What to do?

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

[Up, Down]

Here's a start for Y'all.   Ask yourself:                                                                       Who's gonna stand up?    Other versions: orchestral, With Crazy Horse, and solo.       A-and: Fork in the Road.

 

This is what's really happening: ... all the rest is strictly hypothetical.

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: Or ... don't blame the Arabs: Find morally ambiguous people (at home & abroad) to blame: Dress up the lies & dissembling, put lipstick on 'em: Give up, stop thinking, say "Fuck it!" & resign yourself: Become a perfectly realized being or ... get sentimental: Take the time for a serious course of reality therapy: Pray to the Great Cloud Dragon; hope a Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake comes along: Tarot reading, astrology, star-gazing, tea leaves: Indulge in positive thinking: ... or one-word aphorisms: ... or the heroes of your youth: (Show 'em off, brag on 'em, go ahead - be pretentious.)

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. [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]

I'll recruit my army from the orphanages.

(From Bob Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain, on the 'Modern Times' album of 2006.)

[Up, Down]

[It took me several days to figgure out that this post is really about the American mid-term elections. Do starfish notice when you cut off one of their legs? Probably. Maybe not. ... My only friend these days, a deaf guy at the library who sometimes says hello - he has a gizmo implanted in his brain that lets him hear and thus speak - laughs with me over the 700 votes that went to 'Dimitri The Lover' aka Dr. James Sears in the recent municipal election. ... The vision of America peddalling (officially) so strongly in reverse hits me harder than I want to admit. More on this when I've picked myself up a bit.] Peter Sinclair presents us (a year late but better late than never) with a video of Kevin Trenberth at the Seattle Science Festival. He gives us a limerick by Lynne Page: Deep Doo Doo There’s a clearer analysis forming Of the increase in powerful storming; But it’s not just hot air About which we should care For the cold ocean depths have been warming. This presentation of Kevin's is particularly good - an exemplar. Limericks connect with people and lighten things up. He could even go one further: asking the audience to compose clever doggerel to be passed forward to the stage on scraps of paper, and he could then read some of them at the end of his talk instead of indulging in another more-or-less hijacked Q&A session. He also mentions the strange usage of 'mitigate' to denote stoppage of CO2 and other GHG emissions. This pleases me because I think the word is seriously inappropriate and a stumbling block; have thought so since I first heard it used in this context and this is the first time I have heard somone else mention it, someone with authority. Maybe Naomi Oreskes can figgure out who started it? We've got all these environmentalists wringing their hands over being unable to communicate with the hoi polloi ... while they are using words like 'mitigate' to mean STOP. No surprise then that they are not getting across. It's scientists who serve up any certainty we have around the issue; but their class has given us nuclear power and genetic engineering as well so some ambivalence is understandable. They'll soon give us geo-engineering which will be the end of it. 14th century plague eliminated half of the population (according to Ian Mortimer in The Guardian). If Ebo-Lola can just get airborne we might even dis-evolve back to H. neanderthalensis in time for an idyllic couple'a billion years till the sun explodes. Enoch's Hammer in Spades! How can anyone have such thoughts eh? Or having them, put them out on a page? In public! Must be the fricken' Antichrist at work.

Décroissance!

"The truth shall set you free - after it has broken your heart." So says a wag on a Buddhist website I am looking at. A tweet or a twitter or something. It's very difficult to give up perquisites & emoluments - consumerism as they call it. Not a root cause such as are found among the more fundamental 0'th chakra pathologies - but a decent cause-and-effect linkage. Truth is the muggles will never willingly give up their silly & mediocre perks. Period. We're toasted! Tim Cook twitters while Rome burns: "Beyond serving as Apple's biggest profit center, the iPhone is also a bedrock of consumer spending and the stock market." Savour that phrase 'a bedrock of consumer spending'. It does not appear in the NYT article itself but in the web links leading there. It is part of whatever Google searches for so Google turns it up - as of this date at least. Now in this case I find that I have to step beyond Daphne's dictum ('Do not make principles of your incapacities.') because I have never been able to have a conversation on one of these things except to say "Please call me on a land line." Text messaging works OK I guess - provided you don't have much to say. What is the feminine equivalent of Bliss' punch line I wonder? Adding four inches to a vagina certainly isn't where it's at - tight pussies are preferred I believe. Riding on the streetcar there are just as many women using these phones in public as men. Everybody's got one - except me. What's the metric for a tight pussy I wonder? Coming back to the title of this post to finish up. I thought my own personal situation was about to suddenly and seriously slip into lining up at The Good Shepherd for a bed full of ticks. This has been averted at the 11th hour - an interesting story for another time. When I first begin to lift my head after Copenhagen - in the spring of 2010 - I attend a meeting at one of the churches drumming up trade for an Oikos event (mentioned here). At some point a crazy woman stands up and declaims on being unable to fully participate because the powers-that-be have stripped her of what she needs for a functioning identity - her children apparently. What strikes me is that she is permitted - and I think, "Wow! Here's real compassion in action! Toronto has evolved since my days at Rochdale!" I am mistaken of course, they are simply too repressed to shut her up. The last few weeks of looking up the barrel of homelessness reminds me of this incident, and Dylan's line gives it ... context. A simultaneous blockage in my drains is probably not connected. Be well.

 
[Up, Down]

Golem.

Or:   Golem Fracasso Fricassee Weltschmerz.

[Up, Down]

Flood Bay Street! Toxic Zombies at Bay & King Streets, Toronto Noon on Friday October 31, Halloween.

