HANG THEM ON THE GREEN by The Forgers

This is a pre-Election song for the worst Parliament in living memory. While it's not completely finished, but thought I'd post it while election fever is in the air. I'll re-release it for the next big wave of disillusionment. The video was a rushed job - the water near the end was supposed to be a symbol of stagnation.

The video is on YouTube here.

Now - to vote or not to vote? Like the sucker that I am, I always do.

HOW THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT SCUPPERED YOUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE

Let this moment be inscribed in history.

by Mark Lynas, The Guardian, 23.12.09

"Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was "the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility", said Christian Aid. "Rich countries have bullied developing nations," fumed Friends of the Earth International.

Here's what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. I was attached to one of the delegations, whose head of state was also present for most of the time.

What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors".

Shifting the blame

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks in every corner of the world.

Above all, Obama needed to be able to demonstrate to the Senate that he could deliver China in any global climate regulation framework, so conservative senators could not argue that US carbon cuts would further advantage Chinese industry. With midterm elections looming, Obama and his staff also knew that Copenhagen would be probably their only opportunity to go to climate change talks with a strong mandate. This further strengthened China's negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India.

All this raises the question: what is China's game? Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, "not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?" The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now "in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years' time".

Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away."

full article here

ALBUMS OF THE DECADE: AN ALTERNATIVE LIST

Let's be clear. This decade didn't produce anything like Dummy, Revolver, Suede, Grace, Led Zeppelin IV or Dark Side Of The Moon - but I had a little trawl and came up with:

White Stripes: De Stijl (2000)

Jack White is the rock musician of the decade, bringing some spontaneous fire to a tired genre.

Waterboys: A Rock in the Weary Land (2000)

This album is just one great, passionate song after another - Mike Scott's best since the mid-90s, and my personal favourite this decade. I find it hard to believe he's not more widely recognised.

George Harrison: Brainwashed (2002)

George's posthumous LP was of some sentimental value to me, but it was also a high quality career end. Stuck Inside A Cloud was on my mind for days.

The Coral: The Coral (2002)

Saw them live at Glastonbury, and enjoyed their penchant for '60s garage psych. Why can't more bands be this inventive?

Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand (2004)

Scotland's reply to the Strokes; it got the latest new wave revival going, and is endlessly catchy - and clever.

Robert Plant & the Strange Sensation (also the worst name for a band this decade): Mighty Rearranger (2005)

Before he got together with Alison Krauss, Percy produced this post-Zeppelin career high-point, incorporating some of his "world music" influences, and including the beautiful All The King's Horses. This coincided with a very happy, sunny spring for me.

Elbow: Leaders Of The Free World (2006)

Band of the decade? Their record company went bust and couldn't promote this excellent album. Enjoyed jamming the title track with friends. They always have a strong lyric, and the way they build up themes in the melody is a masterclass in songwriting.

King Creosote: Bombshell (2007)

Another inspired, under-rated songwriter who is original and thought-provoking. His brother is in The Aliens, the best psychedelic band in Scotland. Maybe the only one?

The Aliens: Astronomy For Dogs (2008)

See above. Fans of psychedelia: you are still being entertained.

Kings Of Leon: Only By The Night (2008)

This is just old school "classic rock". The singer's voice makes it very distinctive, and the arrangements are good.

I also wanted to put in more White Stripes, The Good The Bad & The Queen, Editors, Burial, LCD Soundsystem, Feist, The Shins and The Green Man by Roy Harper (brilliant at its best moments) - but there was no room. Sadly, nothing from 2009, not the greatest year for music - or is it just that I'm getting older? Apart from the album my friend made under the name Dick Brucinson & The Basics, far and away the best album of the year, the only things I remember were by Lily Allen, Doves and Them Crooked Vultures. Resolution: listen to the radio some more.

THAT OTHER CRUNCH


Cormac McCarthy's The Road seems to haunt everyone who reads it, so bleak is the picture it paints of a world of depleted resources and a truly broken society. Here, George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth debate eco-collapse and whether industrial civilisation is worth saving. Timely, prophetic stuff - well worth a look.

