Ship of Fools.

Ride on, ride on, in majesty!

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THESE ARE CLIMATE CRIMINALS ! If only they each had two heads, carried pitchforks and sported fiery daemonic horns and tails, or drooled uncontrollably. Read it and weep: Canadian Energy Strategy, July 2015. The Redford Rah Rah engine is out: before and after. Not much serious criticism. No howls of rage. The Editorial Board at the Globe register mild dismay. David Suzuki is in the Times Colonist and repeated on Huffington; but he is too polite by well more than half. Jeff Rubin is not so polite and hits it right on the mark: Canada needs an energy strategy, but not one focused on pipelines. I am moved to go looking for metaphors; fossicking about and stumble over/remember one from many years ago in Philosophy 101: Plato/Socrates in The Republic (section VI) - The Ship of Fools. Just as I'm thinking about all this I read Peter Sale's latest post: Dark Truths; which leads me to revisit Hannah Arendt's 'Men in Dark Times' - one of the few home-remedies for overwhelming despair I have found - and then to look again at some scientific papers on the necessary timing of carbon emission reductions if our civilization and ourselves are going to make it through. Here's a liberated copy of Meinshausen's 2009 paper. At that time a reasonable drop-dead date to achieve a flat Keeling Curve looks like 2024. Not any more. By 2012 Joeri Rogelj (Nature Climate Change: 2020 emissions levels required to limit warming to below 2°C, Joeri Rogelj, David McCollum, Brian O’Neill, & Keywan Riahi, December 2012) is putting it between 2015-2020. There are no liberated copies of this - I got one from the (gracious) author. Various good evidence (including previous papers by James Hansen) and my own proclivities lead me to settle on 2015. In James Hansen's latest: 2°C global warming is highly dangerous (120 pages is daunting, the abstract and conclusions not so much) I don't find any such estimates. Instead it's "Emergency!" When an old Iowa farmer yells "Emergency!" I listen, figguring he means "Now!". There is no shortage of scientific evidence that humanity must stop carbon emissions soonest if we are to survive and the idiot premiers are still planning for pipelines.   DOH! Thirteen crows on a wire: (With apologies to Wallace Stevens.) (Mail, telephone and email coordinates for the thirteen sleveens pictured here can be found below.)

Dear Premiers, That was your big chance - and you blew it. I suppose you're happy, relieved that with the exception of some polite criticism from David Suzuki the 'media' appear to be letting you get away with your ridiculous 'Canadian Energy Strategy'. In the same way that most of the Roman Catholic bureaucracy, in Canada at least, have let Laudato Si' slide into yesterday's news, your bad joke sinks into the murk almost without a bubble. You may even be congratulating yourselves that you did not stand up to be counted as Jorge Bergoglio/Pope Francis did since his encycical has so far "forked no lightning" (to use an image from Dylan Thomas). Be careful though, you may be taken by surprise: consider the athiests who publicly endorse Laudato Si' and are strengthened and emboldened by it; and consider this silly half-baked 'strategy' of yours which places you unequivocally among the do-nothing deniers. You have faithfully followed the lame example of your colleagues Wynne & Couillard and their bogus carbon trading scheme, in presenting politically resonant but useless policies as you play to all sides on the issue. You won't believe me I know, but once upon a time I too made 300+ a year and I fully appreciate the seductiveness of it, the tendency towards insulated & mediated perceptions of what's going on - including inside one's own skin. I understand the happy smiling faces you show for photographs. But one or two generations hence - it won't be long - if your names are remembered at all it may be by your own grandchildren if you have any, who will curse you for not acting to stop climate change and the related environmental ... What do we call it? 'Crisis'? 'Armageddon'? 'End'? ... when it was "in you and in the situation," to do the right thing and you took the easy way out. I know you will not read this yourselves, but perhaps the functionary assigned to scan your correspondence who does look at it will ... understand, and will then just get up and walk away to join the Unis'tot'en Camp - that would be a good start. Be well.

