Ignominy obloquy calumny et spiri(too)-snafu.

Poetasters, philosophasters, Tartufferie & general paresis.

Postscript: The death of 'The Movement' by correctitude.

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No less and no more than Freddie Nietzsche himself playing silly buggers; or myself. Or could it be callous disinterest? Incomprehension & misunderstanding? There are so many ways to go wrong, to get it wrong gentle reader and I can't find much of a way through them though I've tried. 'Akrasia' (The state of mind in which one acts against one's better judgement; weakness of will, ‘incontinence’.) sez one'a the pundits over at The Guardian. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm. "It doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to you," (says Neil Young, the wanker!). ignominy: in- not + nōmen name - so literally 'without name' (echoes of Nobodaddy); obloquy: ob- against + loqu-ī to speak; calumny: straight Latin - false and malicious misrepresentation of the words or actions of others; also pariah (paṛaiyan, paṛaiyar), shunning, and outcast. Interesting that 'gnomon' comes from a different root - Greek for 'know' not Latin for 'name' although the etymology is confusing, unclear, as if the roots of 'know' are so old as to be almost lost, obscure. Got the cold shoulders. Got the silent treatment. Even got the bum's rush. 'Magine 'At! Got the Kenosha Kid. Got the Hokey Pokey. Got the Shuffle Demons. Waltzing on Air. Got the Tennessee Waltz. Shit from shinola. Only left the apartment on Earth Day to trek across town for cheap coffee grounds at the No-Frills. So. I wish I could disappear gentle reader, vanish and re-emerge as the porteiro in some run-down termas in Mangaratiba or Chuí. The woman over at Compassionate waziz, Julie Johnston, has apparently ... retired. Ah! When Chris Hedges talks about it he says: Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil” holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion. But the only mention of 'burnt children' I can find in Nietzsche is: Perhaps there even exists an order of rank among these burnt children, these born artists who can find the enjoyment of life only in the intention of falsifying its image (as it were, in a longwinded revenge on life): the degree to which life has been spoiled for them might be inferred from the degree to which they wish to see its image falsified, thinned down, transcendentalized, deified - the homines religiosi might be included among artists, as their highest rank. [Section 59 of 'Beyond Good and Evil', translation by Walter Kaufmann 1966. I can't find any more or any sign of a 'molten pit' in Adrian Del Caro's 2014 translation either.] I can't help wondering (and not for the first time) if Hedges is one of those homines religiosi our fine feathered Fred is on about? Friedrich Nietzsche & Arthur Rimbaud - some common elements in their life stories. I will tell you a little about the people in this photograph. Loyola Pomeroy was a fisherman in Great Paradise and one of the keepers of the Marticot lighthouse. They were two brothers, Loyola (Lol) and Albert who married two sisters, Bridgett and Carmel, and all of them kept the light as their mothers and fathers had done before (but that's another story). When I knew them they had taken the "shiftin' money" and so had to humbly ask the government's permission to come back to Paradise and live in their own houses for the duration of fishing season - because the government "growth centres" weren't really growing much except broken men and everyone knew it. Lol showed me how one man could get a drum of gas up out of a skiff and up onto the wharf at low tide by himself. He could also pick up a drum of gas and walk with it - without his arms going all the way around. He showed me how to "run new bearings" into a make-or-break engine without taking it up out of the boat. He taught me the rudiments of splitting cod - an essential skill. Lol fished lobster in the spring of the year and he was renowned for being able to stack an unbelievable number of lobster pots onto his punt on opening day, a huge pile. He would chug out of harbour, top heavy and wavering, with a proud smile that seemed to go twice around his face. One year he had his young son with him and, when they hit open water outside the harbour he caught a bad wave and it all tipped over. The water was freezing. He managed to push his son up onto the hull and hold him there - one hand on the keel and one on his son - but he could not get out of the water himself. When they found them Lol was dead. His son lived. Quite a legacy. The man in the middle was Alton, my father. Look how he puts his hands on their shoulders. Look at the size of those hands. See his smile. The woman was Elizabeth Anetta. See the eager vitality in her face. She quit smoking when she found herself pregnant with me - not so common in 1945 as it is now. She believed that carnal love touches the eternal (a crazy idea) and I must've picked it up from her somehow. The young fellow in front is my nephew. Up in Fort Mac these days makin' money. Still there even after all the recent layoffs. He has grown up to be quite tall, so that when he assumes Charlie Daniel's posture (below) it is particularly comical. There is an implicit story in the photograph as well. When I went out to Paradise in the late 60s, know-nothing kid from Toronto with a beautiful young woman companion - Harold Horwood called us the 'Paradise Hippies' when he wrote about it in The Telegram - mom and dad hired a float plane to come and see first-hand what we were up to. And found it good. Yeah. That was their way - see first-hand - and there's a lot to be said about that ... maybe later.   