In Monbiot's words "... the survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species’ remaining time on earth."

CHANGEABLE


When I was a kid I used to play at being Doctor Who, and that entertained me even in the playground, or walking to school. In particular, his abilty to regenerate fascinated me. Being transplanted very suddenly, as I have been this month, sets off the same kind of dislocated feelings I imagine would happen were you to wake up in a new body. My whole adult life has been like this. When you measure it in eras, life seems long, even though you know it isn't really.

I’m here in Nottingham, to all intents and purposes alone, and surrounded by relics that are like the memorabilia of my past lives. Where did I find time to read all those books in my 20s, for example? I only have the sketchiest memories of them, and it took me a whole day to clean 12 years of dust from the spines. I’ve also unpacked my CD collection, the soundtrack of very different days. My old clothes don’t fit, for some reason – and here are a couple of cardigans (cardigans?) and jackets I can hardly remember wearing.

The place like a new planet. People seem very different from Hungary – mostly because I can understand what everyone is saying in public places. I have to mention this example, overheard at a bus stop – a son, in his late 40s, to his mother (thick midlands accent): “You’re the age Gran was when she pegged it and I’m the age you were when Gran pegged it!”

The climatic conditions are (what else?) changeable. I seem to remember the wind blowing the clouds across the sun in some other waning summer, and being caught in the rain. Have I been here before?

There are some continuities too: I still have an appetite for red wine, and now my console is reconnected, I’m in magical touch with everyone I knew from other time streams. This is a good thing when you’ve got that exiled feeling.

MPs ARE TOO EXPENSIVE


There is no justification for these ludicrous expenses claims (see below) by people who have also regularly voted to hike their salaries well above the average rise, and who recently called for a 66% pay rise. They ought to be removed forthwith.

full report in The Guardian 08.05.09

• Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, who allegedly claimed money on three different properties in one year alone. She also spent £5,000 on furniture in the space of four months after she bought the third property.

• Jack Straw, the justice secretary, who claimed back the full cost of council tax, even though he received a 50% discount from his local authority. Straw repaid the money last summer after a high court ruling requiring the receipts to be published.

• Lord Mandelson, who claimed thousands of pounds to repair his constituency home in Hartlepool after announcing his resignation as an MP in 2004.

• David Miliband, who spent hundreds of pounds on gardening at his constituency home.

• Alistair Darling, who changed his official "second home" designation four times in four years.

• Geoff Hoon who switched his second home to allow him to improve his family home in Derbyshire at taxpayers' expense before buying a London home.

“If present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress.”

UN Environment Programme report, 2007

A GENERATION AGO....

It's thirty years since Maggie Thatcher first came to power in the UK and in a future history the chapter about her era may well be subtitled (1979 - 2008). Whatever the main title (I'd go for Thatcherism And The Age Of Waste), its theme will be an ironic one - that her policies ultimately hastened the death, or at least the containment, of the very free markets she revered.

Free market capitalism is emphatically not the greatest system that we can devise for running the world. It distributes goods and services, true, but what a failure it's been in terms of maintaining social cohesion, and even economic stability. What a rejection of human expertise it now seems, after a century of progress in the understanding of how to (and how not to) manage a balance of growth, relative economic stability and social justice. (Remember the "social market"?) What an abdication of planetary responsibility it turns out to have been. And in its old age, what a festival of consumer overspend, fantasy and political corruption.

The party's over. Soon Thatcher's admirers won't have a leg to stand on, and the dear leader will be gone. Not the end of history, then.

LESS MAD WORLD


The world is a less mad place to be now. Listening to Jarvis Cocker's guest editor slot on the Today programme this morning, it slowly dawned on me that we're both part of the new orthodoxy. I found myself agreeing with everything he said - many were things I have thought again and again over the past twenty years. The urgent need to push the environment to the top of the political agenda can now be delivered in a flat monotone rather than screamed in panic - because everyone apart from career contrarians (Jeremy Clarkson et al) believes it, at some level. It all seemed a bit dull, however, even though Jarvis was doing his best, just like the mournful progress of a hymn tune which makes its weary way to its final utterly predictable conclusion.

