what it actually gives us. And diversity is always seen in its outward forms, or in terms of representing various grievance groups or minorities: diversity of though, or opinion, is really not welcomed (‘What — a genuine Tory? What — a conservative? Get outta here!). They want lock-step Leftist/watermelon thinking but all the faces of the rainbow so they can’t claim to be fair-minded.
And as for bio-diversity: nature can usually see to that just fine all by itself. But there are times when humans are more than willing to help, provided they know they’re not encouraging a threat to themselves — which is why people put bird feed out and nesting boxes but don’t throw crumbs down for cockroaches and pizza for rats. Makes sense to me!
Yes, I quite agree … our only saving grace might be that they’ve overdone the wolf-calls to such an extent that:
a) the MSM will be more cautious before jumping – unquestioningly – on this new, improved, flavour of bandwagon
b) surely there’s only so much hysteria that the public will tolerate (we may have reached a “saturation point”)
c) the immutable law of pendulums has kicked in, and it’s now swinging the other way
d) they’ve prematurely hoist themselves on the blades of their own wind turbines …
although it will be somewhat interesting to watch them squirm as they try to hang on while peddling the perils of “biodiversity loss”!
Incidentally, there’s an interesting paper which examines the history of alarmist prognostications that is quite instructive:
Click to access green%26armstrong-agw-analogies.pdf
Thanks for link 😉
Hilary
Cough. I see I got the above all typo’d. Should be ‘thought’ not ‘though’ (made the same mistake on *your* blog, Crown), and should be ‘can claim ‘ not ‘can’t claim’.
Hilary, thanks for the information.
Just want to add: G’day Oz.
If Mexican kidnappers were smart they would snatch Gore and then threaten to release him if we don’t pay them.
Biologists are already hip deep in AGW grants so a switch to biodiversity would be a no-brainer for them. Does this mean we should no longer try to eradicate things like Plasmodia falciparum, smallpox virus, polio virus, AIDS virus, etc? Should we encourage the development of drug resistant strains of bacteria? Should we abandon pesticide use and let millions starve as insects devour food crops? Do we stop killing rats and mice? Do I tell my girlfriend she has to stop killing gophers (yeah…like that’s gonna happen)? Where I live we aren’t allowed to kill the coyotes that eat neighborhood cats. Is that protecting biodiversity, or just coyotes?
If Mexican kidnappers were smart they would snatch Gore and then threaten to release him if we don’t pay them.
Ooooohh. The ultimate weapon.
If the amount of money thrown at AGW was spent on WESTERN industrial development and training, we would not be in the economic straits we are now. People know this. I noticed also at the same time that HMG is tightening its domestic pursestrings, they plan to boost foreign aid by 40%.
Countervailing import tariffs, Western countries putting their own people first, no more foreign subsidies to nations which openly or covertly seek our blood and the overthrow of our countries, and skeet shooting of greentards launched from arbalists. Open no-home-free licence to do what one so wills with anyone so much as wearing a green necktie. Simples. LOL
Large circus tent-stake mallets do nicely too. Papu, inexplicable force of nature, has the answer to any questions which might arise concerning this policy: http://revver.com/video/606423/papu-family-values/ It seems a rational alternative “relative” to current political solutions.
hro001 says:
October 21, 2010 at 10:26 am
Hilary, thank you for the paper, I’d not seen it. Amazing how the same bad pennies keep turning up.
“Stephen Schneider was active in the efforts to ban DDT, to get governments to act to
prevent global cooling and, in recent years, to get the government to act to prevent global warming.”
Pointman
Crown, you are a wicked wicked wicked soul. I like you, though.
From Crownarmourer’s blog http://knottedprop.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/biodiversity-the-next-scare-bubble/#comments
Amanda
Question for you, Crown.
In the days of slavery, sugar was the big-money crop. Many people in England didn’t want to consume it or, if they did, said a mea culpa over their cups of tea because of the slaves that had harvested it.
My question is, if you loved sugar and sweets (as I do) but slave-labour was needed to get it, what would you do? Not eat it and go without? Stick with honey (stick, get it –ha ha ha)? Or move to Canada or New England and eat maple syrup?
on October 20, 2010 at 7:18 pm | Reply crownarmourer
Amanda tough question I would use slaves but only if they were organic and harvested in a eco friendly sustainable manner.
Amanda yes I am destined for hell however I expect for once to be in the company of the rich and famous.
Crown, see the Jukebox for the song I’ve put up in your honour. I just thought of it now.
Oh, it’s Joni Mitchell, ‘Carey’.
Pointman, hi.
G’day Ozboy,
Biodiversity offsets!!!
Remember when the WWF bought huge tracts of Amazon rainforest so as to “harvest” Carbon Credits for NOT destroying it?
What are the chances of it all being worth twice as much now that proposed Biodiversity Offsets compound its value?
Considering that the Wilderness Society has just signed a Contract with the Tasmanian Govt to stitch up huge tracts of our forests and close down forest logging, what’s the bet that they’ll all share in Dividends from creating a Carbon Sink PLUS whatever the value of Biodiversity Credits?
Chutzpah indeed!! You can’t say these people don’t plan ahead.
Ok found the propaganda video….
Amanda left one on the jukebox.
Biodiversity offsets!!!
A thought – (I have a few sometimes..lol)
Wonder if eradicating feral animals will earn Bio-credits. You know, when the Govt laces grain with rat poison to kill the wild horses in Kosciusko National Park (doesn’t kill them, just causes haemorrhaging in their joints, they go lame and starve to death) or machine-gun them from helicopters (very bad PR reactions – poison’s quieter).
Can a farmer claim Bio-credits for getting rid of rabbits but gets heavy fines for culling kangaroos?
Will this create an impetus (and finance) for finally killing off cane-toads? (Sorry Bufo).
If I call my Pest-Guy to get rid of a European Wasp nest will I get Credits but if he knocks off native water-rats that have gotten into my house, will I get fined?
The implications are unfathomable.
Crown, sir, I’ve seen the film you’ve shown and I have some questions, sir.
1) So that’s the choice: between ‘indigenous’ people and ‘city’ people? What if I don’t fit in either category? Isn’t there a whole lot in between?
2) ‘Could’ be 90 million species? According to whose model? You could say 900 million and I couldn’t contradict that. Bit like the stars in the universe, innit? Yes, I like seeing lots of butterflies and I appreciate that it takes a lot of different trees and fungi to make the world’s forests. Beyond that, the actual figure doesn’t really mean very much. You might as well just say ‘a lot’. (Reminds of Woody Allen asking Mariel Hemingway ‘how many times can you m ~ l ~ ?’ Her answer: ‘A lot’ (if I remember right).)
3) ‘They’re disappearing’ — Where’s the evidence? ‘At an alarming rate’ — show me.
Frightening rates: prove it.
4) ‘Projected trends’: would those be the same sort of models that predicted climate change?
5) Percentages don’t mean anything unless I know what population numbers you’re working with in the first place.
6) If land is converted to food crops, what do you suppose we humans should do? Not eat? Why do you think fertilizers and pesticides are used? So there’s more food for humans that need it, perchance?
7) Well there comes climate. They’ll have to edit that part of the video as that won’t work as a prop/purported cause any more.
8) This is globalism gone mad. Humans have been messing about with the genes of veg and animals since before we started to build civilizations. But somehow I am now to believe that if a frog goes here, a bear will go there and a human being will be depressed over there because it’s all so sad.
9) I note the emotional, Mr Crown, and is that really allowed? Spiritual need? You mean if the hwang-mao beetle of the Yang-Zho slopes disappears, I shall be spiritually impoverished? Am I spiritually impoverished when nature disappears species all by herself, as she regularly does and always has?
10) Why do they have a narrator who sounds like she has a mild lisp? Is that to stimulate our sense of sympathy and compassion? Sweet young thing with a lisp?
11) ‘Saving species protects jobs’. Uh-huh. Wonderful.
12) I’m glad that it’s all go in Nagoyah. What does that have to do with me in Florida?
13) Why is Sting singing in the background?
14) Children are planting trees. Lovely. Shame they have to be manipulated by the U. N.
15) ‘Our very existence is put in peril’: hyperbole?
16) ‘Must be ratified by all the world’s governments’: coercion? What about sovereignty? Democracy? Was anyone at the U. N. making such noises when Saddam Hussein made war against the people of his own marshlands and desecrated the ecosystem of what once was ancient Sumer? Huh? Or did the U. N. just let that atrocity go unnoticed?
I don’t know why there is an emoticon at number 8. I did not knowingly put it there. Hmmm.
Amanda as to number 14 they work for me and it’s sugar cane they are planting.
amanda as for species most of the guesstimate could be insects and things like bacteria and deep sea organisms. But yes they are guessing.
Crown,
as to the sugar — I shoulda known.
As to numbers: they make it sound awfully definite though, don’t they? And I note that they do not bother to specify that it’s mainly or often life on the level of sponges –which are only just above bacteria in complexity, if I remember rightly. Certainly there is nothing dumber than a sponge, even when alive! :^)
By the way, I’m eating Lyle’s golden syrup right now… homemade treacle tart…
Hi Crown,
Saw the promo video…….
Seems biodiversity is the biggest impetus behind tourism which is fine if everyone wants a life-long career as a bell-hop, taxi-driver, waitress, chambermaid, cook or dishwasher, forever cleaning up after or toting the wealthy about as they wander the planet scrutinising wildlife.
I’d rather leave it to the David Attenboroughs of the world to bring Nature into my living room – far more eco-friendly.
David Attenborough is really handsome and I could have fallen for him about 25 years ago although that would have made me the same age I was when I started digging Foreigner; but he has old-fashioned English teeth, all knocked about like an ancient graveyard.
By the way, when the BBC recipe tells you to put 9 tablespoons of golden syrup in with the same amount of fresh white bread crumbs (made in my breadmaker, btw), and mix that with a full teaspoon of ground ginger and the grated rind of one whole lemon and the juice of same, don’t believe it. You will end up with a ginger tart tasting somewhat like lemon and very little of treacle. It’s true that I’ve eaten the whole thing in about 24 hours, because it was so thin and there was nothing to it really — but that just proves my point: you need *twice* the syrup and *twice* the bread crumbs and *half* the ginger and *half* the lemon rind (though perhaps the juice is all right). And I say that as someone that likes both ginger and lemon.
amanda as to the clues you have mentioned about foreigner you must be what 29 now or was that 26 years old.
Blackswan and there are a limited number of wealthy people and only so many hotels they wish to stay at so maybe a reduction in the number of people perhaps, so they don’t have to pay for the poor people.
Crown: he he he. As my grandma says when you tell her you like her cooking (as I really do): ‘you can come again!’
By the way, if a BBC recipes says the wrong thing and wrecks a treacle tart, does that mean my family still in England gets a tax rebate?
Crown: I think the whole propaganda vid smacked of pushing people’s buttons: let’s try *this* button. And if *that* doesn’t work, let’s try this other button… let’s appeal to their sentimentality, and in the next breath let’s appeal to their greed. Yuck.
How sweet. How courteous, how respectful of elders.
