Tony Hayward wanted his life back.

He's getting that, plus 11,8 million pounds (that's 18,22628 million U.S. dollars) as a goodbye gift.

I wonder what they'd give to someone who did not fuck up on the job?

Vandaag: drie hoofdlijnen, direct onder elkaar, op nu.nl

Ouderen vrijwel kansloos op arbeidsmarkt
'Kantorenmarkt verder verslechterd'
Daling personeelsadvertenties zet door

Vertel me even weer dat het zoveel beter gaat met ons economie...

ExxonMobil spent ~ $25 million since 1998 to fund climate denier groups

They promised they would stop doing this in 2007. They haven't stopped at all, though: last year they gave 1.5 million dollars to climate denier groups - funding much of the still ongoing Climategate frenzy (yes all scientists and scientific organisations have since been cleared by a number of independent investigations) ...which erupted so conveniently right before the climate talks in Copenhagen that the process was utterly derailed and ended in failure.

No wonder the public is confused about climate change, there has been a sustained, well funded campaign of deliberate disinformation poured over their heads. And on the other side, underfunded, under siege climate scientists (who by definition are not very good at PR and campaigning). It's an uneven fight, it's an unfair fight. And the victims are us, the planet and all that lives on it. All for higher profits for a select few.

I get so mad that this is allowed at all - this has nothing to do with free speech. If you yell fire in a packed movie house and people die as they get trampled in the rush, that's going to get you before a judge. Why is this different? Because the time scale is larger and most of the dead are in countries far away, where they are poor and without influence?

I think ExxonMobil's behaviour is criminal. If a corporation is a person in the eyes of the law, perhaps it's time they were treated as one.


Found this on desmogblog, the Times article is subscription only.

One last comment on Climategate

Yes I know, I said i was done with Climategate but I just want to link to this article: Climategate: the missing context because yes, I would like to see a journalist do the research, and dammit, publish the expose.

I want to know who was behind this, and why.
And I want to see them strung up on a high tree with killer ants covering their honey coated bodies.

How dare they play these games with our commons. How dare they.

SWELTER!!!

Dear heavens, it is HOT. and HUMID.
Even the thunderstorms don't cool things noticeably.

I'm not a tropical heat kind of person, I do much better in cooler climes.
I love summer up to 30C, then things go downhill fast.

My poor garden is reeling. Nothing is growing to production yet, except for the one broccoli plant (harvested, yum) and a few heads of salad. My courgettes refused to grow in the cold, then peeped up when it got warm and are now stunned by the heat, standing still. The gem squash, same thing. The fig tree, thank heaven for fig trees, is producing abundantly.

Goodbye, sweet girl.

I will miss you so.

I'll be able to retire.... WHEN, exactly??

The growing number of older people would require the average retirement age to rise to 67 in 2040 and 70 by 2060 to maintain the current pension system, it says.

Lower birth rates and longer life expectancy mean that retiring earlier will not be sustainable.

Germany will raise the retirement age to 67 in 2029. Spain is considering a similar hike and Britain is discussing increasing it to 68.

But other countries are moving far more slowly. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is facing fierce opposition to his plans for people to retire at 62, instead of 60.

Source

Keep going on like this and I'll be working straight into my grave. I don't believe that this is truly necessary, I think this is simply an effective way of weakening worker's rights. Just as child pornography is the hammer that is preferred to winnow away our privacy rights online and elsewhere.

CO2 emissions remain steady

This graph from the report "No growth in total global CO2 emissions in 2009", published yesterday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), leaves me profoundly depressed.

It shows that in the industrialised countries, CO2 emissions went down thanks to the economic crisis. At the same time, it increased quite a bit in the developing economies. Result of this sum is a steady state over 2009 - this is so not the decline we had hoped for!

Every time I work myself up towards a little optimism, something like this comes and kicks my feet from under me.

We are not going to beat this thing, are we.

Professor Michael Mann cleared of all scientific misconduct.

Again.

Let this be an end to the matter.
If people persist in howling misconduct, I would let them and treat them with the scorn you'd heap on the head of an ignorant fool, laugh at them, ignore them, anything but engage them.

It's been enough. Respect for another's opinions is a fine thing, but the paranoid are never convinced.


As for the CRU hack, I hope next time I run into it, it's a movie with a damn good script.

The legal basis for the war in Iraq

Does it even matter any more? To me it does, especially when i read this:

Tony Blair was named winner of the prestigious Liberty Medal last night by America's National Constitution Centre for "his steadfast commitment to conflict resolution" in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

It makes me want to hurl. Like I said before, what use are international law & treaties if there's no way of holding people/governments accountable when they trample all over them? In this entire sorry situation, the perpetrators have been rewarded every step of the way and still are. The ones who are paying, have no voice and no recourse.

Yesterday, at a public inquiry that is going on unnoticed, official documents were released for the first time...

Just another postscript.