Postscript:                 THE DEATH OF THE MOVEMENT  BY CORRECTITUDE. You may already be aware of the 'Keep it in the Ground' campaign spearheaded by The Guardian. The development of this campaign is documented in a remarkably frank series of podcasts (six so far). The latest initiative is to promote a video to 'go viral' - and the first try came on-line on April 30th: Dear Bill Gates, Please help us to Keep it in the Ground. Now (after 24 hours) it is pushing 50,000 hits - too soon to say if it will really take off. If it did it might actually reach Bill Gates. I find the campaign fascinating because Alan Rusbridger and The Guardian are playing it straight. If you listen to the podcasts (above) you will see the birth of a campaign: bumbling, bungling, warts and all. It began when Rusbridger met Bill McKibben late last year as they were both about to be awarded 'Right Livlihood' awards, and finally hit the front page of the Guardian in March; and although McKibben has not (as yet and as far as I can see) supplied much substantive support, his '350.org' logo appears on some of the Guardian pages endorsing the campaign. I may be quite a cynic but the thing has captured my imagination and I have done what I can (which is not much to be sure) to make it known about in Toronto (as mentioned in the last few posts here). So yesterday, as I just so happened to be on-line when Alan Rusbridger's email with the video link arrived, I immediately passed on the news to the Toronto 350 mailing list (something on the order of 100 email addresses). It wasn't long before the 'President' of 350 Toronto whacked my peepee: Please don't use the members' list for posting things like this. The members list is for important announcements that relate directly to the whole group. This isn't the kind of thing we want to fill our people's inboxes with — especially without explanation. People will either think it's spam (especially with an moralistic and imposing subject line like that), or might have seen it before from other sources. [sic] Judge for yourself how imposing and moralistic it was. The entire message was, "Please look at this and pass it on, it's the right thing to do!" with the URL of the video. Oatmeal is moralistic? Who knew? This is not the first (or even the second or third) time I have been stopped cold by Toronto 350 on bullshit correctitude issues. The last time was when I suggested making a Chinese Dragon in the form of a black tar-sand pipeline. The only reaction was for someone to inform me that 'Chinese Dragon' is not an inclusive term and that some people might feel 'unsafe' in places where such phrases were spoken openly (this from the so-called 'Director of Outreach'); and the chairman of the meeting (the 'President' already mentioned) refused to include the suggestion in the minutes. And that was the end of that (!). Not a pretty question but ... I have to ask: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG  WITH YOU PEOPLE?! (Thanks to Bill Maher.)   For someone firmly embedded in an agnostic/atheist landscape - even a fat old whoremonger like me - it is hard to live down early exposure to the KJV. This empty space now resonates with Lot's story of Sodom (and the very comparable 'Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like'). And one can't help but wish that any of them had heard and understood Matthew's "go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone". What to do? Good question. Best idea is to get (ta fuck) outa this uptight town somehow but ... I don't have the money for that anymore gentle reader ... nor any objective, nor any invitations. Oh my. I'll come back to this issue in a week or so when I've cooled down. A-and here's an interesting 75 cent word for y'all (picked up this week in Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians') - maieutic: Pertaining to intellectual midwifery, i.e. to the Socratic process of assisting a person to bring out into clear consciousness conceptions previously latent in his or her mind. (OED) And anyone with experience of midwifery knows it's a messy business. The 'come-back-to-this-issue', the carry-on (carrion?) is here. Fact is, you just never know: After some months of apparently increasing indifference my sweet beloved sends a bunch of photographs and pretty soon I'm hummin' Manu Chao "Só têm que ser homens" and dreaming of better days - and then she wants pictures from me and I don't have any but I snap a few selfies on the cell phone and figgure out how to get them over onto the computer and then here. Ain't love strange. Ignominy nothin' !!   Did I tell you I love you     I love you.                 Did I tell you I love you    I love you. today? No.                                                     today? No.                     I adore men with Alzheimer's. Unfortunately it's not all funny: Sex, Dementia and a Husband on Trial at Age 78 (in the NYT a few weeks ago).

