The (maybe) solution to global warming: salp shit

and 134 million 200m metre long pipes suspended in the ocean.

That’s a whole bunch of pipes. The suggestion comes from James Lovelock, who I am increasingly thinking may be right on a lot of things (the severity and speed of climate change, the need for nuclear energy until we get our renewable act sorted out), although the idea that the planet is a self-healing organism is fanciful.

Meanwhile I’ve been headscratching about whether a liberal environmentalism can ever work. Joe Otten writes (and writes well) about it here. No shit, salp or otherwise.

The world is not right: Jane Garvey

has left Radio 5 Live’s Drive show. For years Jane and her ‘miserable git’ sidekick Peter Allen have hosted one of the best news shows on radio. She is a bright, articulate, irreverant, funny, razor sharp broadcaster, a model interviewer with one of those lovely alto female voices the BBC use so well. When she and Peter Allen hosted the show together, I felt that all was right with the world. Dismayed to find her leaving, I sent an email in to the show, which was used in the editor’s farewell blog post about her here. (”Glue her to the chair. Offer her more money.”) They didn’t use the bit where I threatened to bury any managers who might have brought about her demise under my patio. She’s off to pastures posh and new: Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, a recognition of her talent, but weekdays 4-7pm just won’t be the same again.

The BBC: when its good, it’s very, very good.   And that’s mostly BBC Radio.

BBC hack licks Gordon Brown’s feet.

Need a good vomit?  Read this by the BBC’s pikaian in chief.

The BBC Labour Party conference sketch: better than a finger down the throat.

It’s official: Mozambique’s Catholic Archbishop is barking mad.

Archbishop Francis Chimoio of Mozambique has accused the west of sending HIV infected condoms and retrovirals to Africa to ‘finish the Africans off’.

That’s an Archbishop, the chap who has a wooly scarf presented by the Pope to signify his spiritual brotherhood with the Big Heiliger Hund in the Vatican. He should be sacked and his medication reviewed, since the man is unfit to hold office, and is crucifix-chewingly mad. Now, as a once colonial occupier, Britain and our European colonists colleagues are not completely blameless (but Africa has had a while to get over it), but if we withdrew all our NGOs, aid workers, charity donations, development aid, 4×4s, research, pills and rubber johnnies then you’d see the continent die even faster.

Archbishop, go look in Rwanda, Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan and Zimbabwe (probably a few more basket cases, too). Africa seems to be perfectly capable of slaughtering its own with starvation, maladministration and machetes and without any help from us. Archbishop go look up the story of the mote in another man’s eye and the plank in your own.

Great blog name of the day: Marginalized action dinosaur

Give that blog a triceratops, I say.

The BBC politics page did

go all Pravda-ish over the Gordon Brown’s speech, something Iain Dale characterized as a Brown-gasm.  Gor-gasm, surely?

Gordon ‘Domestos’ Brown

wants to kill 99% of all known bugs. Dead. In his Castroesque speech (one hour, Thor help us if ever actually gets elected) to the Labour Party conference yesterday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged the Labour government to conquer - if I remember aright - malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, MRSA and the lastest superbug du jour Clostridium difficile.

Laudable stuff, duly clapped by the applause chimps. By way of a reality check, we’ve been trying for sixty years and can’t yet cure the common cold, a virus with few of the tricks of HIV. My friends in white coats are frantic about the underfunding and utterly insecure ‘career’ path available to scientists in the UK.

MRSA and c. diff are domestic problems, to a lesser extent HIV and TB (there’s a lovely extreme drug resistant TB on its way for Gordon to grapple). Malaria will once again become a problem in the UK soon. The UK will not conquer any of these diseases.  Some of our labs and universities may make a breakthrough or do some of the handle-turning, but to pretend otherwise the Prime Minister was just farting through trumpets.

If I were an hookworm or a biharzia I’d be very upset: not a mention in Bournemouth. Just how damn worldwide disease does a worm have to get before a Prime Minister notices you and pledges a pogrom? Did Gordon’s spinners tell him ‘we don’t do helminths’.

