When called a quitter in somebody’s first-time comment in this space, my initial response was to serve the name-caller a big warm cup of ShutTheFuckUp. Then I gave it a bit more thought. One result is this essay.
Contrary to the respondent’s interpretation of my essay, I’m not suggesting we quit. Giving up is not giving in: Accepting our fate is not synonymous with jumping into the absurdly omnicidal main stream. Just because we’re opossums on the roadway doesn’t mean we should play possum. Resistance is fertile, after all. To employ a bit of The Boss: “In the end what you don’t surrender, well the world just strips away.”
Or, to employ a bit of Zen: Let go, or be dragged.
Or, to employ a bit of popular culture: Carpe diem.
Or, to employ a bit of Nietzsche: “Live as though the day were here.”
Climate chaos is well under way, and has become irreversible over temporal spans relevant to humans because of positive feedbacks. Such is the nature of reaching the acceleration phase of the nonlinear system that is climate catastrophe.
As a result of ongoing, accelerating climate change, I’m letting go of the notion that Homo sapiens will inhabit this planet beyond 2030. I’m letting go of the notion that Homo sapiens will inhabit this verdant little valley at the edge of American Empire after it turns to dust within a very few years. I’m letting go of the notion that, within a few short years, there will remain any habitat for humans in the interior of any large continent in the northern hemisphere. I’m letting go of the notion we’ll retain even a fraction of one percent of the species currently on Earth beyond 2050. But I’m not letting go of the notion of resistance, which is a moral imperative.
I will no longer judge people for buying into cultural conditioning. It’s far easier to live in a city, at the height of civilization’s excesses, than not. I know how easy it is to live in a city surrounded by beautiful distractions and pleasant interactions, and I fully understand the costs and consequences of dwelling there, as well as the price to be paid in the near future. I spent about half my life in various cities, and I understand the physical ease and existential pain of living at the apex of empire. Also, I know all about the small joys and great pains associated with living in the country. I spent the other half of my life in the country and in towns with fewer than 1,000 people. I understand why the country bumpkin is assigned stereotypical labels related to ignorance and, paradoxically, self-reliance.
It’s clearly too late to tear down this irredeemably corrupt system and realize any substantive benefits for humans or other organisms. And yet I strongly agree with activist Lierre Keith: “The task of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much personal integrity as possible; it is to dismantle those systems.” If it seems I’m filled with contradictions, color me hypocritical fully human in a Walt Whitman sort of way: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Our remaining time on this orb is too short to cast aspersions at those who live differently from ourselves, as most people in industrialized countries have done throughout their lives. Most people in the industrialized world became cultural crack babies in the womb. There is little hope to break the addiction of ingestion at this late point in the era of industry, and I’m throwing in the towel on changing the minds of typically mindless Americans. No longer will I try to convince people to give up the crack pipe based on my perception of morality reality.
I’ll continue to speak. I’ll continue to write. But these efforts will be presented with less urgency than I’ve previously employed, and they will represent personal perspectives and actions. I’ll no longer recommend to others the path I’ve taken.
Nietzsche’s comment about seizing the day, every day, brings to mind the final words of Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal — carries the cross of the redeemer — not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.
With the preceding dire news in mind, it would be easy to forget how fortunate we are. After all, we get to die. That simple fact alone is cause for celebration because it indicates we get to live. As I wrote more than five years ago, our knowledge of DNA assures us that the odds any one of us existing are greater than the odds against being a particular grain of sand on all the world’s beaches. No, the odds are much greater than that: they exceed the odds of being a single atom plucked from the entire universe. To quote the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, “In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.”
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This essay is permalinked at Democratic Underground, The Refreshment Center and Seemorerocks.
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The latest trailer from Mike Sosebee’s forthcoming film is embedded below. Follow all the updates on Facebook by clicking here.
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Please join me in supporting Peter in his quest to return home.
September 19th, 2012 at 7:50 am
“It’s not until we’ve lost everything, that we’re free to do anything.”
- Tyler Durden
You do great work Guy. I know people all over this country who are still fighting, and most of them only really started putting their bodies on the line (in the realest sense of the word) when they started sensing how hopeless the future truly is.
That hopelessness is a recognition that the world you were primed and prepared to receive as a young person will not exist. And thank God for that. Now we’re free to build the world we want, regardless of how ephemeral it may turn out to be.
For fuck’s sake, let’s not go gently, let’s not whimper in the final twilight.
September 19th, 2012 at 7:58 am
.
I know people all over this country who are still fighting,
What does that even mean? Fighting? Resisting and rebuking, I can understand, but fighting is what this System inculcates and does so well. If you fight, you serve it, because it thrives on fight in all its forms. If a New World is possible, fight cannot be part of it, otherwise, it’s not a New World, it will be yet another iteration of the same ol, same ol.
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September 19th, 2012 at 8:00 am
Good for you! ‘Bout time! I’m reaching the same point Guy, tired of being called judgmental. Anymore it’s about do what you want when you want to do it and have fun doing it, sickening as it is.
September 19th, 2012 at 8:54 am
Once again, my personal experience is similar but different, maybe mostly because I live in Germany and not in the United States. While we, too, of course, are born and raised in a culture of Empire and the underlying system is the same (and the corporations are the same, of course), there are subtle and not so subtle differences. The environmental movement and the green party, while by far not as radical and decisive as it should be, is quite influential. Even the mass media, at least the publicly run television and radio channels, touch on topics like peak oil, species extinction, food security and of course climate change quite regularily. All in all I get the feeling that there is a greater awareness of these topics even with “normal” folks who would not consider themselves environmentalists or activists. I am not saying that the German people are likely to shun capitalism and become a nation of self-sufficient permaculture farmers anytime soon (which I, for lack of better solutions, would suggest as probably the best way out of our dilemma at the moment), but I really see more and more of the people I talk to – and I mean talk to in everyday situations: neighbors, colleagues, people I meet on the bus or the train, not my close circle of activist friends – becoming aware of the mess we are in and looking for solutions. Many people are growing some food in their gardens or on their balcony. And many of them will tell you it is because they don’t want to rely on the supermarkets. More and more people choose to work only part time, to have more quality time with their families. Baby steps, sure, and it might be too little too late, but I do see the potential for a mass movement there. Not a top down organized movement … Germans tend to be very suspicious of people whe want to tell them what to think. One Führer was enough. But more a grass roots kind of movement. Many individuals figuring it out on their own and then finding others with similar ideas, forming little groups which then might get together with other groups. Like a system of little creeks flowing together to form streams and then maybe a river. I don’t think we are headed for a revolution. More for a slow paradigm change, where the old system will continue to run it’s destructive, mindless course, but less and less people willing to participate as consumers or wage slaves, who opt out and start putting up small scale alternatives which then might or might not connect to each other.
I guess what I am saying is: while I do get more and more angry with “the system” and feel my urge to bring it down get stronger everyday, I actually get more hopeful about the majority, or at least a surprisingly large minority, of the people around me, because many of them seem to share or at least starting to get into that notion. Humans are like lemmings. Only lemmings don’t mass suicide down cliffs … they mass migrate to a new habitat when the old one cannot sustain them any longer. Only this time our new habitat is not going to be a new continent, it is going to be a new society.
In the 80s I had one of those motto pins you could put on your jacket that said: “Stell dir vor es ist Krieg und keiner geht hin” … “Imagine there is a war and no one participates”. And I think this is how this thing is going to end, at least here in Europe: Imagine there is an Empire and no one participates. People will stop to vote, people will stop to buy crap, they will stop to drive their cars around, they will stop to work regular jobs (mostly because there aren’t many of those left, anyway) and they will stop to pay taxes (because if you don’t buy anything, and you don’t earn anything, and you don’t drive, what are they going to tax?). It will take a few years, though. Roundabout two decades I would guess, and I really hope Mother Earth can hold on that long.
September 19th, 2012 at 9:14 am
One thing you left out of your discourse is the joy to be derived from continuing to do what you know to be right in the sense of leading to a more life-affirming result if only lots more people had started doing it quite a while ago. You strive to live in harmony with nature and to tell the truth as you know it and that feels good. Nothing wrong with feeling good in our remaining days.
September 19th, 2012 at 9:20 am
As far and as long as we care to walk, the empire is still there; it is a global economic, financial, social, cultural, and political superstructure, and eventually a kind of smart systems super-organism concentrating resources and power to the top of the evolutionary hierarchical flow structure and power relations.
The top 25-100 US supranational corporations, including the largest banks, have revenues totaling an equivalent of 40-75% of US private GDP. The banks have assets that now total an unprecedented 130% of private GDP. The banks have a virtual 100% claim on all labor, profits, and gov’t receipts via compounding interest and collateral holdings in perpetuity. They own the US gov’t, mass media, and SCOTUS, and they are positioning to seize legally all assets public and private when the US gov’t inevitably defaults.
The Anglo-American and European Power Elite are positioning to pull their money out of China-Asia to crash the economy and destabilize the region in order to justify escalating regional war eventually with China to contain China, Russia, Iran, and Radical Islam.
“Fighting the empire” is an invitation to alienation, inner-conflict, disillusionment, anger, resentment, clinging to what is perceived as lost, and despair.
Resistance really is futile. Acceptance and letting go is the only “non-choice”. That is, we have the choice not to choose to fight a war with ourselves and that which was lost long ago.
The top 0.01% Power Elite and top 0.1% rentier oligarchs no longer need the real economy and a system of representative governance to function for the bottom 99%+. Therefore, they do not need the vast majority of us as annoying useless bread gobblers consuming scarce resources per capita.
What would one do if one were to realize that the vast majority of the human ape species are redundant to the top 0.1-1% and to Nature’s adaptive system of evolutionary flows?
In this context, why should the top 0.1-1% care what happens to the vast majority of the human ape population?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui7WOdHhvIA
Spirits in the material world
There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution
We are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail you
The subjugate the meek
But its the rhetoric of failure
We are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Where does the answer lie?
Living from day to day
If it’s something we can’t buy
There must be another way
We are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
Are spirits in the material world
September 19th, 2012 at 9:22 am
.
I have to laugh at the “quitter” comment. It doesn’t even make any sense, and whoever issued it, obviously does not grok what you have asserted on these pages many times over. Industrial Civilizations is killing the Living Planet, and in short order, the majority of life on this Living Planet will be extinct because of it. To quit Industrial Civilization, to the extent and degree that’s possible, is something everyone should do…in fact, it’s really a moral imperative. Of course, there are those who will continue to believe that you have to fight it, but for that, I point back to my first comment in this thread…….and the Stages of Grief.
That “quitter” chastisement is yet another fastener that has kept this System perpetuating and growing stronger. It’s a failsafe, and everyone from an early age is indoctrinated to serve as prison guard by keeping everyone else in line if they try to quit the System.
Thank you for joining me in quitting, Guy. I admire you for your moral determination and for not giving the System the attention, respect and reaction it demands. And, thank you for blog anarchy…..it’s a very unselfish and gracious act on your party, and I for one, appreciate it greatly.
.
September 19th, 2012 at 9:27 am
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Spot on, BC, spot on.
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September 19th, 2012 at 9:37 am
I think I can be OK if I am satisfied that somewhere in the Universe there is life
September 19th, 2012 at 9:48 am
It is no we who quit industrial civilization, it is industrial civilization that quits us by becoming too toxic.
September 19th, 2012 at 10:57 am
Guy:
I am new to your posts, but I find your writing stimulating and insightful. I also agree with your forecasts in paragraph #4. A huge die-off if not the total extinction of homo sapiens is a highly likely event in this century. There is no real mitigation, so trying to get the most out of everyday is the only alternative. Don’t let the cornucopians bother you, it’s a natural response of the human epic which is programmed for survival and reproduction. Evidence and reason are not really most people’s forte.
September 19th, 2012 at 11:10 am
To those of you who know me by my comments, I firmly agree with Guy on all points.
As a retiree,I needed something more to occupy my time for myself, that is fun, inexpensive, innocuous, physically and mentally demanding, and obsessive. Disc golf is my answer.
When you cast your ballot for, “Crazy of the Day”, please remember me.
September 19th, 2012 at 11:43 am
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Curtis, I played Disc Golf in Undergrad for fun. It’s a cool game. I like Frisbee, in general. When we vacationed at the beach this past summer, I brought the Frisbee because that’s what I did when I was young when at the beach…well, one of the things. I couldn’t get anyone to throw it with me. All the kids, including mine, were more interested in i-everything then they were in something as archaic and strenuous as Frisbee. I felt sad. My Dad never played anything with me, especially not something as unconventional as Frisbee, and here my children won’t play it with me either.
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September 19th, 2012 at 12:28 pm
It’s a monumentally sad situation.
September 19th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
M.B.
This is the best place to order discs from:
http://www.discgolfcenter.com/ No tax, free shipping for over $20.00.
The internet is full of good info, articles, videos, etc.
It is a young persons game, but there are some older guys and gals. Everyone is very casual, laid back and friendly. I think it is excellent therapy. I try to play everyday for a few hours.
I play with intensity. At 69 I have only a few fast twitch muscles left, but I play for accuracy. I play with people younger and better than me and study all of the time. I have been playing 14 months, and have made a lot of progress, such that I can now keep up with my younger friends.
It has progressed since you where an undergrad. Take a new look at it. I would be glad to give you some tips on getting restarted, particularly what to look for in discs.
To find a course near you:
http://www.pdga.com/
Curtis (I play disc golf) A. Heretic
September 19th, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Extract from Stephen Vincent Benet’s Nightmare With Angels.
You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In fact, you will not be saved.
-Stephen Vincent Benét”
September 19th, 2012 at 12:38 pm
.
What On Earth?
http://vimeo.com/7281668#
Say what you will….these things fascinate me.
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September 19th, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Once one comes to terms with his own death, the death of the species is a piece of cake. Nearly all species die because of their own actions, and we are no exception. Not sure it was ever a fun ride to begin with.
September 19th, 2012 at 12:42 pm
.
In fact, you will not be saved.
I hear ya. I wish my daughter didn’t like Smallville so much. I have to keep listening to this when she does.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYdCzs5uPrI&feature=related
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September 19th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
As it seems that you are finally ready to climb that Dark Mountain, maybe you should think about getting involved with the Project.
http://www.dark-mountain.net/
September 19th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
RayS, appropriate. As Bob Dylan wrote, and Jimi and U2 sang:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIC_NEfeWMQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4vU7f3xu-A
“Rock and roll stops the traffic. (Most everything stops the traffic in SF.)”
Bob Dylan All Along The Watchtower
“There must be some way out of here” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion”, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.
“No reason to get excited”, the thief he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”.
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
__________
There’s still stunning human beauty in this world, evidenced by lovely young ladies like Katie Melua (virtually unknown in the US, regrettably) and her “If the Lights Go Out on All of Us”, “The Walls of the World”, “Piece by Piece”, and “I Cried for You”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5WzD9qtFyg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXBNqVbC6g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fr5-16ZnPM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fr5-16ZnPM
Let go and enjoy . . . while we still can.
September 19th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Hey Guy, and friends
I stumbled upon your opinion recently in a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOq2A_SGTYA which I thought was succinct and to the point and summed up the thoughts that I was getting from our current situation.
I hold the belief that the end of the era of current civilisation is imminent, however I also know people who hold different beliefs.
Now my belief is strong, it’s backed by empirical science but it is not a belief that is widely held in the world. Most people seem to think the next 10 years will be pretty much like the last 10, with ‘booms and busts’ and ‘work and play’.
Now I hate to bring the concept of religion into a sane conversation as I am an atheist, but I think there is a lesson to be learnt here.
Many (millions) of people profess to believe in a god. I think they are misguided and should question their belief. And they may think I am wrong not to believe as they do. So I have to question my own belief with some humility.
Could we as a species stop the madness of self extinction if we understood what’s at stake? I like to believe we could, and we should.
So what are the stakes?
The extinction of ALL life in the known Universe, versus the end of a comfortable life for maybe a third of one species of life on this one planet.
With those stakes understood I can’t surrender and I can’t quit.
We may be wrong about the forthcoming climate chaos exterminating all humans, if there’s a chance of my species surviving I want to be a part of that.
September 19th, 2012 at 1:10 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHP9Rh-ooh0&feature=g-like
September 19th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
We’re in a strange place, that’s for sure. Paradoxically, the people who read this blog or attend Guy’s lectures are the least prepared, psychologically, for the sudden, wrenching changes under way.
In his latest podcast, Dmitry Orlov does another of those things he does that really messes with your mind. He says you can’t really prepare for collapse, not if you’re an educated person with the leisure time and resources that have enabled you to become collapse-aware. You can’t doanything. What is necessary is to become someone else, someone who isn’t privileged but is living hand to mouth, struggling on the margins, a hobo even. And such people know nothing about the predicament “we” face (sorry, Morocco), yet are already accustomed to hardship.
September 19th, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Max, long before climate change (the planet has been warming for centuries and for millennia since the last ice age, of course, and humans for millennia have been impacting local and regional microclimates) gets the bottom 99%+ of us, the banksters and their police-state and client gov’t war machine will destroy the existing mass-consumer division of labor and system of debt-money credits, the social welfare sate, and income and purchasing for the vast majority of us.
The banksters literally want it all, and since ’08, and with the assistance of the debt-money printing press they own at the Fed, they’re going to get it all.
Consequently, for the first time in human history, we have today a de facto militarist-imperialist, rentier-oligarchic corporate-state dictatorship complete with a growing surveillance and police-state apparatus from which there is no hiding nor escaping.
Welcome to the machine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnzaykWhlXs
We’ve been here before. We were warned. We were not allowed to know. What we don’t know won’t hurt us, you understand.
http://www6.svsu.edu/~jalewis2/British/British%20Fascism/1935%20Corporate%20State.pdf
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.asp
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
- Benito Mussolini
From George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”
Part 3, Chapter 3, excerpts:
“The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. … There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.’ He came closer to the bed. For ever! he repeated. … You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak, he added as Winston remained silent.
Winston … knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party … sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. … That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come…
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. … We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? …
You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery.’ Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. … The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. … How does one man assert his power over another, Winston? Winston thought. By making him suffer, he said.
Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? … A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy, everything.
Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. … There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. … If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. … That is the world that we are preparing, Winston.”
They’ve won. The future has arrived: a civilization based on fear and hatred; a world of terror; war without end; empire and triumphalism; no trust, no wives, no children, and no friends; boots stamping on faces; progress of increasing pain; and a Hobbesian “war of all against all”.
And who created this world unfit for humans and non-humans alike? We did, you and I. All 7 billion of us acting upon our evolutionary programming, the force of desire and will to power, and procreative imperatives.
We have met our creator and our destroyer, s/he who created the world in our image, and s/he is us. We are the cause of our suffering and its ending. If a person or civilization is suicidal, there is very little one can do to prevent it.
“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
– Toynbee
September 19th, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Arthur Johnson, I know all about the Dark Mountain project, and this website is listed there. So far, they haven’t published any of my writing, but we’re coming from the same dark place.
September 19th, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Nice antidote to stuff i’ve been hearing/reading all day, Catherine Austin Fitts telling host Bonnie Faulkner on KPFA’s Guns and Butter http://www.kpfa.org/archives/ (look under today’s date, it’s at 1PM PDT) that everything in the future will be provided in people’s garages by 3D printers supplied by “composite materials,” that oil will be replaced by high intensity solar, and maybe even free energy and cars running on water, and materials will be supplied via mining the Moon, Mars,…. Or Zero Hedge featuring an article by Charles Hugh Smith which includes comments by his friend Marc likewise invoking 3D printers and home delivery via automated gas-electric trucks, and downplaying the idea of Peak Oil induced collapse. “It’s gonna be alright” intones the mighty Wurlitzer. Thanks, Guy!!
September 19th, 2012 at 2:32 pm
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And such people know nothing about the predicament “we” face (sorry, Morocco), yet are already accustomed to hardship.
Sorry about what? He’s saying what I have said here before. There is no preparing. The ability to be responsive, reflexive, improvisational and mobile will get you through it, if it’s possible to get through it. Being nomadic, I believe, will be part of that process. I’m glad he’s come clean on that, because it necessarily includes himself as one of the peeps that cannot prepare, and will not be prepared. However, I’m also not sure I’d want to live a life of pure hell, and if there is a chance to come through this, the intervening years, in all likelihood, will be rather unpleasant.
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September 19th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
Hello there!
I came across your blog about a month ago & reading here has sparked some interesting internal dialogue. I would not call myself a ‘doomer’ or a ‘prepper’, but more of a realist. Once your eyes are opened to the world around you, they cannot be shut. I can accept what is happening in our world, as I have already had my psyche and heart torn apart trying to fight it, or at least trying to feel useful in making some kind of difference. I think that is actually quite common for artist types, of which I am.
My dilemma is I have small children. Three of them under the age of five, to be exact. A while back there was a thread where folks here were discussing how they are “preparing” for collapse and it really made me think, though above mentioned little ones keep me from joining many discussions. Anyway, I decided that there is not much I can do, except to remain resilient and adaptable to change. I figured my life has been hard enough, and if it has prepared me for anything, it is change, as it seems to have been in constant upheaval. But I worry about the little ones. There seem to be some very smart people in this community and several medical professionals, so I want to ask something kind of specific.
I’m from Alaska, so I know cabin fever. Far worse when it is due to heat/bad air.
My son, 4 1/2 yo, has SEVERE environmental allergies, asthma, and SEVERE food allergies/anaphylaxis. We nearly lost him last summer after exposure to food allergen, and we are in a constant battle with the allergies year round. He just started pre-school, and already caught a cold, which led to lung infection. So, I guess my question is, how do you prepare for upheaval with medically fragile children? He qualifies for medicaid, but when I see the actual cost of his meds, i.e.. epi-pens, steroid inhalers, albuterol inhalers, nebulizer treatments, various antihistamines, nasal sprays, it is simply outrageous. And scary, because we have tried letting him go without any meds for periods of time, due to severe side effects, but I’m telling you, that verdant valley turning to dust in a few years is our reality.
We live in Rapid City, SD and with the heat/extreme drought, we live in a dust bowl that is ready to catch fire. Our grass dried up and blew away. It is very windy here, and we get all of the wildfire smoke from out west. We have frequent air quality alerts, like today, but I feel the standards are pretty low, because I often see/smell smoke in the mornings, but find no reliable info on air quality. I try to play it safe, as I also have asthma, and my 1 1/2 y/o seems to have developed a hacking cough when we go out to play. It has been the first summer I have spent indoors
Also, the few things we are able to plant (we rent a house) really suffered, no matter how much water/fertilizer we utilized. We could not keep up with tomatoes last summer, this summer there were none, save for a few which some were the size of a pea! Zucchini we planted next to the neighbors abandoned house did fine in 1/2 day sun, though stopped producing in extreme heat. Things feel in chaos as last year was complete flood conditions all spring and summer. But we had almost no snow cover and it was 75 on January 2. I knew that grass wasn’t going to survive. So…I am at a loss as to why many people haven’t ‘woken up’. Villages in Northern Alaska have been suffering the effects of global warming, receding ice, melting permafrost, for at least 15 years, but people in the south central part of the state are glib about it because of their cold summers and record snow.
Sad and scary times. I really want to take the rest of my savings and take my children on a road trip to see some of the national parks. Would that be selfish of me?
@Capella nice post. Are you familiar with the artist Joseph Beuys? Post WWII, I believe he dealt with many issues we are facing now, and as a whole, post war/post holocaust Germany did as well. I think that is why at least part of your country is more mature when facing the current state of the planet. No offense to the great usa, of course! haha…
September 19th, 2012 at 2:38 pm
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Wait a minute. I think I know why you said it, Martin. The school and the planting the metaphorical seeds for a New World. Well, I harbor competing views, and depending on the day, one holds sway over the other, yet they coexist as possibilities for me concomitantly. That’s another thing about these End Times. There’s going to be a great deal of schizo behavior. Predictable patterns are going to be a thing of the past, perhaps, for awhile, until we go extinct, or somehow miraculously, some come through it and out the other end of the Crucible and become part of a New World…one where Humankind doesn’t play a lead role.
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September 19th, 2012 at 3:21 pm
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“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
- Benito Mussolini
Where’s the contemporary Mussolini? The Hitler? The Franco? That’s one of the main ingredients of Fascism, yet I see no individual like that anywhere, leading a Populist revolt to restore the USA to its Purist roots.
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September 19th, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Morocco, it was a reference to your earlier protestation about using the groupthink “we.”
September 19th, 2012 at 3:29 pm
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Ah, duh, if it was a snake, it would have bitten me. Thank you for the hat tip, though.
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September 19th, 2012 at 3:38 pm
http://www.zazzle.com/soylent_green_dark_long_sleeve_tee-235385141137774734
http://www.zazzle.com/soylent_green_tees-235315902671250056
Bama, et al., there is one resource on the planet that is in abundance, and on which the human species could rely for quite some time. It might take a creative marketing and advertising campaign to sell the resource, however. But it is a democratic resource, as it is of, by, and for the people.
The best thing is that it’s PETA approved! For people who love people.
http://www.zazzle.com/the_soylent_green_party_t_shirts-235392263667786134
I can see it now, a new political party for the people.
For the sake of my fellow worthless gobblers, I’d be happy to sell my aging carcass for my fellow human and non-human creatures. I can’t promise that I taste like chicken, buy one must make sacrifices in these cases.
September 19th, 2012 at 3:50 pm
Bama, fascism is much further evolved than in Il Duce’s or Herr Hitler’s day. There is no need for a charismatic dictator, although it helps to sell the system to the masses. Obummer is a good example, of course.
The dictatorship is of the owners of the militarist-imperialist, hierarchical, command-and-control corporate-state, and it has a friendly face, unless you’re an Iraqi, Afghan, enemy combatant against empire, etc.
Eventually the top 25-100 US corporations will be “the economy”, if not already, leaving the rest of us outside the fortified ramparts of the impenetrable corporate-state fortress.
September 19th, 2012 at 4:17 pm
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BC, it’s much more complex than that, but I think this is of interest as it relates to Fascism. I know of a blogger who fits this description to a T, yet no one will admit it except one poster of the many. He’s German, and he’s rabidly Anti-American, but highly Authoritarian and he was once a member of the Green Party that fought against Nuclear Power. I could name names, but I won’t. He’s militant, has a background in the German military, is technically savvy and a fervent ecologist and supportive of Authoritarian and Totalitarian regimes across the globe so long as those regimes are allegedly in conflict with the U.S.
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/janet.html
‘Ecology’ and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right
Ecology is warped for mystical-nationalist ends by a whole series of neofascist groups and parties. Indeed, so multifarious are the ecofascist parties that have arisen, and so much do their memberships overlap, that they form what antifascist researcher Volkmar Wölk calls an “ecofascist network.” 8 Their programmatic literature often combines ecology and nationalism in ways that are designed to appeal to people who do not consider themselves fascists, while at the same time they ideologically support neo-Nazi street-fighting skinheads who commit acts of violence against foreigners………
” What is clearly crucial is how an ecological politics is conceived. If the Green slogan “we are neither left nor right but up front” was ever meaningful, the emergence of an ‘ecological right’ defines the slogan’s bankruptcy conclusively. The need for an ecological left is urgent, especially one that is firmly committed to a clear, coherent set of anticapitalist, democratic, antihierarchical views. It must have firm roots in the internationalism of the left and the rational, humanistic, and genuinely egalitarian critique of social oppression that was part of the Enlightenment, particularly its revolutionary libertarian offshoot.
” But an ecologically oriented politics must deal with biological phenomena warily, since interpretations of them can serve sinister ends. When ‘respect for Nature’ comes to mean ‘reverence,’ it can mutate ecological politics into a religion that ‘Green Adolfs’ can effectively use for authoritarian ends. When ‘Nature,’ in turn, becomes a metaphor legitimating sociobiology’s ‘morality of the gene,’ the glories of ‘racial purity,’ ‘love of Heimat,’ ‘woman equals nature,’ or ‘Pleistocene consciousness,’ the cultural setting is created for reaction. ‘Ecological’ fascism is a cynical but potentially politically effective attempt to mystically link genuine concern for present-day environmental problems with time-honored fears of the ‘outsider’ or the ‘new,’ indeed the best elements of the Enlightenment, through ecological verbiage. Authoritarian mystifications need not be the fate of today’s ecology movement, as social ecology demonstrates. But they could become its fate if ecomystics, ecoprimitivists, misanthropes, and antirationalists have their way.”
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September 19th, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Human extinction by 2030? But that’s when my Social Security payments begin!
September 19th, 2012 at 4:29 pm
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BC, I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t see that as Fascism, I see it as something much more diabolical. Certainly it incorporates attributes of typical Fascism, if there is such a thing, but it also incorporates attributes of Maoism and Stalinism, and it has attributes that are uniquely its own, and it transcends the USA, although it uses the USA as the strong arm….the stick, if you will.
And, so long as that Soylent Green comes with gravy, I guess I can live with it. I loves me some gravy.
When collapse occurs, I believe there are many possibilities and permutations, and one of them will most certainly be a return to good, old-fashioned Fascism….the kind you know, when you see it. The Hot Evil Fascism of Germany, Italy and Spain and the Balkans. In fact, the break-up of Yugoslavia is a prototype of things to come for various regions of the planet…except the prototype is much more benign then what’s to come, imo.
Then, of course, all of it could be avoided if an involuntary population reduction scheme were implemented, and I wouldn’t put that past the most powerful peeps the planet has ever known.
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September 19th, 2012 at 5:42 pm
As Slavoj Zizek sez: “Resistance Is Surrender”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/slavoj-zizek/resistance-is-surrender
The first time I read this my mouth fell open. Zizek “out-Foucaults Foucault” with regard to power and resistance.
He’s a weird guy, a Catholic Marxist, and an outlandish thinker.
Now, about Rapid City South Dakota. Lived there, done that. One of the more conservative places in the U.S. Remember the folks in Montana that held off the BTF for a while, claiming their own country? I was surprised that didn’t happen in RC. Tell me, is Bill Napoli still a state senator?
I have some nursing professor colleagues still there. I keep in touch only irregularly. I know that one would like to come up here, but she tells me that her parents on the farm in SD couldn’t go on without her. I should email her and see if the farm has blown away. I remember in 2003 the temperature in the center of the state somewhere a bit north of Pierre (pronounced “peer”) reached 123 degrees and all the crops and hay died, plus most of the livestock.
My advice: Go back to Alaska. It might even be better for your son with his allergies. I just prepared a lecture for Friday for my students that uses asthma as the example of a disease that will skyrocket with climate change.
Allergies are a disease of civilization. Treatments will soon be unavailable. Hell, even health care will soon be unavailable. Better to leave civilization.
Don’t resist. Just don’t play.
No, maybe go to Whitehorse Yukon. One of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.
September 19th, 2012 at 5:58 pm
That’s “ATF” not “BTF” It’s the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The people in Montana called themselves the “Freemen”
September 19th, 2012 at 6:45 pm
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BC Nurse Prof, when I said the word resist, I meant it in the sense of don’t give the System its demanded respect and reaction, not resist as in struggle with it or fight it. That’s why I also included the word rebuke. Yes, what you said, “just don’t play” sums it up nicely. I like that. BC is a beautiful place. Was there in 2004. Went to Whistler via Vancouver. On the ride up from Vancouver, my mouth hung open the entire time, and I couldn’t pay attention to the high school friends I hadn’t seen in twenty years, the scenery was so breathtaking…..well, there was that, and there was the crazy cabbie who I thought for sure was going to drive right off that highway and plunge us to our death five hundred feet below.
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September 19th, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Martin Knight
Regarding your comments about Dimity Orlov…
Did you really need him to spell it out for you? Obviously it is what is left after all the superficial coating is removed as the theorised ‘Collapse’,(its here now), occurs that counts.
What kind of relations do you and your family, or close cohabitors, have? Where do you get water, and how do you obtain food? What energy sources do you regularly use, and what back ups do you have as alternatives?
Most people will rapidly go to wood burning as a backup. What signals do you give to strangers about your threat level? Are you a successful scrounger/scavenger for materials and yes food? Do you know common places to scavenge from? Do you know local and regional sites to have backups for scavenging materials and foods? If you have dependents, can they be managed and are they prepared?
The list goes on and on and on….
I have been progressing on this adaptation for about three years now, and my family and kids are now putting signs up in the front yard, disguised as being from local residents, criticising me for hoarding out of fear.I’m not afraid, just gatering stuff I’m using now.
Orlov is essentially correct about the difference between experience and theory. Those living without the extras, or mainstays of Empire will naturally be far better adapted than those who merely are mentally prepared. No argument IMO.
But it is all about what you think is a priority for today! I am not waiting for anyone to rescue me/us. DIY, and some colaboration may come.
Some people, no a majority of people, will not understand, YET, what is going on with the scavenging thing nearby me, but who cares? I am endeavouring not to offend people, serve local support networks, and that means actualising the human scale gift community, and get some physical exercise by walking everywhere. There are times of doubts, yes, but that is par for any course a human embarks on somewhat outside the orbit of most neighbours life expectations.High functioning for me is activating sound intuition on how to proceed in situations that have potential for new links to people and activities that will be a long term support to me and my family and the rest of sentient life, not necessarily in that order of priority of importance.
Some advice on scavenging. If in doubt IMO it is usually better to ask if something is owned, and if it is still needed. Also shaving, for men, helps with congenial discourse, but altogether unnecessary if you are a good discourser.
All
A comment on adaptation and Empire:
An aquaintence once expressed loathing of the person who invented the funnel, used for decanting liquids, and in the aquaintence’s case mostly engine oil. I was a bit puzzled so asked him to clarify. He said that because the inventor had solved that problem, of not spilling the valuable fluid, he no longer had the task of finding a solution to the problem. If we look as culture as in part, the handing on of solutions such as this example, to problems, then eventually the younger generations do not have to think for themselves because all of the major problems have beeen simply handed to them.
I took his point, and in some ways this may explain why it is given out now that Hunter Gatherers in prehistoric times had bigger brains, measurably so, because they had to figure things out, often quicky, if it was friend or foe stuff.
Soon our brains will be selected for the old survival skills, if we get to surviving very far.
Live for taday, with an eye on tomorrow. See if that works….
September 19th, 2012 at 10:30 pm
I appreciate this so much, Guy. Right there with you.
September 19th, 2012 at 11:19 pm
“It’s alright, ma…it’s life and life only.” – Bob Dylan
Now is all we have. Carpe diem.
September 20th, 2012 at 12:00 am
@BadlandsAK
Have a look at this site: Gaps.me
It takes some reading and understanding, and then – acting, lots of acting.
What we have experienced over here the past 2 months – this has incredible power to heal. And its “only” food we are using, true food this is, but.
In case you want more information, I think Guy can provide my email for ya.
Peace.
Bernhard
September 20th, 2012 at 2:48 am
Guy “After all, we get to die. That simple fact alone is cause for celebration because it indicates we get to live.”