So we had to fight hard for the boring mainstream. And so it came to pass - the UK government and Barack Obama both committed to 80% reductions in carbon emissions by 2050, and I am going into 2009 with a spring in my step and feeling more at home in our strange civilisation. Not only this; the progress of history and ideas is at last resuming. (See September 18th, below) It's not a bad time for the new President to be taking office. The timing is uncannily perfect.

What I'd most like to do in 2009 is get reinspired.

A GREEN NEW DEAL

"As long as the basic tenet of unlimited hoarding of wealth remains fundamental to our economy, economic disparity and environmental degradation will continue. We will continue to accept as fair and inevitable that economic growth creates concentration of wealth, on the one hand, and unemployment, displacement of people and poverty, on the other. Without a fundamental rethinking of the current economic dogma of private property rights above all other values, and that human progress is best measured in increased material consumption, we cannot create an environmentally sustainable and poverty-free society."
Roar Bjonnes, a Proutist thinker.


It is much easier to diagnose the problem than to propose solutions for it, especially solutions that don't contain the kind of dynamic which moves inevitably to some kind of old-style state-controlled economy. I think that, even in the context of a free market economy, certain restrictions would be practicable, and without removing incentives for motivated and successful people. For example:

1. The prohibition of dealing in certain kinds of "junk" stocks, however they are defined: hedge funds, short selling, etc
2. Fixing currency exchange rates, or otherwise prohibiting large-scale currency speculation.
3. An end to corporate lobbying to restore democratic control of parliaments, and the payment of MPs at a more moderate level to attract people who are genuinely interested in public service.
4. Increasing taxation on multinational corporations as part of a co-ordinated reining in of the supranational freedoms which they have accumulated and abused. The money would be used to fund green technologies and training for work in a more environmentally sustainable economy.
5. Repossessed property should be taken into the public domain to replenish the public housing stock, and rented in the first place to the defaulting occupant(s), at a subsidised rate. Over time, there should be a gradual restriction in the number of properties one individual/family is allowed to own.
6. A substantial increase in the minimum wage, which would be paid (including flexible increments) to people working for publicly-funded sustainable projects. This would be paid for by a drastic reduction in military expenditure, as well as far heavier taxation on higher earners.

STRANGE PRIORITIES

A colleague of mine asked a good question today: Why is it that the UK government bought the debts of the Bradford & Bingley the other day (at a cost of £4000 per household, on average) - and yet sold the profitable part to a (privately owned) Spanish bank? Is this simply bad business sense or, more likely, knee-jerk neoliberal thinking by a government that has well and truly lost touch with its roots?

AIN'T JUST THE ONE WAY

"Democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised." George W. Bush, in his closing remarks yesterday. Translation: "I'm shit scared." The best system for whom? And how many alternatives are currently being considered?

GOOD NIGHT TO FREE MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM!

"This is a failure of a system where we relied on the markets and excluded government. And the markets failed." Tony Benn

"The authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have demonstrated that they'll do all they can to protect and preserve institutions that directly touch the lives of millions of people." Robert Preston, BBC News

The events of this week are the final full-stop at the end of the long, rather tedious Thatcher-Blair era when free market dogma was seen to trump all other concerns and put an end to sensible political debates about how our economies should best be structured and run. Suddenly, it's all up for grabs again, and so much the better.

Trumpeted by Reagan and Thatcher and followed blindly ever since, the dogma that people's interests should be subordinated come what may to the whims of the free market rolled back some of the best achievements of the twentieth century. This flawed doctrine bequeathed us the evil inheritance of an ever widening gap between rich and poor, unviable economic prescriptions for developing nations, spiralling property prices, economies built on "industries" that produced nothing, increasing profits in the hands of Fat Cats and financiers, and ever more miserly wages for people who actually did the work and produced the goods. Even more seriously, it was this apparently unassailable idea which has brought the global environment to the brink of collapse. Finally, (finally!) the system has begun to implode.