 
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Repent!

It's Friday the thirteenth again.
Can't go on like this: it can't and I can't neither.

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Laerte: Este é o strip mais estranho que já fiz. / This is the strangest strip I've ever done.         The other book she read and reread, repeatedly, was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. She felt in her bones the crippling burden born by the Man mired in the Slough of Despond, she followed his travels through wilderness and the Valley of the Shadow, his encounters with Giant Despair and the fiend Apollyon. Bunyan’s tale had a clear message and meaning. Not so, Asgard and the Gods. That book was an account of a mystery, of how a world came together, was filled with magical and powerful beings, and then came to an end. A real End. The end. A.S. Byatt 'Ragnarök', excerpt from chapter 2.   This is exactly where (at the third reading) I finally see exactly how I've gone wrong. As is usual with epiphanies (if our Northrop is any example) it will be longer in the telling. I didn't see it when Paul told me in the 70s, and I went along and went along with ol' Foxy Loxy as long as I could possibly do so. Even when the horrendous (and probably inevitable) truth of it became too clear to deny I tried to just walk away - into rejection (some of it imagined) solitude and lonliness as it turns out, enervation, despair, beyond despair, desperation ... using up most of the good capital (stamina & humour) my father left to me. To here: where I (finally) see that I might have done differently - and without compromising either vision or integrity. Oh my! Oh well. Matthew: From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Please don't be fooled or misled ('mɪsled' - with a long 'i' and the stress on the first syll-able - as Anita used to say it) by these bits of scripture. It's just counterpoint. Like Lennie's "I wonder what they meant?" I won't play your 'what if?' game. Ah, but I'm playing for keeps.   "Faith of our fathers holy faith, we shall be true to thee till death." To which saccharine sentiment I respond, "And will you have Crise de foi with your Crise de foie (gras)?" They say the universe is expanding. This little part of it, not. They say the sun will explode in some billions of years anyway - so what difference? Nothing to lose though, or nothing more; light & easy, easy breezy. "There will be nothing to lose till you lose your heart," as it goes in the old tune (which I will try to find later, if I remember). I get up onto a streetcar behind an old man who has pissed himself. It's a moment I can't forget. Peer Gynt outwits the button-moulder ... alas, I am not so clever. I think of 'Perennial Philosophy' as the Golden Rule. Turns out there is a marginal connection between them but the main 'thrust' of the Perennial seems to be any old kind of woo-woo mysticism. OK then, (maybe) I stand corrected on that (and maybe not). It's the Golden Rule that appears again and again and after all and essentially unchanged regardless of formulation, while each iteration of the woo-woo is 'so' unique. Why don't you put    Why don't you put     Why don't you put    Why don't you put   Who are you your memories         your metaphors         your jaws                your molecules        really? on paper?                on the clothesline?     in the barrel?           in a credit rating?    I'm not shouting! At first it seemed like a good idea to include these two stories in their entirety within the post - but the links are probably dependable enough for now:             Entropy by Thomas Pynchon, 1960 (5,400 words); and,             Sea Story by A.S. Byatt, 2013 (2,200 words). Both authors are now in their late 70s - Byatt born in 1936 and Pynchon in 1937 - and this is about all there is in the way of similarity beyond arrogant intellectual pretentiousness. Both have sufficiently displayed their ample feet of clay over the years. Neither is fit for a following of devotees even if it is true that Pynchon's strangeness has attracted a bit of a cult. The Pynchon link includes the author's opinion of the story - he doesn't like it (and this could be a strong recommendation). The publication dates alone should be enough to show that the stories come out of very different times and spaces. In many ways these writers are no more than somewhat senior versions of Malcolm Gladwell augmented with luck and competence. So then, suppose you just read the two stories in stand-alone mode? As far as that's possible what with the scientific, literary & musical references in 'Entropy'; and supposing you know already that Perrier bottles are no longer made of glass; and then meditate, consider, wonder ... how their bones (as it were) might shed any light (or even seem to shed any light) for a fat, stupid, soon to be homeless old man who has just realized he took the wrong turnings. And I write sincerely hoping that such wondering may be useful to someone. In the spring of 2010 I am still talking with one of my sisters and she asks me what I'm thinking. So I point at the latest blog post (March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb) and she actually goes away and reads it, all of it including the stories. Imagine! Then comes an email asking what it's about. I answer (something like this - all the emails have been subsequently lost): "It's Easter time, seems right to be thinking about rebirth, regeneration; about the Phoenix, Simorgh, Simurgh, Samandar ...; about Bamyan, Bamiyan, Bamian ... and the destroyed Buddhas there; and about 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (the covers of some editions include Lawrence's drawing of a Phoenix). And that's where the conversation stops. I don't get around to really thinking about Quetzalcoatl for several more years (despite Bob Weston's gift of his Quetzalcoatl belt buckle four decades previous) - nor to the serious doubts about Lawrence's motivations springing from a reading of 'The Plumed Serpent'. I'm sure there's no connection between the stoppage and the ... stoppage.         