There is no life without death so for all that find life worth living the fact that they die is the price they pay for that life. As you note it can well be considered a price worth paying. It also means they can’t keep anyone in Gitmo forever.
Thought came to mind after reading your essay “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” For us in the first world it has been a time of comfort, a time we can pursue the joys of learning how the world works, a time when a world of knowledge and interactions opened up to us over the web, a time when some progress has been made on accepting people different from us. And of course a time when we have to witness our own self destruction. For many it is just plain “the worst of times”, for the 1 billion born into poverty of less than $1 a day, for the people who live their whole lives on garbage dumps, for children sold into slavery, the child soldiers of Uganda, and no “best of times” in their future. For them death means “we get to stop living”
So sad the wise ape, the intelligent ape, could not do better. Ah well it was always the case that life on earth and the planet itself would end. The demise comes a little earlier than expected, unnecessarily earlier, but perhaps as Dilworth proposes we were always “Too smart for our own good, and too dumb to do anything about it” so the end may quite necessarily be now.
September 20th, 2012 at 2:51 am
OzMan,
Once again I regret my limited participation on this blog. To avoid further misunderstanding, let me make my position plain. I am making no preparations for collapse at all. Nothing.
September 20th, 2012 at 2:51 am
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/nsidc-calls-record-2012-low.html
September 20th, 2012 at 3:39 am
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I have to laugh at The Dark Mountain Project thing. Right up to the very end, this compulsion to engender exclusivity and elitism in all things….even The End. It’s astonishing……and absurdly ridiculous. People wanting to think themselves special and superior in the face of complete annihilation. If The End doesn’t humble this farce, obviously, nothing will. Arrogance to the last breath. That’s the Human legacy.
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September 20th, 2012 at 3:45 am
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Martin, you sacrilegious heretic, you! I know there’s a Curtis the Heretic, but do we now have a Martin the Heretic? How dare you not place yourself upon bended knee and pay proper homage to the Deity of Doom. May it smite you where you stand, or sit, or lay! Oh, wait, we’re all going to be smote anyway, so what does it matter? In the end, the one luscious, juicy, flavorfully satisfying card we have left, is defiance of all things demanded by this System, including Doom.
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September 20th, 2012 at 4:50 am
You have good insight, MB, and I say that as one who is not a flatterer. Indeed, I try to show my respect for people by not flattering them. You would be amazed how often this turns out to be a bad idea.
Since I am placing things on record, I would also like it to be known that I own several funnels, all of them quality items, some of them specialist tools for laboratory procedures or filtering kerosene into stoves. I like to think ownership of them confers a measure of self-reliance rather than shrinks my brain. The artefacts of industrial civilisation all embody a conundrum: like alcohol they are both the cause of, and solution to, life’s problems.
September 20th, 2012 at 5:16 am
Occasionally……. one will receive an email that stuns. This was one of them, from Dr Graham Turner.
Dear Chris, Len, and all,
In the 10 years since the CSIRO work you mention (Future Dilemmas), that modelling has been enlarged and extended – by a diminishing number of colleagues including myself. In particular, it was clearly important to search for solutions using our `stocks and flows’ simulation applied to the problems identified in the Future Dilemmas.
What follows is a summary of my personal reflections; they should not be interpreted as representing the views of CSIRO.
In brief, this recent work strongly confirms Chris’ observations. And I think it has implications for the system design (as opposed to system modelling) perspective in Richard Mochelle’s reply.
In the latest modelling, while I didn’t specify a steady-state economy (SSE) as an outcome, this is what effectively resulted from my attempts to lower GHG emissions, ease oil constraints and other environmental pressures, while keeping the economy functioning. But there are immense challenges, as outlined below, which I believe make the SSE outcome extremely unlikely.
For a reference:
Turner, G. M. (2011) Consumption and the Environment: Impacts from a System Perspective. In Landscapes of Urban Consumption (Ed, Newton, P. W.), pp.51-70, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood.
and have some PPT presentations that summarise it. (Several of my other projects and publications find similar outcomes, even though they focus on different topics and details.)
On a side note relevant to the 1st of Chris’ points below, this work was an off-shoot of simpler work in 2010 for the Immigration Department looking (again) at the environmental and resource implications of different immigration (and population) levels. The Department eventually released that report, after months had passed, and after the Population Issues Paper. It was released on the 23rd December 2010. Not surprisingly it received little attention. There were other interesting aspects to the handling of this work; Mark O’Connor has generally documented these well in a piece for The Drum website.
But back to content…
While the modelling showed that it is technically feasible to achieve the SSE or to approach sustainability, there are important caveats. Even with my background as a technologist (applied physics) many of the technological assumptions I made were rather heroic; and of particular note, a reliance on imported oil was not eliminated.
But (putting these caveats aside for a moment) what was striking was the immensity and rapidity of change required. Population had to be stabilised (zero net immigration & 1.6 births/female); multiple substantial technological/engineering schemes had to be implemented simultaneously; consumption rates had to be substantially reduced; and most importantly, the working week had to diminish to 3-days by 2050.
I would judge that nothing short of a true social and political revolution (i.e., probably a “painful” process) would be required all these necessary changes. Feasible in principle? Yes. Likely? No.
And this is just for Australia. We can’t ignore the global context, and particularly the issue of oil constraints.
This has hit home even more strongly for me when I recently updated my comparison of the original 1970′s Limits to Growth scenario modelling with almost 40 years of data (from 1970 to 2010). This is published in:
Turner, G. M. (2012). On the cusp of global collapse? Updated comparison of the Limits to Growth with historical data. GAiA, 21(2), 116-124.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oekom/gaia/2012/00000021/00000002/art00010
Essentially, we are still tracking on the `business-as-usual’ scenario, which sees a collapse occur through resource constraint. What is alarming, is that the key mechanism for the collapse, and the timing, appear to be playing out. It is not that resources (particularly, oil) run out at all, but that they become increasingly difficult to extract. This has the effect that the industrial system, services and agriculture are not adequately supported and output begins to collapse, followed by population.
In the model – and contrary to common understanding – this doesn’t happen some decades away, but at about 2015. Overall, the BAU scenario has rather startling alignment with contemporary events.
While we can never be certain, I don’t think that we can simply dismiss this as coincidence; too many of the ducks line up. There is a real prospect a collapse has effectively begun (but will it pan out as modelled, especially the timing?).
This does not mean that we should lose hope, become despondent and chuck it all in. On this point, I agree with Richard Mochelle: “do what we think OUGHT to be done, what MUST be done”. Unfortunately, surely certain wealthy miners agree with this approach but with much different aims?
Based on the research, I believe it’s time to create as many “lifeboats” as possible, in order to leap into these if necessary. In many on-the-ground ways this probably has much in common with a greenleap into a sustainable future. But the difference is likely to be that lifeboats depend more on bottom-up decentralised local initiatives. A focus on local food, water, energy, and social systems, right down to the household level. This is where I remain hopeful.
Best wishes,
Graham
September 20th, 2012 at 6:10 am
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Martin, your last post reminded me of one of my favorite movies when I was young. It’s cheesy by today’s standards, but replete with many of the existential issues we discuss here, especially what you just mentioned. I’ve watched this movie at various stages in my life and my perspective of it has changed over time as I have evolved and grown. When I first watched it, at age nine, I sided with Neville, and dreaded the mutants. I’m now neutral, and I understand the mutants message, not their tactics, just as I understand Neville’s affinity to the former world. Soylent Green is often mentioned as a possible permutation, but I think an Omega Man scenario is also plausible…and probable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=929ceD32uVo
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September 20th, 2012 at 6:11 am
Heading to downtown Philly to protest the fracking industry conference there (trying to convince our legislators that “all is well, it’ll be cheap, safe and plentiful.” Where have we heard that canard before?
Oh, right nuclear energy. Welcome to the new Fukushima of PA unless we stop this industry from ruining our only source of potable water. As with the nuke industry, where they dispose of the waste (which in this case can’t be processed to get the toxic chemicals out so it can be used as drinking water once again)? Are they dumping it into streams, lakes and rivers? Are they storing it in vast containers which will erode in time? This must stop!
September 20th, 2012 at 6:28 am
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Tom, funny you should mention that. This past summer, whilst visiting family in that area, my bro and I and our immediate families stayed in a hotel off of Ridge Pike in Collegeville/Limerick. My father, who is 87 by the way and does not remember who we are, resides at a VA home in Collegeville, and even though he doesn’t remember us or recognize us, we went to visit him anyway, and we had a wonderful view of the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant steaming away. Needless to say, it was ominous, and these practically dead older folks in this VA home get to stare at that all day long….their legacy…our legacy….a legacy of suffering, death and destruction, as their own imminent death taunts them…coming ever closer but still just out of reach.
http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/phillyburbs.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/66/e66f487e-579a-11e0-9747-00127992bc8b/4d8dcbbaa5133.image.jpg
There’s a twisted beauty in that photo.
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September 20th, 2012 at 6:32 am
Morocco,
Why do you think the Dark Mountain Project is a farce. Have you taken the time to read the Manifesto, and Paul Kingsnorth’s piece “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist”?
September 20th, 2012 at 6:50 am
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Arthur, firstly, the look and feel of it appears to me to be contrived. Secondly, as I look deeper, it comes off as Elitist and Exclusive….only the Crème de la Crème need apply. Of course, I can’t be sure, but why would they not publish something of Guy’s? I like to adhere to Martin’s philosophy of not flattering people unnecessarily, but Guy’s a proficient writer, and his essays are extremely salient and poignant to Dark Mountain’s venue, so why not publish something of Guy’s? Thirdly, there’s this:
http://dark-mountain.net/get-involved/support-us/
And it includes membership levels. Considering what is discussed here, how dire things really are, does it not seem foolish and absurd to you that someone needs to create yet another online membership drive and organization….one that embraces The End?
I remain skeptical. And by the way, I buy very few books because I have a limited budget. We rely heavily on our local library, so anyone trying to make a buck off this End Times gig isn’t going to make it off me.
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September 20th, 2012 at 7:08 am
MB you wrote “have to laugh at The Dark Mountain Project thing. Right up to the very end, this compulsion to engender exclusivity and elitism in all things….even The End. ”
That makes three things we now agree on
or is it 4
September 20th, 2012 at 7:14 am
Somehow I am reminded of the great cartoon – Turf war on 49th Street
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Turf-War-on-West-49th-Street-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8544919_.htm
Two people are standing at a corner holding signs – one says “The End of the World is near for Religious Reasons” and the other “The End of the World is near for Ecological Reasons”
But if the end of the world is near and the end cannot be stopped, who cares.
September 20th, 2012 at 7:18 am
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That makes three things we now agree on
or is it 4
HaHa!
It’s getting to be too many for me to count. If we keep it up, I will have to pull out my hair shirt and flog myself for engaging in the dreaded Group Think. 
.
September 20th, 2012 at 7:24 am
But even more than that I am reminded of this cartoon.
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/And-so-while-the-end-of-the-world-scenario-will-be-rife-with-unimaginabl-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8544483_.htm
Business man talking to colleagues – So while the end of the world will be rife with unimaginable horrors, the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit
I note that “The full text of the manifesto is below. You can also buy an elegantly designed, numbered and hand-stitched physical copy, made by our friends at Bracketpress in Lancashire.” Why in dog’s name would anyone want a numbered hand-stitched pamphlet when in 18 per Guy or 38 per Arctic News the human race will be extinct.
Time to take the extinction of the human race a bit more seriously than joining Dark Mountain at say level 4 “LEVEL FOUR: £100 or more a year. As well as the book, the newsletter and the event invitation, we will list your name in the next Dark Mountain book and/or on our website. (If you prefer to be anonymous, though, just let us know.)” Clearly they are not taking the future facing humans seriously at all. EXTINCTION means that it – no more humans to collect things, buy things, make money, take pleasure at seeing their name in a book, donate, read things, value things, enjoy things, suffer. Done, finished, over – well unless there are aliens who come and examine the stuff we leave after the radiation from 400 Fukushimas settles down.
September 20th, 2012 at 7:39 am
Morocco Bama
I’m told authors greatly desire to have their books purchased for public libraries because there is a royalty paid for every borrowing of them, and it means the book that is in a library has not only paid its way by being purchased, but also keeps on giving withevery reader/borrower. So you may well be getting them richer. Not sure if this applies entirly throughout the world, but North America may have other rules.
September 20th, 2012 at 7:53 am
Martin Knight: Indeed, I try to show my respect for people by not flattering them. You would be amazed how often this turns out to be a bad idea.
Thanks for the laugh out loud moment this morning!
September 20th, 2012 at 8:06 am
Kathy C, enjoyed the cartoon you shared. Here’s a classic Peanuts from yesterday’s paper that is more inline with my own personal philosophy of late:
http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/2012/09/19?utm_source=google&utm_medium=gadget&utm_campaign=gadget_clickthrough
September 20th, 2012 at 8:13 am
Dr. House – thanks. Good philosophy for sure.!
September 20th, 2012 at 8:16 am
Martin Knight
Multiple funnel ownership noted.
I think my point generally with that anecdote was that if as an individual, and aperhaps a cohort of young people, you have never really had to solve critical, or at least advantage providing problems, as a general rule, you are less adapted to doing so, and in a time where adaptation is needed, as well as using less of everything, the individual or group that has little experience is less able to self provide.
Another good example is how the internet has changed academic scholarship. It has had many consequences, I’ll grant, but this particular one is the now widespread process of ‘copy and paste’, instead of study, think, and having learnt, research and think and write. I’m not suggesting that all in academia and its processes were always sacrosanct and pure and perfect, however, in the past you had to pay a lot of money to cheat essays, and lecturerers and prof’s were pretty in your face and knew the capacities of students they had had for a while.
Now the PROBLEMS to be solved are how to copy and paste, and seamlessly segue, and not get detected, which itself might be easier now too, it depends on faculty, etc.
Problems that impact on survival were where the brain size issue really came up. So I suppose I conflated the idea of advantage, in a financial sense, (inventions can bring wealth), and survival.
Why are you making no changes whatsoever about collapse? There is no right thing to do, even if collapse is immanent IMO. So do you have a reason you can share as to your stated non-other-activities re collapse? I’m always interested to hear others views, they all help IMO.
September 20th, 2012 at 8:23 am
Kathy C
“Done, finished, over – well unless there are aliens who come and examine the stuff we leave after the radiation from 400 Fukushimas settles down.”
Now you’re talking!
September 20th, 2012 at 8:40 am
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because there is a royalty paid for every borrowing of them
I doubt that, but if it were true, it needs to cease immediately. I don’t want my Library spending my property tax money calculating royalties for authors. That money can be used to procure more books, and hire more Librarians.
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September 20th, 2012 at 8:43 am
Regarding DM.
I thought the manifesto was brilliant. Nobody else had brought attention to the emphasis on story, as a cultural, psychological, personal vector.
So, I wanted to assist in any way I could, so I wrote something, emailed it, and they published it in DM 2.
Since then, I discovered that ‘things’ did not develop in the way I had hoped and anticipated. ( instead of climbing Mount Kailash so to speak, it went downhill, hahahaha ) Someone recently mentioned the Light Valley. An alternative vision.
You need to remember the time factor. DM originated from nothing, several years ago. I’ve been on the internet since the mid 90s. At that time I only found about six people who had a clue. Zerzan was one, Prieur another. I shan’t mention the other names. There’s been a long, slow, build up of awareness. Sure, it’s elitist and I could hack it to pieces on many other grounds, and feel entitled and tempted to do so. But it is what it is, just one vehicle to which a certain section of soceity can respond. Relative to the whole spectrum out there, most are worse.
But then you folks here should be sorry about that, instead of preening your moral superiority, because the reason it became what it now is, is because they don’t know what to do. Or, what else to do.
Does anyone here know what to do ?
September 20th, 2012 at 8:48 am
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So you may well be getting them richer.
Alright. I’m going to stop reading books then. Pretty soon they’ll have us cleaning their houses, and in return, they’ll give us a free copy of their book that tells us ever so eloquently that we’re all going to go extinct very very soon and it’s all our fault…and they’ll autograph it.
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September 20th, 2012 at 8:52 am
Called to Private Grand Jury for owning books…
http://thesoundandnoise.com/2012/09/14/young-persons-called-to-private-grand-jury-for-owning-books/
September 20th, 2012 at 8:56 am
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Does anyone here know what to do ?
Take the Skinheads Bowling, Take Them Bowling?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INnFvMgET1E
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September 20th, 2012 at 9:10 am
The way I see you, MB. The guy with the beard.
http://youtu.be/yWfetF1jCO4
September 20th, 2012 at 9:15 am
Kathy C, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group predics extinction of all life on Earth, not merely humans, by 2047.
My name appears on ten books. I receive small royalty checks, but none of those royalties are related to library loans. Rather, they all result from direct sales.
September 20th, 2012 at 9:21 am
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So, you are a violent person, uvula. I thought so. You have all the telltale characteristics. Pathetic. I would never say anything close to what that freak in the beard said, nor do I condone violence against him. You’re outed once again.
The irony is, I can’t stand bars and bar scenes.
If you’re in pain, mate, don’t project it. Keep it to yourself, and don’t try to level it onto others, and make them feel what you feel. Your pain is bad enough, so don’t spread it around. It’s unfortunate you can’t laugh and be humorous, but don’t prevent others from doing so just because you have to be serious.
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September 20th, 2012 at 9:30 am
In the United States, libraries do not pay a royalty each time a book is checked out. The royalty is included in the initial, one-time cost of the book (the same as when an individual purchases a book). It appears that the practice varies depending on the country (for example, from my brief non-thorough research just now, UK libraries seem to pay a royalty each time a book is checked out).
I found a useful overview on how authors make money here:
http://jenniferonwriting.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-authors-make-money.html
(note that this is a different Jennifer, not me.)
September 20th, 2012 at 9:31 am
Violence ? What violence ? There’s no violence in the video !
You must be hallucinating, or is it your usual paranoia ?
It’s not a bar, it’s a martial arts club.
I laugh all the time. I find you most amusing. Thanks for being such a clown.
September 20th, 2012 at 9:31 am
Is this “off topic”?
I think it illuminates a specific avenue of resistance to the forces which make life into abominations.
Humor me, please, I’m just a biological life-form…
Monsanto’s Smoke Screen
Misinformed by “Science”,
There are a lot of pictures of deformed albino Sprague-Dawley lab rats popping up over the past 2-3 days. Those kinds of pictures are easy to come by.
What is really going on?
Monsanto had to fund scientific studies to “prove” that it’s GM corn/maize varieties were “safe” for human and animal consumption in OECD member countries.
So firstly, the intent of these studies is clear. The intent of these studies is to find no fault, no metabolic danger to living organisms.
Monsanto has done this dance before, and knows how to do it. It is general knowledge, anyway. It is a very common dance. Industry funds most of this research, and funds the researchers who provide the desired results most reliably. I’m not jaded. I’ve been involved in physiologic research studies on lab rats for years in college and med school. I’ve had long discussions with researchers, often about other researchers, and methodologies used, tossing out a couple of bad data points to get where you need to be, things like that. My critical reading of medical and physiological research has generally led me to conclude that 80-90% of published, peer-reviewed research is totally-biased-crap, meant to prove dome predetermined “fact”.
In order to justify conclusions, researchers are supposed to reveal all raw data and all statistical methods of analysis. This is Greek to most readers.
Let’s look at how Monsanto stacked this data in their own favor.
Yes, this is ALL Monsanto data we are discussing, and it is 12 years old, and it has been kept secret, pried out by Greenpeace lawsuits and such.
We only have Monsanto data to talk about here, but now, after more than a decade, the raw data and methods are available for review.
Toxic effects show up more over longer times, with more animals to look at, with higher doses of the toxins, and with more tests, to look at more specific types of acute and chronic change in physiology.
As Monsanto I want studies with shorter time frames, fewer animals fed my corn, animals fed lower doses of my corn (maybe give some of my corn to the control group, by not genetically analyzing their feed, so they are secretly more similar to the test groups), and I don’t want to do very many liver or kidney or sex hormone tests, and I don’t want to do them very often, and I want to end the whole study well before cancer has a chance to start, or “long-term-toxicity” can kick in.
Mission Accomplished!
Monsanto bought study protocols that really only had 10 rats in each group fed specific GM corn products. With 10 rats per group, you just can’t find anything but high frequency effects. They only fed a maximum of 33% GM corn to any group, and the lower dose was 11%. There were very large groups of hundreds of rats used as various sorts of controls, so the study looks better with hundreds of rats, but they were not the ones in the test-groups, so it is fluff. The lack of rigor in defining the diets of some “control group” rats left open the possibility to mix some of the study maize into their feed, while nobody was looking, and that was all the time. Nobody looked. there was no genetic analysis of the feed given to the most general control group.
This information never formally existed, but if I were a crooked researcher, I would have spiked the feed of the control groups at night with the same GM corn that I was giving the experimental groups. Monsanto knows how to get what they pay for, right?
The small groups of test-group rats at low feeding concentrations only got to participate for a maximum of 3 months, then Game Over. Long term toxic effects were specifically excluded from the short term study, but the conclusion was that the GM corn was safe in long term use for billions of humans and animals. “Science”.
Evidence of cancer was excluded by the very short term and by not looking for any cancer or tumor markers. Check!
Evidence of teratogenicity was excluded by strictly avoiding pregnancy and not even looking at any reproductive hormone levels.
The final firewall was the statistical techniques used.
How can you justify a safety conclusion on such a small dose, small cohort, short time study group, which you checked so few things on?
You just say it’s so, and hide all your records.
That worked until Monsanto lost the court cases. Monsanto just lied about the statistics.
If your design gives a 70% chance that you will fail to find major toxicity, and you don’t find it, then you just say you did a careful study, and it wasn’t there and the data is proprietary. Check!
What can the very limited raw data reveal about the few rats fed low concentrations of 3 GM corn varieties for 3 months, and tested as little as possible?
The 3 GM corn varieties are prefaced by NK, which is “Roundup Ready” and therefore contains traces of “roundup”, as well as 2 MO (Monsanto) prefaced varieties, containing the Bt toxin and a never-seen-before-in-the-living-world “novel Bt” toxin. These are pesticide toxins derived from Bacillis Thuringiensis, which makes them as part of it’s daily chores in the world.
The novel Bt is really something to look at closely, but not for Monsanto… Cows abort when eating Bt feed, we now know, but this study stays completely away from that whole realm. A lot of the suspicion rests on these inseparable pesticide contents of these GM corn varieties, but not all of the suspicion, because these are not necessarily the only “improvements”, just the obvious ones.
I will not give a blow-by-blow breakdown for each feed group, but there were sex differences and dose differences and time differences in pretty much all groups, despite efforts to ignore them by study design. There were liver and kidney effects all around, sometimes more for males, sometimes females. There were suggestions of reduced cardiac muscle mass, possibly overall muscle decrease (not looked at) in the Roundup Ready group, which could be due to eating a little Roundup. Some of the Bt rats showed some liver changes associated with diabetes, and gained weight, but liver enzyme studies which might show signs of liver inflammation were strictly avoided. there were kidney effects which raised the possibility of renal toxicity, and showed different grouped levels of toxins excreted by the kidneys. These feeds really seemed to have different effects on the kidneys, and on male and female kidneys, but tests for early kidney damage, such as protein leakage into the urine, were avoided.
Some of these groups definitely gained more weigh than others.
Why?
Sorry, beyond the scope of the study. Who cares?
Obviously, a proper statistical analysis of the expertly-constrained data reveals nothing reassuring about even short term effects of these GM corn varieties. It points to differences in metabolic effect from each variety, even with just a few rats to look at for a short time, and totally avoids looking at birth defects, intergenerational issues, different species, and even cancer and long-term toxicity.
Monsanto got what they paid for, even if they had to slide some extra loot under the table.
It is not enough to justify their GM corn existing in the world at all, let alone being fed to any other organism.
In America, you can’t legally find out if it is in your Fritos, tortillas or popcorn.
It’s illegal to tell you that.
It’s probably pretty hard for companies to even know that about the lots they buy.
Don’t ask, don’t tell…
Who is going to do the studies that need to be done, which would take over a decade to really do properly?
Nobody?
Will this stuff be taken off the market pending the proper studies, as actually required by regulators, but never done?
Here is the reanalysis of Monsanto’s raw data and techniques. It’s dense, but it isn’t bullshit.
It’s French…
http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm
Corn-Fed
September 20th, 2012 at 9:33 am
Over the last six months or so I’ve been trying to wrap my psyche around the inevitability of human extinction in the next hundred years (if not sooner) and smashing my head against a brick wall of nihilism. The Slovenian philosopher Zizek maintains that genuine atheists must first pass through Christianity, because in Christianity the paternal sky god falls into his creation as a miserable human being only to get himself tortured and whacked by his beloved creatures. Thus Christianity, according to Zizek, is the true death-of-god religion. Now we have come full circle, from the death of divinity to the death of humanity, along with most of the other organisms on this planet. For those who embraced either a religious or secular theology of hope and believed that eventually we would build a better world, that we would rid ourselves of the psychopaths in power, that we would morally evolve and enter into a more empathic relationship with all life forms, the apocalyptic failure of this vision leaves us in a very dark existential void. How do we ascribe meaning to our omnicide? How can there be a moral imperative to resist, if there are no moral imperatives? Assuming moral postures against the homicidal system which has sustained us, at this point, seems like a psychological tactic to avoid the full realization of what we have done. So, the answer to the question about what we should do is that it doesn’t matter because now, whether one knows it or not, we are all condemned to nothingness.
September 20th, 2012 at 9:50 am
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The way I see you, ulvfugl. The guy with the beard.
http://www.islandbreath.org/2010Year/10/101022greer.jpg
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September 20th, 2012 at 10:02 am
Close, but no cigar, MB. Mine is more noble, dreadlocked and pale blue. I kid you not.
September 20th, 2012 at 10:06 am
“So, the answer to the question about what we should do is that it doesn’t matter because now, whether one knows it or not, we are all condemned to nothingness.
Wonderful insightful comment, depressive lucidity.
I wonder, if there is a difference between people who do nothing, knowing the situation, and people who do nothing, not knowing the situation ?
Bit like Zizek’s ‘Coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream’.
September 20th, 2012 at 10:29 am
Does anyone here know what to do ?
What the cartoon posted by Dr. House says, that’s what you do. But what you don’t do is elegant denial. Something like the elegant way Romney meant to say that 1/2 of all Americans are freeloaders
So obey your funny bone and click on Colbert http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/419186/september-18-2012/mitt-romney-s-secret-video?xrs=eml_col
September 20th, 2012 at 10:40 am
Finding balance in a tilted world…
To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there’s more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged. -Norman Mailer, author (1923-2007)
September 20th, 2012 at 10:48 am
Mike Stasse: That email is an absolute jaw-dropping stunner, alright. Mind if I spread it around? It represents an another academic seeing the conclusions from the data and not denying it. A true scientist. I’m humbled.
I stopped publishing my philosophical papers because I realized it was useless. We’re down to biology now – species and DNA survival level. Here we are, lucky to be here at the end of all life on earth (except the extremeophiles, my heroes).
But look, this brings us back to philosophy! Thanks for your input, depressive lucidity. The philosophical question we’re running smack dab into right now is:
How are you going to live your personal life in the face of what we now know is going to happen soon?
As people have posted, individuals and groups have made different decisions on this question. Some decided to make money on it. Some decided to quit civilization and live apart until the end. Some want to keep fighting the System in a myriad of ways. As it becomes more clear, some will descend into the worst kind of hedonism. Some think they can stop it; think they have a moral duty to stop it.
Wasn’t there a Far Side cartoon where two guys in a boat, fishing, see a huge mushroom cloud on the horizon? One guy says to the other: “I’ll tell you what this means, Bob. It means no license and screw the limit!” or something like that.
Everyone will respond differently. Me? Knowing it’s almost over? Knowing there’s nothing I can possibly do to change that? If life came from somewhere else, some time in the future, would they know we were here and we screwed up badly? Some of Jack McDevitt’s novels deal with this situation.
Rocks will still be here, right? How do we know of ancient civilizations here on earth? By rocks. Could we leave a message? I don’t know, but I’m beginning to wonder.
The bad news of my day is that last night a bear broke into my orchard (the only one WITHOUT a wildlife exclusion fence) and DESTROYED one of my pear trees. Broke off all the branches and stomped on them. Mutilated the other pear tree. Ate all the apples off one tree. Then left, scraping off some hair on the barbed wire. So I’m calling the fence guy and spending another few K on more fence. Damn.
September 20th, 2012 at 10:58 am
I read a sci-fi book quite a few years ago – I believe by Greg Bear – in which a physicist discovered that some xenophobic alien life form had dropped a singularity into the core of Earth. The originally minuscule singularity was growing in size exponentially and would soon devour the planet. The scientists were able to predict when the black hole would eventually lead to literal collapse of the earth’s crust, thereby ending all life.
While I wasn’t terribly impressed with the author’s idea of how various segments of humanity dealt with their ultimate demise, there was the usual “what can we do” and “we must do something” discussions – very similar to those found here, actually.
But, in the case of this book, people realized rather quickly that there was no time left to do anything other than kiss their loved ones goodbye.
It seems to be human nature to “have to do something” in the face of imminent demise. In fact, more than one commenter here has stated that morality demands that we “do something”. Others have implied that not “doing something”, even with the full knowledge that it won’t help, is a flaw of character (as evidenced by the “quitter” comment Guy referenced). And yet, with all that posturing, no one – not a single person – has come up with a credible plan of action that will lead to any substantive change in the outcome – for any life form, human or otherwise.
I will admit that the possibility exists that the interpretation of the data could be wrong and that climate change is not going to be as catastrophic as predicted. I will also admit that the data might be wrong and the earth really can sustain 10 or 12 billion people. I’m willing to concede that we might be underestimating the ability of the oceans to adapt to lower pH. I’ll also acknowledge that all the data concerning oil production and EROEI might be flawed and we’ll go on increasing production for centuries to come. I might admit that somehow we can survive 400+ nuclear reactor meltdowns. I might even admit that the infinite credit economy we’ve created, all the pollution we’re producing, and all the other resources we’re stripping away might somehow be mitigated by some as yet unforeseen technological miracle. . . .
Wait a minute. No I won’t. It’s over. It just a matter of when.
So, as I and others have said many times: Want to do something? Live each day as if it were your last, love those around you, live life to the fullest.
September 20th, 2012 at 11:02 am
Some decided to quit civilization and live apart until the end. Some want to keep fighting the System in a myriad of ways.
That’s me, fwiw. Not a lot. Just means I can lay on my deathbed with some self-respect.
I figured out the right and wrong as a kid. I have made mistakes, but never compromised, never been part of ‘the System’.
September 20th, 2012 at 11:23 am
I will admit that the possibility exists that the interpretation of the data could be wrong and that climate change is not going to be as catastrophic as predicted. I will also admit that the data might be wrong and the earth really can sustain 10 or 12 billion people. I’m willing to concede that we might be underestimating the ability of the oceans to adapt to lower pH. I’ll also acknowledge that all the data concerning oil production and EROEI might be flawed and we’ll go on increasing production for centuries to come. I might admit that somehow we can survive 400+ nuclear reactor meltdowns. I might even admit that the infinite credit economy we’ve created, all the pollution we’re producing, and all the other resources we’re stripping away might somehow be mitigated by some as yet unforeseen technological miracle. . . .
That’s a really good synopsis. Of course, a lot more could be added.
But it strikes me, there’s another big factor. That is, that MOST people alive don’t know that stuff, don’t know it matters either way, and that even when they DO know it, what then ? They shrug, or if they are shocked into caring, by thinking about their children, whatever, isolated individuals are rather powerless, and trying to organise cooperative mass action…. well, we see it all the time, from the French Revolution all the way to OWS….
I mean, in a science fiction sort of way, it’s be possible to think up numerous imaginative strategies for changing the course of events. But how to put them into effect ?
September 20th, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Thanks for your comments BC Nurse Prof. Doing philosophy in the face of the inevitable helps me cope with the day-to-day task of fitting into the crowd. My personal challenge has been to maintain my composure in the midst of people who are totally programmed by the system and who vigorously resist anything that challenges their indoctrination (i.e. their false sense of emotional security).
After everything is said and done, the terminal and irreversible nature of our situation will force some people to finally disconnect from the Matrix Candy Land of Capitalist Delusions and face the mystery of why we are here. Why were we born into a generation that will see, at least the beginning, of the end of the human phenomenon? How/Why we became so destructive and blind? I’m not suggesting that answers to such questions exist, only that we have the extremely rare opportunity to confront them in a raw and imminent way. For those who are not married to reductive materialism, there may be great spiritual value to just stand in the shadow of these Questions without resorting to our usual tricks of evasion and distraction.
Or, we can go shopping at Target secure in the expectation that Godot is on his way with a bag of cosmic panaceas to save us from ourselves.
September 20th, 2012 at 12:10 pm
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution!”
—Emma
September 20th, 2012 at 12:14 pm
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The REAL Dr. House, an excellent movie with a similar theme was Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Interestingly enough, the one who was able to handle The End with the most dignity, grace and composure was the manic depressive, and the Scientist, who was the optimist up until the very end, when he knew it was The End, committed suicide, leaving his wife and son to face the cataclysm head on by themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcZWZhUozr4
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September 20th, 2012 at 12:25 pm
Aaaah
Godot ! My all-time favourite…. So glad you mentioned that, dl.
I’d just love to walk into that set in real life and spend time with those guys….
I’ve spent long periods in Welsh public houses where the conversation was remarkably similar, but who was the playwright ? God ? Nature ? Culture ? Beer ?
http://youtu.be/b542GxhzYiw
September 20th, 2012 at 1:12 pm
VLADIMIR: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. I can’t go on! What have I said?
***
VLADIMIR: You have a message from Mr. Godot.
BOY: Yes Sir.
VLADIMIR: He won’t come this evening.
BOY: No Sir.
VLADIMIR: But he’ll come tomorrow.
BOY: Yes Sir.
VLADIMIR: Without fail.
BOY: Yes Sir.
(Silence.)
September 20th, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Samuel Beckett walking with a friend on a gorgeous day. The friend says,
‘It is a great day’. Beckett response; he agrees. The friend says, ‘A great day to be alive’. Beckett: ‘I wouldn’t go that far’.
September 20th, 2012 at 1:20 pm
In a new report entitled Gold: Adjusting For Zero, Deutsche Bank analysts Daniel Brebner and Xiao Fu paint an incredibly dark picture of the bind the global economy is in right now.
Brebner and Xiao are pretty frank about how levered up the financial system is at the moment, and they warn that the next shock will be totally involuntary and unexpected.
Read more at Business Insider.
September 20th, 2012 at 1:58 pm
It was always the case that each of us was going to become extinct. Its just that we always thought we wouldn’t be the last ones to go extinct.
