Vituper8

Humour me for a moment

Greek civilisation preceded West European expansion by many years and is often accorded a further kind of precedence.  The Greeks made so many early steps in maths, philosophy and literature, it is argued.  We just end up recycling their ideas in so many fields.  They were therefore "better", and modern civilisation is degenerate by comparison.

Imagine for a moment that these things happened in a different order, with Britain, France, Germany etc developing the resources to support a rich culture by 100BCE and Greece following on 1500 years later. Might Shakespeare and his contemporaries have developed all the basic themes of poetry and drama, and Roger Bacon of philosophy?  Might Euripides have written a version of Hamlet?  Might the French have had a word for it?

As counterfactuals go, this one is so hard to set up that it falls almost immediately.  Just hold on to it for long enough to wonder whether the "superiority" of a culture relates to anything more than its coming first.

When prices rise...

The price of wheat and other basic food commodities is rising.  Does that mean everybody in the world pays more for their daily bread?  No, it means that there isn't enough to go round, so those who can afford it pay the higher price and those who can't afford it go without.

Why is the Labour party so timid?

They may not have (certainly have not) done everything right over the last ten years, but they don't even make the cases they could do.

When a Tory spokesman jumps up to complain that Britain is the dirty man of Europe or hospital waiting times aren't good enough, the Labour minister just squeaks "we've achieved a lot but there's more to do".

The Conservatives left us with just a few problems. We were in the bottom division for recycling, child poverty, educational achievement, hospital waiting times (the Tories are now recycling the claim that there's a waiting list for the waiting list which was a major feature of their own tenure). And the rest.

Labour has done an embarrassingly poor job in so many fields, but we are still well up on major measurements like these. Why the hell can't they make a simple point that would work in their favour?

 

It makes me angry to be ashamed of my country!

This week I hear that the decision to stop the investigation of bribery and corruption charges against BAE systems might cause serious harm to Britain's international reputation.  The US government even complained at the highest diplomatic level when the investigation was halted.  So we go against logic, law and international agreement just to save a big trade deal with the Saudis.  Plenty of other countries would do the same, but that doesn't make it right.

Another shameful episode came a few weeks ago, when British troops were found innocent of war crimes charges.  An Iraqi was killed in prison.  We know which army unit was responsible for him when he went in, while he was there and when he came out in a box.  But there was "not enough evidence" to track down exactly which bunch of squaddies was responsible for the murder.  So that's all right!  The judge even commented on the "closing of ranks" which had led to the cover up, but they were still discharged.

We preach to the world about democracy and law, but our standards are not as high as we pretend.

Impeach God!

We know that Iraq is a mess, and making the world a greater mess.  We hear rumours of a move on Iran, with no troops left in the caddy, so we'll have to go unconventional.

Never mind the US battlegroups poised in the Gulf.  Think of the caller to BBC Radio 4 last week who asked what the point of Trident was if we couldn't nuke Iran.  No obvious sense of irony.  No recognition of the fallout problems, including those for British forces next door in Iraq.

Tony Blair might have to join the Kissinger/Rumsfeld club of people who neglect to arrange lecture tours in countries with inappropriate extradition arrangements.  But what about Belgium, where you can be prosecuted for war crimes committed elsewhere?  Be careful.

I don't want the leader of my country to be dragged off to the International Criminal Court.  Not because I think he's done no wrong, but because I'm uncomfortable about my country being a pariah.  And if you follow colonialism and slavery and the mangling of the middle east in the inter-war years with the current muscular interventionism, you can see my problem.

And yet you look at all the other world leaders and decide either that a good dozen of them should be prosecuted straight away, or that we let the lot of them get away with it.  Or that humanity wasn't a very good idea in the first place.  Impeach God!

We're doomed... or are we? Part 2

Tony Blair proposes that the world should work to stabilise the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 550 parts per million by 2050.  That concentration is associated with fairly dangerous rises in global temperature, and others - the German government, for example - want a much lower target.  But whatever the number, whatever the date, we have to recognise what stabilisation actually means.

At this date, it is proposed, the proportion of carbon dioxide in our air should not increase (or decrease) from one year to the next.  Let's assume we can actually measure it, that differences between atmospheres over the Antarctic and the Sahara and the Amazon can be evened out, that differences between lower and higher slices of the atmosphere can be incorporated in a single figure, that we can include other greenhouse gases such as methane by a simple arithmetic calculation.

What do we have to do to achieve stabilisation?

• Burn no fossil fuels at all OR burn fossil fuels and capture all the carbon output and stick it into holes in the ground, AND generate the massive amounts of energy to do the capturing and storage from within the same operation.  That won't work with cars, unless somebody invents an interesting car nappy (auto-diaper, other translations on demand).
• Generate all electricity by nuclear, wind, wave, solar or other non-carbon-based technology AND sort out all the other problems with nuclear AND manufacture and install all the windmills and power stations and other generating gear using non-carbon-based technology
• Fuel all transport (INCLUDING the trucks that drag out the uranium ore) by electricity, hydrogen or truly sustainable biomass - is there enough land on this earth to grow the sugar, maize, weeds, wood... and how much energy will it take to ferment and distill the stuff into fuel?
• Catch enough flu or have enough wars to cut the global population in half and then half again and then...
• All of the above.
• Admit that there isn't enough common purpose or religion or anything in the world to achieve what is required, and lie down to die.
• Do as much of the above as we can AND start taking some carbon out of the atmosphere.

Carbon offset schemes often work by planting trees.  Trees are good, but basically they take in carbon for a number of years, then they die and give carbon out over the same kind of timetable.  Growing loads of trees over a short timescale will help.  A bit.  For a short time.  But we've liberated millions of years' worth of carbon in a couple of centuries.  We have to accelerate the carbon capture, not just to take up what we generate this year, but two years' worth a year.  Year after year.  AND MORE.

