The Pacific is our dustbin

The Pacific Ocean is officially now our dustbin.


Look at the image here, drawn up by the nice people at The Independent newspaper.

Those two dark blobs represent much larger blobs of bobbing plastic, garbage, trash, rubbish, call it what you will. Our detritus.

Effectively, this floating bin now stretches from Japan to Hawaii, and from Hawaii half way to the US.

The amount of ocean fouled by this trash is twice the size of the continental United States.

It really is time to recycle, people. This is not a green fantasy anymore. What happens when we run out of ocean to piss, shit and dump plastic into?

The Mouth of Hell

John Bradley's pics of the mouth of Hell have been surfacing in various spots around the interweb recently.

But I thought it would be only fair to credit him for his work. His site is here, and you should go visit. He takes great pics.

These, however, are something else again.

Today is the day when we're all supposed to turn off our lights for an hour to stop global warming, or somesuch tokenistic nonsense.

Why is it tokenistic? Because in the desert of Turkmenistan in Central Asia, the mouth of Hell is burning:


Yes, that is an open crater in the ground, on fire. This is located not far from Darvaza in Turkmenistan. The backstory is that in the Fifties, Soviet miners drilled into this cavity while looking for natural gas or oil.

None of them wanted to go in and explore in case there was poisonous gas present. So instead, they decided to burn out any poisonous gas first. The fire has been continuous for decades.

See the two dots at the crater's edge below? They're people.


This shot might give a better perspective on how big this is. Factor in the size of the crater and the length of time it has been burning, and imagine how much gas has been wasted here. Then consider the carbon spewed into the atmosphere. Still turning off your lights for an hour?


Inside the crater, which apparently attracts curious insects and animals from miles around, you can get a better sense of why the locals call this crater the mouth of Hell.


Of all the many environmental tragedies in the former Soviet Union, I'd have to rank Chernobyl top, followed by the Aral Sea.

But for sheer, visual, gut-wrenching wrongness, it is hard to top the mouth of Hell.

More preaching from the perverted

Hooray for the Catholic Church. They've got a new two-for-one offer on deadly sins. Pope Benedict has issued seven more deadly sins to go with the ones they already had identified.

So, are these new sins for you, you may ask? Could they possibly be as much fun as sloth, gluttony or lust? Sadly, no.

Here are the 21st Century additions in full:

Genetic modification
Performing experiments on people
Environmental pollution
Creating social injustice
Causing poverty
Being extremely wealthy
and Taking Drugs.

Let's examine that list a little carefully. According to the Catholic Church, it is now a mortal sin to smoke a joint, litter, or lead third phase medical testing of new medications. I don't see raping children in your care on that list, strangely enough. Funny that.

Let's leave aside the issue of the Catholic Church ruling out contraception, abortion or stem cell research. We already knew they didn't like those.

But the Vatican's opposition to extreme wealth takes some beating for chutzpah. And the Catholic Church, with their tithes on peasants and collections at mass, have shown themselves extremely efficient at causing poverty too when it was their inclination.

The two that stick in my craw particularly though are the edicts against littering and taking drugs. Which drugs exactly do the Vatican have in mind? The legally available ones that kill more people than all the others, like nicotine? The one that causes most social and family dysfunction and anti-social behaviour, alcohol?

Or perhaps they mean the available-on-prescription medications which big pharma sold as treatments for the depressed, which ended up killing them?

I'm guessing they might mean illicit drugs, like cannabis, which has been freely and safely used in dozens of cultures for over 5000 years.

The environmental pollution one is a bit much too. Would it be too much to ask for a sliding scale of penitence for these sins? Like, is it one Hail Mary after confession for smoking a spliff, but three rosaries if you've been dealing cocaine to Katy French?

And if I drop my mars bar wrapper on the ground, would I get only one Our Father from the priest in the box, but a few hundred if I admitted fly-tipping medically hazardous waste?

In their attempt to update themselves, the Catholic Church merely shows once again just how out of touch it really is.

Here's a tip for them: next time they feel like a make-over, try ordaining women, paying compensation to abuse victims, permitting priests to marry and allowing condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS and other STIs. That would get them to the mid-20th Century anyhow.

Eco-idiots, plane and simple

Eco-morons are currently preventing passengers at Manchester Airport domestic terminal from getting onto planes.

These delusional hobbits apparently believe that stopping people from going about their business (businesspeople being far and away the biggest travellers on domestic flights) is going to convert millions to their 'return to the Middle Ages' ethos.

Perhaps they should have turned their attention to the low-cost airlines that ply routes abroad instead, since that is where the bulk of so-called 'binge-flying' actually takes place.

But that would make sense, and these morons rarely make sense. As one astute London blogger has spotted, the last time these freaks held a protest, they protested in the wrong place.

Instead of targetting Easyjet, instead they targetted a completely different company. And now we see them, arm in arm in armtubes, blockading the wrong terminal at an airport.

The best thing about global warming is the prospect that these idiots will fry.

Man plans, Cod laughs

There's something fishy about this. Apparently, codfish in the North Atlantic are dying out.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. My fishmonger could have told you that. Cod used to be a staple in poor households that couldn't afford meat, even the cheap cuts. Nowadays, fresh cod is rarer and more expensive than smoked salmon.

But according to the wonks behind this study, it's nothing to do with the fact that we've had half of all boats in Europe out dredge-netting the region for cod for the past forty years.

It's global warming. Isn't it always global warming?

But if it was global warming, then why aren't the cod being found further north, up by Iceland?

This EU-funded research neatly sidesteps blaming overfishing by the European fleet for devastating cod stocks. And anyone who believes its thesis that we haven't wiped out cod simply by eating too many of them will be prepared to let the same boats overfish the next species.

Global warming is becoming a cover story for all sorts of other nasties. It's a classic example of vested interests hijacking the environmental banner for their own reasons.

An ancient Jewish saying has it that while man plans, God laughs. Well, if we plan fish stocks and fishing rights on the basis of this type of junk science, then the last laugh's on us. Apart from the cod, who we'll have eaten to extinction by then.

By the way, that picture of the man with the fish above? That's the size a cod is supposed to grow to. When was the last time you saw a cod that size? When was the last time you saw a cod, full stop?