You’re all going to die….

Remember this? From the Independent in March 2000:

“Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.”

Ha ha ha…

I’ve been snowed in for three years running…

What about this prediction from the 1982 book Fact or Fantasy (World of Tomorrow):

“From the way in which the Earth moves around the Sun, we have some ideas of the kind of weather that both we and our descendants are going to suffer or enjoy…in general, summers will be less warm and winters more severe. Meteorologists expect the next century to be mostly cold, but the weather should improve in about 150 years time!”

Oh well, that’s nearer reality than this article that ran in the French weekly l’Express back in 1962:

“By the year 2000 all food will be completely synthetic. Agriculture and fisheries will have become superfluous. The world’s population will by then have increased fourfold but will have stabilized. Sea water and ordinary rocks will yield all the necessary metals. Disease, as well as famine, will have been eliminated; and universal hygienic inspection and control will have been introduced. The problems of energy production will by then be completely resolved.”

People and predictions, eh? Especially those scientists…

What about the article in the April 30, 1899 edition of the Chicago Tribune? “Population Close to ‘Standing Room Only’” was its title.

“If the population of the United States continues to increase at the rate that has prevailed during the last twenty years in the year 2000 it will reach so great a density there will be room for an average of only one person to an acre in the vast area.”

Oh dear, tell me more Obi-Wan…the article concludes:

“Deductions must be chiefly speculative, but all that have been made public by the weightier minds turn to the restriction of immigration as the most logical method of imposing a check on an advancement that is fast growing menacing…”

Menacing…sound familiar to you?

Ever Wonder What Happened To The Little Mermaid?

Thinking about the Mekon…

So I sit here staring out the window with my one good eye, like Odin the other’s been sacrificed to wisdom ( well, hardly that I s’pose, to be truthful ). My thoughts, unexpectedly, turn to the Mekon…

I first encountered him in the pages of The Eagle comic as a boy – an encounter that also encompassed a first time acquaintanceship with gas chambers. At the time, I couldn’t get my head around the idea of specifically building a “chamber” in which people were to be killed.

It seemed absurd.

Madness.

Monstrous.

The chamber, I recall, was all gleaming stainless steel – a truly sterile affair, where execution, the murder of one individual by the state (or in this case the Mekon), could be conducted in a clean, methodical manner. The victim’s only input in to this ritual, of course, was to die quietly.

At the time we had a gas fire in the living room and the gas had a musty unpleasant stink to it. I imagined that small stainless steel chamber gradually filling with the stink of gas. Was it the smell that killed you?

Anyway, the Mekon was this small green super-scientist with a huge head (reflecting I guess the size of his brain, hence his mind warping IQ) whose atrophied limbs required him to utilize this little hoverdisc that resembled nothing more than a flying commode. He was Lord of the Treens, a race of green meanies inhabiting the northern hemisphere of Venus. The Mekon, unhappy with half a planet, desired all of Venus , the earth, the solar system, everything. The Mekon was a true, textbook megalomaniac…(only such a condition isn’t recognised medically)

He was the creation of Frank Hampson, the brilliant originator of the Dan Dare comic strip. The Dare strip was ingenious and to the mind of a young boy, it was the future!

In one strip the Mekon declares ‘We shall overcome any misguided resistance and later reduce your population (i.e. the earth’s population) to scientific limits’.

Ummm, with hindsight, perhaps the human race would have been better off if the Mekon had taken over? Perhaps we’d have had less problems today? Instead of breeding like…well, like Rabbits, we would have been forced to conform to “scientific limits” on our numbers?

But the Mekon was thwarted by Dan Dare. The world remained free. The earth’s population continued to multiply – and to pollute the planet that birthed it. Of course, we now see the “misguided resistance”, so shocking to the Mekon’s sensibilities, was nothing more than a display of human greed. The world government on Earth was full of Neo-Colonialists who wished to exploit the mineral wealth of Venus…as always exploitation was the name of the game.

Today, I find it interesting that the Mekon and the Treens were green. Green for healthy. Green as a lettuce leaf. Green as…well, if I were a cynic, green as gangrene, except the puss from that is yellowish. Perhaps Frank Hampson was ahead of his time in suggesting we should look after our environment? Unfortunately, it was a message not heard or understood by many.

Slightly more people heard and listened to Rachel Carson. Her book Silent Spring back in 1962 launched the environmental movement. One could almost say that Carson made ecology “subversive”, science (or a scientist) against industry ( or greedy capitalists), when she went head-to-head with the chemical industry.

Today the earth really has need of the Mekon. We’ve got plenty of Dan Dares – too many, probably. What we need is a big headed, bright-green, super-scientist on a flying shitter, putting everything to rights…instead we get a George Bush or a Tony Blair or a Gordon Brown or a Nicolas Sarkozy or a clone of one or all of them – did you notice Sarkozy recently launched an attack on immigrants in France? He is himself the child of immigrants. What madness the scramble for popularity engenders…

We need a Mekon to ensure we reduce the number of planes in the air – the whole damn world flies off to attended a meeting on Climate Change. Have these people not heard of Video Conferencing?

