The climate talks in Copenhagen were not a pop quiz. Our “leaders” have had years to prepare and plan to reach on consensus on the sacrifices that need to be made to limit climate change. And yet Western nations are willing to make only the most meager concessions. You might expect the world’s biggest polluter to take the lead in trying to reduce harmful emissions. But the US, the world’s biggest polluter for quite some time, is too busy trying to pass the title of sootiest sovereignty on to China to do much of anything, even though China has only recently industrialized and has four times the population and thus pollutes only a quarter per capita of what the US does. Well to be fair, the US did do something – as Naomi Klein notes, they trotted out everyone’s favorite diplomat Hillary Clinton to berate and blackmail developing nations. Not surprisingly, that didn’t go over too well. So while Obama blathers on without really saying anything the talks are looking more likely to collapse without coming to an agreement. And even that may not be the worst possible scenario since no deal at all is better than a terrible one. As Klein notes again, Western leaders desperately want some kind of agreement so they can at least pretend they did something, but that something could very well stick a fork in developing nations . The latest pledge of $10 billion per year is such a paltry sum it wouldn’t even match the brokerage fees Western financial firms rake in for carbon trading and the likely reductions would not be enough to keep Africa from being fried.
We do know, from witnessing a series of these jarring about-faces, that the G-8 powers are willing to do just about anything to get a deal in Copenhagen. The urgency clearly does not flow from a burning desire to avert cataclysmic climate change, since the negotiators know full well that the paltry emissions cuts they are proposing are a guarantee that temperatures will rise a “Dantesque” 3.9 degrees, as Bill McKibben puts it.
~snip~
Europe, he [Matthew Stilwell of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development] says, fully understands how much money will be made from carbon trading, since it has been using the mechanism for years. Developing countries, on the other hand, have never dealt with carbon restrictions, so many governments don’t really grasp what they are losing. Contrasting the value of the carbon market–$1.2 trillion a year, according to leading British economist Nicholas Stern–with the paltry $10 billion on the table for developing countries, Stilwell says that rich countries are trying to exchange “beads and blankets for Manhattan.” He adds: “This is a colonial moment. That’s why no stone has been left unturned in getting heads of state here to sign off on this kind of deal…. Then there’s no going back. You’ve carved up the last remaining unowned resource and allocated it to the wealthy.”
It is abundantly clear that waiting for the world’s “leaders” to fix the problems that their own policies have created will not be enough to avert disaster. We will reap what we sow, and if we continue to sow the seeds of destruction the harvest will be bitter indeed.
After passing credit card reform which does nothing to limit usurious interest rates and health care reform which does nothing to limit exploding insurance costs and financial reform which does nothing to regulate the disastrous derivatives trade, all I want this year for the holiday which replaced the pagan festival of Saturnalia is for Congress to shut their goddamned yapping pieholes and stop “helping”.
1
ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS,
a buzzard on a branch.In Afghanistan,
no partridge, pear tree;
but my true love sent to me
a card from home.
I sat alone,
crouched in yellow dust,
and traced the grins of my kids
with my thumb.
Somewhere down the line,
for another father, husband,
brother, son, a bullet
with his name on.2
TWO TURTLE DOVES,
that Shakespeare loved –
turr turr, turr turr –
endangered now
by herbicide,
the chopping down
of where they hide –
turr turr, turr turr –
hawthorn thickets,
hedgerows, woodland.
Summer’s music
fainter, farther…
the spreading drought
of the Sahara.3
THREE FRENCH HENS –
un, deux, trois –
do not know
that French they are.Three Welsh lambs –
un, dau, tri –
do not know
that Welsh they baa.Newborn babies –
one, two, three –
only know
you human be.Only know
you human be.4
THE GRENADA DOVE IS CALLING.
The Condor calls from the USA.
The Wood Stork calls from its wetlands.
The Albatross calls from the sea,
on the fourth day of Christmas.The Yellow-eared Parrot is calling.