There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples.         He had returned in time. Down there on that crowded globe, the alarms would be flashing across the radar screens, the great tracking telescopes would be searching the skies - and history as men knew it would be drawing to a close.         A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe. Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something. Stanley Kubrick: 2001-A Space Odyssey, 1968, concluding chapter 47 - Star-Child.   [The obvious symmetries are not always best. The character in the book & film is Dave f'rinstance, and my name is David. Easy to imagine a certain ... putting on of airs. And you, gentle reader, can have it any way you like.   ;-)   I do think that Arthur Clarke had very very little to do with it.] Do lemmings put their head up their ass on the way to the cliff edge I wonder? Obediently following the official instructions on what to do in the event of an air crash or nuclear explosion? Don't mind me. I'm probably one of those poor sods with Dunning–Kruger syndrome. (Though if you read their paper you may suspect - as I do - that it don't wash.) Be that as it may, John Cleese's rant is worth the minute it takes to watch ('cept he don't include American Senators among the heavy abusers); and Garrison Keillor's somewhat subtler Prairie Home Companion skit is a good'un too. This year's Canadian Year of the Ram stamps make me think of the 2003 sphinx, Canadian version, made of snow, and none of them are anything like a ram at all. You may think it strange that the Green Party logo is there on that sign with the others. OK, do this: read The Green Party of Canada's platform, in brief or in (100 page .pdf) detail and then show me how it is sufficient to avert the unfolding environmental catastrophe. I get a different message from Elizabeth May herself - see here. I have been following up in my riding (Beaches-East York) and will report again soon. (Several days of effort so far and no clues yet.) Adão Iturrusgarai: How to turn a junkie into an ecologist: Trash talk that we're         Without water you can't            Coca plants and             Defend the Planet! running out of water.         make beer and whisky ...          poppies die ...                Save Water! I'm surrounded by idiots.   Outside of them there's     Next there's a great         I provide light and heat                                         a circle of imbeciles.         wheel of cretins.            for the whole system. [This last one's included just to show that even Laerte can be the victim of her own psychology (not all of which she is necessarily the cause of though responsible for) combined with inappropriate rhetorical follow-through. She's a tennis player perhaps.] Sometimes the uncertainty descends so heavily, all personality, identity dissolves. Black terror one would do anything to escape except one has no idea what the 'anything' might be ... ... and then ... it passes.   Just listen (even if it chokes you) to Chris Hedges talking with Abby Martin and then show me how to realistically walk around what they're saying. Addenda: A 2009 interview with A.S. Byatt in which she says of herself: I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously - but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people.   Two poems from 'Parasites of Heaven', Leonard Cohen, 1966. I buy the book in one of the bookstores on the south side of Sherbrooke Street opposite McGill and read it in the Mansfield Tavern that used to be on the Sherbrooke corner. It's sunny and cold that day I think. 1966. In the very next pidgeon-hole over is the title poem from 'Bring Forth the Cowards', Pierre Coupey, 1964. I always want to say "Call forth the cowards". I went to some trouble a few years ago and got the book from the stacks in the Toronto Public Reference Library and photocopied the poem and then transcribed it incorrectly (the scanner software choked I think and I didn't check it well enough) into a blog post somewhere ... here it is. Some silly thing. I had decided to get copies of all of Dudek's McGill Poetry Series or something like that. I might have bought several of them that day. My library then was kept in a lovely oak bookshelf with glass doors that my mother got for me when we moved to Montreal from Toronto - in 1960 or so. I remember her buying it for me. It was expensive, even second hand, but she didn't hesitate. All gone now: bookcase, books, mother, even memories; and yet these few poems remain, grains of sand in the flesh of an oyster that have never become pearls. Haveta laff.

