Decimate. (Obliterate? Annihilate?)

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Perdido Bay Alabama: ('Perdido' is Portuguese for 'lost'.) THX1138: The meanings of words drift - sometimes in complicated, even subtle ways. 'Decimate', literally, is killing one in ten, a Roman tactic for dealing with sedition. Ten percent probably worked pretty well for them - without destroying the efficacy of their armies. Rule-of-thumb for specifically management activities within a project also used to be 10% - or 'tithe', Old English for 'tenth' - for 'government' you could say, both corporal & spiritual. But it went cancerous & mad along the way - free-of-tax day is now sometime in July or August, say, 60-70%; and the entire edifice is crumbling under the weight of it. Considering that government has become indistinguishable from industry & usury it's more like 90%. It's reflected culturally here and there - follow up on fandens fødselsdag / The Devil's Birthday if you like and ... think about it. Cadê O Cidadão? / Where is Elmo?: Let's go Citizen! Celebrate! The spectacle of growth has started already. Pssst ... Where is the citizen?         Viva! Whoopee! Uh!Uh!Uh! Yahoo! They're right there eh? Underneath that insupportable tax burden.   Everyone has to become adult. At some point it's necessary to abandon that infantile thing ... ... called happiness.   Cartoons cannot be taken at face value either. ... Just imagine what life in Toronto might have been with the other high-school dropout, George Smitherman at the helm: new and expanded eHealth (currently ~1,000 mouths at the trough) ... whatever ... I didn't vote for Rob Ford but some days I wish I had. Well then, a friendship relation between a man and a woman is obviously possible ... A woman doesn't have to be seen just as a sexual object! On the other hand we could be trivializing human relationships! Friends: Will trade a feminist sociologist for the crudest macho chauvinist. Any takers?   Angst Asiatisk i vælde er angsten. Den er modnet med umodne aar. Og jeg føler det dagligt i hjertet, som om fastlande dagligt forgaar. Men min angst må forløses i længsel og i syner af rædsel og nød. Jeg har længtes mod skibskatastrofer og mod hærværk og pludselig død. Jeg har længtes mod brændende byer og mod menneskeracer på flugt, mod et opbrud, som ramte alverden, og et jordskælv, som kaldtes Guds tugt. Fra romanen 'Hærværk', Tom Kristensen, 1930.        Angst Overwhelming eastern angst, come to fruition in immature years. In my heart it’s a daily sensation, as if whole continents disappear. My anxiety becomes a longing - visions of dread and distress. I yearn for mid-ocean shipwrecks destruction and sudden death. I long to see great cities on fire, humanity fleeing in a headlong surge, world wide break-up and collapse, an earthquake they call 'God’s scourge'. From the novel 'Hærværk' / Havoc, by Tom Kristensen, 1930.   I do not speak Danish, not at all. The translation is a melding of what I could find (with great liberties taken). I am imagining this nugget embodied in petit point samplers everywhere on bourgeois mantelpieces like the ubiquitous kitsch statuettes & prints of Don Quixote already there. [Kitsch (OED): Art characterized by worthless pretentiousness.] Not that the poem itself is kitsch; no more Cervantes' story - both of which are ... golden. Echoes of Yeats' 'Second Coming'. Altogether a very resourceful & self-possessed young woman: Tempting to post more of this delightful person in all her glory ... maybe later.

 

Dr. King said you only need 5% to turn it around. I could quibble over how long such a turn-around would take (too long sez I). ... But still. ... (This is what I might call properly positive thinking.)

 
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... a-and not all that swift to begin with.

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The title of the post comes from remembering "Who have never been happy or good" in Auden's 'September 1, 1939' - no, nor very smart neither sez I. (!)

Mar Grosso near São José do Norte:





 


Do not recharge cellular batteries for the animals.






[Which way does Coriolis force turn in the northern hemisphere?]

 

Obama, I'm calling to tell you I'm not coming to the US anymore.
Thanks Dilma, but you shouldn't have worried about it my dear, I already knew.

Trafigura, Côte d'Ivoire; Hansel & Gretel:

Turner: Typhoon Coming On The Slave Ship, 1840.

 
 
 
All hope is not necessarily bogus sentiment, just most of it:


 

['Conservation of electricity is underway' see here.]

You know what they say: "If wishes were horses ..."

 
Bottom line:

Or is it? ... Or is it?

