An experiment (that may help with the Twitter Threads about this that I am supposed to be doing)  I am going to do 350 words or thereabouts about three things per day. At that length I can ramble less and maybe throw in some zingers that translate into Killer Viral Tweets – oh yes.

Belling the Brown M&Ms

I have just had (brief) sight of another movement strategy document.  I found myself unable to engage with it not just in terms of lack of time, but also emotionally.  Over the years (okay, okay, decades) I have been exposed to these, and I’ve gone through the usual phases of excitement/relief (“ooh, someone’s thinking strategically, beyond the next protest”) through lukewarmness (“yeah yeah, feels like a retread”) to where I am now – with a deep, visceral and perhaps even unreasonable  distrust of grand strategies.  They contain Big Names and Big Ideas (Gramsci this, Lakey that, Moyer this, Lenin that. Blah blah – and the lack of women is not a huge accident, though the latest at least has Hannah Arendt, not that she ever wrote about her gender).

I get that Grand Strategies are seductive, soothing and we all need to believe we can get ‘there’ (map utopia blah Wilde blah).

But this.

It amounts to so much “the cat should wear a bell and here’s our plan, except we don’t have the power to compel any mice to do anything difficult or dangerous.”

So for me it has become like the fabled ‘no brown M&Ms’ clause Van Halen had in their contracts for their huge stadium gigs in the USA, back in the 1980s. You need a simple way of testing whether the glorious complicated and comprehensive plan is actually getting implemented/is implementable.

For me the brown M&M test is this – If you can’t get the ABSOLUTE BASICS of building sustained and sustainable groups, then it is all just piss and wind. And if you don’t know that, acknowledge that, or have a plan for that, then thanks but no thanks, I’m not gonna go chasing waterfalls.

And so I will probably sit on the sidelines for ever more, more obviously irrelevant and ineffectual than I was before.   So it goes. Let it be. Here comes the Anthropocene.

What I feel: Just meh. Just empty.

“Model behaviour” or “hubris gonna kill us all” or “You have no idea what you’re into here” (Bourne 3)

So, two new reports.  The first is about financial institutions and the risk models they have been using.  Turns out the models are shite – who knew (lots of people, who have been saying it for years/decades, but didn’t have the right letters behind their name and people were too busy making money to listen).

https://www.ft.com/content/a5027391-41a4-4e21-a72d-f8189d6a7b71

Financial institutions often did not understand the models they were using to predict the economic cost of climate change and were underestimating the risks of temperature rises, research led by a professional body of actuaries shows. Many of the results emerging from the models were “implausible,” with a serious “disconnect” between climate scientists, economists, the people building the models and the financial institutions using them, a report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter finds.

Second, well, here’s the screen grab.

What I feel: white hot anger. We’ve been gaslit by arrogant STUPID ‘smart’ people who were too busy building themselves up (career, money, influence) to have any cognitive humility. The system rewards overconfident sociopaths.
There is certainly a place for confidence, but it has to be warranted and cautious.  “Our” systems don’t reward that, cover up mistakes, blame the victims. The quote marks around our are about ownership – we live under these systems and are rendered powerless to do anything about them.

For personal reasons that we don’t need to go into, I have an absolute allergic reaction to being lied to by authority figures who are covering up their own greed or stupidity/mistakes.  The red mist descends. It has caused some fun times in my life, for sure.  I just never learned to smile while being kicked in the teeth. So it goes.

(the Bourne quote is from the astonishing Waterloo sequence early on in The Bourne Ultimatum – Bourne warns the journalist that he is in too deep, that he just doesn’t understand the rules of the game. And so it goes.)

17 degrees for first time

And here we are. 17 is supposed to be that age of infinite possibility, of raging hormones and freedom you can almost taste. At least that’s what so many books and songs celebrate, mostly for middle class kids or even working class ones back when the Western economies were growing rapidly and “social mobility” was more than a pipe dream.

But a global average temperature of 17 degrees Celsius?  Not so good.

And this graphic

Look at that vertical black line.  What the fuck? What the ACTUAL FUCK.  How is this possible (rhetorical question). What will El Nino do to that line? Will it just stay above all the way down the slope? What will next year bring?  What the actual actual fuck.

(think for a minute on what it will do to the bodies (yes, only at first of brown people and black people and we know how much they matter to Western media and decision makers), but also to all the animals on land, creatures in the sea, the birds.  The plants.  We have comprehensively murdered everything.  Engels talked about social murder. Presumably some eco-Marxist has talked about ecosystem murder?  Anyone?

This means nothing to everyone who doesn’t already ‘get it’.  It’s as emotionally salient as when we passed 400ppm for the first time, on May 13 2013.  It’s just  abstract in the extreme.

What I feel: see above. Am just incredibly uncomfortably numb.