So you're the kind of vegetarian    that only eats roses Is that what you mean with your Beautiful Losers                                     1965

The nightmares do not suddenly develop happy endings             I merely step out of them as a five year old scientist leaves the room where he has dissected an alarm clock Love wears out like overused mirrors unsilvering             and parts of your faces make room for the wall behind If terror needs my round green eyes for a masterpiece             let it lure them with nude key-holes mounted on an egg And should Love decide I am not the one             to stand scratching his head wondering what wall to lean on             send King Farouk to argue or come to me dressed as a fast

 
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The Last Ocean.

I'se the bye that builds the boat and I'se the bye that sails her.
I'se the bye that catches the fish and takes 'em home to Liza. 

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'The Last Ocean' is a recent film - and a very good one. The makers keep a website where you can find more about it. The copy I watch comes from the library - there are no torrent copies on-line anywhere that I can find (which makes me wish I knew how to make one). I do now have a copy of the library's copy and if anyone asks I will pass it on to them. [Adherence to copyright regimes works against film makers and their films (it seems to me). Surely the number of viewings trumps revenue. Whatever.] Meanwhile in the news: Fishing quotas defy scientists’ advice as the EU increases their take and relaxes regulations around dumping bycatch.

I did a few shifts as a Newfie cod choker in days gone by: took ~150 kentles one year or 15 tons heavy-salted; ate an occasional spawning lobster (delicious!); chopped boatfulls of dogfish to a bloody pulp on beaches when they fouled our traps; also ate the odd 'puffin pig' (dolphin) killed unintentionally, maybe once a year and canned the leftovers for the winter. Dolphins don't survive any time in a cod trap - their skins are surprisingly delicate and they beat themselves to death against the twine. Still and all - that was an inshore fishery and if every fisherman (the women I know who are fishermen tell me they prefer that term) were inshore ... well, we used to say (as we watched the draggers and factory ships on the horizon - this was the late 60s in Placentia Bay and they were Russians, but it didn't take the Canadians long to catch up and get 'efficient': long-liners, gill nets, trawlers, draggers) ... what we used to say was: "You could cover the water with byes jiggin' from dorys and never jig 'em all and no one go hungry."

The impetus, the 'real reason', I took time to make this post is abhorrence, a visceral repugnance to the smug & smarmy attitude of the woman in the first row above, Carolyn Schwalger, and her lobbyist chum Peter Bodeker who curls his lip so aptly, and the imbecile lies they believe and repeat. The two guys in this row - a politician & a merchant - are no more than generic fellow travellers at the trough. Saving the best for last ... now come the banal bureaucrats & craven consultants. (And thanks to the OED for 'pusillanimous'.)

A handsome & personable young consultant equipped with a bogus standard and a certain reserved & diplomatic politesse and the cutest dimple in his ... chiny-chin-chin. It's about entirely symmetrical with the UNFCCC fiasco, particularly in the perfectly pious prose of such as Denzil Miller and in the proliferation of baffling and meaningless acronyms, but most especially in bringing minimal improvement beyond the regular cashing of salary cheques.

