Up, Down.
Contents: Great Pumpkin, Krista Ford, Marikana, Belo Monte, Torture, UNFCCC doh-doh-Doha, K-k-Canadian Coal, Eu-nuch, Zaatari, Consultants & muses, 12-09-12, 12-09-16, 12-09-18, 12-09-19.
This blog started not quite seven years ago and I am vaguely hopeful that this is the end of it.
Maybe the Great Pumpkin will set me free (at last), or it could be 'Apocolocyntosis', or 'Godot, Waiting For' - take your pick - and there are others ... this Kafka essay by Will Self is good (though the bells and whistles are silly and I doubt it will be there for long).
Poor Krista Ford is excoriated for telling a simple truth: “Stay alert, walk tall, carry mace, take self-defence classes & don’t dress like a whore.” She apologizes (is forced to apologize). I can only hope she has her fingers (and possibly other parts as well) crossed at the time.
Her uncle sets out to stop the Toronto gravy train - but finds it too difficult. It might be a case of the snake not enjoying the taste of his own tail, or that he hasn't quite thought it through (he is not a man who thinks things through now, is he eh?) but I for one believe that he honestly meant it at the time (there are occasions when the past tense is simply ... appropriate).
So. It's genetic. This is not a small thing it turns out (being as humans are 'racing' towards extinction for about similar reasons).
Marikana: That the police hunted and killed as well as confronting, that they tortured prisoners in their cells.
It's simple really. Who do you believe? Jacob Zuma? Who thinks rape is just fine and that washing your pecker after the fact prevents AIDS? Or the chief of police who tells her men not to be sorry for killing 34 people?
Or some dipshit left-lib Pulitzer prize winner? (Not hardly!) Here he is on Wikipedia, and he keeps a website. He has a book too, The Bang Bang Club which has been made into a movie worth looking at. (Still a copy on IsoHunt.)
Belo Monte: That woman Deborah Duprat is more than just a pretty face eh? The MPF is appealing. That the project is bogus is proven conclusively for me as the pension maggots increase their stake. Uh oh! There is gold on the Xingu too - they are doomed! And it is k-k-Canadians behind it: Belo Sun Mining Corp. / Belo Sun Resources.
Torture: In Red Dust Tom Hooper does get at the fact that people who are tortured are damaged in the process. Can we expand the concept to include whatever it is that has been done to consumers?
Probably not, considering that the Americans have decided that what went on at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is not worth prosecuting, that Guantanamo will stay open, and that waterboarding is still legit ... (I am speechless) ...
And we are going to teach these people enough ethics to consider the fate of future generations? I'm sorry but I don't think so. (If one single person reads this and leaves a remark that they think there is a chance, however slight, then I will carry on trying. Indeed, I will carry on regardless. There is simply nothing else to do.)
UNFCCC leading up to doh-doh-Doha: Inadvertent truth comes from IISD once in a while (the Canadian connection). This is from one of their recent newsletters: "... however, another delegate said, sighing, “I am still very unclear as to the purpose of this meeting here in Bangkok.”"
K-k-k-Canada: Peter Mansbridge or Peter Kent or whatever his name is does a fine imitation of Michael Jackson's backwards moon-walk as he reduces restrictions on coal generating plants.
You can follow the trail - it's all there on the Internet - little footprints from the HR Milner generating station in Grande Cache across Alberta and all the way to Ottawa: from the Alberta Utilities Commission, through Maxim Power Corp., Grande Cache Coal, Weyerhauser, Ainsworth Engineered - Peter Kent knows who his friends are and he serves them well.
How fucked up is that? Who cares?
A Eunuch with old head injuries: Just before I started McGill I was in a car accident that left me in a coma for several days. I arrived in plaster from hip to ankle but managed to snag the job of stage manager in the drama society's production of The Flies. Fucked it up totally. Walkabout. Someone else had to pick up and build the set at the last minute. I must say they were kind to me about it - there was a British guy in charge and I think he figgured it out.
And a year or so before there was the mumps that left me with one nut. Enough for a beard and repeated procreation - but missed the required level of competitiveness or something I guess.
'Eunuch' is not an 'eu' word (as in good, well, easy; eudaimony, euphoria etc.) but my personal etymology is eu-nuch, beautiful bark (but no bite).
Another camp, Zaatari, in Jordan: Syrian Children Offer Glimpse of a Future of Reprisals.