The Kakapo calls from NZ.
The Blue-throated Macaw is calling.
The Little Tern calls from Japan, calls
my true love sent to me.The Corncrake is calling; the Osprey.
The Baikal Teal calls from Korea.
The Cuckoo is calling from England,
four calling birds.5
THE FIRST GOLD RING WAS GOLD INDEED –
bankers’ profits fired in greed.The second ring outshone the sun,
fuelled by carbon, doused by none.Ring three was black gold, O for oil –
a serpent swallowing its tail.The fourth ring was Celebrity;
Fool’s Gold, winking on TV.Ring five, religion’s halo, slipped –
a blind for eyes or gag for lips.With these five gold rings they you wed,
then slip them off when you are dead.With these five go-o-o-old rings.
6
I BOUGHT A MAGIC GOOSE FROM A JOLLY FARMER.
This goose laid Barack Obama.I bought a magic goose from a friendly fellow.
This goose laid Fabio Capello.I bought a magic goose from a maiden (comely).
This goose laid Joanna Lumley.I bought a magic goose from a busker (poor).
This goose laid Anish Kapoor.I bought a magic goose from a bargain bin, it
was the goose laid Alan Bennett.I bought a poisoned goose from a crook (sick, whiffing).
This foul goose laid Nick Griffin.7
THE SWAN AT COCKERMOUTH –
of a broken heart, one half.The Mersey Swans, flying
for Hillsborough, wings of justice.Two, married and mute on the Thames,
watching The Wave.A Swan for Adrian Mitchell
and a Swan for UA Fanthorpe,
swansongs for poetry.The Queen’s birds, paired
for life, beauty and truth.8
ONE MILKED MONEY TO MEND HER MOAT.
Two milked voters to float her boat.
Three milked Parliament to flip her flat.
Four milked Government to snip her cat.
Five milked the dead for close-up tears.
Six milked the tax-payer for years and
years and years…
Seven milked the system to Botox
her brow.
Eight milked herself – the selfish cow.9
BUT THE DEAD SOLDIER’S LADY DOES NOT DANCE.
But the lady in the Detention Centre
does not dance.
But the honour killing lady does not dance.
But the drowned policeman’s lady
does not dance.
But the lady in the filthy hospital ward
does not dance.
But the lady in Wootton Bassett does not dance.
But the gangmaster’s lady does not dance.
But the lady with the pit bull terrier
does not dance.
But another dead soldier’s lady
does not dance.10
LORDS DON’T LEAP.
They sleep.11
WE PAID THE BLUDDY PIPER
fir ‘Royal Bank;
twa pipers each
fir Fred and Phil,
fir Finlay, Fraser, Frank.
Too big tae fail!
The wee dog laughed!
The dish ran awa’ wi’ the spoon…
We paid the bluddy pipers,
but we dinnae call the tune.12
DID THEY HEAR THE DRUMS IN COPENHAGEN,
banging their warning?
On the twelfth day in Copenhagen
was global warming stopped in its tracks
by Brown and Barack and Hu Jintao,
by Meles Zenawi and Al Sabban,
by Yvo de Boer and Hedegaard?
Did they strike a match
or strike a bargain,
the politicos in Copenhagen?
Did they twiddle their thumbs?
Or hear the drums
and hear the drums
and hear the drums?
~ 2009, By Britain’s Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the first woman and Scot to hold that title.
gal·li·mau·fry (gāl’ə-mô’frē)
n. pl. gal·li·mau·fries
A jumble; a hodgepodge.[French galimafrée, from Old French galimafree, sauce, ragout : probably galer, to make merry; see gallant + mafrer, to gorge oneself (from Middle Dutch moffelen, to open one's mouth wide, of imitative origin).]
I learned a new word today. I thought Gallimaufry was the planet Doctor Who came from. Who knew?
What’s going on in this mixed-up world lately?