 

As of the close of this edition the world had not ended.



The full Hunter's Moon was yesterday. A line in the sand, stepped over.

As for humans bein' 'swift'? Sapiens? Mark Zukerberg a genius? (It says so on my mousepad.) You think so? Or computer nerds in general? Or doctors? Anyone? Einstein? Long story ... but in the end I think not.

I watched Stephen Harper day before yesterday doing his pre-throne-speech warmup for the caucus. It's on YouTube. Every person in that room should be charged with ecocide - or just plain-old murder, whatever. We are all soooo FUCKED.

Sacanagem! Toute fuckée!

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Lost in the forest ...

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(Hansel & Gretel will be featured in the next post.)

Trying to discover the name of the person who designed the Durban COP logo - got as far as knowing that he or she is indeed a South African bureaucrat in some ministry, then silence.

Nanabijou, Sleeping Giant:




It may help understand some of the following to know that I think of the UN as a Baobab:
 
[But not Yvo de Boer for the record. He's no baobab! Gave it his very best shot and left when it was time to go.]





Of related interest: The IPCC AR5 attribution statement, and Gwynne Dyer in the Georgia Strait, When feedbacks are triggered, climate change becomes a runaway engine (a commentary on the IPCC's AR5).

My commentary: in AR4 it was 26 words, now it's 54 - just more than twice as many words. Fire them all!

The monster of corruption

 
 

[Thanks to Gord.]

 



Internet at a popular price

[Consider Frye's primary & secondary concerns: "Primary concerns are such things as food, sex, property, and freedom of movement: concerns that we share with animals on a physical level. Secondary concerns include our political, religious, and other ideological loyalties," (from 'The Double Vision' (Chapter 1).


On my street there was a beggar who spent the entire day discussing everything. He put out all of those thoughts thinking that they were important, but rarely did anyone pay attention. / Now he's just another Twitter user.

Ambiguities & ambivalence:

Pachamama is a powerful myth: but portrayed as a ghoul? as Medusa carved into the walls of our parliament? as a sometimes violent highway-snake that eats whole forests? I like Pachamama, and Iemanjá (and of her Orixá cohorts, Oxum particularly :-) ... but looking at these images has reminded me that, like Pandora, the myth cuts both ways ... or at least two. Not entirely benign, these myths. Take scientists f'rinstance: Some of 'em - Peter Sale as an exemplar, a veritable paradigm - are honourably & passionately engaged. More are working coldly for cash - possibly to provide their families with a third car - developing 'better' bee-killing insecticides. more 'effective' fracking fluids &c. It's not really that difficult to see why those who recognize the environmental apocalypse for what it is are not always heard - don't have much 'stroke'. Up-front admission of complicity might help. ... Can't say. Remembering in this context the scientists as they figured in Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast'.

 

Don't eat TIPNIS.



Delightful nubiles of various shades ... selling sneakers? socks?
 
Nubile selling chain-link fence? Or (pretending to sell) herself?
 

The Love Clairvoyant: --I had a vision of worms eating rats ... but we're not here to talk about politics.

 
Comics from the 10's:

Sir, it is forbidden to smoke under the marquee.

 

First Computer, 1964: The dolphin is a cetacean.
Computer Net, 2011: I think the dolphin is a fish. / It's a whale. / Hahaha, who cares?

“Deep. Sinister. And they’re all in on it together.” “Too paranoid for you?” “Not me, paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much.” Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 2013.   Thomas Pynchon's remarkable novel Gravity's Rainbow is a book that seems to me to have grasped a central principle of this situation. The human being, this novel tells us, is instinctively paranoid. Northrop Frye, The Double Vision, 1991, 2 - The Double Vision of Nature.   We await silent Trystero's empire. Anyway Pynchon is getting old, late 70's now. First typos ever, spotted in 'Bleeding Edge' (and those were the high points).

 
Bottom line:

Charles Embry of Sundance Roofing played by Tracey Walter in 'Erin Brockovich'. A footnote to 'Deadbeat misogynist asshole' posted previously, and closing the bracket on 'Mauer im Kopf' above. I posted a short clip illustrating the point on YouTube.

Full moon comin' up on the 18th - the Hunter's Moon. The full moon and associated changes in tides figgure symmetrically in the mythology of human afairs among fisher folk; births, deaths and such events.

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