Perhaps WWIII is an easier future than burning up with climate change. So here is a bit of nuclear humor from a time when we were wisely more afraid of nuclear extinction. Tim Lehrer – we’ll all go together when we go.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv6mPgtay6E&feature=related
September 20th, 2012 at 2:02 pm
Despite all the hardships they knew,
People still try to pull through;
Guess it’s some evolved drive
To keep staying alive,
Just something that animals do.
September 20th, 2012 at 2:20 pm
@BC Nurse Prof
You noticed how conservative Rapid City is/was?! It is paradise compared to the place we moved from in the middle of the state! Funny that you mentioned moving back to Alaska as a way to help my son’s allergies/asthma, because when I moved from there about 7 yrs ago to attend grad school, I thought I was going to die from uncontrollable asthma/allergies, which I developed as an adult. Moving to South Dakota did away with those issues almost immediately. They are still present, though easily managed.
Whitehorse is beautiful, and Alaska is always a possibility, though an expensive move. Oh, and you might be surprised how conservative it is there, too! They have their own militia types, but also a vibrant arts community to balance that out. You might guess who my ‘crowd’ is!
We figure every place has its own set of issues. Here we can fill our freezer with trout from a lake right down the street. In Alaska, salmon runs are a disaster, and any fishing spot on the road system will get you nothing. It is expensive to hunt/fish there. Here, Mr. Badlands is getting ready to go deer hunting, and the forecast is still for 80 degrees, plus they have found disease in the populations where he hunts. So, we’ll see what happens. We love it here, but the difference one season makes…even though we have plenty of water running from the taps, the psychological burden of heat and no rain starts to create an underlying worry, which combined with all the other factors starts to feel like barely contained panic. But no time to panic when one has to tend to needs of others. For now we are going to ride it out, but have decided against buying a house here.
@Bernhard
Thank you for that info. I took a quick peek at the GAPS site, and will have to investigate further. It occurred to me that there was a vast difference in my 3 pregnancies, because I often wonder how my son got so unlucky with his health issues. I mean, my 1 1/2 yo daughter just had her first cold, and my 3 yo has only had a couple mild colds. All were breastfed for over a year. During my pregnancy with him, and for the following 6 months, I was on multiple rounds of antibiotics for recurrent infections, which turned out to be MRSA. Oh, and I was a vegetarian during his pregnancy. There could be many influencing factors. As I learned in art school, nothing is benign, and nothing is created in a void. So, I will read further and yes, I would definitely like to get in touch to hear your situation. Again, thank you so much.
September 20th, 2012 at 2:25 pm
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Two things about that report, Guy. Business Insider and Deutsche Bank analysts. I don’t trust either, at all. Isn’t Deutsche Bank one of Big Banks partly responsible for this financial fiasco? If their analysts release something for public consumption, you can rest assured there are ulterior motives involved. They’re always gaming something. Yes, the economy is going to collapse, but the how, when and what of it won’t be prognosticated by the likes of Deutsche Bank analysts, Business Insider, or Nouriel Roubini who hobnobs with Oligarchs as he disseminates doom and gloom forecasts.
http://dealbreaker.com/2010/01/nouriel-roubini-larry-gagosian-consider-the-eiffel-tower/
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September 20th, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Morocco Bama on September 19th, 2012 at 11:43 am sez: All the kids … were more interested in i-everything then they were in something as archaic and strenuous as Frisbee. I felt sad. My Dad never played anything with me, especially not something as unconventional as Frisbee, and here my children won’t play it with me either.
Once connected, children are incompetent at being kids; don’t even know how to be happy and have fun; too scared they might miss some irrelevant piece of info transmitted through the air.
September 20th, 2012 at 3:44 pm
Morocco Bama, the so-called Great Recession wasn’t caused by banks, although they benefited financially. As with each economic recession since 1972, it was triggered by a spike in the price of oil (in this case, to $147.27/barrel).
Arctic death spiral under way: Climate scientists and ice experts are now using phrases like “unprecedented”, “amazing”, “extreme”, “hard to exaggerate”, “incredibly fast”, “death spiral” and “heading for oblivion”.
Those mainstream scientists wouldn’t be surprised if they spent a bit more time reading what I write. This is groupthink in action.
September 20th, 2012 at 4:10 pm
.
Guy, that may be so, but oil didn’t create the derivatives market, the Big Banks did, and that’s a Genie that cannot be put back in the bottle, and that’s the Genie that will bring the economy down lightning quick, imo. Unregulated Financial Markets led to this impending Derivatives Catastrophe that’s about to unfold. This Ponzi Scheme, the economy, is in the devour itself phase, meaning every move these Big Money players make now, will have an equally negative effect somewhere else in their portfolio. They speculate the price of oil to $150/gallon and they hasten the inability of people to pay back those loans that never should have been created in the first place. An increasing share of people’s disposable income had to go to higher prices for everything else, including fuel, so they started to default en masse on their mortgages. They would have eventually anyway, but that price spike hastened it. So, they robbed their own Peter to pay their own Paul, and then had their division known as the Government force the Plebes to pay back Peter. The problem now is, there’s nothing to pay back Peter and Paul with, and yet they’re going to keep on stealing from one and the other of their portfolios hoping Ben and Co will keep the QEs coming….but the QEs are less and less effective, and the psychopaths are scrambling to find a way to maintain the value of their ill-gotten spoils.
All that is aside from the environmental calamities that are befalling us as we speak, so in that sense, it’s somewhat moot, because when the damn bursts many years too soon like it is right now, we’ll find out soon enough that there is no dark side of the moon. As Roger said, it’s all dark.
http://paperboat.studiopod.com/2012/06/
.
September 20th, 2012 at 4:11 pm
.
It’s true, Brutus, and more than anything, that breaks my heart.
.
September 20th, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Those mainstream scientists wouldn’t be surprised if they spent a bit more time reading what I write. This is groupthink in action.
Indeed it is, and ironically, even their latest response is group think motivated. It’s finally the right thing to say, but they have to move together like a school of fish, and that’s dangerous when they move right into the jaws of a shark. They’re all so afraid of losing their status and thus throwing their career down the crapper that they won’t allow themselves to get outside of that group box. Before they consider anything of any import, they feel the pulse of their colleagues, and if their colleagues don’t appear receptive to it, they set it aside as “simply not worth it.” So, now the school of fish sees the shark. What’s the school’s next move?
.
September 20th, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Guy, Morocco Bama,
With the help of people like Bill Gates the next move in group-think by the scientific community could well be in support of geo-engineering. And why not? If they see species (ours) extinction in the cards they will grasp any straw available. Isn’t it possible that straw could be using technology to fix the ills that technology has brought us? The bastards!
Michael Irving
September 20th, 2012 at 5:36 pm
Michael Irving, if the technological straw is created by Bill Gates, I would imagine it to be as perfect as his Windows operating system, no?
September 20th, 2012 at 6:43 pm
thanks for the intro to the beautiful katie melua, bc. i liked this soothing video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHQG6-DojVw&feature=relmfu
September 20th, 2012 at 7:01 pm
.
Michael Irving, yes, they’re going to do geo-engineering, it’s being telegraphed, and yes Judy, it will be as perfect as Windows Vista.
Long Live The Queen.
Thank goodness tomorrow is Wine Night!
Soon enough, there will be no more of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECL1h133Dps
.
September 20th, 2012 at 7:20 pm
Thanks to Yorchichan…
I have a calculation for the probability of assessing each card in a 52 card deck correctly for red or black in one consecutive sitting.
1 / 495,918,532,948,104.
or
A 1 in 495,918,532,948,104 chance of getting all 52 cards correct.
As I mentioned to Yorchichan in our emails, I do not feel that this was a truely ‘predictive’ situation.
My reasons for stating that are that as I sat and assessed each card I made that assessment and it was a real event in real time. Also the outcome of the deck being in sequence was predetermined, although entirely random, and each card was already either red or black, only no one was aware before the card was turned over in piles at the end. (..no one else but me, by virtue of my assessment) So to me nothing was predictive, it only seems that way from a mathematical probability calculation viewpoint.
So no one be confused, I have no predictive ability. Scientifically, I was the one in 495,918,532,948,104 situation enactor. Truely, there should be no problem for a true scientist/mathematician to accept that.
Now were I to attempt it again 22 years later, and having never done it since then, and do it again, with 52 out of 52 correct, then there would be something to write home about to the mothership…
As I posted before, I’m not going to blow my average by trying.
Probably not in optimal health righ now either, perhaps after I finnish walking around Australia I’ll chance it, I should be of optimal health by then… who knows?
September 20th, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Morocco,
Since I don’t know the content of what Guy submitted, I can’t say why DMP didn’t publish it. But the eighth principle of Uncivilization may be relevant:
“The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”
Guy’s claim that extinction of humans by 2030, and all life by 2050, is an absolutely certainty is a very clear expression that we’re facing, not TEOTWAWKI, but “the end of the world full stop”. This is fundamentally incompatible with principle eight. So that’s one possibility for DMP not publishing him (incompatible visions).
Another possibility is that Guy’s writing is not “Uncivilized writing”. What does that mean? Well, I think that only becomes fully clear through careful consideration of the entire Manifesto. But try this:
“Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective — we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed — but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession…It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own — a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare — might recognise as something approaching a truth…The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing. To ‘unhumanise our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’ This is not a rejection of our humanity — it is an affirmation of the wonder of what it means to be truly human. It is to accept the world for what it is and to make our home here, rather than dreaming of relocating to the stars, or existing in a Man-forged bubble and pretending to ourselves that there is nothing outside it to which we have any connection at all.”
Whether that “Man-forged bubble” is located in a large, unsustainable city like Tucson, AZ or a mud hut in an isolated verdant valley in rural NM, I might add. Guy’s writing is passionate, ardent, scientifically well-informed…but Uncivilized? Er, perhaps not so much. Still very, very human and very, very civilized, in its own way. This doesn’t mean his writing can’t become Uncivilized; all the raw material to do so is there in his life experience. But he’s not there yet, as least not for DMP purposes. For the DMP is not about The End of the Last Story full stop. Rather, it is about
“new paths and new stories, ones that can lead us through the end of the world as we know it and out the other side.”
September 20th, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Kathy C,
Indeed, you can buy an elegantly designed, numbered and hand-stitched physical copy, made by the DMP’s friends at Bracketpress in Lancashire. Why, indeed, in dog’s name would anyone want a numbered hand-stitched pamphlet when in 18 per Guy or 38 per Arctic News the human race will be extinct.
For beauty’s sake, I suppose. Per the Manifesto:
“Its [the DMP's] first incarnation, launched alongside this manifesto, is a website, which points the way to the ranges. It will contains thoughts, scribblings, jottings, ideas; it will work up the project of Uncivilisation, and invite all comers to join the discussion.
Then it will become a physical object, because virtual reality is, ultimately, no reality at all. It will become a journal, of paper, card, paint and print; of ideas, thoughts, observations, mumblings; new stories which will help to define the project — the school, the movement — of Uncivilised writing. It will collect the words and the images of those who consider themselves Uncivilised and have something to say about it; who want to help us attack the citadels. It will be a thing of beauty for the eye and for the heart and for the mind, for we are unfashionable enough to believe that beauty — like truth — not only exists, but still matters.
Tell me, is it so wrong to believe that beauty not only exists, but still matters? Are the Dark Mountaineers right or wrong to claim that virtual reality, whether it be their own website or this one, is ultimately no reality at all?
September 20th, 2012 at 7:45 pm
ulvfugl,
What “things” about DM did not develop in the way you had hoped and anticipated?
September 20th, 2012 at 8:09 pm
Michael Irving,
Stewart Brand advocates exactly that (geo-engineering) to try and save the planet from excessive carbon emissions and positive feedbacks. He’s even got a catchy name for it: eco-pragmatism.
September 20th, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Although this is some years old now and many have seen it, it is still a very good general educator to the unititiated about the consequences of endless economic growth and peak oil, peak energy on human population and the planet.
‘Economic Growth and Peak Energy Animated’
http://paperboat.studiopod.com/2012/03/02/economic-growth-and-peak-energy-animated/
No getting around our core problems, human overshoot and continual growth.
In passing, it is interesting to note how one definition of CANCER is a cell mutation that has swithched on the cell division part of its life cycle and can’t turn it off.
Endless growth = tumour = immanent mortality.
September 20th, 2012 at 8:21 pm
Thanks Doc!
I’ve always liked being alive. Consider the alternative
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3tcS8__Fmw
Bob
September 20th, 2012 at 8:51 pm
I read this comment on another blog just now and had to LOL.
“Patrick Flandreau • 2 days ago
If it’s hot, it’s global warming
If it’s cold, it’s global warning
If it’s raining, it’s global warming
If the bus is late, it’s global warming
If there are Middle Eastern protests, it’s global warming
This global warming is terrible.”
Actually, it would not seem to be ‘Global’ Warming at all, more correct it could be termed:
“Comprehensive worldwide sea and atmospheric temperature rise”.
I can’t imagine that either the interior temperature of the Earth, nor the land surface temperature below a meter is significantly elevated above local averages. If anyone knows otherwise Please Inform All Here ,PIAH.
September 20th, 2012 at 10:00 pm
AJ : “What “things” about DM did not develop in the way you had hoped and anticipated?”
That’s a good question, puts me in a slightly uncomfortable situation, wishing I hadn’t mentioned the matter…
Firstly, it means I have to cast my mind back 2,3,4… years. A LOT has changed since then. No Occupy, or 99%, then, for example.
A lot comes down to old-fashioned petty politics, which occurs in any human assembly. People have a spectrum of views, and even if there’s much in common, they each wish to emphasise particular aspects, and get frustrated if some other view prevails. Green politics typically splits into idealists and pragmatists, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, etc. but the same pattern of splits and cliques happens everywhere, whether its a family gathering at Christmas, schools of thought in a University, or the International Communist Party. There’s always quarrels, fights, discord, factions, passionate stances, etc, because that’s how humans are.
Where an individual stands on a particular issue must depend upon their personal worldview. Stuff like what they think ‘nature’ is, what they think ‘technology’ is, what they think ‘a story’ is, and so forth. I had hoped that DM would be a didactic tool where these concepts could be thoroughly explored and bring new radical insights. Instead it was mostly going round and round in circles, getting nowhere, on a rather dismal intellectual level.
I see DM as very much a right brain/mythos thing, coming from the arts, rather than the sciences, and then it attracted a rag bag of odd people, most of whom didn’t really understand where Kingsnorth and Hine were at, i.e. talking about the power of narrative, literature, stories, myth, poetry, song, dance, etc. and how INDIVIDUALS come to terms with defeat, the failure to ‘save the planet’, etc. It was never intended to be what some of the people wanted, activism, protest, revolution, social reform, whatever…
My hope was that people would coalesce and get educated and move British culture in a whole new direction. That didn’t happen, hasn’t happened, and because of the time factor – we’re in a movie, not a photo album – it’s too late now ( too slow for me, anyway ).
I know some people here were lurking at the Unciv Forum, and so will have observed events and formed their own conclusions.
There’s another weird aspect which will be IMPOSSIBLE for foreigners to comprehend, and that’s the English class aspect which is pervasive throughout English soceity. I do mean English, not British.
I suppose PK and DH did the best they could, as young men trying to herd cats, but IMO, they made big errors of judgement. Either the thing is an uncensored anarchist venture, where the ‘mob’ sorts things out amongst themselves, or it’s got leaders who insist upon respect for their authority and LEAD. It turned out to be neither, just a hypocritical mess in the middle.
I was first banned temporarily from Unciv. Then censored. Then banned permanently. Then censored on the DM blog site. Then, after a big quarrel with PK, in private, over an issue which turned out to be a misunderstanding on both sides, I was invited to write anything I wanted, as rude and contentious and outrageous and disrespectful as I wanted to be, on any issue, and it would be published without any editing or censorship…. but by then I was sick of the whole effing venture and had set up my own blog, so i have not taken up the offer. I assume it still stands, but I’m sure they’ll manage fine without me
Good luck to them anyway, and I mean that sincerely.
My political position is basically green anarchy, anarcho-primitivism, not so much as a practical choice – I can see why people like modern medicine and technology, for sure – but as an ETHICAL choice, because to cause ANY non-essential harm to the biosphere, is, in my worldview, morally, totally unacceptable. A crime, a sin, sacrilege. Worse, but there’s no word for it…
This view springs from a spiritual insight, comparable with that say, of St, Francis, or the Amish, or Deep Ecology, and then hooks into the public and political domain, in e.g., the way that Ghandi’s religion was the base for his politics.
September 20th, 2012 at 10:32 pm
Some of you will be interested in the two links:
http://regmorrison.edublogs.org/files/2012/06/gamblers-3-2fe1qvj.pdf
The first is an interesting perspective from Reg Morrison
The second is David Wasdell regarding the role of the IPCC:
http://www.aglmedia.co.uk/index.php/wasdell-ipcc
Cheers
September 20th, 2012 at 10:56 pm
Re those dancing feet…
http://youtu.be/E1JilUK8jeQ
September 20th, 2012 at 10:58 pm
And if you can’t do that, how about some of this…
http://youtu.be/Rm_oaqW_qRM
September 20th, 2012 at 11:23 pm
re Probability of correctly “predicting” colour of all 52 cards
This turned out to be an easy calculation. It is simply one over the number of arrangements of 26 non-distinct objects in 52 places i.e.
1/(52!/(26!26!))
Interestingly, this is only about 9 times greater than the 1/(2^52) calculation. To put this in perspective, a ticket is 7 million times more likely to win the Euromillions jackpot. If you believe OzMan, and I do, it is incontrovertible evidence that the human mind has powers that cannot be explained by current science.
September 20th, 2012 at 11:34 pm
Yo!
September 20th, 2012 at 11:36 pm
“Indeed, you can buy an elegantly designed, numbered and hand-stitched physical copy, made by the DMP’s friends at Bracketpress in Lancashire. Why, indeed, in dog’s name would anyone want a numbered hand-stitched pamphlet when in 18 per Guy or 38 per Arctic News the human race will be extinct.”
Isn’t it obvious ?
To spread the work around, to give money and hope to good people whom you like and respect, people dedicated to creating beauty, rather than to some anonymous corporation where nobody cares and they just churn out whatever satisfies the lowest common denominator and maximises profit margins
It’s about QUALITY. Quality in everything you do, ( as an expression of soul ! )
I mean, do you take care to give your children the best food you can, prepared with love and care, or just throw them some off-the-shelf commercial slop, because we are going to be extinct someday ?
We cannot say, with any precision, when we will die, as individuals, or when the entire planet will become uninhabitable, or when civilisation will collapse. We can foresee that it WILL happen, inevitably, some time. But there are too may variables to be able to make a precise accurate prediction.
A Yellowstone type super-volcano eruption, or a large asteroid impact, could happen any time. So could World War 3 using nuclear and biological weapons. Or the world banking and financial system could collapse. Or there could be a global pandemic of some lethal disease. Or the methane releases could be even worse than some people think. Or some astonishing new technological discovery could completely change the parameters.
The list goes on and on, but all these events have to have error bars, uncertainty, so we cannot be sure whether the graph will drop off a cliff, go down like a staircase, or be a long arc.
I grew up with this uncertainty. There was always the chance that the USA and Russia would destroy everything, with nuclear weapons, deliberately or even unintentionally by a mistake. It didn’t happen, but it very nearly happened.
So, while we witness this thing roll out, what do we do ? It would be nice to change the course of history and bring everyone back to sanity. But that doesn’t seem to be possible. So then what do we do ? Keep trying ? Give up ? Or accept powerlessness and enjoy each moment being as happy as we can manage to be ?
Personally, I try to minimise my contribution to the bad and maximise my contribution to the good, but I am very limited in what I can do.
I think the idea of ‘quality’ has a lot to contribute. Each step, each breath, each word, each push of the trowel into the earth, each kiss on the cheek, every expression of what we are, has immense potential, it can be fabulously empowering and enriching or it can be deadening and demeaning.
September 20th, 2012 at 11:49 pm
Perhaps a near future coming at us all…?
“Off the Grid: People Who Have Left Technology Behind”
http://www.visualnews.com/2012/04/11/off-the-grid-people-who-have-left-technology-behind/
An excerpt:
“For various reasons — from seeing the effects of modern society on the natural world, to the way people are increasingly connected to electronic devices, or the way the rat race of consumerism envelops the fabric of our communities — a number of people are choosing to live a more ‘down to earth’ existence, getting them in touch with the land in older, now forgotten ways.
French photographer Eric Valli spent a number of years with 4 groups of these interesting people, collecting intimate images of their daily lives in the American wilderness that they now call home. The images we have here are from 3 of those groups, each with a varying level of societal connection.
The first, a lone huntsman living in the southern bayou, looks to be somewhat connected to modern technology. He has small battery-powered lighting, a modern canoe and has a bottle of ketchup on his table. The second, a family who dresses in almost Amish fashion, steps further from modernity, living by lamplight, using horses and growing their food themselves. The third group however, takes living in the wilds to a whole different level. These young wilderness seekers have donned leather clothes of their own making, bows and arrows, and look like they could have walked off the set of Dances With Wolves. While the picture of this less than cleanly crew inside a modern grocery store certainly raises some questions about how much they actually live in the wilds, it could be simply to emphasize the contrasts of their life against the modern world.”
For whatever reason Eric Valli’s site below seems to run slow, perhaps because a lot is high res images and video, I’m not sure, but there are some spectacular images, but perhaps to some it looks too consumerable visualy. To each their own I suppose.
http://www.ericvalli.com/index.php?/stories/off-the-grid/
My comment is that from these three types of situations it would appear the nomadic full adventure Hunter/Gatherer (and probably scavenger too but can’t tell yet…) is only for the quite young and fit (looking). That is just an impression. I’m still attempting to view the short teaser of Valli’s film called “Linx” of these groups.
One issue is, not many can do this at once because the carrying capacity of each region is pretty small, when contrasted with current world population at 7 Billion.
September 20th, 2012 at 11:51 pm
Again, re the quality of the book. Is there any point in publishing and printing books at all anymore ? Most information is now digital and virtual, and if you want a paper version, why not do the cheapest photocopy on the cheapest paper ?
But then we could apply this to everything. Plastic spoon, antique silver spoon, hand-carved wooden spoon, chopsticks… which is the most satisfying and aesthetically pleasing ? A lot of the stuff in my home I have made myself, and a lot more has been made by someone with similar love and care, and attention to design and detail. I really don’t like mass-produced factory junk much. It offends me. But I have to compromise, if I want to survive, because just like everyone else, I’m trapped inside the culture, the mega-machine.
There was a time in my life when I felt so strongly about Big Pharma, that I wanted no part of modern medicine. I’d seen people destroyed by doctor’s mistakes and pharmaceuticals. But I caught pneumonia and was hospitalised. The doctor said ‘Take these antibiotics’. I gave him my anti-drug spiel. He said, ‘Okay, but then you must decide whether you wish to die or whether you wish to live’, and I had a forest to care for and needed to live for that reason, so, a handful of pills and I was cured, after a few days, instead of being buried.
September 21st, 2012 at 12:19 am
Again, re Ozmans cards, and apparently ‘miraculous’ non-ordinary events…
I had spent years in seclusion and zen meditation. I had ‘purified’ myself. There was nothing in me that was not God, so to speak. All ‘defilements and obstacles’ had been conquered and cleansed.
Then my life completely changed, and I had a forest to look after. So I worked flat out, non-stop on that project, asking the tao to show me what to do, what was good to do.
So, I’m driving along some little lane on an errand, far from anywhere, and my vehicle breaks down. It’s at least a ten mile walk to the nearest house or phone, and unlikely any other vehicle will appear, perhaps for hours, even days.
I’m thinking it’s probably the points in the distributor that need adjusting, or something like that, but I have no tools. so, after trying the ignition a few times, looking at the engine, sitting down and having a think, and so forth, I’m getting more and more distressed and frustrated and desperate…
So, I finally lose my temper, and start talking to this God, this Tao, this Universe, in no uncertain terms…
‘Look, you m*****f*****g b*****d, I’ve given up everything to serve all sentient beings, I’m a good person, I’m doing my best, WHY aren’t YOU doing YOUR bit and HELPING, you useless load of s**t !’ and so on…
So, I’m walking up and down this lane, thirty yards or so, storming away in my rage and close to tears too, and then back to the van, and then back up the lane… wondering whether to set off and walk to the nearest wherever, which will be hours and it will be dark, and who am I going to get to rescue me, when I don’t know any locals or have any money…
And guess what ? I look down, and in the little strip if grass in the centre of the road, there’s a brand new shiny yellow handled screw driver ! Exactly the right size for adjusting the points… and I fall on my knees… and hold it it my hands… and then, no time to waste, sort out the motor, and off I go…
And thereafter, whenever I had a problem and was stuck, I did much the same, with the same result. This CAN happen… there’s a sort of knack to it. But first you have to be ‘nothing’, so to speak, and judging from my experience arguing on the internet, it’s almost impossible to explain to anybody…
September 21st, 2012 at 1:02 am
ulvfugl
Your story about getting Pneumonia and the choice of living and dying is going to be how people interpret their own choices very soon when, and now, as ‘they’ get squeezed by the downward spiral into ‘collapse-world.’
‘They’ are going to be helped into percieving the situation so it serves the competative junkies and PTB, and in their own minds choose what looks like a clear survival choice, when local community meetings, and yes, some compromise, but largly communal, group effort will be of far more unifying, peaceful and of energetically optimal effect.
We see the pressure building here in Australia already, on issues like immigration, especially concerning those, described 2 decades ago as refugees, but not que jumpers and asylum seekers.
Instead of talking rationally about all that is discussed here on NBL, and some of the unhappy, tragic and horrific consequences looming, the populace are media and politico massarged, into reacting to the economic and psychological ‘pressure’ people are feeling, into inflaming racial and xenophobic fears, which can be more easilly remassaged and managed by elites in high places.
IMO the key here is, that as others have noted, people are getting more uncertain about the eternal rosy future, with holidays and icecream and eternally young sexy resort living dreams. ‘They’ are less certain it is a morally legit process, and have to self discipline much harder to stop the deep thinking that helps quickly unzip, and then totally unravel their dreamy personal weave of ‘easy futureworld inc’.
That leaves a lot more people uneasy, for say a demonstration of what can now be deployed at will; ergo – the obviously stage managed recent publication of anti Islamic slurs on the Prophet Mo—–d, and the highly predictable retaliatory riots and demonstrations by Islamic sympathisers in a veritable Schadenfreude play, dialed up to demonstrate the need for state power and control of ‘threats’ to reasoned and rational law and order,(…that BTW, as NBL’s are aware, also destroys the living planet).
It will come down to pushing the right buttons by TPTB and people will react in survival mode, and prefer to accept the relinquishment of percieved ‘others’ rights, all the while walking themselves, and thie children, and grandchildren, into ‘caves’, and d’ungeons’ and anti terror enclosures..er..I mean free democratic societies…
All
The preperation for wholesale Schadenfreude has been the growth of voyeristic TV programs like Survivor, and The weakest link and all the Fatty competitive elimination shows, or permutations of. Even a show like ‘Dallas’, preconditions viewers from the economocally lower ‘classes’ to think of their own situation as unempowered and undesirable, and rearrange their mental deckchairs to reprogram them to bleat the aspirations of not just middle class North Americans, but filthy rich Texan back stabbing so and so’s.
An engineered class warfare opens up. People begin by degrees to be comfortable with a widespread acceptance of getting pleasure from witnessing at first other people’s discomfort and tribulations, and then other people’s failures and disappointments, and then thier distress and suffering, and then their dismal life predicament and future. When contrasted with the largly illusory life ease ot the viewers, the temptation is to not want to know or encounter someone in the dispised category, for fear of ‘catching’ the class disease they have been identified as having/representing. Its no surprise that the show Survivor, is called ‘Survivor’- once pitched as an ordeal of coping in the primative tribal situation, and needing to have tradable skills and abilities, it quickly morphed into social pairing of ridiculable mismatches, and the expliotation of developng countries, all not for survival, but a Million bucks.
And…( don’t get me started on what we had her..”The biggest Loser”)
from those sufficiently interested you can read about how pathetic humans can become if managed/herded correctly here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biggest_Loser
An excerpt, ‘I can’t resist’…
“The Biggest Loser is a reality television show which first started in the U.S. in 2004. The show centers on overweight contestants attempting to lose the most weight to fight for a cash prize. There are different variations of The Biggest Loser around the world. Each country has made its own adaptation to the show; however, the contestants always have the same goal: to lose the highest percentage of weight (or most weight) to become the Biggest Loser.”
ulvfugl, again,
Your comments”
“Personally, I try to minimise my contribution to the bad and maximise my contribution to the good, but I am very limited in what I can do.
I think the idea of ‘quality’ has a lot to contribute. Each step, each breath, each word, each push of the trowel into the earth, each kiss on the cheek, every expression of what we are, has immense potential, it can be fabulously empowering and enriching or it can be deadening and demeaning.”
I find this simply inspiring, and a great reminder of what potential lies in every living moment, in every breath we take, and how we interact with others and the living planet. Cheers for that.
September 21st, 2012 at 1:23 am
ulvfugl
The screwdriver tale made me LOL. I’ve had many small situations like that, but I must admit, I don’t seem to require an angry meltdown, like you describe, just a equinimous state, from either surveying the relevent options, and/or engaging intuition, but mostly they happen alone.
I have found these things happen to me more in terms of signs, but sometimes as practically as absurd as the screwdriver episode too.
How could one have that experience, of the screwdriver, and not be transformed, or at the very least confounded, and deeply troubled as to how the universe actually IS functioning?
I can recommend the movie by Akira Kurosawa , ‘Dursa Usala’, concerning living with intuition in contrast with the Empire mind going full tilt.
What was the forrest you became responsible for? Is the story of it somewhere I can read maybe online?
Now how about if you found a ball point pen or something you definitely couldn’t use, that would have been like being mocked, but to actually find the needed tool, in that moment, what are the odds hey?… maybe about as much chance as getting 52 cards correct in a deck as to red or black? But somehow I think your event is far less likely, such that it will never be able to happen again. Slim odds eh…?
Great story…NBL Story of the week IMO.
September 21st, 2012 at 1:32 am
ulvfugl
Oh, it just came to me… the fact that it was a brand new screwdriver was the mocking, hilarious bit, like you ordered it, and it was a new one supplied. An old one just wouldn’t do now would it? If you are going to be a part of syncronistic experiences, may as well have them bloody showy ones to boot, eh?
“But first you have to be ‘nothing’, so to speak…”
‘Leave the Ego at the door’…That is so, IMO.
September 21st, 2012 at 2:00 am
Thanks, Ozman.
It was 25 years ago, or something like. That forest is possibly one of the most special places in the whole British Isles. By some fluke chance, I came upon it, and was given a role to care for it. It appeared to me that nobody else involved really grasped its importance. It’s only small, maybe 85 acres left from the original wildwood that once covered the whole country after the glaciers retreated, and maybe 100 acres of less original woodland, but it’s always had tree cover for maybe 7000+ years, and there’s nowhere else left like that, so the species diversity is fantastic, all sorts of very rare plants and insects and fungi, etc. It’s a wonderful glimpse of what has been lost. And nobody was looking after it properly, which was insane.
So I worked out a management plan to the highest standards, and put it into effect. Whilst that was going on, the United Nations and the WWF and others set up the Forestry Stewardship Council, to try and preserve the world’s forests. So I submitted ‘my’ forest, for their scheme, and it was the first forest on the planet to be approved. I did this on my own, living on social security and despite my illness. Kinda like climbing Everest alone without oxygen, hahahaha, or being the first to circum-navigate the globe in a kayak, or whatever. It was hard.
Then all hell broke loose, because vested interests from every dark slimy festering stinking corner of Mordor erupted in rage and fury because it threatened their plans and profits
No, the whole story is nowhere recorded, all I’ve said so far is on my blog post. i don’t know if it’s a good idea to tell more or not. Probably not.
http://www.monsangelorum.net/?p=315
September 21st, 2012 at 2:44 am
Arthur Johnson you wrote “Tell me, is it so wrong to believe that beauty not only exists, but still matters?”
I see you don’t get it either. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and no where else. A pile of poop it beauty to a dung beetle. If we humans go extinct along with most if not all of the life on the planet, there goes beauty – no beholders left. We are talking about EXTINCTION. Ie. no more humans ever. No more mammals, no more birds or insects, perhaps a few bacteria. Unless Aliens exist any beauty Dark Mountain creates in words or in the packaging of those words will disappear – no observers, no beauty.
September 21st, 2012 at 2:48 am
Jeff Masters weighs in on Arctic Sea Ice Loss
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2237
contains a nice rebuttal to the “But the Antarctic is gaining ice” folks that are sure to resurface. I don’t raise the subject with deniers any more-too damn frustrating.
September 21st, 2012 at 2:59 am
And here come the deniers
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC1209/S00050/antarctic-ice-area-sets-record-high.htm
September 21st, 2012 at 3:07 am
As the horsemen of the Apocalypse race towards the finish line, the Congo is NOT succeeding at containing the latest outbreak of Ebola
http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/2012/09/dr-congo-76-ebola-cases-and-32-deaths-as-of-september-19.html
DR Congo: 76 Ebola cases and 32 deaths as of September 19
Seems like a small number to be concerned about, but since it is highly contagious and has an average case fatality rate of approximately 83% over 27 years and is a nasty way to die, it is of note when a new round shows up and starts increasing in numbers and range.
Per wiki “The virus has been confirmed to be transmitted through body fluids. Transmission through oral exposure and through conjunctiva exposure is likely[42] and has been confirmed in non-human primates.[43] Filoviruses are not naturally transmitted by aerosol. They are, however, highly infectious as breathable 0.8–1.2 micrometre droplets in laboratory conditions;[44] because of this potential route of infection, these viruses have been classified as Category A biological weapons.[45]“
September 21st, 2012 at 3:13 am
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and no where else.”
Nonsense. Is your pet dog that’s just been flattened by a truck as beautiful as when he or she was alive minutes before ?
Any human alive with any sensitivity can tell the difference between a sublime work of art by a great master and a sewer full of stinking garbage.
We are humans, we respond to certain things in certain ways, that’s true. But if you can’t tell the difference between the roar of a diesel engine and Bach’s music, or being on a deserted beach at the edge of the waves, and being in a sordid prison cell, then there’s something wrong with you, IMO.
September 21st, 2012 at 4:03 am
Hey Kathy C. I just came across the snake worship video, mentioned in previous thread.
Don’t know about anybody else’s aesthetic taste in music, but for me the guitar playing is amongst the best I’ve ever heard.
http://youtu.be/nl_8r7WG3g4
September 21st, 2012 at 4:17 am
ulvfugl YOU don’t get it either. If there are no beholders left what happens to beauty. Once again all my comments relate to the impending extinction of all life on Earth except maybe thermopile bacteria.
But regarding your example, what is more beautiful to a vulture – a dog running around or a dog flattened on the road?
September 21st, 2012 at 4:19 am
.