Here is an example of God’s Great Golden Work, illustrated by this story, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein cut the asking price of his Park Avenue apartment by 10 per cent.
Yes, God’s Work Blankfein is showing magnanimous charity in cutting the asking price of his Park Avenue crash pad (is this fucking Green Acres or what?) to $13.5 million from $15 million. You see, he wants to move over to 15 Central Park West, the new and improved most swanky crash pads in Manhattan. One of his former Sux mates successfully flipped an apartment there, doubling his investment from $11 to $21.5 million in less than a year. Nice to see our tax dollars put to such good, I mean God’s, work.
Blankfein’s apartment comes with built in olympic sized floor aquarium for when he feels the need for a dip with his squidmates, and a blacked out walk in closet with hanging perches for when he needs his vampire beauty sleep. There will also be the gate to heaven where he can use his zirconium and platinum encrusted gold pass credit card when he’s feeling the God urge.
It seems it is all in the family over at 15 Central.
In a Goldman Sachs proxy statement for the fiscal year ending 2006, the company disclosed that “Mr. Blankfein intends to purchase for approximately $US27 million a residential apartment and related facilities in a building in which certain Goldman Sachs-managed real estate funds hold an economic interest of approximately 31% in the aggregate.”
The building was 15 Central Park West.
Such a deal.
Meanwhile, Elvin Tim is busy being Santa God’s helper pretending to give a shit about the little people just in time for the holidays.
Treasury wants more lender leeway on loans
“The banks are not doing a good enough job,” the Times quoted Barr saying in a Friday interview. “Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed, and they will be.”
Yes, Timmy’s Elf Shop at Treasury and the Obama Administration are finally getting around to noticing that the loan modification program hasn’t been very effective so far.
More than 650,994 loan revisions had been started through the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program as of last month, from about 487,081 as of September, according to the Treasury. None of the trial modifications through October had been converted to permanent repayment plans, the Treasury data showed. That failure is getting the administration’s attention.
“We are taking additional steps to enhance servicer transparency and accountability as part of a broader focus on maximizing conversion rates to permanent modifications,” Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly said in an e-mail yesterday. The Obama administration plans to announce additional steps tomorrow, including new private-public partnerships and resources for borrowers. source
More PPIPs! Whopee!
They tried low level bribery:
“The administration’s initiative provides a cash incentive of $1,000 to the mortgage servicer once a loan is converted from a trial to a permanent modification plus annual payments of $1,000 for as long as three years provided the loan remains in good standing. “
Now those so called incentives will be tied to the banks making the modifications permanent. I am underwhelmed with their prospects of Treasury’s reigning in of bankster negligence.
Well maybe it still does for the organ with which many people perform the majority of their cogitation, but in this case we’re talking about the brain.
Often you’ll hear from anthropologists who say that homo sapiens possesses greater intelligence than other animals and its own homonid forebears and the evidence can be seen in the increased size of the brain case that evolution has given us. It always made me wonder that if that were really the case, why aren’t whales building space ships and why aren’t ants wallowing in their own filth rather than building complex societies.
Scientists looking into that notion have found that having a bigger brain doesn’t always make you smarter.
“Animals with bigger brains are not necessarily more intelligent,” according to Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary’s Research Centre for Psychology and University of Cambridge colleague, Jeremy Niven. This begs the important question: what are they for?
Research repeatedly shows how insects are capable of some intelligent behaviours scientists previously thought was unique to larger animals. Honeybees, for example, can count, categorise similar objects like dogs or human faces, understand ’same’ and ‘different’, and differentiate between shapes that are symmetrical and asymmetrical.
“We know that body size is the single best way to predict an animal’s brain size,” explains Chittka, writing in the journal Current Biology. “However, contrary to popular belief, we can’t say that brain size predicts their capacity for intelligent behaviour.”
