Who am I? Who are you?

Ninguém muda ninguém. / No one changes anyone.

2012-01-28T00:03:00.013-05:00

(Uh oh ... Have I said this all before?)
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

There is a process at the Toronto Public Library (TPL) to ask that a title be purchased - worthy of Kafka so I don't very often indulge. Anyway, it payed out this time - four copies have been ordered and it is now available to be 'held' (sounds like a 21st century sex act).

So, go with your trusty TPL card and 'place' a 'hold' on Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face by Peter F. Sale.

Speaking of sex acts ... two Toronto women (I want to call them 'blonde bookends' though both are competent in the extreme; and one has no idea what colour their DNA is): Jane Pyper, the City Librarian; and Karen Stintz, TTC Chair; bracketing (as it were) two ultimately important front-lines ... I'll leave it there.

A sweet girl once said to me (with a smile), "Ninguém pertence pra ninguém." / No one belongs to anyone. She is a devotee of candomblé and this song by Virgínia Rodrigues, Depois Que o Ilê Passar, brings that moment to mind (another was sitting together at Teatro Rival in Rio listening to her sing it):

     Rebentou, Ilê Ayê Curuzu
     Toque de Angola Ijexá
     Vamos pra cama meu bem
     Me pegue agora
     Me dê uma beijo gostoso
     Pode até me amassar
     Mas me solte quando o Ilê passar
     Quero ver você, Ilê Ayê passar por aqui
     Não me pegue não me toque
     Por favor não me provoque
     Eu só quero ver o Ilê passar
     Quero ver você, Ilê Ayê passar por aqui

[Teatro Rival (aka Petrobras Teatro Rival) is just a few blocks away from the buildings that collapsed on Avenida Treze de Maio this week in Rio (Treze de Maio / May 13, was the date in 1888 when slavery was 'officially' abolished in Brasil, though it has yet to be accomplished); here's a map. It happens every few years (always during renovations it seems) - a big piece of Hotel Canadá fell onto the street in 2007, and a building on Rio Branco near Assembléia collapsed in 2003 sometime. Strange I know but it is one of the things I like about Brasil.]

Ilê Ayê is a musical group, a huge one, formed in the 70's - a big part of Carnaval in Salvador (where Gilberto Gil comes from). Ilê Ayê might also be a Yoruba (a kind of people, a tribe, uma nação from Nigeria) expression meaning 'the house of life'. Curuzu is a neighbourhood in Salvador where Ilê Ayê (the group) began. Ijexá is a kind of music, a rhythm, also a(nother) kind of people from Nigeria, and a kind of Capoeira (which some people call 'Brasilian ju-jitsu' but it is more like a dance).

     It burst (busted) out, Ilê Ayê Curuzu
     A touch of Angola Ijexá
     Come to bed sweetheart
     Take me now
     Give me a delicious kiss
     You can even crush me
     But let me go when Ilê passes by
     I want to see you, Ilê Ayê passes by here
     Don't hold me, don't touch me
     Please don't tempt me
     I just want to see Ilê pass by
     I want to see you, Ilê Ayê passes by here

It is looking like I am entirely wrong about despair not necessarily leading to paralysis. I still don't think it's 'necessary' but here I am, paralysed, stopped, parado; QED.

Best not to mess (I guess) with bourgeois notions at all unless you have a fireproof floor. I had the ætiology all screwed up - ignored (at my peril) certain social feedback effects. (Could it possibly have to do with Karma? Fear is more like it - 'It's catching y'know'.)

But there's paralysis, and then there is just not moving - hard to distinguish from the outside - catalepsy vs some kind of voluntary renunciation ... a form of, say, transcendental meditation? Or a convoluted passive-aggressive response to isolation, shunning (implicit and explicit)? Or ... a simple lack of resonance?

One of Fernando Meirelles' early films, Domésticas / Maids, includes a fellow who loses his life somehow and winds up in a chair watching TV; until one day his wife comes home (from her job as a maid) and finds him still sitting in the chair, dead. The next husband seems to be going the same way until she realizes that 'It's the chair!' and gets rid of it (it's a comedy y'unnerstan').

I admit it! When I first saw 'Lake Titicaca" in the headline (Urban population boom threatens Lake Titicaca) I thought it was Mexico City - didn't there used to be a famous lake there?

Of course Titicaca is really on the border between Bolivia & Peru, not far from the Bolivian capital La Paz - here's a map (you knew all this already right?).

One of the highest lakes on the planet - high enough that there are measurable climatic effects associated with increased insolation.

A-and it turns out there is a smallish island in Lake Titicaca, Isla Amantaní, with two hills on it and (naturally) two hilltops: one dedicated to Pachamama and one to Pachatata; and even a hint of love in the name 'Amantani' don't you think? Earth Father doesn't show his face too often but ... yeah.

There is evidence of liminality stretching back over some longish period of time in the form of at-least-partially corbelled stone arches (a tradition carried on admirably by the tourism marketeers and the Catholic Church - but with concrete).

Mr. Alexander J. Pourbaix has been President of Energy and Oil Pipelines at TransCanada PipeLines Limited (aka TransCanada Corp.) since July 2010. ... Mr. Pourbaix is a 2002-2003 recipient of Canada's 'Top 40 Under 40' Award for leadership excellence (see Bloomberg).

In the first picture there do seem to be several lackeys trailing behind; so, four million a year is about right then?

A lawyer with a name like 'FromBeneath' working for Transcanada; wedding ring on the finger there; an honourable man, no doubt about it.

Then I went to the barber for a haircut and read this as I waited: 'CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure' from October 2008 (see below) - Hal Kvisle CEO (now past-CEO) of TransCanada. An engineer with an MBA and the instigator of Keystone & Keystone XL. Not a tall man.

In the interview he says, "... I’ve always been determined that anything I’m involved in is not going to be built in a way that harms the environment." I expect he believes it. Eight million a year and worth every penny.

The story of Terry Gou and Foxconn; weaving as it does around Steve Jobs and his iStuff (iShit?).

Which brings us back around to the last sentence of Limits to Growth:

The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.

[The last chapter of Limits to Growth can be found here (.pdf, pages 17-21).]

Without knowing what things were like before, our grandchildren may very well view the state of the planet they inherit as 'normal' (because yes, some of our grandchildren will still be on it - extinction, even when a meteor strikes, doesn't happen overnight). In that sense, Terry Gou's mistake (not a 'mistake' exactly, but you know what I mean) might have been just - moving too quickly.

Some perspective on 'quickly': David Suzuki is reported here:

After 50 years of working in Canada and the world for a planet he revers he told the audience that our Earth is in "far worse shape" than it was when he began and that progress "has gone backwards."
[I trust he actually said 'reveres'.]

It is about the same story with John Porter (a generation before Suzuki) on social inequality: The vertical mosaic: an analysis of social class and power in Canada in 1965, and The measure of Canadian society: education, equality and opportunity in 1987.

Some perspective on jumping to conclusions: Ol' Simon wazizname ... Critchley (whom I was dissing in the post on Peter Sale's book).

I remember some (almost forgotten) when, picking up Simon Critchley and putting him down again for some reason. Then recently a friend mentioned him so I went to the library and ordered up Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance from 2007.

But it was slow coming, so in the meantime I got Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997), found it impossibly opaque, threw it at the wall and moved on.

So that when Infinitely Demanding finally arrived I nearly skipped it. Glad I didn't - more on remedies for nihilism next time.

This video from September 2008 (before Obama's election) is interesting (he's more than a bit of a show-off): Branding Democracy: Barack Obama and the American Void (and at Fora TV). (But I like it when he disses Charles Taylor.)

But, seriously folks ... the idea of fundamental politial myth, fiction, a ficção ... of course it is; the power of the people is real enough, while Divine Right of Kings and Perfect Union are management inventions.

Blancmange (speaking of fiction): The only video I could find is at MSN; transcripts can be found here & here; and I grabbed (poor but watchable) videos of the speech and the Q&A session following (in case they take the MSN one down).

I include a picture of Shawn Atleo ... well, why not? A pawn in the game. Pawns are important too.

Who was that economics guy? Chicago School was it? ... Oh yeah - Milton Friedman; and he and his colleagues, students, tap dancing with Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It is clear that our Milton is not very tall from that first photograph - and his feet are not even in it!

Watching Stephen Harper's Davos speech a few times (as I had to do to grab it) I was remembering certain sermons by certain preachers I have known - they way their mouths go when they are nailing it down tight around sin (or lemons). Times're gonna stay tough ... yup; gotta do what we gotta do to ensure growth ...

These two verses (15 & 16) in Matthew only work in isolation for me. He embeds them into a procedure which effectively leads to shunning. Taken out of context they make (a bit) more sense:

Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.

But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.

Well ... even the second verse already seems to be headed off somewhere compulsive. What exactly could it mean to 'establish' a word in someone's mouth I wonder? Don't know, and only a very limited subset of the possibilities is appealing - if it means the equivalent of 'point taken' then I am with it, otherwise not.

Even that 'gained' in the first verse could be a trap - why not 'regained'? Or 'restored'?

I think someone told me once that the Amish (or the Quakers was it?) use this verse as a prime mover, and even not knowing any more about it than that has endeared them all to me (to a degree).

Who orders this shit is me.
KOÉ?! / Say what?!

The existential-self-referential pork sausage version of Oroborus.

I can't find much on the artist, Luimau (maybe a nick-name?); the only website I can find is Osso Vozes, which stopped in 2009.

The trail led from Benett to Salmonelas to Porko Parade and Issi Vizes/Osso Vozes and stopped with this editorial:

Osso Vozes destrata a vida de um cartunista que quase nunca desenha, troca o incerto pelo errado mesmo, mistura minas com bombas e, principalmente, não tem uma idéia geral do que seja essa tira. Lui, um cartunista desproporcional.

[... Ah, his name is Lui Duarte, and indeed, he is still busy, just last week in Fortaleza (in the Brasilian state of Ceará - map) at Sobrado Dr. José Lourenço.]

No one changes anyone? No one belongs to anyone? Au contraire, mon cher frère! Infinitesimally small as they may be, the only changes that occur (like the shoreline and the sea) are there in the interstitial zone (or in the possibly imaginary one involving God). There is no other there ... there. Is there?

Be well gentle reader.

[Is that 'interstitial' or 'intertidal'?]

Postscript: Le Rendez-vous (refrain)

Garderez-vous parmi vos souvenirs
Ce rendez-vous où je n'ai pu venir?
Jamais, jamais, vous ne saurez jamais
Si ce n'était qu'un jeu ou si je vous aimais.
Les rendez-vous que l'on cesse d'attendre
Existent-ils dans quelque autre univers?
Où vont aussi les mots qu'on a pas pris le temps d'entendre
Et l'amour inconnu que nul n'a découvert?

[paroles: Gilles Vigneault, musique: Claude Léveillée - on an album in the early 60's]

This one is not so good. The original studio version (audio) is much better but there is no way to link to it directly - you have to scroll down and click on it. And a couple of rounds of Frédéric while we are at it: here & here.

The first one was: They say, "sing while you slave," but I just get bored. Then there was this one: Who am I? Who are you? ... said Moses to the Lord.

I think the next one will start soon: I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet. And with a subtitle: "Je me fous du monde entier."

Appendices:

1. CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure, FPM, October 2008.

CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure, FPM, October 2008.

TransCanada Corp.’s headquarters in downtown Calgary is striking for its high ceilings and blond, blue and white hues. It’s a coolness that seems to rub off on CEO Hal Kvisle, Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2008. Since taking the top job in 2001, Kvisle has led the transformation of a poky, regulated western Canadian gas pipeline company into an agile, continental gas (and soon to be oil) pipeline operator and power producer. The volume of deals and announcements has been especially high the past two years, but at no time have things been any more hectic than the Monday of our interview in mid-September. Over the weekend, Lehman Brothers announced it was filing for bankruptcy and Bank of America bought the ailing Merrill Lynch. At the same time, Hurricane Ike pounded Houston and the Gulf Coast refinery region. As it turns out, TransCanada had big stakes in both Texas and Wall Street. A few days later, the company would announce US$250 million worth of exposed contracts with Lehman Bros. This morning, however, we begin by talking with Kvisle about TransCanada’s other “exposure” — to hurricanes like Ike in the Gulf.

FINANCIAL POST MAGAZINE: Last year, you bought U.S. pipeline company ANR for US$3.4 billion. That gave TransCanada 17,000 kilometres of new gas pipeline in the U.S., primarily in the Midwest and Gulf Coast. It also means you now have a direct interest in what happens there any time a hurricane hits or tornadoes strike. What are you going through today?

Hal Kvisle: Now that we’ve been involved in ANR, tornadoes and hurricanes are of much more material interest than they were before. The western segment of the ANR line gets hit by a lot of tornadoes. They never hurt the pipeline, but we now have employees who have their houses destroyed by tornadoes going through. They’re in Tornado Alley up through Kansas and places like that. The other line is in Hurricane Alley coming in through the Gulf. Twice now in two years we’ve been hit by big hurricane activity. This one, Ike, has really caused quite a bit of disruption and damage. Many of our people in Houston are unable to use a telephone. It’s been a big job on our part just to check on everyone and make sure all of our people are okay.

FPM: How many people do you have there?

Kvisle: We have roughly 400 people in Houston and we have roughly an equal number of people in locations like Nashville, Greensboro, different places all up and down the system.

FPM: Is expansion into the U.S. the biggest change in TransCanada during your tenure as CEO?

Kvisle: Yes and no. TransCanada was initially an east-west company connecting Alberta to the Ontario and Quebec gas markets. If you roll back the clock to the year 2000, we had some small assets in the United States, but virtually all of our net income and our business activity was related to the transmission of Canadian gas. Today, while our U.S. pipeline business is not as big as our Canadian business, it will be soon. The completion of the Keystone oil pipeline system — our first oil pipeline — will really add to our presence. The game plan is for the U.S. pipes to become as significant to TransCanada as the Canadian pipes.

But we’ve also grown in the power business, in both Canada and the U.S. Officially, we just break our company into two — the pipeline division and the power division. And the pipeline division is still bigger than the power division. But if you break the pipeline division into Canada and the U.S., power is bigger than either of them. So that’s been quite a remarkable development. Since the year 2000, we’ve grown a power business that is bigger than TransCanada was at the time of the 1998 merger with Nova Energy.”

FPM: You’re capping a year of home runs. You won the bidding for the Alaska gas pipeline, announced the Keystone project expansion and bought the Ravenswood power plant in New York. Is this the company you envisioned when you took over in 2001?

Kvisle: I don’t know that I would have foreseen exactly this. But what I did foresee was that we could no longer be a one-trick pony with all of our eggs in the Canadian National Energy Board-regulated, Mainline-plus-Alberta basket. We had to diversify beyond that. We said we’d need to grow in areas where we have some kind of competitive advantage. So those two areas were pipeline throughout North America and big investments in power generation. Power generation was an ideal capital-intensive business to invest in — same capital structure as pipelines, no real limitations on growth. We move about 20% of all the gas in North America and you can’t get a lot bigger than that, but we’re today 1% of the North American power-gen market, so there’s lots of room for growth. Beyond that, working on things like Alaska and the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was just part of the longer-term plan.

FPM: You worked for Dome Petroleum in the 1980s, which was big in the Arctic. Now you’ve got a green light on the Alaska line, and we even hear talk of progress on Mackenzie. Has the North’s time finally come? Are we finally going to see these pipelines built?

Kvisle: It is time for the North. The market needs the gas. It’s time for us to develop the Mackenzie Delta and offshore regions. It very clearly puts a Canadian stamp on all that. It’s time from a reservoir perspective, for Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to go on gas sales.

That said, I don’t know whether we’re going to see those pipelines built or not. I’d say it’s highly certain that the Alaska project will go ahead. And if everything turns out in the correct logical way, there will be a pipeline through the Yukon and B.C. to Alberta. And it will connect that gas through to North American markets. The only issue that I raise about that is that there are challenges in Canada to getting that pipeline permitted and built in an expeditious manner. I think Canada has to pay a lot of attention to this, because if we don’t stand behind our commitment to get the Canadian section of that pipe built on time and on budget, there is the risk that Alaskan gas could go to the LNG market.

FPM: LNG — liquid natural gas — is shipped by tanker, correct?

Kvisle: That’s right. Now, we don’t think the LNG market through Valdez, Alaska, is economically the right answer, but it might be the answer if Americans start to perceive that there’s too much risk building through Canada. And why would they perceive that? I think it would revolve around the Mackenzie. The Mackenzie has been an incredibly difficult project to move forward. We have real challenges on the regulatory front in Canada. Things just get bogged down. And no question we’re bogged down in the Mackenzie. We’re talking about a multi-billion-dollar impact on the cost of the Mackenzie project. It’s the complexity of the regulatory process — and the fact that it’s still not over — that has added something like $3 billion to the cost of the Mackenzie project.

FPM: Besides Alaska, what have been the biggest recent highlights in your mind?

Kvisle: Home run No. 1 from my perspective was the successful integration of ANR. It’s all well and good to go around doing these $4-billion deals, but it takes an enormous effort inside the company to make it part of TransCanada. The fact that we’re generating excellent profitability and getting good financial results from what was a pretty big investment, that makes us happy. The second big win for the year was the regulatory rate approval that we got through on the TransCanada GTN system to California and the renegotiation of certain terms there. That was a real positive outcome that we’d been working on for two years since we acquired GTN. The third big home run is Keystone. And there are two parts to it. We are under construction on the main Keystone project. So for me that’s really significant. And then on the Keystone expansion, which is the short cut across and the extension to the Gulf Coast, we’ve announced significant, binding, long-term contracts. My fourth one would be Ravenswood, the New York power deal. Financial results will tell the story of Ravenswood and it’s too early to say. We remain very optimistic. That is a very significant asset in a very significant market. There’s also the Bruce nuclear plant in Ontario. We’re now two-thirds of the way done the biggest nuclear construction project in North America.