Amanda yes that is what it is for Hakuna Matata the circle of life living in harmony with nature blah blah blah.
Meant for weaker minds than ours, life is really resilient and can bounce back fast. The Amazon forest 500 years ago was farmed intensively criss crossed with man made canals etc. They got smallpox died out and what you think of as pristine wilderness isn’t.
Same goes for the jungles of Central America.
I don’t know what Big Bird is on about; but I imagine that being fancied by a woman that could be his granddaughter would indeed seem ‘respectful’ by a man such as Attenborough.
Crown: I believe there is still pristine wilderness somewhere; I believe I’ve even *seen* some of it. Mainly in Canada. Because no one wants to live there, and hardly anyone ever has.
Crown, what about this more modern version?
amanda… David Attenborough for some reason he’s just not my type.
This is more my type… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eLDvM7eSq0&p=7733B6449023A1E9&playnext=1&index=82
Obviously if that is how one measures “respect” for others and their Life’s Work.
amanda the pristine wilderness in Canada may only be 12,000 – 8000 years old.
BTW, I know you probably think they’re ***. Well, the lead tenor was for sure, and died young of AIDS. But I saw them in Toronto at an outdoor venue and we all enjoyed their performance very much.
Swan, that is *not* how I respect others and their life’s work. There is scarcely an Attenborough documentary that I have not seen and learned from. I have his autobiography — much recommended by my father — on my shelf right now. However, I do reserve the right to look at men as women look at men. ‘Young’ or ‘old’. And the chorus of protest against my doing so is … not there.
Blackswan as the saying going goes respect is earned and not given, so yes if you have led what could be considered a good honest decent life and achieved something with your work and raised the children well to do likewise then yes a modicum of respect is due.
As long as it does not turn out that your youth was wild and full of the wrong kind of adventure.
I am talking in general not you personally and just because you are old does not mean you deserve my respect however your actions may.
Crown, nothing in Canada is very old, except for the Precambrian Shield. And truth be told, I wouldn’t know that if it fell on me like a gargoyle from a great height.
Is it wrong to respect scantily clad bikini models?
Are we getting crossed wires? Who was Swan addressing? Was it me, who dared to observe that Attenborough’s smile is darling when his lips are shut but reveals tombstones when they’re open, or was it Crown, who prefers a young hot nubile babe with great pipes and other things to the guy that hosted Zoo Quest? We may never know.
I found the Victorias secret video on youtube but I’m not allowed to watch it but I respect their work.
Of course, whatever you say. It is there…..you simply have no capacity to hear it.
Crown, great: so if I tell you that the other day I purchased the leopard-print ‘miraculous’ bra with cross-over black cords in the front and black ribbon straps, you will have absolutely no idea what on earth I’m talking about? Unless your wife bought one, of course. The leopard print is so realistic, isn’t it?
Calling in Swan… come in, number seven…
Who is ‘you’?
Actually Dave Attenborough has done some great work his politics may be a little off but this is the man who brought us Life on Earth, Burgess shales included a prime example that life is constantly changing, some of dies out new life forms arise, mankind may not be here forever, if we left this amazing blue planet and settled on new alien worlds we would change into something new.
Puerile rubbish.
amanda you would be correct and I am totally banned from saying thinks like “gosh I am unsure of that which you speak you will need to send me pictures of that” on account of my life being measured in minutes rather than years.
Okay, well, I don’t wish to be inflammatory or anything — craving your favour your Honour Mr Ozboy sir — but it would seem that what Swan is saying is that it’s sacrilegious to view Sir David as if he does NOT actually have a foot in the grave. That the idea of say, wining and dining Sir David, a bit of live piano and a nice Giacomo Conterno from a fortunate year, while wearing my most fetching outfit — assuming that he would have my company — is somehow beyond the pale and disrespectful to his Life & Work. Though I have to say, try as I might I cannot see how he would view it that way…..
Crown LOL! What a treasure! No wonder she is a dragon over you! I would be, too!
What’s this about Richard Attenborough in a tiger patterned beribboned bra with tombstone teeth dirty dancing with Big Bird? Or was it a baby seal?
Well, at least no one mentioned the S***P word.
crownarmourer says:
October 21, 2010 at 2:30 pm
As quietly as I can, I must tell you that jungles eat everything, but most of all minds. Nothing stands before them. Only those born there and continuously resident there for at least 50 generations have any business confronting the Green Grin for a lifetime.
Ssshh! Walt, to indicate sh**p is to mention sh**p! Oh darn, I’ve just done it again.
Walt, that spider still gettin’ to you, huh?
Amanda, there are triple canopy tropical forests in the Everglades. One summer take the trip with Mr. A. with a well-armed guide or two on an airboat. Then imagine 13 months of that, where the only god you have left to believe in is the Helicopter God. Something apart from the forces of Heaven and Hell stalks the mangroves.
Well as me Nan used to say “life’s too short to argue” sound advice but she also said “kill him” while watching the wrestling but that is little old ladies for you.
amanda as for my dragon lady she has tiger eyes and an unusual iris colour deepest purple. The tiger eyes is an optical illusion because of the way the light catches her eyes.
Confuselated Bear….confronting the Green Grin for a lifetime. My friend had one of them it was all down to bad oral hygiene.
Well, actually, the barracks at Fort Clayton were quite nice, actually LOL ( The Asia sojourns into the hellspots of Southeast Asia were in’s and out’s, too, out of Japan.) No air conditioning or we would all have had pneumonia in 72 hours. The entire Canal Zone also enjoyed the not-Nature-respecting General Gorgas who kicked yellow fever’s arse and cleared out the mosquitoes for the most part with simple vegetable oil coating of the standing water surfaces in the area in the early part of the twentieth century. If you’ve a fillable spray bottle, and a mosquito problem, you can do the same thing for your neighborhood with a half gallon of Mazola. Mosquitoes actually have a very limited flight radius and are territorial to boot, which is why the oil on the water treatment works.
I try to tell people mosquitoes are worse in the summer in upstate NY than they were during the rainy season in Panama, and they don’t believe me. Asia was and is a different story. Asians do not know what motivated General Gorgas or why he did what he did for a general’s pay. Such practical altruism is lost on them.
Comfy at home no longer confuselated Bear: Do I have to? Can’t we just admire them and then get in the car?
but she also said “kill him” while watching the wrestling but that is little old ladies for you.
LOL Oh my goodness. I love your nan already. My nan was a goer, too, so I expect our nans would be there together shouting ‘kill him!’ and debating about who would make the tea.
Crown: Tiger eyes. Hmm, interesting. I have tiger-eyes in my ring and my matching ‘slave-bracelet’ (or ‘handflower’ as the seller on Etsy prefers to call it). Love the colour. Sort of glowing caramel, dark and light.
Amanda,
Itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MIUVDsz-lM&feature=related Along came the rain and washed the spider out Bwahahahaha!
If you’ve a fillable spray bottle, and a mosquito problem, you can do the same thing for your neighborhood with a half gallon of Mazola.
Why the hell didn’t the city of Houston think of that?
Do you know what they do? In the mosquito season — which is at least half the year — they send the loudest, scariest-sounding, horses-of-the-Apocalypse spraying truck round residential streets at — you guessed it — three o’clock in the morning. Do you know what it’s like to be woken for months on end at three a.m. by a scary, the enemy-is-coming-for-you truck, with the accompanying chemical stink, assuming you are silly enough to have a window open?
God I love Florida!
G’day All,
Another milestone for me: yesterday morning (my time) LibertyGibbert passed 100,000 hits. Not much compared to Anthony Watts (who reached 50 million hits a few weeks ago), but nonetheless a big thank you to all who have supported this site over the past few months.
Cheers,
Ozboy.
Walt, most spiders are nice, little, harmless, dinky, mind-their-own-business sorts of beings. They would never in a million years criticise David Attenborough. Or ask for a date with him.
Sleep well.
amanda the unseen backbone of civilization are little old ladies with sharpened umbrellas at the ready to wield unforeseen punishment on the wicked. Little old ladies are also the ones known to fight off bears tigers and other assorted dangerous animals with impunity while many a man flees for his life.
Oz: Congrats! We all think you’re swell! Love the site. Thank you so much for having us.
Crown: I’m glad to hear it, as I intend to be one of them some day. : ) G’night.
Goodnight amanda.
Crown: Goodnight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZex6cWWCg8&feature=related My spider was bigger.
Walt one for you… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHAeJSwUbaw&feature=related
bb
A film from Environment Canada on spider behaviour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAkgc9WX-Dg Velly interesting.
Walt my spiders are bigger…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPE00A6b9TY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOHJUrcVdJk&feature=related This is sort of cute in a profoundly twisted way. Dagon was actually the god the Philistines worshipped. There is a lot of crossover stuff one hates to think about in Lovecraft’s work. But hey, that’s New England.
That’s what standoff arty is for. There should have been self-propelled 155’s the back of that hill loving those spiders in high-trajectory mode while the guys on the wall had smokes and a brew.
Wonder if you can ship one of those spider thangs to the White House freight collect.
“Special Delivery!”
I get misty bear… he did a lot of work with R E Howard as well, Lovecraft was a horror genius and the fact that sometimes things don’t end so well is a plus. The ‘At the mountains of madness’ may end up as a movie.
I get misty bear there is something to be said for Robert Heinleins vision of citizenship only be granted to people who are willing to serve society via service in the military.
Well there is until you remember that some people at the top are somewhat odd and prone to stupid decisions
bb.
I love Nature in any calibre it requires.
The hilarious part of all this save the tree slug stuff is three or four generations ago most of us Yanks were fighting Nature just to survive. No Indian flute music, no dancing pandas, no pink fluffy bunnies. More like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0so5er4X3dc&NR=1&feature=fvwp Well, maybe not.
Crownarmourer,
Me and me Dah went to catch this as a sort of goodbye present to me prior to shipping off to Southeast Asia, then we had a couple of beers in silence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4gTt6rptTU&feature=related Then he said, “Glad the Marines don’t have horses.” Amazingly good film work, almost hallucinogenic.
I fink our next pushoff into glory won’t turn out so well as this Tony Richardson beauty, mates. Too many fronts at once, not enough troops. vulnerable supply lines, the lot.
Good post Ozboy, this will get interesting. Just to re-iterate yesterday’s Guardian Editorial ‘Around 1.9 million species have been described , but nobody knows whether the world is home to seven million of them, or to 70 million’.
The sub-text being ‘we haven’t the foggiest but we must save them all, with the exception of homo sapiens, whom we loathe’.
One very hard figure to find is the average lifespan of a species or even any agreed ‘concensus’on any number – they simply don’t know. Various studies come up with various figures, the most optimistic by a very long chalk being 10 million years. Allowing for that, 99.9% of all species that have ever existed on the Earth are extinct and the vast vast majority of them left no offspring species behind. The Earth has only been around 4.5 billion years and only contained life in any basic biological, and I mean in a cellular sense, for about 500 million years.
The Dinos were knocking about for 150 million years and died off about 60 million years ago. The got hit by a mass extinction but mass extinctions were old news by that time. It had happened before several times. There was one before theirs called the Great Extinction. That baby took out 95% of the species on our planet and we still don’t know what caused it.
