Jeff Koons in London

How disappointing.

The Serpentine Gallery in London has decided to delight us all with a major exhibition by American artist Jeff Koons - his first (and hopefully last) "major exhibition in a public gallery in England."

Koons' kitsch and banal creations represent all that was wrong about the culturally dishonest decade when the former Wall Street commodities broker first set himself up as a full-time artist. Like his art, the 1980's was a crass and selfish era during which the seeds of the current economic collapse were sown in the Anglo-American economies through the affirmation of unrestrained greed as a social good.

Koons has weathered the economic storms, creating such vulgar works as Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and continues to create works of factory art as shallow as the philosophy he espouses.







An hour and a half by train from central London, by contrast, lies the fair city of Bristol where, free of charge, members of the public can see an alternative exhibition to that offered by the Serpentine. Banksy Versus Bristol Museum offers a different vision of life and is well reviewed here.

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Greenland: Future Frontline of the Environmental Crisis?

As Greenland, the world's second largest island (after Australia) moves today from being a dependency of Denmark to exercising a significant amount of greater self-rule, the quasi-country is likely to become an increasingly important symbol in battles over climate change. What the Amazon basin was in the 1980's and 90's, Greenland may become in the coming decade.

Greenland is believed to contain beneath it and, especially, in its seas, large amounts of untapped oil and gas. Exact quantities have been difficult to predict because of the vast Greenland Ice Sheet which covers 80% of the island to a depth of 2-3km. On a global scale, The Greenland Ice Sheet is second in area to that of the Antarctic.

Needless to say, many within the oil and gas industries are looking longingly at the prospects of future extraction from Greenland - a prospect which is ironically only a possibility as a result of global warming. American Oil giant ConocoPhillips, for instance, has been prospecting in Greenland since at least 2000. (2003 annual report, p. 54). Along with others, ConocoPhilips has been active in oil exploration in Peru's Amazon region, which has resulted in significant conflict with indigenous tribal groups, as previously reported on this blog.

Rising temperatures are resulting in a thaw of the ice sheet and of the seas surrounding Greenland and other Arctic islands. Average year-round temperatures in the Arctic have, over the last 100 years, doubled that of the global average, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Predictions of future temperature changes continue to see the Arctic region become warm at twice the rate of the world's average. Sea ice in the region has decreased by between 5 and 8 % since 1979 and some climatologists are predicting an Arctic with virtually ice-free oceans by the middle of the C21.

Although some are seeing in these predictions the potential for a tourist boom - the North East Greenland National Park, for instance is the largest in the world - and others are even excited about the prospect of opportunities for real estate investment in the coming years, others are taking a longer term view.

Ruth Curry, who has studied the climate of Greenland in detail, explains that the melting of the island's ice sheet is unlikely to be a gentle affair. Melting surface water trends to trickle to the base of the ice through existing fissures and crevices, creating a liquid base to the ice sheet. This in turn destabilises the ice and can result in huge "slip-and-slide" events when vast areas of ice hurtle from the land into the sea.

The ice sheet, says Curry, contains enough water to raise the global sea level by 23 feet. - a height similar to that of the Indian Ocean tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004.

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UK Global Warming Report: Acknowledging the Tipping Point?

The UK Global Warming Report has, out of the blue, taken the climate change discussion forward in one disturbing leap.

Whereas many within the environmental movement have argued long and hard for significant reductions in greenhouse gases - as preventative measures to reduce the risk of global warming - the report assumes such warming will continue to get worse and focuses on the realities of what will probably happen to the climate in the UK over the coming decades.

I reported on this blog 15 months ago that James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory, was predicting then that the world had already passed the tipping point of widespread environmental degradation and that significant environmental collapse was highly probable within 20 years (make that less than 19 now).

The UK report, released today, assumes significant climate change and offers a range of possible scenarios for the UK based on the latest and best scientific models.

None of which should make us apathetic about seeking significant reductions in greenhouse gases now. After all, we want to try and see the "best case" scenarios rather than the worst ones.

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Now the Government Wants my Phone Number

On the draft application form for the national ID cards - may the plan be cursed - that the government is determined to introduce at a cost to the tax payer of billions of pounds, applicants are required to provide "a contact telephone number."

That's a strange request, since the ID cards - curse them - will not contain the bearer's phone number, nor will it be stored on the national database.

