Chicken Yoghurt » The coming apocalypse

WWF’s Earth Hour: put that bloody light out!

Justin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:10:56 +0000

It’s the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour this coming Saturday…

On Saturday 28 March 2009 at 8.30pm, people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour – WWF’s Earth Hour.

We want a billion people around the world to sign up and join in.

[...]

Every single person who signs up to WWF’s Earth Hour sends the message that they want action to tackle climate change!

The cynics and climate change deniers will no doubt call it an empty gesture when really those of them of a romantic bent should be enjoying the amazing spectacle and the rest can copper up the money they’re saving sitting in the actual as well as rhetorical darkness.

People of all persuasions, I beseech you, it’s a moment we can all come together and savour.

It could be you

Justin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:04:47 +0000

I’ve written before – and at length – about my experiences when I lost my job and fell into the clutches of a monolithic, uncaring and incompetent government system. I haven’t mentioned it lately because I thought, at a distance of five years or more, things must have changed and my experience was no longer relevant.

And then I watched Dispatches on Channel 4 last night – ‘Digby Jones examines how the government is tackling the unemployment crisis’ – and the old feelings of cloying panic and despair crawled back for a visit.

Things don’t look much improved to me – it was all chillingly familiar. The late benefits, the uncaring, undertrained or absent staff, the impenetrable systems, the empty promises. And with unemployment racing away, things can only get worse. The government has closed dozen of Job Centres since I was frequenting them, getting rid of 30,000 staff.

Will things, can things, change? I think it’ll all come down to how it all impacts on the white, middle classes. Five years ago, I was something of a freak on the unemployment scene and treated as such. The staff in the Job Centre and New Deal office genuinely didn’t have a clue what to do with me.

Now we can expect more like me to be beating their fists in futility on the door of the Job Centre. Traditionally and through little fault of their own, the unemployed have not had a voice in the media or mainstream, which is why the government has been allowed to get away with treating them as the have and do.

Unfortunately, it’s going to take the subjecting of a more articulate, educated, resourceful – and above all voting – demographic to bitter, protracted hardship in order to introduce a little humanity into how we deal with the unemployed. Middle England, I’m sorry to say, must suffer.

Will the real Dick Cheney please stand up?

Justin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:52:04 +0000

'We'll be there in a second, Mr Vice President'

It was nice to see Dick Cheney at Obama’s inauguration being the one pushed about for a change. What’s it like to feel like the US constitution, Dick?

They said he was in a wheelchair as he’d hurt his back moving stuff out of his house.

Yeah, right. We all know he has a legion of winged monkeys in waistcoats and fezes to do all the menial stuff. Dick Cheney carrying boxes? And George Bush is retiring to write a new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu.

The real reason is Cheney’s finally, inexorably, curling up into a ball of pure evil that will eventually become super-dense. The world will then collapse in on the infinitely dense centre of his black heart. You read it here first.

The Curmudgeon: We’ll Eat Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When

Justin — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 09:09:05 +0000

Philip on Gordon Brown’s relentless optimism…

“Today, the issues may be different, more complex, more global” than the Second World War, an altogether simpler and more local affair; yet nevertheless, “the qualities we need to meet them the British people have demonstrated in abundance before”. After all, we survived the First and Second World Wars by mortgaging ourselves to the Americans (who could afford us at the time); we survived the industrial revolution by stealing from brown people and subjecting our own people to vile factory conditions, draconian poor laws and the workhouse; we kept smiling through the Black Death by blaming it on Jews and witches: whitewashed with a minimal twenty-first-century gloss, these are all good, sound New Labour coping strategies.

Read the rest…

Just a thought

Justin — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:24:38 +0000

With the global economy in the toilet and the environment not far behind it, might it be worth someone checking to see if the world’s richest bastards are building a fleet of rockets in the Australian desert?

It’s later than you think #2

Justin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:13:08 +0000

Finding Nemo? You better hurry…

One-fifth of the world’s corals have died and many remaining reefs may be lost by 2050 as carbon dioxide from cars and pollution-spewing industries make ocean water warmer and more acidic, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network said.

Me? I’m off down Sainsburys. They’re practically giving Stella Artois away at the minute. It’s cheaper and easier than building a rocket to get off this turd.

It’s later than you think

Justin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:09:10 +0000

So anyway, this one goes out to all those nice gentlemen who are about to shaft us all at the Poznan climate conference.

Anybody else not exactly feeling fiscally stimulated?

Justin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:14:15 +0000

Let me see if I’ve got this right. If we get the 2.5 per cent VAT cut – from 17.5 to 15 – in the pre-budget speech today as massively and widely leaked by the headline-desperate government, that means on a £100 trolley of VAT-liable shopping (food is exempt from VAT so don’t expect the food bill to fall), you’ll be a whopping £2.50 better off.

That means, if I spend £200 on stuff other than for feeding my family, I’ll have saved enough for a sixpack of Stellas, yes?

The Sunday cheer-up

Justin — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:00:21 +0000

How’s this for a we’re all going to die tearing each other to pieces over the last hunk of mouldy bread mash-up?

Overlay this:

Over a third of China’s land is being scoured by serious erosion that is putting its crops and water supply a risk, a three-year nationwide survey has found. [...] If the loss continues at this rate, harvests in China’s northeastern breadbasket could fall 40 percent in 50 years, adding to erosion costs estimated at 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) in this decade alone.

With this:

Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

Is it too early to start drinking?

Don’t worry, be happy

Justin — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:15:43 +0000

The last words I had with my other half this morning as she left for work were cross ones. It’s raining, the school run beckons, and I don’t have the car today. The youngest has a stomach pain and I don’t think she’s faking it. The new puppy keeps crapping in the most inappropriate places. I’ve blocked the toilet with puppy crap and kitchen paper.

And the galaxy is hurtling – being dragged – towards an unknown dark structure beyond the edge of the visible universe at a rate of two million miles an hour.

Cheers.