There were proto-humans and I’m being very generous here with the ‘humans’ bit, knocking around 200 thousand years ago, some contemporaneously but essentially homo sapiens (that would be us folks), have only been around 40 thousand years or so.
If you’ve ever been at sea in a storm or caught out in the country when some bad dude weather arrives, you’ll know on a personal level what every creature on the face of the Earth knows. Anytime Mother Nature decides to do so, she can reach out and snatch the life right out of you. As in individuals, so in species.
The idea that we’ve any effect on forces like that or can somehow run the show is not just arrogant but simply ludicrous. If we have one survival trait in the face of something like that, it’s not our intelligence. It’s our ability to adapt to what’s coming at us.
Pointman
G-Day, howdy, hi & hey (I think that covers just about everyone), oh, ni hou Locusts. I peek in every so often but don’t have time to stop for a drink. Foster dog, dog and family can be very demanding. I thought I’d comment a bit as this is my field (or at least related to it). If AGW doesn’t crash down with lot’s of nasty very public lawsuits, loss of credibility, funding pulled and government shake ups, this could get very ugly. Like Dr. Dave said, biologists are already looking to get a piece of the action. There is a lot of pressure to chase funding and a lot of borderline dubious science going on. There is also a lot of prestige in identifying a new species. The claims that X number of species go extinct a year are similar to the X number of possible planets with life on it. It is a made up equation with no real basis. There is also the claim that X number of species have yet to be discovered. This is really dangerous if included in the biodiversity numbers because it skews the data. Another problem is that good science can be used to increase species number and rarity. An example is that they just recently decided (with the help of genetic testing) that a population of a certain kind of gibbon was a different subspecies. This species was already threatened, but now we have two subspecies that are highly endangered. Now we have to pour twice as much money in to that country because there are two species rather than one, but before that we have to waste a bunch of money to decide the best way of preserving their biodiversity (preventing cross breeding of the two subspecies).
I don’t do phylogenetics so I can’t be sure, but I don’t think that they have set standards for how much of a difference you need to have to separate a species, subspecies, race etc. I’ll look that up tomorrow at work if I get the chance. I’m sure there is lots of warring between the lumpers and splitters.
Anyhow, I hope that AGW crashes hard and burns anyone who is involved, otherwise the bad ones wont hesitate to climb on this bandwagon and the good might get drawn in. I also hope when it does crash it destroys the UN. I have a few things to say about the last few posts, but that will have to wait for another time.
Good night all. I’ll try to come back tomorrow.
T.
I didn’t stamp on a cockroach this morning. I now have earned one 1 EUBiDiv credit. Can I auction this on eBay or do I have to wait until EBX is created? Is this a scam invented by the Jainists?
What a fantastic cause, it’s hard to argue against, and again fits in marvellously with the Gaia theory. I am all in favour of biodiversity. It’s hard to be against it, unless you are a French
sheepfarmer protesting the reintroduction of wild bears and wolves in to the Alps.I didn’t wash this morning, saving millions of armpit bacteria in the process.
The best way to ensure biodiversity is to eat everything we dare and keep as pets all that we can’t bear to eat. There are far too many cows and wait for it… sheep in the world.
In fact, there ought to be a movement against cows and
sheep, and chickens that lay large eggs, and oversized apples: all species that only exist because of human meddling. Oh and dogs, and cats, and pigs.People should be banned from mowing their lawns, or at least fined if grass is found to be below half a foot in height. In future when people talk about a snake in the grass, they will mean a real one rather than Slo’worm, the amorous milkman.
England should be reforested, as should everywhere else; and mobile phones banned, as they are killing all the bees.
Oh stuff it, lets just kill everyone instead.
Stop Global Dumbing Now
Thanks for the attempted hi! Unfortunately you accidently called me either a monkey or a wart! I can’t tell which…
If you examine the human eye as an optical instrument, what’s interesting is how small its visual acuity actually is. Visual acuity is basically how much of the world an eye can see at any one moment. The visual acuity of the human eye is about the area of your thumbnail viewed at arms length! The eye scans what’s in front of us and the brain stitches all of the little images together to come up with a bigger picture of the world. We see with our brains. We know it does this because without that process or something similar, we wouldn’t be able to see.
This area of scientific enquiry bumps up against the biggie in Biology, the brain versus the mind. Think of the brain as the hardware and the mind as the software. We know lots and lots about the brain and how it functions at a biomechanical and chemical level but we’re essentially clueless about the mind. It is for this reason that experiments in this area are fascinating.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11553099
Pointman
Should those in favour of biodiversity be against racial mixing?
The Green evolution
From watermelon to Phlegm Glob; I had been using watermelon as a derisive term for the useful idiots involved in the last hoax (AGW). After I learned (H/T Crown) that there may be folks who found the term watermelon, distasteful for completely the wrong reasons, I have decided to start using the term Phlegm Glob, to describe the vile slimy green all the way through idiots.
I encountered one of these Phlegm Globs over at the guardian; I enclose its foul mouthed display of arrogance in full.
“Let me guess, you have no idea what the word “biodiversity” means, and you’re so fucking stupid you just wrote a troll comment about something you are totally ignorant of. Here’s a good idea to save you future embarrassment: look up what “biodiversity” means in a dictionary before you write trollish comments about it. OK?”
I looked in a dictionary and I found Biodegradable, biodynamic, but no sign of biodiversity, it must be my old 1999 dictionary.
Did they perhaps mean check Wiki?
“Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is one measure of the health of ecosystems. Life on Earth today consists of many millions of distinct biological species.”
They have no idea how many species there are out there.
They have found creatures declared extinct, alive and kicking (Lazarus taxon) just one well known example is the coelacanth.
They find new species everywhere they look, how can they now declare that we are under threat from a vanishing biodiversity (an unknown word in 1999), if they do not know how big it is to start?
NoIdea
A song for our lovebirds:
Which reminds me of another one:
Haha
Morning Everyone.
Oh No!! Now we’re coming to the end of the CAGW/CC/whatever and don’t seem to be replacing it with CAGCooling there obviously has to be another bandwagon for jumping on to keep the coffers filling.
As to the number of species involved – it sounds like Keith Waterhouse’s “Ministry of Guesswork” to me.
If you really want to see how much processing the brain does on sensory input, meet Daniel Kish. He’s totally blind and yet can ‘see’ using echolocation. He’s now teaching other blind people the technique.
Pointman
And Dan Kish isn’t the only one.
Pointman
To me, it seems if the money spent on these risibly transparent schemes to generate return on investment from outright lies and fabricated paradigms of Nature’s behaviour are but another way to make money from a priori an arbitrary reward/punishment matrices the unwitting public must negotiate as rats do a maze to get at their piece of cheese. This is how people think when they are unemployable and have no marketable skills of use to others.
If all the money spent on these Ponzi schemes and outright fraud were committed instead to simple industrial development to create work for the masses and to provide an honest return to the investors, there would not be the scramble to save all these tanking environmental investment funds which full well deserve to fail.
Reviewing changes in economic activity in the apparel sector, I would name the Noughties the Years the West Gave Away Their Textiles And Shoe Industries to Nations Which Do Not Care About Quality. They don’t care as the market was given to the Third World as a tool to develop their manufacturing sectors so they could enjoy the growth we do not. Clothing is a huge market, and one may attack it with only a serger, sewing machine, cutter, and a few patterns to start. I know personally a young woman working as a shop clerk who makes men’s coats on the side who is making four times from her coat making than from the retail work.
It’s not a labour issue which chased away domestic Western production of clothing either. Based on the offsetting factor of lower per capita productivity, offshore labour costs based on workhour expenditure and shipping dock rework are three to four times what they are here, and more (Offshore teleservices suffer the same conundrum). Special subsidies and grants and duty drawbacks are made especially to offshore clothing manufacturers in the developing world to allow them an anti-competitive advantage over domestic production, again, to satisfy foreign aid objectives.
In the instance of biofraud, I predict there will be, as with AGW, nothing in the way of penalties imposed for fraudulent bioturdity regulation violations on the resolutely striving oppressed nations fighting the evil imperialist, sexist, weightist, brainist West.
NoIdea,
Gosh, what a charming prat that Groiniad counter-poster was, eh? Typical of them. You have to understand, they believe they are the new ruling class even though they are not elected, and therefore what is yours is theirs, and they likewise will not put up with insubordinate complaints based on the possibility that the bioturdity promoter is full of goose squeezings. They learned to live up to their self-elevated station in life in their daycare centre from their anti-nannies where R.H Tawney was read as well as J.K. Rowling to teach them how magic works in the real world: mostly through bullying and intimidation and demanding socialist tithes to the First Church of Eugenics to pay their rent.
One wonders how the insurance companies underwriting the pension funds which funds’ existence dangles from the thread of their actuarial tables and probability charts handle all this, too. How are they calculating projected revenue streams from this fraud, I wonder? No mutual fund nor environmental trust can exist lawfully without insurance underwriting. I would love to see their spreadsheets and systems sim scenario inventory for a typical bioturdity Ponzi investment scheme.
It would be fun to get a lawyer drunk who packages investment trusts for NASD and SEC licenced brokers for to get him or her to hold forth on this subject of underwriting pre-qualification standards for environmental investment schemes. I’ll be chatting to a few this coming week relative to the film project. Bwahahahahaha. I’ll find where to stick the knife in yet. That is our Big Red Button, if we can sort out how it works.
That Big Red Button would do nicely for the AGW fraud, too. What the hell are they basing their financial projections on so as to lawfully justify providing the insurance underwriting necessary for issuing paper on an annuitized basis? These are securities, not simply stocks.
Pointman says:
October 21, 2010 at 11:48 pm
I knew Force Recon types who could find our little communist friends (come to save us all from the misery of a balanced, well-ordered and democracy-based existence) in the depthless dark of the jungle night through seeing Charlie’s auras LOL You had to be a bit on the wired side owing to copious chemical assistance for that to work, though. The King of Thailand’s best hockey puck and a few hits of speed and you were good to go, I was told, for the next three days and nights.
Hi ! Locusts & Wild Honey
October 21, 2010 at 8:13 pm
/// They have found creatures declared extinct, alive and kicking (Lazarus taxon) just one well known example is the coelacanth. ///
When the children were younger, we made a very special (i.e., expensive) trip to East London, RSA, where the coelacanth was found. A Mr Latimer, when he heard that we had come from Paris, gave generously of his time and expertise to make the discovery of the coelacanth exciting for the kids. (He turned out to be the brother of Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, who had “discovered” the beast pre-WW 2). The East London museum is absolutely world class, one of the best we have ever, ever seen … (grin) … to this day we have a copper coelacanth on the wall in the entryway.
Actually, while Amerloque wanted the family to see and learn about the coelacanth, he was far more interested in something one can only see there, which had fascinated him for years. One might even say that is was, for Amerloque, the zenith of the visit to East London. (grin)
The East London Museum is where one can see the world’s only remaining dodo egg.
