In case you were in any doubt:

Great tits cope well with warming

Impressed.

(hat tip — probably every site on the hintertubes by now)

Contrary to the assertion on the advertisement, we–humans–are not ‘99% monkey’, but we are 100% ape. Of course if you are feeling like a baboon, you might be interested in Paulville–a cursory scan of the website forums turns up yet more ‘libertarians’ in favour of the free movement of capital without corresponding free movement of labour–or in fact free movement of pedestrians … shut that gate! Do they really enjoy it when their waking hours are spent staked out on the porch with a loaded shotgun trained down the street? Perhaps someone should build Paulieville next door–just to piss them off.

Remaining on the topic of feudalist filth, according to the Times, ‘help is at hand for organisations that fear disruption if their workforces are unionised’–those bastards, refusing to send their children up chimneys!

Burke Group […] is a new sort of HR consultancy that arrived in Britain eight years ago. [I]t describes itself as the largest American management consultancy that specialises “in union avoidance and preventative industrial labour relations”. It employs more than 60 consultants, including a representative in Britain.

Most of the companies seeking Burke Group’s help want to swing an employee ballot against union recognition. If 40% vote in favour of recognition, their union gains legal rights, including the right to negotiate on pay, hours and holidays.

The next time you ask what trade unions have ever done for you, think about the 40 hour week, award wages, holiday and sick leave, the fact that your employer is supposed to provide a safe and secure working environment and that your kids aren’t working 16 hours a day in a factory–rights which were won after years of hard class struggle by working men and women, for which some laid down their lives. Anyone who takes these rights for granted is deluded–they are not guaranteed.

Fight the power!

End slavery!

Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. [ … ] By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. [ … ] if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level.

The Gospel of Consumption (via isotopp)

Christopher Hitchens

Of all the slogans that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama might have picked to distinguish themselves from one another, “Prolier Than Thou” was probably the least convincing.

Yet in the closing days of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, it seemed as if the two graduates of the nation’s most privileged law schools, and the two former residents of the Ritziest parts of Illinois, were in a race to don the bluest collar and the most stained factory overalls.

Not since a desperate George Herbert Walker Bush (father of the current incumbent) started munching on pork-rinds, donning a Teamster cap and squeezing behind the wheel of a big rig in 1992 have I seen anything so condescending and ridiculous as the recent competition between Clinton and Obama to down the most beers, pose with the most guns, boast of the most hunting expeditions and so forth.

(By the way, if you want to know the most interesting class difference between Britain and the United States, notice that in America it’s the worker and trade union member who talks most about hunting, shooting and fishing.)

However, it was not really the class vote at which people were looking. In North Carolina, Senator Obama reaped almost one hundred per cent of a constituency which the commentators quite frankly called by its primary color.

In Indiana, that constituency is not such a large share of the electorate.

Nobody especially likes to bang on about this, but this is as good an explanation as any for the discrepancy between the two candidates and the two states.

And, since West Virginia and Kentucky are next up – and reporters are almost unconsciously describing these two states as for some reason more “natural” for the former First Lady – in a short while we will be seeing the pendulum of politics swing back again.

There is less and less point in pretending that this campaign is not “about” race.

As far as I can calculate it, though, Mrs Clinton can carry all the next five states AND Puerto Rico and still not get an arithmetical majority.

Nonetheless, she continues to act as if she knows something that the rest of us do not. And I can tell you that it spooks the Obama campaign.

Last night, claiming victory in Indiana, she continued to make her pseudo-populist demand that there be a remission of the tax on petrol. She loudly repeated her call for the disallowed votes in Michigan and Florida to be counted and recounted.

She coined a new term – “invisible” – for the luckless and underprivileged Americans that she so weirdly claims to understand and represent. (“Invisible Man”, I could not help remembering, was the title of Ralph Ellison’s most famous novel about the neglect of black Americans.)

And she looked tireless and energetic and full of vim and vigour in her – ill advised I felt – electric blue trouser-suit. It’s this amazing love of combat for its own sake that has won her so much grudging respect even from many Republicans.

However, just take a look at the speech and notice the lugubrious, white-haired, red-faced, scowling and bored figure standing so listlessly just behind her.

How can a campaign once renowned for slickness and spin have permitted such a horrid spectre at the feast?

And this dreary, resentful and shambolic person was once himself described as the country’s first black president. If his wife loses we shall know why.

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