jack off

Jack White has written a song especially for a Coca-Cola advert.

He explained, 'to be asked to write something particular along one theme of love in a worldwide form that I'm not really used to appealed to me'.

At Leeds train station last summer, I was struck by seeing an advert for Coke that had two of the distinctive bottles with 'LO' on one and 'VE' on the other. The adjacent poster was Ford cars selling 'Ford's summer of love'.

Everyone likes love, so tell them that buying a product is buying love and they'll cough up. It's so obviously cynically manipulative that I feel like I'm insulting your intelligence pointing it out. But if Jack White, clearly a bright spark, can be taken in then something's gotta be said.

Noel Gallagher's responded

He ceases to be in the club. And he looks like Zorro on doughnuts. I don't believe in adverts. He's meant to be the posterboy for the alternative way of thinking. Coca-Cola man. Fucking hell. And OK, you want to spread your message of peace and love, but do us all a fucking favour. I'm just not having it. It's like doing a fucking gig for McDonald's.

It takes nearly three litres of water to make a litre of Coke, yet increasingly they're doing it in water deprived areas of the world because labour is cheaper and regulation on employer and environmental responsibilities is weaker.

Mark Thomas' exposing of Coke's participation in Nazi Germany, complete with nice Aryan adverts, is illuminating.

They opened up bottling plants in Sudetenland shortly after the Nazis had invaded. They exhibited at Nazi trade fairs. And in 1941 when Coca Cola GmbH could no longer get the syrup to make Coke from America they created a new drink out of the ingredients they had available to them. That drink created for the Nazi soft drink market was Fanta. Fanta is the drink of Nazis.

The excellent book by Mark Pendergrast "For God Country and Coca Cola" describes the CEO of Coke GmbH standing under Coca Cola banners and swastikas at a Coke rally before leading the audience in the Seig Heils for Hitler. Pendergrast also points to the near certainty that Coke used forced labour in the bottling plants

This is interesting for sure, but it doesn't actually constitute a reason for disliking them today.

Mark Thomas has been clear about what they're doing these days, but more heavyweight is War On Want's recent report.

It shows that Coca Cola has:

- exhausted community water reserves in India by drilling deep into underground reservoirs, drying up local wells and leaving farmers unable to irrigate their crops.

- contaminated local ecosystems in El Salvador and India through waste effluents discharged from its plants.

- been implicated in human rights abuses in Colombia, including the death and disappearances of trade union activists at Coca-Cola bottling plants.

- adopted union-busting tactics in a wide range of other countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, Peru, Chile, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

One of the Colombian trade unionists, Isidro Seguno Gil, was killed inside the Coca-Cola plant. The paramilitaries got into the plant, found the person they were after, killed him there on the job, left the plant, and got away scot-free.

His wife campaigned for justice. She was murdered.

As well as murdering trade unionists, hundreds of other Colombian Coke workers have been tortured, kidnapped and/or illegally detained by paramilitaries working closely with Coke's plant managements.

In India, thousands of people are left without water. They walk up to seven kilometres to get drinking water, and their crops have no irrigation and fail utterly.

A worldwide song of love, eh Jack?

When you find Noel Gallagher's your spiritual and moral superior, it's time to stop doing anything at all until your soul returns.

nice n sleazy

In January, Harry Hutton's post on the absurdity of marriage mused:

The reasons given for matrimony in the Prayer Book are:
1. The procreation of children.
2. A remedy agaynste sinne and to avoide fornication.
3. The mutual societie, helpe, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other.

Is that it? Are those still the reasons, or have they got some new ones? John Prescott, for example, is married; did he really have trouble avoiding fornication, looking like that? Is that what they're claiming?

Amazingly, the answer is yes.

Then again, maybe it's not so surprising. Politics is showbiz for the ugly. As they appear side by side on our tellies, the contrast between the surgically beautified celebs and the politicians is great, but really the latter are a bunch of plain frumps like, well, nearly everybody who isn't a celebrity obsessed with their appearance.

Jemima Lewis makes this point in the Independent.

Ugly man gets laid - that's the subliminal scandal behind the headlines; and not for the first time. When Robin Cook had his affair it was his ginger hair and gnome-like visage that caused most consternation. John Major's dalliance with Edwina Currie scandalised the nation chiefly because it seemed so unnatural: grey men who tuck their shirt into their underpants are supposed to be above (or do we really mean beneath) feelings of lust. And when David Blunkett - a blind man with a beard, of all things! - fell in love, the nation's hilarity knew no bounds...

They are, after all, just like the rest of us: snaggle-toothed, flat-footed, thick-waisted, baggy-eyed members of the human race. Do they deserve to be mocked for it, any more than we do?