FPM: A lot of what we’re talking about in terms of the deals and the transformation of the company led to your selection as Outstanding CEO of the Year. Can you tell us a bit more about your role in the process, your footprint on these things?

Kvisle: The merger between TransCanada and Nova occurred in July 1998, about a year before I joined. And when I started talking to TransCanada about coming to work here — not as the CEO but to run the trading and business development department — I was attracted to it in part because I’d been through one of these big mergers before. I was there for the Dome-Hudson Bay merger in 1982. And one of the things I learned then is if you bring two organizations of people together and you keep all the right people and you keep the right projects and you get the right focus, things can work out really well.

People always talk about the cost synergies. Or they talk about the heft of the company in the financial markets or the business community or whatever. But to me, the single biggest upside of a merger is the coming together of two teams of people that actually might see the world a bit differently, might have better ideas. If you can get them properly organized you’re going to have a winner.

FPM: How did things play out after you arrived?

Kvisle: We discovered after I joined and Doug Baldwin had stepped in as stopgap CEO that much of what I’d been hired to run had to be sold. TransCanada had quite a bit more debt than anyone expected coming out of that merger, and less revenue, and we had to do something about that. I essentially spent my first 18 months at TransCanada selling off businesses that I’d been hired to run.

I took the CEO job in May 2001. The No. 1 job at that point was to establish what strategies we were going to pursue and get the organization focused behind those. A real key to our success has been our executive leadership team and some of the changes that have occurred on that team over time. This includes people like Alex Pourbaix, whom I elevated to the senior team and gave a mandate to grow a very significant power business. Similarly, we identified the big northern projects as a priority. And so I elevated Dennis McConaghy as the guy to carry those forward. Russ Girling was the CFO and it was seen to be very important that we maintain our standing in the financial community and our credit rating, so Russ agreed to carry on in that job. But we started thinking about who might be the successor to Russ, as he really wanted to run a business unit. A couple of years ago that occurred, when Greg Lohnes came back after five years at Great Lakes and became the CFO.

What I’m trying to convey is that there was a whole lot of important organizational work that was required over that period: What are the strategies of the company going to be? How much money do we have for investment in big opportunities? How are we going to cultivate the best opportunities? To me it was a question of getting the right people into the executive leadership team and then working with them to make sure that they each had the strongest possible department.

FPM: Is there a point through there where it all started to click?

Kvisle: I’d say all of that started to come together in ’03. It took us a couple of years of really focusing on the operation of the existing assets to try to increase cash flow. Our investments in energy got us through that early period, when there weren’t many opportunities on the pipe side. And then starting in about 2006, a whole bunch of stuff started to come together in pipelines. We did the GTN acquisition. We acquired effectively 100% of Great Lakes, we acquired ANR, we took over operatorship of Northern Border, we kicked off the Keystone project — all of this happened in the last two years.

FPM: What does that mean in quantitative terms?

Kvisle: We generated a billion dollars a year in cash flow in year 1999-2000. Today, we generate almost $3 billion a year in cash flow. So the cash coming out of our existing assets has gone up two and a half times. Our capital program was about $400 million then. We’ll invest just under $6 billion this year. And lately, our finance team has had an extraordinary run. We’ve issued over $3 billion of equity, of TransCanada common stock, in an 18-month period. And we’ve issued twice that much debt.

FPM: Do you see the market meltdown affecting TransCanada and other companies like it?

Kvisle: I do. In times of uncertainty, everybody pulls their horns in a little bit. And it’s so uncertain what is going to happen in the world next. Five months ago, if you’d have asked anybody what could possibly happen to Lehman Brothers, bankruptcy would not have been on the radar screen. Yet today, here we are. To see Merrill Lynch taken over by Bank of America, it’s an astounding thing.

FPM: Let’s talk more about the Keystone pipeline. It’s slated to carry oilsands oil into the U.S. starting in late 2009 and to refineries in the Gulf by 2012. The price tag: US$12.2 billion. How did it come together? Why is it important?

Kvisle: Clearly, there’s a big supply of oil being developed in Alberta. That supply needs an outlet. So we looked around and said, “Where is the market in North America that would most likely want this crude oil?” A lot of people put pressure on us to look at the Pacific market. But I’ve just never been a fan of pipelines to the Pacific coast. Why go there and compete head on with all the middle-east crude when we could deliver the crude into the middle of North America — a close-at-hand market in which we have more advantages than disadvantages in serving? So we landed first on the Wood River-Petoka market, near St. Louis. Secondly, the Cushing, Okla., market. Thirdly, it was always our plan to ultimately extend to the Gulf Coast and hook into the biggest refining market in the world.

FPM: As a gas pipeline builder, you’ve had lots of experience with protestors and opposition to your plans. But while these hurdles are mostly local with gas, opposition to oilsands oil — aka “dirty oil” — is global. Does that concern you?

Kvisle: It just makes things more complicated. It’s not unlike getting involved in Bruce Nuclear. All of a sudden now we have to deal with the issues related to nuclear power plants. There are foes out there to nuclear power. Generally, there are foes out there related to anything an engineer might ever do. And so you have a certain number of well-organized parties that are very opposed to the development of Fort McMurray. I don’t agree with any of their criticism. I’ve spent a fair bit of time up there. I know quite a bit about it. I know that Fort McMurray is not devastating the boreal forest of all of northeast Alberta, and yet that’s what they say. I know that Fort McMurray uses less than 1% of the water that flows in the Athabasca River, but you know the Kennedys would have you believe that it’s something much more than that. And the latest one is this issue of “dirty oil,” that somehow oilsands production is dirtier than any other production, when the truth is that between 85% and 92% of the CO2 emitted from any barrel of oil is emitted by the end user. And the other 8% to 15% is emitted during production, transportation and refining. So, is a barrel that has a little more emission in the production phase really a dirty barrel compared to any other, when between 85% and 92% of the CO2 is emitted by the person who uses the barrel at the end of the process?

Our position is that we move what the market wants us to move. If the market wants us to move that crude, we are to move it and we are going to do it without having an impact on the environment.

FPM: One can’t help but think of the global attacks Canadian forestry companies faced. And how that hurt the whole sector.

Kvisle: We appreciate the global elements of this. Nowhere is that a bigger issue than on the CO2 front. In the world, generally, people want to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 we emit and I don’t have an issue with that. But if mankind wants to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 it emits, we need a 30- or 40-year program of shutting down plants that emit a lot of CO2 at the right point in their lifecycle and replacing them with something new, and we need to do it in the normal course of capital replacement. On the other hand, having us proceed in a direction where many of these high-quality, long-life plants are going be required to shut down prematurely is an enormous mistake.

I think we are in a very difficult situation in Canada, where a whole variety of governments have led the electorate to believe that we can solve the CO2 problem relatively easily and that the burden of doing so will be borne by somebody else. In fact, we have a situation where everyone is going to pay enormously if we don’t proceed in a much more careful manner and respect the lifecycle of these big assets that we have. There’s no way of meeting Kyoto targets, Canada should know that by now. It’s a very serious public policy failure in Canada, firstly, not to recognize the reality of what you can and have to do, and secondly, to head off in a direction that’s different than the United States, not recognizing that we’re 90% integrated with the U.S. in terms of our economy. This is a very difficult thing. It’s the toughest issue I deal with in my job.

FPM: Tell us about your personal environmental ethic.

Kvisle: I grew up in west central Alberta. My father was a biologist and a school teacher and he was really involved in conservation. He would research things like how do you provide better habitat for the moose and elk in the Alberta foothills. So I had a lot of exposure to that and I’ve always been determined that anything I’m involved in is not going to be built in a way that harms the environment.

I’ve spent decades working in oil and gas development in the foothills region of western Alberta, and I think it’s a real credit to the companies that work in that part of Alberta that the landscape isn’t destroyed by oil and gas activity. There’s no other industry where you can make a $3-million investment and all you see is a wellhead sticking out of the ground. You know, we invest $30 billion or $40 billion a year in the oil and gas sector, and with the exception of Fort McMurray, the surface disturbance is really minimal.

FPM: We hear you’re applying those principles at your ranch, too?

Kvisle: A big part of what we’re doing on the ranch is preserving the nature of the area. I share the view that we need to maintain these different ranching areas in Alberta in a very pristine condition. We can’t overgraze them. We can’t let the cattle ruin the creeks. All of that stuff has to be done in a long-term, sustainable way. There were no buildings on this particular property. So we went out there and said we’re not going to develop this in a big grandiose fashion. We’re going to have minimal impact. All the electricity is supplied through solar panel systems. It’s entirely off the grid. All the heat is wood heat. We just find all the trees that are going to fall down and rot and turn into CO2 anyway and burn them.

FPM: When did you build there?

Kvisle: I’ve had a farming property up by Innisfail for about 15 years. We picked up this cattle-grazing operation five years ago.

FPM: It sounds like a nice place for retirement. You’re now 56. You’ve been CEO of TransCanada for eight years. Have you given any thought to how much longer you’ll want to stay in the job?

Kvisle: I think it’s important that you don’t stay longer than you’re really significantly contributing to the leadership of the company. In my case, I look at it in terms of a half-dozen different projects that we’ve got on the go here. I see things like reaching commercial agreements on Alaska — that’s a job that I take very seriously and I think I can contribute to. Second, we have acquired this Ravenswood asset that is essential to electricity supply in New York City — so making sure that we get through the full integration of Ravenswood, that we run it really well. I want to see oil flowing through the Keystone pipeline. We did all the work to get that going. I don’t leave part way through something like that, that’s got a few years to run. Similarly, Bruce Nuclear. I am convinced that we’re going to have a tremendous success story when we get A1 and A2 refurbished and we start them up and get them running. Those are the kinds of things I think about before retiring.

Down.

"Hold up! Buried Treasure!"

2012-01-20T01:10:00.012-05:00

(a garbage collector overheard in the alley).
Should have been called: Roots in the Energy Drain.
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

BBB
Attention: This program will violently insult your intelligence.

What intelligence?

You have to know that BBB is 'Big Brother Brazil', a bourgeois-porn TV reality show in which lovely young people live in a 'mansion' together; flirt, feel & fuck (sometimes, just off-camera); and then get voted out of the plastic Eden one-by-one. (Ho hum.)

[Original from Alberto Benett Charges – Ideias – Esboços – Rabiscos. This site merits a word or two of praise - he not only publishes cartoons as they have appeared in various newspapers, but sketches too - if you look carefully you can see something of his process.]

A guy I know, good person, university graduate ... so (partly) in jest I offered him $100 to read the last blog post and make a comment. He replied (by email), "I haven't read all of this because it is just messy for me the blog post, and I can't really focus on the blog post. The other problem is that some of the words you are using is above my heads. Do you want me to post my comments here or on your blog?" A rich vein to mine for meaning ... some (other) when.

[Oh right. I'm supposed to respond to that? Because I like and even admire this fellow? Sorry but I really am an asshole I guess.]

Oh, you must turn it into something beautiful, but conventionally beautiful, demonstrable; it cannot be love, it must be only proofs.

Someone somewhere, an editor, a marketeer, has got this all figgured out: knows about literacy levels in k-k-Canada; knows close to precisely how many copies of a certain book will sell; can quote from memory how many copies of Ethical Oil have sold so far and what the curve looks like - how many will be remaindered, how many of Requiem for a Species, and of this latest one I have been 'hypeing' - Our Dying Planet.

Things that go 'bump' in the night:

#1 - SOPA/PIPA.

I guess I just do not see the leverage? The money comes from ads right? And Internet access fees. And the idea that this kind of protest is going to change anything much doesn't quite compute.

No matter how you cut it, sliced diced or julienned, thievery is thievery and hypocrisy is an energy drain. (You did note that the last image there is from Demonoid right?)

Images like this are floating around. I didn't see anything like it.

SOPA is 'Stop Online Piracy Act' and PIPA is 'Protect IP Act'; some details here.

#2 - Keystone XL (?)

"A Good Call" says the NYT below, and for a moment I wonder if they have now got Billy-We-Won McKibben writing their editorials - but it covers most of the ground, so just the headline is bogus. Enough angles and spin-vectors to bring on vertigo - almost exclusively irrelevant. The pundits go on and on and on - better to go to the source, here is the 'Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline' below (not that he says anything except to repeat the phrase "the health and safety of the American people" twice in what? 250 words?).

More and more often I see an image of our Barack that reminds me of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray - in fact, they all do; here, watch this wee video of Joe Oliver from the Guardian (original here). Why does he have to look at his notes so closely to get out a 25 second sound byte?

"Thousands upon thousands of jobs ..." he says, but it seems to me he is primarily concerned with his own (in several senses).

#3 - A disconnect in the dead zone.

Harnessing the energy of the dead zones! It conjures up visions in green and yellow of designer GMO algae - one species per polymer in a giant machine with some kind of rotary dial on the front of it. Lookin' good, from Gene scientist to create algae biofuel with Exxon Mobil:

"Algae consumes carbon dioxide and sunlight in the presence of water, to make a kind of oil that has similar molecular structures to petroleum products we produce today," said Jacobs. [Emil Jacobs is the Exxon/Mobil connection; and Craig Venter is the eminent scientist.]

But the picture has a moustache; from Cargo boat and US navy ship powered by algal oil in marine fuel trials comes:

The exact nature of the algae, one of 30,000 single-cell organisms known to exist in the wild, is a secret closely guarded by Solazyme, the company that manufactures the fuel in giant fermentation tanks in Pennsylvania. The fast-growing algae are fed crop or forest waste and convert their sugars to oil.

So ... how does the sunlight get into those giant fermentation tanks then exactly?

#4 - Toronto Budget Victory (!)

We taught that slob Rob Ford a lesson huh? (Sez the leftards.) Paddy-whacked his pee-pee! And spent the surplus, and failed toe-telly to stop the gravy train - it was imaginary gravy anyway wuzzun'it? Do farts have lumps?

Next step is 'revitalizing the left', starting with the unions according to Rick Salutin (original here).

And anyways, Rob & Doug are on a diet eh? What's that about? Are they the kind of vegetarians who only eat old women?

#5 - More than just a pretty face?

Three links around Fatih Birol from the Guardian: 1) Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies 'could provide half of global carbon target', 2) Fossil fuel subsidies: a tour of the data, and, 3) OECD Inventory of estimated budgetary support and tax expenditures for fossil fuels (.pdf including all the dirt on k-k-Canada).

A-and a plug for their environmental coverage (timely, well-researched, a-and often, usually, with links to the relevant documents); best thing to do would be stop looking in The Globe & Mail at all, abandon it, and make a shortcut on your desktop to the Guardian Environment Section.

[Previously here on our Fatih in November & December 2011.]

"We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it."

(From Macbeth, though you may want to remember who is speaking and about what - or not.)

Peter Sale is apparently not amused. I sent him a link to my 'review' and it has been almost a week and no acknowledgement. Too crazy I guess. Oh well.

I offered to help Occupy Toronto maintain a vigil at Peter Kent's office every day for an hour or two during rush hour - they weren't interested. I heard of someone planning a hunger strike in Ottawa and offered to go along - and got no answer. So ...

There were a few euphoric moments when I realized that Joe Oliver's riding office is in Toronto too - and slightly more accessible by TTC than Kent's - but the TCC people did not answer my request to borrow the 'Hungry for Climate Leadership' banner. (Oh well.)

Meanwhile, a hunger strike does seem to be the next thing on the list. The place, I think, is on the steps of wherever it is the National Energy Board's tribunal - or JRP? Joint Review Panel? Is that it? Anyway there are three of 'em on it - is holding the hearings on the Northern Gateway pipeline. It's a travelling show so following them around would mean ferries & flights & motels & B&Bs to book. It would be good to see Bella Bella again.

It is not clear to me that anything will come of it. I doubt I can do it by myself - obviously I CAN do it - I have the will and the skills & resources, but the energy? Well ... anyone who thinks things happen in a vacuum is simply ... mistaken.

I got as far as designing a placard to carry. Not hungry for any specific kind of leadership - since there is none at all on any side as it is ... one could quote Robert Frost's Considerable Speck. For the flip side it is still a toss-up: "George Soros is not paying me to do this," is one I thought of; or "100% owned and operated by a Canadian with no affiliation to any radical foreign celebrities." (Or domestic for that matter.)

No one speaks to me, and no matter what you say it does take two to tango. The sweet girls in Brasil send pictures of themselves on the beach with their kids (Beleza!) and that's about it. (And that's enough too :-)

Oh I know I know I know I know I know - letting it out of the bag like this probably does it in as effectively as any energy drain; but it is all 'faint hope' around here now y'unnerstan'. The odds are so long that it really doesn't make much sense indulging in niceties.

I read Ondaatje's latest The Cat's Table - ho hum - the high point is when he quotes Beckett's "Despair young and never look back," as if he knows what it means; poser, milking the literary cash-cow for his retirement. Should novels have footnotes? (Maybe there was one and I didn't notice.)

"On any sheet the least display of mind."

(Uh oh! ... )

Portal Rio+20 Construindo a Cúpula dos Povos
Rio+20 Gateway - Building the People's Summit
I get a monthly newsletter from the CPT - Comissão Pastoral da Terra. It came a few days ago and one of the items was this: Rio de Janeiro: Encontro dos Povos sobre a Rio+20 / Meeting of the people about Rio+20. And it's not far from there to Rio+20 Gateway - Building the People's Summit.

Ai ai AI!
Damned airplanes! I wonder if I could get there by land somehow? Or by sea?

Could I possibly be of any use or ornament if I did manage to get there?

(What'm I gonna do now?!)

Be well.

Postscript:

I often hear the garbage men in the back lane at 5:00 AM as they load the bins from the Tim's just up the street. When he shouted "Hold up! Buried Treasure!" I went to the window to see what it was he had found - but they were out of view.