Did you say “biodiversity” ? (wide grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
A tad OT. Here’s a group picture for the prospective attendees for the Kanc*nt Klimate Konference:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/8078311/The-XVth-International-Clown-Convention-in-Mexico-City.html?image=1
Celebrate bioperversity!
We’ve only recently had “Send in the Clowns” or I’d post the link.
meltemian says:
October 22, 2010 at 5:05 am
There’s clowns and there’s clowns …
Pointman
That song’s too good just to hear the first minute of it.
Pointman
Walt O’Bruin says:
October 22, 2010 at 2:10 am
Brilliant comment Walt!
You’ve got ’em to a T.
Grauniad Socialist scummers.
Walt O’Bruin says:
October 22, 2010 at 2:24 am
“through seeing Charlie’s auras ”
That thing exists and why it hasn’t been investigated is beyond me.
Pointman
meltemian says:
October 22, 2010 at 5:05 am
Don’t bother, they’re here. LOL
Edward,
Are we surprised? I have nothing but respect for Atlee and the union machinists, carpenters, welders, road workers and others who worked to provide to the Commonwealth the bounteous excesses we enjoy today when for them, an orange in their stocking at Xmas time was a much-fussed-about extravagance.
These pettifogging shakedown artists with no intent or ability to deliver an honest day’s work hate people, and it shows in every thought, word and deed, as do all idlers with no dream for crafting a better tomorrow under their own horsepower. They have no right to bear the same sobriquet as Keir Hardie nor even Arthur Scarsdale, who at least had some cred if not a grasp of how to acquire the social skills needed to keep mining going, which activity now is a boom industry, hiring miners even as I write this. (They are advertising for apprentice miners for the PowerFuel mine at the Hatfield colliery.)
They are out to destroy the world in the most hallowed tradition of millenial white-robed religious fanatics, except their god is Death, for themselves but first for all non-believers.
Biopervertos, please submit to us a single-page plan stating your required budget and how it is to be repaid by you and you only by said enterprise of bioperverting the planet. Tell us also how you and you only are going to compensate those whose livelihoods you seek to permanently destroy. Give us a timeline, too, so we can schedule a democratically-administered referendum on your proposal.
Death to communists. Now is not the time to let up!
Pointman says:
October 22, 2010 at 7:36 am
It has been extensively since the 1940’s, but you have to have a clearance to get at the Real Deal, or really good Orthodox Jewish connections LOL They do have a colour-coded moral dimension to their glow, which angers secularist researchers no end. Halos ain’t horse puckey, is the short version. The Raiders of the Lost Ark finale pretty much sums up the moral hard-wired mechanics of these phenomena associated with “probabilistic determinism,” which was the secularist-taunting description of G_d which got Philip Caudwell kicked out of the British Communist Party.
And in case you get bored with the entire AGW/destroy the world fixation of the leftards, Viz holds forth the solution to the problem:
http://www.viz.co.uk/crapjokes.html
And in case you get bored with the entire AGW/destroy the world fixation of the leftards, Viz holds forth the solution to the problem:
http://www.viz.co.uk/crapjokes.html
I would buy a ticket to EightAce: The Movie,” definitely.
*”EightAce: The Movie.” Is there such a thing as Eight Ace the beverage, what is it, and is it exported to the States?
Walt O’Bruin says:
October 22, 2010 at 8:48 am
No eight aces.
“A lonely impulse of delight …”
Pointman
A plan for Phlegm Globs
We must know the scale of the alleged problem.
I suggest that everyone whom is worried about the ability of nature to take care of its self, rush immediately to the nearest jungle or wilderness.
They must of course travel by foot, to minimize damage to the ecosystem.
I suggest naked and without any of those nasty injections, that may kill any little critters that decide a human host is yummy.
As a method of counting species they encounter, they can use a method of scratching lines in their wrists with any sharp flints or thorns they may come across.
Their festering rotting corpses will feed a multitude of grateful benefactors.
Are there any problems with this plan?
We can all appreciate the tragedy of humanities encroachment into the habitats that used to belong to “nature” alone. When we hear about the plight of the tigers or the panda’s, when we remember the Dodo, we can empathize and feel sorrow that a species is declining or gone due to “our” influence.
There are also alien species introduced with sometimes devastating consequences to the “pristine wilderness”
The “new age” approach is to live in harmony with the land.
How will this work with alien species? Do we exterminate them to allow the natural order to continue?
Who gets to define harmony?
Do we remove mankind from the wilderness and cram them into ever more massive cities, whilst developing ever mutated, modified and cloned foodstuffs to allow nature more chance to breathe?
Or do we just eradicate those humans, whom ever it is that are perceived to be threatening whichever species?
Mankind has only survived due to our ability to adapt; it is a natural ability as evidenced by many species taking up residence in what would be classed “un-natural” habitats.
Some species adapt and use us as part of the ecosystems that they exist in.
If you take out the humans, where will the bed bugs live?
When nature decides it wants to eradicate some forests with a lightening strike, should we just sit back and let them burn because it is natural?
Is mankind natural?
With AGW we are encouraged to strangle all carbon based life on the planet by sequestering plant breath underground, now they are telling us we must eradicate humanity to save the weeds and the germs!
For those that insist it is overpopulation that is unnatural, why is it always someone else that must die?
Do all of those who insist that overpopulation is happening live in cities or town?
Do they nearly get killed by idiots driving their big cars as they pedal to work in their effort to “make a difference”?
For every human you Phlegm Globs kill, hundreds of billions of symbiotic bacteria will die. Can you useful idiots live with that on your conscience?
NoIdea
Walt O’Bruin says:
October 22, 2010 at 7:44 am
Thank you Walt, a great reply and unerring comment.
I think you may be interested in this post by an interesting guy who is “right down my street”, as it were:>)
http://raedwald.blogspot.com/2010/10/pride-of-north.html
Those lads were good.
NoIdea says:
October 22, 2010 at 9:05 am
Excellent post N, I have oft’ wondered (having read books as a kid about the end of the world etc) how long before nature would take to obliterate most traces of human ‘civilisation’ if, we suddenly did a ‘runner’ or went M.A.D?
If one takes a look at neglected houses, after a couple of years nature is at work in all sorts of ways, reclaiming that which is hers, the transformation wouldn’t take long – and as we know, till the sun turns into a red star, Gaia has a bit of time at her disposal.
We on the other hand do not.
Having read accounts and heard them first hand and having been to similar forests (in Burma) – about, General Slim and the 14th’s campaign in Burma (my Godfather fought in Burma + uncle flew recce missions) and the bloody awful ‘jungle’ conditions – taking a walk in the forest (in the altogether), is not a very good idea.
No, nature can take care of itself quite nicely thanks.
We’ll only be here for a ‘twinkling of an eye’, nature in all of her ferocity, endures.
Bio diversity wotsitNature’s darling little critters going out of ‘existence’ – is junk thinking, but then, are we really so surprised?And remember:
L’homme propose, Dieu dispose.
Y’all are missing a fun thread on Crownarmourer’s site: http://knottedprop.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/mustaches-what-do-they-say-about-a-man/#comment-530
I have a new post ready on the important and asked for subject of Mustaches or Mousetaches……
http://knottedprop.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/mustaches-what-do-they-say-about-a-man/
You are of course free to leave any comment or post a pic as it is a fairly free speech zone.
Crown: WordPress was being a prima donna and wouldn’t post my comment, and while it was monkeying around, you posted yours! A double bill.
Edward says:
October 22, 2010 at 11:05 am
“Men come and go, Earth abides.”
Pointman
Pointman, you’ve got a moustache. Any thoughts?
Pointman says:
October 22, 2010 at 11:24 am
Yes, I like that pointy!
Earth only knows that it’s abiding because men notice that it is.
Amanda says:
October 22, 2010 at 11:07 am
“Y’all are missing a fun thread on Crownarmourer’s site”
Unfortunately, it’s already become famous in the blogosphere as a place not to post if you don’t want the sysop to reveal your location because you’re giving him your IP address …
Pointman the shy
Edward says:
October 22, 2010 at 11:29 am
Ecclesiasticus I believe. Also all flesh is grass? Like it but I never quite understood it.
Pointman.
Yes Amanda, I still have a moustache.
Pointman
Crown’s not going to publicize or ‘out’ anybody. Damocles might have complained about something but then Dam himself is not exactly the person in whom I would place my trust. I think ‘do unto others’ is the biblical idea that applies there….
She’d look much better without the nose-ring. It’s not even just a stud, it’s an actual hoop. Cor dear. It ruins her face.
Amanda says:
October 22, 2010 at 11:47 am
Possibly but perception is all.
Pointman
Pointman, allow me to speak for my friend in a way that should not cause him any blushes since there’s nothing to blush about. If I felt that I needed a true blue, decent, upstanding, morally upright, kind-hearted, caring, compassionate, and thoughtful person to speak up for me or lend me a hand — to be a friend, without undue sacrifice and within reason (one should never prevail too much upon others if one can possibly help it), I would think of Crown. (Whose real name I know, as we occasionally correspond off-blog.) If I had a secret that — for some reason — matters of state, save the world, where Elvis can currently be found — not likely but I’m speaking of principle here — I had to share with someone not a relative and preserve, I would happily tell Crown. So, that’s my estimation of the risk involved in posting on his blog.
Amanda says:
October 22, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Amanda, I respect your judgement and loyalty and the decisions you’ll make accordingly. Please extent to me the same courtesy.
Pointman
Pointman: Of course I extend to you the same courtesy! I’m not trying to browbeat you, man. I’m simply saying what I see as the truth so that others won’t feel you are in possession of some special knowledge that they ought to take under advisement. What you do is your own business. However, I am quite happy to post at Crown’s, it’s a privilege to know him, and I enjoy his blog.
Edward says:
October 22, 2010 at 10:25 am
Thanks very much for the compliments and the link, Edward. I instinctively like any blogspace running a Gauloise ciggies ad LOL
Earth will abide, exactly as long as shall English craft.
Good evening, Walt. I don’t believe in a rewarding and punishing deity, though I’m open to the idea of an Unmoved Mover of some kind. But that takes us, if anything, more into the remit of philosophy than of religion.
Pointman, somehow or other I’ve seen that song/video before recently. I don’t know what to make of it. ‘Make the stoic squirm’: yes, I know what that’s like. Her voice seems oddly abrasive, in my opinion, even her accent at the beginning rather grates. You probably think otherwise and so do her fans.
should really be a semi-colon after ‘opinion’ for best comprehension.
Ozboy: I notice that the blank heads beside our names (unless we have self-chosen avatars) have disappeared. It looks better this way, I think.
Just WordPress acting up I think – Oz
Walt O’Bruin says:
October 22, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Walt, I used to smoke Disque Bleu. Gad, I can taste one now. Mmmmm
Pointman
Pointman,
In my high school from 1966-1969, at the peak of the British Invasion, if you didn’t smoke English Ovals unfiltered in the boxed container, you just weren’t in the game.
Canadian smokes tasted entirely different. We favoured Du Mauriers and Players but most of all MacDonald’s Export A’s with the Scots tartaned lovely on the green pack. Stubby little ciggies with a rich body, sort of winey taste.
