Goblin dream transformations.

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Why do I park in spaces reserved for cripples? Because the Internet transformed me ...         ... into a sitter.   Lake Urmia (aka Oroumeih) in Iran is as good as gone: Lots of places of interest on this map: Sochi where the LGBT have been recently fighting it out with Vladimir Putin, the Chechens, the Americans ... ; Baku, headquarters of mega salaries earned by the international band of gypsies who build oil fields; the Aral Sea (mentioned here recently); Armenia; Mosul (What happened in Mosul again? Was that before or after W. declared the war won?) ... From 1985 ... so, say, 30 years. The one I grabbed (the last one at the right) seems to show an increase, a rebound, but it's hard to tell with Google. So many dimensions for dream transformation, a-and a rich cultural hinterland already documented: 'The Hag' of Irish & Newfoundland mythology; the thirteenth fairy in 'Sleeping Beauty'; ... a long list I am sure. Plus many photographic and cinema montages over at least several generations - Roman Polanski's 1965 shocker 'Repulsion' for one. After Gerry lost his legs he had nightmares (he told me), of being in a prisoner of war camp where racially identified torturers were zapping his legs with high voltage wires. He would drift in and out of it and if anyone happened to be there in a moment of semi-lucid wakefulness he would ask them to please cut the wires. Mine is a dream goblin: a hand and forearm reaching from behind and around to thrust between bloody ribs and grasp and squeeze my heart. I have learned to enjoy it over the years. And another, only once: of dying and becoming one of a row of heads of lettuce in a black, peaty vegetable garden; and my friend Keith putting his hands, fingers, between the leaves.   Toying with notions of identity.   There is indeed a solar-thermal generating plant Ivanpah in the Mojave Desert - in fact there are a number of comparable plants in the region, more than I had imagined. But what is the red bit there? No idea - and not knowing makes the whole thing incomprehensible. Maybe it's just me. A-and yes, Haiyan was big, BIG! biggest fricken EVER; but was it as big as most of India? Or most of China? Or has the image been subtly altered? Distorted? Photoshopped? Enlarged for effect? I am sure we can twist Kurt Cobain quoting Joseph Heller's Yossarian "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you" - maybe through a loop of wartime wisdom like 'three on a match' - and come up with a nice & pithy expression for terror dreams that at once debunks the psychotrophic cop-outs and puts a crack in it all through which one might just be able to smile back at The Hag. I'll leave that with you as an exercise. Or ... Consider what will be done to force you to hide and not speak of suicide wishes & recurring anxiety dreams. "Well time passed and now it seems everybody’s havin' them dreams."   (Talkin' WWIII Blues) Easy enough to see where Gwynne Dyer is coming from as he fearfully boosts geo-engineering: see Geo-engineering is in trouble and the retraction Mea culpa on geo-engineering; it's not as bleak as I thought in the Georgia Straight recently. Even such a sold-out intellectual as Pascal Bruckner and his recent 'The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse'. Hard to tell of course reading it in translation but it looks like the rankest tissue of exaggeration and ends with the ubiquitous 'Technology's gonn'a save us!'. Rah-rah Science! It's a common refrain. Oh my.   "You can be in my dream if I can be in yours." Now there's a proper Valentine's Day sentiment eh? Dream well gentle readers.

 
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Is energy drain the flip-side of bootstrap?

(Do farts have lumps?)