~snip~
While some increases in brain size do affect an animal’s capability for intelligent behaviour, many size differences only exist in a specific brain region. This is often seen in animals with highly developed senses (like sight or hearing) or an ability to make very precise movements. The size increase allows the brain to function in greater detail, finer resolution, higher sensitivity or greater precision: in other words, more of the same.
~snip~
Chittka says: “In bigger brains we often don’t find more complexity, just an endless repetition of the same neural circuits over and over. This might add detail to remembered images or sounds, but not add any degree of complexity. To use a computer analogy, bigger brains might in many cases be bigger hard drives, not necessarily better processors.”
If Chittka is correct it would go a long way towards explaining the curious case of the the hobbit fossils (homo floresiensis) which were discovered a few years back. The fossils were dated to about 18,000 years ago meaning that they lived at the same time as modern humans. There has been much debate about whether these diminutive hominids were modern humans suffering from some genetic disease or were of a separate lineage. Archaeological evidence shows that the hobbits were using stone tools, fire, and hunting in groups which is pretty similar technology to what modern humans were using at the time. If the theories of anthropologists like William Jungers are accurate and the hobbits really were a separate species from homo sapiens , then Chittka’s theory would explain how the hobbits were able to develop these technologies despite having brains only 1/3 the size of homo sapiens.
Not only does the size of one’s brain not necessarily determine intelligence, but a pretty strong case can be made that evolution does not select for increased intelligence at all, or at least not any more among human beings. It all boils down to the fact that nobody likes a smarty pants.
We have evolved to the point where as a species we can manipulate the environment around us so that every day is no longer merely a struggle for basic survival. As a result the pressure to continually adapt has been taken off and there is no need to get better when just getting by will suffice for the continuation of the species. You can read a fairly scientific discussion of this idea here, although take it with a grain or two of salt since the author Kyle Skottke was an undergraduate at the time the paper was written.
Two main theories concerning g [general intelligence] are the dependent domain and the independent domain models. The domain dependent model has general intelligence as a broad category which is divided into smaller more specific intelligences, including mate selection, cheater detection module, and face recognition module. Under this model, it can be inferred that if an individual’s g is high, then their ability to select and obtain a mate, detect lies, and recognize people’s faces would also be higher. It also follows that someone with a low IQ would have trouble finding a mate and detecting when people were lying.
The independent domain theory states that general intelligence is only one of several psychological mechanisms, along with mate selection, the cheater detection molecule, and the face recognition module that have evolved. It is important to note that in this model, general intelligence is defined as the ability to use deductive logic and abstract thought.
I believe the independent domain model is more realistic since there have been numerous studies showing that the psychological mechanisms of the brain are unlinked. One such study was done to compare the correlation between IQ, which measures g, and the success of individuals in finding a mate, which was measured in terms of marriage. The studies found shown that very intelligent individuals (with IQs above 125, at or above the 95th percentile of the IQ distribution) are the least likely to marry of all the cognitive classes (Kanazawa, 2004). This data suggests that mate selection and general intelligence are unrelated, such as in the field independent model.
~snip~
It is clear that as a species, Homo sapiens exhibits a broad range of intelligences, of which heritability can account for 50 percent. The fact that there are genes which control intelligence provides a platform for evolution and natural selection to act upon. During the early development of the human race, there would have been many more challenges in finding food and reproducing than we face today, which would have made the mechanisms of natural selection much more important. In today’s society, nearly anyone can survive and reproduce, which negates the principles of natural selection, which only function if there are more individuals born than a given environment can support. In essence, since we have effectively eliminated hunger and disease, we have removed any pressure from the environment to keep adapting and become more fit.
You can read a less scientific but much more humorous discussion of that same notion here.
Since human intelligence has come so far since the Stone Age, can we say that because of nothing more than evolution we will all become geniuses in the next hundred years or so? The short answer is – no. Evolution favors only those mutations that are somehow more favorable to procreation. It doesn’t make decisions based on Man’s assumptions of what’s right or what’s wrong or on any sense of moral progress or the greater good.