I saw the crow scavengers at work in Ocean Falls. Someone scrawled "Scouse Bootle!" in big red letters across the wall of the ruined sawmill. The only serious fire we had to put out while I was there was in the paper mill where two of the lads had been taking pieces of stainless pipe out of the pulp with a cutting torch one Sunday morning (which is what caught me in the clip below).

Now two women, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, have made a film on the take-down of Detroit. This short clip Dismantling Detroit has two distinct sets of voices in it (from this NYT article, the clip is also here on Vimeo). 'Exceptionalism' is a new one to me - I get stuck between the authentic dialog and the stale vege-pap rationale it is wrapped up in.

The two film-makers have voices too (which make it all clearer in a way, to me at least).

A friend sent me along a link to Greedy Lying Bastards in the Guardian. This is all good - education going on at the meme level. But how long does it take for the memes to take root and bear fruit? Just a question y'unnerstan' but ... Don't we already know they are greedy lying bastards? Haven't we known that for ... a decade and more?

Time is short friends.
As this edition goes to press the world has still not ended, but they are working on it with all their energies.

Appendices:

1. A Good Call on the Pipeline, NYT Editorial, January 18 2012.

2. Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline, Barack Obama, January 18 2012.

A Good Call on the Pipeline, NYT Editorial, January 18 2012.

President Obama has properly rejected, at least for now, the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would run from Canada to the Gulf Coast. He rebuffed the demand of House Republicans that the controversial project be decided in haste under an election-year deadline.

The foolish requirement that Mr. Obama issue a decision on the pipeline by Feb. 21 — cynically inserted into the payroll tax bill passed in December — could never be met given the need for a thorough environmental study before any judgment is made.

The president made the right call in accepting the recommendation of the State Department, which has primary jurisdiction over the proposed 1,700-mile pipeline that would cross through ecologically sensitive areas in the Midwest. Mr. Obama said his judgment was based not on the merits but on a timetable that was “rushed and arbitrary.” He has maintained that a decision on the current proposal could not be made until some time next year. The pipeline sponsor, TransCanada, could submit a proposal to build along another route, but that, too, would require time for a comprehensive environmental review.

Republicans intent on scoring campaign points immediately repeated their fallacious cries that “tens of thousands of jobs” would be lost by not instantly approving the project. They made no mention of the risks inherent in the project: harm to the Canadian boreal forests and threats to water supplies in the Midwest. Bipartisan opposition to the pipeline has notably been led by Gov. Dave Heineman of Nebraska, a Republican.

The extraction and production of tar sands oil in the fields of northern Alberta would also cause far more greenhouse gas emissions than drilling for conventional crude. Lobbyists and House Republicans have tried to sell the project as a reduction in America’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But much of the pipeline oil that would be refined on the Gulf Coast would be destined for foreign export.

Far more important to the nation’s energy and environmental future is the development of renewable and alternative energy sources. This is the winning case that Mr. Obama should make to voters in rejecting the Republicans’ craven indulgence of Big Oil.

Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline, Barack Obama, January 18 2012.

Earlier today, I received the Secretary of State’s recommendation on the pending application for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment. As a result, the Secretary of State has recommended that the application be denied. And after reviewing the State Department’s report, I agree.

This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people. I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil. Under my Administration, domestic oil and natural gas production is up, while imports of foreign oil are down. In the months ahead, we will continue to look for new ways to partner with the oil and gas industry to increase our energy security –including the potential development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico – even as we set higher efficiency standards for cars and trucks and invest in alternatives like biofuels and natural gas. And we will do so in a way that benefits American workers and businesses without risking the health and safety of the American people and the environment.

Down.

Peter F. Sale - Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face

2012-01-15T10:00:00.023-05:00

or (In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King.)
Up, Down, Postscript.

Peter Sale - Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face from University of California Press. Watch his schedule for upcoming events. More links previously here & here.

Don't let the subtitle of this post fool you. The book is important - I said that already, right? And the man too. So, get it, read it, make your own evaluation and see where it may take you.

The modus operandi here is basically ad hominem with no correctitude (and no cranberry sauce either!). Best to state that up-front. There are reasons - defensible and indefensible; and implications - mostly structural (including that the reader figures into it as well as the author with just a slight concommitant blurring of the subject/object split); ... for another time.

There are a few key notions (of mine): 1) An english-lit lecturer, a good friend, now dead; last thing he told me (I thought he was crazy!) was that Homo sapiens has split in two: H. grǽdum, greedy human, and H. agapiens, loving human; and telling them apart at this early stage is tricky; 2) It's see CO₂ emissions level off flat by 2015 or what follows is no more than a protracted dénouement - and a brutal one - make Gloucester's fate in Lear look like the teddy-bear's picnic!; and, 3) Any sensible person familiar with 'the science' around this issue has despaired already (but that doesn't mean they've quite given up).

So, how does Peter Sale fit into this ridiculous & arbitrary framework?

[I am having a hard time with this. I know the next step is to scan the relevant pages, tune them up carefully into HTML, figgure out where and how they will fit ... but the energy is just not coming. It will come, eventually, maybe.

Where did that awful subtitle come from? What a thing to say! "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King." WTF!? Are you nuts!? (Am I nuts?) There it is. No one sets out to end up here do they? I am thinking of the 13th fairy in Sleeping Beauty and of all the praeterite who have fallen through every crack in every system ever invented; I am thinking of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the bit where he fills the tires to 200psi as the gas-station attendant backs away - Hillarious! Mad!

I want to say to this guy Peter, "Ok man, let's go to the Gateway hearings and stage a hunger strike on the steps outside and hope for snow."

An hour goes by ... I find myself apologizing (to myself) for being unequal to the task ... and for trying to hide it under a rug of self-indulgent froth. OK then ... no scanning; I will just put page & location references in a few places and you can take me at my word on the rest or follow up as you wish (which I doubt anyway).]

On the up side: I do love it when a Canadian refers to Canada as 'there' (page 250, top). If the sun shines out of his arse (which I do not even suggest) at least it's not because he's a Canadian (eh?).

On the down side: he is associated with the UN and presumably takes their coin and accepts their imprimatur, or at least operates under their banner side-by-each.

Do we have to wait until Rio+20 and COP18 in Qatar prove as complete flops & fiascoes as Durban & Cancún & Copenhagen & Bonn & & & & & & & ... before there is a collective shout of ¡YA BASTA! for the United Nations Cluster FCCC and all of its gorgeous acronyms and squandered budgets and self-congratulatory posing?

Yvo de Boer did it well and proper. He gave the UN his very all (which is exceedingly clever AND substantive AND indefatigable), wept in public (which I do not view lightly in such a man), and then moved on. If KPMG is truely a force for good remains to be seen - I would guess not, but if Yvo guesses differently then ... I'm listening.

Population numbers: People keep repeating something about a curve that goes to 9.2 billion in 2050, deriving apparently from some UN bean-counter. Can no one but me see that this is utter nonsense? The whole shitteree is going bust long before we reach 9 billion. There will never be 9 billion. Maybe there will be 3 or 4 (or five or six?) billion stacked up like cordwood somewhere, and probably not just in one place either - could be close to home wherever you are, could be closer to home than you would like.

He goes on a bit about how mentioning population is politically incorrect. There is even a hint that he had to be persuaded to put the population chapter in at all. Well, yes, it is easily prone to misinterpretation and so on, touchy - so spell it out explicitly then, clearly, 'Say it plain!' - but the time for correctitude is long passed. And having once brought population growth to its proper place in the scheme of things - think about it and get it right.

I will go to the trouble of scanning one paragraph (page 80 bottom-81 top):

Much of this continuous rain of energy does not reach the earth's surface because it is reflected into space or absorbed by the atmosphere. In addition, particular sites on Earth are variously experiencing night or day, cloud cover or clear skies, and variable inclinations toward the sun. As a consequence, the average rate of receipt of solar energy at a specific site on the earth's surface is about 0.250 kilowatts per square meter continuously throughout the year, or about 32,000 terawatts for the entire earth. To put these numbers into perspective, of the 174,000 terawatts of energy arriving from the sun, only 18.3 percent (32,000 terawatts) gets through the atmosphere and reaches the earth's surface. Of this 18.3 percent, all photosynthesis uses just 0.06 percent (100 terawatts). The rest (18.2 percent) moves water around the hydrologic cycle, generates winds and therefore weather, and dissipates as heat. At present, humans are consuming about 13 terawatts of energy at any particular moment; if all this came directly from sunlight, we would be using just 0.007 percent of what reaches the earth's surface. I'll repeat my point: there is way more than enough energy arriving on the surface of the earth every day to provide for all our current energy needs, so the amount of energy we use is not the problem.

It pales a bit taken out of context, but as I read it the first time I was suddenly 'in the presence' of a skilled teacher making a point clearly - pellucidly! Maybe you had to be there ... maybe you will see what I mean ... I hope so.

My copy now has many such passages marked; just as well perhaps that it is not in the library yet.

There is a lot of guff about how scientists cannot communicate this or that. Well, this guy can certainly communicate when he wants to. Sure, you do have to actually read it, pay attention, want to hear, and so on.

Chapter 5 - The Problem of Shifting Baselines, is the very best I have seen on exactly why humankind are dithering while Rome burns.

On the other hand, he tells us the book is pitched for the 'general reader'. All good, and at least he does not mean the 'general audience' that knuckleheads like Billy-We-Won McKibben go on about.

But words like 'pelagic', 'benthic'; phrases like 'a simple model of a distributed set of open local populations' are moving beyond the 'general reader' I know. Even the young lovelies with recent degrees from UofT seem able to read only what is on the syllabus, and then only in groups and to the extent necessary and so on. Two of my children with university degrees cannot spell - and don't want to and don't care - a complicated mess.

And it is a complicated nexus of issues in the public realm as well: from declining standards of education & literacy in 'the West' to the arrogant war on libraries now going on in Toronto The Good.

Maybe it is best to cut your losses and say what you mean as well as you are able to say it (which is about what Peter Sale does in this book in my estimation). Still, it wouldn't hurt to tell the competent general readers out there that they may have to stretch a bit and to be patient and read on if they can't.

That said, it is not Kant; it is not Simon wazizname (?) ... Critchley. It is not incomprehensible even when it is difficult.

Oh, and yes, there are other parts I have scrawled question marks beside, marked 'vague' - OK, he's not Winston Churchill (though I wish he was).

Does he protest too much? Or too little? And is it telling?

When he expresses an opinion on an issue on his own turf (it seems to me) he says he is "out on a very thin limb here" (page 162, top-ish) - but when he lays out several chapters of energy analysis and policy which is certainly not in his bailiwick, there is no caveat whatsoever. (?)

I don't mean that it is not a good idea to deal with the energy issues - obviously it is. Given the recent IEA report and so on. If you are going to avoid the moral and aesthetic quagmires (for one reason and another) then using the economics of energy is an adult thing to do.

As for the 'telling', you may plumb that as you will.

On the business of CO₂ emission deadlines he seems to know very well what's what but then seems to soft-pedal it. 'Soon' and 'very soon' and 'right away or else' figure in there, but I didn't see a clearly stated target.

FLATTEN THE CO₂ CURVE BY 2015 OR WE'RE COOKED! That's what I'd like to see from someone 'with authority' but what comes instead is mostly equivocation.

Ahh maybe it is ... the delicate issue of appearance: beautiful/handsome people, fit, fed, fortunate (and smart of course), nurtured by bourgeois assumptions and conventional success - it's an internal landscape with a lot of inertia (and in Canada too, where temperature often augments viscosity).

(I will not go into the Probus connection though it bears on this. Surely you can figgure that one out.)

So, no, I am not expecting to be shoulder-to-shoulder with our Peter on an environmental front-line near you anytime soon (but yes, possibly later on, who knows?). I would like to be. I would be honoured to be. In the way that I went to Washington last summer thinking, "If that sumbitch James Hansen can go there with prostate cancer then I c'n damwell go with bad feet!"

He has not ascended into the front rank in my 'pantheon of saints' (you don't get there in one step): Noam Chomsky, Gwynne Dyer, James Hansen, Hannah Arendt, Northrop Frye, Naomi Oreskes, Charles Taylor, others ... but he's headed in that direction, along with David Schindler, Graham Saul, even Naomi Klein (and again, others). That's something - there are so few adults in the room that the addition of one more, even tentatively, is ... gladdening, heart warming.

I am (now) confused about the relationship between species & the ecosystem they live within. I thought certain species were key and that when they were removed (by extinction say) the system would suffer greatly and risk collapse. I am not an ecologist so my notions are bound up in metaphors like 'the keystone of the arch' the 'web of life' and the 'fabric of the network'. An arch collapses when the keystone goes. A small tear in fabric can make a large rip. An unravelling hole in a sweater or a sock gets inevitably bigger. And having been both a Newfie cod-choker and a maker of tensegrities I thought I knew something about twine & nets & wholistic systems - there was a time I could knit the 'wit' for a lobster trap.

But what Peter is saying is that it is more like a gradual dilution as species within an ecosystem disappear - with no dramatic moment of collapse for the ecosystem itself.

Time for a re-think. Good.

I think we need a musical interlude so here's Do Wah Diddy: The original 1963 version by The Exciters (black women singing about a man), and the 1964 cover, Manfred Mann (white guys singing about a woman). A Make-or-Break engine does have a piece of gear called an 'exciter'.

Certain weak arguments are used to effectively dismiss the Woodstock & Technopolis scenarios, and there is a lack of detail, depth, in New Atlantis. Does this reveal anything important? A desire to get it out the door and be done with it? Is that it? Or possibly a disrespecting bias against hippies & nerds? Wanting their 15 minutes of show-off on the stage and getting it; but no more, neither a jot alone nor a jot joined (coupled?) with a tittle.

I don't know.

Sometimes I think people feel they must put something positive forward, some hope to shore up against despair, some feasible or plausible program - but it may be false to the extent that they step up to it before they have fully drained the cup. I have seen Elizabeth May do this a few times in speeches; try to end on a hopeful note and fail dismally because she may not really feel it herself. There is a lot of fear of despair - an assumption that it inevitably leads to paralysis. (Someone who doesn't do this is Lester Brown.) And the attempt to formulate something without the necessary & proper antecedents doesn't quite come off.

I'm just guessing.

But this ain't Sunday School Toto. I think we all need to tell it like it is, unvarnished, messy, vulnerable - incomplete, fragmentary, even just plain wrong. Bob says, "The naked truth is still taboo wherever it may be seen." I guess it's time to take a step or two past our Bob then eh?

Creeping secularism and the ubiquitous pussy-foot do-si-do parlay around anything teleological; spiritual spelunking by debutante dilettanti (with 'Titles' in someone's 'Catalogue', with 'Literary Agents').

Christopher Hitchens & Richard Dawkins ... Bertrand Russell, on the one side, and C.S. Lewis & Chris Hedges and others on the other; shouting back and forth. Who cares? (Everyone of course! It is as fundamental to wonder about God as it is to wonder about where you will shit - but perhaps these are personal matters.)

There was a cartoon I wish I still had, Backbench I think: two men on a battlefield are shouting at one another; "RUDE!" shouts one, "CAD!" shouts the other, all bold caps; and in the final frame two soldiers are talking; one says "Any casualties today?" and the other replies, "Just a couple'a sore throats."

Exaggerated sensibility around other people's possible faith is one of the the canaries in my ideological coal mine - and there are traces of it in this book. If someone's faith holds water, if it washes, then they will not likely be offended by anything much anyone else could say; or even do in some cases.

But ... not everyone has Blake's perspicacity around such things - see A Poison Tree aka Christian Forbearance.

From a similar promontory in this flat swamp of a landscape comes an appreciation of Peter's several jabs at urban virtual consciousness. The city muggles do not know how to drive in the snow. They do not know anything much at all on a physical level: how to sharpen a chain saw; how to get a pig into the back of a pickup; how to save yourself and your beloved from freezing when you are caught out in the open in an early spring rain on the Newfoundland barrens ...

And from another nearby (these are promontories of less than a metre in height y'unnerstan') comes recognition of grandchildren, their uses and abuses.

I like James Hansen. A lot. Mensch. Still, reading his book Storms of my Grandchildren I began to sense some soft ground (having learned about soft ground from my father as we trod the floating margins of boggy lakes digging up pitcher plants to take back to our garden in Toronto for my mother who wanted to see them there - ridiculous! they never grew though we tried again and again) and made an item in the circular file that I named 'Grand-daughterism' at the time. I have a grandson now too so I have revised it to 'Grandchildrenism'.

Like my mother before me I mean something physical when I say 'love' - a naïve stance but there it is - and for me, loving my children and theirs has never included using them in a moral argument (or any other way). Not something that falls out of an ideology; a fact, an infolding.

You can figgure the rest of this out for yourself if you are inclined.

Did I mention the evident care and attention that went into this book? The (more than several) years spent writing it? The almost total lack of typos? The use of actual black ink? (Okok, thank goodness the type is black because it is a bit small, and the footnote font is all but illegible to me - I have to really strain to read the footnotes - so thanks for the black.)

Did I praise the overall shape of the argument?

I said it is an important book. That means it is helpful to me personally as I try to find my way; in advancing a notion, or a self-confidence, or an understanding - of where to go from here or of how to go from here across a terrain so ruined ... [Well, I find I can't finish this sentence ... (?)]

Conclusion #1 (I will make like John Fowles with The French Lieutenant's Woman and put three endings):

So ... what is Peter up to with this book? I can only guess and you may be able to guess much better than I - fill yer boots! Can I make a general statement? Not really; but if I were to try it might go something like this (being what has become slightly less murky since Peter's book arrived in the mail from my sister a month or so ago; what has come ever so slightly into better focus):

My friend's evaluation of my work (in 1969) was "Things that love night love not such nigh(t)s as these," one character half-removed from this (which I still take as a compliment); and of myself his evaluation was 'febrile' (a word I did not know the meaning of at the time). I know it surprised him to learn, quite near the end, just how much these two points mean to me - that I treasure them.