But the eighth principle of Uncivilization may be relevant:
See, I don’t call that a principle, I call it an opinion….one based off an unspoken and perhaps unconsciously applied principle, but it’s not a principle in and of itself. It looks like the principle at play behind that opinionated statement is “always see the glass as half-full and envision another world in all that you do.” And, it would seem, applying that principle judiciously would mean necessarily self-censoring yourself so as to never make statements like “it’s lights out in a year, and the human species is going to be extinct.” And, you know, that’s fine if that’s DM’s thing, but if you want truly “uncivilized”, you have to approach each and every expression in whatever form without any conscious filters, to the extent that’s possible. Already, their envisioned New World is constrained by a false sense of Positivism…..and let’s face it, that’s one of the reasons we’re in this quandary that led to the motivation to form DM….the Positivism of technological innovation to provide greater and greater standards of living in perpetuity. Geo-engineering will be the Grand Finale of this Positivism, and then there will be no glass, half full or half empty. The irony of that Positivism of Technological Innovation is that it’s always been a myth. It selected it’s own measurements by which to judge/evaluate the standard of living, and such a thing cannot be reduced to quantitative analysis…there are just too many psychical intangibles to make any kind of meaningful conclusions about standard of living.
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September 21st, 2012 at 4:21 am
.
Kathy C, uvula is detained at the moment, but he said to give this message until he returns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnaSRhMB_qo
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September 21st, 2012 at 4:26 am
.
But regarding your example, what is more beautiful to a vulture – a dog running around or a dog flattened on the road?
Ha! This reminds me of one of my favorite sayings. It comes from the movie Apollo 13. It goes…
I’m so hungry, I could eat the ass out of a dead Rhino
My children and I say it all the time now when we’re really hungry. It’s hilarious to hear the children say it…especially when they were very young….yes, I know, the shame of it all…..allowing, and encouraging, my children to use the word “ass”…..it’s positively “uncivilized”.
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September 21st, 2012 at 4:27 am
ulvfugl sorry I forgot you think we have souls that continue on after our death. I suppose they will find it beautiful to see a world of no life or only bacteria and a landscape littered with beautifully bound pamphlets rotting. No wait, in the final throes of human life on earth pamphlets, violins, cash, pictures, anything left that burns will be used to cook (or heat if the thermocline fails). So much for the beauty of the creations of man. Hubris, all is hubris
September 21st, 2012 at 4:35 am
ulvfugl YOU don’t get it either. If there are no beholders left what happens to beauty. Once again all my comments relate to the impending extinction of all life on Earth except maybe thermopile bacteria.
But regarding your example, what is more beautiful to a vulture – a dog running around or a dog flattened on the road?
if there are no humans around, everything that is now of concern to humans will no longer be of concern. I get that completely.
I don’t mind if you want to deny YOUR OWN human nature, that’s your business, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you deny MINE, and i have a highly developed sense of what is beautiful and what is not. I’m not a vulture or a dung beetle, I’m a man, and like rest of humanity, have a built in aesthetic sense.
September 21st, 2012 at 4:42 am
ulvfugl sorry I forgot you think we have souls that continue on after our death. I suppose they will find it beautiful to see a world of no life or only bacteria and a landscape littered with beautifully bound pamphlets rotting. No wait, in the final throes of human life on earth pamphlets, violins, cash, pictures, anything left that burns will be used to cook (or heat if the thermocline fails). So much for the beauty of the creations of man. Hubris, all is hubris
Well, that’s a great shame Kathy, I thought there was more to you than that. I thought we were having a serious and intelligent discussion. I have never ever said ‘I think we have souls that continue after death’, I have specifically said that that is NOT my view, but you obviously didn’t bother to read my comments, and now deliberately misrepresent my position to suit your own narrow prejudiced view, that’s really quite offensive.
So you obviously prefer that we all live in squalor and ugliness NOW ? How perverse and ridiculous that is.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:15 am
.
29th scroll, sixth verse, of Ape Law
Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport, or lust, or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
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September 21st, 2012 at 5:19 am
“i have a highly developed sense of what is beautiful and what is not. I’m not a vulture or a dung beetle, I’m a man, and like rest of humanity, have a built in aesthetic sense.”
I have an aesthetic sense the encompasses the whole of life. The vulture and the dung beetle are a part of the beautiful completeness of the world we live in. To me no poem or work of art is as beautiful as the web of life. We are all indebted as humans to the life forms that digest our waste, whether from our ass or from our death, and turn it back into food to sustain us. It is this separation from nature, including the encapsulating of nature in art to own it, that is our downfall. I think vultures are beautiful beside being grateful for their road cleaning measures. I adore the smell of compost and rich dirt thanks to the millions of insects and microbes that create it. Nothing is more beautiful to me than my own real sunflowers and the goldfinches they attract despite the fact that I do like Van Goh’s sunflower pictures. Still the real thing, alive with pollinators and birds is far better. As I sit here I hear the music of the life outside that far surpasses any symphony.
I did read that you said you didn’t think souls continue after death. Apologies, it is not my reading but my old brain remembering that is at fault. So say you can separate from your body but your soul you say doesn’t live on after your body dies?
Given that 3 billion people live in squalor NOW and their labor to provide us with cheap goods and minerals provide us the “beauty” of art, I find that our art, our middle class lifestyles, my use of a computer, etc all to be an ugliness. I am part of it, and found I was unwilling to give up more than I have. I accept my guilt but I don’t glory in it. Maybe that is a distinction not worth making.
Did you know that they cut of boys balls just to have boy sopranos for the works of some of our more revered classical musicians. Ah but art is worth it so the elite of that time could hear the beautiful and haunting strains of the castratos.
The last castrato sings Ave Maria http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711ZhavjIO4
September 21st, 2012 at 5:20 am
Chimpanzees go out in gangs and murder their neighbours.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:24 am
Yes, I knew about castrati. History is littered with horror, and yes, capitalism is killing around 20 million every year, and making the lives of many millions more utterly wretched, but nobody want to talk about that holocaust.
I live as simply as I can, whilst still remaining effective.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:27 am
Yorchichan & Ozman: With respect to your standard permutation calculation, the Baysian method would take into account the information coming to one after each draw.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
September 21st, 2012 at 5:34 am
OzMan, it’s been awhile since I thought about the cancer analogy for the human race. ‘Uncontrolled growth = cancer’ is a little simplistic, but not wrong. To carry the analogy a little further, nuclear plants melting down around the planet will be our radiation “therapy” and chemical plants releasing all their nasties will be our chemo”therapy”.
Once again, nature really DOES bat last.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:38 am
“I did read that you said you didn’t think souls continue after death. Apologies, it is not my reading but my old brain remembering that is at fault. So say you can separate from your body but your soul you say doesn’t live on after your body dies?”
Apology accepted.
My impression, and no doubt you’ll correct me where I’m mistaken is that your rejected the bigoted Christian fundamentalist literalism of your youth, and have replaced it with a sort of mirror image, an archaic 19thC. mechanistic, reductionist, materialist, positivist, scientism, that has been obsolete for a century.
I mean, does your personal view of science take into account the interaction between mind and matter at all ? It does not appear to.
Anyway, my position is neither of the above. When I talk about ‘soul’ I’m talking about something far more intellectually sophisticated than the concept of soul proposed by Christian literalists, something more along the lines of Subtle Body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtle_body
What happens to it when I die ? How can I answer that, when I’m still alive ?
September 21st, 2012 at 5:56 am
ulvfugl,
I have encountered quite a few patients over the years with a bad opinion of medicines and vaccines (and doctors, too, but we won’t talk about that
. In many cases, I agree.
Your personal story reminded me of a story: I picked up a new patient in the hospital once who had a similar attitude as yours. She had been admitted by the ER and it was my first time to see her. When she expressed an opinion similar to yours, I said, “okay, let me go get your discharge orders ready”. She was astonished and said, “I can’t go home! I’m sick!”. So, we had a discussion about what hospitals are for, and she let me treat her. That was 5 years ago. She’s still my patient.
September 21st, 2012 at 6:02 am
.
Sorry, but when it comes to matters of human expression, the adage that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is certainly substantially in play. Take the prologue from the movie Antichrist, as an example. I happen to believe it is stunningly beautiful, in every way, yet Yorchichan was so disenchanted with it, he didn’t bother to watch the rest of the movie it so tainted him. Two different perspectives and reactions to one expression. There’s no superiority in either perspective, or any other. I accept Yorchichan not liking it or appreciating it, and I don’t think him inferior or uncultered because he doesn’t. He’s not alone, by the way. This movie was not only not appreciated, it was excoriated, by and large, yet I find it an incredible work of art….a masterpiece of film-making, and yes, it is highly “uncivilized”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWC9pHS-ErI&feature=related
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September 21st, 2012 at 6:10 am
.
Chimpanzees go out in gangs and murder their neighbours.
Broccoli is a vegetable.
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September 21st, 2012 at 6:17 am
ulvfugl: thanks for responding to my question aways back (regarding what else is there besides the Christian viewpoint and reincarnation for whatever it is that we apparently (rationally or irrationally) believe will live on beyond our bodily extinction).
i have a question: Is this the purpose of human evolution – to lead us to our own demise?
September 21st, 2012 at 6:17 am
.
I did read that you said you didn’t think souls continue after death. Apologies, it is not my reading but my old brain remembering that is at fault. So say you can separate from your body but your soul you say doesn’t live on after your body dies?
At least you have the conscience and integrity to apologize. That’s something that can’t be said for the recipient of that apology.
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September 21st, 2012 at 6:21 am
.
Once again, nature really DOES bat last.
Yeah, except it’s not a baseball game, but if it was, Civilization is now attempting a suicide squeeze, and as we know, successful ones are rare indeed.
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September 21st, 2012 at 6:24 am
Ulvfgl you wrote “I mean, does your personal view of science take into account the interaction between mind and matter at all ? It does not appear to.” Well in this case you didn’t read me very well. Antonio Damaiso wrote a book about how he thought our extended consciousness, our sense of self arose from the interaction of the brain and the body. I told you I agreed with him. If that isn’t mind and matter I don’t know what is.
I have personally stated many times that I think humans are best off as hunter-gatherers, living in intimate relationship with the web of life that supports them. I have stated that I am appreciative for the knowledge that science has given me but think that it will be our downfall.
Tell me, can’t your soul see the beauty in a vulture. They are majestic. I don’t need science to tell me what a valuable part the play in our environment. Its pretty obvious. But their slow circling in the sky, the awkward but the graceful slow motion as they take off, those are beautiful.
It took science to tell me that millions of microbes are in each teaspoon of soil, that there are fungi webs in undisturbed soil. Gads Darwin even wrote a hole paper on earthworms. To augment my feeling that rich brown soil makes healthy plants, that I can smell rich soil and it smells good, science has told me what is going on that I can’t see. I find that knowledge beautiful too. And it convinces me that my attraction to no-til gardening was right. I don’t have a soul, but I do have senses that are often underused that I can tap for pre-programed knowledge. And I have a brain that can seek out more knowledge and test it with its own scientific method program.
The web of life is the most beautiful thing I know of and every part of it is beautiful. Can’t your soul see that beauty in the vulture even as it dines on road kill. Why can I who thinks I don’t have a soul, just a DNA created mind and body see that beauty. Thinking we have a soul IMHO is just another form of hubris. We are just one in a line of homo’s from a line of apes and thinking we are top shit because we have a soul OR because we have science is our downfall. We can go extinct and if we go before the vultures they will find beauty in us – I hear they go for the eyes first
September 21st, 2012 at 6:33 am
.
i have a question: Is this the purpose of human evolution – to lead us to our own demise?
I rather like the simulation hypothesis….that this shared reality we are experiencing is a program of our own choosing. Who or what created the source code, is also up for conjecture, but some have advocated that the source code originated with our highly evolved selves well into the future providing the environment for this simulation as an exercise to determine our evolved progeny’s possible past. It’s a wicked theory, and as plausible an explanation as any that religion/philosophies can provide. Considering that, this end that we are now confronting was only one of many possible outcomes, meaning the source code of the simulation allows for an effective infinite number of possible evolutions/outcomes, and this is the one that coalesced from that soup of source code. As such, we are now very real in the sense we are encrypted bits and bytes on a highly advanced hard drive, and can be recalled, after we’re deactivated, from that ether from whence we came, just as computer forensic experts can find data on a hard drive even though it’s been deleted and written over a number of times.
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September 21st, 2012 at 6:48 am
Hi Tom I responded to your other ( tree ) question here
http://www.monsangelorum.net/?topic=forests/#post-4544
September 21st, 2012 at 6:56 am
Tom : i have a question: Is this the purpose of human evolution – to lead us to our own demise?
I don’t know what the purpose is, or if there is any purpose. But having appeared in the Universe, and become conscious of our existence, it seems pretty bloody stupid to screw it up and cause our own extinction…
September 21st, 2012 at 6:59 am
The REAL Dr House.. it’s quite odd for me to talk to a doctor as if they were an ordinary human being
Thanks for the story 
September 21st, 2012 at 7:10 am
Kathy Tell me, can’t your soul see the beauty in a vulture. They are majestic. I don’t need science to tell me what a valuable part the play in our environment. Its pretty obvious. But their slow circling in the sky, the awkward but the graceful slow motion as they take off, those are beautiful.
What a bizarre question. Of course I see the beauty in a vulture. What has that to do with what we were talking about ?
You suggested that beauty only exists in the eye of the beholder. I say that’s not true. All humans see aesthetic beauty, and also see ugliness and abhorrence. There’s consensus across a wide range. It appears to be an intrinsic part of human nature.
“It took science to tell me that millions of microbes are in each teaspoon of soil, that there are fungi webs in undisturbed soil. Gads Darwin even wrote a hole paper on earthworms. To augment my feeling that rich brown soil makes healthy plants, that I can smell rich soil and it smells good, science has told me what is going on that I can’t see. I find that knowledge beautiful too. And it convinces me that my attraction to no-til gardening was right. I don’t have a soul, but I do have senses that are often underused that I can tap for pre-programed knowledge. And I have a brain that can seek out more knowledge and test it with its own scientific method program.”
Of course science is wonderful, Darwin a great man, and so forth. Where we differ is that you fail to recognise that the consciousness which thinks it possesses a brain is your SOUL.
“The web of life is the most beautiful thing I know of and every part of it is beautiful. Can’t your soul see that beauty in the vulture even as it dines on road kill. Why can I who thinks I don’t have a soul, just a DNA created mind and body see that beauty. Thinking we have a soul IMHO is just another form of hubris. We are just one in a line of homo’s from a line of apes and thinking we are top shit because we have a soul OR because we have science is our downfall. We can go extinct and if we go before the vultures they will find beauty in us – I hear they go for the eyes first
Totally weird that you think I cannot see nature as beautiful. I have no idea why you come to that conclusion.
As I said before, I don’t THINK i have a soul, I AM my soul
September 21st, 2012 at 7:10 am
Tom
the Baysian method would take into account the information coming to one after each draw.
There is no information coming to one after each draw. OzMan stated he did not look at the cards after he predicted the colour so he did not know if he was correct or not. Even if he had looked at each card after he forecast it, in the null hypothesis of him not having special predictive powers it would not have affected the probability of predicting the correct sequence of all the cards. (In actuality it might have adversely affected his chances as the pressure built after knowing he had gotten 40+ cards correct so far!)
The 1/(2^52) calculation would assume OzMan is not remembering the number of red/black predictions he has previously made. It gives a lower bound for the probability.
The 1/(52!/(26!26!)) assumes OzMan is keeping count of the number of red/black predictions he has previously made. It gives an upper bound for the probability.
Essentially, there are 52!/(26!26!) ways of arranging the cards by colour. OzMan therefore had at most a 1 in 52!/(26!26!) chance of getting the sequence correct if he was guessing at random.
September 21st, 2012 at 7:30 am
Kathy C
Well, 83% of 7 billion to die within 27 years, is….um… let’s see… about 1.2 billion survivors, give or take in a generation. That seems about right for the carrying capacity of the planet. But only if all cylenders are firing properly, which we seem to have strong indications it wont be.
Looks like Ebola could do the trick, not that I’m wishing it in any way. One just has to imagine one’s own child or sibling or loved grandparent going that way. One of …”the thousand shocks the body’s heir to…”.
a wicked simulation computer game , out 5 years or so ago is ‘Pandemic 2′. The goal is to successfully terminate human ife by engineering a pathogen that will go undetected long enough by health authorities so it will have wide continental coverage, and closing borders to shipping tourism and travel is too late to stop it.
It is fairly sophisticated, enough IMO to teache an intellegent user t what are some of the standard countermeasures used in infection detection and disease control. Always too little too late in the game, these measures, if successful, usually only manage to save a small portion of humans on say Madagascar or New Zealand. I found rodents to be the most effective vectors, for they become endemic on shipping and that is usually a 100% penetration on the major land masses.
I don’t play it anymore….I was too successful.
Seriously however, it is a much safer option on how to scale down human population without any devious responsibility on the part of the PTB.
Strangly coincidental is that the recent will Smith film, “I am Legent”, once produces as , “The Omega Man in the 1979′s, is on TV here tonight. TPTB like to rub our noses in it sometimes I suppose.
September 21st, 2012 at 7:34 am
Again to Tom : i have a question: Is this the purpose of human evolution – to lead us to our own demise?
I think there are probably two questions there. One is the purpose of all life, because we are obviously just one part of something that has been evolving for long time, and most scientists say ‘it’ has no purpose or direction or even meaning.
Tom Campbell however, the NASA physicist I quite in my blog, says the purpose is to evolve and our purpose is to align ourselves with that evolution, rather than to hinder or resist it. I remain somewhat sceptical of his reasoning, although I admire his attempt at a Theory of Everything.
But the second question is, is there a purpose for us each as individuals, in which case, I’d say yes, as in Jungian Individuation. And I’d phrase that as the quest to find our own individual soul. And then I’d say that, the seeker and the sought are actually identical
September 21st, 2012 at 7:38 am
Sorry about the typos….
http://www.jungiananalyticpraxis.com/individuation_lecture.htm
September 21st, 2012 at 7:45 am
ulvfugl
You wrote:
” Chimpanzees go out in gangs and murder their neighbours.”
I don’t have the full story on this but I remember reading some recent research that brought serious doubts as to the sociological causes of this definitly shocking observatios of Chimps. One point was that these groups of chimps contained some high proportion of individuals, and their young, that were the subjects of Jane Goodalls research, which she herself has acknowledged, may have been skewing her findings on innate primate behaviour. This was by way of the effects of food provision on behaviour. Initially they had success in getting access to the groups, but subsequently found they could observe more frequently by attracting the chimps with food left for them to retrieve.
The second piont is that there were many groups of human malitia moving in and out of these chimps home ranges, and some researchers have theorised that the chimps may have imitated the human behaviour when it was obvious to them the battles were about food and resources. I don’t know if that is overstating the intellegence of the chimps, or overstating ours, with respect to the violent wars we wage, but if the chimps were fiddled with in terms of their natural relationship to food, and they came under pressure by way of habitat reduction, and they were witness to and/or traumatised by human warfare, it is a possibility that muddies the waters when attempting to conclude we are not the only species of primates who kill in organised groups.
September 21st, 2012 at 8:01 am
Yes, I read that too, Ozman. My line was really just a quip in response to MB’s law of apes that stated only humans behaved that way, or whatever.
I think we are just as closely related to bonobos, which have different and less violent behaviour.
September 21st, 2012 at 8:02 am
ulvfugl
You wrote:
” And then I’d say that, the seeker and the sought are actually identical”
In this case there is a distinct difference in that the sought is unconscious, as per Jungian individuation, and therefor, the realisation, if the ‘one’ is not yet completed. In platonic language we could say…
The shadow on the cave wall of the flickering fire is not yet fully aware it is essentially an effect of the inerplay of the fire and some interruption to its light with the wall. IMO it is most significant to see that although there is a unity in the ‘seeker’ and the ‘sought’, the seeker only seeks when the sought is not the realised condition of consciousness. In that fundamental understanding the seeker disolves or is burnt away as a early, temporary adaptation to self undertanding in the infinite void. Full consciousness, or ‘Total Recall’ is the only path in a developmental sense for self understanding, and yes, is a kind of letting go, because at some stage it is all just going to be ripped away from us anyway, as death of the body-mind arrives.
September 21st, 2012 at 9:30 am
The REAL Dr. House
Re the cancer thing I wrote. I don’t equate humans as a cancer, far from it. To clarify, years ago when studying Macrobiotics, I came accross the diagnosis that cancer was an unbalanced Yin energy process, because it was a bout growth and differentiation and multiplicity, which is considdered by some to be a Yin phenomena. Yang being contracted, hard and dense. The type of situation humans are presently in is an expansion, Yin phase if you like. Out of balance siuations bring equally forceful balancing energy by attraction, so it goes in Tao. I merely was pointing out that the cancer cell is in most respects a normal cell, excepting it has mutated to be stuck in the cell dicision stage of its life cycle, which paradoxically is near enough to its death phase if it can be said there is a death phase in a cell cycle, that continually has cell division in the cycle.
I also want to add that although I caan be as rough and crude with my humour, my brother died of Lymphoblastic Luekemia when we were 13 year lods, and I hold the Nuclear industry, and the elites in Governments and those PTW then responsible. I don’t take any offence, and I full get the humour you are alluding to. The world wide radiation blanket that looms is one scenario I suspect could be what TPTB think is a saving adaptive throw of the dice for some species to evolve and survive, even us or our survivor mutations down the track. I see it as a chance that the radiation can produce far greater mutation rates in us and other life forms, and the majority will be fatal, but some may have an adaptive advantage in the mess that is high order temperature changes to world climate. If certain thinktanks have crunched the numbers and also found that humans cannot survive, then their only solution, in a kind of Dr Strangelove mentality, is to help us adapt as fast as we can, and much higher background radiation could do the trick. Although it would be no trick ,and no going back. Some bean counter probably worked on an influential beurocrat and came up with the ‘Double recessive protocal’ and there we have it. I’m not sure of cours, just a maligned hunch.
BTW, most are not aware that the animal gene for five digits, or Pentadactylism, which amongst other things, gives higher primates like us great dexterity, and an opposable thumb, is a recessive gene. It is so successful in conferring a survival advantage, over Polydactylism, or multi digit apendages, that the dominant genes were almost entirely selected out. Everyone who has five digits is a double recessive for Pentadactylism. A genetic variation in a population does not have to be a dominant genetic aleal, it an also be recessive. This is also how our surviving mechanism can retain ‘stored’ variations that can be extemely uncommon, but highly successful if environments change and it eventuats they are an advantage at some later stage. Natural selection is itself a way of preserving life in this form
September 21st, 2012 at 9:30 am
Thank you, Guy. This is, I think, a very realistic and even satisfying place to rest.
I have no ability to affect the outcome. Any efforts I’ve made have been more than easily counterbalanced by all the oil/coal/gas being burned (along with all the activity that enables) by the other 6,999,999,999 people in the world.
I used to think that Peak Oil would break civilization, and that Climate Change would be a medium term effect. I now realize that I was wrong. Climate impacts on the food supply are here now, and will get worse as time goes on (look north to the ice…)
However, it’s going to be thje convergence of problems that fractures civilization: problems with the food supply, energy supply, water supply, money supply and governance in the face of massive refugee movements – all coming to a head over the next decade or two.
Actually I’ll go further than just saying, “I have no ability to affect the outcome”. I don’t WANT to affect the outcome. I actually want to see what happens over the next two or three decades: global warming, species extinctions, food/water/energy shortages, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, overfishing, deforestation, desertification, overpopulation, social breakdown – the whole nine yards.
We are in the unique position of living through the real life manifestation of every dystopian SF novel ever written, and I really want to see how it turns out. I feel no particular concern about the fact that I’ve decided to take my shoulder off the tinker’s wheel and instead devote my energies to the things I want to do, the things that I have decided are more important in this situation.
I used to want to change things; I hoped to help put out the “fire on the roof of the world” or at least show people how that might be done. Then I wanted to wake people up to the fact that the roof was on fire in the hope that *they* would act. Both of those have turned out to be forlorn hopes. Now I I have turned my attention and energies inward instead. My involvement with the outer (physical) world has shifted to simply watching. And sometimes I remind people that there’s no shame in being a witness.
I mentioned my idea of a Kubler-Ross Stage 6 (“Looking for the Gift”) in a comment on another thread. Once we stop screaming and bargaining we can begin look for the gift in all these upheavals. Examples of that “gift” might be:
* Understanding that humanity is a special animal, and that both our specialness and our animal nature must be a factor in all we do;
* Realizing that we are a part of nature, not apart from her.
* The awareness that our sense of control is an illusion born of fear;
* Recognizing our personal and collective limitations, and reorienting our action within them;
* Awakening to the fact that change is not the enemy, but the nature of reality;
* Realizing that what humanity faces is not a set of physical problems, but the turmoil that always accompanies a transition from adolescence into adulthood.
It’s time for us to stop thinking in terms of “fixing” things (especially when what’s broken isn’t just the climate and the oil supply, but a couple of dozen interlocking wicked problems – including tipping points we’ve demonstrably passed already.)
It’s time to think about the best ways we can come up with to live happy, caring, cooperative, altruistic, mindful, joyous, and even sacred lives in the midst of a world we have defaced forever..
There is a very good reason why the concept of “Surrender” is at the core of all the world’s sacred philosophies. Unlike the defeatist Western interpretation of the word, this form of surrender means accepting that there are some things that can’t be done, and choosing instead to do the very best of those things that can be done. We’re about to find out for ourselves that the opposite of surrender isn’t victory, but final defeat. I don’t like the idea of defeat, frankly, so I’ve chosen to surrender to What Is.
Grant me this day
The courage to change those things I can,
The serenity to accept those things I cannot change –
And above all, the wisdom to know the difference.
September 21st, 2012 at 9:40 am
Re. allergies – a pandemic caused by our War on Microbes.
———–
An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism
Since time immemorial, a very specific community of organisms — microbes, parasites, some viruses — has aggregated to form the human superorganism. Mounds of evidence suggest that our immune system anticipates these inputs and that, when they go missing, the organism comes unhinged.
“We were willing to put up with hay fever, even some autoimmune disease,” he told me recently. “But autism? That’s it! You’ve got to stop this insanity.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/immune-disorders-and-autism.html?pagewanted=all
September 21st, 2012 at 10:00 am
Sea ice may be gone in 2014 http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/arctic-sea-ice-gone-in-september-2014.html
September 21st, 2012 at 10:24 am
So, the answer to the question about what we should do is that it doesn’t matter because now, whether one knows it or not, we are all condemned to nothingness.
Those who hew to the Judaeo part of the “Judaeo”-Christian tradition might be unperturbed:
“In other words, “Ein Sof” signifies “the nameless being.” In another passage the Zohar reduces the term to “Ein” (non-existent), because God so transcends human understanding as to be practically non-existent.”
My impression, and no doubt you’ll correct me where I’m mistaken is that your rejected the bigoted Christian fundamentalist literalism of your youth, and have replaced it with a sort of mirror image, an archaic 19thC. mechanistic, reductionist, materialist, positivist, scientism, that has been obsolete for a century.
The rejection arises from a very deep bitterness at the failure of the prescribed mode of faith to mitigate the harshness of reality.
September 21st, 2012 at 10:35 am
OzMan, you may have entered contentious territory, but IMO that’s exactly where a deep acceptance of our situation leads.
“IMO it is most significant to see that although there is a unity in the ‘seeker’ and the ‘sought’, the seeker only seeks when the sought is not the realised condition of consciousness.”
I agree. This realization is the purpose behind Ramana Maharshi’s eternal question, “Who am I?” If “I” am not my self (in its conventional sense of an amalgam of body, thoughts, feelings and memories) what is my true Self?
“In that fundamental understanding the seeker disolves or is burnt away as a early, temporary adaptation to self undertanding in the infinite void.”
Yes, the seeker and all further seeking vanishes in that moment of realization. However, even in that moment, “self understanding” can be a slippery thing. Am “I” pure awareness? Or does awareness simply provide the container within which the sense of “I” arises, along with everything else? Should “I” strive to understand the answer? For me the most profoundly satisfying answer to the question “What am I?” is, “I don’t know.”
September 21st, 2012 at 10:47 am
Tom,
“Is this the purpose of human evolution – to lead us to our own demise?”
Evolution is a process without intentions – no “purpose.” Evolution is the effect of life moving through time and changing circumstances. That is it.
Ask yourself, “is the purpose of gravity to lead us to our own demise?”
September 21st, 2012 at 11:11 am
.
My line was really just a quip in response to MB’s law of apes that stated only humans behaved that way, or whatever.
Well, it was an idiotic quip that completely missed the point. It comes from the movie The Planet of The Apes, and my intention in posting it, for the most part, was to satirize the end of the world principles from Dark Mountain of which Arthur provided an example. Specifically, he stated the “the eighth principle of Uncivilization.” It immediately triggered in my mind that quote from the Sacred Scrolls in The Planet of the Apes. It was not meant to imply that apes are not violent, although, ironically, the new world of the apes was starting to look very much like the old world of humans, so the scroll was rather hypocritical in the context and setting of the movie.
.
September 21st, 2012 at 11:14 am
.
“is the purpose of gravity to lead us to our own demise?”
I’d say the purpose of gravity is make men’s balls hang to their ankles when they reach eighty, and women’s breasts to hang to their knees when they reach the same age.
.
September 21st, 2012 at 11:18 am
Regarding …the meaning of human life, or all life…
Yes I’ll have a go at it, why not ….?
My son and I were discussing how the function of mutations, and variation in form and function in life is the singular most important adaptation this life process has developed. We got there because as my son was understanding some of the basic genetics I was telling him about, he realised that without the mutations there would be no life now, because the key situation on this planet is environmental change and variation. So even as some scientists have theorised that some highly conservative,(genetically speaking) simple life forms may have been among the early planet colonisers, they did not survive, and only the ones that could mutate at sufficiently stable enough rates and small degrees survived.
So it follows for me that a primary purpose of life is to remain alive, via any form of reproduction or replication possible on this planet. I have read that in Hinduism, and some Buddhism schools it is said that all is required is for life to continue, until the lifetime arises where realisation can take place.
A symbol used is the Marla beads; the chain of beads in Hinduism represents the chain of lifetimes that are ordinary incarnations. The larger Marla bead, of which there is only one per necklace, however, represents the one lifetime of realisation of Self in human form.
So in some ways I am sympathetic to that view, but not a believer in the world belief cosmology of Hinduism, per say.
To broarden the considdration to the personal …
Popular culture sometimes broaches the great eternal themes of the classics, and when it does it can be grand IMO, because it has managed to reach a wider audience than each category on it’s own can lay claim to.
The 1982 film directed by Ridley Scott, titled ‘Blade Runner’, starring Sean Young, Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, brings up the issues of personal meaning in an individuals life when death is known to be a certainty. Based on a Phillip K. Dick novel, titled, ‘Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?’, the film follows an Urberman, a superhuman replicant synthetic robot, Roy Batty, attempting to find a solution to his own mortality, and when his efforts come to no avail, in his dying moments he expresses a highly compassionate and moving action that saves the life of another, the one trying to kill him.
‘BladeRunner – Complete Rooftop Scene ‘
A link here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuBToeQeeEU
This scene with Batty, expressing passionate but restrained love and awareness of conscious understanding as a base condition of his being, is similar in tone to Hamlet’s question, “What is this quintescence of dust?”.
The replicant Roy Batty’s final words are both poetic and spiritually elevated to broaching selftranscendent concerns, by their moment to moment realisation of the limits of his bodily vehicle and lifetime’s meaning, when he calmly but resolutely speaks to Deckard and says,
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. [pause] Time to die.”
A type of plea for greater understanding like Hamlets that tries to process what possible purpose could be had if there is such an absurd extinguishing of ‘My’ life and consciousness, accompanied by all the ‘love’ of life I have known, expressed and experienced.
Although not in the original script, the actor Rutger Hauer, who played Roy Batty improvised the ‘Tears in rain soliloquy’. The superhuman events Batty mentions are allusions to the atypical and heroic journey he himself has been on, (which move his life into an Archetypal frame), and the places he refers to are actually celestial destinations emergent from an earlier European stellar cosmology, and mythology. The ‘Tannhäuser Gate’ is a reference to a portal considdered in earlier Germanic legends (of the Christian influence) and Wagnerian opera of the same name, to represent a door from the mortal Earthly realm to the proto-underwold called Venusworld, populated by carnal desire and sensate pleasures. The opera’s central concern thematically, according to Wiki is:
“…the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through love…”
‘Tannhäuser (opera)’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannh%C3%A4user_(opera)
Batty’s reference is mythical in scope, but draws us linguistically into a recognition that he has lived an extraordinary life, beyond the heroic life of an enslaved supersoldier, prevailing off-world for the benifit of the Tyrell Corporation,(a distopian endgame depiction of corporation dominated Empire).
He has penetrated the central questions of mortality and broaches the mystery of life’s purpose. His journey has brought him to find a solution to beat death, which is embedded in his genetic code, while being chased by Deckard, a cop sent to nutralise him.
Batty represents the best of humans abilities to rise to the challenge of meaning amidst the reality of mortality. But in my view it only hints at other alternatives for a solution. Deckard, wounded and feeling he is about to be beaten by a far superior adversary, is as shocked as the audience when at the moment of his own death-fall, Batty saves his life. Although the Directors Cut has no later end scene and no Harrison Ford voiceover, the studio release version has Deckard explaining to the audience, from wikiquote.org :
“I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life… anybody’s life… my life…”
As it turns out Rutger Hauer rewrote his final lines the night before shooting the scene, and commenting about the prevoius script version of the dialogue…:
From Wiki again:
“Hauer described this as “opera talk” and “hi-tech speech” with no bearing on the rest of the film, so he “put a knife in it” the night before filming, without Scott’s knowledge.[7] In interview with Dan Jolin, Hauer said that these final lines showed that Batty wanted to “make his mark on existence … the robot in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of.”[8]
When Hauer performed the scene, the film crew applauded and some even cried. This was due to the power of the dying speech coming at the end of an exhausting shoot”.”
IMO in saving Deckard’s life Batty is elevated, or he elevates himself beyond the mode of attempting to be a survivor of mortality, but to one who understands all life is the point of existance, and in true theatrical form this happens at the moments he accepts death. I would go as far as to write that it would be hard to find a better depiction of a death scene that incorporates no personal fear, where the central concern is to find a way, having exhausted a search for a way, to preserve the heart’s passion for the privelage of a body-mind to be in, to exist in, or simply to be. What is rarely accomplished in dramatic depiction, and is successfully performed here, is an authentic exaltation of life’s spiritual yearnings amidst death. Exaltation is a key to the triumphant nature of Batty’s realisation and queessance and universal compassion comperable to the extraordinary life he has experienced, (and indeed he was ‘created’ for).
That may merely be my projection, however, I think it is consistant with Batty’s passion for life.