Gauloises were too much of too much. If I were before a firing squad, I would request one as my last cigaret, though.
My bear is intact, OzBoy. Don’t mess with the Bear, WordPress LOL
On second thought, if I were before a firing squad, I would break a 40-year ban and request a Cheech and Chong three-foot long Special, big enough to pass around to the firing squad and the officer in charge as well as for me, a gallon of Mateus, and twenty pepperoni pizza’s.
Make that five gallons.
Pointman since I am in in communication with Damocles himself about this issue he is not mad at me, I did post his country which incidentally has already been posted about on the DT long before. He asked me to remove it I did as he requested because in hindsight it was a bad decision on my part in less than 40 minutes.
However if you know differently let me know I do know which blog he is actually concerned about. I can say I have not shared his IP address with anyone or anybody else’s I have rechecked any email correspondence from that time period and again no.
Amanda says:
October 22, 2010 at 12:42 pm
As I grow older, if the lines of division between sets of knowledge serve no purpose, I don’t draw them, as with any constructor, the tool that fits the hand & purpose is that which I use. Also, as I grow older, I know less and less about more and more LOL It is also difficult not to draw inappropriate conclusions from the evidence of the senses.
I tend also to see religions now as a means of adapting to prevailing cosmological schemes, not the other way around.
It’s when people feel absolutely sure about something is when the trouble starts. I asked a Ukrainian lady doctor working on my eyeballs at the veterans’ hospital what she thought brought the Soviet Union down, she answered instantly “An obsession with ideological purity.”
BTW, the bleeding in the eyes have stopped, the retinae seem to have more firmly reattached themselves, but my prescription for my specs has slid off the chart to increased nearsightedness LOL. Hooray for lutein and coenzyme Q-10 and biotin and zero booze. The surgeon is only in once a month to do his thing on my Kermit the Frog eyelids, but that ought to do for the twitching and swelling eyesockets, she sez. The big enemy now is internal eyeball pressure, so I have to watch the salt intake a bit and trot some more.
The silly bit is, to judge from the eyes, I look to be stone drunk all the time, or just completed three rounds with Mike Tyson.
If one thinks life is a jigsaw puzzle, one has to believe that all the parts fit. They do not, of course. It is what keeps life interesting.
Courtesy of the http://dailybayonet.com/
Al Gore sets the Californians right on Proposition 23.
Walt this may please you…. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/20/bad-news-polar bears/#more-26763
I’m having trouble with the Guardian’s ” carbon-free agriculture. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.
farmerbraun I suggest composting hippy’s it seems to work well as they are purely organic.
While I see merit in your proposal, I struggle with the idea that my farm, which is no more than a net carbon- sequestration apparatus, is to become carbon-free. What about my hydrogen bonds? What shall I attach them to?
G-Day all.
My apologies Locusts. I am told my pronunciation of the few Chinese words I know is good, but my spelling must be atrocious. I would never call you a monkey and I only call my sister a wart.
No Idea. The term “biodiversity” has been around a while, but only recently has been raised to PC status.
I managed a little research today. There are quite a few recent books and studies on biodiversity, most of them sponsored by a group called the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (like that name? Sounds very USSR to me). It’s an NGO with many member countries. (Familiar? Destined to be the WWF of biodiversity?) The papers and books use many of our favorite buzz words like “sustainable” and are authored by familiar names like E.O. Wilson. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/11/animal-vegetable-or-e-o-wilson/
They are ready to step in to Global Climate Erectile Dysfunction’s place as they are currently supplementing it. This one will be harder to fight. The key to the science will have to be:
1) Biodiversity is not genetic diversity. (Climate is not weather.) Genetic diversity is good as it increases survivability. Biodiversity is kind of a double edged sword thing. Good in a perfect world, but the world isn’t always perfect. When competition pressures are increased, someone is going to lose out.
2) While it is one measure of the health of an ecosystem, it is not the only one. Just because an ecosystem is less diverse does not mean it is less healthy.
3) Humans increase biodiversity as well as decrease it (domestic breeding aside).
There’s more but I haven’t thought it all out yet.
Thank you Hillary and Ozboy.
Good night.
T.
farmerbraun
Concentrate on farming for subsidies. Farmers should grasp this opportunity to be instruments for wealth redistribution. At the cutting edge of political reform. Producing less food should also be seen as beneficial in the long run, as it should result in lower world popular. Obviously a good thing, both for carbon reduction, and demands on resources. The clique shall inherit the earth.
There’s an entire thread in that last line, fen.
Hmmm… Oz
I thought this stuff had pretty much finished:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1322601/China-forces-woman-abortion-EIGHT-months-breaching-child-policy.html
hi Oz
I’m working towards an illustrated version….But I have something else in mind first.
Brilliant stuff mate… I think I speak for us all when I say I can’t wait! – Oz
meltemian
Did you say you have holiday accommodation on Cyprus? If so, do you have website details?
crownarmourer says:
October 22, 2010 at 1:40 pm
How Damocles feels, I couldn’t possibly speculate on but I do note that the last time a link to your site was posted at the DT, he immediately posted advising against visiting it.
Pointman
farmerbraun says:
October 22, 2010 at 5:51 pm
If they sequester CO2 in an aquiferous limestone tier, what the CO2 will bond to and form is calcium carbide, which when in contact with water forms acetylene, as in welding gas, which detonates something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV9-VFZ1sP0 If a hundred million cubic feet of acetylene is released underground as a result of degenerative calcium carbide formation, the resulting detonation should result in something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrGnILY8NOQ And the surrounding population reduction problem is solved. Simples.
Happy news here. People are not buying teeny tiny pink with silver sprinkly stars cars which like 2CV’s and beetles of yore will end up as hood ornaments on diesel lorries and Cadillac SUV’s:
CAR CONSUMERS NOT BUYING BASED ON FUEL EFFICIENCY – NADA
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The head of one of the biggest automotive industry groups said sales of small, fuel-efficient vehicles remain modest.
http://www.DownstreamToday.com/News/article.aspx?a_id=24387
Thansk for the link, too, Crownie. I’m waiting for the polar bear population density to reach levels where they trash an entire Inuit village en masse. It will be like the last reel of “Resident Evil” except with polar bears instead of zombies and no Milla Jovovich (sob). The upside is there willl be a lot of Inuit wearing beautiful furry and warm polar bear winter coats.
Inuit are pretty well armed from age 12 on. Granddad’s Lee Enfield or Remington and Winchester bolt actions are favoured (the autoloaders freeze up). Hope a Cadet unit http://www.cadets.ca/marksmanship-tir/championship-championnat/home-accueil.aspx with a belt-fed .50 cal is around when it happens.
fenbeagle says:
October 22, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Oooooo.
Crownarmourer,
I’m already a zombie drowned polar bear. I just have to watch out for the head shots LOL
They should sequester CO2 underground in the Hamptons, Malibu and under the White House.
Better yet, under the EPA headquarters.
They would find it an uplifting experience.
Hi Meltemian !
So, are you inviting all of us chez vous in Kerkira ? Amerloque lived an entire summer in a hut on the beach at Sidari. Nary a hotel in sight. (grin) Is it the same now ? Have you been there ?
This was during the bad old days of the Greek “Colonels”, after their coup-d’état in 1967. It was relatively cool at Sidari, though, ’cause Amerloque and his flame-at-the-time got on well with the local informer, a balding, beadyeyed, half-albino fellow with the inevitable “worry beads” in perpetual motion. His were amber.
That was also the period when, by official decree from Athens, every Greek – and tourist in the country – was required by law to eat potatoes once a day, seven days a week.
Amerloque’s relationship to spuds and ‘taters hasn’t been the same since. He must be one of the few resident Francophiles who will rarely touch a “frite”. (wide grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
Hi Pointman !
Excellent post on gangs … (grin) … and thanks for posting it here (wider grin)
Best,
L’Amerloque
fenbeagle.
Sorry no – we’re on Corfu and we only look after someone else’s holiday rental. We look after their pool and do the cleaning etc.
Amerloque.
Yes – all visitors welcome (well most). We’re in the middle of the island in a place called Vassilika just outside Agios Ioannis – didn’t want to be too far out of Corfu Town. Driving from the north into town in the winter can take an hour or more.
I bet things have changed from when you were here, but I’m sure the island itself is just the same. We love it.
Amerloque says:
October 23, 2010 at 12:05 am
Thank you, my pleasure.
Pointman
crownarmourer says:
October 22, 2010 at 3:27 pm
I predict Proposition 23 will pass with flying colours. People are fed up with Tinkerbell solutions to real-world problems.
When these greentard “What were we thinking?” proposals all fall by the wayside, Gore and the rest of the alleged market-fixers are probably going to be subject to a very broad range of investigations, all related to their handling of money.
Went to read the text of Proposition 23 in full. The Proposition basically calls for a suspension of any and all environmental reg’s associated with AB 32, the greentard agenda for California.
Guys and gals, this is our thin edge of the wedge. Bwahahahaha! Here is the text in full:
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Text_of_Proposition_23,_the_%22California_Jobs_Initiative%22_(California_2010)
Here’s your bio-eco-enviro-crypto-fascisto-greentard agendum, Gorebreath.
Anyone wants to “save the planet,” do it with your OWN money, not the taxpayers, just like the evil, demonically possessed private sector.
The State should sue the greentards for every subsidy and grant penny and pence back, once this is all substantiated as based on fraud, plu sinterest, plus punitive damages, plus compensation to people’s livelihoods they have destroyed. AND with no government bailout as the banks received.
Pointman about Damocles that is his choice I checked my records and the other blog no one posted his IP addresses, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t lying to you or anyone else.
Zip Nada Nothing. WordPress does let a blog owner know of a persons IP address and I get wonderful emails as well telling me of a persons service provider. WordPress does this for a reason it allows me to know if you are the same person with a different fake email address. Also contrary to some peoples belief it does NOT give me your home address and social security number and all your bank details.
That particular weekend Damocles drew our attention because we believed him to be on a high moral crusade to ban Mack yet again and also report any post that he disagreed with for being remotely abusive. Ask Amanda on that one she can back me up, a lot of people were not happy bunnies that weekend.
If you must know a few of us talked back and forth about the the matter outside of the blogs and in the end it was decided that the only course of action was to approach the relevant authorities and let them look into things to see if they had any merit. I was not holding my breath on that one though.
So no one posted anyone’s IP address I only use the tools WordPress gives me and yes OZ knows your IP address, email and service provider.
All true – Oz
OT, anyone heard from MemoryVault lately?
Hope he’s okay.
Recuperating comfortably, last I heard. I believe he’s lurking – Oz
MV and MOTM, both been quiet of late.
While we are debating biodiversity, you can all celebrate this concept by playing the game Torpedo Joe, where you get to blow up endangered species like seals, dolphins, mermaids and silly sailors, all from the comfort of your living room.