The rest of us somehow manage to suspend our disbelief long enough to fall in love. We find beauty in unexpected places - a hawk-like nose, a wiggly eyebrow - and trust our lovers when they say the same of us. Life would be unbearably bleak if we couldn't transcend the lumpen reality of our bodies; look into someone else's eyes and see a sexpot reflected back.

It's one thing to condemn a man for adultery; quite another to ridicule him for his looks.

But there's something here that strikes me as more profoundly wrong. Rather like the way the American government only got the murderous Al Capone on tax charges, so it seems pathetic to be going after Prescott for shagging his secretary, or Charles Clarke for a departmental cock-up when he personally has pushed the government's authoritarian agenda so hard.

Like Prescott, Bill Clinton suffered for his sexual behaviour. As Eddie Izzard pointed out, if lying were to have a degree system like American murder charges, lying about your sex life would be 58th Degree Lying; everyone has done it at some time.

Whereas not everyone has committed crimes against humanity in Belgrade and Baghdad that, were the standards of the Nuremberg Trials to be imposed, would see them dangling from a rope.

If we're to depose the likes of Prescott and Clarke, it should be for the real damage they've personally done to the world.

The sexual tittle-tattle is a sideshow whose only real value is to complete the full set, to demonstrate that the Labour administration is awash with every colour of sleaze. Indeed, there's so much of it that some goes under our radar.

Whilst we've been concentrating about Charles Clarke's errors and thinking - or rather, shuddering and trying not to think - about John Prescott's cock, other indefensible tosh passed us by.

Sport Minister Richard Caborn has been defending the decision to - your incredulity meter's going to need a new fuse - dish out a grant of £30,000 to Manchester United to provide lunchtime fitness sessions for their staff.

Marina Hyde nailed it with eloquence:

"What it is," Caborn explained at the weekend, "is thinking out of the box a little bit."

If by "the box", Richard means the realms of human sanity and reason, then there is no disputing the fact that Sport England's decision - in which the minister claims to have been "fully involved" - is indeed as far from its lidded confines as is possible in this temporal dimension...

I can't help feeling that for all the Byzantine iniquities of the cash-for-peerages row, it is the breathtakingly simple, batcrap craziness of this kind of argument that resonates most effectively with what New Labour is given to calling "the man on the street".

There are some decisions so obviously and immediately indefensible that for a government minister - a grown man, if you please! - to attempt to explain that the second richest sporting club in the world is an ideal candidate for a grant to aid staff fitness would seem palpable nonsense to the average eight-year-old football fan in this country, and a more serious affront to anyone older.

How should we respond to this growing mountain of outrageous abuse of power?

A LibDem candidate has defected to the Conservatives, saying they can, 'ensure the departure of our current presidential, autocratic and authoritarian government'.

Is his memory really so short? The Blair administration is like the last days of Major's government, and it's not a coincidence.

It's not 'Blair' or 'Labour'. It is entrenched power. It's 2006 Labour, it's 1995 Tories, it's the Orange Order in Northern Ireland, it's Labour councils in the South Wales Valleys. Anywhere that power becomes consolidated and feels permanent, those who wield it turn into Robert Mugabe.

Whilst I commend the thorough and excellent job done by the Blairwatch site, I'm wary of anything that seems to imply that a change of government offers a lasting solution.

Only a change from government can do that.

two wheels good, four wheels bad

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's written a piece about how great his electric car is.

Having had an accident on his bike he wanted to find another way to get to work. He dismissed public transport and walking as too lengthy, and admits to feeling 'just possibly a teeny bit smug' at deciding on the electric car. It is described as 'emission free' and 'carbon neutral'.

Even ignoring all the resources used to manufacture the car and ship it halfway round the world to Mr Rusbridger, neither claim is true.

It is emission free when you look at the vehicle itself, but that's only because they've been shifted from exhaust pipe to power station. The climate does not care where we emit, only that we do.

It is rather like people in London believing smokeless fuel is clean because they don't see the factory in Abercwmboi spewing out filth so bad that villagers can't hang washing out and the trees are black.

Powered by electricity from the national grid, his car is not carbon neutral. It is predominantly fuelled by coal and gas, with a significant portion from nuclear and a smidgen of renewables.

Of course, if the national grid took more electricity from renewable sources it would make the would make the car greener, but as such sources cannot ever meet a majority of our domestic and industrial needs, they won't fuel the additional demand of our vehicle fleet. More vehicle use means more fossil fuels burnt whichever way you look at it.

If he's going to be honest with himself, he - like anyone who uses motorised personal transport - has to accept that his preferred commuting time is either impossible or unsustainable.

mixed messages

The Independent keeps on doing prominent stories about climate change, seeing the issue clearly, yet intersperses it with twaddle about how it's OK to fly as long as you pay someone to plant trees.