Or we really are doomed.

Not the book I thought it was

 

Pangborn

Crazy.  I've carried this book with me for nearly 30 years, not read it for more than 20.  Become convinced that it was about a bunch of mutant kids with individual powers that only become useful when they join up as a sum of more than the parts.  Thought I'd look it out when I heard about the TV series Heroes (not bothered to see that, of course), just to pursue what seemed from the reviews to be similarities.

And then I discover that the book I remember (which did exist!) is not the one whose cover I've regarded fondly from time to time as it's moved from bookshelf to bookshelf or home to home  It's a naive, optimistic little story covering fights and flights and centuries with ease because it hides behind the observing eyes of a long-resident Martian.  He can be a good man because he isn't a man.

Written in 1954 (I will check this again and again), it predicts plastic settlements around the Arctic circle as the ice disappears and talks of spring coming ever earlier.  I know I was talking about global warming in the seventies when I bought this book.  Is this where I got it from?  It also includes the word "###########" which I'd associated only with Bill and Ted but now I discover is a coining from 1845 with a much richer history.

Reading it again makes me feel good.  I'm remembering something from a long time ago.  I'm reading something new because it's not the book I thought it was.  I want our Martian hero to get his man.  I'll report again in a few hours when I've finished it.

---

A detailed description of the overpasses and technology of a future city is the hard bit of sci-fi, especially when it's a city of the 1970s and I'm sitting here in 2007, but the people and the conspiracies he handles well enough.  But though he's predicted so much, a cigarette is still cool.

A couple of quotes:

"That March day was like a little girl fresh out of her bath, cool, sweet, ready for mischief."  Written in 1954.  Discuss.

"You had to believe you were unwanted, or you'd be a social outcast."  About institutional life as a young person.

The Martian baddy leads the story but it's really about human nature and philosophy and sweat and tears.  Judgement of human worth from outside.  It ends well enough, and a watcher goes back into the shadows, with ludicrous optimism and no fear of what Billy Kell will do next.

This was an experience I never expected.  When you read a book you usually have to deal with reviews, reputations, recommendations.  This was a book I thought was one thing - I didn't even read the blurb on the back - and it turned out to be another.  Great! 

Now all I need is for the sci-fi crowd out there to tell me the name of the book I thought I'd been looking after all this time.  Then I can look for it on the dispersed family shelves or elsewhere, and see whether it contains the story I thought I'd carried with me.

Iranian weapons in Iraq and selective caring

Supplies of weapons by Iran to Iraqi militias may well be real, but they are certainly being used to build up the upsurge of bad feeling towards Mr Ahmadinejad's fiefdom.

And Tony Blair seems to be taking a lot of notice.  His spokesman claims he has been "at the cutting edge of identifying this problem", first raising the point in October 2005 (Guardian 13/02/07).

This contrasts ever so slightly with the way (or so his spokesman told us) he did not see fit to enquire about the weapons which Saddam Hussein could supposedly arm within 45 minutes and direct at the troops Mr Blair was about to send into Iraq in 2003.

Maybe he's learned a lesson.  But is it the big one?

He's at it again

Yet again I hear Tony Blair (this morning, BBC radio) faced with the accusation that the mishandling of the Iraq adventure has made the world a more dangerous place.

Yet again I hear him reply that we should not accept terrorist arguments that "our" actions justify their attacks.

Yet again I hear the interviewer fail to move in for the kill.

We may not agree that a terrorist action is justified (by anything), but caused is different, and Blair is a lawyer, so he knows that.  Coalition decisions have led to things happening, they have caused these things to happen, they have increased the number of people willing to take such actions and therefore the chance that they will happen.

Testimony to this comes from intelligence agencies all over the world (including Tony Blair's own and those under the care of John Negroponte), parliamentary and congressional committees and the school of the bleeding obvious!

Blair's problem is that if he admits this error he will disappear up his own fundament.  Our problem is that he is still our face to the world.

The work you want, the help you need

That's the inspiring slogan of the JobCentrePlus organisation organisation in the UK.  You might get the idea that this branch of government has the objective of finding you a job and giving you whatever assistance you require on the way.

(Pause for hardly muted harrumph)

 What they actually do is take your details, request your signature every couple of weeks and look disapproving when you keep going back.  Their database contains the most depressing jobs available, with descriptions composed by a remarkable set of twelve-year-olds.  The only help they give you is kick your backside and direct you to a number of harassed private sector companies who swap the contracts and the staff every year and are therefore ideally placed to give you all the help you need.

And then... when you've been a customer of theirs for a number of months, they move up into a higher gear (somewhere around second).  Over the last three meetings I have had the following wonderful, motivational experiences:

1. Let's run through your job seeker's agreement (a document you sign which is a promise that you really would like a living wage and you will read the papers...) so that we can be sure that you're searching for the right kind of work:  no changes except a stern reminder that I must be willing to travel up to 1.5 hours to work now.  Goodbye.
2. Why don't I show you how tax credits can bump up your earnings (yes, I know) even if your wage is pretty low.  (I know, I've done it).  We'll make up the figures (I could have brought the right ones if you'd only asked) and come up with an illustration of your possible payments (well, I needed some more scrap paper).  Goodbye.
3. Why don't you do this friendly literacy test (but I've already done one, and it will be on your records) while I go and sort out your travelling expenses (and I've got a degree, which is also on your records).  Thankyou and goodbye.

Next time we're going to look at the training courses they might be able to offer, and if there's one that might be useful to me I'll muse on how great it would have been to discover that fact some months ago when it might have taken me out of their hair and saved small quantities of tax money.

One day I might tell you about the time they changed my sex.