A-and the Toronto mayoral election is not until the 27th. Please consider: Olivia Chow & John Tory As A Couple'a Right Donkeys! (a few posts below). (And now, returning to regular programming already in progress ...) I know this may be difficult for some of you, gentle readers, but this post will be properly read with Frank Zappa, the Hot Rats version of Willie the Pimp playing ... LOUD in the FOREGROUND! It's a ten minute track. I also think of it as a wee update to Environmental Apocalypse Greatest Hits, previously in this blog. Not a soul asked for a copy of the mixed CD but the offer is still open: send me a mailing address and I will send a CD with all of the tunes. Though it may be better named: Armageddon Ragnarök Greatest Hits. Marshall McLuhan - Tribal Spiral, December 18 2005, almost a decade ago. The thoughts below (such as they are) follow on from this early post in my blogging career (which I only embarked upon because they brought me there and set me in a cubicle with a computer and nothing to do for almost a year). Blogger has evolved since then and the thing is about impossible to read unless you [CTRL +] a few times to make the text larger. At that time I was working for Halliburton in Houston - a consolation prize for having been finessed out of a position on Barracuda/Caratinga in Brazil by an unscrupulous Newfoundlander - but it was about over. A week or so after this post they offered me a five-year extension on the contract and I had a vision of hell-on-earth so profound that hours later I was in a taxi to the George W. Bush Airport fleeing back to k-k-k-Canada - well, Newfoundland actually. McLuhan's words quoted in that post come from a 1969 interview he did with Playboy Magazine (remember when we read Playboy for the articles? :-) and this bit, Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man. comes from towards the end of that interview. Now, if you know enough of McLuhan to see that this 'mystical body of Christ' he is on about no longer has any flesh (with our brains on the outside of our skulls and all) then maybe you can step directly to an appreciation of the resulting humanoid as Golem. And at that point there is no need to read further. When humanity no longer has flesh there is no more reason to fear extinction. That it is only urban ideological idiots willing to flirt with the thresholds of cosmic black holes who can seriously entertain such nonsense ... well, I rest my case. A-and this, gentle reader, is as close as I have gotten to answering the question of why humanity is not facing the environmental armageddon it has engineered itself into. It's the nitwit urban muggles! What set me off (if you are interested) was tOad's illustration aimed at the People's Climate March a few Sundays ago. I couldn't figgure it out; but after looking at it for a while I began to wonder if he was drawing a Golem eating a whale (with no difficulty at all, like a kid swallowing a goldfish)? I have been re-reading Marshall McLuhan's books and eventually, thinking of a Golem as a creature of clay I remembered the Tribal Spiral post referenced above. Thanks to Google's excellent search capabilities it takes me only several days to find it, and, sure enough, there's the connection. These Catholics never give up on the unified spirit of which we are each a glowing flake. Teilhard de Chardin and his noosphere, Charles Taylor proselytizing towards the end of 'A Secular Age' &c. &c. - but I always have the impression that they are trying to slide it in without anyone really noticing. Of course I say that because I'm a bigot. McLuhan captures us with keen and accurate little observations - of the stripper who is actually 'wearing' us f'rinstance. He tries (unsuccessfully) to generalize them and gets carried away ... like the kid swallowing the goldfish. He is (properly I think) compared with Toqueville. There's lots of good in 'im - particularly, insights into up-side / down-side. But keep in mind the similarly flavoured geometric bullshit promoted by our Bucky; Buckminster Fuller and his two volumes of 'Synergetics' (which I have actually read). If you want useful geometry look to Harold Coxeter not Bucky. If you want useful spiritual metaphors look to Northrop Frye not McLuhan. Like McLuhan I had a vision of computers: email properly used (meaning people actually read it); the net as a huge encyclopaedic book accessible and remembered with hypertext links (except that, like Bryophytes, the Internet grows by 'death from behind' and the links don't work dependably for long); 4GLs (of which I wrote one) that would 'fully realize' SQL as an intuitive tool (instead it has been mystified into incomprehensibility and beyond). Anyway, as Bob Dylan says somewhere, "Anyone with any sense has already left town." Enough with words. For two youthful exemplars of civilization turning strange, try: Carlos Saura, Cría Cuervos, 1976; and maybe, François Truffaut, Les quatre cents coups, 1959. "Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos." / "Raise ravens, and they'll peck out your eyes." 'Willie the Pimp' has probably ended by now. The background Musak® from here on out is Janette 'Porque te vas' and Sacha Distel 'Scoubidou'. Tiny Stories: Luan was very much alone.           His lonliness ended when he             After two weeks Otto ran away. "... and now a recipe for                adopted Otto, a mongrel.         mashed potatoes!"               "Otto! Otto!"   "Bark! Bark!" Hello? Industry removal service please. Humans created     They told God not     First chance he got    The humans            It was supposed to God, and at first      to eat the                 he went and ate it.     sent God away.       be just for a little it was fine.              forbidden fruit.                                                                        while but God                                                                                                                           never came back. Thinking about whether or not CSIS and the Mounties have facial recognition software hooked up to their CCTV? What would it mean if they did? More on this later. Another from tOad that resonates with Golem. "Cesar: Pour le surmoi tout ce qui n’est pas soi en moi est sous-moi. / Caesar: Everything that is not superego in me is beneath me. There I was, goin' 'round bein' a carpenter, boat builder, computer programmer & 'software developer', hippie, fisherman, friend, father, whoremonger ... ... and all'a time what I really wanted was to be a Old Testament Prophet. Never guessed it till now.

 
[Up, Down]