Seriously well-educated people engaged in annihilation for their personal profit and prosperity. Layers upon layers of well-connected and well-fed administrators and consultants - like yellow-jackets at a picnic ... T'OUSANDS of 'em: CCAMLR and MSC and ISEAL and INTERTEK (a huge international consultancy with a more-or-less separate arm for fishes, IFC, formerly Intertek Moody Marine (IMM), formerly Moody Marine Ltd., working - it appears - only for MSC, and ASI, and a holy host of others (you can find a list on ASI's website). Horse Cock! Bollocks! and a load of old   Cobblers! (Cobbler's awls is balls.)   Oh?! You think I am being too hard on them? Consider some science then:         Seafood stewardship in crisis, and related Correspondence. The only thing 'sustainable' in all of this here is the fricken' multitude, the legion if you will, of high-priced 'stewards' - and that (of course) only in the short term because when this 'resource' is drained and exhausted (which won't be long) there really are no more to move on to and the time-servers time will be past (which is cold comfort eh?). There have been moments - when Iceland went to war with the UK (three times: 1958, 1972-73, & 1975-76; see Wikipedia) to save their cod, and won! Alas, these moments are too few.

For that 450 kentles (there were three of us) we got 3¢/pound, with a share for the boat and Harry Wareham paid off it made us ~$600 each - and that was enough to live and enjoy living. Soon after that they began bringing packers around with refrigeration on board and the boys got 9¢/pound 'in the round' and figgured they had it made. I was gone by then, headed off for Mexico (which I never got to): "That must be somewhere up there on t'other side of Montre(h)al," said Old Pius. There was no bycatch - we took home what we caught, all but the whore's eggs (sea urchins) and dogfish. [Truth be told I don't remember the financial details very well anymore. Was it 3¢ or 13¢? Was it quarter shares or sixth? It was half a lifetime ago and I've been away.]

Two Pius (as they were sometimes known) are honoured here today.

Phillip Pius Power:   Phillip Pius, usually called Old Pius was known for his singing. He married Maggie Hepditch and they had 6 children; Annie Francis, Mary, Clara, Kathleen, Margaret and Young Pius. Mary Margaret Hickey, now residing in Southern Harbour, also grew up in their home. Pius died in March 1993 of cancer. He is greatly missed throughout the community and the province. Pius Power Jr.:   Pius Power Jr. also known as Young Pius was a singer like his father. It was nothing unlikely to come up along side of him in the morning and hear him singing as he hauled a cod trap. Almost everyone gets sea sick at certain times - Young Pius never. He was well known and liked everywhere he went. Pius married Anita Best, a favourite Newfoundland singer and they had one daughter, Kate, who was often seen at folk festivals singing with her mom and dad. He then married Mary Ellen Wright. They had three children, John Pius (P.), William (Billy) and Ellen. All three sing and dance and Ellen can also play the violin. Pius died in May 1996, of cancer. He continued to entertain friends, family and staff at the Health Sciences Center, with his music and stories. (Text found in the liner notes of a CD I have since lost.)