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Life is not the kind of film where everything turns out as we would like. Even so, I prefer it un-cut. For me 'bootstrap' is primarily a computer term but its history goes back ... see Wikipedia, which gets it right: a metaphor. An un-bootstrap then, a 'bootstrap (not!)', might be an 'energy drain' (as we used to call it back in the day). Maybe 'soi distant' has something to do with it. Who said that? Was it ee cummings? The varieties of free-rider (for show not blow as they say about pocket-handkerchiefs): bureaucrats, 'career' politicians, consultants; have been called 'barnacles on the Ship of State'. Apt, for anyone who knows anything about boats. In the inshore Newfie fishery we called it 'slub' - a combination of barnacles & seaweed growing on the hull - slows you down, uses more fuel &c.. Once in a while you put your punt up on the beach at high tide, scrape and re-paint with red-lead, and float her off again on the next tide. If Jesus comes back (if he was ever here in the first place) he might throw the consultants out of the temple this time eh? And that would be the (merciful) end of the United Church of k-k-Canada being as it's 99 & 44/100ths percent consultants. When we make the movie Rob Ford can play the forerunner: a combination of John the Baptist and George the Gravy Train Killer waddling about in the Credit River in a toga with one of those big floppy gloves that says "I'm #1!".   It doesn't matter how you worship, as long as you're down on your knees." Leonard Cohen, 'Light As The Breeze', 1992.   One question that might fall begging out of this: Are all humans nowt but hangers on? Is it in the OEM spec? Some doom enthusiasts say so: But things may not (always? ever?) be what they first seem. Predilections ('dilection' being spiritual or Christian love) and assumptions are potent root causes of opinion. They fatally distort & fog the lenses and mirrors of the intellectual telescope. A-and they can be so deeply buried (metaphors and such like) within the psyche. Still, in the language there is gradation: a calling, a vocation, a career, a pastime (better in French passe-temps), solitaire, solipsism ... just a clue ... And another - when you hear yourself saying, 'That's obvious!' or 'Obviously' or 'Of course' or 'Clearly' you might just wanna give your head a little shake cuz maybe it ain't. Smoking is suicide they say. Maybe mining tarsands and burning the refined oil/gasoline/plastic/fertilizer is a kind of civilizational smoking - a bad habit yeah, but hey! I'm addicted! Even W thought he knew that one. BUT  As P.W. Anderson points out in a 1972 paper in Science, 'More Is Different - Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science': "... the twin difficulties of scale and complexity ... at each level ... entirely new properties appear ...". An example of this can be found in another paper I remember seeing in Scientific American about the same time in which a systems analyst proves that above a certain number of lines of code more bugs are introduced with each change than are fixed. These observations have a certain weight. Could it be common sense I wonder? The pervasive and ubiquitous coupling of 'passive' and 'aggressive' suggests to me that blaming the victim is a bog-standard and fundamental human mode. You can see it in Toronto as they jockey for position at the shelves in a supermarket: each one at once apologizing for stepping in front and clearly either reduced to merest passivity or not giving a rat's ass. Why did everyone turn on me? There once was a man named Moby Dick Who had the misfortune to be born with a corkscrew prick. All his life he did search and hunt To find a woman with a corkscrew cunt. When he found her he dropped down dead. The sonofabitch had a left-hand thread.

 
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Oh Greenland.

