Holocaust (concluded).

[Up, Down]

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.

 
[Up, Down]