I have attended so many events here in Toronto in the last three⁺ years and watched how the nutbars and reprobates are professionally stick-handled to the sidelines. And it always makes me think of this: "... brushing from whom the stiffened puke i put him all into my arms and staggered banged with terror through a million billion trillion stars." Which does indeed bring us round again by a commodious vicus of recirculation (here) to the Good Samaritan and Environs.

What a surprise eh? (Hardly.) ... Here, you could start here for example, or even here; or here with Auden's "We must love one another or die."

Without the least interference by any transcendent being wise or otherwise, without magic or miracle, with no divine principle in play and with no exalted Gaia or other goddess overseeing the action - it could all change, as they say, in a twinkling.

A-and that, gentle reader, is something about the human heart that everyone knows (without the fear of contradiction).

Get this book and read it. It is helpful.

[The guy at the back with the 'round jeer for a hat' would be me, ignore him.]

Be well.

Conclusion #2 (& #3?):

At about the time in 2005 when I was starting this blog (from an office on one of the top floors of the KBR Tower in Houston, with a clear view - in at least several dimensions - of the by-then-empty Enron buildings downtown), Peter Sale was already writing Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face.

Neither of us quite accomplished what we set out to do I don't think; in any event they were probably very different things - though Peter has done better by orders-of-magnitude - that's plural, at least 100x then and more like 10,000x. Is it putting on airs to make such a comparison? I don't think so. I hope not.

The record of a 'fair witness' then? A message for our grandchildren that we did not (entirely) sell them out? Something like that?

Except ... comforting as it is to do your part it's not enough. It's not working. (!!!) I have known for a year and more that we will have to go to the wall.

And who the hell wants to do that?

Conclusion #3:

There is a lot going on (99.44% on the interior and not necessarily floating) and I am overwhelmed; so write this all off as a more-or-less gentle and harmless old madman with too much time on his hands sinking into a dream of fair women (or trying to).

And anyway, it was begun on Friday the 13th and the Ides of January, during the first bit of snow in Toronto this winter - it's bound to be silly.

But here, try this on for silly: the two species of human, H. grǽdum & H. agapiens, as place-markers for those psychological states Northrop Frye mentions when discussing Pynchon in Double Vision:

"In interviews I am almost invariably asked at some point whether I feel optimistic or pessimistic about some contemporary situation. The answer is that these imbecile words are euphemisms for manic-depressive highs and lows, and that anyone who struggles for sanity avoids both."

A struggle I seem to be losing, what with the imbecile part so clearly on display an' all. Oh well.

I purchased another copy which I will send on to Peter Kent when it arrives. As I think about it I see that I maybe should have got one for Mardi Tindal too, given their memorable interaction in Durban - but I sent her a book once before and she never read it as far as I know ... so skip that.

They are wilful children these people - can't spell and refuse to learn - what can you do with them? How can you think if you don't want to learn? I don't know.

Postscript:

As I finish fixing typos and excising or toning down the really really egregiously silly stuff, the last Durban candle has finally gone out. Almost two boxes of candles this year from the Dollar Store downstairs, lighting the way for my fingers on this keyboard through the shortening days and long dark nights. It was not quite a conscious decision y'unnerstan'; more of a symptom of lifestyle choices - in the end I just ... forgot to light the next one. Anyway, the days are getting longer.

I guess this can be reasonably included in that list of mine; so here's Alzheimer's

'Vantage #9: However (approximately) perfect are your offerings and obsessive-compulsive rituals, they will all be forgotten - easily, lightly, naturally - with no regret.

[The news is all bad: Stephen Harper & his sycophant sleveens, including Alberta Premier Alison Redford, are frustrated that the Gateway hearings may actually be hear-ings and are stamping their feet in pique, throwing unseemly tantrums nevermind how cunningly they've stacked the deck; while the mainstream press publishes photographs of First Nations people with mournfully aggrieved expressions wearing funny hats, and of ageing (now affluent) hippie couples wearing Birkenstocks. Drilling regulations are quickly re-written to permit Chevron & Statoil full access to the Beaufort Sea. An eminent arithmetician has figgured out that 30% annual loss of honeybees cannot be sustained - not even if Bayer says it is OK - and someone else thinks this may not be good for food production prospects; while one in seven on this planet, our Terra, goes to bed hungry.

I am thinking of Milo Minderbinder offering his messmate 'shareholders' a tray of chocolate-covered Egyptian cotton balls - but it's crude oil & coal dust this time not chocolate, and ... the image morphs to something else as I am distracted by a gracious muse (uma querida bênção) carrying to me not a nightmare, no, but, something else ... and I go off to re-read Pynchon's 1960 story of Callisto & Aubade - Entropy.]

Fuck man! If we are gonna fix this we had better get our damn thumbs out!

Doonesbury did this one on Friday 13th. Caught my eye. ("I was made on a Friday and ya' can't fix me!")

I thought 'Angry Birds' must be a reference to that Alfred Hitchcock movie ...

Down.

Kid stuff. Kid's stuff. Kids' stuff.

2012-01-10T15:00:00.011-05:00

Genuine? or, authentic? or ... not.
Up, Down.

Peter F. Sale - Our Dying Planet from University of California Press; and at Amazon.ca, Amazon US, & Abe's. (But still not at the Toronto Public Library?) Watch his schedule for upcoming events. More links previously here & here.

The next post will contain a (probably lame & incomprehensible) review of this important book.

Sh-boom, sh-boom, ya-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

The Chords, one-hit wonders from the Bronx, discovered playing in a subway station; and The Crew Cuts, coming out of a more-or-less exclusive choir school in Toronto.

Sh-boom: A hit for The Chords in March 1954 - here & here; and a hit again for The Crew Cuts in July/August - here. The lyric quoted above is from The Crew Cuts' version.

Life could be a dream ...
(Keep in mind that in those days the 'sh-boom' imagery hearkened to recent events in Hiroshima & Nagasaki ... Bikini Atoll, Enewetak, and so on. Turns out 1954 was also the year in which Endosulfan/Thiodan/Thionex was registered by Farbwerke Hoechst A.G. aka IG Farben aka Sanofi-Aventis aka Bayer - and there are still enthusiasts.)

'Authentic' carries the baggage of individualism, 'genuine' doesn't; but 'genuine' has been thoroughly abused and worn out by barkers & shills, Madison Avenue; nonetheless, either of them could be redeemed in, say, a ... twinkling?

In the 40's Jorge Amado writes a story; a good one - you have no idea what is going to happen until the very last page. O Gato Malhado e a Andorinha Sinhá / 'The Swallow and the Tom Cat' - illustrated by Carybé with an anatomically-complete cat; this is also good.

In the 60's Russell Hoban and his (then) wife Lillian start a series of 'Frances' stories. I have read one of them, 'Best Friends for Frances' which is mystifyingly asexual and cloyingly correct. You can't go generalizing from a single book - except that years ago I read Russell Hoban carefully - 'Mouse and His Child' is among the top-three, 'Riddley Walker' surmounts the handicap of an invented language ... and so on ... Anyway, they divorced (not that that answers my quibble).

Anne Tyng's spiral spatial development notions given to me sometime in the 70's; and, ... two girls dancing samba on the beach road in Ipanema in the early oughts with golden spirals around their breasts (Wowzers!).

And somewhere in-between, under that yet-to-be-conceived-of rainbow, building the twenty-four armed star of tetrahelix spirals whose axes pass through a single tetrahedron and almost establish the vertices of a small-rhombicuboctahedron - inventing a whole graphic software with the matrices necessary to construct one tetrahedron upon the face of another and then view it any how. I always meant to go back and build it again as a tensegrity; never did, lost the software.

[Ah! She died last year and is now beginning to have a presence on the Internet: at Wikipedia; & a portion at least of her 1969 paper Geometric Extensions of Consciousness; a video in San Francisco - with a view of Alkatraz - in April 2011, 5 Chapters (8 minutes); and another at Harvard in October (70 minutes). Possibly (only) emphasizing (too much) the trivial aspects that remain and leaving just ... modes of saying goodbye.]

John Carroll knows something; and his wife Maria Carroll brings a complementary view; both divide their time between Peoria Illinois & Haiti.

When I read that some, many, are fleeing to Brasil (see Haitians Take Arduous Path to Brazil in the NYT) ... even being better received there than they would be in, say, Canada or the US; still an' all it seems to me tragic & unnecessary.

There is something about the way she has spread her fingers on the wall behind her ...

Be well.

Down.

They must be thinking they'll thread the needle.

2012-01-06T20:18:00.020-05:00

(A-and winning the Trifecta!)
Up, Down, Appendices, One more thing (or so).

Peter F. Sale - Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face from University of California Press; with an excerpt: Chapter 1 (including the story of the Newfoundland cod fishery).

At Amazon.ca, Amazon US, and at Abe's. (Still not at the Toronto Public Library?)

A review of 'Our Dying Planet' in The Independent, September 11 2011; and, a November 29 2011 audio interview (40 minutes) with Michael Stone on KVMR Nevada.

Watch his schedule for upcoming events. More links in the previous post.

You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?” and somebody points to you and says, “It’s his,” and you say, “What’s mine?” and somebody else says, “Well, what is?” and you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”

Reality Check #1: A researcher, or a scientist, or several teams of researchers & scientists ... someone ... takes the H5N1 bird-flu virus - now called 'A(H5N1)'? - and plays with it; and the next thing you know, we have:

"Biosecurity advisers to the American government, which paid for the research, have urged that full details not be published for fear that terrorists could make use of them. The World Health Organization warned Friday that while such studies were important, they could have deadly consequences."
(NYT recently here & here)

So ... where are these 'security advisers' when it comes to the likes of Not-Lord Monckton & Nigel Lawson Baron of Blaby? Why are these purveyors of pernicious information not threatened with prevention?

Deadly consequences you say? Peter Sale guesstimates a balanced population for earth at about 3 billion. Is not the fate of the other 4-6 billion important enough for the security experts?

(A few more details on H5N1 from Gwynne Dyer: ... and creation of a deadly flu, December 26 2011.)

Reality Check #2: In a New Year's Day rant, Paul Krugman does 'the little black dress' of spiels for growth (a patter with pearls):

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
(NYT recently below)

So ... it's not 'debt' at all then (if we believe the OED which stresses 'obligation to pay or render') and we need another word for whatever it is. What shall we call it? Let's stop calling it 'debt' because that is (understandably) confusing.

A-and what about the interest? The dragon Oroborus is eating its own tail. Interest, presumably compound, nicely represents the necessary acceleration in its rate of eating. If it eats quickly enough won't mouth meet anus eventually? This seems such a fitting image for current circumstances ... Waidaminit! Wasn't there a porno/horror flick with that plot recently? Is that it Paul?

Or ... it's the end of a Looney Tunes and Porky Pig is saying "Th-th-th that's all folks," and vanishing into a black hole (with a flush).

Rick Salutin's rant: A minute and a bit - or the original (if you want to watch the ad). Amusing that a glitch at The Star silenced the ad for me - otherwise good production values were evident; and Noam Chomsky can't match him on understated sarcasm.
(Interesting ... I grabbed this video - poor quality, hand held - and posted it on YouTube so I could link to it here; and the next thing I find is an 'official' copy on YouTube from The Star with no ads, go figgure?! So I have now thrown away my copy - good for The Star.)

I spend a fair amout of time trying to imagine what people like Stephen Harper and Peter Kent (and Not-Lord Monckton & Nigel Lawson Baron of Blaby & Bjørn Lomborg & ...) can possibly be thinking. (?)

Where can they be 'coming from'? Oh I know: it's greed, it's venality, it's habit, even it's fear, false pride, ignorance, stupidity; but none of these quite satisfy. For me it's like trying to imagine what drives a kiddie-diddler.

And once in a while I get a clue:

Back in the day I was hard up for cash in Peterborough - and with dependents.

First try was as a nude model at the local art school - 15 bucks an hour sounded good (for that time). I was worried that I might get an erection which would be embarassing. What I found was that I got chilled - the room was cool. But the woman running the show knew how to do things and called a break about the time I began to shiver. A skinny girl came over. I knew her by sight because she had out-bid me at an auction the week before on a cardboard box full of sheet music and records - the auctioneer called him 'Bobbie Dye-lon' - she went to $10 and I couldn't go $11, didn't have it. Anyway, she came over during the break and said, "You know that line in Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat?" and I said, "Which one?" and she said, "I'd like to jump on it sometime." I was only saved because it so happened that I did not understand this idiom at the time.

Eventually, after a long and bitter struggle with the Chief of Police (over my long hair) I got a taxi licence and began to drive for City Cabs. It made $15 an hour look like a fortune.

One night - I had the big Merc, a full-sized car with all the fins which was the boss's personal ride most of the time - there was a bus, and a stale yellow light, and another car slowing for the light, and I tried to slide through between the car and the bus to run the yellow. Just about made it - didn't. The bus got me on the passenger side and about turned the taxi up on its side. Missed the other car - it stopped and then turned right around the front of the bus and went on. The bus backed up and the taxi came back to earth. Surprisingly the damage was not severe - passenger door & rocker panel completely crunched, that was it. Cops came - I got a ticket for something; the car was driveable so I went on back to the stand.

The next day the boss and I went up to the wrecker and got a door and put it in; pulled & beat at the rocker panel; sprayed on some primer to keep it from rusting. The door was a different colour but you couldn't really see the rocker panel and at the end of the day the car was OK. He got it repainted later that week.

All he said to me about it was: "Never pays to try and thread the needle - better just to take it slow and steady." He didn't even try to make me pay for it. That could have been difficult since I was just making it from one week to the next and the ticket alone about did me in - I guess he knew that. He was a 7th Day Adventist - I don't know if that had anything to do with it. A kind man. An adult. I never forgot him.

Ai Ai AI! These old-farts and their fricking stories!

Anyway, that's what I was wondering about this week. Stephen Harper & Peter Kent must know what is coming and they must be thinking if they can just gun that big Merc they'll thread the needle, slide through and deal with reducing CO₂ emissions later-on another day. And maybe there are just enough back-seat sycophants around to make 'em feel OK with it. And the scientists are too measured by half - personally despairing but publicly equivocal except for a very few. And the environmentalists are so shrill an' lame an' all ...

Hell of a risk; deadly risk for so much and so many. Not even a risk; rapidly becoming a dead certainty:

WE HAVE UNTIL 2015 TO GET THIS UNDER CONTROL.
FOUR YEARS.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
(Is there anyone out there? Anyone at all?)

How perverse is it?

I keep coming back to Paul (not Krugman, the other one) and his coals in Romans 12; not quite corresponding with a proper notion of what loving your enemies might mean. Twisted. Or ... There was a vision someone had in a bar one time of "God loving snakes!" but I can't know how true it was.

Or ... is all of this a fit of pique? In bold & CAPS an' all but substantively nothing more than bourgeois hand-wringing? A carry-on of childhood temper tantrums & 8-fold moxie transcendence morphed into a way to total self-destruction? Now that would be perverse, wouldn't it eh? It's a possibility.

I like the term 'doom-monger', 'doomer' even moreso.

As a kid the 'weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth' of the whoremongers in the Old Testament got my attention. Given that iron-mongers sell, I thought whoremongers must be pimps. This made the moral clear & kept things safe & simple until the OED gave it away - a monger is a trader, trade could be buying or selling, maybe just kibbitzing in the marketplace - Uh Oh!

Eventually of course I met some whores - bound to happen - and that turned the whole thing on its head when they didn't: rob me, carry foul diseases, gibber with satanic glee, try to steal my kidneys - or not all of 'em at least. Could be I was lucky and clever enough to be chosen by gooders - who treated me kindly, laughed at my jokes, took me home to meet their kids; and continue truer friends to me (long after the money ran out) than, say, the bourgeois women I married. (All estimations of character being based upon qualities proven over time; and estimations being all we have.)

Curmudgeon can be imagined to have a derivation running through corn-monger (or not, see below) making it a Daily Double. And now ... doom-monger, doomer: someone who thinks the lemming-meisters are driving us towards the cliff and that the cliff is not far off. Whoopee! It's a monger Trifecta!

Yee-haw! Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump here we come! Yep. That sounds like it - or close enough for the girls I go with.

If anyone has a clue, the merest whisper of a rumour of a clue, a tiny hint, the wildest speculation around what to do about all of this I sincerely wish they would run it past me.

Be well gentle reader.

(Simply wrong according to the OED: The occurrence in Holland's Livy, 1600, of cornmudgin has led to a suggestion that this was the original form, with the meaning ‘concealer or hoarder of corn’, mudgin being associated with Middle English much-en, mich-en to pilfer, steal, or muchier, Norman form of Old French mucier, musser to conceal, hide away. But examination of the evidence shows that curmudgeon was in use a quarter of a century before Holland's date, and that cornmudgin is apparently merely a nonce-word of Holland's, a play upon corn and curmudgeon. The suggestion that the first syllable is cur, the dog, is perhaps worthy of note; but that of Dr. Johnson's ‘unknown correspondent’, coeur méchant for French méchant coeur, ‘evil or malicious heart’, is noticeable only as an ingenious specimen of pre-scientific etymology.
Wishful thinking on my part: Some may refer to certain species of evangelist and other rapture-seekers as 'doomers' but as time goes on and the language evolves these scurrilous definitions will be abandoned.)

One more thing: (or at least several, definitely)

Ahh, I see I forgot about Murphy the last time ... Oh well.

Five complicated stories:

1) A robbery (for cash & painkillers but they don't say which one) reported in the NYT with private guns everywhere ends with the robber & an interloper dead.

