This post has come a long way since I started writing it.

It was originally about the 90% tax on bonuses paid by companies in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. (Incidentally, who thought that acronym was a good idea? Because stuff like this doesn’t get a name like that by accident. A tarp is something you put over your broken window to stop the rain getting in. That’s not remotely what this is. This situation wants a scheme called HUGEENORMOUSSTORMPROOFTITANIUMSTICKINGPLASTERPLEASEGODLETTHISWORK.)

But it turned into something else, and I’m having lunch with my new book and trying to work out where the Barleycorn Brothers fit in and whether they can be responsible for the tough stuff, and so on, so forgive me if I wander.

So it all started with my Twitter feed, from which I gather that Walter Olsen is vexed by Cory Doctorow passing on the information that Connecticut’s Vote Working Families propose to do a bus tour of AIG execs’ homes and (presumably) yell at them.

For me, personally, I think that if you made fifty million dollars over the last eight years selling sub-prime mortgages and doing all the other stuff which has apparently made a giant hole in the bottom of the economy, you should – of your own will – give a bit of that money back. I think that certainly, while the economy staggers around like a drunken sailor tripping over piles of rope, and tries to figure out where it left the rum, it would be better if execs didn’t have vast bonus packages which bear no apparently relation to whether they’ve presided over the biggest disaster in modern financial history. (Hint: they have.)

I think, in fact, that if you made fifty million dollars over the last eight years and you only have to drive ten minutes to find people who are struggling to keep their low-paid jobs in the economy you created by doing so, you should probably think about putting some major effort into fixing the damage. I think you probably should give back next year’s salary and bonus and live lean on the twenty million you have in the bank. Assuming you didn’t bank with someone who went bust, which I guess is possible.

But I think it has to come from you. No one can legislate to make you penitent. 

And I have to say, I’m not crash hot keen on the idea of people being bused to your house to tell you what a bastard you are and scare the crap out of your kids.

The thing is, the reason that shouldn’t happen is the same reason you should give back the money: people ought to behave like people. Without being made to do so.

It may be true that government ownership of corporations is a bad idea. It’s also true that corporate ownership has not done well these last years. So finally what it comes down to is that, if you’re a corporate boss, you have as much responsibility to be a grown-up as your governmental equivalents. Corporations have to find a way to construct themselves so that they steward the market, rather than pillage it. If market practice skews pricing and crashes the economy, that defeats the whole point of having a market. In that case the market isn’t old enough to be left with the housekeys and must be babysat, which basically means massive regulation. That’s not the end of the world, by the way – markets are created by rules, defined into existence. The problem is that the more you regulate, the more you create outré exceptions people will exploit in creative, frequently destructive ways.

The only real answer to the market being an idiot is for the people who are in the market to stop letting it be an idiot.

So, should world governments be clawing back bonuses?

Maybe. If it actually helps, sure. But the thing is it that it doesn’t make much of a dent in the money that’s gone missing, and even if it did, that’s not why they’re doing it. The wider issue is that they’re doing it because people are – quite rightly – extremely pissed off. 

We, collectively, all of us: we have to start making decisions based on something more than instant satisfaction, blame and fury, short-term gain and ease of living. Because those criteria are not serving us well. They are leaving us with an economy in lead shoes, nuclear proliferation, environmental collapse, and social disintegration.

And that is no way to run a planet.

John McCain. Ooooooh, John McCain.

Look, I’m not big into telling the US how to run its own domestic affairs. I feel I have a stake in how America handles its foreign relations because that’s pretty much the whole world, but internal stuff is for Americans to manage. This present financial apocalypse is probably an exception, though, because it turns out the system is so badly broken that the US can’t sort it out without cooperation with other countries. 

But seriously.

John McCain: quit disrespecting the honey bee.

I’m serious, man. Quit it.

McCain objects to the inclusion in the latest round of stimulus money of $1.7m for a honey bee lab.

Dude, honestly? $1.7m is a problem for you? Because it seems to me that you’re, ohh, three trillion dollars in the hole. Which is a number so big I don’t know how to write it. What’s the abbreviation for “trillion”?

And more than that: bees are dying and they’re important.

(In fact, they’re really, really important. Three quarters of food production (76%) is dependent on bees and 84% of vegetables grown in Europe depend on pollination. [link][2]) 

From Wikipedia:

Colony Collapse Disorder (or CCD) is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or Western honey bee colony abruptly disappear. While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term Colony Collapse Disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006.

(Photo: Honey bees entering a beehive by Björn Appel. Click for license info.) 

European beekeepers observed similar phenomena in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, and initial reports have also come in from Switzerland and Germany, albeit to a lesser degree. Possible cases of CCD have also been reported in Taiwan since April 2007.

So given all that, and that we still have no idea what CCD actually is or how to stop it – and this is our food supply we’re talking about here – it just seems to me that this is a pretty pressing issue, and putting it on your list of top ten pork moments is a really irritating and irresponsible thing to do. Because I will wager that the reason it’s there is not that you don’t think this is the right lab at the right price, or whatever. It’s because it’s an easy political score to take the mickey out of a bee lab. Because the words are funny.

Honey bee lab.

Ho ho ho.

Try: collapse of global food source.

Still funny?

I’m suddenly acutely aware that I have no skills which would be useful in the event of the Apocalypse.

When the whole damn map looks like this, I will be utterly useless. Who needs a novelist when your primary interest is in locating water?

I thought maybe I should learn to bake. I’m a decent cook, so I thought, well, bread would be a sure-fire thing. I quite like the notion of being Harkaway The Baker in the village at the end of the universe…

Hm.

So it turns out that these irritating artisan bakeries are less ludicrous than I had thought. I have so far made:

Flat bread (by which I mean that I made bread and it came out flat. It was actually a reasonably useful object. You could use it as a tray, or a shield, or even as a frisbee to kill game. It was not, however, edible.)

Explody bread (this was not useful at all. It exploded. I had to clean the oven. Twice.)

Eeeebil world-dominaty alien bread (I thought it would be a good idea to leave the dough to prove a bit longer. I did. It did. And then it went beyond proof into hyperbole and theories of bread supremacy and tried to take over my kitchen with its tentacled ickiness. Clare says I left it slightly too long and it became infected with some non-yeast organism. I say it was an invasion.)

Soufflé bread (which appeared initially to be successful, then to be explody, and finally turned out to be flat bread).

And finally, Schrödinger’s bread (which I put into the oven and which has mysteriously vanished; I maintain this was because the wave-form collapsed and it turned out I imagined the bread, but Clare says it caught fire and burned away to nothing because I got distracted by page two hundred and eighty of my second novel. Granted, I got distracted for about thirty hours or so, and granted also there does appear to be a fine layer of carbon on the baking tray, but I feel her explanation has a slightly accusatory tone and I have decided to ignore it.)

I may have to fall back on my secondary post-Apocalypse career: charismatic cult leader.

I’d really rather make bread, though.