This leaves an intellectual vacuum into which the new ecological thinking, hitherto dismissed as a heresy of the fringe, can begin to develop and mature in the arena of serious debate. Unfettered by a dogma which now looks as dated and irrelevant as the scholasticism of Medieval Christendom, people (and possibly even the less cautious politicians, when they eventually put down their hymn sheets and realise the world has moved on) will be able to debate green and sustainable solutions to the global problems of the new century without being shouted down. We can dare to imagine, for instance, repowering with wind and solar energy. We can now do better to provide a decent standard of living for everyone without relying on "trickle down". Once unthinkable, now that governments have shown they will actually intervene in the economic sphere, such completely affordable aspirations are now possible with a bit of political imagination and a whole lot of pressure from people on the streets.

We may be going through the birth pangs of a new era and it's been a long time - my whole adult life - coming. The battle of ideas is back on, and there's a whole world out there to be claimed. "For the many", Mr Blair, actually for the many. Good night free market fundamentalism. You won't be missed.

IRREVERSIBLE

"Today is just another Friday in August. Drowsy and close. Office workers' minds are fixed on the weekend, clock-watching, waiting perhaps for a holiday if your finances have escaped the credit crunch and rising food and fuel prices. In the evening, trains will be littered with abandoned newspaper sports pages, all pretending interest in the football transfers. For once it seems justified to repeat TS Eliot's famous lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."
Andrew Sims, New Economic Foundation, writing in the Guardian


(Today I felt like a child who has woken up from a nightmare, except that it's a waking dream and it's continuing. There is almost no one who understands the situation; there's little comfort to be had; it's crouching in the shadows every minute; I'm powerless.)

100 months

from the same article: "But does it have to be this way? Must we curdle in our complacency and allow our cynicism about politicians to give them an easy ride as they fail to act in our, the national and the planet's best interest? There is now a different clock to watch than the one on the office wall. Contrary to being a counsel of despair, it tells us that everything we do from now matters. And, possibly more so than at any other time in recent history."

There's little comfort in that, because most of the people are like the politicians: no one seems to want to know.

get ready for 4 degrees

JAMES LOVELOCK, PASCAL'S WAGER, RALPH NADER & THE ROBOTS


In The Revenge Of Gaia, the new book by the climate scientist James Lovelock, he "predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater." (from an article in today's Guardian.) Given that some kind of catastrophe is inevitable, Lovelock's solution is to "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years till it hits the fan." A lot of people I know have been saying this kind of thing for a while; often they're the same ones who refused to believe in the ecological crisis when it first burst, well, crept, into the newspapers in the late 1980s. Funny, that. Of course it's nice to live with the weight of the world lifted from your shoulders... but there's a more intelligent solution.

We've been here before, in the face of another great defining moment, the retreat of religion. At the time when there was still uncertainty about God's existence, French philosopher Pascal came up with his famous "wager', namely that in the face of this uncertainty, it was a better bet to believe in God because of the size of the prize i.e. eternal bliss. Presumably, the pleasure we might lose in terms of reining in the worst of our Earthly desires would be made up for in the sense of serenity we'd experience by doing the right thing? Anyway, this is how I understand it.

Something similar applies now. It is simply a better bet to act as if we can ameliorate the climate catastrophe. Until we're sure we can't. This time it's the size of the possible loss that counts.

On a related topic, given that we expect climate catastrophe, and that we have daily exposure to the latest evidence (if such were needed) that capitalism isn't working very well at the moment, why isn't there more of a fuss about veteran campaigner Ralph Nader's presidential bid?