What could be the reason for such wilfully unjoined thinking?

Last Saturday's issue featured a huge front page splash about a 3 degree temperature rise - highly likely within decades - causing ecosystems to collapse, rainforest to retreat, drought to spread and much more.

Immediately above it, a sponsored competition from American Airlines to win flights to New York.



More than 5% of the issue was car adverts.

don't feed the stags

It's an unusual campsite that combines camping facilites with a golf course. By and large, golfers have the requirements and the plentiful hard cash that make them choose different holiday accommodation.

It's a still rarer campsite that combines camping, golf and the shooting of stags that try to get into your tent.

Yet at Lochranza, this is exactly what you get.



(sorry for the blurry photo, picture was taken in a hurry. I didn't want to get caught taking pictures in the Gents, thought it might get misconstrued)

travelling fnarr and wide

My brother drives a model of Chrysler called the PT Cruiser. He refers to it as simply 'The Cruiser' which amuses me no end. I amuse myself further - and make him somewhat bored - by referring to it using terms such as The Fluffer or The Felcher.

This week I'm at his house, and I've realised this double-entendre thing was not of his doing. It is the inevitable consequence of living, as he does, in Formby.

It seems to the untrained eye to be a sedate middle class dormitory town. However, I have no doubt it lies on one of the greatest convergences of double-entendre leylines on this earth.

I go to check out compost bins at Formby Hardware. The brand of bins they stock - which I've never seen before and are all made from plastic - is Rubbermaid.

Nextdoor is a butcher's with a big sign in blazing orange capitals, SPITROAST CHICKENS.

Is that the title of a porn movie featuring reluctant participants in spitroasting?

Or is it, as the fiery block lettering implies, a command to bestiality?

Reeling, I look across the road to see an, ahem, 'leather goods' shop called, yikes, Backhouse.

A sign in its window tells me it's advertised in the local freebie paper, 'The Formby Trader'.

Which is either the name of a champion cottager, or else an Albert Goldman dirt-dishing biography of George Formby's rentboy early days.

I try to escape this place via the internet. Come on my old faithful, tell me of places where I'm not overwhelmed with smut.

So I go and find Jim Bliss, and he's talking of going to Stillorgan.

I wonder if that's twinned with Cockshutt?

south pacific

Despite the staggering scale of it, almost all logging in Papua New Guinea is against the law. But when the logging companies can buy governmental favour, that's no barrier.

They've already acquired 70 percent of Papua New Guinea’s available forest resources, and the government is planning to hand out concessions for most of the rest, even though it's illegal.

This is where the bigger environmental groups come in. Small autonomous direct activists certainly do great work in support of Pacific tribes, not just in solidarity action but in personally delivering medical supplies. But there is a degree of muscle needed to sustain a campaign that only the big groups have.

Despite their disgraceful attitude on the Icelandic dams issue, in Papua New Guinea Greenpeace are right in there, helping communities kick logging companies off the land and following it up to get the bastards prosecuted.

Being all cyberagey, there's an onboard blog from the Rainbow Warrior crew, helmed by my fab friend Sophie, and it's newly added to the blogroll in my sidebar.

Greenpeace is just starting to extend its work to the other half of Papua - West Papua, controlled by Indonesia.

Many people there don't want any industrialisation. Their attitude towards money economies has a lot to teach us. Wiwa Wewo of the West Papuan Lani tribe came to Europe to find out what is this thing called 'the West' that wants to kick him off his land.

He wrote a pamphlet for us and for his tribespeople to explain what he found. Called Just Leave Us Alone!, you can get a pdf of it here, and you really should.

orwellian lineage

After Newbury, Guy wasn't anomalous in keeping on fighting for environmental and social justice. In tracking down Störm for the reunion, I found him via the Olan Trust which he established in 2004, among a squillion other things he's been up to. The others have all done a ton of great stuff since then too.

Wasn't it all supposedly 'just a phase'?

Weren't we all meant to be tory voting James Last listening conformist twats by now?

My book about the Newbury Bypass only got criticised in two reviews. One was Living Marxism, whose criticism is a compliment. Their line was that because Jimi Hendrix’s acid dealer believed in a nonsensical theory of imminent global cooling, all theories on climate change are bollocks and all who say so are political imbeciles.

In a private joke with myself, I started an article with the opening line from that review.

The other criticism was an aside in an otherwise positive piece in Do Or Die. They said that many of my ideas were 'quite reformist and unthought-through', which is accurate and entirely justified.