This dates back to 1996 at least, but it is still one of my all-time stress relievers.
http://www.playitontheweb.com/games/Torpedo-Joe-game.htm
As long as even secular millenarianism is afoot —again. Remember the Communist Revolution and REAL fascism?– here are very nice religions to join as an alternative to the greentard faith, shortly to enjoy the destiny of the Albigensians, Shakers and followers of Cthulhu, who have only last week all been eaten by their god:
http://www.tarvu.com/
http://www.landoverbaptist.org
http://www.venganza.org/
Good to hear that, OzBoy. Looking forward to seeing them back!
They have pulled Big Vern’s chemist’s shopping game off the Net for some reason, so I am providing my distributable copy of it for your perusal and enjoyment.
Can’t imagine why anyone would find this offensive.
http://www.transactionsmagazine.com/KABLOOMEY.exe
Here’s one especially for MV and MOTM called “St. Patrick’s Bar.”
http://www.youtube.com/joecartoondotcom#p/u/51/WwGlTlmfz6o Argh. Aye!
crownarmourer says:
October 23, 2010 at 1:49 am
Where exactly did I say you or anyone else had revealed his IP address?
By your own admission @ 1:40 i.e. “I did post his country”. A disgraceful lapse in netiquette.
My use of language, as we both know, is exact. The travails between Damocles, Mack and anyone else involved, is their business in which I have absolutely no interest.
Pointman
Pointman…By your own admission @ 1:40 i.e. “I did post his country”. A disgraceful lapse in netiquette.
Agreed and yes I regret it, I did mention it was serious lapse of judgement on my part and was fixed asap but it was nothing that had not already been posted on the DT before and was no secret. However Tom Chivers posted the location of Damocles on the DT a few days later and this was not an issue to Damocles. So my point is I am held to a higher standard apparently for something that was no secret in the first place.
When you run websites, which I have done, you acquire technical data about your users to which no other party is privy. Since such information is privileged, it therefore follows that you have a duty of care to safeguard it. Any leakage of that information whether by accident or by intent, is a serious lapse in one’s duty, integrity or both.
Evidently Tom Chivers doesn’t think so and therefore is not a man of honour. I’ve never posted to his blog and never will now.
Pointman
The main reason I haven’t said more about where I’ve been, where I live, and where I’m from is that nobody would be interested. Although, having said that, anyone that cared to — again, no one — could compile quite a detailed biography from all my various posts here and at the Deleted Telegraph over the past year. Perhaps I would be slightly more circumspect if people knew my full name, but as no one untrustworthy does, that’s that sorted. Anyway I fail to see the big deal about having one’s country of residence known. Good luck trying to find ‘Amanda — USA’. It’s a bloody big country and there are lots of Amandas. You’d need a whole lot more than that before you’d find me! Still less if I posted as Froggy and didn’t use my real name at all, as most people don’t. Some among us obviously have their reasons, and I’m sorry to hear it, but most posters I have read don’t mind in the least letting people know which country or even state (Msher) and city (me, Crown, Walt, for instance) they live in. In fact if I drew up a list of all the blog-posters I’m reasonably familiar with, I could tell you what country they’re in and often, which part of the country. Of course, what people say about themselves online may or may not be true, but in my experience the bulk of us present ourselves pretty much as we are — you couldn’t keep up falsity for months on end and anyway, the little truths about ourselves come out in little-noted drops and hints. It’s not like we all have to have an official statement and biography plastered by our screen names all the time. People say things about where they are because it’s relevant to the discussion and does not compromise their privacy. So I suppose that ‘Jehosaphat’ might say that ‘he’ is in Malawi when she’s really in Indiana, but I suspect that most regulars are not always trying to hide themselves, and you’d never find a ‘Jehosaphat’ in Indiana, anyway.
Right, back to Wagner!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_55pRyH_9yU&feature=related Fageddaboutit.
Mmmm
Pointman
Interesting duel, Duelling Bear. Not unlike sport Epee. Which I used to enjoy very much.
My first ever attempt at Epee in a competitive tournament. Pitched me against a little grey haired lady fencer older than me (and more experienced, at that time)
As it was a competition, and the situation seemed right, I was tempted to fence very aggressively (and rather well, it seemed to me at the time)
She defeated me easily, by dropping her blade every time I made my final move, and accurately contacting my knee with the point of her sword, as My leading leg lunged forward registering a hit, before my energetic attacks could land. I scored one hit in five.
After that, I learned to fence Epee properly, it is a fine sport.
fenbeagle says:
October 23, 2010 at 5:06 am
Used to fence myself. I always enjoyed a good bout with the sabre but boy did you need to be fit.
Pointman
Locusts & Wild Honey
October 23, 2010 at 2:42 am
Hi Locusts
Alive and well on holiday in Llandudno, North Wales. Been warm and sunny last few days but rain this afternoon, home tomorrow.
Hotel has not a single low energy bulb anywhere in the place and more than enough heating. Perhaps AGW has not got here yet.
Enjoyed your China reports, keep safe. My biggest risk recently is walking the length of the pier watching the turbines going round in the distance. Probably the first time they have done anything useful for months.
Bearing in mind the recently grounded nuke sub grounded off Skye, I hope they are keeping the sub charts properly updated!!!
Pointy, Nerf Swords I remember well. We had them at Huge Aircrash Company when I was doing the QC/QA documentation work to bring them back into compliance on their PC board work procedures traceability for the Navy audit team. First time in my life I ever got a chance to pound the tar out of a corporate VP. Great fun, good exercise, and not even a bruise.
I tried out for the Wayne State U. fencing team, which for years were the USA’s best. Couldn’t make the cut. All Poles, and just amazingly swift. Tone not strength and a super-quick mind are what count. Pump action ping pong ball guns were big then too.
Here is what shortly shall befall the greentard movement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzg76_erwvg&feature=related Goodbye grasshopper.
If I had blown that gig or walked away, 200 jobs would have been lost to Raytheon, all PC board assemblers, Hispanic women or (mostly) single mom’s. We all needed stress relief. Nice gig, though. Got a chance to chase a PhD philologist off the contract, a real Noam Chomsky talking potato type of “I’m too good to sweat” leftard. He would never shut up about the morality of guided missile manufacture so the Gnome (he looked like a lawn gnome without the hat) our super said, “Fine. Next time we go to war, we’ll save one Laser Maverick just for your house.” Good people.
You couldn’t give me a regular job. Maybe money gets tight sometimes, but you only live once.
manonthemoor says:
October 23, 2010 at 6:08 am
Hey, bud. Wondering where you are hiding. Don’t be a stranger!
That sub must have hit a shoal of drowned polar bears.
Nerfs and sabres
If your after bruises, you can get them from sabres, as Pointman probably knows? Epees to If it goes badly wrong…… Foils probably not.
I have managed to win local competitions in all three. But Epee is the most fun, to my mind…..And the slowest! When your in ‘control’ of your opponent, there’s plenty of time to think. The trick is, not to be confused about who is actually in control.
….You do have to be fit though. I leave it alone now.
Locusts,
Confucius Say: “Awrays bling pistol to sword fight.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anEuw8F8cpE Works evely time.
*wahks
Nerf Sword Bear
October 23, 2010 at 6:20 am
Greetings Walt
Enjoy ALL your posts, glad you keep enjoying life and your informative dialogue. Your efforts are part of what gives LG the unique personality which hopefully will last a long time.
I try to keep up with LG and JD on the DT but it is so time consuming to follow the DT and any useful information quickly get lost.
I like to think blogging and comments have made a difference, and we have the initiative. Our ability to respond to events is beyond compare, plus of course to monitor and search the internet. Thus we are able to challenge AGW, Renewable energy and government decisions. This process will now move on to Bio-diversity, Cap and Trade, Cancun as well as the impact of your forthcoming mid term elections.
We live in a time where history is being made before us.
NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO LET UP
(Thanks Amerloque)
Walt, your Harrison Ford clip made me shriek with laughter. It’s so funny the way he turns around immediately afterwards as if he’s hungry and thinking of lunch. Plus it reminded me of how Harrison Ford is such a hunk.
manonthemoor says:
October 23, 2010 at 6:42 am
MOTM, good to hear you’re still around and up for the fight. I was beginning to think of a parting glass.
Pointman
I was looking at the Algerian (‘rai’) singer Faudel, and wondering why he didn’t appeal to me more (not that he *has* to, but he was unpleasantly reminding me of someone). I realized after thinking about it for a bit that he’s visually a cross between two of my least favourite people, Barry Obarma and my aunt’s husband. Not his fault, of course, and I’m sure he’s a very nice chap. Anyway, I mention this because the aunt’s husband takes a dim view of other people — cynical, sneering, superior — and commented once that he likes fencing because it gets his tensions out when he can essentially bruise the other guy legitimately. Which just confirmed in me that he is indeed a nasty-minded git, and the fact that he subsequently dabbled in yoga does nothing to moderate his gitness. Anyone that would engage in a sport because he likes giving pain to other people is really, really not my cup of tea. Of course he’s all of 5’4″ as I doubt he can be much taller, so perhaps that has something to do with it.
P. S. ‘something to do with it’: I mean something to do with his attitude; I don’t mean that he’s not my cup of tea because he’s short.
Amanda
There is no real ‘pain’ in sports fencing, that I’m aware of. Injured pride sometimes, but no real physical pain. When there is bruising, which can happen in saber, you don’t usually feel it, at the time. And there is often much apologising anyway, as it tends to be a mistake. If anyone was making ‘mistakes’ often, and deliberately, they would struggle to find anyone that would agree to fence with them, unless it was someone who could put them in their place. (In which case, lots of people would likely find the time to gather round to watch)
It’s not unlike, blog debates…..people know who is playful…..and who is being nasty.
Fen, à vous, mon ami.
Pointman
Fen,
Thank you for that explanation. In that case we can add ‘boaster’ to my uncle’s (no blood relation) vices. Smoked out early as a bad sport and probably inept as well. No wonder he turned to yoga! LOL
One for you, Pointman.
I’ve been on long drives as it was getting dark, from one big state to another, playing this over and over.
I’d like to try fencing if I could do it outdoors. Also my opponent would need to be in wheelchair to even things up. Otherwise a normal forward thrust could result in my getting it in the eye. Or something.
Amanda
The very first fencing competition I went to,a team event, many years ago was in the company of our fencing club that hadn’t been going long. So we were all novices and very nervous. A solicitor friend, who I have fenced with for many years was particularly worried about how badly she would do, and couldn’t prevent it showing. When she was called forward for her first bout, her lady opponent came forward….. (In a wheelchair)
My friends face visably lit up, as we prepared her. Not politically correct I know, but it was a release of tension, and she had been very nervous….’But…..I can just run round and hit her from behind…..Can’t I?’ she beamed. (a solicitor, as I said)
No…..As it turned out, they brought out a chair, which my friend had to sit in, and neither of them could actually move about. This being the rules with wheelchair fencing. This also meant that wheelchair lady was much practised, while my friend did not have a clue what she was doing!
….All the more remarkable then, that it was my friend that won!
manonthemoor says:
October 23, 2010 at 6:42 am
Thanks, MOTM. The history being made before us and by us consists of a possibly vain effort to keep millions of socialist greentards from ruining our Western economies for the benefit of their outright and self-admitted Communist offshore friends.