(Did this post make you itchy?)

Uzbek steals bloggerheads, ex-Ambassador and someone else’s chin.

The English Premiership football league is increasingly a thing dominated by spoiled petulant millionaires (who need their legs slapping) and club owners whose sole aim in life seems to be pissing enthusiastically over football fans with one hand while extracting their cash with the other. The fans choose to allow themselves to be pissed over, so that’s fine. They could always go fishing, or collect strange triangular stamps from countries about to vanish below a Pacific high tide.

I don’t write about football because I’m not really interested. Currently, however, an Uzbek gentleman with a name that would have been in the ‘girls’ half of the register when I was at primary school appears to be trying to buy Arsenal football club. He has also taken exception to a book written by our Craig Murray, ex-Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who whimsically pointed out that the UK/US’s allies in the GWOT were in the habit of torturing dissidents and occasionally putting them to death. Boiling them, if I remember aright. For revealing which, the Blair government sacked and calumniated the man. Mr Murray understandably went rogue and wrote a book exposing all, including some allegations about Mr. Girlsregisterov.

Mr Girslregisterov threw a gargantuan Uzbek wobbly (and you want to see one of those: many goats die) and ordered his powsh London lawyers to issue a takedown notice against the rogue Ambassador’s blog hosting company. The hosting company microwaved a whole server taking out as collateral a few high profile politico bloggers and a hilariously loose cannonish political blog activist called Tim Ireland who blogs as Bloggerheads.  As of tonight his blog is still unavailable. Tim gets up noses like coke in a City bankers’ toilet.

The whole nastiness is written about and updated in far greater detail here, and Chicken Yoghurt deserves come kind of award for to be invented, struck and presented for his services to free blogging speech.

Now, I am a northerner, and the limit of my football allegiance is to be mildly happy when northern teams do well at the expense of southern. However, Arsenal (a London team) are currently playing sublime football without any money put in by Mr Dodgski Girlsregisterov. And looking at him, he has clearly stolen someone else’s chin, having at least one more than is strictly necessary.

So, Mr Usmanov, (and I say this as an internationalist) kindly fuck off, fuck a long way off in short jerky movements. We like our freedom of speech, our rogue ex Uzbek Ambassadors, our web activists, our Labour councillors, our Conservatrive mayoral candidates for London and don’t want your sort around here stopping them writing. I might not agree with them all, but I want the right to read what they have to say, and want them to have the right to write it.

And to his lawyers: I wish you shit beneath your fingernails. You didn’t have to do this. But you did.

A blog I like:

Raedwald (just an English boat). I suspect we may honourably disagree on some things but he has a boat, and reading his previous postings he is a proper seaman. The kind of sailor I’d sleep soundly if he were on watch. His boat and blog have an Old English name, Raedwald after the man who (and as a northerner this hurts) bashed the King of Northumberland in 617 to become King of all England. Raedwald is thought to have been buried at Sutton Hoo in 625.

From his latest post Reform!, he’s angry, and rightly so. As a lifelong liberal, I agree with much of his anger, and how interesting that this kind of anger and dissent is now coming from the right. As G.K.Chesterton (a pompous verbose ass for whom I have little time, but gifted with a turn of phrase) said, we are the people of England and we have not spoken yet. When Raedwald and I largely agree (except on matters of seamanship, on which there are no political differences, one is a seaman or a lubber) an interfering authoritarian government is forging interesting informal coalitions in opposition.

Marcel Marceau

irritating mime artist, has karked it.

‘Oh look, he’s miming dying again.  He’ll be fine.’  Now can we stop having people pretending to be against plate glass windows in public, please?  Where I used to live we had a schizophrenic gentleman who patrolled the town centre and dealt with them really well, and those dickheads who pretend to be statues, they really couldn’t stand a shower of thorazine saliva and soon started moving in the general direction of away.  He should have been awarded a small stipend from the town.