Cockroaches have different personalities, scientists find. You will think I'm simply comparing these people with cockroaches. Not quite. This recent research identifies two distinct 'cockroach personalities' - basically shy & bold - which is an advantage in a Darwinian regime helping to ensure that some survive (to dance on our dead bones). The thing about this strategy - for, say, a top-of-the-food-chain mammal which has painted itself into a corner - is that it's useless against physics. Even the wily cockroach may not survive what's coming. And of course, there are also points of comparison - possibly even fair and valid ones - with career bureaucrats & (particularly) lawyers. Consider the (apparently) deciding factor in the struggle of Lafayette Colorado to stop fracking ... which has been (at least for now) given up due to excessive legal costs. See: Heavyweight Response to Local Fracking Bans in The New York Times. Longmont Colorado battles on - good on 'em! The NEB - National Energy Board: Comprising 13 lawyers & oilmen, and a few retired politicians thrown in, a-and a whole (holy) host of supporting administrators & hangers-on. What is evident is that the NEB is a place to park people who have shown some kind of loyalty (and presumably will continue to show it) in paid positions with considerable (seven years in most cases) and secure tenure. Bureaucrat / PR Man It's the 'National' Energy Board and yet, out of thirteen (board feet) of 'em there is no background in Wind? Solar? Geothermal? and minimal in Hydro Electricity? Zilch! Nadinha! How can it be? (I quote the familiar Wesley hymn intentionally.) Read this account of their CEO's current promotional tour and you will see that it's all about politics - dressed up in a transparently bogus language of concern.  Gas           Gas           Lawyer    Oil & Gas  Oil & Gas  Lawyer  Politician  Pipelines    Lawyer   Politician  Lawyer     Lawyer Not surprisingly, they support & promote the constuction of pipelines. Some details on their recent approval of Enbridge's Line 9: •   A good summary: with links to relevant documents on the East End Against Line 9 website (Thanks to Jessica Lyons, John Sharkey, and the others.);   •   The NEB Press Release: on the Canadian News Wire (CNW), and on the NEB website;   •   A loud (if inaccurate) Rah! Rah! from The Globe and Mail. Shawn McCarthy & Jeff Lewis write whatever they are told to write but my reading of the NEB order is that this approval is for construction and that "Prior to operating the pipeline, Enbridge must apply for and be granted Leave to Open.";   •   A previous press release in March of last year replete with links (and an email address for the NEB); and,   •   The description the NEB board on the NEB website from which most of the photographs and other details above were taken. Aside from stumping for Stephen Harper's re-election with bogus publicly-funded promotional tours the NEB CEO Peter Watson takes time to pretend to refute Marc Eliesen's criticisms - and pretence is as good as debate in the current k-k-k-Canadian intellectual milieu where you have only to repeat a lie once or twice for it to become the truth. The Vancouver Sun reports on Marc Eliesen's withdrawl from the farcical and fraudulent NEB review process in October last year. A letter from Marc Eliesen is linked to at the foot of this report. Here are two more links to that letter just in case: on Scribd, and on the NEB website itself. A few days later they publish Peter Watson's reply (also published on the NEB website). Crocodile tears. He says, "I can assure you we take this obligation to the people of Canada extremely seriously," and of course they do - the obligation to kiss Stephen Harper's arse and do their utmost to see that he's re-elected in the fall so they can keep their places at the trough. There's a word for Peter Watson (and for each and every member of his NEB) - sycophant: a mean, servile, cringing, or abject flatterer; a parasite, toady, lickspittle. [Gable's cartoon is ostensibly about lunches at the G20 meetings - but one can mix and match organizations (CCAMLR, MSC, NEB, UNFCCC, any meeting of any organ of the EC government) and issues (sustainability, ditto, oil pipeline approvals, a climate treaty, dirty Canadian oil) with equivalent humorous effect.] The UN and the EC can be lumped together: (they have much in common as organizations, as well as history with Connie Hedegaard)

You could say, "Miguel Arias Cañete is not a tall man." Peter Kent on the other hand is a relatively tall man (physically at least). Christiana Figueres is short; Connie Hedegaard is relatively tall; and they are both (apparently) air-heads. No help to be had in forming opinions based on height then. Maybe what they say and do is a better guide. (Heaven help us all if the bottom-line criterion turns out to be achievement.) Cañete says that missing global warming target would not be failure. How totally mind-fucked do you have to be for that to make sense? But then again, what would you expect a former oil mogul to say? He's also a right-wing Spaniard lawyer trained by Jesuits. I guess if you're going to put a fox in charge of the hen-house then you might as well make it a real fox. Two additional Guardian reports: from late last year as Connie Hedegaard wrings her hands; and recently, when Todd Stern dittoes Cañete.

