What a species we are. Utterly oblivious, for the most part, to what is coming. I think if you asked a thousand people, randomly selected, to say what the atmospheric concentration is, give or take 5ppm, you'd get, what maybe 10 or 20 that got it right. If you asked the same thousand about the... Continue Reading →
A crazy(making) time to be alive
I grew up in the shadow of the bomb - when I was eight or nine I was worried about the neutron bomb. The shooting down of KAL007 had a profound effect on me (and we now know that that period - late 1983 through to mid 1984 - was when we came pretty close... Continue Reading →
Banal point #94 – without language and imagery of thriving democracy, we’re idiotified
Embarrassingly banal blog post (not that it has ever stopped me before). We don't have a language or imagery of democracy. If you do a word association, people will come up with "parliament, or government". If you ask them for an image, it will be the Whitehouse, Palace (!) of Westminster, or Parliament House. Maybe... Continue Reading →
In the café at the end of the world
“They’ve gone overboard with jabbing everyone..... Covid, it’s just a cold, it always was.” So the woman in her late 50s or so tells her older companions, at about 1pm, on Thursday September 21, 2023. They seem to agree, or at least not argue the toss. There can be as many dead as you like.... Continue Reading →
One sign we were taking climate change and human/animal futures seriously would be…
... if all the house organs of the smugosphere (I won't mention names) were devoting at least one whole issue a year to the questions of Pathological Activist Cultures (1) - what are they, where they come from, what sustains them, what damage they do (short-term, long-term), what has been tried to overcome them (did... Continue Reading →
The wheels on the bus… another climate metaphor
Thinking a bit about metaphors at the moment, how they are cognitive affordances - make some ways of 'doing' easier, others harder. So, on climate change Human civilisation is in "the bus". And the wheels on the bus, as every parent knows, go round and round. And for a long time the bus didn't really,... Continue Reading →
Ayn Rand, climate change and food vulnerability
It's funny what stays with you. When I was 20 I went through a very brief Ayn Rand "phase." For those not familiar - she's a loony tunes author and "philosopher" for whom anything that wasn't competition and "free markets" was the slippery slope to the gulag. Google her if you want a laugh. In... Continue Reading →
Of Midnight Cowboy, Sea Surface Temperatures and our (didn’t need to be inevitable) doom…
There's a scene early on in the film Midnight Cowboy. Young gorgeous Jon Voight is a hick in the big city (New York), from the middle of nowhere (Texas, iirc). He sees someone (a "bum") lying unconscious on the sidewalk and instinctively strides towards him to see what help he can offer. Then he looks... Continue Reading →
The one weird thing stopping us taking action on climate change
How’s THAT for a click-bait headline, (albeit circa 2014)? You’re unlikely to read to the end of this, so I’ll spit out the tl;dr - It’s hubris, or pride, or arrogance, whatever you want to call it. Of COURSE it is also the wildly successful disinformation and delay campaigns run by the oil companies and... Continue Reading →
On the Antarctic, morbid symptoms and being court in a trap End of Days #25
It will be hard to remember what it felt like right now. There are two options, as I see it. In the first, we return to “normal” weather patterns etc(how? Why? Is this not human-centric thinking, as if the world were made for us. Of course, lots of people believe it WAS made for us)... Continue Reading →
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