To conclude, I feel the central meaning of life is its utter full realisation by the emergence of the transcendental Heart as the real mode of existance.
While dramatised in Blade Runner, as a struggle with mortality, and in Hamlet as a considderation of how to proceed when faced with mortality, the real foundation process of bodily existance is conservation of life, or being.
Be alive, and live, until the ultimate conditions of existance are revealed, to love to the outshining moment.
September 21st, 2012 at 11:19 am
Kathy C,
I see you don’t get it either.
Oh, I get it. Human extinction by 2030, all life by 2050, due to global warming. The world a 196,939,990-sq-mi charnel house of unimaginable, agonizing death by starvation, dehydration or predation for all life forms.
That’s pretty much it, right?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and no where else. A pile of poop it beauty to a dung beetle.
Partly no and partly yes. Humans and non-humans have a natural preference for symmetrical over non-symmetrical form, whether that form be visual, aural, or tactile. This is true even for dung beetles. This innate sense of “beauty” is then filtered through whatever human or non-human culture the particular individual is living in. Guy can provide you with the evolutionary biological details of why this is so.
If we humans go extinct along with most if not all of the life on the planet,
IF? Don’t you mean WHEN? Or do you have some doubts about Guy’s claim that human extinction by 2030 is a lock (“already baked in the cake”, as it were)? If you have doubts about this, what else do you have doubts about?
there goes beauty – no beholders left. We are talking about EXTINCTION. Ie. no more humans ever. No more mammals, no more birds or insects, perhaps a few bacteria.
I believe there is now some observational evidence suggesting that even bacteria may have an innate preference for symmetrical form. If so, then beauty…survives.
Unless Aliens exist any beauty Dark Mountain creates in words or in the packaging of those words will disappear – no observers, no beauty.
Interesting idea. DO Aliens exist? If humans only have 18 years left before extinction, as you and Guy claim, would it be worthwhile for Dark Mountain–or anyone else–to create beauty for the benefit of those Aliens?
September 21st, 2012 at 11:27 am
.
The question is, what do we do?
There can be no, “if only we knew”
Come on, Man!
There’s no way to plan
So make like Tom & Nicole and Screw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCakejA9VMc
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September 21st, 2012 at 12:00 pm
.
navid, that was an informative article on Austism. Thanks for depositing it. Perhaps Autism is evolutionary….meaning, it’s increasingly being selected for given environmental catalysts. There are a certain percentage of those with Autism who are able to communicate via computer…and do so remarkably well. They can connect with each other in virtual communities via the computer. It’s interesting to note that a highly sterilized environment, one that’s necessary for the creation of microchips, is also what has led to the creation Autism that allows those “afflicted” and computers to come together in a form of synergy….the initial phase of an ultimate merging, if you will. Of course, there’s also the theory that Autism is a remnant of our past as foragers, and perhaps a resurgence of it is in anticipation that those hunter-gatherer traits may be needed again, if the very near future. Who knows? It interesting to consider it, though. I’m not necessarily hanging my hat on any of that, but it is thought provoking.
http://www.jaredreser.com/cognitiveparsimony/partseven.html
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September 21st, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Morocco Bama
Yes a great ending scene but ultimately a pointless response to the problems depicted here at NBL. No reason not to though IMO. Any response is as good as any other response if that’s how one sees the situation, that is.
There may not be a better modern dramatic depiction IMO of the perils of decadent corruption and abuse of privelage by TPTB than Stanley Kubrik last ‘fingers up to you fuckers’ film you link to “Eyes Wide Shut”.
If ever there was a film that wanted to bring home to North Americans that they are not in the top 1% of the game this is it. Tom and Nicole are very little fish, and Kubrik is esentially saying to middle North America,
“You will never get the chance to enjoy these types of human excesses, and hedonistic pleasures, and power, but and so be content with your little pleasures, and be awake to the ordinary love you have right at hand.”
Some of that is a calling to be awake and satisfied with real love, which sounds fine, but another aspect is to stay in your place and let the big boys continue to FUBAR anyting they like, and play by hidden but nevertheless deadly rules or codes…. Face it, little fish don’t have any power to alter the situation anyhow.
Like I wrote, it could be one way to ride out the collapse, so to speak….
September 21st, 2012 at 12:21 pm
“In other words, “Ein Sof” signifies “the nameless being.” In another passage the Zohar reduces the term to “Ein” (non-existent), because God so transcends human understanding as to be practically non-existent.”
Yes, that’s my understanding too, Robin, and Ein Sof correlates with its equivalent term in other traditions, e.g. the 8th jhana, and the Cloud of Unknowing, etc.
“The rejection arises from a very deep bitterness at the failure of the prescribed mode of faith to mitigate the harshness of reality.”
Yes. I think we can expect to see huge waves of that phenomenon as the crises deepen, and dis-illusioned individuals inflict their anger and pain upon others as a sort of retaliatory revenge… probably it’ll be harnessed as a political force, as it was in the 1930s blackshirts and brownshirts. I think we see it in the angry destruction of sufi tombs in Timbuktu, and it happened during the English civil war, when stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals, as if destroying an inanimate symbol releases the pain of perceived betrayal.
September 21st, 2012 at 12:26 pm
MB :Well, it was an idiotic quip that completely missed the point.
Yes, idiotic, perfectly matching the tone and tenor of your idiotic contribution. If you had said something profound and insightful, then I’d have matched that quality, and we might have had a productive worthwhile exchange, but as it is you continue your loudmouth vituperation on topics that you have made no serious attempt to understand. Shame.
September 21st, 2012 at 12:35 pm
Paul Chefurka :“Yes, the seeker and all further seeking vanishes in that moment of realization. However, even in that moment, “self understanding” can be a slippery thing. Am “I” pure awareness? Or does awareness simply provide the container within which the sense of “I” arises, along with everything else? Should “I” strive to understand the answer? For me the most profoundly satisfying answer to the question “What am I?” is, “I don’t know.””
No knower, and no known. No awareness, only Void. That’s where the big mistake of the Western scientific quest was made, by Descartes, who never persevered to that point, and so settled for ‘I think, therefore I am’, and we’ve been stuck with the consequences ever since. Derrida would call it logocentrism, an unbalanced emphasis upon logos and verbal knowledge.
As I understand it, regular entry into that level of Unknowing, doing it for no reason at all, produces immense and profound changes to everything one is.
September 21st, 2012 at 12:41 pm
One of my favorite funny movies is Pecker http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126604/
Its also one of the best commentaries I have ever seen on the elite art world. And had I not seen it I wouldn’t have known why the Tea Party folks calling themselves tea baggers was so funny. Pecker is a young amateur photographer who takes pictures of his community. He is discovered by a talent scout and makes it big time in the art world, but almost loses the people he loves. His family is a hoot – his mother dresses street people to be fashionable in a second hand clothing store. His grandmother has a virgin mary statue that talks, his sister works at a male dance club, and his girlfriend is the most dedicated laundromat owner you have ever seen. His crazy world is absolute sanity compared to the elite art world. Its a gem of a movie and a great commentary on what is important in life especially here as we sit at the blog at the end of the world.
September 21st, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Thanks again everyone for your thoughtful responses. Much to ponder, nothing to do but be until life’s over.
September 21st, 2012 at 1:41 pm
John Day,
Thank you for sharing your insight into the shenanigans Monsanto uses to shape the outcome of the studies it funds to find its products “safe” for humans and the environment. None of this surprises me, although I was not aware of many of the manipulations you mentioned.
I was wondering if you would mind my copying your comment and sharing it with friends, both via email and my FB page. I would be happy to leave out your name, if you wish, since it’s not really necessary to get the message through.
Thank you again, John, for posting this.
Judy
September 21st, 2012 at 2:04 pm
.
then I’d have matched that quality,
It was insightful, but you’re not here to share, you’re here to monologue and blow wind. You don’t impress me in the least, but obviously, you do impress yourself. You’re full of hot air…that’s it. You do have a way with words, but your words lack depth and substance, and you both repeat yourself and contradict yourself repeatedly. The fact that you find so little common ground with anyone or anything shows me that you’re just here to relieve your hard-on to argue ad nauseam about everything, and yet nothing. I take particular pleasure in knowing that when this thing finally does go down, so too will what I just described. Hallelujah!!
.
September 21st, 2012 at 2:09 pm
.
Yes a great ending scene but ultimately a pointless response to the problems depicted here at NBL.
And your pointing that out is also pointless, ironically.
I thought they were practicing non-attachment.
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September 21st, 2012 at 2:10 pm
“nothing to do but be until life’s over.”
Or
“The only living boy in New York.
I get the news I need on the weather report.
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.
Hey, I’ve got nothing to do today but smile. ” Simon and Garfunkle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGDt2skie84
September 21st, 2012 at 2:12 pm
We’ve known for a long time about basic polar amplification. Warming melts highly reflective white ice and snow, which is replaced by the dark blue sea or dark land, both of which absorb far more sunlight and hence far more solar energy.
More recently another insidious feedback has become obvious — as the Arctic ice retreats, big oil companies can drill for more fossil fuels whose combustion will accelerate warming and ice retreat. You might call this the “brainless frog” feedback.
Now Reuters reports on yet another feedback:
Local pollution in the Arctic from shipping and oil and gas industries, which have expanded in the region due to a thawing of sea ice caused by global warming, could further accelerate that thaw, experts say.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said there was an urgent need to calculate risks of local pollutants such as soot, or “black carbon”, in the Arctic. Soot darkens ice, making it soak up more of the sun’s heat and quickening a melt….
“There is a grim irony here that as the ice melts … humanity is going for more of the natural resources fuelling this meltdown,” he said. Large amounts of soot in the Arctic come from more distant sources such as forest fires or industry.
So the direct pollution from shipping and fossil fuel extraction could speed up Arctic melt.
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-09-20/arctic-death-spiral-new-local-shipping-and-drilling-pollution-may-speed-polar-war
September 21st, 2012 at 2:14 pm
.
and dis-illusioned individuals inflict their anger and pain upon others as a sort of retaliatory revenge
That’s rich, considering the source.
.
September 21st, 2012 at 2:17 pm
MB,
Tonight is wine night! Time to chill (and that includes me-in spades)
September 21st, 2012 at 2:20 pm
It was insightful, but you’re not here to share, you’re here to monologue and blow wind. You don’t impress me in the least, but obviously, you do impress yourself. You’re full of hot air…that’s it. You do have a way with words, but your words lack depth and substance, and you both repeat yourself and contradict yourself repeatedly. The fact that you find so little common ground with anyone or anything shows me that you’re just here to relieve your hard-on to argue ad nauseam about everything, and yet nothing. I take particular pleasure in knowing that when this thing finally does go down, so too will what I just described. Hallelujah!!
Insightful ?? Oh sure. Idiot. Now why would I want to impress YOU ? Shallow, superficial, opinionated fool.
You have not done the work, but you want to claim the fruits. That makes you a fraud, a con man, a huckster, trying to gain status under false pretenses. Shame.
September 21st, 2012 at 2:21 pm
.
Judy, in several minutes I will be there. Yahoo!!!!
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September 21st, 2012 at 2:27 pm
MB,
I’m already there, and I understand!
September 21st, 2012 at 2:56 pm
“When it comes right down to it, our modern categories of “real” and “unreal,” and also the subdivision of the unreal into “imaginary” and “hallucinated,” are essentially linguistic and conceptual political plays. They’re ways of policing consciousness by giving people ways to pigeonhole their experiences in prefabricated ontological slots. And—to grossly misquote Shakespeare—reality itself flows right through and past those slots, because there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our current flatland versions of philosophy and psychology. Fortunately, recent developments like the resurgence of psychedelic research and thought, the birth of the “paranthropology” movement as exemplified by Jack Hunter’s excellent journal of that title, and the serious philosophical attention being given to shamanism are all addressing the imperialism and shortcomings of the modern Western mindset.”
http://cosmicomicon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/tc-blog-review-interview-matt-cardin.html
September 21st, 2012 at 3:03 pm
ulvfugl,
Isn’t it obvious [why the DMM is made available in physical form]?
To spread the work around, to give money and hope to good people whom you like and respect, people dedicated to creating beauty, rather than to some anonymous corporation where nobody cares and they just churn out whatever satisfies the lowest common denominator and maximises profit margins.
Exactly.
It’s about QUALITY. Quality in everything you do, ( as an expression of soul!)…I think the idea of ‘quality’ has a lot to contribute. Each step, each breath, each word, each push of the trowel into the earth, each kiss on the cheek, every expression of what we are, has immense potential
Yes.
We cannot say, with any precision, when we will die, as individuals, or when the entire planet will become uninhabitable, or when civilisation will collapse. We can foresee that it WILL happen, inevitably, some time…but all these events have to have error bars, uncertainty, so we cannot be sure whether the graph will drop off a cliff, go down like a staircase, or be a long arc.
Just to speculate, prevention of Guy’s runaway climate change/ELE (extinction level event) scenario might require a combination of global economic collapse (to collapse carbon emissions) plus a volcanic eruption large enough to throw enough sulfur into the atmosphere to dramatically cool the planet for several years (to put the Arctic into a long hard freeze to rebuild the ice cap).
So, while we witness this thing roll out, what do we do? It would be nice to change the course of history and bring everyone back to sanity. But that doesn’t seem to be possible. So then what do we do? Keep trying? Give up? Or accept powerlessness and enjoy each moment being as happy as we can manage to be?
From the moment we wake, devote ourselves to the perfection of whatever we pursue. The perfect apple is a rare thing. We could spend our entire lives looking for one and it would not be a wasted life.
September 21st, 2012 at 3:12 pm
Oz,
I love it that your son noticed the necessity of mutations – no life without them.
“So it follows for me that a primary purpose of life is to remain alive, via any form of reproduction or replication possible on this planet. ”
I would disagree with the “purpose” part. “Purpose” comes after-the-fact and is the opinion of the observer (some critter smart enough to recognize it is alive). Life is just a result of the process we call a universe – more of an mostly unintended consequence that is bound to happen than anything else maybe?
Like the stars – stars do not have a “purpose” that I am aware of. But the process of life required the creation of all the elements by the stars, and requires the star’s corralling and heating of orbiting planets, so maybe we can think the purpose of the stars is to generate life?
I don’t think so. But, that is the opinion of this one observer only. FWIW ; )
September 21st, 2012 at 3:17 pm
ulvfugl, thanks for the insight into “Descartes’ Mistake”. It rang a great big bell for me.
Arthur Johnson, “From the moment we wake, devote ourselves to the perfection of whatever we pursue.” Like speaking the perfect admonition, perhaps? Very well said.
September 21st, 2012 at 3:28 pm
“From the moment we wake, devote ourselves to the perfection of whatever we pursue. The perfect apple is a rare thing. We could spend our entire lives looking for one and it would not be a wasted life.”
That’s interesting, AJ. Yes, I went through a long phase holding that view. I think it’s valuable, instructive, important, make it habitual. But then I sort of let it all go, left that phase behind, because I found the perfection was always there anyway, requiring no effort or devotion. But I wouldn’t have found that if I hadn’t done the disciplined bit, the quest, first.
I think it’s a bit like those Japanese tea ceremony places. They manicure the garden to achieve absolute perfection. Then the tea master goes out and looks and is sort of horrified by the imposed orderliness from the immaculate grooming and has to spread some dead leaves around to add a touch of natural messy scruffiness.
September 21st, 2012 at 3:34 pm
“thanks for the insight into “Descartes’ Mistake”. It rang a great big bell for me.”
Thanks for the thanks, Paul.
Yes, I’m wanting to write a proper blog post on that, because it seems so fundamental and needs to be thought through in a coherent lucid manner… but I keep getting distracted by other stuff…. this internet is like a conveyor belt, keeps on bringing new stuff faster than I can keep up
September 21st, 2012 at 3:44 pm
ulvfugl, I think what you’re referring to is called “wabi sabi”. Persian carpetmakers deliberately put mistakes into their carpets for much the same reason.
However, there is a big difference between deliberately eschewing the search for perfection and simply not caring enough to try in the first place.
September 21st, 2012 at 3:45 pm
…Perhaps simple mindfulness is enough.
September 21st, 2012 at 3:51 pm
AJ : “Just to speculate, prevention of Guy’s runaway climate change/ELE (extinction level event) scenario might require a combination of global economic collapse (to collapse carbon emissions) plus a volcanic eruption large enough to throw enough sulfur into the atmosphere to dramatically cool the planet for several years (to put the Arctic into a long hard freeze to rebuild the ice cap).”
Yeah, but to speculate around that line of thought. What if the whole system has a sort of Gaian physiology, along the lines I wrote about on my blog, so we can think of it as a unique (as far as we know) organism or quasi-organism, in its own right, with it’s own obscure homeostatic vitality, then perhaps it ‘wants’ to develop a fever, to rid itself of this parasitic plague that our species has become…
In which case, our ignorant attempts to fix it may be counter-productive, or not… We’re totally in the dark, like a bunch of peasants, in flickering candle light, around a sick family member, who is obviously seriously ill, possibly near death, but we are unable to diagnose or to cure…. and we’re arguing about whether to apply more leeches or whether to try trepanation…
My intuition says, ffs, let’s stop making things even worse, with insane schemes to extract Arctic oil and put mirrors into space and so forth… but TPTB are going to do whatever they are going to do…
September 21st, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Hey, check this out:
http://healthafteroil.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/neoliberalism-degrowth-and-the-fate-of-health-systems/#_edn30
Well done!
September 21st, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Paul : “However, there is a big difference between deliberately eschewing the search for perfection and simply not caring enough to try in the first place.”
Oh yes, indeed. I should have made that clear. Maybe half a lifetime seeking perfection, and another half forgetting about it
“…Perhaps simple mindfulness is enough.”
Yes. A great teacher. Every minute zen. Never missing anything.
Possibly that practice re-engineers the entire brain, as shown in a video I posted recently by a young woman whose name escapes me for the moment, so that after long practice, practice is automatic, effortless.
But then there is also the inner work to consider, the jhanas, etc, which is a bit different to mindfulness.
But, thinking about it, working at mindfulness could be a mistake, because it’s imposing a pre-conception.
Maybe the Soto thing, just observe intently, no attempt to change anything, like watching clouds.
September 21st, 2012 at 4:12 pm
My understanding of mindfulness is what you describe as Soto – simply observing intently. Not a practice, just a way of being. Communication would be so much easier if it wasn’t for all this language getting in the way.
I’m not a Buddhist, but my caution about jhanas is that it’s very easy for the monkey-mind to get caught in states of consciousness, and mistake them for the end-point. Neti neti – states are not it, any more than thoughts or feelings, body or mind.
September 21st, 2012 at 4:14 pm
Humans and non-humans have a natural preference for symmetrical over non-symmetrical form, whether that form be visual, aural, or tactile.
But of course: birds of a feather flock together:
“The bilateria are all animals having a bilateral symmetry, i.e. they have a front and a back end, as well as an upside and downside. Radially symmetrical animals like jellyfish have a topside and downside, but no front and back. The bilateralia are a subregnum (a major group) of animals, including the majority of phyla; the most notable exceptions are the sponges, belonging to Parazoa, and cnidarians belonging to Radiata. For the most part, Bilateria have bodies that develop from three different germ layers, called the endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm. From this they are called triploblastic. Nearly all are bilaterally symmetrical, or approximately so. The most notable exception is the echinoderms, which achieve near-radial symmetry as adults, but are bilaterally symmetrical as larvae.”
But beauty lies in the eye of the beerholder: one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
September 21st, 2012 at 4:17 pm
Paul, again re …Perhaps simple mindfulness is enough.
I think there are actually different schools of thought on that, and probably, it’s not wise to offer a blanket response, because it should be tailored to the specific individual and their current attitude and character.
The way I see it, we have our own inherent wisdom, built in, natural human nature, and we should respect that. It’s sort of intrinsic, in our body and unconscious mind. So we don’t want to screw it up even more than it’s already been screwed up by the usual process of education and socialization and cultural colonisation of our being.
I mean, it’s possible for mindfulness to be misunderstood. I’ve met people who claimed to be doing it, who were actually trying to force themselves to conform to some sort of ridiculous code of behaviour, suppressing everything that they thought was unacceptable, etc.
September 21st, 2012 at 4:19 pm
Judy,
I post things with my very own name, because I have nothing to hide.
In fact I’m flattered if people find my work useful and even more flattered if they bandy my name about.
there are a lot of John Days, anyway, even some non-human John Days in Oregon, and a fish by that name, oddly enough…
September 21st, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Robin Datta,
But beauty lies in the eye of the beerholder: one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
Yes. Hence the importance of the rest of what I wrote: “This innate sense of “beauty” [preference for symmetrical over non-symmetrical forms] is then filtered through whatever human or non-human culture the particular individual is living in.”
September 21st, 2012 at 4:26 pm
“My understanding of mindfulness is what you describe as Soto – simply observing intently. Not a practice, just a way of being.”
Oh good. That’s sort of what I meant. Learning and insight just happens automatically and effortlessly, you just have to pay close attention and put all the ego crap out of the way, and let yourself be the thing that you are
“I’m not a Buddhist, but my caution about jhanas is that it’s very easy for the monkey-mind to get caught in states of consciousness, and mistake them for the end-point. Neti neti – states are not it, any more than thoughts or feelings, body or mind.
Well, finding the jhanas and then getting into them properly is extremely hard work, which is why so few people know anything about it
Yes, ‘states are not it’, but I see the jhanas as kind of like having a bath. You do it when it’s appropriate. The rest of the time you do mindfulness in everyday life. Then, without any effort or intention, the jhanas show up in everyday life and everyday life becomes a magic carpet ride, instead of a confused and confusing chore
September 21st, 2012 at 4:38 pm
This was the video lecture I meant, by Sara Lazar. if changes can be detected after three months, what does that mean for someone whose done it for a lifetime ? It kinda says that you can make your own self to your own specification… just as bodybuilders make their physique, you can consciously grow your brain into different ways of being…
http://www.monsangelorum.net/?p=4104&cpage=1#comment-871
September 21st, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Morocco,
I don’t know if the spectrum of autistic traits are being “selected,” or favored, because I have no idea if they increase the chance of survival and reproduction.
It looks more and more like autism and many other diseases are an unintended consequence of industrial culture. See the “hygiene hypothesis.”
That’s an interesting link, thanks. I suppose the behaviors of autism could be sort of a default pattern our brain goes back to – sort of “a remnant of our past as foragers.” But I would not say the resurgence of autism is in “anticipation” of anything – anticipation by whom/what ???
September 21st, 2012 at 5:05 pm
Kathy, I’m sorry, but I take issue with your potshot against art.
I’m pretty sure the family in that movie is just as bad as the art world. Clothing stores, laundromats, stuff, stuff, STUFF. That’s supposed to be the “good alternative?” Consumerism helped cause the whole environmental mess to begin with.
Jeez, artists paint about the natural world all the time and have been warning us for years that the American way of life is shallow and empty, and THEY’RE the ones you’re calling the enemy?
I recently took a visit to the National Art Gallery in DC, looking at the beautiful paintings there. The artists painted gritty stuff like people in villages sewing clothes together and turning it into play, or people living in East Side Manhattan streets, etc.
So here’s irony for you: as elite as you might find art, it’s the only way to rise above the ocean of kitsch. Ironically, the only way to be “real” is to reject the “reality” our culture presents us with, as artists have skill in doing.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:06 pm
ulvfugl,
Re: the direction being taken by DM.
Since I’m not familiar with any of the details wrt your experiences with DM and the Unciv forum moderators, there’s not a whole lot I can say. From a distance, the origins of the dispute appear to lie in genuine differences in perspective: how precisely “civilization” needs to be defined/understood, which path (story vs. scientific theory vs. some blend of the two) is the better way forward in dealing with the coming calamity, DM as a refuge vs as a force for fundamental cultural change, etc. All of which was then amplified by personality issues leading to the break-up. Unfortunate.
Personally, being in the U.S., I’ve done little more than lurk. My impression, though, at least wrt the website, is that most of the valuable, insightful stuff takes place at the blog, or in the books, at the workshops, etc., not at the unciv forum. It’s important to keep in mind just how difficult it is to try to do what PK and DH are trying to do. They’re literally trying to re-connect people to the wild, most of whom have never actually experienced before, as well as change their entire internal psychology, and the stories and narratives that internally drive them. That’s a very tall order to fill in a short period of time. It’s only been a little more than three years since the Manifesto was published. So I wouldn’t count DM out just yet. They’re only at round 4 of a 15-round match.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:11 pm
ulvfugl,
Again, re the quality of the book. Is there any point in publishing and printing books at all anymore ? Most information is now digital and virtual,
But, of course, you know the answer. Per the Manifesto:
“because virtual reality is, ultimately, no reality at all.”
September 21st, 2012 at 5:50 pm
AJ, what you say re DM is probably very fair, I’m not really an objective observer. I have to avoid the temptation to be drawn into malicious gossip about the neighbours, so to speak, just because we had an acrimonious altercation about how the boundary hedge should be trimmed. Yes, the whole thing is in flux, rather like college, a new batch of students repeating the same old questions and opinions as last year’s, not realising that the teacher has heard it all before, over and over
Yes, but by extension, if one takes Kathy’s argument, that there’s no point in making a hand-sewn book, because we’re going to become extinct, therefore all is hubris and vanity… then there’s no point in doing anything at all, good, bad, or indifferent.
That’s the sort of miserable nihilism that alcoholics and junkies often use to explain their condition. I know that world. What’s the point in being born, if you’re going to die anyway ? What’s the point in getting educated if there are no jobs ? Negative feedback loops to justify and conceal some inner fear. Existentialism spent a lot of time bogged down in that sort of paralysis and despair.
But all these things are just lines of thought, neuro-chemical activity, electric pulses across synapses. I’t just as easy to have the thought ‘I am a good person’ as it is to have the thought ‘I am a bad person’. Neither has any substantial connection to the reality of what you are. They’re just ‘thought’, stories we tell ourselves.
Most people never get to have a break in the internal story telling, and mistake it for reality.
Zen knows how to break the impasse. A silent mind. Direct sensual awareness without commentary. That sort of thing.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:53 pm
I recall that Castenada called it ‘Stopping the world’.
September 21st, 2012 at 5:59 pm
As an antidote – I find this is wonderful. The world is full of such astounding mystery and marvel. Oh, if I could have my life over again, and spend time in that sublime valley, exploring those caves….
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/mustang-caves/finkel-text
September 21st, 2012 at 6:11 pm
Navid, you wrote “I would disagree with the “purpose” part. “Purpose” comes after-the-fact and is the opinion of the observer (some critter smart enough to recognize it is alive). Life is just a result of the process we call a universe – more of an mostly unintended consequence that is bound to happen than anything else maybe?”
Glad to hear someone making sense in this increasingly insane discussion.
Ways to deny that we are mortal
Religion
Pseudo religion
Belief in civilization and art as proof that we are unique (we are unique but we are still mortal)
Belief that we carry on in our progeny (after a few generations it is possible that none of our unique genes are still there)
Belief that we carry on in our species (all species go extinct)
Belief in a purpose for our lives
Belief that the universe matters
All desperate attempts to not look death in the face. What matters is not good art, souls, religion, lasting longer than others etc. What matters is the moment and it is death that gives our every moment meaning for at any moment we could have no more moments. So smile, dance, and hug someone you love.
Ah well when the stench of 7 billion people dying earlier than expected fills our nostrils people may finally get it.
September 21st, 2012 at 6:20 pm
Arthur Johnson, your comment “story vs. scientific theory vs. some blend of the two” suggests a gap in understanding. IMO the idea of science is every bit as much a cultural story as Norse mythology. It’s part of the foundational narrative of our culture – how we explain who we are to ourselves.
DM isn’t suggesting a substitution of story for science. Instead they are suggesting a shift in the stories we tell about ourselves. Science will remain a part of them, but as I understand it they mainly want to blunt the razor’s edge of our separationist, dominationist stories with respect to our place within nature and with respect to each other.
It’s common for people in our culture to think of cultural narratives or myths as something that only “uncivilized” peoples have. While scientific theories and the scientific method itself are unique tools by which we explore our universe, the “idea of science” is a story. In other words science is a tool but scientism is a story – one to which Western industrial civilization is very much in thrall.
September 21st, 2012 at 7:45 pm
John Day, thank you. I received both of your messages, and I’ll will be happy to bandy about your name along with what you wrote.
judy
September 21st, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Paul Chefurka
To jump in on your discusson with Arthur Johnson…
IMHO religions were/are foundation stories that are psychologically supportive of childhood mentality and consciousness. Science is IMHO an attempt to reconcile the earlier state of consciousness of the religion business cosmology with developmental growth impulses. Science take a typically adolescent independant and thesis/antithesis approach to it’s earlier foundation of religion.
I agree in principle with you that religion and science are complexes of stories and self talk that bare no semblence to a complete understanding of reality, (my paraphrase with that). However, IMHO, there is a futher stage of growth and that is what we confront as we become,(if) fully human adults. Religion and science are commonly recognised as limitations on consciousness, in part on a collective level now, for their misplaced destruction of the biosphere.
The adult psychologically has grown beyond the need or desire to relate, or be, in reality through models. The real unmediated experience of existance is required. As in the Matrix, the red pill is now the only option:
“The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are pop culture symbols representing the choice between the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue) and embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (red).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill
That may also be an inflection point of the adolescent, the desire or impulse to know the truth, but the adolescent is still carrying the baggage of the childhood conditioning, and is attemting to throw off those stories and patterns of thought and action. Still in reaction to earlier conditioning and adaptation.
There is a tendency for many to disclaim and dispise the previous adaptation from which they possibly have struggled to emerge, (retaining sanity sometimes even, it can be that critical) and antismokers who are previous smokers is a popular example of too much emphasis on the badness of smoking and not enough care to the person who is struggling, even refusing to give up.
Also people who were once religious, and then have found huge weaknesses and corruption in the mainstream heart of their faith, or even subtle limitations of being embedded therein, can have a wound that is difficult to visit, let alone heal.
When they jump ship to a new view, say science, or some form of agnosticism, or nihlism, or even hedonism, it can be for the right reasons, but hold the pain of the tearing apart of the previous self and all its compassionate endeavour, and desire for great divine love to be the decisive healing force in the world.
I am thinking now in some ways of what I know of Kathy C’s history with Christianity, (oversiplified here and taken as she has put down recently, without judgmnetalism intended on my part). Jumping ship is a natural attempt to grow beyond what were devotional adaptations to the world of universal suffering and the cure in universal love.
The codified stories of Christianity, for example of a foundation religion, are concerned with individuals who have gone through great transformation due mostly to divine intervention and love, and compassion. Paul’s conversion on the raod to Damascus, on his way to persecute the new Christians, and Christs defence of the woman who is so be stoned to death, with ‘He who has not sinned shall cast the first stone” come to mind. These stories BTW move me too, but not to be a Christian, just to undo prejudice and the motivation to hatered.
So IMHO childhood, adolescence, and adulthood are where we are at, and there is no need to serverly denounce any of these cosmologies or stages or adaptations, but more important is to recognise that individuals and groups and world cultures can be dominated by the needs and viewpoints of their particular adaptaions to the growth cycle. IMHO that helps to posit any solutions to big problems.
Because vulnerability and innocence, even gullability are qualities of small children, we attempt to protect them from the harder issues and traumas possible in real existance, in the physical as well as the emotional sense. Adolescence is marked by a more critical and even defiant capacity for resilliance and self governance in terms of emotional and physical self management. The mind is also more robust and able to interrogate and navigate prejudice, implied fallacies of cultural conditioning, and subjectivity. Or at least attempt to. In part that change involves a reassessment, and very often a struggle to come to new individual values on cultural and family views, cosmology and life obligation. The impulse is to discover what is really going on, and in the context of emerging from a particular world view. The human environment can bare strongly on the ease or difficulty encountered, as many of us know from our own family experiences.
However, as with the earlier stage adolescence does run its course, and a new impulse to directly experience reality, without models of reality in the way arises, and IMHO this is what many of the esoteric schools within mainstream religions were attempting to accomplish. Indeed it is what Science was motivated to accomplish, but it has been caught in the trap of overlegitimisation of its counter-religious precepts, and has denied much experience and evidence that contradicts its methods and cosmological models. Again, Science emerged from the limitations of religion, (still there in some place in the world).
Also, an adult experiences reality in a direct, observant and clear way, knowing the limits of present knowledge in a situation, and when to act and what to do. Without the conditioning, and the reaction to conditioning that so ditorts and disturbs many, being is far simpler.
The fact that this is a very rare individual in our times is testament to the difficulties of getting beyond the earlier conditioning and reaction to conditioning.
Many people feel that they can never go back and undo all that they term the wasted years doing things that came to nothing. I have always been able to accept that if I desire to develop the full self, and be truly human, and infinitly happy, then where I are now is only because of all that I was in the past, and that ‘now’ I am always in a position to continue growing.
Lots of caviets apply here of course, and I am not disregarding the 1 billion still struggling to feed themselves and their children etc.
Religion and science have got us to this point in time, and many can point to these two pillars of Empire as the root cause of the planetary predicament, accepting that human population overshoot is here.
However, the root cause IMHO of the mess of unstoppable Empire is our inability to experience reality directly, and our collective desire to be stuck in these early stages of adaptation to the universe, with their models of reality.
Satisfaction, or not, with the dominant narratives of religions or science is no longer a game changer for the future of the planet, as Guy has communicated. What is done is done, and yes still being done with 3% annual growth, (…funny how cutting down trees and habitat loss can be termed ‘growth’ by any rubric).
What we do is still of importance IMHO, because if we continue to grow we will be able to respond to reality with greater intellegence, and assist our fellow beings, of all forms along the way.
No solution here, but Being can be a solution of sorts. it all depends on how we live each moment.
(Kath C – I make no attempt here to summarise your life of be critical of your journey, I just felt I wanted to compassionatly recognise some of the deep wound it appears you feel in the previous humanitarian endeavours you put your whole self into. I could never account for another’s life and so called ‘stage of development’. I write in broard terms about culture, and it is in our own hearts that we are thus or thus, not for others to pontificate upon. I hope you accept this clarification.)
September 21st, 2012 at 10:33 pm
Morocco Bama
I just noticed your mentioning my name in an earlier post in connection with Antichrist. In order that you can forget about this once and for all, I want to point out that my abandoning the film after a few minutes tells you very little about the film and a lot about me. I watch a lot of movies at the cinema and its difficult for my small screen to compete. Any film I watch at home had better convince me of its merits pretty damn quickly or I’ll get bored and switch off. The majority don’t. Similarly, a long time ago I used to like watching “major” sporting events, but it got to the point where even if I’d been looking forward to an “important” final, I’d inevitably lose interest and switch off after a few minutes. Now I don’t have access to television any more because I don’t want to waste my life watching it. I don’t spend much time on the internet either. The only other two web sites I visit are hotmail and the bbc (apart from the odd link from this blog I click on).
ulvfugl
Despite our initial exchange of name calling, I have warmed to you. Partly because I admire your passion and what you’ve done for the virgin forest and partly because my grandma was from Pontypool! I’m even prepared to believe your story about knowing the type of mail you were receiving whilst still asleep, whether through subliminal messages or unexplained powers of the mind. It’s easy to see how some kinds of sixth sense would be of benefit in evolution and therefore given our incomplete understanding of physics I won’t rule them out. However, when you tell stories about objects appearing by magic just when you need them, then I start to doubt your sanity. It’s similar to when Guy or the articles he links to talk about extinction of all life by mid century. I doubt even the disasters you mentioned could cause this to happen. Nothing save a nearby star going supernova or the oceans boiling dry could cause total extinction of all life on earth.