Three thoughts: One:   As the awful situation we are all in becomes clearer and clearer, more and more (previously) right-thinking people will shift along the number-line of activism: beyond letters to the editor & their MP, educational programs & campaigns, demonstrations of one kind and another, private and public fasting; towards non-violent confrontation - so-called civil disobedience, hunger strikes, monkeywrenching; and beyond ... to self-immolation, serious property damage, violent (desperate) outrage, sedition, revolution. We had an object lesson not so long ago in Canada with the FLQ. Note the time line: running from bank robberies & bombings in the early 60s, to the murder of Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte in 1970, and eventually (with some waiting - being an ideological struggle and therefore somewhat 'flexible') things evolved. The FLQ energy was absorbed into the PQ and they took over the government. To the point where in the late 70s and early 80s (as I remember it) the FLQ came back from Cuba and one of 'em, Paul Rose was it? got elected? (That seems a bit extreme. ... Ah! ... He was nominated and ran for the Quebec NDP but was not elected.) So. 20 years more or less. Unfortunately we don't have 20 years - physics knows nothing of ideology and will absolutely not wait. In the meantime the Stazi will not be (have not been) long catching up. Maybe you noticed already that you can't get aboard the Newfoundland ferry without photo ID. Two:   Watch and listen to Naomi Klein's speech at Powershift 2012 in Ottawa, and a more recent discussion with Owen Jones, and read at least the chapter 'Blockadia' of her book 'This Changes Everything'. Oh sure, this is at least several hours effort, more than you're prepared to invest - but it contains essential clues to the only antidote I've seen. I'm not going to say what that is - take the time to find it and see it or fuck off and die (as Job's good wife said to 'im one time). Three: Acting alone is sorry second-best but it is possible. I didn't use to think so ... Oh sure, I know, this kind of rant does no good at all. When the bottom falls out the time-servers will all scurry away and find new rocks to hide under and new pastures in which to ply other officially green-coloured nonsense - geoengineering maybe, or sustainable fracking - until ... the entire species to which they belong is gone and the rocks they are under become tombstones. I may not pass this way again so here's a Good God Damn! to Joey Smallwood and his diabolical Resettlement Program, and another Good God Damn! to John Crosbie, the sleveen Canadian Minister of Fisheries who collaborated to engineer the collapse and permanent closure of the cod fishery in 1992.

There was an old man, Ned H., living in Little Paradise (the only person left there at the time) who was being chased by the Mounties for diddling (or possibly trying to diddle, or maybe 'thinking about' diddling) his thirteen-year-old neice. The RCMP were no match for 'im - he'd hear their boat comin' miles away and go sit up on the hill till they went away again. One winter he fell through the ice on a pond and died while taking his socks off as he sat beside the hole he made. The worst his neighbours would say about him was "He were no Christian." These were the same neighbours who tossed a priest off the wharf for touting Joey's resettlement plan. (Yes! They really did!) Did he have a conscience? Integrity? He told me she led him on. I knew him and believed him then - but it's true that I wasn't there. I did raise a daughter and I have talked with other men close to me - my brothers-in-law - who also raised some daughters. Fact is, young girls do sometimes try it on at that age and it's a fine threading of the needle to deal properly with it.

The word 'probity' comes to mind. An interesting word combining conscience and integrity with uprightness, honesty, sincerity, even modesty (can be found in the Latin root). Did Ned have probity? What about Two Pius? Did they have more or less probity than the collection of shitheads presented here today? Silly question eh? And if Joey or Crosbie or, any of the others could or would respond it might very well (and quite properly) be in terms something like Beaudelaire's (coming to me via T.S. Eliot): "You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frère!"   Can we start a campaign d'you think to convince all of them (who are still living) to walk away from their so-called jobs and positions? Not in protest but as a vote-with-your-feet kind of thing in favour of human survival on this planet. More silliness eh? Here, try this: from George Monbiot; and another from Gwynne Dyer. Rwanda 1994: "It is not a genocide." (Christine Shelly, US State Dept) [The pics are screen grabs from a PBS Frontline video: Ghosts Of Rwanda. The Rwanda genocide and Christine Shelly's shameful part in it are included here lest there be any remaining doubt that this is the blog of a fruitcake nutbar. The shame really belongs to the likes of Kofi Annan and Bill Clinton but Christine earned her share. Here, her obituary has been posted in a Democratic Underground archive - a possibly sobering story for feminists, it looks like she gave her all in order to do no more than play silly buggers for Bill Clinton. And the point is: that Rwanda was a cake walk compared to what is coming unless humanity does a quick 180. That's all.]

 
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