Take a minute to look at what Nader stands for. Click the link, go on. He wants to cut the bloated military budget, adopt a carbon tax, lead an "aggressive" clampdown on corporate crime and - if this doesn't sell him, nothing will - impeach Bush & Cheney! None of the other candidates would dare to confront corporate power. But isn't this precisely what needs to be done in 2008? It's hard to believe that so many millions of voters can't see this. (Ignorant? Stupid? Androids? A combination of all of these?)

The mainstream politicians wallow in the public's ignorance/stupidity/roboticness, of course. Even though it's clear we are locked into a kind of danse macabre with global corporations, none of them have the imagination to disengage from this, or even talk about how this might be done. We can have "change", Mr Obama, but it needs to be radical and visionary.

I would like to see the current generation of politicians swept away - by the ballot box if possible, but by any means necessary - to be replaced by more courageous people, like Nader, who are not afraid to say what they believe, and whom we can therefore trust to respond effectively to the current crisis in capitalism, and to the threat of global catastrophe.

"ENJOY YOURSELF. IT'S LATER THAN YOU THINK"


Even though I'm not a polar bear, at the end of 2007, everything has come to seem increasingly temporary to me and I'm not sure quite how to lay plans. I'm trying to prepare myself psychologically. Above all, I'm trying to lighten up and just to get on with things. That explains the title, from a great old Specials song.

It's been a really bad year for polar bears.

"On Sunday 16 September 2007, the sea ice covering the Arctic ocean melted back to a record low point. It has always melted back in the summer, but in recent years it has retreated further and further, to new lows, strongly suggesting the influence of climate change. The 2007 retreat, however, shattered the previous record, set only two years earlier, by a quite colossal amount, an amount so enormous as to be scarcely credible. It exceeded the September 2005 low point by another 22 per cent – an area of 1.2 million square kilometres, or more than 385,000 square miles. This represents an extra area of ice five times the size of the United Kingdom. Gone in a single summer. If you consider that and you don't think the world is rapidly warming up, what do you need to convince you?" Michael McCarthy, The Independent, 28.12.07

The main event of the year was this, and the weak (but not wholly disappointing) response of the UN Climate conference in Bali. With a potential rise of 6.4 degrees in global temperatures by the end of the century, which would make life on the planet unviable, (source: IPCC Report) what should my response be?

And then there's the - potentially - even more urgent question. What happens if the oil runs out? Despite the awful problems with biofuels, I still want to know (very selfishly) whether they can lubricate mechanical parts, power planes, and be used in the manufacture of plastics. Politicians have largely avoided talking about the potential scarcity of oil from about 2015 onwards, probably because, compared with global warming, we aren't even close to consensus on this. But you have to think. (Don't you? Don't you?) Will we be catapulted within a couple of decades back to an almost pre-modern (static, localised) society? Will the internet and other media work in a society where oil is unavailable or twice as expensive? Will technology and transport be the exclusive preserve of the very rich? At the very least, a huge hike in oil prices must lead to an unprecedented economic recession. As for the other consequences, they're hard to see. I'm not an economist. But jobs, house prices, the whole social order are going to change. My sector, teaching EFL, will shrink drastically with any recession in international trade.

I may be crazy. I think this because almost no one else is talking about it! This is what it must feel like to be mad. But I can't pretend that prospects like these don't overshadow most of my hopes as I look to 2008 and beyond. Ultimately it feels like planning a last gasp holiday, or a final fling, just before the shit hits the fan. There will be last gasps and final flings in 2008.

To lighten up for a moment, here's my other review of 2007:

BEST MOMENT
I loved everything about Zurich, especially looking down my street to the mountains beyond. Also seeing the turquoise waters at Plitvice for the first time, on a photograph and then for real.