Morocco and ulvfugl
This isn’t intended as criticism, but your frequent bickering reminds me of one of the reasons I prefer living in SE Asia to the UK. People here are far less competitive and confrontational, at least in a direct way. When a group of Westerners get together and talk there is often a competitive edge to the conversation that is not present when the locals talk together.
Because I am from the West, I think there is nothing wrong with the occasional heated exchange so long as you don’t carry it around with you. The people I’ve always got on with the best are those who don’t bear grudges. I’ve had real fights with people occasionally (long ago) and the next day it was as if it never happened. How it should be IMHO.
September 21st, 2012 at 11:19 pm
unholy crap Kathy! LOL.
Reality is a bitch, ain’t HeShe?! Life itself is just sort of a “splash” in time, and each of us just a drop-in-the-moment during that very, very long splash. Or “dust in the wind” as per Guy’s most excellent choice of song-tags for a post.
Remember Douglas Adam’s whale that “improbably” appeared 800 miles above a moon… and then slowly recognized itself as a self… hearing noise and saying, “Hmmm , I wonder what that is ???” and “Hmmm, I can move this… flipper…and…” then >SMACK/SplasH< into the surface of the moon.
I think we humans are in the process of one of those kinds of moments ; )
Glad to hear someone making sense in this increasingly insane discussion.
Ways to deny that we are mortal
Religion
Pseudo religion
Belief in civilization and art as proof that we are unique (we are unique but we are still mortal)
Belief that we carry on in our progeny (after a few generations it is possible that none of our unique genes are still there)
Belief that we carry on in our species (all species go extinct)
Belief in a purpose for our lives
Belief that the universe matters
All desperate attempts to not look death in the face. What matters is not good art, souls, religion, lasting longer than others etc. What matters is the moment and it is death that gives our every moment meaning for at any moment we could have no more moments. So smile, dance, and hug someone you love.
Ah well when the stench of 7 billion people dying earlier than expected fills our nostrils people may finally get it.
September 21st, 2012 at 11:57 pm
The intractability of the problem of reconciling science with “spirituality” stems from the lack of discernment of consciousness which illumines the material world.
Within the material world can be recognised gross manifestations such as the body (and the brain). There are also subtle manifestations such a the functions of the reptilian brain (emotions, instincts) the mammalian brain (values, morals, ethics) and the primate brain (intellect). All of these are affected by conditions that affect the brain (physical trauma, chemicals, tumours, diseases, etc).
Consciousness is not apparent as an object. Light itself if not directly seen is invisible. A beam of light passing from left to right in front of a person is apparently non-existent unless there is some material object – even a particle of dust or a wisp of smoke – in its path. But one can see such a light if one steps into the beam and looks directly at it. So too, objectless consciousness can be perceived directly be the intellect.
But just as a reflection of the sun in a lake full of waves and ripples is seen as the glistening and glittering of the waves and ripples, so too consciousness reflected off “objects” in the mind/ego/intellect is recognised as the perception of those objects. It is said that “perception” is reality. It is actually the process by which an image of some phenomenon (an external object, a memory, etc.) is made into an object in the mind/ego/intellect. When this object is illumined by the consciousness it is is recognised as being “perceived” by the “perceiver”. External “reality” is dependent on the process of creation of an object in the mind/ego/intellect: the ears of a bat, the nose of a dog, the eyes of a butterfly (sensitive to ultraviolet light) all create different “realities” from our own.
The “I” is the consciousness illuminating the mind/ego/intellect. This “I”nidentifies with the body/brain, and thence with other characteristics including those derived from gender, society, relationships, etc.
Consciousness itself is not an object and has no parts. It is therefore referred to in some traditions as the Emptiness or the Void. But unlike light, for which there are external objects, in the absence of consciousness there are no objects: it is not an emergent property of objects; objects are an appearance because of it. Conditioned in many ways, it seems to be the manifold separate consciousnesses. It is neither an “I” nor a “not-I”.
Science is valid where it does not venture into domains where it has to address consciousness, a veritable quagmire because the primacy of consciousness is not understood.
September 22nd, 2012 at 1:20 am
One of the biggest things to Let Go:
The Last Day
September 22nd, 2012 at 2:15 am
Paul Chefurka : Arthur Johnson, your comment “story vs. scientific theory vs. some blend of the two” suggests a gap in understanding. IMO the idea of science is every bit as much a cultural story as Norse mythology. It’s part of the foundational narrative of our culture – how we explain who we are to ourselves.
DM isn’t suggesting a substitution of story for science. Instead they are suggesting a shift in the stories we tell about ourselves. Science will remain a part of them, but as I understand it they mainly want to blunt the razor’s edge of our separationist, dominationist stories with respect to our place within nature and with respect to each other.
It’s common for people in our culture to think of cultural narratives or myths as something that only “uncivilized” peoples have. While scientific theories and the scientific method itself are unique tools by which we explore our universe, the “idea of science” is a story. In other words science is a tool but scientism is a story – one to which Western industrial civilization is very much in thrall.
I’ve given thought to this area and its problems, so I’ll offer my take, if I may.
Some of the confusion stems from the fact that the subject crosses many different academic disciplines, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, literature, etc, etc, each with their own territorial boundaries and technical jargon.
So, if we start with that word, culture, and think of it very simply and crudely, as a bundle of stories that are in people’s heads. Of course, that’s inadequate, because we are talking of many millions of people, and immensely complex stories with roots that go back several millennia. As you said, these stories are how we explain who we are, to ourselves. They are how we orientate ourselves, moment to moment, day to day, in relationship to all that exists and all we experience. They give our lives and activities meaning. And it’s not a static thing, it’s a flux, a river.
So then we can split these stories into two main categories, surprisingly easily. Mythos and logos. There appears to be a reason why it is so easy.
That’s because of our brain structure. Left brain and right brain, which for some peculiar reason, have very different, and conflicting, preferences as to ‘how to know’.
Mythos knowledge is poetic, intuitive, emotive, sensual. Logos knowledge is literal, logical, reasoned, cerebral.
It’s not the case that one or the other is ‘better’, both are valid and essential. But typically, individuals tend to favour one or the other, because one or other side of their brain dominates, at a particular time. Grossly oversimplified, musicians and painters are right brain folk, lawyers and scientists are left brain folk.
This physically-based biological heritage often makes it almost impossible for individuals to communicate and have mutual understanding, because they are coming from such radically different world-views. But we can try, what else can we do ?
I differ slightly from what you say, Paul, re science. I think that ALL we HAVE are stories, and that includes science, a logos-type story. However, science ( and law ) are a special sub-category of story. Their stories have to be attached to empirical evidence. The narrative, in other words, has to conform to some tangible, testable, measurable, logical, demonstrable terrain, in a rather precise way. Same goes for evidence in a court case.
The exact relationship that is required between a science story and empirically testable phenomena, is extremely interesting and very hard to establish. I mean, we are talking about a statement emanating from a human mind, and the relationship of that statement to some corresponding aspect of reality. People once thought that this correspondence was simple, obvious, common-sense. ( That’s left us with the archaic heritage of logical positivism and scientism.) The more closely you study the matter, however, the more bewildering and problematic it gets.
In mythos-type stories, this isn’t a problem. The relationship is whatever you imagine it to be. A ginger-bread house is a ginger-bread house because the story says so. But in quantum physics, the photon is a wave, or a particle, depending upon whether someone observes it or not, and Schroedinger’s Cat, inside the box, is simultaneously alive and dead, until you look, and it instantly becomes the one or the other.
The manner in which these conundrums can best be comprehended remains to be resolved…. Nobody, as yet, has come up with a new paradigm which can contain and explain all the anomalies and enigmas. For me, that means the fundamental paradigm for reality, that we hold in our heads as a mental model, is mistaken, incorrect. The world is not what we think it is, nor how we think it is.
September 22nd, 2012 at 2:40 am
Nobody, as yet, has come up with a new paradigm which can contain and explain all the anomalies and enigmas.
That’s true. Perhaps such a paradigm has not been formulated because it is unsayable:
September 22nd, 2012 at 3:39 am
Hi Martin Knight
“Perhaps such a paradigm has not been formulated because it is unsayable:
I suppose that’s where Wittgenstein arrived, with his famous remark ‘Of that which we cannot speak we must remain silent’, but I’m not completely convinced that we cannot say more…
I’m probably in full full agreement with Robin’s model, as outlined above, re consciousness. I suspect any differences between us are merely a matter of alternative wording. I think that that model is near enough to work with, as a general paradigm of reality.
If we accept the analysis that I outlined above, re stories, then bring zen into the picture, I’d say zen is a special kind of story, one that eats all stories, both mythos and logos. It’s the direct confrontation of mind with reality, with no further commentary or interpretation.
And what does zen have to say, concerning that enterprise and that encounter ? Well, it’s famous for it’s ‘direct pointings’, that defy all cultural conventions and analytic paradigms. The silent mind, whose consciousness is unified with the consciousness that pervades all things, the consciousness which pervades, indeed possibly IS, the whole Universe.
September 22nd, 2012 at 3:40 am
ex·tinct [ik-stingkt]
1. no longer in existence; that has ended or died out: an extinct species of fish.
per Guy at the article he wrote for transition voice.
http://transitionvoice.com/2012/08/not-even-a-spoonful-of-sugar-could-help/
Every day, we have more reliable knowledge about the abyss into which we’ve plunged. Consider, for example, the International Energy Agency’s forecast of business-as-usual leading to a 6 C warmer planet by 2035.
Malcolm Light, writing for the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, considers one of the many positive feedbacks we’ve triggered in one planetary region and reaches this conclusion:
This process of methane release will accelerate exponentially, release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century.
Navid, yes I think it is time to dust off all my Doug Adams books – what better reading for these times. I forgot about the whale.
September 22nd, 2012 at 6:40 am
Navid and Kathy C, I agree. I think I’ll put out my Douglas Adams collection and reread those. It’s a clear reminder that The Virgin Terry is right: we live in a surreal world!
In fact, the last 18 hours or so have had their own surreal quality for me. I’ve had to hire a nurse practitioner to help out with the madness at my office. She’s a middle aged woman who is a typical white, middle class, conservative Christian, mother of two.
For some reason, while we were talking at the end of the day yesterday, she mentioned that Barack Obama was a Muslim. I almost fell out of my chair. On questioning, she admitted that she didn’t really know that he was a Muslim but that he “acted like he was”. The more we talked, the more I realized how deficient she is with critical thinking skills – at least as regards anything outside her traditional right-wing conservative viewpoint. She only works for me for two days a week. The rest of the time, she’s a teacher of other nurses. I just found the whole experience to be surreal, particularly when juxtaposed with the frequent conversations here about trying to educate people about collapse, etc.
Later, we went to the county fair. I hadn’t been in decades, but now that we have goats and chickens, I wanted to go see the livestock. That part was a lot of fun – I met several local goat growers/farmers – but it was in stark contrast to all the little fat kids with fat parents running around (Arkansas is one of the most obese places on the planet) eating funnel cakes and cotton candy. No Earth-shattering wisdom to come from that, but it just seemed surreal. — Full disclosure: I had a couple bites of funnel cake myself.
Then, as Josh and I got on the Tilt-a-Whirl, I was again impressed with the surreality of the situation as a 52 year old doctor was screaming like a kid while riding a fair ride with his gay partner. Fun, but different.
September 22nd, 2012 at 7:09 am
When a group of Westerners get together and talk there is often a competitive edge to the conversation that is not present when the locals talk together.
Morris Berman once asked a friend of his who practised the Feldenkrais technique what he had gained from it. After some thought, the practitioner replied that he had noticed that it was less and less important for him to win an argument.
September 22nd, 2012 at 7:39 am
Kathy and House, I just found this cut. The Improbable Whale moment for Humanity has lasted the a few hundred years – we are just starting to realize we have flippers !!! and that wind… hmmm “:
“…It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a Sperm Whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet and since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity. This is what it thought, as it fell:
The Whale: Ahhh! Woooh! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my… well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a… tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what’s this roaring sound, whooshing past what I’m suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I’m dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There’s an awful lot of that now isn’t it? And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me? Hello Ground!… (whale dies).
Curiously the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, ‘Oh no, not again.’ Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.
—–
Don’t Panic!
http://fuckyeahh2g2.tumblr.com/page/2
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:03 am
Tis a privilege to watch the Beginning
Tis a privilege to watch the End
Tis a privilege to raise the sword
And to struggle by tooth and claw
Tis a privilege to raise the hand
And to caress both lover and child
Tis a privilege to be conscious
That hub of this eternal Now
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:10 am
Kathy,
Intelligent humor like “HitchHiker’s Guide” is better than drugs or alcohol ; ).
We really can’t take any of this personal, I think. We are happening because of what happened in the past. We do not have any real collective self-control. And there is no “purpose” that we are destined to fulfill… and we hate that. Especially the lack of self-control, and the lack of control over our destiny… blah, blah, blah. Goddamn, this is worser than when I learned there really wasn’t a Santa – I mean it. That sucked. This is worse.
I have no idea how much if any life will make it through this transition. But this song is what I think of now when I think of things like this:
——————–
House – it sounds like the nurse practitioner added to the madness in your office ; 0. She sounds pretty normal to me. Like you describe, I find myself sort of “shocked” once in a while to realize the majority of people around me at any given moment think mostly like your assistant. I am really glad you included the details of your night out – experience the surreality first hand once in a while.
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:12 am
oops… monkey fingers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xs7zeof-NA
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:39 am
Dr. House I just had a neighbor tell me she would rather have a Mormon in the White House than a president. Must be that Fox News is gearing up the Muslim issue. I told her I didn’t think he was a Muslim or a Christian, that I didn’t think anyone in high office was religious at all. Egads Muslims don’t pray in the morning at school, they pray what 5 times a day on a rug facing Mecca. 4 years he has hidden that. And they were willing to impeach Clinton for a blow job but not Obama for forging a birth certificate and gaining the presidency illegally. Come on Inhoffe, come on Orin Hatch, come on Ryan and Romney – do your duty call out the Muslim for what he is.
Clearly Fox and friends can subvert critical thinking (if it ever existed). Sometimes I will watch a Colbert clip or a clip from the Daily Show. I do love when the pull out the various Fox commentator comments and you get to hear them one after the other deliver the same line. Its the only time I ever see Fox except the waiting rooms of Dr’s offices. I am always appalled.
There are times when I do not mourn the passing of human life on the planet. And other times that I can barely stand it – Raffi Big Beautiful Planet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk9aCy7vXs0
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:49 am
Dr. House – glad you had a good time at the fair. I always loved the rollercoaster – haven’t ridden for years but looks like we are at the top of the world rollercoaster and about to shoot down. What a ride it is going to be. Consider your enjoying the rides a preparation
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:58 am
Re. “Mormons”…
Who gets into heaven ?… “The correct answer was…”
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/152270/abandon-all-hope
September 22nd, 2012 at 9:26 am
ulvfugl,
I totally get what Kathy C is saying. It’s not nihilism. Think about it for a minute. She completely buys Guy’s claim that catastrophic global warming will cause human extinction by 2030 and extinction of all life by 2050. it’s a lock. It’s baked in the cake. No power on Earth or beyond can change that now. Humans have no more than 18 years to live. It’s a terminal condition. There.is.no.uncertainty. There.are.no.error.bars.
If you accept that, if you buy Guy’s and Kathy C’s claim on that, then her advice on what to do in these last few years of human existence (“smile, dance, and hug someone you love”) makes perfect sense. Don’t you see? Kathy C is saying that it’s time to start the process of saying good-bye to all those you love or simply care about. The time has come to say all those things that you always wanted to say, or always meant to say, but for whatever reasons, you just couldn’t bring yourself to say. Now is the time to do that, because the time left is short. Very, very short. It’s time to “put all your affairs in order”, so to speak.
Tick tock.
September 22nd, 2012 at 9:50 am
Arctic Sea Ice: What, Why, and What Next
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/21/arctic-sea-ice-what-why-and-what-next/
————-
Figure 3 is particularly interesting. The “phase-change” that Ugo Bardi talks about :
“Kinnard was kind enough to send me the team’s underlying data. Combining it with satellite based observations from 1979 onward, the last few decades pop out. Ice coverage fluctuates for centuries, but stays in a narrow band, until suddenly, in the last few decades, the amount of ice left in late summer plunges.”
September 22nd, 2012 at 9:52 am
[Crosspost:]
At first, it seems pretty bizarre,
Our whole species crossing the bar;
But we’re hearing the knell,
So we might just as well
See things as they really are.
September 22nd, 2012 at 9:56 am
AJ : If you accept that, if you buy Guy’s and Kathy C’s claim on that, then her advice on what to do in these last few years of human existence (“smile, dance, and hug someone you love”) makes perfect sense. Don’t you see? Kathy C is saying that it’s time to start the process of saying good-bye to all those you love or simply care about. The time has come to say all those things that you always wanted to say, or always meant to say, but for whatever reasons, you just couldn’t bring yourself to say. Now is the time to do that, because the time left is short. Very, very short. It’s time to “put all your affairs in order”, so to speak.
Hahaha, no I don’t see it like that at all, myself. I think we should smile, dance, hug, anyway, because we all have a finite life and always have had. I live with death, all the time, so I try to be as happy and carefree as I can manage to be.
I don’t accept the 18 years because there are so many error bars. If, for example, there’s a world war, starting this autumn, with nuclear, chemical and bio weapons, the future will be very different, to if there is no war. Or if the banking and finance system collapses, then economic activity will plummet, and so will CO2 emissions, or if there’s a global pandemic that kills half the population, likewise… with vastly decreased population, the future would roll out differently to BAU….
So all I’m saying is that it’s impossible to make a precise prediction. That doesn’t change my belief that we are headed into a Permian-type mass extinction event. But if you look at the geological record, such changes took a very long time, relative to a human lifetime. We’re changing the planet so rapidly, almost unprecedented speed, that the results will be dramatic, but may still be slow from a human perspective.
And while I’m still alive, I have no objection whatsoever to people making hand-sewn books, if that’s what they want to do.
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:09 am
Kathy C,
If extinction by 2030 is now baked in the cake, then arguably a better choice than Douglas Adams is the 1959 movie “On the Beach”, and the novel of the same name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)
The conversation between Admiral Bridie and Lt. Hosgood near the end of the movie, as the deadly radioactive cloud drifts over Melbourne, bears repeating:
Admiral Bridie: HOSGOOD ? HOSGOOD ?
Lt. Hosgood: YES, SIR ?
Admiral Bridie: IT LOOKS AS IF WE’VE HAD IT, HOSGOOD. WOULD YOU LIKE SHORE LEAVE OR ARE YOU STAYING ABOARD ?
Lt. Hosgood: I’M REMAINING ABOARD, SIR.
Admiral Bridie: WOULD YOU HAVE A GLASS OF SHERRY WITH AN OLD MAN ?
Lt. Hosgood: NO, SIR,
Admiral Bridie: BUT I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO HAVE ONE WITH YOU…
Lt. Hosgood: SIR.
Admiral Bridie: THERE’S ONE THING THAT ALWAYS BOTHERED ME, HOSGOOD. A GIRL LIKE YOU– WHY NO YOUNG MEN ?
Lt. Hosgood: THEY NEVER ASKED ME. I GUESS MAYBE IT WAS THE UNIFORM.
[ Glasses Clink ]
Admiral Bridie: TO A BLIND… BLIND WORLD.
I should add that the scientist in the film, Julian Osborne (played by Fred Astaire) is a dead ringer for Guy. Memorable Julian Osborne quote:
Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough to blow themselves off the face of the Earth?
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:18 am
navid,
A minor, but perhaps not insignificant, nit to pick with the SA article. The 2012 Arctic sea ice minimum is actually 760,000 sq km smaller than the 2007 minimum. So the situation is actually even worse than described.
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:34 am
Paul Chefurka,
DM isn’t suggesting a substitution of story for science. Instead they are suggesting a shift in the stories we tell about ourselves.
Indeed. You’re right. I mis-spoke. DM is certainly about fostering such a shift.
Science will remain a part of them, but as I understand it they mainly want to blunt the razor’s edge of our separationist, dominationist stories with respect to our place within nature and with respect to each other.
Yes, although my reading of DM is that in the new stories, science will be in something of a subordinate position. PK talks about this in “The Quants and the Poets” at the DM blog.
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:37 am
AJ : Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough to blow themselves off the face of the Earth?
I think it is remarkable what a close run thing it is. If the dominant culture had been different, we wouldn’t have got into this mess. It’s the insane capitalist ‘greed is good’, combined with a science devoid of ethics, plus a few other strands, like the Biblical ‘go forth and multiply’ and ‘dominion over all living things’, etc, that created the recipe for disaster and extinction.
We could, with just a little tweaking, have had a dominant global culture similar to the Amish, or to the Kogi, people who take their responsibility to care for the world seriously, and see our culture as the reckless irresponsible foolish Younger Brother who refuses to listen to wise advice from the Older Brother.
http://youtu.be/pnLX9pdKuEg
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:46 am
“I should let you in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centred, civically ignorant sheep. You eat poisoned food, buy manufactured products no one needs, and turn an uncaring eye away from millions of people suffering and dying all around you.”
http://finalbullet.com/2012/09/07/how-we-lost-the-future/
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:50 am
Auto-defrost
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:52 am
Arthur – I think it is very good to nit-pik an article like this. I think that despite the weak attempt at “good news” the article makes it very clear nothing about this is “good news,” and I think makes it perfectly clear “current models” are grossly underestimating what is happening.
The picture painted – in an honest and balanced way IMHO – is that all of our models are grossly wrong. There are too many repetitions of “but current models do not take this into account…”
Looking at Figure 7 on June Ice Extent- note the trend line and how the past three years show we have broken that trend line to the downside. This June extent and volume is a “lagging indicator” relative to the September data (fig 3 and 6) – but it looks like the June pattern is now following the September-pattern of collapsing extent and volume. In other words, the June data will look like the September data within a few years… and then we can update the models maybe …???
Of all the feedback loops mentioned, the waking of the microbes in the tundra reminds me of that line from a WWII movie, after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor… “We have awakened a Sleeping Giant…”
I think this Limits of Growth Model #3 graph is still likely to be accurate:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/ecolonomics/00/ecolonomics-004-ltg.png
September 22nd, 2012 at 11:08 am
Arthur,
This part I’d nit-pic too:
“A reminder that some periods of the last 10,000 years have been a bit warmer than our present, seemingly without triggering runaway explosive release of Arctic methane,”
An apples-to-plywood comparison – strawman distraction to avoid reality?
How many times in the last 10,000 did we dig up and burn 50 million years of accumulated Carbon (fossil fuels) within a century or so ???
So… jeez, ya think this time might be a just a wee-bit different than those times in the past 10,000 years?
The delusions and bargaining die hard – especially for the highly insulated.
September 22nd, 2012 at 11:09 am
From a wise man, Dmitry Orlov
“I do not view aging as a competitive sport, and that I do not aspire to smashing any records in the longevity department.”
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/09/le-vieillard-gros.html#more
Ulvfugl you wrote ” I think we should smile, dance, hug, anyway, because we all have a finite life and always have had. I live with death, all the time, so I try to be as happy and carefree as I can manage to be.”
I was thinking of adding a comment along the same lines, but had to go feed chickens so you beat me to it. OK I think I am up to 4 things MB and I agree on and at least 1 that you and I agree on.
September 22nd, 2012 at 11:26 am
The second half of On the Beach (1959). The ending starts at 49:00. The scene between Admiral Bridle and Lt. Hosgood starts at 52:13
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn7JAE5D39o&feature=relmfu
September 22nd, 2012 at 11:36 am
And the first half of On the Beach.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxvx9gQ8k0&feature=fvwrel
There’s a more recent adaptation (also available on youtube) in color, but the fact that the original was shot in black and white gives it a particularly powerful mood.
September 22nd, 2012 at 4:12 pm
Thanks for the agreement, Kathy C. Personally, I think the ‘hug’ should be extended to all sentient beings, which is something I was trying to get around to in the previous Attachment/Non-attachment thread. Indeed, it ought to be extended to include the whole damn biosphere, if we had a culture that was not terminally psychotic.
There really is no conflict between the spiritual stuff that I am into, and good science.
For instance, I use a variety of mudras that I have learned from a variety of sources to control my chi, and to control the condition of my inner being ( or soul ).
Here’s one to freak Yorchichan out. I can become completely weightless whilst walking, using mudras. This will, I guess, confirm Yorchichan’s estimation of my sanity.
However, I don’t mean that, if I was walking upon a measuring scale, that it would not register the gravitational pressure from the soles of my feet. What I mean is that all inner sensation of weight, of a heavy body, disappears.
Believers in dogmatic scientism will scoff, and say that its some sort of subjective illusion. But real scientists would say ‘Okay, let’s have a look what’s going on and see if we can understand it’.
I don’t know if there are mobile brain scanners, or treadmills attached to brain scanners, but it shouldn’t be too difficult for someone somewhere to do a PhD on this, ( if they havn’t already ? ). There’s a perfectly plausible hypothesis to test, which is that certain configurations of hands provide a feedback loop to certain brain areas, to effect functioning. Possibly, there’s an area controlling the sensation of bodily weight, which is influenced in some way by the mudras I use.
This sort of thinking is supported by this research on athletes for example.
September 22nd, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Found this beautiful MV while surfing the Web this afternoon. Powerful rebuttal to Kansas and their “Dust in the Wind”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQz2GHTLfwc&feature=related
September 22nd, 2012 at 5:00 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26YLehuMydo&feature=player_embedded
Oppenheimer
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
September 22nd, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Ulvful – you say we should extend hugging to all sentient beings. who or what do you include in that circle? Just humans, or self aware animals, or all creatures that feel and perceive? My dog loves to be hugged (but being a rat terrier not when she is on the trail of a furry thing). My chickens reject hugging although a small number like to be stroked – most just want to be fed. Please let me know what circle of beings I should hug. Gorrillas? I will pass on that. George Bush – no never mind he is not sentient.
September 22nd, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Nice video, Arthur, thanks,
I still think we are all dust in the wind, but we do have souls.
‘Oh, all that soul and chi stuff is woowoo hippy garbage’ they say.
But look, the damn thing, the ‘stuff’, can be detected, scientifically, measured with instruments. How much light do YOU emit ?
http://youtu.be/dOYikGwoVj4
September 22nd, 2012 at 6:01 pm
you say we should extend hugging to all sentient beings. who or what do you include in that circle? Just humans, or self aware animals, or all creatures that feel and perceive? My dog loves to be hugged (but being a rat terrier not when she is on the trail of a furry thing). My chickens reject hugging although a small number like to be stroked – most just want to be fed. Please let me know what circle of beings I should hug. Gorrillas? I will pass on that. George Bush – no never mind he is not sentient.
Well, a lot depends upon how we define the word ‘hug’. I’m using it here very loosely, figuratively, metaphorically. Certainly doesn’t include anyone from the Bush Crime Family or Monsanto Crime Corp, or anyone who is willfully cruel to animals. I’m not the sort of saint who says love all humans unconditionally, or even respect all humans unconditionally. I think respect has to be earned, and some people forfeit their rights, by immoral behaviour, and should be treated accordingly.
I think anyone who willfully harms the biosphere is committing a crime. This is hard to define, because it’s a new paradigm. I suppose, like any justice system, there has to be a scale of culpability.
However, for the non-human world my love is unconditional. But love implies care and respect, and you don’t go and hug something that clearly doesn’t want to be hugged, because that’s disrespectful and intrusive. Most wild animals don’t want anything to do with humans, and who can blame them for that. But I have myself cultivated intimate relationships with wild animals and birds, and it’s surprising what you can hug if you know what you’re doing… see this video… but don’t do it if you don’t know what you are doing…
http://youtu.be/7oEYH7m1cmo
It’s very hard to explain, but with animals and birds, there’s a way of intuitively sensing if you’ve got the relationship just right. Linda Kohanov has gone into this in great depth, re her Tao of Equus stuff with horses.
I have had, still have, relationships with many, many species. I had one cockerel whom I loved and admired very much. He was the dominant cockerel and as he aged younger males challenged him, and he fought with them, and over the years first lost one eye, then the other. Which meant he couldn’t be left out with the flock, because he’d be attacked and unable to defend himself, and he didn’t know where he was.
I had to decide whether it was kinder to kill him or what to do. I put him in a coop alone, and he lived like that, just on wheat, for three years. Every day I had to decide whether his suffering was too much, or whether he wanted to live. He greeted me when he heard me coming, and I had to steer him to the wheat, and so his random pecking would find the food bowl and the water. He’d crow very vigorously, and so I guessed he was feeling okay. But some days he’d be in despair, and greet me with long anguished sad noises. In a very cold snap in the winter, he suddenly weakened and died naturally in the night.
I have killed lots of cockerels, ( and other things ) but I hate doing it. I feel sick afterwards. That cockerel was very special, an amazing individual character. I had another one that was just as incredible. We used to have long conversations. I’d make noises to him and he’d reply. The books all say that cockerels take no interest in eggs and chicks, but he was fascinated by chicks and spent long periods with his head down inspecting them and talking to them.
Oh, another thing. They fall in love. The cockerel and hen put there heads down close to the ground, side by side, and gaze into each others eyes, completely still, for a long time, and then that pair go around together to find a good nest place and mate.
These were all rare breed poultry though, some of which are still much closer to the original wild jungle fowl, than the modern commercial breeds, so their behaviour is a lot different.
Minerals ? Rocks ? Well, I think they should be respected too. I’m not certain what the precise right relationship should be. I listened to an old man on the radio who was a stone mason who worked restoring cathedrals and similar buildings. He said that for him stone is alive. He taps a piece with his hammer, and the sound it makes speaks to him.
September 22nd, 2012 at 6:08 pm
Whoops, I meant to paste this video, it’s a bit better. But there are also better I’ve seen but can’t find at the moment.
http://youtu.be/azBWVt_R9vQ
September 22nd, 2012 at 6:29 pm
Hug a gorilla ? Why not ?
http://youtu.be/uUxLlVUVxIY
But I think part of the thing of getting the right relationship with all these wild animals and birds, you empty yourself of your own responses, you don’t go to them, you respect their independent will, and let them come to you. You have to understand their non-verbal language and the sign language that they put out.
September 22nd, 2012 at 6:43 pm
Arthur Johnson
Just a note-
it sems that this bit of dialogue is actually spoken by Lt. Hosgood:
“…BUT I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO HAVE ONE WITH YOU… ”
Funny how in the text it reads with a different emphasis, like Lt. Hosgood is not responding and the Admiral has to keep declairing affection, but when it is read correctly it is far more dramatic and romantic, as is seen in the film. The wonders of language and ….timing.
September 22nd, 2012 at 6:56 pm
navid
I hav looke over brifly the SA sea ice linnk and find this small quote at the end most worth repeating:
“The math is slightly different than Wadhams’, but the answer is roughly the same – a warming effect (a ‘climate forcing’ in the parlance of the field) roughly as large as all current human-caused warming.”
Repeat…
“roughly as large as all current human-caused warming”.
Wow. Olso as noted by others the official models are clearly way too conservative and ‘Hopeful’, and smack of massaging a dire forcast so as not to stop ‘us’ in our preverbial tracks.
Very rough awakening soon for the rest who aren’t looking at the real data.
September 22nd, 2012 at 7:25 pm
BC Nurse Prof
I have been reading the earlier link by titled:
‘Neoliberalism, Degrowth and the Fate of Health Systems’.
I have to say it is great to read authors who are attempting to steer the dialogue with ‘the established bureaucracies and scientific institutions’ into an acceptance of ‘degrowth’ as a necessity, and not to be seen as just a major recession. They do this by arguing that as carbon based fuels are peaking or have peaked it is basic thermodynamics that leads to the conclusion that there will be less net energy to put in the front end of the world capitalim system. Acceptance of the situation is a big start in changing thinking, no wonder denial is the previous step in change.
A quote from the article:
” Before discussing how health systems are affected we first lay out the larger social-ecological context of modern society’s predicament. This includes a brief overview of the idea of degrowth,[i],[ii],[iii] which is a response to ecological overshoot and reaching the physical resources and ecological limits to growth, and why it must supplant growth as the cardinal metaphor of modern culture. Then we outline how the inability to perceive that the world has reached the end of growth –by mistakenly seeing the present as a Great Recession- threatens health systems….
Understanding economic contraction is not merely a cognitive process of evaluating arguments and evidence. The modern mind is ensconced in a mythology that sacralizes technological progress, mastery of nature and economic growth. These convictions make it difficult or impossible to see the unfolding socioeconomic descent as anything other than a deep economic recession that will end when the correct policy measures, stimulus, austerity or some combination, are enacted. As children and throughout adulthood we moderns learn in sublime, tacit and explicit ways that a constantly expanding economy is good, has no downside, validates our sense of self-worth, and is therefore the natural state of human affairs. (We also are socialized to believe that nature is passive and subject to the dictates of humans, meaning we can use our intelligence and technology to get out of environmental dilemmas such as peak oil and other resource depletion, climate change, overpopulation, acidification of the oceans and so on through the long list of ecological insults and damage we have wrought.)
For instance, French Premier Francois Hollande in June said, “If there is no growth then no matter what we do we will not meet our debt and deficit reduction targets.” President Obama at about the same time told Charlie Rose, in an interview broadcast on CBS, that running for president is about laying out your “theory for how to grow the economy.” This year Prime Minister Steven Harper said, “… we’ve tried to focus on what we can do to sustain growth in the Canadian economy.” In short, economic growth is the quintessential policy goal of all Western governments. Imagine seeing any of these three leaders giving a speech announcing that humanity has reached the limits to growth and therefore will have to redesign the social world.
This brings us to our bedrock argument: economic expansion is thermodynamically impossible because there is no longer sufficient net energy flowing into the global economy to restart and sustain growth.[iv],[v] In support of abandoning the quest for growth ecological economist Tim Jackson points out: “The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate, the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.”[vi] This 80-fold increase will, of course, never happen. The two-part rhetorical question we have is, how long it will take and how much further damage will be done before this is absorbed into humanity’s collective consciousness?