Ride on, ride on, in majesty! Hark! all the tribes Hosanna cry; Thine humble beast pursues his road With palms and scattered garments strowed. Ride on, ride on, in majesty! In lowly pomp ride on to die! O Christ! Thy triumph now begin Over captive death and conquered sin. Ride on, ride on, in majesty! The wingèd squadrons of the sky Look down with sad and wondering eyes To see the approaching sacrifice. Ride on, ride on, in majesty! Thy last and fiercest strife is nigh; The Father, on His sapphire throne, Awaits His own anointed Son. Ride on, ride on, in majesty! In lowly pomp ride on to die; Bow Thy meek head to mortal pain, Then take, O God, Thy power, and reign. The 4-note rising scale at the beginning of the second part never fails to thrill me. The sound in this YouTube rendition is not very good, muddy, but you can get a general idea. Choral music is so moving because it is one of the few truly cooperative human activities, and is also difficult to either fake or effectively coerce. In the myth, Christ does not sail into Jerusalem, he rides a donkey; but it is easy enough to mentally hear Leonard Cohen's "Sail on! Sail on! O mighty Ship of State," overlayed. I trust the complexities of a (full-ish, please) 'Compare&Contrast' exercise between the christian crucifixion story and the annihilation of H. sapiens if not all planetary life (including soul as well as body when one annihiates the OED informs me) are not beyond you gentle reader. Lest you be tempted to underestimate the task: Consider this screen grab from the movie version of Tomas Pynchon's 'Inherent Vice' - using the facade of a California mental hospital to evoke Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei - savouring the horrid and oh so 'inappropriate' comparison, while keeping in mind that American exceptionalism is as invisibly strong in Thomas Pynchon as it is in Bob Dylan ... and John McCain for that matter.

Koordinaten der Scheiße Köpfe: (von West nach Ost und Nord nach Süd)

Yukon Premier Darrell Pasloski: Yukon Government Administration Building 2071 Second Avenue, PO Box 2703 Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Y1A 2C6 867-667-8660 premier@gov.yk.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Northwest Territories Premier Bob McLeod: PO Box 1320 Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, X1A 2L9 867-669-2311 bob_mcleod@gov.nt.ca and in Wikipedia Nunavut Premier Peter Taptuna: Government of Nunavut PO Box 1000 Station 200 Iqaluit, Nunavut, X0A 0H0 867-975-6000, 1-877-212-6438 (toll free) info@gov.nu.ca and a blurb in Wikipedia British Columbia Premier Christy Clark: PO Box 9041 Stn Prov Govt Victoria, British Columbia, V8W 9E1 250-387-1715 premier@gov.bc.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Alberta Premier Rachel Notley: 307 Legislature Building 10800 - 97 Avenue Edmonton, Alberta, T5K 2B6 780 427-2251 premier@gov.ab.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall: 2405 Legislative Drive, Room 226 Regina, Saskatchewan, S4S 0B3 306-778-2429 bradwallmla@sasktel.net & premier@gov.sk.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger: 204 Legislative Building 450 Broadway Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3C 0V8 204-945-3714 premier@leg.gov.mb.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne: Queen's Park, Legislative Building Toronto, Ontario, M7A 1A1 416-325-1941 premier@ontario.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Québec Premier Philippe Couillard: Édifice Honoré-Mercier 835, boulevard René-Lévesque Est, 3e étage Québec, G1A 1B4 418-643-5321, 514-873-3411 email interface and the blurb in Wikipedia New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant: Centennial Building, PO Box 6000 Fredericton, New Brunswick, E3B 5H1 506-453-2144 premier@gnb.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Prince Edward Island Premier Wade MacLauchlan: Fifth Floor South, Shaw Building 95 Rochford Street, PO Box 2000, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, C1A 7N8 902-368-4400 premier@gov.pe.ca and the blurb in Wikipedia Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil: 7th Floor, One Government Place 1700 Granville Street Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3J 1X5 902-424-6600 premier@novascotia.ca and a blurb in Wikipedia Newfoundland Premier Paul Davis: Confederation Building, East Block PO Box 8700 St. John's, Newfoundland, A1B 4J6 709-729-3570 premier@gov.nl.ca and in Wikipedia		(You know this is Stevie not Shelley right?) I also trust that anyone looking at this already knows that 'the economy' is the reddest of red herrings and is presented for entertainment value only. I know I'll never be forgiven for suggesting any connection between Bill Reid and a Ship of Fools, and yet ...