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Kina is Danish for China. I cannot get a translation for the caption - "Pyha - Vi nar det vist lige!" - looked high and low since I came upon the cartoon in March of last year. Google Translate gives, "Phew - We get it displayed right!" which might mean she is showing them the clear channel in. I still thought she might be standing up for the environment, but I guess the facts in the Guardian article below speak for themselves.It's another fricken' diamond mine!Aleqa Hammond, Premier: Jens-Erik Kirkegaard, Minister of Industry & Minerals: BP wins first Greenland drilling concession - Amaroq Greenpeace says decision to open country's pristine waters to company responsible for Deepwater Horizon spill beggars belief. BP has won permission to drill in the clear waters off Greenland, just three and a half years after abandoning similar plans to apply for a licence in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Greenpeace said it beggared belief that a company with BP's chequered track record would be allowed to work in one of the world's most fragile environments. The British oil company confirmed last night that it had won a licence to work on the Amaroq concession off the coast of north-east Greenland – its first permit in or around that country. The government in Nuuk boasted that the presence of big oil companies would accelerate the chances of striking oil but even some energy executives have warned of a potential disaster because of the difficulties of dealing with a spill around ice. "BP and our partners ENI and Dong Energy are pleased to have been awarded block 8 in the north-east Greenland licence round, an area amounting to 2,630 square kilometres," said BP in a statement. "North-east Greenland is a long term play, and we expect several years of careful planning before exploring this challenging and interesting region. We look forward to working with the BMP (Greenland's bureau of mines and petroleum) and partners to develop a 2D seismic work programme," it added. BP applied for the licence as operator but has subsequently decided to hand that role over to ENI, in an unusual move that it would only say was "mutually agreed" between the consortium partners and the government. Jens-Erik Kirkegaard, the minister for industry and mineral resources, said both BP and Shell were among those given four exploration blocks in the Greenland Sea. "We were able to attract the largest oil companies in the world to explore for oil and gas in our area. It increases our belief that they are able to find oil and gas in commercial quantities." But he insisted that safety would be paramount. "All exploration for oil and gas is conducted by following the highest achievable standards when it comes to protecting the marine environment and living resources in the sea," he added. But John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace, lambasted the move. "With a safety track record like BP's it beggars belief that they would ever be allowed to drill in and around the Arctic. Even one of their main competitors, Total, recognises the extreme dangers of drilling in the Arctic and have pulled out. He said the British oil group had "polluted miles of the Louisiana coastline and destroyed the livelihoods of thousands with the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe" and was now "sniffing around the Arctic, one of the world's most fragile environmental regions". He added: "BP and its shareholders should realise the enormous risks of any move into the Arctic and the opposition they will face from the millions of people, locally and globally, who have signed up to protect the region." BP abandoned plans for drilling off Greenland in the summer of 2010, in a move that was widely believed to have come after pressure from the government in Nuuk arising over worries about the public relations impact as much as the safety record of BP following the fire and pollution at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the end of 2012, BP has not been awarded any new licences by the US government but has won stakes in drilling rights in the Barents Sea off Norway. BP is also now a 20% equity holder in Rosneft, which has substantial licenses in the Russian Arctic. Shell had been pioneering a new round of drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska but ran into conflict with the safety authorities after its drilling rig, Kulluk, ran aground. The French oil group Total has argued that energy companies should stay away from the Arctic because an oil spill would risk doing so much damage to the environment. Christophe de Margerie, the group's chief executive told the FT in September 2012: "Oil on Greenland would be a disaster." (The Guardian)   And to the east of Greenland, Росне́фть: There is a lot in these next few images: the greed and arrogance of nations & their corporations - puissance; the lack of names on the Google map; the (good-hearted) pride of workmen in their accomplishments; the courage (and affluence) of the Greenpeace protesters; and more! ... Listed here as the only honour I can give: Peter Henry Willcox, USA; Miguel Hernan Perez Orsi, Argentina; Camila Speziale, Argentina; Colin Russell, Australia; Ana Paula Alminhana Maciel, Brazil; Phil Ball, UK; Kieron Bryan, UK; Alexandra Harris, UK; Frank Hewetson, UK; Anthony Perrett, UK; Iain Rogers, UK; Alexandre Paul, Canada; Paul D. Ruzycki, Canada; Faiza Oulahsen, Netherlands; Mannes Ubels, Netherlands; Anne Mie Roer Jensen, Denmark; Sini Saarela, Finland; Francesco Pisanu, France; Cristian D'Alessandro, Italy; Jonathan David Beauchamp, New Zealand; David John Haussmann, New Zealand; Tomasz Dziemianczuk, Poland; Roman Dolgov, Russia; Denis Sinyakov, Russia; Dima Litvinov, Sweden; Marco Weber, Switzerland; Gizhem Akhan, Turkey; Ruslan Yakushev, Ukraine; Andrey Allakhverdov, Russia; Ekaterina Zaspa, Russia. More photographs here.   Oil mongers and sad old freaks alike find comfort where they may: This doesn't exactly make sense to me, OK, but it has a certain something: That guy there? Yes. You want me to go over there and talk to him. Yes. If I refuse. I'll fire you.                     Harsh eh?   Maybe you can figgure it out. (?) Oh sure, some fat perverted old prick sitting in Toronto can criticize Theresa Spence & Aleqa Hammond eh? He's a damned misogynist anyway! Excommunicate the sonofabitch! F-f-fuck 'im! Here are some more balanced views:         Greenland’s race for modernity by Gwynne Dyer in Georgia Straight last month;         Climate change brings new risks to Greenland by John Vidal in The Guardian; and,         A report of an interview with Aleqa Hammond by Balazs Koranyi of Reuters. It seems to me that the discussion is still completely framed within a notion of growth & progress that should surely be entirely discredited by now. But even Aleqa Hammond, living on the front line of a changing climate, is looking at economic & social progress rather than either CO2 abatement or survival. I guess it shows that the power of the paradigm, wishful thinking, and wilful concupiscent illusion are potent beyond any rational enlightenment.

 
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