Short posts till I am feeling a bit better (to be clear, not feeling bad, just fairly immobile and with mild discomfort that was challenging my pharmacological Calvinism). First thing I'd point to is a couple of piece by an excellent writer/thinker called Jessica Wildfire. There's her 'urgent normality syndrome' thing, but some other worth-reading... Continue Reading →
Novels, moorhens, surgeons, gratitude – End of Days #14 and #15
Greetings. On my voice recorder there is an untranscribed apologia for no-diary-yesterday, in which I explained that I lolled around finishing off Stanley Johnson's The Commissioner (tl:dr - nice start, a few amusing observations of Brussels and the functioning of the European Union, but enough thrills to be a thriller. Nice stuff on industrial espionage,... Continue Reading →
The Thin Red Line and all that it portends… End of Days Diary #13
Look at this graph. The red line is the North Atlantic surface sea temperatures for this year, All the other lines below it every other line that we have data for. And you look at that line. And if you have any imagination at all, you know what it spells. And you keep thinking to... Continue Reading →
Of Walt Benjamin, Titanic metaphors, gallows humour etc – End of Days diaries 11 and 12
Apologies to my thousand of readers who hang on my every word. Yesterday, I got lost in feeding moorhens. And I could and should have done my doom diary then, but I didn't have anything to say (when has that ever stopped me before??). And then I spent a long time moving piles of books... Continue Reading →
Of Kafka, CCS, suicide machines and so forth – End of Days Diary #10
So, The conversation, (full disclosure, I have written for it) has got a couple of excellent articles you should read. One is a summary of air and sea temperatures, and what it all means. It doesn't talk about the Atlantic sea ice issue. But you've got 1000 words, you can't talk about everything. The second... Continue Reading →
Of cricket, calories, carbon labelling and extreme ignorance among ‘educated’ people. End of Days Diary #09
Doom diary, day nine much delayed because I was too busy having much fun in the face of the apocalypse. Namely one of my best (only) friends, who was best man at my wedding, came up and we listened to and watched a lot of cricket - the first Ashes test more of that later. ... Continue Reading →
The past, lies we tell ourselves and submarines going pop… Doom Diaries #08
The past, as well as being another country, is a slippery, slippery thing. And there's overlap with words like “history,” “custom and tradition (see Hobwbawm and Ranger’s 1977 edited volume The invention of Tradition.) Where am I going with this? There was an interesting comment on my last blog post about where and when entrenched... Continue Reading →
Of no “wake up” moments, understanding powerlessness and ruts-becoming-tunnels. End of Days Diary #07
. It seems as if there will not be any “wake up” moment, (something I have long told other activists not to expect!). I t seems to me that we have inoculated ourselves and the “boiling frog” thing, although no one ever did boil a frog, does in fact work well enough as a metaphor... Continue Reading →
End of Days Diary #06 – anger
I want to talk about anger (and perhaps self-recrimination, but especially anger). And of course anger is not “allowed.” Anger is somehow a sign that you are “maladjusted”, which is an interesting term in itself - that you should adjust yourself to the indignities, inequities and injustices of the world. And if you display anger,... Continue Reading →
End of days diary #05 – collapse is what?
I had the entirely sensible suggestion that I should be doing Twitter threads as well as blogging. I agree. I'm not sure that I can be bothered or perhaps I am thinking that my work should “speak for itself” and folks should come to me that kind of arrogant presumption and egomania is not unheard... Continue Reading →
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