Sitting on a bench in the park:   One is not permitted to smoke in the Toronto Public Library, so when I'm working there I retire to a nearby park-bench once in a while; and sometimes another smoker comes by and asks for a light. It happened today. An older gent walking his dog stopped, and when he was lit we had a short conversation. He began with a back-handed joke about smoking. I replied that harsh judgements on smokers are disproportionate when one considers the evils of climate change and potential extinction of our species due to fossil fuel addiction. He said, "Oh no, technology will find a solution for all that." I said I'd looked into it and found that the technological remedies don't wash. He said, "But they've discovered other earth-like planets close by. We'll just move over there." I asked how we would ever travel even 100 light-years of distance en masse? We laughed. His dog began to chase another that was passing and off he went. Not long after at the bank I noticed that the teller had henna designs on her hands. I said, "I think it must be delightful to have someone painting such lovely, fine, things on one's hands." She looked at me and smiled: "Yes," she said, "It is." Were any of Arendt, Milman, or Reid able to concretely, seriously, imagine a final end of H. sapiens I wonder? As an intellectual exercise maybe - the proposition for a university debate - but not, I don't think, to savour emotionally. (I don't really mean 'able to', gentle reader, because they might, would probably &c., have accomplished it had it occurred to them.) While Pynchon & Dylan live full on in that space and 'float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.'         Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,         From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.         Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth.         You're an idiot, babe. It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.         Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves.         We're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.

 
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Dark fruit cake.

Conspiracy of noise.

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Everyone's heard the expression 'conspiracy of silence'. I'm wondering what a 'conspiracy of noise' might be like? Leonard Cohen's "Getting lost in that hopeless little screen," almost seems to be about TV. Maybe it's also about these solitary computer screens. So many of the threads here appear in his amazing 1992 album 'The Future' that I can't help but try to gather up a few of them: Keith Ecclestone talking (so many years ago) about the 'plenum void' as flip-side alienation (it was the 60s); the 'Always' of my mothers crazy notion of carnal love; Ivan Illich's compassion and Jacques & Raissa Maritain's "l'armée des étoiles jetées dans le ciel," considered as 'amorous array'. I mentioned Chris Hedges' set piece 'The Myth of Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies' most recently delivered in Vancouver a few months ago as 'The Rules of Revolt'. In the Q&A portion of a 2013 reading he says:         Sitting in front of your computer screen, alone in your room typing angry screeds about the government means you're still sitting alone in your room - which is just where they want you. Where they don't want you is out in the street.         The Internet and electronic communications are very good tools for organizing, but very bad tools for creating mechanisms of mass movements that have the ability to actually begin to impede the function of the state. The Internet has created this strange world where those who are hackers have the ability to break down electronic walls and expose the inner workings of power to us, which is why they are being so ruthlessly persecuted, far and beyond anything they do or even might have done.         I think the Occupy Movement showed that we have got to begin to build the kind of large mass movements that I saw - I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe - in Eastern Europe where we were pulling 500 thousand people to Alexander Platz in East Berlin or 500 thousand people into Wenceslas Square in Prague. That's what we've got to do, and we have to use mechanisms like the general strike. These are the mechanisms that are going to save us.         I don't - in that sense, in terms of the ability to actually begin to, other than hacking - see the Internet as particularly useful that way. In fact if you look at Julian Assange's latest book 'Cyber Punks' which he did with Applebaum, he argues that ultimately the digital age is going to make totalitarian control even more efficient." The other thread, an image, a string of images: from Hedges talking about Neitzsche's 'molten pit' and 'the burnt ones' (also the title of Patrick White's first collection of stories); through Cohen's blizzard that "overturns the order of the soul"; Ibsen's boyg in 'Peer Gynt'; the vast whirlpool which I think I first saw in Edgar Allen Poe's 'A Descent into the Maelström'; and coming full circle back to the sinking of the Pequod in Melville's 'Moby Dick' that Hedges also mentions (after a brief diversion through Dante’s Inferno and the myth of Ulysses). He says (this is quite a tangly bit, replete with nonsequiturs, and needs close reading):         It is only those who harness their imagination, and through their imagination find the courage to peer into the molten pit, who can minister to the suffering of those around them. It is only they who can find the physical and psychological strength to resist. Resistance is carried out not for its success, but because by resisting in every way possible we affirm life. And those who resist in the years ahead will be those who are infected with this “sublime madness.” As Hannah Arendt wrote in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', the only morally reliable people are not those who say 'this is wrong' or 'this should not be done,' but those who say 'I can’t.' They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: 'If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.' And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith." The bit from Kant brings up (again, from the ol' compost heap) the last sentence of 'The Limits to Growth':         The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence. I don't actually think that faith has necessarily to do with it. And ministering to the suffering is not an end in itself. But I can see how Hedges' background might lead him to put it that way. Jesuit rhetorical tricks? Is that it? All of this (gentle reader) makes exactly where I am sitting - viz., alone in my room - more and more unbearable, untenable, silly, wasteful ... and so on. I just hope that the automated text-analysers over at CSIS and the NSA don't interpret these meditations as anything ... dangerous.

