Atheist London bus ad pledge: sign up now.

Devil’s Kitchen is not a blog for the faint-hearted. It is a very forthright and sweary libertarian blog, often hilariously funny. Some uncompromising bloggers claim to be ’scorched earth’: well DK is Hiroshima after the bomb.

He’s also (as one would expect of a Devil) an atheist and here he proposes that we Brit atheists pick up a sharp stick, and each dobbing in a fiver, give theists a good jab back. So go read Atheism: a worthy cause, then go to the Pledgebank Atheist Bus Page and sign up to spread the word to the people of London:

“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life.”

Emily Hill of the Guardian is an eegit.

What bilge from yonder Comment is Free article dribbles? Soft, it is someone called Emily Hill and she is writing crap.

Gentlewomen prefer Bonds.

It’s now been scientifically proven that being a bit of a bastard is simply a natural evolutionary strategy.

Emily, you can’t be a bit of a bastard. Your parents are either married, or they’re not, and it reflects not at all on your misogyny or otherwise. Find a new insult and use it correctly, eh? Make one up if you must,then you can define how it should be used. Just leave us bastards out of it. Oh, and science doesn’t prove things, it deals in probability. I thought facts were sacred.

This blog kills climate skeptics…

not this blog, but this blog. RealClimate. Their most recent post typifies what happens. A report appears that, say the oceans are not warming. The roof gets blown off the denialist chicken hut and they hurtle clucking and flapping into type with all kinds of foil hattery.

AGW is a UN-forced scam to increase taxes, to bring in the New world order, keep scientists rich with public money (oh those labs: I was in the Natural History Museum a while ago and they’re SO rich they don’t care which set of Porsche keys they pick up at the end of the day!) Most of the skeptics don’t have a science degree to bless themselves with, far less a real knowldege of the process of science, its methods and literature.
Then a site like RealClimate does the work: reads the papers, absorbs the data, compares the graphs, looks for diference in methodologies, finds the discrepancies that can skew trends, reaches back into the literature. And comes up with a considered post like this: ocean heat content revisions. The money line:

This isn’t going to be the last word on OHC trends, and different groups are going to be publishing their own versions of this analyses relatively soon and updates to the most recent years are still forthcoming. But the big picture is that ocean heat content has indeed been increasing in recent decades, just like the models said it should.

An here’s a gem from the middle of the post:

Other problems came up when trying to tally the reasons for sea level rise (SLR) over that 50 year period. Global SLR is a product of (in rough order of importance) ocean warming, land ice melting, groundwater extraction/dam building, and remnant glacial isostatic adjustment (the ocean basins are still slowly adjusting to the end of the last ice age).

Bold emphasis mine. The oceans are still settling down after the end of the ice age 12000 years ago. So when the foil hatters start pointing at eight-year cooling trends, well they really can go and do the other thing.

Gordon Brown you’re no dinosaur.

Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland yesterday wrote what most of us have known for a long time: Gordon Brown is a rubbish Prime Minister. We didn’t need him to pronounce it, but watching the broadly Brown boosting Guardian columnists writhe in agonies of disappointment is great spectator sport.  It’s pyrrhic sport because I’m rather fond of Britain and don’t like seeing it being run by incompetents and malcontents. Just too many *tents going on.

A minister who bravely commented off the record about his wounded boss observed:

“He’s a dinosaur,” the minister adds, lamenting Brown’s failure to delegate, his dithering, his days that start - or end - at 4am.

I hope he’s not: dinosaurs* bossed the earth for 140 million years and of they had a name for we mammals it was probably ‘dinner’. Scientists were wrong about them: 30 years ago they were tail dragging, mush-chewing, shuffling slow-wits, more recent interpretation of their fossils suggests that they were smarter, faster and more active than previously thought.

Modern humans have been around for only about 100,000 years. 1/1400th the time dinosaurs bossed the place in all their diverse pomp and success (and of course their descendents are still with us: birds). And the way we’re going it’s unlikely that as a species we’re going to make it to our first million years. ‘Dinosaur’ should not be an icon of redundancy and incompetence: it should be a symbol of versatility, success and dominance.

*IN half a respect, he’s right. ‘Dino’ means terrible, and we’re mostly agren that Gordon Brown is a terrible prime minister.

Deep sea carbon storage: one of those ‘oh shit!’ moments (2)

I don’t know much about deep sea chemistry but have a feeling in my bowels that if an eminence like Wallace Broeker is suggesting we pump our CO2 to the Pacific seabed in a compressed, liquified sludgy state, hopefully going nowhere and doing little, he must think the problem of atmospheric CO2 very grevious indeed.

‘oh shit’ 2.1:

Arctic ice melting faster than ever.

Brown’s government has datahorrea

Not again! Salford MP and Secretary of State for the Client State Hazel Blears has had her offices robbed and a laptop with sensitive gummint documents aboard nicked (and probably already swapped for heroin). They are merely ‘restricted’ the lowest grade of secret government document.

That comes after the highest grade of document - a top secret assessment of al-Qaida that had no business being outside MI5 offices was found on the 18.42 from Waterloo last week, along with some other secret stuff also left on a train (do equal opportunities laws require us to recruit Alzheimers’ sufferers as spies?) and the ballwarts who rule us lost 25 million records, including bank accounts and trivial shit like that earlier this year

Lunartalks has to agree with matgb’s conclusion: Hazel Blears is shit and should resign (for real this time).

Anecdotery: It’s not a new problem: I once found papers relating to Royal Navy submarine deployment in a House of Commons photocopier. I scanned one page to see what I’d got, then gave them to a policeman.

Royalty: very silly.

William made Knight of the Garter.

‘Prince William, who will be the 1,000th Knight in the Register, will wear a blue velvet cape and black velvet hat with white ostrich plumes for a procession from the castle to the chapel.’

Bonkers.

Obama aide talks Pooh.

Now, I yield to no-one in my admiration for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, but I have never thought him the new von Clausewitz as a Barack Obama aide seems to:

Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”

Eh? The Daily Telegraph has the full, slightly strange story.

Related lunartalks: There is one true bear and his name is Pooh. (Not touchy theist safe.)

BBC defines murder victims

by their mode of transport. Wierd.

I suspect that the young man whose life was ended was rather more than a cyclist, something not yet formally identified by scientists as a separate species. Although if Flann O’Brien was right, we may well be. In his novel The Third Policeman he writes:

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles”

Yes I’m gullible

(according to this lady) but fuck it I’ve got an allotment and it’s looking fine this June day:

and digging my compost trench I thought long and hard about my support for David Davis and concluded that on this issue it’s the right thing to do. Politics as usual has failed on protecting our civil liberties, and is heading for a real country-wreck (nay, a world-wreck) on the impact of climate change and the changes we need to make if we as a population are to survive it.

Related: in Comment is Free someone called Julian Rose suggests London grow more of its own food.  A good idea, but as a recent allotment acquirer I can tell you it takes commitment and hard work (and still the bastard weeds keep coming).  A bit utopian, but once fuel prices start to make shipping food into cities very costly, maybe society will have to work on collaborative local solutions to these problems.