2) The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in the NYT here & here: Obama, Elizabeth Warren (now a senate candidate), Richard Cordray. I like the expression on the guy clapping.

3) Tyler Brûlé - Mister Zeitgeist (in the NYT). A great idea, ideas, a small private fortune - except ... A 50's childhood so unconscious that we didn't even learn to hate gays - how could we hate what didn't exist? And by the time they tried it on us it was too late for hate. But the 'except' stays.

4) More of Barack and the Keystone Trolls (it is definitely 'and' not 'vs.'): "Oil chief issues threat" says the Guardian. I guess it's a line of scrimmage metaphor but who watches football well enough to understand all of this shite?

5) If anyone has despaired it might well be Yvo de Boer; and yet he just keeps on putting his best foot forward (see below). A 1%-er who is pulling his weight.

I don't believe for a minute he thinks Durban was any kind of success. 'Breakthrough' could be a tactful slip of the tongue - preceded by one of his patented Dutch pauses.

A-and, a very long story:

I got interested in the Frade (pronounced 'fraud-ge') FPSO when it was looking like I would have to leave Brasil. I can't remember what the draw was - a rotating turret? And later on I gathered some information on it here.

Then I noticed that Brazil is having ructions with Chevron over a spill involving Frade to the tune of $20 billion; which led to a Guardian article on the $18 billion Chevron/Texaco/Equador judgement: Chevron accused of racism as it fights Ecuador pollution ruling with a picture of a guy I recognized, Pablo Fajardo.

"Racism?" I thought? Seems an odd accusation (not that it isn't true). And a bell went off - hadn't I already posted his story somewhere? I was sure I had researched Pablo Fajardo before - sure enough, back in my October 2009 archive I found some photographs & the Vanity Fair article but no evidence that I did anything with it. A few posts tagged 'Equador' showed me that I didn't even know how to spell it - Ecuador doh! But an hour or more searching line-by-line for traces led nowhere. Google is so undependable at searching - supposed to be their raison d'être too.

Oh well; you have to laugh, it's all so funny.

So, here's a very good article from May 2007 on the situation: Jungle Law by William Langewiesche; a good short video 60 Minutes - Amazon Crude (15 minutes) that aired May 1 2009 and definitely turned up the heat; a full-length movie in theatres September 2009, Crude (downloadable at Demonoid); a-and a few interesting personalities:

Steven Donziger.

Richard Cabrera.

Silvia Garrigo, a Chevron lawyer and 'Corporate Responsibility' person. I have known women with that shape of face who were not terriers - and if you watch the 60 Minutes clip carefully you will see that she is not tall. Here's something she said in 2011:

"Guided by The Chevron Way, which is anchored in getting results the right way—ethically and with integrity—our unyielding goal is to show that we can lead in providing safe and reliable supplies of energy and providing tangible and sustainable benefits to the communities in which we operate."
(Corporate Responsibility at Chevron, final sentence)

David O'Reilly, Chairman and CEO of Chevron during some of the period of the struggle.

Ibsen's Peer Gynt (pronounced 'pair hoont') falls down in despair but then, at the last possible moment, the great Boyg disappears in a fizzle just like The Wicked Witch of the West saying, "He was too strong. There were women behind him."

And if it so happens they're women who were once upon a time in the game ... so be it, no problem.

Appendices:

1. Nobody Understands Debt, Paul Krugman, January 1 2012.

2. Ex-UN climate chief says business should get ready for low-carbon world, Fiona Harvey, Thursday 5 January 2012.

Nobody Understands Debt, Paul Krugman, January 1 2012.

In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!

And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.

But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.

And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Ex-UN climate chief says business should get ready for low-carbon world, Fiona Harvey, Thursday 5 January 2012.

Last month's Durban climate talks have given a strong signal that governments are serious about tackling global warming

Businesses should be putting plans in place this year to prepare for a low-carbon economy, having been given a strong signal from the latest climate change negotiations that governments are serious about tackling global warming, according to the former United Nations climate chief.

Yvo de Boer said the message from the Durban climate talks in December, which ended with a dramatic last-minute deal to forge a new legally binding climate agreement, was that businesses ought to press ahead with moves towards operating in a low-carbon world. He said that businesses should interpret the talks as a "clear signal that the international community is committed to taking the climate change agenda forward, that market-based mechanisms [such as carbon trading] will continue and that there will be clear reporting guidelines" on carbon dioxide emissions, which will affect companies.

De Boer, now special adviser on climate change to KPMG, was the architect of the Copenhagen climate summit of 2009, at which countries made voluntary commitments to cut their emissions by 2020. Many countries, green campaigners and businesses complained that the system of voluntary commitments did not provide the certainty needed to spur the development of a low-carbon economy across the globe.

The breakthrough at the Durban climate conference was that all countries, developed and developing, agreed to start work on a new worldwide agreement, to be signed in 2015, that would stipulate legally binding – not voluntary – emissions cuts to kick in from 2020.

De Boer told the Guardian that moves to create a global legally binding agreement were good for businesses. He said business leaders had stressed to him that they needed greater certainty from politicians, in order to make the right decisions to stay prosperous in the future. Only a global, legally binding agreement on the climate could provide the sort of guarantee that generates a wave of investment in greener technologies, and meaningful efforts to cut greenhouse gases. Such an agreement would also help to ensure there was a level playing field across in terms of business regulation – and this too would work to the advantage of companies, which could be reassured that their rivals were facing the same constraints.

He said that it was a "mistake" to think, as some people have argued, that a "bottom-up" approach – whereby countries and industry would make voluntary commitments to cut emissions – would be sufficient to reduce emissions by the drastic amounts needed in order to keep temperature rises within relatively safe levels.

His views are broadly shared by Lord (Nicholas) Stern, author of the landmark 2006 Stern review of the economics of climate change. Stern told the Guardian that the efforts of many businesses and nations so far to cut emissions would not have happened without the impetus given by the international negotiating process.

However, some close observers of the talks, including the UK's former chief scientific adviser Sir David King, take an opposing view, arguing that the annual climate talks that have been running for nearly two decades have borne little fruit and that nations should focus instead on a series of voluntary, non-binding pledges and on encouraging industry to cut emissions.

Stern also warned that the current pledges on greenhouse gas emissions from governments around the world would not be sufficient to stave off dangerous climate change, and must be strengthened.The Durban agreement was snatched at the last minute after the talks, which were supposed to end at teatime on 9 December, carried on through two more nights into the early hours of Sunday morning. A last-ditch compromise among the European Union, India and China over the wording of how a new agreement should be described – the words "legally binding" were replaced by "an agreed outcome with legal force" – enabled the talks to end in consensus.

"Slowly but surely, like it or not, the world is moving forward on climate change, with business now able to seriously calculate the implications of a low- carbon economy," De Boer said. "The meeting in Durban was its usual roller coaster ride, ending with a surprise commitment to continue the Kyoto Protocol, along with a raft of other climate change agreements. While the outcome has signalled a breakthrough for a political consensus on climate change, the outcome for business is only just becoming clear."

He said the agreement at Durban to continue with the Kyoto protocol beyond 2012, when its current provisions expire, would also have a big effect on many companies. "Business can be confident that market-based mechanisms such as the clean development mechanism [under which carbon credits are issued and sold] will continue," he said.

The clean development mechanism has generated billions of dollars in investment in low-carbon technologies around the world since it came into force in 2005, but in the last two years the investment pipeline has all but dried up, because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Kyoto protocol.

De Boer said the "Durban platform", the name given to the deal reached there to negotiate a new legal agreement, showed that "an international agreement for global action on climate change is within our reach and should therefore be considered within every forward looking business strategy".

He said: "With a pinch of luck, by 2015 [when the new agreement should be signed] the current economic crisis will be behind us, creating a more benign climate for governments to make commitments the world needs in order to tackle climate change effectively and business needs to survive and prosper."

But he warned that the science of climate change was becoming clearer, making it more obvious that our current efforts to cut emissions have been insufficient, and that much more needs to be done. "Our concrete actions have not taken us anywhere near where we need to be to keep temperature rises below 2ºC [which scientists regard as the limit of safety]," he said.

De Boer stressed the key role for business in tackling global warming, for instance through investments geared to cutting emissions in the developing world. At Durban, countries agreed most of the terms by which money can start to be released under the "green climate fund", under which $100bn a year in financing should flow from the rich to the poor world by 2020. "Prior to the conference it was unclear what role business would play in the fund; the worry was that the private sector would be sidelined," he said. "Thankfully, Durban saw confirmation that the fund will have a facility to fund private sector initiatives. It will seek actively to promote business involvement and catalyse further public and private money."

De Boer said this should mean more public-private partnerships in developing nations working on green growth, which should create jobs, alleviate poverty and improve infrastructure as well as tackling climate change.

Down.

Persistence

2012-01-02T00:09:00.044-05:00

vs. gravity & the conspiracy of Murphy.
Up, Down.

Peter F. Sale - Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face from University of California Press.

At Amazon.ca, Amazon US, and at Abe's. (But not at the Toronto Public Library for some reason?)

He talks with: Ecoshock, Part 1 & Part 2 - audio only, about 15 minutes each; with CBC on Quirks & Quarks - audio podcast 50 minutes (including idiot remarks by Bob McMuggle but otherwise informative - as if there will even be a recognizable 2050!); and on all-night California radio with George Noory of KSFO 2 hours, and with Ecotopia on KZFR 30 minutes.

The Holocene Mass Extinction is now underway.
We have ONE BIG complicated problem, not many small ones. (!!)

Riddley Walker might have called it the 1 Big 1.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
Falls the remorseful day.

Inspector Morse: TV on the cusp - somewhat less use of gross manipulative techniques make it shine - if only relatively; 33 episodes, 1987-2000 downloadable here. The last episode features the poem by A. E. Housman: More Poems XVI (also here), 1936.

InSecurity & Death in Paradise are ok too, but not so much.

Some variation in methods and absolute numbers but agreement on the overall shape of it: two bumps on the hump, ten years between 'em; or, say, a peak and a hump (a peek was it?). And yes ... the elephant was eaten head first.

A friend of mine regularly complains that he does not see acknowledgment of population as the root cause of all our troubles, nor anything like it. What he means is that he does not see it every day in The Sun & The Star & The Globe (and other tabloids). I say, yes but (immediately putting myself in a bad debating position) ... anyone with any sense has been saying it for years, from Paul Ehrlich & The Population Bomb in 1968 on forward. Before that too, Malthus was when? 1800 give or take.

Neither of us is right. He is able to blame everything on the lame liberal media: leftards & associated reactionaries; and I know that indeed, population is not quite a root cause, not quite the be-all or end-all, close but no cigar.

My friend Keith liked the word 'fecund', liked to speak it in his lectures because that hard-C has a certain impact and does something delicious in your mouth when you say it. I am more with 'fecundity' which sweetens it with a bit of doo-wah-ditty.

Jean Quan was born in 1949 - in the wee trough between the peak and the hump. So what?

I remember a poem about persistence; that an image may persist in the eye beyond death. I think it had something to do with Hiroshima. I can't find it again.

When one of my my sons was 17 and smoking too much dope for my liking, I sat him down to demonstrate the difference between blended and single-malt whisky. We drank some of each. The point was made and we then played some hundreds of games of crib to see who would buy us a bottle of Isle of Jura. We marked the games with bars & strokes on the edge of a shelf beside the table. I had hoped to be living beside that shelf longer, just to see those marks and be reminded ... It was soon left behind and lost but I still have the empty Jura bottle.

I learned about Jura from a particularly dissolute Scot. Between rumpy-pumpy with half (or more - it was the early 70's) of the girls at the bank we sometimes drank Guinness together at a bar on Fleet Street not far from St.Pauls, and one evening he showed me how to cut the bloat from too much stout with a quick double whisky, and Jura was preferred.

Then in the mid-90's it abruptly changed, for the worse. Shite! Obvious from the first sip of a bottle with the new label. So here's the timeline:

1810 established, though whisky was being made there before this;

1875 James Ferguson & Sons;

1901 abandoned, the distillery that is but not likely the practice;

1960-3 rebuilt, Jura Distillery Co Ltd / Mackinlay McPearson Ltd / Scottish & Newcastle Breweries / Robin Fletcher & Riley-Smith & William Delmé-Evans (architect);

1994 Whyte & Mackay Ltd;

1996 American Brands / JBB Greater Europe plc.;

2001 back to Whyte & Mackay Ltd.

There are still Macallan's and Highland Park; both adequate, though the price becomes so high that it is almost impossible to ignore.

There is a youthful time of fucking to exhaustion with no plan, waking still coupled, astounded by beauty. Before any tricks; long before Wyatt's "Dear heart, how like you this?" kicks in. Youth passes but one may learn that real quality has a kind of gravity to it; an inevitability that needs no standard beyond the moment (Anarchy!). Matthew (in 11:30) even reports him saying, "For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Possibly not his yoke as it turns out but, yes.

Some of the girls have rows of tiny scars from razor cuts here and there on their bodies - reminders of an initiation into Candomblé, na barracão.

(The anonymous model as tally was found at Sirreal. I mentioned the bottle of Jura before. The island is not so remote, not so far west of Glasgow, but the route is not direct as you can see on this map. Information about Jura whisky here, here, & here.)

Two or three more words in Japanese: (see Setsu-den previously)

Long before the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear fiasco, per-capita energy use in Japan was about 50% of what it is in North America. They have reduced it an additional 25% and more since then, with pride in the achievement. The Japanese recycle 70% of post-consumer plastics, compared with 20% (if you're lucky) in North America. QED.

リサイクル / risaikuru / recycling.

プラ / pura / plastic.

もったいない / mottainai / "Oh, what a waste!"

In Toronto (The Good) there are ad campaigns stressing what NOT to put into the recycling box.

In Ontario we have enough bureaucrats on the gravy train to recycle every piece of e-waste by eating it (see Harry Crews' Car). Start at OES (Ontario Electronic Stewardship) and follow the sewer off in all directions, leading, as it often does to containers bound for bum-fuck somewhere or other where life is even cheaper.

In k-k-Canada, those who give a sweet rat's ass are few and far between - a nation of the led-by-the-venal-and-mediocre. Always be polite. Don't give in to despair. And never never send cash in the mail.

I mention The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (download) again because it is both informative and potentially instructive.

Highland Mega Quarry in Melancthon: (previously here)

A few more faces for the rogues gallery: John Lowndes, Joseph Izhakoff, & John Scherer - all 'principals' apparently. Principal sleveens, stoats & weasels, working in the interests of Seth Klarman, a very wealthy short-seller (which is good or bad depending on who you talk to) and named Investment Guru of the Year for 2011 by somone or other.

Two longish articles on the situation:
Anatomy of a quarry fight, in The Star recently, and,
Quarry on Ont. farmland was the plan, firm says, at CBC in October.

A link to what look to me like the good guys: NDACT (North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce, Inc.) and to their excellent christmas card, and to my first line for information: Mining for the Truth in Melancthon.

Maybe even a bit of good news (not the death of Ilya Zhitomirskiy y'unnerstan' but the concept) on the IT networking front, check this out: Diaspora.

(Or, if you feel like weeping over the same issue, have a close look at what's happening at Occupy Toronto as they shill for Facebook & Google⁺, and compare&contrast with Occupy Wall Street, open-source and all.)

"... he’s afraid and confused and his brain has been mismanaged with great skill."
(License To Kill, Bob, 1984, and by Richie Havens & lyrics.)

I was in a church-choir in a small village. There were three of us. The others were willing to sing this tune - the pianist liked the phrase I've quoted as I remember. I bought the sheet music but we never got around to it. I can't remember why not. Someone's husband came along with a french horn around christmas time and we did a version of Wenseslas. That was a gooder!

Be well.

Down.

Even the (colossal) sun has spots.

2011-12-31T04:00:00.025-05:00

or, "Shit!" roared the King; and all his subjects stooped and strained, for in those days the King's word was Law.
Up, Down, Appendices, Afterword.

Two poems by Wallace Stevens side by each: which cannot be dependably formatted with HTML to appear much like they do on the pages of Collected Poems (1954, republished 1981). Not that Stevens indulged in typographic effects to the degree of, say, ee cummings, and not that cummings is of the same calibre either; still, he or someone close to him was careful in the selection of fonts (Electra); I think he cared. But it simply cannot be accomplished on the Internet, too many variables - there it is.

So, get the book, read these poems: The Motive For Metaphor from about 1947; and, Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself sometime later but before Collected Poems was published - it is the last poem in the book. Stevens was 75 when it came out and died before his next birthday.

I know "It was like a new knowledge of reality," is ... lame, precious. OK?

THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING
      BUT THE THING ITSELF

       At the earliest ending of winter,
       In March, a scrawny cry from outside
       Seemed like a sound in his mind.

       He knew that he heard it,
       A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
       In the early March wind.

       The sun was rising at six,
       No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
       It would have been outside.

       It was not from the vast ventriloquism
       Of sleep's faded papier-maché . . .
       The sun was coming from outside.

       That scrawny cry—it was
       A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
       It was part of the colossal sun,

       Surrounded by its choral rings,
       Still far away. It was like
       A new knowledge of reality.

Same length; two birds & two alphabets; two pauses made with periods and spaces, two 'outside's; that's all. I don't pretend to understand - just a kind of comfort that comes to me with Stevens.

I don't go looking for him; he arrives in odd ways, somehow, when I haven't even realized that I am glad to see him coming.

(Previously: Sunday Morning and Which is real? being the first poem of Stevens' I ever encountered. And since HTML is so undependable, here is an image of something like the idea I was shooting at: two of Stevens' poems.)

Ski stories:

From a distance you could see the trails cut on the side of the hill spelling L O L. Dad stopped the car so he could point it out. We were on our way to a big party the year that the deal was cut to go commercial; mid-50's sometime. I was a kid and did not know how to ski very well so I got dumped on the baby hill.