This rather begs the question as to why the government should require these phone numbers, which, let it be understood, are not subject to the same regulations concerning privacy and security that will govern the cursed database and ID cards themselves.

I cannot bring myself to believe that the collection of these phone numbers will have anything to do with the government's other big database initiative - to collate all of our phone and internet records, all in the name of national security. Nor can it have anything to do with the money that can be made by selling on these numbers to private sector companies.

Sir Ken McDonald, recently retired Director of Public Prosecutions, made this comment on the government's planned communications database.. I can't improve on this as a critique of what is wrong at the heart of this agenda:

"The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile.
We must avoid surrendering our freedom as autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make judgments that are compatible with our status as free people."
No other country is considering such a drastic step. This database would be an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information.
It would be a complete readout of every citizen's life in the most intimate and demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with such a roadmap to our souls.

source


This is the party that won only 15.3% of the popular vote at the most recent electoral test they took part in. Hopefully, we have only months to go before we can finally give this government the Parliamentary electoral kicking it deserves for introducing this oppressive database state and for taking our country into an illegal war of aggression in Iraq.

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Iranian Election: no Excuse for Western Agitation

Watching the scenes of Iranians protesting in Tehran after the re-election of President Ahmadinejad and noting the predictions (on the BBC , for instance) of on-going antagonism between his government and those of Britain and the United States, I am reminded of the words of an Iranian friend currently seeking asylum in the UK.

When I asked him once whether he thought the United States would ever fight a war against Iran, my friend said that he doubted that would happen as the American government should be aware of the Iranian people's long history in unifying against foreign invaders - the country having successfully resisted all attempts at military conquest since 1501.

Instead, my friend said, he believed that if President Ahmadinejad continued in his provoactive stance towards the west, the Americans would attempt to ferment civil unrest within the country and seek to bring down the government in that way. In that scenario, thousands of Iranian civilians would be killed by the police and security services in the uprising. This, in effect, would, accoring to my friend, represent a proxy war fought against the Iranian government with Iranian civilians serving as the foot soldiers, with no loss of American lives and with no significant political damage if the uprising failed in its (American) aim of achieving regime change inside Iran.

Let's hope for the sake of thousands of innocent Iranian civilians that Mr Panetta and his colleagues at the CIA show the restraint needed to not contribute to such a bloodbath.

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Peak Oil, Market Forces and Social Change

Kevin Carson at Center for a Stateless Society makes the following prediction about the relationship between peak oil, environmentalism and social change in the coming decades. I respect someone who will stick their next out and make a bold prediction or two, even though I am less convinced of the logic of the market than he appears to be. I would certainly like to see some of the changes he foresees taking place.

Based on the premise that oil will become increasingly expensive to extract, thus raising prices dramatically, Carson predicts:

So we can count on the coming astronomical increases in energy prices, through the good old-fashioned laws of the market, to spur people to increased energy efficiency without any help from the government. We’ll see most of the long-haul truckers abandon their rigs, and most airline routes shut down. In manufacturing, we’ll see a radical shortening of supply and distribution chains and a relocalization of production. We’ll see trucked-in out-of-season produce become a luxury good, and vegetable production in backyard gardens and in local market gardens increase by an order of magnitude. We’ll see people gradually moving closer to where they work, and an explosion of production in the informal and household economies as suburbanites move production closer to where they live. We’ll see housing contractors discover the market value of passive solar heating and cooling technology. We’ll see the recycling of industrial waste heat become economical.

....

And it will all be done by the free market, because people motivated by old-fashioned self-interest will follow an economic law older than the internal combustion engine: when something costs more, people use less of it.

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The BNP, the Left and an Opportunity

Interesting post by Left Luggage on the implications of the recent BNP electoral successes. Some highlights of the piece:

• policies (denial of benefits to migrants, death penalty, increased police powers) held by the BNP are also held by 15-20% of the UK population according to a recent MORI poll
• to prevent the far-right turning this potential support into actual votes, there is a need to fill "the political vacuum left by Labour’s desertion of the working class", a topic commented on in a recent review of Colin Crouch's book Post Democracy here.
• the BNP draws its support primarily from older manual working class voters and those on state benefits
• the left has been "unable to approach" the issue of immigration effectively
  
• "voter volatility is at a post-WWII high" meaning that the British electoral market is more open to new entrants than it has been in modern history. LL concludes, however that "there is no 'new entrant' from the Left to speak of and the BNP are proving effective at filling the vacuum from the far-right."

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