FILMS
Atonement (not seen until 20th Jan 2008)
The Lives Of Others
This is England
Notes On A Scandal
The Last King Of Scotland

BEST THING I SAW
rewatched Our Friends In The North

ALBUMS
King Creosote - Bombshell (for great songwriting)
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand (for the voices)
The Shins - Wincing The Night Away (the melodic hooks)
and the Radiohead album turned out to be great, after about the 5th hearing

GIGS
Madness at the Sziget!
Roger Waters in Budapest (for those timeless songs, and how he stitched them together into a whole)
Gogol Bordello at A38, Budapest (for the sheer energy)

BEST THINGS I HEARD ALL YEAR
Shearwater - Palo Santo
The Good The Bad & The Queen - Herculean
Simian Mobile Disco - Sleep Deprivation
And the best album, not from 2007 I don't think, was The Rough Guide To The Music of Hawaii.

MISCELLANEOUS EVENTS
DELTA
Led Zeppelin reunion (I wasn't there, I want them to tour)
Facebook (I am there, and wondering if the novelty will fade in 2008)

BOOKS
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan
Martin Amis - London Fields (both of these for the imaginative scope, the characters and the prose)
Chris Abbott, Paul Rogers & John Sloboda - Beyond Terror (for the facts. If there are such things, and it's a moot point, then here they are, and in a little over 100 pages.)

2007 CHRISTMAS CAROL: A TALE OF EVERYDAY BETRAYAL

dedicated to the negotiating teams from USA, Canada and Japan who served us so memorably at Bali:

In ten days' time, they'll be knocking back the wine, having watched their children sing about the baby Jesus and how the new-born king came to save the world. They might get a little dewy-eyed then, and while they watch again the tale of Tiny Tim they'll probably "reconsecrate" their hard hearts to him. But we who watched it all on TV will never forget their moment now, how those gutless gentlemen couldn't muster their sentiments in the Earth's defence, even in the face of all that evidence. They probably thought they were pretty smart, obviously mindful of their great careers, even as the world was coming apart around their ears.

IT'S DRIVING ME URBANE


When I was a student, we used to talk about what was going on in our souls. Now we make polite conversation. We used to "set the world to rights". Now anything of epic proportions is ventured tentatively, and to close friends only. To see if they're in the mood. We used to revel in exploring the mysteries of life and death and consciousness. We'd speculate wildly about radical schemes, and shout about love to the sky. Nothing was taboo. I know it was a bit strident sometimes, a bit direct and unhewn, but it was in some ways randomly philosophical. And I liked that. Now we're features journalists. Like Sunday magazine articles, each carefully hedged opinion is as unlikely to give offence as it is to raise a flicker of real excitement. I often find. I wonder what happened in the years in between. Did something change our minds?

END OF THE WORLD - BUT NOT IN HUNGARY

Saturday December 8th is the International Day of Climate Change Protests. It is, arguably, the most important protest in human history in that the issues concerned urgently affect us all, although doubtless it will come and go, and be forgotten. The latest IPCC Report warns starkly of "abrupt and irreversible changes" if nothing is done to reduce carbon emissions, and global leaders are meeting in Bali to cobble together whatever bland compromise they imagine their electorates can stomach.

We, the people, are gathering on the streets to urge them to go further, to let them know that we care about policy in this area, that we acknowledge the apocalyptic nature not only of the report, but of events occurring weekly in the News.

Although protests will take place in at least 83 countries, including Albania and Belarus, there is no action planned for Hungary. Presumably it will be isolated from the economic and social upheavals in the next decades by virtue of being well inland? I understand that people are dealing with seemingly more urgent and relevant problems here, but it is frustrating and bewildering that so few pay any interest at all in this era-defining issue that is ineluctably coming home to roost.

Global Climate Campaign

MALAISE


I'm thrown from pillar to post
Don't know what I fear the most
My escape plans are littering the ground
Broken window where the world came in
Stomach-churning dose of vitamins
Will help me make the right constructive sounds

I feel I've lost control
Got a riot for a soul
And they're looking for somebody to kill
All their faces are mocking masks
As my decisions are disasters
And the procession is winding down the hill

There's nothing I've ever done
Made a difference to anyone
Of my deeds, there's little to record
Now the river has burst its banks
And all its filth has filled my tank
And its noise will drown my final words