Showing posts with label Bok. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bok. Show all posts

Monday, December 22, 2014

What to do?

Apply the Golden Rule and see if it sticks.   
Fuck, fight, hold the light.
(Thanks to Ken B.)
[Up, Down]

Neil Young: Who's gonna stand up?

Here's a start for Y'all.   Ask yourself:                                                                    
  Who's gonna stand up?

   Other versions:
   A-and: Fork in the Road.

 
This is what's really happening:
Ballard Street: He throws himself on the mercy of the day.
Berkeley Breathed. Bill The Cat.


... all the rest is strictly hypothetical.

Earth First!But seriously ... three possibly useful & effective examples have seeped and soaked into the squash over the last few years:

                Crowbird & Occupation Apple Tree;
                Zoe & the Forest Action Network; and,
                The entire East End Against Line 9 committee.

More on this below.
What to do betwixt & between? Infinite possibilities! ...

Blame the Arabs:
John Larter.Matt Wuerker.
Or ... don't blame the Arabs:
Tom Toles: Church of the Almighty Dollar.Tom Toles: Our survival plan is to sacrifice our children.
Find morally ambiguous people (at home & abroad) to blame:
MacKinnon: Veterans Affairs, Julian Fantino the sleveen.Malcolm Mayes: Veterans Christmas.
Lee Judge: Hate America.
Dress up the lies & dissembling, put lipstick on 'em:
Harry Bliss.John Larter.
Chip Bok.Tutu pig.
Give up, stop thinking, say "Fuck it!" & resign yourself:
John Cole: Justice. Bah!Lee Judge.
Become a perfectly realized being or ... get sentimental:
Chiquinha: Voando / Flying (stoned).Lassalvy: Sea Shell.
Take the time for a serious course of reality therapy:
Anita Kunz: Arctic Ark.Mike Thompson: Fear.
Pray to the Great Cloud Dragon; hope a Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake comes along:
Signe: Pope UnSelfie.
Jay Williams & Mercer Mayer: Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like.
The Elephant's Child Rudyard Kipling.
Tarot reading, astrology, star-gazing, tea leaves:
Pearls Before Swine: Give Up Pig.
Indulge in positive thinking:
Anonymous but defiant frog.Paul Conrad: Congressional Bipartisanship 1999.Remember, it may get worse.
... or one-word aphorisms:
Shepard Fairey: Andre the Giant, OBEY.Anonymous: Resist.Barack Obama: Hope.
... or the heroes of your youth: (Show 'em off, brag on 'em, go ahead - be pretentious.)
Hunter S. Thompson.Hunter S. Thompson. 
Some people say to take examples from the abolitionst movement of the 17th & 18th (& 19th & 20th & 21st) centuries (which has yet to eliminate slavery in its many forms) - I think we might be better off taking examples from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

Adam Czerniaków, Neville Chamberlain - are those the kind of leaders you're looking for? Is that why the palliative & appeasement dimensions of 'mitigation' have such widespread appeal?

The three examples I gave at the top can be found:

                Occupation Apple Tree,.
                Vancouver Island Community Forest Action Network.
                East End Against Line 9.

All well worthy of praise and whatever support they may ask for.
We can quibble if you like. A quick round of intellectual table tennis over whether it's Earth (mother or father), or Humanity (sapiens or graedum or agapiens), or Nature, or Ecology, or simply life itself. Regardless of the outcome I like this phrase 'Earth First!' with a gen-u-ine exclamation point and all.
Earth First!
[I myself can probably not be found. Weak and worn out; smoking, sipping & savouring death (while avoiding the main draught). Holding the light perhaps or ... consumed by self-pity, or both - no way of telling - but either way, demonstrably supernumerary, superfluous and ... not required, unworthy of any engagement.

The danger is not the loss of faith & hope, the danger is not despair; the danger is that no one will notice and take interest. There is a calculus of spirit though it is not mathematical and so is not suitable for engineering.
]
 
[Up, Down]

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Oh k-k-k-Canada, they've got you upside down.

Doolally tap.
Up-a-daisey! 
[Up, Down]

[Who says no good comes from TV? The phrase 'doolally tap' is used in one of the silly soaps I spend my life watching these days. Deolali is a British army camp in India from the time of the Raj, not far from Bombay & Bhopal. Tap, tapa is Persian & Sanskrit for 'fever'. 'Doolally tap' then, is British army slang for 'going postal' (or simply mad).]
 
Neil Young: Who's gonna stand up?

Not EVERY Canadian. Try this:                                                                    
  Who's gonna stand up?

   Other versions:
   A-and: Fork in the Road.

We can quibble if you like over 'save the earth', 'save ourselves', 'save humanity', whatever.

Here's a series you won't soon guess: 7, 11, 13, 17, 22. Seven & eleven are lucky numbers, thirteen is normally an unlucky number but maybe not for those born on that day, seventeen is a prime number I happen to like, twenty two is the top of 22/7 an approximation of pi (the number that contains all numbers). Taken together they are the dates on which the blog will be published this month. See how simpleminded it's become. :-)

Found in an OED citation:   "The most labyrinthine acrobatic choreography — a tortuous series of slithers, blind leaps, upsy-daisy lifts, and ass-over-heels floorwork." (The New Yorker, 1984)

Confession: (I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK.)
Adão Iturrusgarai: Confession.
Darling, I have to tell you something. I'm not a lumber-sexual. I'm just a wood-cutter.

