More Noblesse Oblige

Prince Charles continues to use his position a lot more wisely than the rest of the anachronistic rabble from which he hails. Frank may have been manning the anarchist barricades for 40 years but he now, somehow, finds himself in bed with Chuckles. Life, eh?
This cartoon is a modestly amended regurgitation of a very early Frank strip, which is as much as I can manage today.

In the wind....designs improve and the promise of increase abounds (outside of the lamentably poorly served UK) and even the mafia are keen to get involved!
Hell - even the French!

In the water...anacondas

McFly 23 is out and about in Manchester, teaching elephants to tapdance

Long Term Plan

The brain seems ill-equipped to deal with what it has to deal with. Oh dear.
No wonder we forget the maths about electric cars and ignore sinking islands and bury our heads in disposable trash. No wonder we hold our breath for "clean" coal and look on the bright side of neo-colonialism.

And yet...

...and then again...

Deep Cover

As more video evidence of uncontrolled policing at the G20 protests comes to light, and undercover infiltration of campaigning groups is used to deny citizens the right to assembly, we are advised not to expect much at Copenhagen

It;s not just the infringement of campaigners rights - UK information gathering, from illegal internet intercepts to compulsive DNA collection, continue to arouse fears.

David Attenborough joins Optimum Population Trust

More nails in Satire's coffin

Truth is far stranger and dumber than fiction.

Noel Lynch brought the Tesco idiocy to my attention thus;

"Today's Guardian has a half page advert for TESCO. It is headed 'Turn lights into flights'. It shows a low energy light bulb and says that if you buy it you can get a clubcard voucher that you can turn into 60 Airmiles. So that's save a small amount of energy by buying a low energy light bulb and then consume a large amount of energy by flying an extra 60 miles. Doh!"

Quite so.

The Earth Hour folk drop a bollock with Alanis -really quite breath-takingly numb of them.

The Masters of the Universe would rather not be regulated, thankyouverymuch

We're probably all fucked now.

OPEC denies any part in Climate Change


An excellent cartoon from Martin Rowson in the Grauniad

Not a good week, on the whole. A lot of Obama-fueled Gordon Brown-nosing, coupled with a handful of pseudo-anarchist wankers playing to a phallanx of pseudo-journalistic cameras made for a poor display. Too much kettling and containment and predictably OTT PCs. A couple of non-committal half-statements at the end of an economists communique may quickly fade away.

Here's an excellent lecture by Dieter Helm. Succinct and informed and inarguably respectable.
(thanks to Marc Hudson)

Media Friendly

All the usual stuff.

You know the drill

Levelling the Land

Monbiot has waxed historical with this

Somewhat sluggish this week, me.

Feeding The Hand That BItes you

There's been a lot of debate lately about whether this or that extreme weather event - from China to Australia - is a symptom of Global Warming or merely a surprisingly large cluster of normal freak events. Are these disasters the last of the rare disasters or the first of the common disasters? This seems to me to be like asking - whilst under violent assault - whether one's assailant is the familiar local nutter or a scout for the rampaging army of zombie psychopaths that are on their way to ravage your neighbourhood but at present are still some miles away enjoying a breakfast of griddled brains in a nearby town. The fact of imminent zombie invasion should surely be focusing our minds rather better than it is. But the general consensus seems to be that, untill our shopping malls are actually being over run with slavering mutants, there is no need for any action that might interfere with the day's business.

Changing the lightbulbs in the mall isn't going to stop an army of zombies. We may need to choose a different battlefield

Beast Market

Seeing as the markets have done such a wonderful job of securing a safe and happy future for everyone, the British Conservative party suggest leaving the safeguarding of bio-diversity in their caring and capable hands

It'll drive us all mad in the end, but some folk have got off to a head start, (short sighted dinosaur politics in the North of Ireland? - who'd've thunk it?)

We begin to say goodbye to Asian water supplies, Indian rains and the salamander

End Daze

As Australia burns in a record breaking drought -(as does China and, soon, California) - James Lovelock advocates a Churchillian battening of national hatches, whilst others man the barricades.

On an entirely irrelevant note...
1) Pop has not only eaten itself, it has been violently sick down its shirt, and

2) The missing Dark matter sought by physics can be easily accounted for by adding up all the invisible elephants in all the rooms in all the houses of our glorious civilization

Burning Man

Renewable energy, - if it is to be resilient enough to manage the transition from carbon based mass consumption to a sustainable future - must be accessed through a technology based on materials in plentiful supply. There's no point basing it on kryptonite or on materials that are prohibitively costly to access or convert. There is only so much platinum (or uranium, for that matter) to go around.
The idea that we can carry on regardless and simply substitute another power source for our present ones is foolish in the extreme. Carbon was a once-only offer. The party's over.