There was a microphone and PA system. A dare-devil was announced and - there he came! Dressed in flowing gauzy green veils, yodeling. Down the steepest parts - airborne off every mogul and then crashing, spectacularly, again and again. Would he get up? How could he carry on? There was so much applause and cheering that he made a second run. And I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to imitate him. No one noticed that I know of.

A few years later we were skiing on another hill, for the weekend; around Huntsville I think. There was a T-bar where the Model A rope-tow had been the year before, and a big competition was going on somewhere nearby.

Overnight it snowed heavily and in the morning the hill was covered with many inches of new powder. It was early - the tow was just starting up; and cold enough that the snow crunched as we stepped. We were all laughing.

Dad set out to demonstrate a telemark turn and came down a steep part of the hill. It was long and slow and graceful, arms held out from his shoulders, one leg trailing far behind the other (in those days you could still adjust your bindings to do such things) - a ballet. But the snow was not as deep as you needed for a telemark and he hit a rock and fell. One of his skis came off and went a little way farther down before it stopped.

Later on, at the lunch counter in the lodge, a man speaking in a heavy accent ordered a peanut butter and pickle sandwich. Everyone laughed (including me); and the server said, archly, "Would you like that toasted?" He thought for a moment and said, "Sure, why not?" Dad said to me, "That guy just won the giant slalom - let them laugh."

(A part of dad's story though he is not mentioned there, from the Toronto Ski Club. They call it Blue Mountain, but there was another name.)

The days are getting longer again. Every year it takes 'til christmas to get over daylight saving time and the first solid returning perception is this: either the days are getting longer or at least they have stopped getting shorter. An indrawn hopeful breath.

Not a Twitter message:

Noam Chomsky answers questions from: John Berger, Chris Hedges, Ken Loach, Paul Laverty, Amira Hass, and Alice Walker (50 minutes). Discovered at the Real News; made back in March - some of his responses may have changed since Occupy.

A-and a quickie: Chomsky's tongue twister (30 seconds).

The two latest reads from Chris Hedges:
       Losing Moses on the Freeway 2005, and;
       I Don't Believe in Atheists 2008.
Framed (for me) by:
       War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning 2002, and;
       Death of the Liberal Class 2010.

He might well have called it I Don't Believe in Fundamentalists. A-and I did hear Christopher Hitchens say, just before he died, "There is no absolute knowledge," ... so, not much light shed here either. I think there is more to be learned from who gives a fuck about such questions than from considering their more or less arcane & irrelevant arguments - the good ol' ad hominem judgements of Clockwork Orange, Natural Born Killers and the like. Have you seen our Noam indulge it (such nonsense) anywhere? I haven't.

Words:

discover (dis-cover): mentioned here back in May (and surprisingly, for once, it took only a moment to find it). The word conjures up activity at the periphery, at the margins, borders, expansion of frontiers; but also (now that such discovery may be tainted, coloured by association with growth & exploitation) lifting portions of the proximate field like a rug or throw-cloth (or like the sod recently laid at St. James'), shifting the chameleon to peer behind it. Though all of this dis-covery remains quite ... liminal.

shibboleth: not a word one uses everyday, but I did (it just slipped out), and someone took me up on what it means, and I said 'taboo' - so I was concerned as I scrolled down the OED list of meanings, a long entry, and I began to think I had been mistaken ... or not.

1. The Hebrew word used by Jephthah as a test-word by which to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites (who could not pronounce the sh) from his own men the Gileadites (Judges xii. 4–6).
2. A word or sound which a person is unable to pronounce correctly; a word used as a test for detecting foreigners, or persons from another district, by their pronunciation. A peculiarity of pronunciation or accent indicative of a person's origin.
3. A catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect, by which their adherents or followers may be discerned, or those not their followers may be excluded.
4. (added in 1993) A moral formula held tenaciously and unreflectingly, especially a prohibitive one; a taboo.

And one of the citations is to Faulkner's The Hamlet: "Eating ... things which the weary long record of shibboleth and superstition had taught his upright kind to call filth."

So. A-and just twenty-five years to get there. You say 'growth' and I'll say 'growf'. Is that it?

accouterment (accoutrement?): distractingly related to 'cooter' as soon as you voice it (uh oh) ... found in this NYT article: Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capitol Hill by Eric Lichtblau on the 26th. And I can't make out if it is an authentic Americanism or a typo.

At the right is a bit of the 'interactive' graphic. There seem to be some arithmetic errors computing percentages in the original, which I can't fathom, but the overall numbers are interesting. Everyone knows what a 'percentile' is eh? I didn't remember it exactly so here, have a look in Wikipedia.

cf. perk / perquisite: both of which have the complete OED imprimatur;

(cf.: abbreviation of Latin confer - bring together, compare, contrast).

All this cooter and liminal dis-covery stuff takes my mind back to an early girlfriend, Irish; she would play games with me (though not the main event, which drove me mad) and used to say uncomforbtle for 'uncomfortable' with a charming childish lisp in an (apparently) unforgettable way.

That Chomsky plays word-games too, though better ones than I no doubt, makes me brazen.

Is there any use in any of this? Beyond a sort of prozac-avoidance mechanism? Beyond busy-work?
(A government funded event took place in São Paulo recently, Pintando o 5 Desafio de artes. A challenge they say (desafio). "Três artistas, música, platéia, muitos improvisos, e tudo muda a cada cinco minutos." / 'Three artists, music, audience, many improvisations, and everything changes every five minutes.' Looks like marking time to me - but who am I to criticize?)

I altered their logo, I prefer to see the five fingers of a hand, painted and ... creating. The abstract '5' might almost be an 'S' - for Superman, Sleveen ... or, or ... Sexo!

(A friend of mine used to refer to a sex act she called 'the whole ten-finger grope' but that's another story.)

I troll around the Internet (far too much), self-indulgence; picking up images that correspond to some degree with the interior landscape; or that simply remind me of far-away Brasilian friends.

And the images that catch my eye these days, the ones I select, are running to what you see here. I figgure some kind of internalization is taking place, waking an anima that haunts my dreams. For a long time I thought it was Abishag - 'faloorum ding doorum' and all - but no, it's subtler than that. And not just one! Though it is no nightmare y'unnerstan' - these are friendly ghosts, allies, stern sometimes but never threatening. There's none of The Hag about 'em, no. More like some of the faces at the end of Coppola's Apocalypse Now maybe. And it's not that 'Golden-Age-in-the-past' guff neither.

In Terra Caetano sings: "... as tais fotografias em que apareces inteira porém lá não estavas nua e sim coberta de nuvens." / 'those photographs in which you appear entirely, yet not naked since you are wearing clouds.' A modest earth.

Pierre Trudeau's 'mere tribalism' (not to mention his 'Where is Biafra?') does not figure into this - it's not that kind of snobbery. But I am not so clever as the real intellectuals and I can't sort things out so nicely. Where do positive tribal qualities fit into anti-globalization struggles f'rinstance? Into sectarianism? How to distinguish Arabs and Israelis living in a single unified Palestine/Israel from, say, the Canadian federation and Québec? Seems to me the provinces would be better off separately or in smaller somewhat-aligned groups, clumps, on their own, without the Feds altogether.

In the end though it comes down to individuals and what they do, doesn't it.

A lawyer friend of mine asked me the other day what to do (about the environmental fiasco, the Cluster FCCC, the lemming sleveens, what you will). I stammered something about suicide - the romantic notion of walking out onto the lake on a cold snowy night with a quart of Macallan's like an elderly Inuk; and Vonnegut's necessary and sufficient argument against such behaviour; and so on. But when a lawyer asks for advice you had better try to say something (or else the doberman joke may lose its savour).

The truth is I have no idea what to do. None. Waiting. Not waiting for a miracle, just, waiting. Learning the details of doing compassion in these dark times (the hard way) and like the man says - practicing resurrection.

(Or something.)

Be well.

Afterword:

Gwynne Dyer with the verdict on Durban: Durban climate-change conference was an almost total failure. It makes me weep.

' SRC="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yQAD9nwRYpg/TvibUkeKAQI/AAAAAAAAaiA/V7jJApGs8iA/s320/Tiras%2BZapiro%2B11-08-11t%2BDurban%2BCop17.jpg" alt="Deportation of Greenpeace." longdesc="Deportation of Greenpeace." title="Deportation of Greenpeace." id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5690468906872471810" ALIGN=LEFT>' SRC="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XfU2jREjOuo/TvibDkQqQfI/AAAAAAAAag8/B6hyE5KVh3w/s320/Tiras%2BZapiro%2B11-12-11t%2BDurban%2BCop17.jpg" alt="See you at COP-Out 18 or COP-Out 19 or 20 ... it depends." longdesc="See you at COP-Out 18 or COP-Out 19 or 20 ... it depends." title="See you at COP-Out 18 or COP-Out 19 or 20 ... it depends." id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5690468614758089202" ALIGN=LEFT>South African cartoonist Jonathan Zapiro on COP-Out 17.

And previously (famously, infamously) depicting Jacob Zuma with a shower fixture implanted on his head. A shower being Zuma's prophylactic against AIDS as reported following a 2006 incident in which he (allegedly) raped a woman known to be HIV positive.

The women depicted as Justice and Free Speech remind me of Maite Nkoana-Mashabane - but I guess what he has done to her (and she to herself) is only vaguely analogous.

Zuma has sued Zapiro for defamation and the case will come to court in August 2012 (details here).

Guy de Maupassant La Ficelle:

... quand il aperçut par terre un petit bout de ficelle. ...

Alors il recommença à conter l'aventure, en allongeant chaque jour son récit, ajoutant chaque fois des raisons nouvelles, des protestations plus énergiques, des serments plus solennels qu'il imaginait, qu'il préparait dans ses heures de solitude, l'esprit uniquement occupé par l'histoire de la ficelle; On le croyait d'autant moins que sa défense était plus compliquée et son argumentation plus subtile.

- Ca, c'est des raisons d'menteux, disait-on derrière son dos.

Il le sentait, se rongeait les sangs, s'épuisait en efforts inutiles. Il dépérissait à vue d'oeil.

Les plaisants maintenant lui faisaient conter "la Ficelle" pour s'amuser, comme on fait conter sa bataille au soldat qui a fait campagne. Son esprit, atteint à fond, s'affaiblissait.

Vers la fin de décembre, il s'alita.

I remember the title as Un bout de ficelle, but everywhere it is called La Ficelle, maybe I am conflating Boule de Suif. (?)

Lewis H. Michaux / National Memorial African Book Store in The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (download):

look son, I'd like to straighten you out
black is beautiful but black isn't power
knowledge is power
so you can be black as the crow
you can be white as snow
and if you don't know and ain't got no dough
you can't go and that's for sho'

Echoes of Joseph Lowery at Obama's inauguration:

when black will not be asked to get back / when brown can stick around / when yellah will be mellah / when the red man can get ahead man / and when white will embrace what is right

This doggerel has a quality of equivocation somehow; over-simplification, inaccuracy, cracks papered over ...

The story of Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, seems to belong here: see below; if you can get between the lines of the double- & triple-talk NYT rhetoric that is.

Consider the punctuation in "... citing reports that “anarchists” were fomenting violence." Why not put whatver verb she used inside the quote? Not enough 'spin' that way to get 'traction' I guess. At 62 she was born in the trough between the peak and the hump of the post-war baby boom (more on that next time maybe).

Not a tall woman.

Change is everywhere evident; or changes at least. Since Rodney King say - though Oakland ain't quite LA either.

I know! (getting back to Peter Kent as venal poster-boy, and Stephen Harper & Laureen Teskey as Mr. & Mrs. Smug.) We can do it up as a calendar (?) That's it! I can see it now: a set of commemorative plates suitable for hanging on the wall (beside the print of Picasso's Don Quixote, next to the Giacometti-esque maquette of the same standing on the real-wood end-table there, and across from The Little Mermaid miniature Den lille Havfrue on the shelf in the cabinet with the glass doors); John Baird, Tony Clement, Peter MacKay (as The Queen), Peter MacKay's dog as Dulcinea; Rona Ambrose & Lisa Raitt (to represent the distaff side and avoid feminist recriminations).

The Perfect Gift!
A product that makes New Year's Eve worth celebrating.
Order now to get the Complete Set!(Each plate is individually signed. All major credit-cards accepted.)

[Renata & Rob: The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing.]

Appendices:

1. Oakland’s Reins Blister a Mayor Raised on Protest, James Dao, December 28 2011.
2. Durban climate-change conference was an almost total failure, Gwynne Dyer, December 14 2011.

Oakland’s Reins Blister a Mayor Raised on Protest, James Dao, December 28 2011.

OAKLAND, Calif. — Days after Jean Quan was elected mayor in the fall of 2010, the Oakland police put a wheel clamp on her silver Prius while it was parked outside City Hall. She cursed her husband for not paying the family’s parking tickets and braced for the embarrassing news articles.

So it began: the rookie year from hell. In May, the city attorney quit, lambasting City Hall as being corrupt. In October, the police chief followed suit, complaining about micromanagement. In November, voters rejected a tax that Ms. Quan had advocated to help fix a budget shortfall. December brought new talk that all three of Oakland’s professional sports teams might leave for fancier digs.

But the problem that has really besieged Ms. Quan, the first woman and first Asian-American to be the city’s mayor, has been the Occupy Oakland movement, which in October turned a grassy plaza in front of City Hall into a muddy staging ground for anticorporate protests.

In a dizzying series of reversals, Ms. Quan initially embraced the protest, then ordered the camp cleared, then allowed the demonstrators to return after the police seriously injured one of them, a Marine veteran. Two weeks later, she ordered the plaza cleared again, citing reports that “anarchists” were fomenting violence.

Now, Frank H. Ogawa Plaza remains empty most days, but Ms. Quan’s mayoralty is teetering. In a city known for its flamboyant and colorful mayors, she has emerged as one of its most controversial. Conservatives accuse her of coddling the protesters, while former allies on the left are incensed that she ordered the plaza cleared at all.

And now two rival groups, one started by a black community activist, the other by a white former mayoral candidate, are vying to have her recalled.

“She should have declared a position and stuck with it,” said Dan Siegel, a longtime friend and adviser who broke with the mayor after the police cleared the plaza the second time but who opposes a recall. “The problem was going back and forth, which wound up making everyone angry with her.”

For Ms. Quan, 62, a longtime civil rights activist and former union organizer whose husband and 29-year-old daughter participated in Occupy protests, the possibility of being undone by youthful demonstrators poses a painful paradox.

To this day, she fondly recalls being “a mouthy little Chinese kid” who chided a dean at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s for threatening to revoke her scholarship because she had posted leaflets calling for a grape boycott on campus. Early in the Occupy campaign, she issued statements saying she endorsed the “pro-99 percent activists.” (Yet when she appeared at a recent panel event with protest organizers, she was loudly heckled.)

In an interview over matzo ball soup, Ms. Quan, who speaks so swiftly that her sentences sometimes tumble into each other, acknowledged sympathies for the protesters. “My background has made it emotionally harder” to order police actions against them, she said. “But I’m the mayor of the city. I have to make decisions based on being the mayor.”

To her critics, Ms. Quan’s ambivalence underscores what they consider her fundamental weakness: she remains, they say, more activist than executive, uncomfortable using police power to maintain order. And in Oakland — which had 90 homicides last year, three times as many as San Diego, despite being one-third the size — public safety is issue No. 1 for many voters.

“Her handling of Occupy was a classic example of her inability to lead,” said Charles Pine, a retiree who is helping to organize one of the recall drives. Or as a former city official put it: “She views herself as part of the group who are giving hell to the man. The problem is she is the man.”

Ms. Quan has had a particularly tense relationship with the police union, which endorsed her main rival for mayor and last month issued a letter calling her handling of the protests “confusing.”

The friction stems partly from her complaint that pay and pensions for the police consume half the city’s general fund budget, leaving little for social programs, parks and public works. Last year, as a city councilwoman, she supported the layoffs of about 100 officers and recruits, though she has hired back more than 50 since becoming mayor.

“I think a lot of police officers feel she doesn’t like them,” said Dominique Arotzarena, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, which represents about 650 officers.

Critics have also attacked Ms. Quan’s crime-fighting strategy, which emphasizes focusing services as well as police patrols on 100 blocks that account for 90 percent of the city’s most violent crimes. “They think I’m too soft on crime because I want to do the intervention and prevention,” she said. “I just think I’m being smart.”

As for talk that she is indecisive, she bristles. “I do stuff based on data, not on rhetoric,” she said.

Ms. Quan grew up in Livermore, where her father, who died when she was 5, ran a restaurant. Though her family had been in California since the 19th century, she was the first member born in America, because anti-Chinese immigration laws had prevented her grandfathers from bringing their wives to the country.

At Berkeley, she and her future husband, Floyd Huen, helped organize a famous 1969 student strike demanding ethnic studies, then wrote the curriculum for an Asian-American course. The couple spent several years in Manhattan while Mr. Huen attended Yeshiva University’s medical school, then moved to Oakland, where Ms. Quan organized immigrant workers for the Service Employees International Union.

Her political career began almost accidentally in 1989 when, after mobilizing parents to fight the elimination of a school music program, she decided to run for the school board, winning in a Republican stronghold. “It was just sort of a continuation of my activism,” she said.

A 12-year stint on the board was followed by eight years on the City Council. Then came her stunning victory in last year’s 10-candidate mayoral race.

Under the city’s new voting system, which requires voters to rank their preferences, she was the first choice on less than a quarter of the ballots. But when second and third preferences were tallied, she emerged the winner of the four-year term, defeating the favorite, former State Senator Don Perata, by less than two percentage points.

Leonard Raphael, the treasurer of one of the recall committees, said Ms. Quan’s lack of a clear mandate might make her vulnerable. “I’m hoping that wrapping yourself in the mantle of progressivism isn’t good enough anymore if you are incompetent,” he said.