The contradiction between the mythology of perpetual economic growth and the realities of its physical limits that Jackson implies is playing out in the modern world. This conflict between cultural belief (one can argue that mythology is a collective illusion or even delusion[vii] experienced as truth[viii]) and thermodynamic and ecological reality is having devastating socioeconomic consequences because contemporary societies are organized to function with an expanding economy.”
Here is the original link:
http://healthafteroil.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/neoliberalism-degrowth-and-the-fate-of-health-systems/#_edn30
I hope you don’t mind I posted it again, its well worth copying and sticking it the pidgeon hole of your local office global warming, peak oil denier, and their slightly less sceptical buddies, to get them playing off each other and having the debate, IMHO. Some of this is well known to NBL regulars, however, to have it reasoned, clearly with so many recent references adds to the impact with conservatives. If anyone does copy it, I suggest clearly footnoting the web address and also definitly include printing the references, which are longer than the actual article, for intimidation value. Note, the said intimidation value is not necessary to accept the arguments in the article, it is to challenge the denier mind some semblance of having a mojority of world opinion on their side to justify the denial. It just challenges that, IMHO.
BTW I am keeping a USB drive on me at all times that has many of the articles and utube segments that pertain to evidence and arguments about the issues discussed here on NBL and have several copies ready to give to people who obviously need a shove in the right direction. There is no substitute for the power of sitting down for hours researching these things to change one’s own mind on issues, but some people who are vocal deniers haven’t really done that, and can do with a push. I tell them to check the references, even just one.
September 22nd, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Ozman
That article is pretty freaky. It really is game-over.
“Very rough awakening soon for the rest who aren’t looking at the real data.”
Yes, I suppose we will have another 9-11 or two or three to distract us muppets. Can’t have the muppets waking up. That would be very inconvenient. Better to distract with moozlimz and other goblins.
September 22nd, 2012 at 7:58 pm
“Imagine if, the next time you go to see The Long Day’s Journey Into Night or The Dark Knight Rises, the activity of your brain is recorded by an MRI machine. Would a full scientific explanation of those recordings really constitute the “best or only” way to understand the experience? For anyone?
Yet in their eagerness to bash those that dare to suggest that one might experience wonder and awe, or be moved, outside a scientific context, the scientistas happily dismiss culture without a second thought.
When the philosopher A. J. Ayer was asked in the 1970s to identify the key weakness of logical positivism, Ayer, once one of its leading propononents, replied that “nearly all of it was false.” By recycling the discredited notions of a dead philosophy, those that rashly criticised Sarewitz have demonstrated that they would benefit from a good, hard reading of poetry.”
http://mysticpolitics.com/faith-and-logical-positivism-limits-of-science-and-scientists/
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Ozman,
Yea, I wondered if anyone would pick up on that. That key line is not in the script, which makes me wonder if the actress might have ad-libbed it. It’s one of the most intense scenes in the movie.
My larger point, though, is that if imminent extinction by catastrophic global warming is our lot, as Guy and Kathy C claim, man, literature and film like “On the Beach” is what we should read and see, to help us psychologically prepare for the stench of those 7 billion people who shortly will be lying dead all over the planet. I mean, DOUGLAS ADAMS??? Please.
True story. In the mid-1980′s, just before Gorbachev came to power, the Soviet Union and the U.S. were actually very close to nuclear war. Although we civilians weren’t privy to the details, we sensed things were bad, and could get really bad, really quick. I was working at my first “real” job (full-time entry-level, benefits–the kind that doesn’t exist in the U.S. anymore). I came to work one morning whistling “Waltzing Matilda”, and a co-worker asked me “So, Arthur, are you expecting a nuclear holocaust?” The previous night, “On the Beach” was shown prime time on one of the major networks. ALL of my co-workers had watched it, me included. The movie sparked serious discussion that day at work about what we would do when the missles started flying. To this day, I’m convinced that the network broadcast the movie for just that purpose, to begin preparing us psychologically for the aftermath of a nuclear war, one in which there might be no way out even for the initial survivors.
“Waltzing Matilda, waltzing matilda,…”
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:40 pm
I read somewhere that Gorbachev, some time before he became president, visited Esalen and tripped on LSD with a whole bunch of other notable names, and that changed his view of politics and America and everything else….
‘How come you smile so much ?’
http://youtu.be/PkO_aLUzOmQ
September 22nd, 2012 at 8:45 pm
The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
September 22nd, 2012 at 9:20 pm
ulvfugl,
There is still time…brother.
September 22nd, 2012 at 9:55 pm
ulvfugl,
I heard that rumor about Gorbachev and Esalen too. No idea if it’s true or not. I do suspect that the major TV network executives at the time were privy to something. A plan was in the works, and we civilians were being prepared. “On the Beach” was one of several “preparatory” films and dramas about nuclear war that were broadcast during the same time period.
September 22nd, 2012 at 10:18 pm
There is still time…brother.
That’s an exceptionally nice thing to say, Arthur.
I get tortured beyond endurance, once, twice, more, every single day, so it’s not so hard for me to let go of all this…. It’s tempting to leave, really. But I have my dog and birds and other stuff that rely upon me.
But wtf IS it ? Like a bizarre dream ? And it’ll all carry in without me ? What will it all have meant ? All so very strange….
Where I grew up, as a kid, my dad was friendly with the guy next door. Some terrible thing happened that I barely understood. Turned out the guy was friends of the guys who gave the nuclear secrets to the Russians. So the British covert agencies gave hima very hard time. Why hadn’t he informed them, when he knew ? His defence was that he put friendship before patriotism. He was never charged with any crime, but they destroyed his career, and his family broke up from the stress. It infected my family too. Fear and paranoia, global power politics intruding into private family life, that had nothing to do with any of it…
In a way, things are worse now, more dangerous. The Mutually Assured Destruction meant that Russia and USA were constantly on disciplined high alert. Now, that’s gone, and nuclear stuff is all over the place, and nobody really knows wtf is going on….
Some appropriate sad sort of music…
http://youtu.be/lwSWDwfsnMg
September 22nd, 2012 at 11:38 pm
Regarding GMO products, a simple change in nucleotide sequence at a particular site in the genome need not necessarily comply in a simple correspondence in engendering a proposed change: the once-derided “junk” DNA that apparently had no useful role is now recognised as controlling the expression of the DNA that acts “normally” by coding for proteins and other controlling regions. This increases in complexity by a few orders of magnitude.
If we add in the effects of the
The Histone Code” very many more order of magnitude are added, to the point where today’s genetic engineers bring to mind the proverbial bull in the china shop.
With regard to neoplasia as a behavioural aberration in metazoan cells it has been suggested that in such conditions the affected cells are reverting towards their primordial (pre-metazoan) individualism, but alas, now being “domesticated”, they are no longer able to survive in the wild.
Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors
September 22nd, 2012 at 11:45 pm
Regarding GMO products, a simple change in nucleotide sequence at a particular site in the genome need not necessarily comply in a simple correspondence in engendering a proposed change: the once-derided “junk” DNA that apparently had no useful role is now recognised as controlling not only the expression of the DNA that acts “normally” (i.e. codes for proteins) but also controls other controlling regions. This increases in complexity by a few orders of magnitude.
If we add in the effects of the
The Histone Code” very many more order of magnitude are added, to the point where today’s genetic engineers bring to mind the proverbial bull in the china shop.
September 22nd, 2012 at 11:48 pm
With regard to neoplasia as a behavioural aberration in metazoan cells it has been suggested that in such conditions the affected cells are reverting towards their primordial (pre-metazoan) individualism, but alas, now being “domesticated”, they are no longer able to survive in the wild.
Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors
September 23rd, 2012 at 1:12 am
Fascinating. So that line of thinking must derive from Lynn Margulis ? Cells that were once independent, got incorporated into larger organisms, and then became ‘us’, and now something triggers their ancient longing for independence, they want to get free again and go their own way… but they’re stuck, like domestic chickens in a farm shed, no way back to the wild….
My dog is in season, she sleeps in the porch, and sometimes, when she smells foxies in the vicinity, instead of her usual barking, she does a long sing-song wolf howl… her hormones remembering something from long, long ago…
September 23rd, 2012 at 1:32 am
You have to understand their non-verbal language and the sign language that they put out.
Even the significance of the sounds of creatures, including humans, can be comprehended by appropriate training, or so it is said. This is referred to in the New Testament as “the speaking of tongues”: understanding and speaking a language that one has never heard before.
One of the better-known references to it in Eastern traditions:
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 3:17
Word, meaning, and perception tend to get lumped together, each confused with the others; focusing on the distinctions between them with perfect discipline yields insight into the language of all beings.
All such tricks are referred to as “siddhis” (powers): the traditions sternly warn against pursuing them. By stoking the fire of the ego they distract and mislead, and can, to the less wise, be a highway to perdition.
September 23rd, 2012 at 1:59 am
Thanks so much for that, Robin.
Don’t know about the last bit though. Sounds a bit silly to me, like warnings not be distracted by beautiful women
I’m afraid I’m the sort of person who finds the beckoning hand waving from a dark alley irresistible, and I don’t care about perdition.
12 years ago, I came out of hospital, thin as a Belsen inmate, just a skeleton, too weak to stand. The ambulance brought me home, took me in a wheel chair to my living room, sat me on the sofa and left me to it. It took me two hours to go from there to the kitchen and back, a few yards, holding onto the furniture. It was midwinter, freezing cold, my neighbour called 2 or 3 times a day to feed me. I mean, like a baby, putting food into my mouth with a fork.
That was a hard time. When I was strong enough to walk, I went into my garden. It was pouring with rain. I saw a rabbit, sheltering under a gorse bush, and was surprised it did not run away. I threw a small piece of stick at it, then thought what a nasty person I am, why do a thing like that ? I walked very slowly near to the rabbit and sat down, and talked it, and said I was sorry and ashamed that I’d been such a gross and horrible creature all my life. I asked if it felt as bad as I did. It just sat there and ignored me, in a slightly contemptuous, dignified sort of way. We just sat there for a long time.
The next morning when I gave pellets to my rheas in the early morning, it was there and ate some, and then it became tame, and if I called it, ‘bunny, bunny, bunny’, it would come running up to me, from 150 yards away. In the morning, it would be waiting at the front door, and hop along behind me to the shed where I kept the food.
It would just about take wheat from my hand, but preferred not to be touched, I tried a few times, but it moved away.
After a while, more rabbits appeared, and also became tame, but not as tame as that one. Once, on a very hot summer day, one female rabbit was laying down flat in her side in the midday sun. I went and sat down beside her, a yard away. After a while her babies appeared and came and suckled from her teats, all completely unafraid of my presence.
The next year, they all caught myxomatosis and I had to spend the summer killing them. That was hard, too.
If that sort of thing leads me into perdition, so be it.
September 23rd, 2012 at 2:05 am
Wiki says of perdition : Christian views on Hell vary, but in general traditionally agree that hell is a place or a state in which the souls of the unsaved suffer the consequences of sin.
It seems that idea derives from Zarathustra, if this guy is to be believed :
You might think, no, that is an obvious idea known around the world, it is part of the human inheritance and can’t have been invented by one person. But that is not so. Good and evil have no part in most human cosmologies. This view of the universe was unknown to most civilizations until Zarathustra’s teachings entered post-exile Judaism and spread from there to Christianity and Islam and thence around the world. American Indians had no such notion, nor did the Greeks, the Romans, the Australian Aborigines, or anyone else I know of. Most Chinese people still find it puzzling, while advanced Hindu thinkers consider it childish.
http://benedante.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/zarathustra-first-prophet.html
September 23rd, 2012 at 2:17 am
Incidentally, Robin, referring slightly to the medical aspect of your persona, why the hell should I be worried about hell, when I am already IN hell ?
The zomigs have stopped working. I am now taking lyrica/pregabalin left over from a previous crisis when they stopped working. They don’t really work either, but I’m taking double this time, plus paracetamol, which I hate. My dilemma is awful. When this happens, I appeal to the doctors, who say, okay try this and come back in three weeks if it doesn’t work, so, when it doesn’t work, I’m in hell, the pain just goes on and on, no sleep, I’ve got a heap of packets, all sorts of stuff that didn’t work…
Hahahaha, I really couldn’t care less if I go to hell because of siddhis or any other reason
I have met all the Wrathful Deities, there’s nothing that I fear in the entire Universe, so if I meet the devil I’ll embrace him and then spit in his face
Btw, good lecture on the Last Day, I listened to it all.
September 23rd, 2012 at 2:48 am
“Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? No one can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or has the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it’s dangerous? No one can tell. This is a bizarre situation to arise in medicine, a discipline in which everything is supposed to be based on evidence.”
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/the-drugs-dont-work-how-the-medical-industrial-complex-systematically-suppresses-negative-studies.html#D8H0qwGxA3gmiQ7X.99
September 23rd, 2012 at 3:23 am
ulvfugl
“Hug a gorilla ? Why not ?”
How about a tiger
” The man who jumped out of the Bronx Zoo’s monorail into the tiger exhibit was charged with trespass Saturday, according to law enforcement officials.
Investigators now believe that David Villalobos was not attempting to commit suicide Friday afternoon when he made the leap into the tiger den. Villalobos, 25, was mauled by a Siberian tiger before zoo employees rescued him by using fire extinguishers to distract the big cat, zoo officials said.
Villalobos was charged Saturday with third-degree criminal trespass, a misdemeanor, and another lesser charge of trespass. He was issued a desk appearance ticket with a future court date for arraignment.
Based on Villalobos’ statements to investigators and what they’ve seen on his Facebook page it appears he was obsessed with the tigers and just wanted to be with them, police said.
According to police spokesman Paul Browne, Villalobos told NYPD detectives that his leap was definitely not a suicide attempt, but a desire to be “one with the tiger.” http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/22/14035351-bronx-zoo-mauling-man-wanted-to-be-one-with-the-tiger?lite
Not every creature wants to be hugged
September 23rd, 2012 at 3:26 am
Going well on the remediation efforts in Fukushima – don’t forget that when the grid fails 400+ nuclear plants go Fukushima with no one able to do any remediation.
http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/09/7m-and-470kg-of-steel-frame-dropped-into-the-sfp-of-reactor3-566-fuel-assemblies-are-in-the-pool/
“About 11:05 of 9/22/2012, Tepco dropped a steel frame of 7m long and 470kg into the SFP of reactor3. 514 assemblies of spent fuel and 52 fuel assemblies are kept in the pool.
Tepco was removing debris by the remote controlling crane and dropped it into the pool mistakenly.
The steel frame was 30cm×20cm×7m, 470kg. It was dropped from South-East side.
Tepco states the radiation level did not change, the dosimeter set 2m above the pool did not measure any change in radiation level either. Water level and the temperature did not change.
It hasn’t happened that such a large material dropped into the pool. Tepco is planning to investigate if the fuel assemblies are not damaged by underwater camera.”
September 23rd, 2012 at 4:48 am
navid
The Soylent Green option is looking more and more likely, however, there is little real way of knowing if it is not already under way.
Soylent green trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpN312hYgU
How would you know what was really in SPAM meat or sausage meat etc, or even burgers of ‘chicken’ pulp?
How It’s Made – Chicken.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEgQpYzIZXU&feature=related
Shouldn’t be too difficult to modify the machines to take Soylent Green.
September 23rd, 2012 at 6:13 am
Cathy C
As if it could’nt get any more absurd…
’33 high school students from Tochigi worked to sort disaster debris in Miyagi’
http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/09/33-high-school-students-from-tochigi-worked-to-sort-disaster-debris-in-miyagi/
“On 9/8/2012, 33 high school students from Nikko Tochigi visited Higashi matsushima city Miyagi to work for sorting disaster debris.
City Council of Social Welfare organized to collect 33 students from several high schools in Nikko. The purpose it to make them think about how they can contribute to the disaster area.
It was the first attempt to send high school student to send to work for the debris.
The students were taken pictures of with smile.”
Comments are better than the story:
anonymous says:
September 19, 2012 at 3:31 pm
‘You might be wondering what sort of parents would send their children off to sort radioactive garbage? Maybe brainwashed employees of the nuclear mura, the electric utility, the waste management industry, the shipping industry that hauls the stuff to kitakyushu, the DPJ, the LDP, the nuclear science faculty at the local university, and media companies who are making money spinning the wide-area waste distribution propaganda under government contracts. Would be very interesting to look into the parents of each of these young victims.’
terry evans says:
September 19, 2012 at 3:38 pm
‘you people have completly lost your minds’
jec says:
September 19, 2012 at 3:40 pm
‘Is the pre-training to work at Fukushima in the future! If the workers are already compromised or exposed, they will not worry about more radiation. They must not be concerned on having children, or worried about the health of themselves or future children. Wonder how the their parents will feel if their young teens get ill with thyroid cancer? I know how it feels..its an on going guilt that my family was exposed to Chernobyl fallout and the teen exposed became ill with cancer–thyroid cancer–not diagnosied in time.’
Tim says:
September 19, 2012 at 6:18 pm
‘This is what happens when the “public” fool school system is in charge..its the sheeple versus the state, who will win ? Obviously the state has won in this contest of “intelligence”. I am deeply saddened and sickened by intentional act of what can be deemed as genocide for profit.’…”
Crikey!! Maybe it is like being in the eye of a storm, you don’t see there is any problem becuse it is all around you and the panic has subsided, and the effects ‘seem’ to have passed… but who would be sooooooooooooo effing stupid??????
Those Aliens will have their meaty/fatty human bits well irradiated, and at the high temperature they enjoy during their prime time entertainment ‘we’ are being prepped for.
“The Hitchhiker’s Kiosk”
Alien Kiosk vendor: “Madam-Sir, would you care for a complementary Bikini Attoll Irradiated Earth Seawater Shake with your Irradiated Human Meaty-Fatty Bits Special?”
Alien customer:” Why not? Thank you”
Alien Kiosk vendor: “And will there be any desert to go with that…. and maybe for the young ones… are you expecting soon?”
Alien customer: “Well yes, is it really so obvious so soon? I’ve always been so slim during ..my ..em ..previous gustigation periods. What do you have?”
Alien Kiosk vendor: ” Oh, but Madam-Sir, I hardly noticed, you look wonderful. Well, we have the usual Othracon cones, from Syloria, but … er.. well Madam-Sir.. they are several hundredthousand years old now, and.. err..”
Alien customer: “Oh dear, no no no…Something fresh.. PLEASE!”
Alien Kiosk vendor: ” Of course… er we have these, uh new, never opened from… er…Earth. They are only 5 Drakons each. They are soft centered, so the little ones wont hurt their Mondables, while evesticating them.”
Alien customer: “Yes, yes, but what are they, I can’t have anything interfering with their fundatrition cycle? And no Estragobukon Verkrill, “We are very sensitive to Estragobukon Verkrill…”
Alien Kiosk vendor: ” The packet says they are Pre-irradiated fool chilren with Fukushima frosting, oh.. and it says they can be taken via the dynchoglut if your little ones are dilergic to Hyuka salts.”
Alien customer: ‘Very well, we’ll take 40, No 50, I’m expecting them to emerge during the performance, and that will keep them busy for a few hundred years while I clean up, thank you”
Alien Kiosk vendor: “Your welcome”
Why would you need Douglas Adams when such exquisite prose can be found here at NBL….?
September 23rd, 2012 at 6:20 am
Kathy C
Ooops… with a K…..Sorry.
September 23rd, 2012 at 6:22 am
Yes, Kathy, that sort of thing seems to occur quite frequently, mentioned in the papers years ago, schizophrenic man eaten by lions, trying to be friends, Daniel in the lions den, etc. That’s what I mean about disrespectful. they don;t ask the lions or tigers first, they just insist upon imposing themselves….
I learned this with my dog. She is incredible. Most amazing dog. People come here and I have to give them a lecture, over the gate, before I let them in.
None of them are any good with animals. Some think they are. I tell them to ignore her, act as if she does not exist, don’t make any gesture towards her.
They can’t help themselves. Its a pons asinorum. People think that putting their hand out to pat or stroke or for the dog to smell is being ‘friendly’, like shaking hands with a human. They just do it automatically, even though I just told them slowly and clearly NOT TO DO IT
My dog interprets the gesture completely different. She sees the extended hand as an uninvited intrusion into her space, even an attempt to grab hold of her.
She is fierce, with big teeth and power. She knows this. She takes pride in her self as a warrior. She wants respect. Intruding uninvited is disrespectful, not the correct etiquette from her perspective. She’ll let people touch her all in good time, when she has decided she likes them and is not afraid of them, she’ll make her own approach and say ‘lets be friends’. But that takes time First she wants to smell, to suss out whether she’s met this person before, and all the other info that only dogs can know.
She always watches my back. If I’m talking to someone, and they move quickly, or extend an arm towards me, she’ll growl or bark and is ready to bite them. In her vision she sees that as an uninvited intrusion into my space ( which it often is ! ) by someone who is disrespectful to me.
When I went to fetch her as a puppy, with another man, we arrived at the place, lots of signs ‘do not enter, dangerous dogs’ , etc. and a bell to ring. Waited and waited. I told the guy I’m going in. He was very doubtful, but said nothing. I walked up to the house and suddenly 20 German Shepherds are barking, and one loose one comes running up to me. I know how to be with these dogs. I just stand still, but I put out an invisible vibe. The dog in front of me says not to go further. I’m completely relaxed, talking to it, looking straight in its eyes. No problem.
The woman comes out and gives me a telling off ‘you are so lucky, you could have been seriously hurt, even killed, blablabla’
Nonsense. Luck had nothing to do with it. I’ve owned those dogs. I know how they think. I have immense love and respect for them. I know their rules. I obey their rules, not mine. I have no fear, and they can tell. They can also tell I will not hurt them. I’m on their patch. It’s for them to decide what they think of me. They are simple souls, always good. Eventually they’ll decide to be friendly and hospitable, even if it takes half an hour. Their very curious, and I think there’s that ancient wolf pack thing, ‘more is better’, so recruiting a new member is in their interests.
Much the same goes for horses, cows, bulls, other animals. In the mating seasin my male rheas get very aggressive and fierce and attack anything. They are bloody terrifying, and dangerous. But it’s all bluff. I treat them aikido style. Catch them below the head, hold at arms length, they keep trying to bite me, for about a minute, then they lose their nerve and run away.
September 23rd, 2012 at 6:51 am
Arthur Johnson, why not Douglas Adams? I’d rather go happy and laughing as opposed to crying and depressed. Just sayin’.
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:02 am
Ozman, that stuff about the children moving irradiated material is straight out of Margaret Atwood’s Hand Maid’s Tale, sending expendable portions of soceity off to work in polluted areas. She got the idea from the way Nazis used slave labour to work on rockets and other stuff, where they only had a short life expectancy from the poisonous chemicals. etc. But this goes way back. The Romans used to send prisoners, criminals, slaves, misfits, to work in mines, where they lasted a few months. Too many of us, life is cheap, a throw-away commodity, like beer cans….
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:14 am
ulvfugl
But… eh.. aren’t Japaneese school children…em.. well.. free?
And I don’t mean free for the picking, I mean not under servitude, not under any economic, or social obligation that would restrict their life choices?
WHAM!
Huh… um.. Oh, what the…? I just woke up…. err… I must have been in a dream. What was I thinking..? I can’t believe I even thought of asking such a STUPID QUESTION!!!!!
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:17 am
ulvfugl
What does ‘ulvfugl’ stand for , if anything? All I can get is ‘u luv..’ then something starting with ‘f’.
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:32 am
Dr. House – Douglas Adams Please !!!
You are not supposed to be happy and joyful ever again. What is the matter with you !
You should watch On The Beach again – this time focus on becoming the character that keeps complaining about how they have 400 bottles of wine and only 5 months left to drink it – very bad planning by the committee !!
“oh what a world, what a world…. I’m melting !!!!
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:35 am
Wolfbird in Norwegian.
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:37 am
oops
Ozman – I think people would talk themselves into eating “soylent green” even after they knew what it was. Just have a star athlete pitch it, and the government claim it is “green” and tax free or something… maybe have it served at parties for 16 debutantes’ balls … people would be fine with it.
September 23rd, 2012 at 8:14 am
ulvfugl, my little rat terrier loves everyone. The problem is she wants to jump up on them and they are usually too prissy to get a tad of dirt on their hands – Even though she is only 20 lbs I understand little children being afraid, she is an animated dog. She lives in the 1 acre chicken yard and is not a needy dog since what she wants to do most in life is kill rats and chicken yards always have plenty of them. Each time we go down to the chicken yard, she sits in front of me and when I clap my hands she jumps into my arm. More than a hug tho she wants her back scratched. We both think she is the best dog we either have had. At 10 she still runs around like a puppy. I wouldn’t like having a dog that growls at anyone period. To each their own. I don’t feel the need of a dog to protect me. I decided long ago when a neighbor was murdered that I wasn’t going to allow myself to live the rest of my life in fear. Someone told me once that I needed to carry a gun to protect myself. I said I have a better protection “I am not afraid”. He looked stunned and then smiled, he understood. Fear attracts danger.
Chickens on the other hand usually disappear into the bushes when any stranger comes but a few select people can walk into the chicken yard and they act like no one new is there. What do they know? A lot of people seem to be afraid of chickens – perhaps the fear can be smelled.
September 23rd, 2012 at 8:39 am
I’ve had Kansas‘ “Dust In The Wind” running around in my brain for the last 5 days along with Kathy C’s refrain (“Everybody dies!”) and it just occurred to me that many of the respondents here at NBL fall into the “graybeard” category. I certainly speak for myself here. Why is that? Is it just that old folks are the only ones with time to sit around all day in front of a computer? Do we oldsters have nothing else to do? Are we lonely? Are we the only ones who care about the future of the earth or, with one foot in the grave, are we just looking closely at a possible cause of our demise?
By the way, those listed possibilities don’t apply very well to me, and I am guessing not to you, but I would be interested in your thoughts.
Michael Irving
September 23rd, 2012 at 8:42 am
The REAL Dr. House,
Arthur Johnson, why not Douglas Adams? I’d rather go happy and laughing as opposed to crying and depressed. Just sayin’.
Because Douglas Adams doesn’t prepare you psychologically for extinction. On the Beach does. It (and similar artistic works) focuses the mind on the reality of what life will be like over the next 18 years. It won’t be at all like a Douglas Adams novel. If Guy and Kathy C are right, you will spend the remaining few years of your life mostly crying and being depressed. There.are.no.error.bars. There.is.no.uncertainty.
Disagreement with the above means one of two things:
1) You’re in denial. Or as Kathy C would put it, you just don’t get it, and you need to wake up, and wake up quick. It’s time for you to start the process of saying good-bye to everyone. Time to begin “getting your affairs in order”.
2) You don’t really believe that Guy and Kathy C are right about this. At the very minimum, you believe that there is uncertainty and error bars in their scenario. HUGE uncertainties and ENORMOUS error bars, so huge and so enormous that they make any serious predictions of imminent extinction ridiculous, and perhaps grossly irresponsible, if people of child-bearing age were to use such a “certain” scenario as a basis for doing something rash to prevent themselves from having children (“I don’t want to bring a child into such a world”, etc., etc., etc.)
So which is it?
“Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda…”
September 23rd, 2012 at 9:01 am
Michael Irving,
I’ve had Kansas‘ “Dust In The Wind” running around in my brain for the last 5 days along with Kathy C’s refrain (“Everybody dies!”) and it just occurred to me that many of the respondents here at NBL fall into the “graybeard” category. I certainly speak for myself here. Why is that?
Interesting question. But “graybeard” or not, perhaps–and for whatever reasons–it is difficult for the hearts of NBL respondents to be touched by sentiments such as those expressed in this song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFL63fmv6Vw
English translation courtesy of JPopAsia:
Far away beyond the distant horizon,
Gently beginning to shine down into the darkness,
The silhouettes of all the sadnesses up until yesterday
fade away and rise to the surface in the light.
Come, let’s try and believe in tomorrow! Let’s recall the young person of the past who embraced the dream on that far away day.
Someday they’ll be realized. Don’t be afraid.
‘Cuz beautiful dreams come true
Within time, when will I lose, lose sight of it?
Because the important things in front of my eyes are so small,
Within the flow of days we misunderstand and pass by each other.
Don’t forget, seek the power of hope
Come, let’s try and sketch the future!
Yes, let’s build it up! Our ideal world
is now being enveloped in kindness.
Yes, let’s feel it and live nobly.
There’s harmony in our hearts
Can you imagine? If everyday
was a wonderful miracle,
then this joy beginning to overflow would be a treasure in my heart.
Come, let’s try and believe in tomorrow! Let’s recall the young person of the past who embraced the dream on that far away day.
Someday they’ll be realized. Don’t be afraid.
‘Cuz beautiful dreams come true.
September 23rd, 2012 at 9:18 am
Arthur,
Thank you for your “extinction behavior protocol” – telling me how I must think 24/7/365 for the rest of my life.
No humor forever – just spend the remaining years of life “mostly crying and being depressed.” No irony, no laughing at the idiocy we cannot control. And if we should see irony, feel humor – SHUT UP ABOUT IT – squelch those feelings and return to Arthur’s “extinction behavior protocol.”
That is an interesting dichotomy I must fit into if I disagree with you. Pick strawman one, or strawman two.
I do thank you for posting “on the beach” – it was wonderful to see it again.
September 23rd, 2012 at 9:23 am
Michael,
One thing I notice is young people are constantly under the influence of their hormones.
We older folk are mostly over that, and I think we tend to become more reflective with age – and because we’ve been caring for little ones, we tend to look further into the future than next Friday’s mating rituals.
There are many exceptions in both age categories of course (randy old men with money chasing skirts and young people fully aware the future is not so bright, and planning a life based on that).
Sorry I could not keep up on the garden conversations – no slight intended!
September 23rd, 2012 at 9:50 am
Arthur Johnson: Because Douglas Adams doesn’t prepare you psychologically for extinction. On the Beach does.
So you have experience preparing for extinction do you? I wonder where you got that?
You can assume you know what you’re talking about all you want, but you don’t. The same can be said of anyone who comments here. All of us are looking at the data and reaching conclusions. I think the conclusions are obvious. You seem to reach a different one and feel your conclusions are just as obvious, apparently. Which is right? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, please don’t presume that you know how to “prepare for extinction”.
I’ll repeat myself from the post above: I will admit that the possibility exists that the interpretation of the data could be wrong and that climate change is not going to be as catastrophic as predicted. I will also admit that the data might be wrong and the earth really can sustain 10 or 12 billion people. I’m willing to concede that we might be underestimating the ability of the oceans to adapt to lower pH. I’ll also acknowledge that all the data concerning oil production and EROEI might be flawed and we’ll go on increasing production for centuries to come. I might admit that somehow we can survive 400+ nuclear reactor meltdowns. I might even admit that the infinite credit economy we’ve created, all the pollution we’re producing, and all the other resources we’re stripping away might somehow be mitigated by some as yet unforeseen technological miracle. . . .
Wait a minute. No I won’t. It’s over. It just a matter of when.
So, as I and others have said many times: Want to do something? Live each day as if it were your last, love those around you, live life to the fullest.
September 23rd, 2012 at 9:54 am
By the way, I read On the Beach when I was in high school. I remember very few specifics about it now, but I never forgot the experience. Never reread it, however. I have reread Douglas Adams novels multiple times. Always make me laugh. Much preferable experience.
September 23rd, 2012 at 9:57 am
Dr House, right on. The best preparation for extinction is right in every book of the 5 book trilogy – DON’T PANIC
September 23rd, 2012 at 10:02 am
Arthur Johnson: At the very minimum, you believe that there is uncertainty and error bars in their scenario. HUGE uncertainties and ENORMOUS error bars, so huge and so enormous that they make any serious predictions of imminent extinction ridiculous, and perhaps grossly irresponsible, if people of child-bearing age were to use such a “certain” scenario as a basis for doing something rash to prevent themselves from having children (“I don’t want to bring a child into such a world”, etc., etc., etc.)
Have you actually LOOKED at the data that’s being presented? Go back to that Scientific American article referenced above and look at that data – really look. Can you show me where the HUGE uncertainties and ENORMOUS error bars are? In article after article, no matter if it’s about climate, population, energy resources, fresh water, etc, virtually every chart of plotted data shows the classic hockey stick – whether it’s pointing up or down, the outcome is bad. If there’s any denial, it appears to be yours – or else stubborn refusal to actually consider the data in front of you.
I don’t mean to be picking on you, but I find your attitude to be very much in denial. A bit surprising, actually, since you are commenting on a site on which most readers are actually studying the facts.
September 23rd, 2012 at 10:12 am
The REAL Dr. House,
Briefly, I take a somewhat middle position. Guy is dead-on about the first positive feedback (Arctic sea ice melt) being irreversible (barring the highly unlikely event of one or more major volcanic eruptions occuring in the next 24 months). This is a disaster, made worse by the opportunistic response of Arctic governments to use this as a “golden opportunity” to grab some oil and fish (this is where humor comes into play).
What isn’t clear is whether the other four positive feedbacks–especially methane outgassing–have also reached irreversibility. If they truly are irreversible at this point, then extinction, maybe as early as 2030, certainly by 2100, is a done deal. Personally, as I read the data (as a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry), I don’t think they are…yet. They may well be ten years from now (2022).
Which means, “there is still time, brother”, to avoid extinction, but it’s probably too late at this point to avoid disaster.
I’ll talk about my take on the psychological issues (joy, humor, crying, depression, etc.) involved in all of this in a separate comment this evening, as I now have a pressing engagement to get too.
And FWIW, I’m really not a bad guy. I’m just drawn that way.
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:11 am
Dang- miss a few days and the comments section gets too long to make it all the way through. I was busy helping another little boy enter the world, such as it is. He is my first grandson.
I just wanted to say that I watched “Genetic Roulette” about GMOs and that doctors who recommended avoiding all GMO foods to their allergy patients reported that their symptoms cleared up within a few months. Farmers reported the same thing with all kinds of problems in their livestock.
However, farmers have a difficult time finding non-GMO feed consistently. Perhaps this would be a worthy area to invest in – production of non-GMO feeds, or more importantly, the seeds to grow them, which are scarce.
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:27 am
Doug Adams told us don’t panic
If you fear extinction just “can it”
With a towel along
You will never go wrong
In the end no need to be frantic
September 23rd, 2012 at 11:32 am
Extinction is the natural course for all species. The lobe-finned fishes that crawled out onto land are categorised as extinct, but their direct descendants comment at NBL. Through natural selection and genetic drift a descendant cohort can differ so much from its ancestors that if the ancestral species were cloned à la Jurassic Park , they would not be able to reproduce with their descendants. If two cohorts of descendants diverged from each other sufficiently, they would be separate species.
The divergence between the two equid species, horses and donkeys, is so recent that we still have mules and hinnies. Some science fiction scenarios have crosses between humans and the great apes: with our 97+% similarity to chimpanzees this may not be too far-fetched. Kathy C’s chickens are the direct descendants of saurischian dinosaurs, the same group as the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Very substantial changes have occurred in Homo sapiens since its first appearance 200,000 years ago: adult males now have a brain smaller on average by the volume of a tennis ball compared to our ancestors of only 20,000 years ago. For the last 100,000 years our teeth have been shrinking; the rate of shrinkage has doubled about 10,000 years ago to 1% every 2,000 years.