~snip~
And besides, is higher intelligence truly an asset when it comes to success in the 21st Century? Surprisingly, many high I.Q. individuals don’t do as well as their less bright fellows. There are several reasons for this being the case. One is that employers don’t especially like employees smarter than themselves. The result here is that many individuals who belong to high IQ societies wind up under employed; working at jobs far below their potential. The same is true when it comes to school and marriage. Kids hate geeks who go around screwing up the grading curve and men are often off-put by women smarter than themselves. In fact, it’s been demonstrated (though not often publicized in this PC culture we currently inhabit) that complete and effective communication between those separated by more than fifteen I.Q. points is unlikely. Just think about that. It means there is no way, repeat NO WAY, that people with IQ’s of 115 are ever going to explain to people with IQ’s of 85 why it’s important to graduate high school and not make babies instead.
~snip~
Solving problems today is easier than ever but implementing those same solutions is next to impossible. When taken in combination, the fact that high IQ humans are born less frequently and then selected as world leaders less often points toward a Space Age marked by a decrease in those very same little gray cells that got us out of the Stone Age.
That last bit is the crux of the problem. Even as our technology increases exponentially, our ability to use it wisely appears to have stagnated. We have known about the power of the atom for over a century and have been able to physically unleash it for decades. But instead of using this discovery to figure out how to provide clean and nearly unlimited energy for all of humanity which would have gone a long way towards ending ceaseless wars over resources, it was used to build weapons that threaten to devastate civilization altogether. Now we have thousands and thousands of nukes but not one fusion power plant and we won’t see one any time soon either as fusion power is a few decades away – just like it has been since the 1950s. As a species, that doesn’t exactly show a whole lot of intelligence.
So, while humanity has managed to raise itself out of the mud, for the foreseeable future we may be doomed to just muddle along no matter how big the old noggin becomes.
The culture wars rage on. A high school in Danvers Massachusetts is awash in blue language and students refuse to clean up their acts so the intrepid principal Thomas Murray has decided that something must be done to curb the ribaldry run amok. What exactly was it that these salacious scholars were saying that has their principal in a state of high dudgeon? Some combination of the Forbidden Seven? Shit? Piss? Fuck, cunt, cocksucker or motherfucker? Or heaven forbid, TITS?
No, the word which has the administration of this Massachusetts high school longing for the days of their Puritan forbears is *meep*.
It’s no surprise that using bad language in school can get you into hot water. But “meep”?
Danvers High parents recently got an automated call from the principal warning them that if students say or display the word “meep” at school, they could face suspension.
Meep doesn’t mean much, unless you are Beaker — the hapless, orange-haired assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on “The Muppet Show.”
While meep may be nonsense, what it represented was no laughing matter to the high school’s administration. High school Principal Thomas Murray said students were using it and other words to disrupt school in a particular part of the building on Cabot Road. The term later became part of a disruption some students were planning online.
“It’s really not about the word in particular,” Murray said. “The reason for the message (was) a group of students were instructed to refrain from that language and other language in a particular part of the building.”
Murray gave students “a reasonable request” not to use the word to disrupt school in a hallway, and to stop other behaviors, but they did not listen, Murray said.
And if that warning doesn’t work, Principal Murray is prepared to call on Danvers’ finest to restore order.
Murray called every student’s home with an automated message and sent out a mass email banning the word from school.
“Please be advised that any student who has the letters ‘meep’ on their clothing or uses the words verbally will face suspension from school…the police are monitoring this situation as well.”
It is still unclear exactly why the students took to their incessant meeping, but if the goal was to make their principal look like a insufferable nooge, well then mission accomplished. C’mon Principal Murray, stop being suck a killjoy and hum a little Ode to Joy with Beaker instead. It might make you smile.
No word yet from Danvers High on the status of mana-mana.
All I know is that somewhere George Carlin is laughing his motherfucking ass off.
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
Liberty, she’s going down.
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