Imagine if all the money spent on transparently fraudulent schemes to build pink castles in the air was instead spent on genuine industrial development along conventional lines, industrial training programmes for youth on the state’s nickel, as it once was, as a mandatory strategy to alleviate poverty instead of madhouse forever-type giveaways, disinvestment in social studies of all varieties and ALL fuzzy anti-quantifiable “heuristic sciences” unless they can demonstrate positive net return on such activities, disinvestment in all quangos, not just the openly stupid ones (they are ALL stupid or they could survive through donations on their own nickel through demonstrating their use to the public), and demanding all alternative energy programmes not receive state subsidies whatsoever but instead demonstrate bottom-line transparency and a minimum of a 30% IRR.
It is beyond madness that giving a young person a free 2-year trades training course and a 5-year apprenticeship matching-funds grant to the employer will pencil out in terms of taxes paid by that trained young person before the first Don Quixote Special does. There is not one wind farm enterprise on the planet which is off the dole yet.
Spreadsheet Bear, you’ve nailed it. Bravo – Oz
It should also be made very clear to greentards through action that to zero-sum game the West through pre-loading the deck in favour of the predator hordes in the developing world to the West’s disadvantage while making a fortune from their true employers will result in instant retribution on a scale heretofore never seen.
The only treasonous offence against their nations and their neighbors greentards have not committed against the rule of law is the outright destruction of industrial facilities through the use of explosives. They will tell you they would if they could, whether the target building was occupied or not. Ask one. No referendum, no environmental millstone neck weights.
Amanda and Fen,
Nerf boxing would be a refreshing release. If it were conducted in office chairs with the boxer-occupied chairs launched at each other this would do a fine job of combining jousting with boxing.
Alternatively, Hot Wheels or tricycles could be used by the combatants.
Walt, what is ‘nerf’?
Have you seen today’s Delingpole thread? I haven’t read it, article or comments, but the photo did catch my eye. I couldn’t help writing the following:
Dear James,
I’ve seen the photo to go with this article.
I’m not eating that.
Cordially,
Amanda
Fen, if I had been your friend I would have guessed it was a set-up! But she won anyway, so good for her — I bet it gave her loads of confidence.
Spread Sheet Bear at 9.44
“It is beyond madness that giving a young person a free 2-year trades training course and a 5-year apprenticeship matching-funds grant to the employer will pencil out in terms of taxes paid by that trained young person before the first Don Quixote Special does.”
Yes. The problem is in finding that employer in the first place. You have to be big enough to absorb the supervision overhead. 15 or 20 happy workers is not big enough.
Marcus
Everybody, two of my faves: Oscar Peterson playing ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ (Gershwin: what I’m listening to on the player right now), and ‘Love For Sale’ (Cole Porter). See the Jukebox if interested.
Cordially, night, night Amanda, don’t let the veg bugs bite!
Have fun
Ah, I’m home alone this weekend. I can play what I like, as loud as I like and the whole of Wallawoora will be jumpin’
Pointman
mlpinaus says:
October 23, 2010 at 10:36 am
Hi Marcus, as you probably know, there’s no federal incentive to train people but you still spend half your time doing it, especially on the young ones who’re hungry enough to want to learn. All education begins when you leave school.
Pointman
OT but not altogether:
Another shining example of how leftards who know what is best for us without asking anyone si this WikiLeaks routine. Just as with the Abu Ghraib and Gitmo nonsense (my barracks in boot camp and my treatment there was worse that any prisoner at either facility was ever treated), the net result has been more dead bodies. Now the only way prisoners of war will ever be taken by US troops is with special teams. It makes no sense to a military commander to take prisoners at all if the consequences they and the other captor-tending team members are going to be put under more pressure by their own forces via civilian pressure that the enemy combatant captured.
The person who released the WikiLeak data is an enemy combatant out of uniform engaged in military espionage and should be dealt with as such under the terms and conditions of the Geneva Convention, i.e., he should be tried and sentenced to death in absentia.
Greensand: There’s precious little chance of that. Goodnight to you.
*is *were Last sentence, first paragraph: …consequences are that…
The WikiLeaks guy is getting more enemy combatants who offer to surrender killed that any single Western military unit alone.
“So what, so long as the West is tarred and feathered?,” I am sure Mr. WikiLeaks thinks with a shrug as he downs another glass of plonk at the Swiss chalet where he resides, then clicks the remote to “The Simpsons.”
*than
Nerf is a brand name of a particular line of toys made by a former made-in-America toy line.
http://www.hasbro.com/nerf/en_US/
Spreadsheet Bear says:
October 23, 2010 at 11:24 am
“person who released the WikiLeak data ”
As usual, they were well away from the place where the metal meets the meat but I’m sure their moral superiority keeps them warm at night and after all, there’s always the book and film rights to sell, both of which will make them MSM a hero. The hanging thread is those guys in the field but who cares about them anyway. They’re blue-collar America and not that televisual anyway.
Pointman
Pointman, is that really what you’re playing? How ’bout James Brown, ‘I Feel Good’?
Or, going down memory lane, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILdBDOPoEDQ.
I put that on my answering machine once. Talking in the pauses.
‘the metal meets the meat’: May I ask, is that what it sounds like — in-group jargon — or is that your own formulation, Pointman?
Bear: an enemy combatant out of uniform but one of us IN uniform, wasn’t he? Do you know what is being done about him?
Oh good lord, Walt. Did you ever play with Nerfs? Go on, fess up now: did you or did you not take your Nerf out in the snow when no one was looking and blast a snowman to bits? We need to know!
Herrow?? Is anybody out there? It’s seance time again. Wonder if I’ll ever do a proper seance. Hmm…. Wine connoisseurs are too much into wine to turn their glasses upside down, but on the other hand, they have far more glasses (as do we) than they can possibly drink from, so that might work. Still, you have to be the right sort of person. Not too simpy, not too credulous. Well, that rules out most people. Oh, well.
Pointman says:
October 23, 2010 at 11:07 am
No incentives, more dis-incentives. A former capitalist exploiter of the working class, I ran a small electronics manufacturing company here in Adelaide. The various R&D grants were good, though the needed paper work was designed by idiots. You are right, in that the various studes we employed actually were hungry for information.
And actually thanked us when they went on to higher and better things…….
Small business? What small business.
Marcus
Amanda says:
October 23, 2010 at 12:01 pm
There are probably nicer discriptions but sometimes, it is as it is.
Pointman
Would you do a seance, Pointman? You just sit at a table with us others, rest your finger lightly on the edge of an upturned glass, in a semi-dark room, and you don’t laugh. Giggling is absolutely not allowed. No glass has ever moved in my experience while someone was giggling. Though at first the temptation is overwhelming.
In the meantime, Pointy’s on the tiles. Let’s not do maudlin. I can’t stand uncertainty …
Pointman
Pointy will have to name his tune if he wants anyone west of the Sargasso Sea to know what he’s on about…. [‘Sony has blocked in your country’]
Uncertainty is the condition of the philosopher setting out on a new sailing. It brings surprise. Some of the surprises are good.
As my song says: ‘the one thing we should be sure of is surprise’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2wqY5Rx87o (excuse the wobbles).
It was Billie Holiday. This one should get through to youse guys…
Let me know if it don’t …
Pointman
It don’t. What’s the name of the tune?
Yes, ladies and gentleman, we are outside Pointman’s dressing room… he has not yet left the building… but the question about whether he would participate in a seance remains unanswered… We have spoken to his manager who says that he is currently occupied with a Holiday and some sort of spirits — though what sort of spirits, we have yet to find out. Stay tuned….
Amanda says:
October 23, 2010 at 12:03 pm
No one has sorted out what the response is to be yet, but I know how the US Government would have dealt with him prior to President Ford’s imposed “reforms” of the CIA’s scope of work in 1976. They used to recruit people for that type of work on a subcontract basis out of Montreal and Quebec City. I don’t know how they do it now, if they ever do.
Oh, yes, I did play with Hasbro projectile-launching and humanoid-whacking toys extensively back in the more light-hearted and genuinely tolerant contract workplaces of the 1980’s, when temping was re-invented to keep everyone working through splitting up one full-time job into three to five temp jobs per year and President Reagan attaching a massive tax subsidy to it, in the form of allowing subcontract labour as a fully deductible operating expense, which prior to the tax code changes of 1982 and 1986 was not allowed, as it constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution and still does (the right of free association; you can be sued for short-circuiting an employment contract and going direct, which I cheerfully did. ) I don’t see the Nerf swords for sale on the site anymore. Curses!
Working from other than a home base used to be fun. The American workplace now is an utter madhouse of Stalinist-era mind-your-tongue oddness that only exacerbates the likelihood of workplace violence rather than reduces it. I would last ten minutes at G.E. HQ in Schenectady unless I wore a dog muzzle or did what most American workers do if they have a shred of individuality left in their left sock: tank up on the goofy pills and ricochet off the walls as brainlessly as a dandelion puffball through their days at the sausage mill.
“Love Me or Leave Me” by Billie Holiday
Pointman
Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that we may have lost the Pointman. Yes, he was last seen in his dressing room, but several eyewitnesses reported the landing of an extremely strange aircraft with many lights blazing and a strange langugage being broadcast… in fact they may be probing him at this very moment. And so we say au revoir and quesadillas. Or is it c’est la vie?
Cough. Pointman. I thought you said you weren’t doing maudlin. Where’s the Elton John ridiculous star-spangled glasses? Where’s the ecstatic? Can there be a song more ecstatic than this?
A.
Walt: You played with projectile toys in the 1980s??? How old are you really?? 32?
His real name’s Jason, and he’s actually only 17. The whole “Walt” thing’s just one big act.
I know everyone’s age here – didn’t crown tell you?
Oz 😉
Walt: your last sentence was pure brilliance. I can’t follow the bit about tax codes, tax or taxes, surveillance camera or cameras, at this time of night, baby. Because I have had some wine and not had my brain -powering Ginkgo Biloba pill yet (supposed to make more oxygen go to your brain — who am I to argue, and I believe that’s the right spelling). Do you know that all the Wagners were ugly, or some were plainish but others very strange and none were beautiful? It’s true. I’ve been reading about them — and worse, looking at their pictures.
I think I’ve lost everybody, including the dog.
Amanda says:
October 23, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Amanda, I write and paint about things but am too scardy cat to look into a camera. I don’t do seances (can’t be arsed to find that accent) because I’m scared the people I let go to save my own ass might come back.
Pointman
Pointman, there’s nobody actually out there. It’s just… well I don’t know what it is, but I don’t ascribe moral value to it. It’s a freaky phenomenon but I’m sure scientists will be able to explain it eventually, if one of them gets around to examining it. I’ll ask my scientist friend, if he can get past the fact that I’m a Republican (even though he loves me really).
Why are you scared to look into a camera? Your portrait doesn’t indicate any reason for being reticent. It doesn’t steal your soul, you know (as I was told that the Arabs think, as a child in Qatar).
Odd, because ‘save my own ass’ sounds American to me. Americans say ‘ass’ (and ‘butt’, which is the height of unsensual and so unlike the object: ‘bum’ is much better — ‘butt’ sounds like a medieval punishment or a paddle for making butter with).