But it is far from clear that the recall groups have the resources to gather the nearly 20,000 signatures needed to put a recall on the ballot next year. They have also failed to coalesce around an alternative candidate — and if the recall question makes the ballot, a mayoral election will be held simultaneously. Mr. Perata has said he will not run.

At the same time, organized labor seems to be lining up behind the mayor, and her friends are beginning to mobilize.

“She is a fierce fighter and very well organized,” said Dick Spees, a former Republican city councilman who is friends with Ms. Quan. “And she will fight it to the end.”

Durban climate-change conference was an almost total failure, Gwynne Dyer, December 14 2011.

The Durban climate summit that ended on Sunday (December 11) has been proclaimed a great success. The chair, South Africa’s international relations minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, told the delegates: “We have concluded this meeting with [a plan] to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come. We have made history.” Don’t be fooled. It was an almost total failure.

This time, the rapidly developing country that put up the greatest resistance to a binding global deal was India. (In 2009 and 2010, it was China.) The chief Indian delegate, Jayanthi Natarajan, held out against any legally enforceable treaty through three long days of nonstop, overtime negotiations. In the end, she agreed that an eventual deal would have “legal force”—but it would not be “legally binding”.

Lawyers get rich arguing over the difference between phrases like these, but that is for the future. The question now is: given what the Indian government already knows, how could it possibly have taken that position?

Three years ago, while I was interviewing the director of a think tank in New Delhi, she suddenly dropped a bomb into the conversation. Her institute had been asked by the World Bank to figure out how much food production India would lose when the average global temperature was two degrees Celsius higher, she said—and the answer was 25 percent.

This study, like similar ones that the bank commissioned in other major countries, has never been published, presumably because the governments of those countries put huge pressure on the bank to keep the numbers secret. But the Indian government undoubtedly knows the truth.

A 25 percent loss of food production would be an almost measureless calamity for India. It now produces just enough food to feed its 1.1 billion people. If the population rises by the forecast quarter-billion in the next 20 years, and meanwhile its food production falls by 25 percent due to global warming, half a billion Indians will starve.

India will not be able to buy its way out of the crisis by importing food, because many other countries will be experiencing similar falls in production at the same time, and the price of the limited amount of grain still reaching the international market will be prohibitive. So India should be moving heaven and earth to stop the average global temperature from reaching +2 degrees. But it isn’t.

Like almost every other country, India has signed a declaration that the warming must never exceed two degrees, but in practice the government acts as though it had all the time in the world. Maybe it just can’t visualize a future in which those numbers become the reality. Or maybe it is just too attached to the principle that the “old rich” countries must pay for the damage they have done.

That’s a perfectly reasonable argument in terms of historical justice, for the old rich countries emitted around 80 percent of the greenhouse gases of human origin that are now in the atmosphere. But if only those countries act promptly, then the average global temperature soars through +2 degrees and Indians start to starve.

Most developed countries do not face similar losses in food production at +2 degrees, for they are further away from the equator. Their position is merely selfish and short-sighted; India’s is suicidal.

Over the past 15 years of climate negotiations there has been a steady decline in the seriousness of the response. The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 committed the developed countries to stabilize their emissions and then cut them by an average of six percent by 2012. Developing countries were exempt from any controls, because they were not then emitting very much. And deeper emission cuts would come in a second phase of Kyoto, beginning in 2012.

Based on what we knew then, it was a cautious but rational response. In the meantime, however, developing country emissions have grown so fast that China now produces much more greenhouse gas than the United States. Global emissions are not in decline, as they should be. Last year, they grew by six percent.

So what was the response at Durban? The 1997 Kyoto targets for the developed countries will be maintained for another five years (with no further cuts), and developing countries will still not accept any legal restraints on their emissions. Then everyone will sign a more ambitious deal (still to be negotiated) by 2015—and the new targets, whatever they are, will acquire “legal force”, whatever that means, by 2020.

By that time, annual global emissions will probably be at least twice what they were when the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997—and the +2 degree barrier will probably be visible only in the rear-view mirror. The outcome at Durban could have been even worse—a complete abandonment of the concept of legal obligations to restrict emissions—but it was very, very bad.

Down.

HUNGRY FOR CLIMATE LEADERSHIP

2011-12-24T12:10:00.036-05:00

Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

December 21 - Winter Solstice, at Peter Kent's constituency office in Thornhill.

Please take a close look at the attached photograph. The young man at the right end of the banner took hold of that pole at Steeles & Yonge, carried it up to Kent's office, about two miles, held onto it facing the rush hour traffic for two hours, and then back down to Steeles again; all in the (at times) driving rain without ever letting go. A skinny fellow, and fasting too at the time.

WOWZERS!
Look at the girl at the other end, her posture. It would take a doughty soul to want to be in her way I'll bet. The girl in the yellow poncho is with Occupy Toronto - and she is unmistakably there isn't she? Present. And the old woman in the yellow and orange coat - a smoker as I happen to know. Look at her. Make it a good long look. She also went the entire route holding onto that banner.

She tells me there is something crooked in the Occupy Toronto media group, information is getting lost and twisted; sounds like a conspiracy theory to me; she says, "Sure it's a conspiracy, what do you think? I'm from Poland, I know about that stuff."

She's right of course, though it may be subtler than outright conscious obstruction (or not). Some of: Cocky know-it-all nerds? Misplaced faith in technology? Pa-ra-noia? Paranoia? Paranoia? (to the tune of Handel's famous chorus)? Lack of experience in knowing when to stop changing platforms? Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Whatever the reason, it has been clear from the get-go. The website(s) have never been effective. No point going there if you want reliable information, none. I notice that the latest incarnation is "the Official online face of the Occupy movement in Toronto." Whoever they are, they don't understand irony either.

Even, could it be the perfect being the enemy of the good (to be as gentle as possible)?

[La Bégueule (Voltaire, 'The Prude' says Google Translate, but I like 'The beguiled').
Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien;
see also: 'Ta gueule connard!' & 'Ferme ta gueule, ostie trou de cul!']

Don't believe me? Fine. Don't do a quick compare&contrast with the OWS/Occupy Wall Street site then. An archive running back to Day 1; a Forum with many many many posts & comments every day; ... What Ever. (!)

The 'official' information on the vigil is here: Hungry for Climate Leadership. They might eventually post some photographs (or not - I personally doubt it, see 'negative' below).

When I several times put out the idea of being in front of Kent's office all day every day, and then rapidly back-pedal to an hour a day at rush-hour, in shifts - it is met with total & absolute dead silence on all sides. (?) Not a word, not one, not even "no."

Does any of this have anything to do with why forty (out of three or four million) turned up for the vigil? (Of course not! STFU!)

I am not a very pleasant person: negative (or at least often mistaken for such), angry, fractious, sullen, ornery, arrogant, impolite ... unrepentant and unregenerate, a snob, an asshole curmudgeon (though not a penny-pincher) ... the list goes on ... not as smart as I sometimes think I am. A-and I smoke!

So I guess it is not strange that I am isolated.

Like despair it is worse on some days than it is on others. Worst is when I get to imagining old-testament prophets suffering the slings and arrows, Ezekiel laying on his side for years! chained there. (Though forty figures in Ezekiel's story too ... hmmm.)

And I am feeling now that maybe I should not even be sharing these stories of the people carrying the banner. (?) I am honouring them, simple as that, but I don't know anymore when I have gone too far, stepped over yet another invisible line (and no one ever tells me).

The basic smiley, :-) is easy. And there is </3 (broken heart) which is in fact quite difficult in HTML. How about this one, ?:-( or ¿:-( for baffled & total incomprehension?

The 'hungry' in HUNGRY FOR CLIMATE LEADERSHIP and the colour of red, take me back to Gabor Maté's In the realm of hungry ghosts: close encounters with addiction and the images he invoked from Buddhist cosmology.

A note on uploading photographs: If you click on the top photograph above to see it at higher resolution you will get 1,600px × 1,200px (the original is 2,560px by 1,920px, if you send me an email I will forward it to you). I have been uploading stuff for years now and only recently noticed that Blogger/Picasa resizes things to a maximum dimension of 1,600px (who checks such things?). So I tried Flickr, where the maximum turns out to be even less, 1,024px. (And Tumblr too where it is 500px.)

Pontius Pilate, handwashing, and so on ...

I sent off this Open Letter to some eminent k-k-Canadian prelates, and to Douglas Stoute, dean of St. James' Cathedral. I expect no reply - I have tried this kind of thing before and not had one, beyond more-or-less polite acknowledgements of receipt (and in most cases not even that). I sent off copies of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to several of them who indicated interest to me, but I have never had a word back that they read any of it.

The operative bit is here: Chapter 20 Conversions, Section 2 [pages 737 ff], or here really, in Luke 10:33:

"But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, ..."

Paying particular and careful attention to what kind of seeing might be implied when they (Andrewes & cohorts I suppose) use the word 'saw' in the phrase "and when he saw him." Even a meditation on the first word of that verse, 'but', would not go amiss.

For the record, here is the event at which I listened to Mardi Tindal, Herb Gale, & Colin Johnson: Environment and Climate in Peril: How people of faith will care and advocate for creation put on in May by Oikos. And here are some previous musings of mine: Waltzing on air (May 2011), and Why nobody came ... a bust then? (October 2009).

A slightly updated notion of correctitude:

I like dipthongs. Here is homœostasis/homeostasis in the OED:

The maintenance of a dynamically stable state within a system by means of internal regulatory processes that tend to counteract any disturbance of the stability by external forces or influences; the state of stability so maintained; spec. in Physiol., the maintenance of relatively constant conditions in the body (e.g. as regards blood temperature) by physiological processes that act to counter any departure from the normal.

Hence 'homœostatically correct' and I'll leave it to you (but do note the 'temperature' reference).

It is wonderfully cute that the OED interface does not recognize 'œ' - if you want to find this word in there you must damn-well know it is in there beforehand.

Trivial Pursuit: Which was first, Rita or Katrina?

(Katrina - August 23-30 2005, Rita - September 17-26 2005)

What about Lee & Nock-ten just in August? Or Washi this last week? Ever heard of them? Google&Bing if you are curious.

"Sail on. Sail on, o mighty ship of state.":   (Leonard Cohen, Democracy)

Just a few bits of news:
     Politics Stamps Out Oil Sands Pipeline, Yet It Seems Likely to Endure,
     Harper warns Americans he will ship oil elsewhere, and,
     Canada 'very serious' about selling its oil to China, Harper says .

There is a video of Harper talking to 'Senior News Editor' Lisa LaFlamme attached to both the CTV & Globe articles - but you have to watch an ad to see it. When it gets dark later on tonight I will grab it with my trusty snapshot camera and post it on YouTube ... ok, here it is: portions of year-end interview.

They have progressed so far, these (silly?) pundits, that they see a 'risk' that America will be upset, even angry - except that the real risk is that we will make the planet uninhabitable.

The poster-boy for venal is Peter Kent (here) so Stephen Harper as poster-boy for smug begins to make a matched set, a 'suite' of poster boys.

There are some who believe in love. I know something about love, a little bit: I have truely loved some women, and my children and their children; some other people. Far from being any sort of force I have found it best expressed in a chinese phrase which translates 'wind and cloud'. Pierre Reverdy's epigram: « Il n'y a pas d'amour, il n'y a que des preuves d'amour. » / 'There is no love, there are only proofs of love,' well, I can't forget it.

(Echoing the philosophical eddy that runs through faith to aesthetics) I am lifted out of myself by certain experiences, though not, I think, transcendentally: Handel's Messiah, when she sings, "I know that my redeemer liveth," and, "For unto us a child is given," and, "And his name shall be calléd, wonderful, counsellor ..."; the New World symphony; Bach; ... even singing some of Wesley's hymns can do it for me ...

There are some who believe in God; most of them seem to me to be using faith as a bulwark against despair. We must resist despair! But I have despaired, I didn't set out to do it but there it is - and yet, on the other side of it I somehow find myself still breathing, still loving.

I sometimes think that those who have not despaired and who still believe in a certain kind of God (with a capital 'g'), are marking time in a way, waiting for a miracle or some other magic that will save us all (and them too of course); and so they do not generally put their flesh on the line, even in struggles they know to be 'ultimate'.

Be well gentle reader.

Postscript:

Probably not, except to say, "Christmas? BAH HUMBUG!"

(Who knew you could still get a rise from the wealthy so easily?)

Appendices:

1. Open Letter, David Wilson, 22 December 2011.

Open Letter, David Wilson, 22 December 2011.

To:
Mardi Tindal, Moderator of the United Church of Canada,
Herb Gale, Moderator of the 136th (past) General Assembly of The Presbyterian Church in Canada,
Colin Johnson, Anglican Archbishop of Toronto and Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario, and,
Douglas Stoute, Dean of Toronto & Rector of St. James' Cathedral.

all,

I went by St. James' Cathedral park on Tuesday. They have indeed put new sod over it all, with lots of little red signs advertising whoever got the contract to do the work. But I wonder if we really need an archbishop, dean, rector and the rest of this fol-de-rol purple cloth to cover up the fact that our planet, our only home, is mortally wounded - and I don't think sod is sufficient dressing for such a wound. The Occupiers might have been, and not only a dressing but a remedy; but their tongues are now being skillfully muffled and Toronto is getting back to "normal".

Please take a close look at the attached photograph. The young man at the right end of the banner took ahold of that pole at Steeles & Yonge, carried it up to Kent's office, about two miles, held onto it facing the rush hour traffic for two hours, and then back down to Steeles again; all in the (at times) driving rain without ever letting go. A skinny fellow, and fasting too at the time.

WOWZERS!

Look at the girl at the other end. See how she is standing. It would take a doughty soul to want to get in her way eh? And the old woman in the yellow and orange coat - a Polish immigrant and a smoker too as I happen to know. Look at her. Make it a good long look. She also went the entire route holding onto that banner. The girl in the yellow poncho I don't know - but she is unmistakably there isn't she? Talk about 'going the extra mile' - and then some.

Now, IF you were leaders (which in my estimation you are not), and IF you had some few like these with you (who obviously are), well ... what do you think might happen then?

Mardi has said publicly, at least several times, that she is convinced that Peter Kent understands both 'the science' and the catastrophe we are facing. What nonsense! Convinced!? Has she no discernment? And I could speak uncomfortable truths about the rest of you as well - all from my own personal experience and observations of what you have said and done in public - but you must be living with that.

Here, read this again: Luke 10:33, and consider exactly what 'saw' means in the phrase "and when he saw him," and this: 'A Secular Age' Chapter 20 Conversions, Section 2, Charles Taylor, [pages 737 ff], being Ivan Illich's take on that story. Your reserve and forbearance (to put a gentler name on it than might be put, because I really do think that you understand at least some of this) is not helping us - who have fallen among thieves.

Be well,

David Lee Wilson,

ps - This is an open message. I have also sent it to 'The Observer', where someone I was once mistaken for is the editor; and to a few people at Kairos; to one of the organisers of the event; and to my children so they can know without the fear of contradiction that I spoke the truth as I saw it when I was able to.

ref: http://torontoclimatecampaign.org/hungryforclimateleadership

Down.

eighth blackbird, is that VIIIb then? or bVIII?

2011-12-19T12:40:00.046-05:00

(with a sub-theme of 'grateful for small mercies')
Up, Down, Nothing much.

If you are in Toronto, please consider attending this important event - details here: Hungry for Climate Leadership.

A candle-lit vigil of hope and solidarity, on the longest night of the year (in so many ways); at the Constituency Office of Peter Kent (sleveen), Canada's Minister of the Environment:
7600 Yonge Street, Thornhill.
(not the 7600 in Richmond Hill).

(Why not straight in front of his house, I wonder? Doesn't he live there somewhere?)

Wednesday December 21, 4:00 to 6:30 PM. Rallying at Yonge & Steeles (a 20 minute walk away) at 3:30 PM.
(You can't get there by TTC apparently. If I find a way I will post it here.)

Elizabeth May has her moments: She doesn't call Peter Kent the P.O.S. he really is - but she doesn't tell us how much she likes him either, at least not this time (and I am grateful for that).

In this press conference she several times hits the shiny little nail right on its shiny little head:
- the original at CBC 30 minutes (better sound quality),
- posted by the Green Party as part 1 & part 2 (not so much).

And in this post: Kyoto withdrawal: There must be a political price to be paid.

Looks like Barack Obama has caved in / is caving in / will cave in / might cave in / might not cave in ... on the Keystone XL pipeline.

Bloomberg: "... Republicans fell short on efforts to force the permitting of TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL oil pipeline ..."
Globe: "... would require Mr. Obama to decide within 60 days whether to grant a permit for the pipeline. But the legislation also allows Mr. Obama to decide not to do so ..."
NYT: maybe so ... maybe not ...

And more of the same nonsense equivocation from McKibben & Meisel (with exaggerated emotional overtones worthy of a basketball). At least they have stopped spouting, "WE WON! WE WON!" and I for one am grateful for small mercies.

Just have to wait and see. (But we don't like waiting, do we?)

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING
AT A BLACKBIRD
I            Among twenty snowy mountains,
      The only moving thing
      Was the eye of the blackbird.

II            I was of three minds,
      Like a tree
      In which there are three blackbirds.

III            The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
      It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV            A man and a woman
      Are one.
      A man and a woman and a blackbird
      Are one.

V            I do not know which to prefer,
      The beauty of inflections
      Or the beauty of innuendoes,
      The blackbird whistling
      Or just after.

VI            Icicles filled the long window
      With barbaric glass.
      The shadow of the blackbird
      Crossed it, to and fro.
      The mood
      Traced in the shadow
      An indecipherable cause.

VII            O thin men of Haddam,
      Why do you imagine golden birds?
      Do you not see how the blackbird
      Walks around the feet
      Of the women about you?