So ... Alewites? North or south of Syria? In the tropics? Anywhere near Constantinople? Istanbul? on the Mediterranean? What is that blank island on the map called? ... Crete?
Two consultants: Looking for clues about how to find bugs I hire a $200/hour psychologist, but after two hours I can see that he has no idea except to agree that looking for bugs is tricky business. So I try the free-store emotional hot-line on the telephone, but the young woman on the other end does not appear to understand what I am talking about either (I think it is a generational thing) ... so. I let them down easy (a laugh with no edge).
'On yer Jack Jones' as someone I knew used to say.
I am wondering if the simple existence of digital, computer metaphors is enough to queer the language entirely - like The Ice Queen, or if it is some form of Vonnegut's Ice-9 that has denatured the mythos?
A-and two muses:Jodie Smith, a model in California - you can see more of her on her Tumblr - a smoker, still wonderfully naive after what looks like considerable experience.
Somewhere she is talking about a shoot she is doing with some photographer and says 'vagina naked'. The post has been taken down ... anyway, I find the phrase (and herself of course) charming.
And Alek Wek, who took a trip back to South Sudan recently with UNHCR.Take a close look at that photograph and tell me what you see.
Why black muses? I've explained this here before.
Bitter? Nope. (Seriously, all appearances to the contrary are just that - appearances.)
Be well.
Wednesday September 12: Still a few days to the full seven year term. Shouting down a profoundly silent well, throwing handfuls of coins, all these years, and not a whisper of an echo even, nevermind a proper response. Yeah ... considering the time it took for tectonics to catch on (Gros Morne being a particularly apt location for such meditations) ... it will be too late soon if consciousness of our environmental jeopardy is not a lot quicker taking hold.
Still ... a great relief to have these few days away, even the cigarette death-wish abates somewhat.
Sunday September 16: No change in August!? This has to be a flat-out lie on the part of the UN bureaucrats. The FAO entry is here, as of September 6 they say (?) it may not be so easy to hide next month ...
I did meet a geologist who told me about when the next ice age will hit Newfoundland (~1,000 years, due to disruption of the Gulf Stream by 'climate change' and concomitant enhancement of the Labrador Current) - but he may not have listened carefully to brother Bob singin' Tempest, yet.
The actual 7 year anniversary will be on Wednesday ... :-)
Tuesday September 18: There is not much going on in Toronto around the issues that really touch me. Oh sure, there is an upcoming training session for 'activists', and yet another information session in the works for November sometime by Toronto Bolivia Solidarity (I think), and a fast & vigil somewhere in Ottawa, or for the diehards there is We Are PowerShift Canada late in October (if you missed Tim DeChristopher's speech in 2011 or didn't understand it) ...
All good, friends & folks, except that it is no longer the time to 'build the movement', it is now the time to actually move.
So it is this one that got my attention: Peaceful act of civil disobedience planned for October to defend Canada’s west coast from tar sands pipelines and tankers. Simply because I think there is a (vanishingly small I'll admit) chance that Enbridge's Northern Gateway can be stopped, and also because of those kids in Waglisla in April - I would like to meet some of 'em and they just might be there.
An outrageously expensive roomette on the train to Vancouver, get to Victoria from there somehow.
Wednesday September 19: Seven years just about exactly - give or take a day or two for leap years, zero-based indexing, the Precession of the Equinoxes and whatnot.The urge to smoke has returned to 'normal' and the only residual effect seems to be a slight mitigation in the Tourette's - from "Fuckin' Bitch!" to "Fuckin' Shit!" Oh well. You can neither smoke nor swear on trains I don't think so it may work out.
An acronym has popped up of course: 'teotwawki' / the end of the world as we know it - lol.
In Denmark things are a little different.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."So said Mario Savio in 1964.
I would like to see 'we' & 'our' in there instead of all that 'you' & 'your' stuff. Anyway, he was talking about some more-or-less abstract concept of freedom which I didn't then and still don't quite understand. That said, the words are right on.
Be well gentle readers; like it says in Revelations, "Be watchful and strengthen the things that remain."
HAHAHAHAHA ... I came back to fix a typo and update the index and found that Google (No Evil!) have changed the interface. So, that really is it then, I'm done here.One final observation, that the character of analysands is intimately connected with this blogging nonsense - through the shifting of the transcendent and mystical towards the secular no doubt.
OK. Done like dinner.
I am ... Out'a here! Be well.
Down.
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