 
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No-name progress I.

Is there a Green Party? and
The famous blue Three Point Plan.

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The guy on the left was already well on the way down and out when the photograph was taken in 2010. A-and, truth be told, this here 'one-plus-three-point' plan is most likely a foregone conclusion too - a shell game with the pea being a miracle. His friend gives 'im a telephone, boughten not bespoke, paid-for. It is not a perfect transaction but he is trying to be kind. What he don't didn't, doesn't, can't, won't see is the reason it was ever got rid of - simply that it (almost) never rang. Now it (almost) never rings. Nothing is changed. As the denominator comes closer and closer to (almost) never it's a cusp and out pop limits and calculus and all the sweet (predictable) music of the revolving spheres. But I am one who looks at the crescent moon to see if she still holds water cupped in her hands. Beyond limits is Heisenberg's uncertainty around position and momentum which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to ... the far more satisfying quantum conclusion that either the universe is ... or is not, never was. ... A way a lone a last a loved a long the Einstein sez "God don't play dice," but it seems to me like ... if He was He might.   Green Party: Round 1: (March 2) Go out to hear Elizabeth May and she sure seems to be telling the truth. Decide to follow it up. (March 7.) Leave a message for the one person I remember from the last time I tried it on with the Greens in this riding. Find a website with an email address and send one. Leave a message on the main Green Party site. Nadinha! Zilch! Round 2: (March 20.) Remember that Charlie Halpern was once kind. Leave a message on his site; he responds immediately and forwards the question; the person I was thinking of answers and promises to include me in the next riding meeting. (March 23.)   Three Point Plan: 1) TSP / Trinity St. Paul's: (March 22.) Visit TSB for Sunday service and meet Bob Fugere who promises to inform me of their next monthly meeting. (March 26.) He follows up with a gracious email explaining that the meeting hasn't been scheduled yet and he will tell me when it is. 2) Beaches United: I am blocked on this somehow. I keep formulating plans to go over, or telephone, or email - and then just don't do it. An open item then. 3) UofT: The divestment appears to be in the hands of 350 - a project on the go since 2013. Two hundred and eighty seven pages of 'Brief' and growing. (March 24.) Go to their scheduled weekly meeting. It is evident that their focus is raising money. Someone promises to send me the minutes. (March 26.) The lovely young Executive Assistant follows through, not with the minutes but with membership on the list. (March 28.) Go along to the Green Show. A bust. If there is a less gracious way to accomplish anything you'll find it first in Toronto. The 350 guy gives me the brush off. At least I manage to get rid of a big bag of e-waste. (March 30.) Sure enough, there is list email - interesting stuff too it is. [TO BE CONTINUED ...]

Emily is 12 years old. Sharie is her mother. Emily has been competing in beauty pagents since she was 4 years old. The photographs come from a recent NYT article based in turn on the latest project of Ilana Panich-Linsman (unfortunately the site does not work very well, for me at least).