"Faire is foule, and foule is faire." Canada is upside down, inverted, backwards, fucked-up:
Aislin: The leaves are falling.Brian Gable: Stephen Harper flying upside down.
Brian Gable: Stephen Harper in Australia.
Anthony Jenkins: The Great Northern Sloth.
Brian Gable: Surprise revenue.Brian Gable: Budget surplus.
Brian Gable: Shock & Awe.Our governments don't give a rat's ass for the environment or for us. What they do care about is anybody's guess - probably continued affluence and hope for the odd blow-job.

Speaking of which: All levels of morality are given lip service and no more. On November 11 shortly before noon we stand with tears in our eyes - and that's the extent of it.

You may wonder how the demise of the CBC is related. We might say good riddance to bad rubbish as they simultaneously implode and explode (much like a kicked-in TV tube). Fact is the information deficit might have been alleviated, mitigated by a public broadcaster worthy of the name. Barbara Frum was one of those but she and her generation are long gone.
It's Hamlet ("to be or not to be") AND Macbeth ("faire is foule, and foule is faire, houer through the fogge and filthie ayre") all rolled up into one.   Exeunt.

Brian Gable: Black Friday.Charles Weiss: CBC bad rubbish.
Brian Gable: Stephen Harper bets on oil.Bruce MacKinnon: Stephen Harper bets on oil.

Always keep in mind that these pipelines are not designed to bring oil to Canadians:
Brian Gable: Oil for China.Malcolm Mayes: Nice Doggy.
Malcolm Mayes: Depend.Anthony Jenkins: Cute! Rich!
Chip Bok: 'Dem dems.Horsey: Pipeline Jobs.

The jobs that are supposed to come from all of this ... are grossly overestimated & exaggerated by proponents as is the resulting prosperity 'human flourishing' and what not. The unions are (quite naturally) trying to hang on to more than their share.

Government propaganda (lies) is identical with corporate rationale (lies):
Khalil Bendib: Circular Logic.Dan Wasserman: Circular Logic.
Dale Cummings: Guiding the herds of caribou.
Abigail Fallis: Dodo, Death Of The Author.Abigail Fallis: Dodo, Death Of The Author.Abigail Fallis: Dodo, Death Of The Author.
Jim Prentice & Stephen Harper au naturel.Jim Prentice & Philippe Couillard.Jim Prentice & Kathleen Wynne.

I've looked high and low and cannot find the "seven criteria for the Energy East pipeline" laid out by Quebec and endorsed by Ontario ANYWHERE. They are mentioned and loads of pundit jizz are spent in the general area but no actual expression of what they are. Kathleen Wynne has already begun to backtrack apparently. If anyone reads this who knows where the seven pillars of this wisdom can be found please let me know.

Given all the hyperbole, some sensible talk about oil prices from Mark Jaccard is in order. And some more-or-less enlightening remarks - if mostly by reflection, and after you discount that the author wants it both ways. Both of these bits are in the Globe, Imagine!

The UN flogging a dead horse (at great expense):
Miel: UNFCCC emissions.Stuart Carlson: UNFCCC Rhetoric Layer.
Malcolm Mayes: Stephen Harper goes to Copenhagen.tOad: deKyotage, Stephen Harper & Peter Kent go to Durban.
Joel Pett: UNFCCC.
Lee Judge: UNFCCC COP 20 Lima.
Toxic Canada.Celastrus scandens, Bittersweet.Toxic Canada.A problem not to be solved by national governments & bureaucracies nor by international governments & international bureaucracies. Surely this has been sufficiently demonstrated over more than two decades. Jim Hansen sounded the official warning in 1988. It was well understood years before that. Let's say thirty years of official incompetence (greed, inertia, complacency, wishful thinking, diplomatic forbearance ... whatever).

Well then ... what kind of thing could possibly solve it?

[When I ask this question people back away from me holding their fingers crossed in front of them, and as soon as I begin sketching out the hypotheticals I'm able to imagine they turn and leave.]

If there were time then the adoption of renewable energy (which is already more than doubling every year) combined with drastic birth-rate controls and effective (Fee & Dividend) carbon pricing could do it. But there is neither political will nor time.

What else? 1) Economic collapse. 2) Plague, pandemic, what you will. 3) Widespread and general sedition, revolt, revolution. A-and, it's got to be sooner rather than later. These are all projects beyond planning & executing. Anyway, the Black Death reached England in 1348, more than thirty years before the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 and the revolt did not succeed nevermind we don't have thirty years.

Take Canada (Please! :-). A national election is coming, possibly within a year. But both of the main alternatives to Stephen Harper's Conservative sleveens - the Liberals with Justin Sinclair and the lame left with whazizname Tom Mulcair - endorse similar energy & economic policies including tar sands development and pipelines. Jobs! and Growth!

One could wish for some electoral miracle that would give control to Elizabeth May and Bruce Hyer. But I went up during the last two elections to visit the Green candidate(s) in my riding ... and neither of 'em understood the kind of jeopardy humanity is facing, or if they did their policies didn't show it.

Say something! Tell me I'm crazy.         I wish I were.
Angeli: Absurd!
How ridiculous! The [drug] traffic controls all of society. We're hostages.
They control cities, corrupt the authorities, murder innocent people with impunity ... Burn busses, bring down military helicopters ...
There are even people who promote the legalization of drugs as the only way to stop the traffic. Really?!
Nonsense! Who could believe that? A bunch of idiots who want to take the country into anarchy.

[The Brasilian pronunciation of 'absurdo' includes a kind of silent 'i', the stress is on the long 'u', and there is a tiny roll on the 'r' - so it sounds like abiss-ÚÚÚrrdo. Delightful!]

THIS is the future we are passing to our children and theirs:
Martin Rowson: Once the money's gone.
 
[Up, Down]