The Angry Exile: Warble gloaming will cut your feet off

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Saturday 23 July 2011

Warble gloaming will cut your feet off

The mind just boggles sometimes, it really does. The Real World Libertarian notes the latest warble gloaming related insanity has resulted in some very strange construction regulations in a Victorian town.

Port Albert, on the southern coast of Victoria has to go even further to meet the challenge. There is a fascinating story from a couple of days ago about how, owing to two sets of regulations, they have to lower their height.
That’s right, residents of the town have to get shorter.

Because of the requirement that sea level rises have to be planned for, new housing has to be built on stumps 1.5m above ground level, despite the fact that the town's original colonial buildings have survived on ground level since the 19th century. Normally, this would not present that much of a problem, other than for the infirm who would now have to climb steps.
Unfortunately, heritage rules prevent rooflines being built higher than the roof of the pub, which may be Victoria's oldest continuously licensed hotel.
Once heritage listings come into effect, its damn near impossible to get rid of them. You see where this is going, …

Yep. The difference is near as dammit five feet, so either lower ceilings for two storey buildings or single storeys which either have pointlessly high ceilings or aren't built up as high as they could be. And this just as research has emerged which found that sea level rise is decelerating and has been the whole time the world has been soiling its pants over Goracle predictions of 6m sea level rise (presumably not calculated from his condo a few hundred metres from San Francisco Bay).

And on that topic I'm adding another warble gloaming date to the list, courtesy of a commenter called Roy UK over at Watts Up With That a few days ago in response to a post asking for some help.

I’m looking for pronouncements in press and blogs from prominent players and scientists in the AGW issue where they’ve said “We’ll have an ice free Arctic by the year xxxx”.

Very much like my occasional 'warble gloaming dates for your diary', and Roy UK found a corker from 2007 (my bold).

Louis Fortier, scientific director of ArcticNet, a Canadian research network, said the sea ice is melting faster than predicted by models created by international teams of scientists, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
[...]
"The frightening models we didn't even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true," Fortier told CanWest News Service, referring to computer models that take into account the thinning of the sea ice and the warming from the albedo effect - the Earth is absorbing more energy as the sea ice melts.
According to these models, there will be no sea ice left in the summer in the Arctic Ocean somewhere between 2010 and 2015.
"And it's probably going to happen even faster than that," said Fortier, who leads an international team of researchers in the Arctic looking for clues to climate change.

So we're a third of the way into that six year time frame and it has not yet occurred, not forgetting that Fortier said that it would probably be even sooner than that. Given that the article comes from 2007 I'm not sure how much sooner Fortier was expecting since there were only two years to go before the earlier end of his no-ice time frame but if he was serious then we're probably about halfway through the period in which he predicted the Arctic Ocean would become ice free. Being harsh this looks like it's already a fail, and even being charitable and treating it as a prediction to occur by 2015 it's looking decidedly shaky.

So the revised list now looks like this:

Probably should have happened by now, or failing that should be possible to observe a very large change in that direction - New York's West Side Highway impassable due to being underwater - Dr. James Hansen (1988/89 interview)
Probably should have happened around 2005 ± 1 yr - British children will not know snow in their own country - Dr David Viner (Independent, Mar 2000)
"Imminently" - loss of world's coral reefs - David Attenborough in July 2009 ('world’s tropical reefs face ‘imminent destruction’ unless CO2 levels are slashed')
By 2010 - 50 million refugees climate refugees (UN Environment Program - currently no link for UNEP site but Watts Up With That has details and evidence of claim)
Between 2010 and 2015, probably earlier - ice free Arctic - Louis Fortier, director of ArcticNet, speaking to Canada.com in 2007
Late 2013 - ice free Arctic - Al Gore (North Pole will be ice free in five years')
2014 - the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair - WWF.
Dec 2016 - the whole world and everything all fucked up beyond repair - the Prince of Wails and the 100 months mob
Dec 2016 - loss of 'the levers of control' for the climate - the Prince of Fails... again.
Late 2019 - ice free Arctic - Pen Hadow (ten years to Arctic ice loss)
Late 2019 - the whole world and everything fucked up beyond repair - UK Met Office.
Late 2029 - loss of Great Barrier Reef - marine scientist Charlie Veron ('global warming will destroy the World Heritage site within just 20 years')
By approximately 2040 - ice free arctic yet again - NSIDC director Mark Serreze

Still, we're getting a carbon tax anyway for all the good it'll do.* Reality generally trumps modelling but when it comes to political decisions it's the other way around.

* My prediction is none at all, or at least nothing that can be measured.