General

Sometimes a poet can grasp the human significance of a technological failure better than a scientist. We are fortunate to have these poetic voices from Japan collected here. May we hear them and, more importantly,may we heed them.
— John Pearson, MD, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility

I’m thinking hard about ecosocialism and retrenchment and revolution against the capitalist state — this old neofascism for/by/because of the state, governments, and their paymasters, oligarchs and unfettered robber barons, of old and new.

Fifty Years after rhapsodic auguries of the acid-informed era involving the coming “Woodstock Nation,” the US citizenry — convulsed by violence, strung out on all the wrong drugs, and with the Rolling Stones still touring — stumble in mortification through the grim phantasmagoria of the United States Of Altamont. What a long, strange, bad (Nixonian in its dour, paranoid cultural and political aura; Reagan/Clinton/Obama in noxious, neoliberal fantasy; Bush/Trump in cresting tsunamis of raging stupid) trip it has been.

This morning on my way to work I had the car radio tuned to the local classic FM station. It’s a safety precaution more than anything. Keeps me (relatively) calm in the traffic and safe from the media commentary of the day, mostly.

Sea level has been stable, at current levels, throughout recorded history for 5,000 years. That’s about to change. Still, it’s very difficult for people to imagine a change in sea level after 5,000 years of rock solid stability.
Nevertheless, assuming sea levels do rise markedly, one of the biggest questions of the century is whether the world is prepared for sea level rise?
As a guess, the answer is: No, not even close.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
— Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome, April 1, 1987

Words, and spin, and the Mad Men and Mad Women of this perverse consumerism and cultural wasteland tied to Predatory Capitalism, Celebrity Culture and Americans who have perpetual ennui because of their perpetual dumb-downing, perpetual swallow of exceptionism as a core value of the American Project To Take Over the World.

NOVA: If this region—New Orleans, the wetlands, and all—were a patient in the hospital, how would you describe them? At what stage are they?
IVOR VAN HEERDEN: Close to death.
[…]

The Eighteenth Brumière of Louis Napoleon (1852), the great philosopher Karl Marx famously stated the history repeated itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
This prophecy is evident today with Russia Gate and the New Cold War.

Charlie Hill, Oneida-Mohawk-Cree: “A Redneck told me to go back where I came from, so I put a tipi in his backyard.”

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.
— Chorus from the song “Sixteen Tons”, written by Merle Travis, and performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955.