Energy is an expression of labour and time. What human or horse muscle can achieve in an hour pales beside the work rate of carbon fuelled engines. We have created a global culture that is entirely dependent on more labour and more time than is available without burning fossil fuels. When the fossil fuels are no longer available, and the alternatives prove inadequate to the immense and wasteful scale of our chosen way of life - how will the powerful seek to satisfy their "needs" for additional labour and time? In the time honoured tradition -of enslavement and conquest? How will the powerful deal with those who compete with them for labour and time? In the time honoured tradition of enslavement and conquest.
We are a predictable species, by and large (give or take the odd black swan moment)

There is no alternative energy source that can meet our "need" to have our cake and eat it too.
Reduce. Re-use. Recycle

One might add - Re-Design

Singularity

Fresh from mapping the ocean floor for our surfing pleasure, Google now joins forces with NASA to create a "SIngularity University" to ride that steep learning curve and maybe get us the jet-packs we so richly deserve

Elsewhere - being profoundly bolloxed gives the Australian government pause for thought.

Fox Trot (?)

And lo - Darkness is upon the face of the waters pretty much everywhere you look, whilst Australia maintains its historically low tolerance of humans. Is it any surprise that Uncle David Attenborough should feel moved to take a small swipe at biblical half-wittery in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

Jonathan Porrit also speaks out about the elephant in the room.

A price is put on life.

Elsewhere, disappointingly, - Jim Hansen declines to support those struggling against airport expansion - declaring it an irrelevance in the face of the real problems - which centre around coal. Of course Jim Hansen is not a man whose opinions one dismisses lightly - and he no doubt has well considered reasons - but we at Throbgoblins International consider that the cultural significance of the conspicuous carbon consumption of habitual frivolous air travel makes it a crucial target in the struggle for a resilient and sustainable post-carbon society.
Mr Hansen will no doubt be on Michael O'Leary's Chritmas card list this year

Plots and Plans

Sowing and reaping becomes a more unpredictable affair as weather begins to dance to a new tune

Obama keeps his momentum going.

Please complain to the BBC about their shameful and cowardly refusal to broadcast appeals for humanitarian aid to Gaza. It won't take a minute.

Meanwhile, turbines get tougher, racism gets weirder and yeast levels begin to stabilise

Crunch

Up the slope of optimism....and down the other side.

If we choose to rebuild the new economy in the image of the old one we only postpone calamity. Too many people wanting too much stuff. Something's gotta give.

A host of golden anachronisms

Daffodils bloom recklessly early in the south of England - ignoring the genetic advice of a million winters.

World Wide Webs

Exotic arachnids (the domestic ones being anoraknids) are surviving winters and establishing themselves in permenant new ranges throughout the UK. Nothing deadly, but a few shocks in store and some nasty bites.

Security issues make their way further and further into our every nook and cranny as Orwell's prescience gets clearer each day.



Pledges are made

Priorities are established

Babylon burns.....
.....in more ways than one

Big Brains

In the spirit of the times Throbgoblins International have withdrawn all our collective dosh out of the bank and given it to the richest person we could find. He'll know what to do. Everything'll be alright now.

On further consideration, however, we think that we would have been better advised to send it to the Kew seed bank - which is trying to safeguard plant biodiversity before it all goes bump, so we still have a genetic pot to piss in, as it were. It faces closure due to a lack of funds.

I marvel at our cleverness, don't you?

and I'd just to say.... Peter fucking Mandelson??????

Raveheart

The Scottish assembly plans to unite the Celtic fringe in resisting Westminster's imposition of GM crops on/in their soil, whilst the Global Crop Diversity Trust are amassing a data and skills base to provide growers with "Climate Proof" crops for when the shit hits the fan. How Genetically Modified plants will ultimately fit into that scenario is, of course, hotly debated. Throbgoblins International would like to see the patent laws of the United States withdrawn from the field so that sense can be extracted. In the spirit of impending doom, we are pretty free with our own intellectual copyright, and would like to see Monsanto, BASF et al join the party

They can take our lives but they cannot take our FREEEEEEDOOOOOMMM! Sounds like a pretty poor deal to me.

An inalienable right to exist?

A clause in the proposed Ecuadorian constitution - which goes to referendum on Sunday - gives Nature the inalienable right to exist within it's own cycles, and obliges Government to protect it. Nation states being what they are, this could never be as pure as it sounds, but it's a marvellous thing to commit to legislation. Let's hope the rest of it isn't Bollocks, and that Zorro's pessimism is misplaced..

A similar guarantee seems desperately needed in Europe, particularly if one is of the amphibean persuasion ( or a bird, or a fish, or a mammal, or a ...)

Meanwhile- whilst the government that brought you economic meltdown brings you that bit closer to climate chaos with a grand fudge over coal fired power - the more sensible among us re-use what we can, in the hope of having a little something left for the grandkids.

Congratulations to Marc and Sarah on their wedding today. You both deserve many blessings and some time off1