The impact tree protests had on those of us new to truly radical politics was epiphanic. The way it joined up our thinking, so that we swiftly realised this wasn’t about saving trees or challenging Car Culture, it was about opposing industrialisation, the profit motive and all concentrations of power. It is no coincidence that a couple of years later many of us who met on the tree protests were together on the barricades of the big anti-capitalist protests.

At Mary Hare, Suzanne was reading Homage To Catalonia George Orwell's account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and we all saw the parallels. Whilst we were not being shot at, we were out making a stand for justice against the power-hungry. Fred Gibson, a Second World War veteran, saw it too and gave his medals to one of us.

Beyond the struggle, there was a commonality with Spain in how we lived as we fought. We were there, everyone equally, deciding by consensus, a living example of much that is desirable but supposedly not possible due to the alleged nasty selfishness of human nature.

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.

Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.

There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life - snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.

Orwell’s personal lesson from Spain matches Newbury for this mix of grand vision among the mud, of having the political truths of our hearts illuminated and proven so that we can never again deny them.

Once you've seen the possibility of your dreams, you are obliged to try to make them happen.

carbon offsets are a fraud

The Independent recently published a piece on 'How To Fly Around The World Without Costing The Earth'. They ignored the only credible answer (evolve yourself some wings) and went with the idea of using aircraft and then paying people to plant trees as carbon offsets.

A chap called Duncan Law responded. He points out that simple measuring of emissions is not enough; as aircraft emit at altitude, their impact is around three times as bad as if it were done on the ground. His most persuasive point is that carbon offsets are a nonsense because the emission is instant whereas the tree's absorption is over many years.

There are, however, many other problems too. It's impossible to say how much carbon a tree will store, so you cannot know how many trees to plant for your emissions. Beyond that, you cannot tell what your emissions are; figures on offset websites for, say, per mile driven usually don't take into account your mpg or how many passengers to divide it among. Figures for a train journey should surely be different if it's a packed rushour train compared to a late afternoon one with only half a dozen of you on board.

Then there's the problem of just counting the number of trees planted. Some offset projects have been buying land that's cheap, clearing existing mixed woodland trees and replacing them with their monoculture plantations.

Whilst all these things are true, they only show why offsets are clumsy and ineffective.

There is a bigger more disturbing truth, that paying for offsets lets us think we can carry on with our unsustainable high consumption, and were we to face the facts that offsets don't really work, we would be forced to concede the reduction on emissions so urgently needed.

Corporate Watch's characteristically excellent article explains:

Planting trees and energy efficiency are important things to do in themselves, but the trouble with linking them to offset programmes is that their positive impact is cancelled out by justifying and condoning a negative one, implying that we can consume at current rates guilt free as long as we have the money to salve our consciences, which takes us no further forwards in reducing emissions. If anything, it takes us backwards, as corporations are able to ride on the image boost of appearing greener, whereas the truth of the matter is that they are a complete fraud.

Not just ineffective or counterproductive but 'a complete fraud'? This is where we hit the biggest and most disturbing truth. You can't offset carbon emissions.

Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the carbon cycle. Trees merely store some of it for a while before releasing it once they rot or burn. They're not an offset, merely a delaying device.

As Oliver Rackham said, it's like drinking more water to keep down rising sea levels.

The wish to avoid actually changing the things we've come to rely on is understandable, but it's effectively a blindfold we're putting on to tell ourselves we're not facing what's in front of us as we walk toward the cliff edge.

The reader response to The Independent also featured incredulity at environmentalists wanting to ban damaging activity.

Do they really expect ordinary people to subscribe to the notion of... "punishing those who damage the environment"?

Given that 'the environment' means the single system we have for survival, I'd answer yes.

And it should include mandatory measures. If I saw a line of sick babies in incubators and somebody was trying to inject poison into their oxygen supply, yes I'd want to force them to stop.

The welfare of future generations of people and other species lies in our hands and we're poisoning their fundamental essential prerequisites for survival. If it's not right to poison people and take away their food and water today it's not right to do it to them tomorrow. We should not respect anyone's claim to a right to do so, we should be tackling them head on and if they won't respond to appeals to their common humanity then they should certainly have their toys taken off them.

If only it were their own future they were fucking up. Again I see the curse of our allotted three score years and ten. Were we to live for several centuries then averting the worst effects of climate change would be our top priority.

i can see clearly now

Time for a new look at Badger Towers. Been meaning to do it for yonks, but you know how it is.

No big dramatic reason, it's just that reading light-on-dark is a bit taxing to many people's eyes.

Rather like the way the advent of Word and DTP programs made many of us print reams of stuff in very pretty fonts without thinking about the readability of 3,000 words in 6pt Algerian, so websites tended to bright and flashy and blogs be done out in lovely colours while the effectiveness of imparting of information took a backseat.

Google were way ahead of us all with their clean stark layout, but we're catching up.