Correctitude: It's not all bad. To begin meetings with a salute to the 'First Nations' is a good reminder that this is all, always has been, stolen land. As long as one is also mindful of corrupt band councils, and aware of large mammal extinctions before the coming of the 'white man' and so on. Or ... Laerte, a transsexual (with a double 'ss'), Patrick White, Rimbaud (from an era when sexual activity was determined by anal inspection carried out by licensed professionals). Re-reading Patrick White: 'Riders in the Chariot' (1961), 'The Solid Mandala' (1966), and 'A Fringe of Leaves' (1976). So many occasions when his words seem to be coming straight through the aether. No mistake that a number of deep friendships develop during the brief weeks reading 'Riders' at MUN so many years ago. (Of course we imagine ourselves a skein of Zaddiks - mensch being beyond our grasp.) And yet, also replete with pettiness - eloquent AND petty.   :-) I'll actually exist? You will.                                       I exist? You Exist. It's not just some kind of illusion? No. It's not that. I'm really going to turn into                                       Wow! I feel much better.    If I'd known I'd have a woman? You are.                                                 So you say.                     switched years ago. The machine didn't exist back then.   Alan Rusbridger's Guardian initiative has hit a few wrinkles. Notably financial links from the purveyors of fossil fuel into The Guardian's own coffers. What is evident now is that he really is playing by ear. And likely (also) hoping for a miracle. This is good. On the other hand, he is playing so openly and so transparently that this ... confusion (let's call it) comes off positively. It mirrors almost perfectly the ambiguous complicity around this issue in the heart of everyman. What he needs now is some small victory: possibly convincing his own colleagues - in the Guardian Media Group (GMG) & Scott Trust - to divest; or a softer target such as the Anglican Church; something - even a huge jump in the petition signers, from 140,000 to millions could conceivably turn the tide. Keeping in mind that this is the third-last stanza out of twenty five, four lines out of a hundred. Taken from Le Bateau Ivre, 1883, and an English translation by Oliver Bernard, 1962. Of course it's well worth going to the library and having a look at Samuel Beckett's translation (which is not available anywhere on-line that I can find).

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes. Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer: L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes. O que ma quille éclate! O que j'aille à la mer!

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

She's having a ball. Who could object? And yet these images and the story (or the parts of the story that are not told) disturb, upset, sadden; and the wondering about this girl, her mother, and the photographer, just carries on ... Chris Hedges fulminates about violence to women, pornography, prostitution. What do you call whatever it is that is happening to Emily then?

 
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Holocaust (concluded).

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It's just like Bob says, "I went to tell everybody but I could not get across." If this were, say, in the Germany of 1940 - sometime between Kristalnacht and Auschwitz - would it be any easier? But we already know the story of Kurt Gerstein trying to tell the Pope what was going on in those days; not only in quase-fictional accounts - Costa-Gavras' film 'Amen' and Rolf Hochhuth's play 'The Deputy' - but through credible historical records. What is happening now may be (numerically at least) orders of magnitude worse than the Holocaust, worse than Holodomor, worse than the Great Chinese Famine. Ah, but it's a probability not a certainty. We like to see our citizens insuring their lives on stacked & exaggerated odds and so enriching banks and insurance companies, but ... plan for a contingency like human extinction? How silly. It doesn't make economic sense. In the event there will be no economy and we are unable to imagine that. Arnaldo Angeli Filho: Urbe / City: A careful look will show that I have tried to impose an order on Angeli's images (with no idea of what he's really up to). Urbanization - flipping from 3/4 rural to 3/4 urban/suburban in the ~50 years following WWII - surely has a lot to do with the general mental stoppage. City people tend not to know how to actually do anything. Prejudice of course. The old-time evangelists calling out, "Repent! The end is near!" And the more recent millenarians & purveyors of the apocalypse - first-order nutbars by the gross. The (urban - universities don't grow on trees except possibly McGill which used to be centered on a Ginko) scientists and their (urban) adherents in the 'movement' mangle a 69-cent-word like 'mitigation' to mean reduction, abatement, cessation (ignoring its connection with palliation - the alleviation of the symptoms and incidents of disease without curing it), which then goes straight over the heads of their real audience. Surprise! Surprise! Nothing much happens. Don't shoot the piano player - but perhaps consider shooting the consultants if they won't retire. An often repeated notion is that we are conducting a life-or-death experiment of uncertain outcome with the only planet we happen to inhabit. All the while ignoring a successful experiment which actually took place - in Cuba, the Special Period when for a few years there was no oil. No mass deaths, and resilience sprang up like Topsy. QED. That this overcomes me, has overwhelmed me entirely, is evident; could be understandable, is not, whatever.

 
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