Josh 51

Comments

[John in France]

... and I notice there are nice H&S bars around the swing seat so he can't fall off.

[Phillip Bratby]

John in France: You beat me to it. I was going to comment that the swing doesn't satisfy H&S rules.

I used to have one of the cartoons below by my desk at work:

http://www.businessballs.com/treeswing.htm
http://www.businessballs.com/businessballs_treeswing_pictures.htm

[John Shade]

Spot on. A mighty fine mental image to file away. It would be fascinating to discover Huhne's own mental image of himself in his role. I suspect it would be a little more flattering, and attached to reality by the slenderest of threads.

[Steve2]

Yeah. I like the image of nothing happening but posturing suits making it be seen other wise.

I remember many years ago when I was defined as Labour and supportive of wind bag Kinnock, when he was starting the Labour reforms (that Blair would cash in) battling against Liverpool Degsie sending taxis around with redundancy forms, etc. At that time I had a rather formative argument with my younger more radical brother who thought the Lib Dems/SDP (I can't remember) were more worthy of our support because of all the radical policies they promised. I disagreed. It seemed blindingly obvious to me at the time the Lib Dems/SDP were opportunistic charlatans prone to making never to be verifiable promises.

I've never thought much more about that argument since, until now, and we see that not only has Huhne as a Lib dem/SDP (I'm not sure) shot his cred totally but he is un-blushing whilst doing so.

That is the thing that seems to undercut most green posturing it is purely - posture - . if it means some other element of society, in reality, is forced into a position of really dealing with it (it being being poor and eating grass) then thats fine. But otherwise it is un-costed hands on hips posturing.

I look forward with popcorn to Huhnes inevitable demise.

[Jack Hughes]

Great post over at Budiansky's blog on "biodiversity":

In the "it must be true because I said it myself" department comes a new "study" in Science on the species-extinction crisis authored by 174 conservation biologists who looked at their own list of species they considered to be threatened and concluded from this that many species are threatened.

He goes on...

the whole science behind the extinction crisis is riddled with circular reasoning, but this is an especially fine example. No new research was involved, no field studies, no nothing that involved actual science as we know it. (The researchers for example concluded that habitat loss is one of the "root causes" of global biodiversity loss; this conclusion was derived from the fact that many of the species listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List were presumed to be threatened, and accordingly placed on the list in the first place, because of . . . habitat loss)

read more...

[Steve2]

Jack Hughes

Thanks for the head up, I loved Budiansky's previous circular reasoning post.

http://budiansky.blogspot.com/2010/09/teflon-doomsayers.html

Yeah. We see a meeting about biodiversity. And weirdly, coincidentally, so we see headlines about unprecedented loss of biodiversity...

Not a conspiracy theory along with the "grassy knoll", but just (apparently) good business to hit the lowest common denominator of human expectation that doom is around the corner.Don't worry though, some guys in suits have flown somewhere exotic together to talk about it.

I think the common man sees the idiocy of this reasoning. I am not a pessimist, I love humanity, and I think the doomsayers days are numbered as soon as we all realise (barring an asteroid strike) nothing has happened yet we can't deal with in good humour and succesfully ;-)

For me Budiansky is one of the great discoveries via this blog.

[John in France]

Phillip Bratby,
Love the tree swing links. Am starting to send them to all my friends.
Cheers,
John

[Bernie]

Does anyone have any idea why Josh's cartoon does not show up? It is there because by clicking on the space I can see part of it but then it disappears.
Very odd.

[Josh]

Bernie, we are working on this, we think it was an upload that did not quite get downloaded first.

But you can see a full version at www.cartoonsbyjosh.com

Philip B, great links, very funny and so spot on.