If the direct descendants of today’s Homo sapiens survived for a couple of million years and were to implant and bring to birth one of today’s deep frozen human embryos, it is a very good bet that the Mr. or Ms. Rip van Winkle would not be able to reproduce with our descendants of that time.
Extinction, like diarrhoea, runs in our genes/jeans.
September 23rd, 2012 at 2:24 pm
Kathy C. : “I wouldn’t like having a dog that growls at anyone period. To each their own. I don’t feel the need of a dog to protect me.”
Your dog sounds delightful. Both my neighbours have those terriers. But a dog that doesn’t growl ? What a shocking thing to say ! Honestly !
That’s like the old Victorian adage ‘children should be seen but not heard’. What a cruel, fascistic notion, to grow up in a family where you’re not allowed to speak. It’s hard to believe that parents could actually be that insensitive and brutal, but they were.
And now you’re saying this about dogs ? Growling is part of dogness, and to say a dog shouldn’t growl is the equivalent of saying it shouldn’t wag its tail, isn’t it ?
I don’t need a dog to protect me. I got her to keep the foxies away, because they were taking my poultry. She came here at 6 weeks old and has never been anywhere else. Visitors are rare, so she’s not accustomed to people. When she hears someone coming up the lane, or smells foxies, she growls. She lays in the porch, guarding our cave. She sees that as her duty. She’s very gentle and sensitive, and when she growls there’s a good reason for that. Incidentally, she also suffers from idiopathic canine epilepsy, so I have some empathy towards you and your child.
“Chickens on the other hand usually disappear into the bushes when any stranger comes but a few select people can walk into the chicken yard and they act like no one new is there. What do they know? A lot of people seem to be afraid of chickens – perhaps the fear can be smelled.”
Yes, mine too. I think it most goes on visual appearance and manner. Birds read the colour, tone, of the image they see, and also the body language, and maybe also some invisible vibes. I wear the same dull khaki stuff all the time, so all the things around here know its me. If I went out with a bright yellow shirt, or whatever, for them it’d be a completely different person, and trigger their alarms. All the ducks, rheas, bantams, wild birds, watch body language to read intention. I behave as if they are not there, kinda like a harmless grazing cow, and so they see there is no threat. But if I want to catch one, they see that straight away.
Look at this video of wolves. That’s basic ‘dog nature’. I know all the breeds are different. I have let my dog be however she wanted to be, so she can express her nature without inhibition or distortion. Her urge to co-operate is incredibly strong. Whatever I do she wants to join in and help. I see it as, basically, the teamwork required by wolves to kill a moose, sublimated by thousands of years of domestication.
http://youtu.be/3hdUCzbCuYk
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:24 pm
it just occurred to me that many of the respondents here at NBL fall into the “graybeard” category… Why is that? Is it just that old folks are the only ones with time to sit around all day in front of a computer? Do we oldsters have nothing else to do? Are we lonely? Are we the only ones who care about the future of the earth or, with one foot in the grave, are we just looking closely at a possible cause of our demise?
Michael Irving, you are probably right that those who comment on NBL skew towards older. I’m 40, not exactly a graybeard, but it’s definitely harder for me to follow comments and respond to them because I’m usually chasing around my 5-year-old (and these days also harvesting food, preserving food, digging post holes, helping to plant an edible hedgerow at the community garden, and connecting with other homeschoolers). But that said, I know an awful lot of younger people who spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer. Some of them do read NBL. But I think there are definitely different patterns in internet usage among different age groups. For example, a lot of my 20-something friends tend to rely more heavily on sites like Facebook and Reddit and Google Plus and whatnot– I think they’re used to being able to filter information in particular configurations, and to digest it in smaller, sometimes fragmentary, quantities. There’s a significant divide between those who grew up without the internet and those who always had it around. I am near the edge of that divide.
I can assure you, though, that it’s not only older people who care about the future of the earth or who think about imminent demise. I just think the younger people who care are engaging in different ways, both online and off.
I find it a wee bit frustrating, myself, that most of the people willing to engage in discussion such as the types that happen here are mostly not parents of young children. I think this is probably because they’re exhausted and overwhelmed. That’s my observation, anyway. I confess, I’m often exhausted. And it takes a lot of effort to step away from the treadmill/rat race of cultural expectations when you have young children. Not to mention the terrifying prospect of contemplating the future of those very specific, beloved, real children. The cognitive dissonance is enormous.
On a separate topic: I’m all for the use of Douglas Adams novels as part of one’s emotional coping strategy. All I can say is: 42.
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Again, thank you Dr. McPherson. Your insights validate, clarify, and illuminate my perceptions and put my fears into perspective. I kinda “got the picture” a few decades ago but thought maybe I wasn’t seeing things properly and maybe folks like Paul Erlich were just full of baloney. Yup, “nature bats last”.
Loved see Ed Abbey in your trailer.
September 23rd, 2012 at 7:41 pm
Loved seeing Ed Abbey. Heard he sometimes shot his television when he lived in Tuscon. Maybe a damn good idea
September 23rd, 2012 at 9:39 pm
Michael Irving
“…. it just occurred to me that many of the respondents here at NBL fall into the “graybeard” category. I certainly speak for myself here. Why is that? Is it just that old folks are the only ones with time to sit around all day in front of a computer? Do we oldsters have nothing else to do? Are we lonely? Are we the only ones who care about the future of the earth or, with one foot in the grave, are we just looking closely at a possible cause of our demise?”
I have a metaphore that may be of interest in responding to this open question.
I once came accross the idea that the stages of human life are like a river. (Not from Siddartha, but that is an interesting parrallel BTW.)
In the early stages the slope of the river is steep way up in the riverlets of mountains, and the ipmulse is strong to get to the destination. As in youth there is little time to look and hang around, and smell the roses. The power of movement seems all that matters. Experiencing as much as possible is what is all about, and the more dramatic the course the better.
As the river forms in lower areas, the strength of midlife takes over and the work of steering the course to the destination, and keeping it all together is strong. Your capacity to carry a lot of energy and soil is optimum and seems all gathering to get you there. In mid life the concerns are maintaining your course.You see the freewheeling of youth disappearing, replaced by the responsibilities of maintaining a trajectory taking over. A recognition that early choices, aparently of no consequence then, mean some real consequencenow.
As the river moves into the plains it starts to meander, and over long linear distances, and seems to tarry back and forth, back and forth, apparently no longer in any hurry to get to the ocean.
As in old age, the pace of life is slowed, but all the work in youth and mid life it seems will be undone at the delta, where the river meets the ocean. Death seems the final hurdle.
Or so I thought in my youth.
I discovered only recently that the reason the river meanders so in the valley, is not only to avoid its disollution, but to bring water and futility to as much of the valley as possible, spreading its wizdom WHERE IT IS NEEDED, for with the next phase of its life cycle, it can’t hope to carry those beyond the coast.
Old age is a time of redistributing what one has UNDERSTOOD of life, not to go to Vagas and blow your retirement(401K).
In the face of extinction, believe it or not, I feel there is no need to change that process, but perhaps just more reason to love all you can the more passionately, as Roy Batty did.
Some NBL posters try to bleet their own take on the Data. I do, but I don’t generally quibble with the ‘Extinction Protocal’, because I feel it is always more important how you live now..’The readiness is all’ approach. I am gearing up for less reliance on centralised energy distribution, but the constraints of family life do not allow me yet to quit this spot and go somwhere optimal with some community as Guy has done. So it is, cope with the situation as it unfolds. Posting is helpful, because although there are disagreements, as there will be, there is some discussion, and sharing, and humour and a lot of peoples diverse experiences, that is great to access, and be aware of.
Options expand, until extinction, but it was ever thus for the individual, was it not?
Now is all we have ever had.
Trashing the TV sounds like a good thing to have done at least once in a lifetime, I might just try it soon. I’ll probably wat for some really bad news to take maximum effect, wearing saftey goggles of course.
September 24th, 2012 at 1:44 am
http://youtu.be/odCSWY05u4Q
September 24th, 2012 at 3:55 am
ulvfugl you quote my words and then act as if you didn’t read them. as you quoted I said “I wouldn’t like having a dog that growls at anyone period. To each their own. I don’t feel the need of a dog to protect me.” I was talking about what kind of dog I want, not about what I force a dog to do. Actually my dog growls – at me if I pretend to take away her squirrel. She doesn’t growl at me if I take away her rats, only her squirrels. (chickens can get botulism from the rotten stomachs of other animals so we try to toss all the kills out of the chicken yard) So I admit to teasing her when she gets a squirrel. But you should approve of that as I give her an opportunity to growl. I am not in the business of forbidding dogs from growling at folks, only in the business of selecting what kind of dog I want around.
I note that like us you have a dog that doesn’t kill chickens. Our dog came to us at 1 year and had already been trained not to kill chickens. As you note it is natural for foxies to kill chickens. It would be natural for wolves to kill chickens. Killing critters for food is the natural state of wild dogs. Any of us who have a dog that doesn’t kill chickens has either picked a breed who has had that bred out of them or trained them not to kill chickens. While our dog came trained not to harm chickens she did get into stealing eggs and we had to train her not to do that as unnatural as it is. Not hard, the slightest sound of disapproval works. She came to us in her friendly mode not growling, at strangers at least strangers that are with us. I wouldn’t have wanted her otherwise.
If you want a natural dog, get a fox, wolf or coyote. Every domestic dog has already been tampered with in their breeding. How can you stand having such an unnatural animal?
September 24th, 2012 at 3:59 am
Can’t believe I even bothered to respond about dogs. Here we are at the brink of extinction and we argue about growling dogs – strange beasts us humans
So on the looming EXTINCTION Front
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/methane-fields-in-the-laptev-sea.html
Below is part of a recent interview published by Voice of Russia – click here for the full report. Editorial note: We anxiously await further findings from the research team as to what the source is of these releases, when the methane was formed and by how much these releases are likely to increase over the year
September 24th, 2012 at 4:16 am
“How can you stand having such an unnatural animal?
I am myself an unnatural animal, as are you, as are all of us.
September 24th, 2012 at 4:31 am
Here we are at the brink of extinction and we argue about growling dogs – strange beasts us humans
If we all agree that extinction is inevitable, then there’s not a lot of point to talking about extinction, is there ? Or anything else, dogs, whatever.
I see it very differently. If someone wants to talk to me, about any subject whatever, I’ll listen and talk to them. It’s just life.
Dmitry Orlov says that all these people on the internet who have time to get themselves informed and read his blog, are the least likely to survive. He says the one’s who are likely to survive are already doing survival full time.
He expects a fast cascading crash of the economic system, with no chance of recovery.
Interestingly, he says the first sign, maybe a huge collapse of a major bank and the Dow dropping dramatically could be the start of that, but he himself would wait a while before making any decisions. He lives on a boat, so if things get nasty, he sails somewhere else.
September 24th, 2012 at 5:51 am
With thanks for the vigorous commentary, and special thanks to Elaine Kost I’ve posted her first essay in this space. It’s here.
September 24th, 2012 at 6:42 am
Navid,
Thanks for your comments re: graybeards. I agree with you that hormones are a governing factor in much of what we humans do (or don’t do). I think that in many cases we choose not to look at that aspect too deeply because it tends to get us thinking about dogs in heat–not a pleasant thought when we start equating that picture with ourselves (we thinking ourselves to be in control of, rather than being controlled by, our baser instincts).
Oh, and don’t think twice about the garden conversation.
Michael Irving
September 24th, 2012 at 6:47 am
ulvfugl
Great u-tube post on GMO food. I had not taken the time to get some real info and this is enough to make me really wonder about nagging health issues in the family. Thanks a bunch for that.
Also Dmitry Orlov is worth listening to IMO, however, he has admitted to being an engineer, but in what I don’t know yet. Does that qualify him to be an expert on collapse? In his favour he wrote some convincing essays on the collapse of the Soviet system, and it was posted on Matt Savinar’s previous LATOC (archives) site, which is where I read it first. I tried to ask him via E-mail, and asked if he made money from this website, because I wanted to asess the motives of Peak oil alertists like himself, and he told me nothing, and insinuated he could smell me from the Northern hemisphere??? Make of that what you will.
So while I no longer visit his site, I do have some regard for his statments, and I also see he may have a collapse approach business model that could profit from a lot of people getting nervous as TSHTF and run to sites like his that are ‘safe havens in a storm’. I don’t know realy how to view him properly. While the web is running he may prosper, but he seems to have positioned himself well in any event.
Survival mode will be interesting for us all, however. With children will be much harder, and it is probably in their best interest to grow them up fast if you can, for they will need all the gumpion and wits available to them.
September 24th, 2012 at 6:55 am
Arthur Johnson,
Not meaning disrespect, however, the sentiments of that song went sideways on me. All I could think about was the anger I feel at Obama. I got mixed up in thinking that we were going to a new place in 2008, a “kinder, gentler place. I bought into a dream (reluctantly) only to have it dashed over the subsequent 3 1/2 years. I know, I know, I should have known better. Life keeps reminding me that “hope” is usually a bitter pill to swallow, often unfulfilled, leaving only a really acid, bile-filled stomach.
Michael Irving
September 24th, 2012 at 7:24 am
Jennifer Hartley,
Thanks for your comments. Looking back I can only second your opinion about how the business of daily living often makes it impossible for younger folks to take the time to look beyond “the next thing” they have to do just to make it through the day. When I was your age I was teaching/going to school/raising kids/building a house/a committed environmental activist/mountain climbing/running/a union rep…….etc…. all at once. I don’t know how I did it/you do it.
As for young folks vs old folks in terms of how they get information I think you have hit it right on the head. I feel like my brain is slogging along in molasses while young folks zig along like the Jetsons of cartoon land. Even TV…I don’t do TV any more, it’s just too disjointed and “in your face” to deal with (and the damned things are in every waiting room selling us something). I even discovered that one of the gas stations I used to fill up at installed mini-TVs in the pumps so you could look at trailers for various TV series while you pumped gas….I mean WTF?
Oh, and did you notice that old guys (like me) tend to just go off on rants about stuff and talk about the good old days???
I understand your wish to hear the thoughts that other younger people might have about the future that my generation is leaving for you and your children to deal with. I’m not convinced we have been any greedier than anyone else at any time in history…we just had the bigger reach because of our access to unlimited power.
Michael Irving
September 24th, 2012 at 7:42 am
Michael Irving said: “All I could think about was the anger I feel at Obama. I got mixed up in thinking that we were going to a new place in 2008, a “kinder, gentler place. I bought into a dream (reluctantly) only to have it dashed over the subsequent 3 1/2 years. I know, I know, I should have known better. Life keeps reminding me that “hope” is usually a bitter pill to swallow, often unfulfilled, leaving only a really acid, bile-filled stomach.”
This is exactly how I feel. Like you, I reluctantly bought into the dream and found (fairly promptly) all my hopes dashed. My anger towards Obama and his crowd pale in comparison to my anger at myself for allowing myself to be swindled.
September 24th, 2012 at 8:09 am
‘Chickens on the other hand usually disappear into the bushes when any stranger comes but a few select people can walk into the chicken yard and they act like no one new is there. What do they know? A lot of people seem to be afraid of chickens – perhaps the fear can be smelled.’
kathy, richard reese made an interesting observation in his book WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE re. wild animals and their fear of humans. he claims, based on his own personal experience, that this fear is related to thinking. he says that when his mind went blank, for example, he could approach a deer without it running away. if so, perhaps some wild animals can sense humans thinking, plotting, perhaps scheming on doing them harm, and this is what makes them afraid.
September 24th, 2012 at 10:13 am
TVT that is an interesting point. Since I e-met Richard years back I am intending to get his book but haven’t done so yet. I doubt that any of our visitors are plotting anything against our chickens. We in fact plot the demise of young roosters and sometimes old hens. They seem no different the days we come down to get some for the axe than other days. In fact we sometimes dub (cut off) the comb of roosters if they develop a floppy comb that drops over one eye. They are supposed to be watching for hawks so we don’t want their vision impaired. This is done with sharp scissors and without any anesthesia (first time I did try numb it with ice). They give one brief squawk, calm down, I stop the bleeding and daub a bit of antibiotic ointment on it. The next day they act not one bit different.
Recently my husbands granddaughter visited – the chickens we much more wary of her than ever before. I couldn’t quite figure it out until I noticed that the new boots her mother had purchased had big eyes on the toes. Nothing like normal eyes but the basic outlines. Change of shoes and they were back to coming for food she threw out for them.
But they are domestic, not wild so I can’t say about wild animals. If you like Richard’s writing you might also enjoy a book I heard about from him that is quite intriguing – Original Wisdom – Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by Robert Wolff. I think there is something to taming the wild thoughts and just experiencing what is around us. I sort of think of our consciousness as a sense organ – the seeking of one sort of information mostly using words (spoken or internally spoken) vs the seeking of information from our eyes ears and skin. So when we turn that off the other senses are better able to operate.
Did you know we have a form of sight that is not conscious. It is the name of my favorite science fiction book, Blindsight by Peter Watts, but also the term for seeing without knowing you see. Some people have eyes undamaged but the connection to the aware seeing brain sight damaged. Still they can see things, they just don’t know they can. Tell them to put a letter in a slot and they will say I can’t see the slot and then put the letter in the slot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight This is probably what operates when you jump back before you even “see” the snake – a sight that bypasses the slower conscious visual area to allow you to react to something you don’t know you saw. Neat huh? I suspect that some of these unconscious senses may account for the experiences Robert Wolff relates in Original Wisdom.
September 24th, 2012 at 10:41 am
The REAL Dr. House,
As I see it, people are going to experience a variety of intense emotions (anger, rage, frustration, depression, etc.) once they become convinced, down to their bones, of imminent extinction of not just humans, but all life by mid-century. But the one everyone should feel, more than others, is despair. Despair, in the face of such a reality, is the emotion most indicative that a person is mentally healthy and stabile. Paul Kingsnorth, who is no extinctionist, by any means, talks about this in some depth, from a personal perspective at the Dark Mountain blog in “On the Correct Management of Despair”
http://dark-mountain.net/blog/on-the-correct-management-of-despair/
Two excerpts:
It’s no secret that a feeling of despair was one of the things that brought me to this [DM] project, and that led to its creation. It was the despair of an environmentalist who could see that environmentalism was failing and who had to work out how to deal with that. It was the despair of someone who felt he had no-one to talk to about his despair because, though many other people were feeling it too – oh, you could see it in their eyes however hard they tried to conceal it – it was never talked about. Activists do not talk about despair. No-one talks about despair. Despair, in a progressive society, is taboo. We do not want despair. We want hope. Hope, all the time. Hope, like a drug. Do not look down – look away.
and later, this:
So that is my despair. What should I do with it? I can talk, perhaps with you. I can share it. I can write it down. But I can’t and won’t pretend that I don’t feel it. And I won’t replace it with something called ‘hope’ just because I can, or think I should. I can live my life well, be happy, love, work, do the things that matter to me. I can save some of the good things, if I try, I hope. But I can’t hold back the despair all the time. Why should I? It’s a response – a rational response – to what we are doing; to the world we are levelling. It’s the only honest response.
Indeed. Despair IS the only honest response. Despair, and how to manage it correctly. Part of that management is being willing to look down, not away, and not to flinch while doing so. And then honestly and openly talk about what you see when you look down at extinction, and then see where that leads.
By contrast, responding to extinction with “the whimsy and wit of Douglas Adams” is no response at all. Douglas Adams is just one more “clever” way to look away, and avoid looking down.
I could say a lot more about this, but for now I’ll stop and just ask this question:
What do you see when you look down, without flinching?
September 24th, 2012 at 11:08 am
Michael Irving,
Not meaning disrespect, however, the sentiments of that song went sideways on me. All I could think about was the anger I feel at Obama. I got mixed up in thinking that we were going to a new place in 2008, a “kinder, gentler place. I bought into a dream (reluctantly) only to have it dashed over the subsequent 3 1/2 years.
Interesting. Still, sincerely feeling serious anger while hearing the lyrics, especially these perhaps?:
Come, let’s try and believe in tomorrow! Let’s recall the young person of the past who embraced the dream on that far away day.
Someday they’ll be realized. Don’t be afraid.
‘Cuz beautiful dreams come true
is not a “wrong emotion”. The artist is trying to elicit sincere emotional responses to her song. As I understand you, you’re saying you tried to do this: tried to believe in tomorrow, tried to recall the young man…”. And got badly burned in the process. And you’re responding to the burn, how? With anger, yes. Anything else? Are you even more mistrustful, more suspicious, than you were before Obama?
September 24th, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Kathy C. “I think there is something to taming the wild thoughts and just experiencing what is around us. I sort of think of our consciousness as a sense organ – the seeking of one sort of information mostly using words (spoken or internally spoken) vs the seeking of information from our eyes ears and skin. So when we turn that off the other senses are better able to operate.”
No offence intended, with respect, and all that, but it is no wonder you and I cannot have a productive conversation about ‘soul’, because if the above is your understanding, I have to say it is very crude and superficial. Do some intensive meditation ! Discover the vastness and riches within, Kathy. There’s much, much more to it than that, that’s just the beginning of self-knowing
That said, it’s still a lot better than the average person, most of whom seem hardly aware that they are alive at all…
September 24th, 2012 at 1:05 pm
tvt“richard reese made an interesting observation in his book WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE re. wild animals and their fear of humans. he claims, based on his own personal experience, that this fear is related to thinking. he says that when his mind went blank, for example, he could approach a deer without it running away. if so, perhaps some wild animals can sense humans thinking, plotting, perhaps scheming on doing them harm, and this is what makes them afraid.”
I think Richard Reese is here sometimes ? He was on the DM forum. He wrote some great stuff long ago, I have a lot of respect for him, although havn’t read his book, I’ve always wanted to, but my pile of ‘books to be read’ is overwhelming… but yes, I think he has a great point there, that’s something to do with it, it’s the ‘vibe’, for want of a better term, that a person puts out.
As I mentioned before, Linda Kohanov has gone into this in great depth. Horses are herd creatures and also prey creatures. They spend most of their time with heads down in the grass, an eye on each side of the head. Danger can approach from many directions. They are highly attuned to the movements and signals coming from the rest of the herd. If one suddenly panics, the signal goes through the entire herd instantly, like electricity.
Horses are much more highly developed and sensitive emotionally, than humans. They ‘feel’ the feelings of other horses, and also of humans. This has been researched in depth by the people who do horse therapy for disabled children. Horses and ponies can tell immediately how a child ‘feels’, and will take great care when carrying children who have severe disabilities, autism, down’s syndrome, etc. Obviously there’s a lot more to it than I can say here in a comment, loads of books, some of which are total crap, since L K came up with this approach, it’s been ripped off by some disreputable people who just exploit the thing for money, as always happens, sadly, so discretion is advised.
At it’s best ‘horse therapy’ is absolutely fantastic, miraculous, the experience will have you weeping with awe and respect for something so wonderful….
September 24th, 2012 at 1:13 pm
By this definition, horses are every bit as heroic as their riders, perhaps even more so: a prey animal going to war is the epitome of a counterintuitive, wholly unnatural move. And yet, horses re-connect us to nature, more specifically to nature’s gifts, her ability to not just challenge, but nourish, inspire, and renew us.
And so, after the long journey we’ve taken together, we come to the deepest, most healing piece of horse wisdom I can offer: The importance of joy, awe, wonder, and inspiration, of celebrating the talents and intelligence of other beings, appreciating daily acts of kindness and courage, as well as the beauty of this world we all share, most especially those rural areas and wilderness preserves we must guard as blessings from a benevolent force still urging us to grow out of fitful adolescence into real maturity, empowered empathy, agile understanding, and unbridled yet compassionate creativity.
Horse wisdom, fully activated in humans, requires paying attention to what is good and right with the world, and expanding that, even as we protect ourselves from predators hiding in the grass. No matter what’s happening around us, the emotional agility, social intelligence, and fear management skills horses teach help us deal efficiently with technical difficulties and interpersonal challenges—and then “go back to grazing.” Over time, as we learn to ride life’s roller coaster with ease, an underlying sense of “deep peace” emerges and strengthens. We find that we can let go of the stories that tie us to past injustice. And we can fully enjoy the present, knowing that we are courageous, empowered, and adaptable enough to meet the future with the relaxed yet expanded awareness of a mature herd leader.
Now that horses are no longer obliged to work in our fields and carry us to war, they’re doing something more important: They’re working on us, helping us reclaim, daily, a hint of paradise not so much lost as misplaced. In rekindling our relationship with horses as guides—as catalysts of human transformation going back at least 30,000 years—we can’t help but realize that even when we wander off the main trail and get lost in the woods, we’re never alone in this world.
http://eponaquest.com/
September 24th, 2012 at 6:44 pm
‘I think there is something to taming the wild thoughts’
how about wilding our tame thoughts? of course, the domesticating influence of a violently coercive and dogmatic ‘authority’ in our lives must first come to an end, something which probably won’t happen until the sheeple population has been drastically reduced. plenty of wild times ahead, but not under optimum conditions, to say the least.
interesting thoughts and observations of your domesticated chickens, kathy. i didn’t know it was a rooster’s job to serve as a lookout for danger. i take it the hens then are free to concentrate on foraging for food, which they need a lot of to produce eggs. however, it doesn’t make sense for them to have evolved those floppy things that impair vision. i understand it’s probably related to sex appeal, those floppy things turn on or impress the hens, but u’d think evolution wouldn’t develop in a manner that tends to be self defeating. upon further reflection, of course, our species is proof that nature does indeed do this. it’s all random and pointless.
thanks for the book recommendation. mentioning blindsight reminded me of a nonfiction book i read a few years ago about someone who was blind from a very young age, who thanks to new technology had his sight restored as an adult, with unpredictable consequences. his brain couldn’t understand much of what he saw. very impaired or non existent depth perception and inability to recognize a familiar face were among his ongoing disabilities. i’ve forgotten why, but he also became depressed, wishing his sight hadn’t been restored, and spent a lot of time in dark rooms so he couldn’t see anything.
surreality is indeed surreal, full of wonders which inspire our big brains to ponder. i think constantly it seems while awake. we’ve evolved to think, to be clever enough to survive in a harsh brutal world at times. becoming civilized has allowed us to become much more abtract, detached thinkers. a mind gets condition to put senses on auto-pilot while consciously pre-occupied with mental abstractions like words and ideas. with civilization gone, our species may re-learn how to be wild, more sensually attuned, less distracted, if extinction doesn’t come too fast on the heels of civilization’s death.
September 24th, 2012 at 6:49 pm
ulvfugl, richard reese has posted at least a couple of comments to this blog in the past couple months.
September 24th, 2012 at 7:47 pm
tvt : “…it doesn’t make sense for them to have evolved those floppy things that impair vision. i understand it’s probably related to sex appeal, those floppy things turn on or impress the hens, but u’d think evolution wouldn’t develop in a manner that tends to be self defeating. upon further reflection, of course, our species is proof that nature does indeed do this. it’s all random and pointless.”
No, that’s completely wrong, tvt, the way domesticated poultry are has nothing to do with evolution, they have been selected by humans to have those characteristics, since they were domesticated. If you want to know what naturally evolved chickens are like you have to look at the original wild Red Jungle Fowl, which still exist in the wild in Asia, although getting rare.
http://www.arkive.org/red-junglefowl/gallus-gallus/
September 24th, 2012 at 8:14 pm
Re the hand made books thing that we were discussing…
The book as talisman…
“The idea of the talismanic book was something I encountered in 1986 while working at Sotheby’s. I chanced upon a copy of Aleister Crowley’s “Ahab, and other poems” and was immediately struck by its mesmeric qualities. It wasn’t simply a matter of materials or typographic design, but somehow as a whole the book seemed resonant and vital. Later I discovered that Crowley had noted the similarities in manufacture between traditional books and the magical talismans of the Golden Dawn and had begun experimenting with merging the two methods. At the heart of this process was the notion that the book-talisman should be charged with the force that it was intended to represent. Of course, this can be interpreted in many ways—and my own take is fairly post-modern—but when I first encountered it in the mid 1980s, this approach seemed the very antithesis of commercial book production, particularly within the occult genre. Curiously, I found that inspiring.”
September 24th, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Arthur Johnson,
Despair is just one emotion that I feel for what is happening and what will happen – but it certainly isn’t the only emotion.
We’ve discussed the Kübler-Ross stages of grief here many times. Acceptance is the final stage yet all stages can be experienced simultaneously, out of order, and repeatedly. Ultimately, however, a “healthy” human will reach and stabilize at the stage of acceptance – even in the face of extinction. After all, each person becomes extinct individually sooner or later.
There have been five other mass extinction events in Earth’s history. I don’t mourn those events, nor feel despair. They didn’t affect me nor any aspect of my existence – at least not directly. But, if they hadn’t happened, it’s pretty certain that I wouldn’t be here typing this message to you about the current extinction event.
By the same token, out of this current mass extinction, new life will be born. I have no doubt that this new life will be wonderful, awesome, and unique. If this current extinction wasn’t happening, that life would never come to be either.
Is that good or bad? I don’t think it’s either one. It just is.
So, give it a rest. Whether a person wants to spend their final days reading Douglas Adam’s, shopping till they drop, or masturbating to Beethoven’s Fifth, it doesn’t really matter. The end comes regardless.
September 25th, 2012 at 2:10 am
TVT – the red jungle fowl that chickens most likely came from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Red_junglefowl_hm.jpg has a small straight comb. Just like your kitten is not like wild kittens and the various breeds of dog are unlike wolves, chickens have been bred to have a variety of characteristics unlike wild chickens. There are now pea combs, rose combs, walnut combs, cushion walnut combs, and large often floppy straight combs. We most run into the dysfunctional combs when crossing a pea to a straight from a leghorn line.
Roosters in the wild and in our acre of free range have various “jobs” – one is to watch for and warn of hawks and other predators so the hens can eat with less worry. Another is to find food for hens (which they always think is good for sex no matter how tiny – and in fact young roosters will often pretend to find food to get a hen close enough to jump on). They also attempt to keep other roosters out of their little flock and a comb over one eye puts them at a disadvantage should a fight ensue. We have several sub flocks usually with a superior and one or more roosters under them.
September 25th, 2012 at 7:22 am
Arthur,
“More angry…?”
Only when I think about the world outside my immediate sphere, which is every time I read any news or opinion columns, which is every freaking day. Inside the world I inhabit I am happy and fulfilled. The unfortunate part of that equation is that even if a person were to choose to live as a monk in a cave the disaster we’ve set in motion will visit us soon. There is no retreat from it any more, no more living a solitary life in the forest, a la Thoreau. Even the 1% will soon be feeling the sting of changing conditions.
I’ve been working very hard on my lifeboat, but have also been practicing my swimming skills.
Michael Irving
September 25th, 2012 at 3:45 pm
The REAL Dr. House,
Fair enough.
Regarding extinction, I have a feeling that a lot more plant life will survive than they’re given credit for. The bulk of the angiosperms are probably finished, but the gymnosperms and cycads, maybe not.
In any event, an extinction of animal forms of the magnitude Guy is talking about (basically back to one-celled bacteria) essentially means the end of complex animal life forever. The Earth only has about one billion years left, at most, before the sun becomes just hot enough to initiate the Venus Syndrome. If things get pruned back that drastically, there likely isn’t enough time left to allow for a second Cambrian explosion to occur and complex animal life to bounce back.
In that event, Kathy C’s quip about Aliens several days ago is pertinent. The idea of an “Extinction Project” to create some kind of long-term physical record of human knowledge, which would include whatever we currently know about non-human biology, behavior, and psychology, might be a worthwhile endeavor. This record would be for the benefit of any intelligent, space-faring alien species who managed to get here. James Lovelock has already suggested something along these lines, as have others.
September 25th, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Michael Irving,
FWIW, my own position on where we are with respect to climate change is succinctly summarized in 17 minutes by this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90
For 2013, I think it’s a dead certainty that the Arctic sea ice extent minimum will be down to 2.7 million sq km (from 3.4 million this year), the North American drought will continue and be more severe, food prices will rise sharply, and there will be widespread food riots in various places, particularly in the Middle East.
The next year is going to be pretty ugly. Keep working on that lifeboat, and keep it handy.
October 16th, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Living in a rural area will not bring a reduction in one’s carbon footprint or ecological footprint if we continue to have a high-consuming lifestyle there; and the demands of rural living could cause us to increase our carbon footprint or ecological footprint. For example, most people who live in rural areas drive their cars more because the grocery store and other destinations are further away. In the city I see lots of people riding bicycles, but in the rural areas I see few people riding bicycles; probably because the rural people find biking impractical for their errands. The high price of land or rent and the scarcity of jobs in rural areas prevents many low-income people from living there. If everyone in the USA moved to a rural area, the rural areas would get more congested — without necessarily solving any land-use problems — and probably creating more land-use problems. New eco-villages in rural areas are a good idea, but only of they can be established within the framework of a new economic model.
October 16th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Most of the people I see living in rural areas not only drive a lot more on local errands, but many of them travel more to escape the boredom of country life. Speaking of boredom, most country people have cable or satellite TV. They also have more pets, who get fed more kibble, and more toys, like gas-guzzling pickup trucks, motorboats, trailbikes, or ATVs. Many of them burn wood in fireplaces and woodstoves — not just for necessity, but for the sheer pleasure of having a fire. So many of them have chainsaws. They also have gas-powered weed-whackers, riding lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and roto-tillers for maintaining their humongous homestead. Lots of people have their own water well and a gas-powered generator for back-up electicity. If power is cheap, some country people will flaunt it with big Christmas displays. Most people who keep horses do it for their personal entertainment, not for practical reasons.
October 16th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Then there’s the ubiquitous rural homestead giant private workshop, equipped with enough power tools, handtools, and gadgets to start a furniture factory and a construction company.
November 5th, 2012 at 8:16 am
I think Guy is doing a great service to help bring the reality of our situation on this planet to awareness, as are such individuals as Chris Hedges, Naomi Wolfe, Amy Goodman, and so forth. It should drive us all to “do everything we can” but “what we are doing,” which I interpret as opening ones mind to deeper understanding of our planet and our place in it, as well as an emergent new paradigm. Such initiatives as the Thrive Movement (Foster & Kimberly Carter Gamble) & Share International are resources we can use to connect solutions to critical problems. It’s not over yet, and there may still be the possibility of survival for our species. Hope can be a false projection of an unrealistic future, but awareness new facts can be the basis of concrete sustainable solutions.
December 20th, 2012 at 9:55 am
Merry Christmas!
I fully believe in the potential of mother earth to repair herself, if humans cannot mend their ways. The mass extension is already occurring. The inhumanity of it is that most will not even give a penny to help feed the starving. There will be survivors and we will be forced to change. Equip your children for the new reality, I guess the meek really will inherit the earth.