We need a Mekon to reverse globalisation, create intelligent urban design, oversee decentralisation with all power returning to local communities (very like the Swiss local communes).

We need to make better use of our water supplies– for example in new buildings we ensure the recycling of water from bath or shower to a reserve tank used for flushing the WC etc, simple but efficient and not expensive to do. All over Germany and Austria I recently saw home power solar panels – huge numbers of dwellings have them, and Germany has built more windmills than any other country in Europe. In the UK we’re still arguing about them, and you hardly ever see a solar panel, they’re too expensive for the average family to install…

In Europe huge amounts of goods are moved by barge on a network of canals, many of the barges holding the load of up to seventy commercial vehicles. In the UK, it mostly travels by road. We’ve even managed to price the majority of commercial goods off the railways…

We need a Mekon to introduce an element of common sense. In time (a lot of time granted ) the earth will become like that gleaming steel gas chamber. Human greed will have condemned the race to death. We will go out not with a bang but a whimper…

And now, deep in ennui, it’s started to rain. The sound of the rain is the saddest of sounds. I seem to remember the Mekon once said about human beings:

“STOP THEM! You fools STOP THEM!!”

That says it all, doesn’t it?

Solar-powered Aircraft Flying TODAY

Solar-powered flight – test pilot Andre Borschberg flew the aircraft from Payerne airfield in Switzerland this morning and is aiming to achieve an altitude of approx. 28,000 feet – and may fly all through the night, conditions permitting (this following on from the short flight earlier this year).

Very exciting news. See HERE. And more HERE.

Lion at the door…

Oh dear…which one is the endangered species?

Climate Change….

Volcanoes, Banking, and Crime – the Big three…

Oh, Lor, planes across Europe are grounded! Because of the Icelandic Volcano…or more accurately, the ash from same, expelled forcefully into the atmosphere – perhaps, like the dinosaurs we’ll all die out, become extinct?

No doubt these clouds of volcanic ash will block the sun’s rays, cause temperatures to plummet. Soon the World Government EU will be appealing for us all to burn more fossil fuels to warm things up…

What a world we live in. The Banks perform like morons, lend money that can never be repaid, throwing good cash after bad – then, who can really honestly say why, we give ‘em shitloads of cash as the economy goes to hell in a handcart.

Well, it we didn’t bailout the banks, sez accepted wisdom, they would have collapsed. It would have been chaos. It would have undermined faith in our financial services sector.

Is that right?

Does that mean our banks have the “right” – like a God-given right – to act as if they were total fukwits? Not only that. But having lost shitloads of cash, the taxpayers underwrite those losses, and the tossers all slap ‘emselves on the back, and payout bonuses all round!!

Who are the real idiots, do you think?

Going back to poor old Iceland. They’ve recently released a report on the collapse of their three major banks. This has revealed a number of cases of “potential illegality and acts of ‘gross negligence’ within government preceded their demise”.

Ummm. The report alleges there “was possible share price manipulation and exaggeration of asset values within the Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki banks.” It also suggests that the three banks were controlled by five investors who had ‘unlimited influence’ and pressured the banks to make loans to their companies and friendly clients…”

Doesn’t seem possible, does it?

“Among those alleged to have received ‘excessive’ loans were property entrepreneur Robert Tchenguiz who received £1.4 billion, retail tycoon Jon Asgeir Joannesson and former chairman of Landsbanki Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson. The report said: ‘We consider that Kaupthing’s loans to Robert Tchenguiz and companies have been in excess of that which could reasonably be considered a commercial assumption. Rules on large exposures were not followed.’ The report goes on to accuse Iceland’s former prime minister Geir Haarde of acting with ‘gross negligence’ and claims former Icelandic central bank manager David Oddsson refused help from Bank of England governor Mervyn King.”

But there are bigger problems highlighted by this crisis worldwide:

Well, I know coz of the ash spewing from Eyjafjöll I can’t fly off anywhere today, but I can consol myself with the knowledge that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks (worldwide) on the brink of collapse in 2008. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result of the worldwide banking crisis…

Bit hard on the Colombian drug cartels, eh, what? Still, we should realise from all of this, it’s organised crime generates these hundreds of billions of £s and $s and €s – and as we all know, it’s money makes this world go around. Crime is also one of the biggest growth areas in wealth generation…

Changes of Earth’s Orbital Cycle cause Changes in Climate…

“In an analysis of the past 1.2 million years, UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki discovered a pattern that connects the regular changes of Earth’s orbital cycle to changes in Earth’s climate.”

See the full story HERE.

Our Future…

What does our future hold for us? Could it be this –

Or might we be luckier and end up like this -

The choice is yours – what do you think?

Woman can only have sex in the open…

Thanks to a bizarre sexual phobia, sex in the great outdoors is the ONLY place Danielle can do it…

“It’s not like I haven’t tried. I just can’t do it indoors without freaking out. I feel like I’m being choked and about to pass out.

“But sex on the forest floor with the sweet smell of pine cones is a real buzz.

“Up against a tree is good too – but I’ve scratched my back on the bark a few times!”

See HERE