The nightmare summit for the Climate

George Monbiot's take on the Mayor's Summit for the Climate. Boris Johnson is called the new face of Thatcherism, but I compare him to the Beano's Denis the Meanace. Boris is intensely likable as the video shows.

And willing to foil an attack on a woman with differing political views from feral kids! So much for armed resistance or the myth that the British "just stand by and watch". No, Boris swoops by on his bike to save the day! A conservative who endorsed Barack Obama with the praise "Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb (Telegraph Column, Oct 21, 2008)."

Why can't US Conservatives be like this? Instead, they have Sarah Palin!

Alas, I am sorry that Boris couldn't save the day in Copenhagen.

Goerge Monbiot said something interesting in his post This Is About Us: "The talks at Copenhagen are not just about climate change. They represent a battle to redefine humanity."

The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow...

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

Quite true, the issue is no longer just about the climate and the environment, but how we cooperate with each other.

Society cannot function if there are no more laws making a return to the "laws of nature". Humans have removed nature from the world and created society. As George Mnbiot says "this a battle to redefine humanity, and they (the expanders/unrestrained) wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today."

Cartoons!

It seems like my life is fast becoming like the film Volere Volare, where the protagonist sees himself living in a cartoon. I should blame this on spending time in Belgium where bande dessinée is the national art form.

I was going to make a comment that Boris Johnson (top left) looks like a character from the Beano. A bleach blonde version of Dennis the Menace (right). I think it's the hair. Or maybe the eyes.

It seems that Private Eye agrees with me on this. They referred to The Spectator as "The Hasbeano", with the Spectator's editor Boris Johnson becoming "Boris the Menace".

I prefer Boris to Red Ken who sort of reminded me of Peter Bowles when he had hair and a moustache.

Not sure what Stephen Fry is doing in this picture, but I do think QI is brilliant. A Fred Flintstone look alike perhaps?

Andrew Marr (top right) is a brilliant journalist. I've started watching his "The Making of Modern Britain" which is interesting, but I am beginning to see I am not as much of a lefty as I think. This show is really oriented toward "democracy". I think that the belief in my being left leaning comes from living in the US which seems to be turning more and more into a facist nation.

Anyway, I think he looks like a cartoon with the ears. I thought I could come up with a "good" picture, but short of a screen capture, I don't think one will show up in a picture search.

I can't help thinking of the Yellow Kid (right) when I see Marr on the screen. It seems that he once was approached by a man in a shop who said, "Here, you look just like that Andrew Marr... you poor bugger."

Marr claims he was once mistaken for Vladimir Putin. Sorry, Andrew, but Putin looks more like Dobby the House Elf than you. Unfortunately, that similarity caused an international crisis.

Now, I just have to steer clear of Toontown.