But you use English spellings and idioms. ‘Arsed’ is an English idiom. So you’re some sort of British I suppose — like Irish music — but have spent some time around Americans? Or just watch American TV?
Yes, well, there’s nobody actually out there… and there’s nobody actually out here. The dog has done the sensible thing and gone to bed. I shall follow her example. Goodnight.
The answer is Yes to all of those questions.
Pointman
Oh hello. Cleaning my teeth. What about the question of why you won’t look in the camera?
I did have a song for you Amanda. But it will keep. It is one of those ones that come in handy as one proceeds down the track through the four stages associated with consumption of l’eau de vie, viz, verbose, bellicose, lachrymose, and comatose. Trust you didn’t get too far.
Amanda, I was actually 32 to 38 or so doing the Hasbro bit on temp worksites, especially at the artsy fartsy ad design and tech publication firms, where one had its own corporate toy box for blowing off steam. The boss at Tech Comm in the Water Street warehouse in Milwaukee even kept a list of his people’s birthdays and had little lunch to-do’s with a cake and all, including for the secretarial (actually especially for) staff, who really ran everything. Work was a part of a well-lived life then. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: no one wants to face it but now the rule is, whoever has to work to pick up a cheque loses. I’m between contracts and I am still yomping the computer on what are basically “spec” (paid upon acceptance) jobs. And I am 60 years old.
The only way out of this Depression which is only now kicking in is through hard and unrelenting work. Cameron and Obama and the rest of the cheque-kiting crowd are so full of it that it is oozing out their ears. They need to stop lying about economic deliverance is just around the corner and stop backing Ponzi schemes to extend the misery further out in time and start investing in industrial plant, impose import tariffs on a countervailing basis, and draft this second generation of wasted young manhood into a Civilian Conservation Corps-type combined work apprenticeship and “finishing school” routine of regular compulsory exercise, discipline, and an orderly existence. What was spent on the bank bailouts could have paid for and trained a workforce to build 20 Hoover dams and thousands of miles of roads.
Those dandelion puffballs on legal dope grinning their way through the workplace are just as likely to show up one day at work with a chainsaw and a ballet tutu and pig mask as in a business suit, Amanda. If I see anything to a contract except the boss’s office once, or more often, them over lunch, and the pile of paperwork or CD’s for the job, it will be too soon. We didn’t need metal detectors, plant security was an affable ex-policeman bored with retirement, there was no need for random drug screening or in-plant rehab counselors, and you looked forward to meeting co-workers most days in the 1980’s and up until 1996 or so. Workplaces now in America are like internment camps.
I’m not alone in these feelings. 30% of the US workforce is contingent labour and a good 20% of that is freelance subcontractors, though to be fair, it has always been a variant of that for aerospace and other forms of one-off manufacturing owing to a shortage of workers and the nature of the scope of work on offer, prototype or template adjustment (re-configuring a manufacturing line’s quality control documentation, for instance) or doing up a set of procedures manuals (when you are done, you’re done), or foodling with new toys which would be used as gauge points for ongoing production (it’s all done with CAD/CAM now). Where temping has grown is in everyday administrative work, and even line labour to facilitate flexible manufacturing and rapid response re-configuring o f assembly lines.
Farmerbraun: I’m delighted to hear that you have a song for me, though I do wonder why you should suppose that I pass through any of the stages you name. That is not at all the sort of drinker I am. Which is to say, I am always elegant. And when I’m not elegant, I’m sexy. See you on the morrow or whenever.
Walt, that is far too much text for now. Must hydrate face and drink water and that’s me ablutions for tonight. The dog is wondering where I’ve got to. I’m her hot water bottle, you know.
Pointman, just in case you are still there , it’s the good Dr John with the one and only David Sanborn. Also on board were Steve Gadd, Richard Tee , Will Lee and Hugh Mc Cracken.
Embarrassed Bear, that’s just what the bastards are doing to Americans. We in the rest of the world get the extra-special treatment. I am so looking forward to the next trillion dollars which are still hot and barely off the press. And the next. And the next
Amanda says:
October 23, 2010 at 2:04 pm
I don’t recall anyone asking about “the question of why you won’t look in the camera?” – that was an honest compliment to you, which you’ve obviously chosen to misinterpret. That being the case, I see no reason for us to interact henceforth.
Pointman
Oz yes my computer tells me everyone’s age pointman is really 180 and his real name is Dorian Grey. Amanda is really 26 and a fully fledged astro fizzycyst and works at Cern.
Blackswan is 35 and a paid secret agent for the Australian government but if has to tell you what he does well he will have to do something about it with a Walther PPK his frequent trips to the mainland is an elaborate cover story.
I’ve been sprung. Right on all counts, except I’m 36.
Stop fibbing Swanny. Or should I say sonny: you’re 14 and still squeezing zits, and we both know it 😉
New post here
Cheers
Oz
farmerbraun says:
October 23, 2010 at 2:26 pm
So long as we have a ringside seat on the next pointless punchup where we all become holy martyrs on behalf of the good name of the Cheeseburger Way of Life, it is always helpful in these trying times to refer to the works of Ernst Doblin, Kit Isherwood, and David Clay Large, America’s premier authority on the history of the Weimar Republic of Germany. We shall reach a point of diminishing returns shortly on printing press runs of the ready.
The difference between then and now is no alpha wolves leading the packs really are sufficiently Stoic moralists nor adequately versed in the quaint and essential generalist art of making complex things simple. A Twenties person with a degree in economics and a consultatory figurative pistol to leaderships’ heads then would have shut down futures trading speculators (but not for stakeholders and players) and the derivatives markets would have been defenestrated by at least 1998. I also am hard-pressed to imagine any of this ending up with anything less turbulent happening than for the Georg Soros types ending up on the end of meathooks dangling from lamp posts, alive.That is how similar issues have been resolved in Central America as recently as the 1980’s, and the Balkans, every major nations’ feasibility study for the next big turkey shoot for the past 150 years, in the 1990’s.
I think also if you spent some time at the RUSIDS site at http://www.rusi.org, those able fellows do a good job at putting meat on the frame of the ideas I have just punted in your direction.
None of this has to happen. It never did. It is a product entirely borne of cultural and community choice, perpetrated by fallible people none of whom knows why anyone else does anything. They can only grab the tiger by the tail and ride out the cross-country flight until the tiger sorts out it is easier to stop and explain power relationships to the holder of its appendage.
OT, OzBoy, I would wage if you asked Fenbeagle to do up your blog as the Blenheim Torygraph with a satirical 19th century style banner and trademark, compleat with unicorns, lions, fencing chaps in 18th century togs and a cannonball bouncing off a head or two, we could draw all the silly bar stewards at the Delirium Tremens over to here and make a Gore-drenched madhouse of this WordPress-formatted affair. Folks here now are so fed up with the Izen-less troll-free environment they are poking at each other just to stay in practice. We need trolls to stomp here with great vigour and regularity.
Either that or it could be called the New Weimar Gazette, done up in Otto Dix like grotesquely realist imagery for the banner. After all, as humanity is ramping up for that sort of melee globally all over again, why not greet it with a Joel Grey/Liza Minelli Kit Kat Klub panache?
I also think a phone call or two to an InterNet ad agency, of which I have one excellent name in my circle of associates, might result in a test-flight of the clickworthiness of this site, thus assuring such energies would be well worth your while.
Geez, Oz – dobber…..
Now me Mum’ll be slappin’ me …again.
I mean good grief, OzBoy, you could be collecting money for clicks on the YouTube postings here. They get run to death. 10 cents a click? Add it up, old son. All you have to do is contact them and sign the contracto. WordPress I think gets a kick, too, but why not?
Edward Musil is a decent read, too, on the subject of Germany’s collapse in the 1920’s. which our situation so closely mirrors here throughout the West.
G’day Walt,
Your verbal paintbrush is at least as effective as the sable-hair ones in painting graphic images. You’re right about the cannibalistic tendencies…lol
I have to change my avatar one day soon. It really is starting to move on its own. Bwahahahaha!
Thanks, BlackSwan. I am up to my eyeballs in completing a project rather faster than I had thought it needed doing, hence the carryover of the polish (I dart from that to this and back again to break up the routine).
Any word on the Cygnet? Is she doing well? Not still in Ecoland, is she, attitudinally?
Thanks for asking Walt – the beautiful Cygnet is fine…now. It seems her passions have changed in recent years. Your earlier descriptions of the modern workplace were no exaggeration and a few years of the blow-torch in a multi-national corporation put paid to a four-year IT degree and all the promise it held.
It’s going to take time to find the wherewithal and regain the confidence for her to go-it-alone. In my day it was just called “burn-out” and we went off to do something else.
What do they say? – one day at a time. As a parent, when your head is hard-wired to “fix everything”, being a spectator is a challenge.
I’ve been enjoying your posts – they’ve restored my optimism that most patrons of the B&G have more than two functioning brain cells…LOL (not too much text at all).
Oh, and the Ecoland thing? Yep. Makes for interesting round the kitchen table conversations when she comes over to visit. I think they call it a Mexican stand-off.
Mlpinaus (Marcus) said he was paddling the same canoe but at least his boy listened and was prepared to read some material until the penny finally dropped. I remain optimistic.
Pointman, I assure you that I didn’t choose to misinterpret anything. I can’t read your mind! How was I to guess that what you said had anything to do with me — I am not that immodest! However, if you intended somewhere within the context that went unstated a compliment to me, then I can tell you that I like compliments as much as the next person. But if you go back through the comments now, assess honestly whether I could have understood you — not living, as you do, in your mind. If anything, I was trying to draw you out a bit and you wouldn’t be drawn. I enjoy interacting with you so I’d not like to be ‘banished’ for something I haven’t done.
Pointman: On the other hand, you don’t owe me anything, and if you would rather not address me or be addressed by me, I’ll respect that.
Pointman: Now that I think of it, this comment (Why are you scared to look into a camera? Your portrait doesn’t indicate any reason for being reticent) could itself be taken as a compliment that you missed. Don’t be so eager to look for slights that aren’t there. Nothing wrong with proper pride, but you see my point I hope.
Amanda says:
October 24, 2010 at 1:31 am
Amanda, my apologies. I was tired and under some stress at the time. Not an excuse but perhaps an explanation. Friends?
Pointman
Pointman: Of course :^)
Thank you! P’s dime.
Pointman
How lovely to be able to play. Interesting to watch the hands. I suppose if I spent less time on blogs I could learn! :^)
Blackswan,
Managers go back to ding-dong school to learn how to “game” employees for maximum yield while undermining their ability to serve as potential workplace threats to the managers’ own empire. One day there will be a massive class-action suit against formulators of those curriculae and those who followed those gaming strategies in the workplace. HR people also play silly empire-building games to put people together who are clearly incompatible even based on a cold read of their CV’s: where I come from, such people are called “sh*t-starters.”
I predict the entire charter of HR management will be reconfigured globally as a result of this cynically-implemented brutal game matrix which makes of modern workplace life a living hell. If military organizations were run as are major corporations, there would be universal mutinies.
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