VIII            I know noble accents
      And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
      But I know, too,
      That the blackbird is involved
      In what I know.

IX            When the blackbird flew out of sight,
      It marked the edge
      Of one of many circles.

X            At the sight of blackbirds
      Flying in a green light,
      Even the bawds of euphony
      Would cry out sharply.

XI            He rode over Connecticut
      In a glass coach.
      Once, a fear pierced him,
      In that he mistook
      The shadow of his equipage
      For blackbirds.

XII            The river is moving.
      The blackbird must be flying.

XIII            It was evening all afternoon.
      It was snowing
      And it was going to snow.
      The blackbird sat
      In the cedar-limbs.

Could be way misleading, what with Obama and 'blackbird' and pictures of a young black woman mixed up into it and all. Oh well.

Can't be helped; or could have been maybe but wasn't; suffice to say it's about what the 1% or the 99% (or whoever the fuck they are) are not stopping doing anytime soon. Makes me want to hear Caetano's Terra or here or here.

Photographs of Geli Forlefac from Kwesi Abbensetts.

Nothing needs to be said here about eighth blackbird, or very little - their website is one of the few I've seen that actually works, both comprehensive and intuitive. The notes that follow are just reminders to myself:

formed in 1996

• Tim Munro, flutes (Molly Barth to 2006)
• Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets
• Yvonne Lam, violin & viola (Matt Albert to 2011)
• Nicholas Photinos, cello
• Matthew Duvall, percussion+
• Lisa Kaplan, piano

- Round Nut Tool
- beginnings
- thirteen ways
- fred
- strange imaginary animals
- Double Sextet • 2x5
- On a Wire • QED: Engaging Richard Feynman
- Lonely Motel: Music from Slide

None of their music shows up on the pirate sites, not much on YouTube either - and downloads are only available in the US, so ...

Reading Empire of illusion, the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle from 2009.

Why thirteen pages of wrestling up-front? I thought I had taken the point after a page or two. And the writing often seems so ... all-over-the-place, tendentious (is that the word?) ...

That said (and nevertheless), parts of this book are making me take long uncomfortable looks at myself.

The little piece of lyric from eighth blackbird's 'addiction': "one too many unchecked fantasies / one too many unchallenged assumptions /one too many unexamined beliefs /and you slide into addiction ..." which I found as I was finishing up the last post - seems to be a harmonic convergence.

And what comes around seems to go around too (or something) - this review of three Orwell biographies turned up in the free section of the LRB: Reach-Me-Down Romantic, which (going around yet once more) also touches on Christopher Hitchens (though the review is dated 2003 it seems to acknowledge Hitchens' recent death - ambiguity is good I guess).

I read some of this on Gutenberg Australia: Fifty Orwell Essays, particularly 'The Lion and the Unicorn' mentioned at the end of the review.

Depressing ... I hadn't realized that he was given to such concluding sentences as, "I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward." Oh well.

That's it; running out of candles.

I did find a bakery this week with a woman there (one of the owners) who both knows how to make bread and run the slicing machine (unlike the wage-slaves at Weston's & Cob's Bread respectively), and she was not in a hurry; and the bread is about half the price. And with croissants. A TTC ride away, but I like riding on streetcars - I was smiling the whole way back carrying my weekly supply of bread.

Something to look forward to on Sundays.

Be well.

( ... hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ...)

Nothing much:

An interesting survey from the Globe: Poll: C’mon, be honest: Answer these highly personal, somewhat inappropriate questions posted on the 16th, response as of the 18th here (but the wankers haven't said how many responded and have not published the geographical & age stats, yet - 'stay tuned' they say).

Responses to December 19th:

1. In 2011, were you more stressed or less stressed than you were the year before?

	Way more stressed		27%
	A little more stressed		27%
	About the same		23%
	A little less stressed		16%
	Much less stressed. Who can complain about 2011?		7%

2. What's the biggest stress in your life?

	Money		22%
	Family		14%
	Work		35%
	The current political climate		7%
	The environment		1%
	My love life		9%
	My health		6%
	What I'm going to cook tonight		5%

3. How many Facebook friends do you have?

	50 or fewer		19%
	51 to 150		18%
	151 to 250		11%
	251 to 400		10%
	More than 400		7%
	None: Facebook is for chumps		36%

4. How many of those friends would you tell if you had a serious health problem?

	None		9%
	5 or fewer		40%
	Up to 25		20%
	More than 25		5%
	Everyone would know. I'd post it on Facebook		1%
	I told you I’m not on Facebook		26%

5. How much household debt (including your mortgage) do you have?

	None. I'm in the black, baby		38%
	Less than $150,000		32%
	Between $150,000 and $300,000		18%
	Between $300,000 and $500,000		8%
	More than $500,000		4%

6. Is that more or less than last year?

	A lot more. I've racked up at least another $50,000		6%
	A little more. I've added on another $1,000-$50,000		12%
	About the same		25%
	A little less. I paid off up to $ 50,000		25%
	A lot less. I paid off more than $ 50,000		5%
	Let me repeat: I’m in the black, baby		26%

7. How many servings of vegetables do you eat a day?

	Do chips count? I don't eat vegetables regularly		8%
	One to two servings		51%
	Three to five servings		35%
	More than five servings. Just call me Popeye		6%

8. How much chocolate do you eat a day?

	I don't eat chocolate most days		62%
	Less than half a chocolate bar		27%
	Up to one chocolate bar (or the equivalent)		8%
	One chocolate bar and another chocolate snack		1%
	As much as I can get my hands on		2%

9. Did you sext this year, either as a sender or receiver of text, video or photos?

	Yes. What’s the harm?		19%
	No. I’d be mortified		63%
	I don't know what sexting is		18%

10. Do you know anyone who did?

	Yes		28%
	No		64%
	I'm not saying		8%

11. Which of the following did you do as a parent over the past year (check all that apply)?

	I lied to my kids		12%
	I bribed them		14%
	I swore in front of them		24%
	I spanked them		4%
	I ate their Halloween candy		17%
	None. I'm a perfect parent		4%
	I don’t have young kids		67%

12. Which of these foods should be banned (check all that apply)?

	Bluefin tuna		34%
	Shark fin soup		61%
	KFC's Double Down sandwich		40%
	Foie gras		25%
	McDonald's Happy Meals		25%
	None. I don't believe in food bans		27%

13. Who is your favourite royal?

	Harry (of course!)		10%
	Will (of course!)		8%
	Elizabeth (of course!)		17%
	Kate (of course!)		17%
	Does Pippa Middleton count?		13%
	Abolish the monarchy		36%

14. Whose death this year affected you the most?

	Jack Layton		55%
	Amy Winehouse		6%
	Steve Jobs		20%
	Elizabeth Taylor		2%
	Christopher Hitchens		11%
	Hickstead		5%

15. What resolution do you really want to commit to this year?

	Save more money		14%
	Lose weight		27%
	Have a better sex life		12%
	Get a better job		9%
	Be nicer to friends and family		10%
	I'm not making any		28%

16. How much cash do you have on you right now?

	None. I've always got my debit card		14%
	Less than $20		22%
	Less than $100		37%
	$100-$ 500		21%
	$500 or more		5%

17. Did you join a gym this year?

	Yes		24%
	No		76%

18. When was the last time you worked out?

	This week		50%
	This month		14%
	Within the past three months		10%
	Within the past six months		7%
	I didn't work out at all in 2011		19%

19. When was the last time you had a physical?

	Within the past six months		25%
	Within the past year		29%
	Within the past five years		26%
	It's been more than five years		11%
	I've never had one		8%

20. What's your secret vice?

	Junk food		27%
	Porn		26%
	Nail-biting		7%
	Impulse shopping		8%
	Stealing office supplies		1%
	I'm not telling		31%

21. Are you feeling hopeful about 2012?

	Yes		65%
	No		13%
	Not sure		22%

22. What are you most hopeful about?

	Money		14%
	Family		25%
	Work		20%
	The current political climate		2%
	The environment		0%
	My love life		12%
	My health		9%
	What I'm cooking tonight		4%
	I told you I'm not		14%

Ah ... another systematic information twister discovered: Pain in the ass formatting tables - so I pasted the responses into a .jpg with Paint, which .jpg was long and skinny (300 x 5,000 pixels or so); uploaded the .jpg, all done! Wrong! Google sets a maximum dimension on photographs (I guess) of 1,600 pixels, so it was not legible.

Down.

River of Shit.

2011-12-16T07:16:00.022-05:00

"It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."
Up, Down, Appendices, Dregs.

Background music:
The Fugs, Wide, Wide River, aka 'River of Shit', and,
Bobbie Dye-lon with Idiot Wind.

"... from the Grand Coulee dam to The Capitol."

Peter Kent formally withdraws from Kyoto (and the world, and our collective fate).

The mouth of the river; or the mouthpiece as it were. If you watch this video carefully you will see that he seems to have a tic, in his nose - too much coke in Durban was it? Shared a few lines with Elizabeth May and Mardi Tindal did he? That might explain why they flatter him (and more?) so eagerly.

I grabbed the video from the Guardian but it is only a portion of what he said. (I did trim off the shill for Toyota - don't these people understand that cars are part of the problem?) Here's the (stinking, and only approximate) text, which mentions questions - if I find any more clips I will post them here.

If it is true as Kent says that "the Durban platform is a way forward that builds on our work at Copenhagen and at Cancun," then whatever is built will be on a foundation of sand (and given what I am going to say about Chris Hedges below, I do hesitate to use biblical imagery).

$1,600 a day? Each? So about the same as the F-35's then? Is that it?

The cabinet and their mouldy master tell us that we absolutely must have the F-35's to preserve our sovereignty. Is it a trade-off then? Is it either sovereignty or existence but not both? ... Ummm, just for me y'unnerstan' but I would prefer existence.

One MP got it right, Justin Trudeau:

"Oh, you piece of shit!" Exactly. Not eloquent, not polite, not ordinary to praise such an outburst; but in this case, yes. Applause, a standing ovation here in this small apartment, with tears in my eyes.

Thank you Justin Trudeau. (!)

A-and here's someone else who gets it, or close; She says:

"Climate activists are starting to realize that we've lost this fight — the ultimate battle for life on Earth; that the fight was too big and the enemies of life on Earth too many in number and too strong in influence. But each one of us can [must?] keep fighting because to not fight is not an option."

I have to quibble just a little: 1) I won't declare that we have lost the ultimate battle until 2015 comes and goes and CO2e emissions have not levelled off. It is a line in the sand I'll admit - and some say we have already stepped over it - but my reading of Jim Hansen's latest (and many others before that) makes me think 2015. And, 2) I think there needs to be a very close look at the complacency, forbearance, and reserve of k-k-Canadians in general to see why we are losing this fight, not just at the strength, wiliness, and guile of our foes.

Listen again to Tim DeChristoper at Power Shift this spring. If people went a few at a time and continuously obstructed - his example was coal, mountain-top removal - then Obama would either have to call out the troops or call off the mining.

What would Tim's idea look like in Canada? Six people stood up and turned their backs on Kent in Durban. What if six more stood up and turned their backs on him every time he spoke, anywhere? What if six people stood outside his riding office every day with their backs turned? What if six people did the same in the riding of every cabinet minister? Could the bought-and-paid-for media ignore it? Could Harper overlook such an opportunity to fill his prisons (and the ones he yearns to build)?

(Maybe it doesn't take six. But it does take at least two, as I know to my cost from having stood by myself for a day giving away '350' buttons on Queen Street last year - Bummer! (Except for the short time my son spent there with me.)

So?

It has become customary to lump all of the guilt and responsibility onto the corporations - and upon the 1% who are, presumably, the main corporate beneficiaries. Some numerical illiterates even imagine that the 1% comprises as few as 400 people - I had this directly from someone at Occupy in a conversation one day, and then verified that such a nonsensical opinion exists (after a fashion) using Google & Bing.

But what about the shareholders, who are they? Who owns the shares? Who buys and sells striving for profit and who gets the dividends? Individuals? Yes; and estate funds created by loving husbands to secure loving widows, and banks, and pension funds, and unions. Even the sacred credit-unions trade in stocks don't they?

So the number of beneficiaries grows, doesn't it eh? The implicated; the complicit. Well more than 1%; like an iceberg, drifting in the cold Labrador current, waiting for the Titanic, only a portion, a smallish portion at that, showing above the waves (or like a whale witnessing a fire).

And the 1% grows and grows until it's 99% again. This must be the dialectical snake eating its own tail; and getting fat doing it?

Or simpler still if you like: How much shit does it take to stink? Can you spread it thinly enough that it doesn't stink? Is that possible?

But hey: an iceberg 'waiting'? A whale 'witnessing'? Not really eh? Have another look at Araquém's onça-pintada. Is it looking at you? And if so, what is it seeing? Can you personify a jaguar?

Someone paying attention may remember that Blackwood's whale has also figured here before, and that I was unhappy to find, when I viewed some originals at the AGO, that the grin I had imagined was just ... geometry.

Chris Hedges, right ...

I guess provenance matters: his latest, below, came to me via the Greenspiration newsletter, linking to TruthOut, which was reposted from TruthDig which is the original I guess.

Attached to the article are links to a gazillion social media parasites: RSS (Google), Digg, Facebook, TwitThis, StumbleUpon, Reddit, YahooBuzz, BlinkList, del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, LinkedIn, Mixx, MyShare, NewsVine, Propeller, SphereIt, Technorati, YahooMyWeb (holyfuck what a list!) plus an embedded ad, tailored by my browser for 'Toronto' from GroupOn (bringing to mind their recent IPO).

Maybe it was just lucky to have watched Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in a Rio theatre, when I was more-or-less operating in another language so that I was sensitized to recognize his bullshit as bullshit. To see Chris Hedges apparently working with him (?) the link was side-by-each with the article, which I am coming to, so I looked at it first. Oh my.

I also note that the half-dozen newsletters I get are all mad for donations just now (not to mention Wikipedia) - something to do with Christmas perhaps. Dozens and dozens of emails. They have all had donations already, more than I can afford; and the repeated entreaties grate on the few remaining nerves.

(It is not me they want, it is my donation. When I meet them at rallies they don't have time to speak to me. They mostly do not answer my emails and letters - and when they do it is just like the government - boilerplate.)

Or if you watch the names of the tracking sites flash by as you load any web page you eventually figgure out that all of them, like sea lice on a salmon, are being informed of your every click. They are all mad to know you - not you of course, but your market potential, your 'value' in hits whatever currency it is they use, in tiny fractions of pennies. A-and all the software I use is mad to install 'automatic update' which I assume is just more of the same.

On the other hand, I have not removed SiteMeter either - I admit to curiosity about who is reading this nonsense, where they are on the planet, how they arrived, what they wanted to see (mostly it seems to be the samba dancers), and so on. So ...

(You could also look at that computer there in front of you. If you own it, then consider how long you have had it and how long you expect it to last; if not, think about it on behalf of who does own it. Ask how much tantalum and tin and gold it contains; and then calculate how many Congolese women had to be raped for it to exist - a macabre calculus. ... But that's another story ...)

All quite mad. Mad as hatters. Me included.

(Is it any wonder that we are mad? Could anyone stare straight up this environmental shotgun barrel - for decades! - and not be tinged & smudged & tainted by madness? The mystery is that neither despair nor madness has stopped us, yet. And that mystery has not so much to do with either faith or magic or miracles, no.)

The last time I was on about Chris Hedges was just a few days ago, here - and I am still waiting for a few more of his books to arrive - so none of this is a bona fide conclusion just yet.

(Though I find myself wondering after reading it several times if he has lost the fucking plot.)

He wants to 'revitalize traditional Christianity' then? Is that it? Does anyone care? And when did the 'unofficial credo' of Occupy become the Beatitudes exactly?

Every sort of capitalized Christianity has already made itself completely irrelevant - from the idiot United Church of Canada leader moving her lips in Durban last week, to Douglas Stoute, the Anglican rector of St. James' in Toronto, and that other fat Anglican pig in London, wazizname ... Graeme Knowles, both of whom evicted Occupy. (Eviction is the kick-off for Hedges' article remember.) And sure, there are some religious individuals I admire greatly, Sister Dorothy for one; but I do not make the connection between their courage and Christ, or even between their courage and their advanced spiritual condition, which Hedges seems to take for granted.

And if you want to invent another Church, Chris me son; even if it's only some kind of lower-case church - please just fuck off.

The gist of it is obvious: Yet another church, this one in New York - Trinity Wall Street, Episcopalian this time - is evicting Occupy, with full washing of the hands as is customary. There are more details from several points of view in something called The New York Observer. And Chris Hedges figgures that if church people would just stand up then maybe ... and he tries to set an example and be present and a witness. All good. If I were there in New York City I would be shoulder-to-shoulder with him. But the little rhetorical bones he uses to join it up to christianity when he tells this story are the kind that stick in my throat - and there are so many. 'Turns' is what Newfies call 'em (the little bones); hence 'turny' which for me goes straight to 'crooked'. I gag and try to spit them out out.

(If you don't have this particular reflex then you probably won't understand anything I've said here. That's OK.)

The churches have repeatedly shown that they will not stand up as institutions. Everyone knows this. The reason pan-handlers tend to hang out there is that they know there is a good chance of touching one of the soft-hearted individuals who are often seen passing through those precincts.

It's individuals you need to reach out to, not institutions - time to stop beating the dead horses.

One problem (which pan-handlers also know about - and Arundhati Roy, who, to her credit, is not afraid to say it) is that they smell, these individuals, rich and poor; they have real and immediate needs of all kinds, they snore, fart, eat with their mouths open, smile at you in ways that may seem lascivious (or, worse than lascivious, in ways you do not, possibly cannot, understand), they have outrageous opinions; they are 'present' and that can be too much. Institutions are useless, but they are ... comprehensible, manageable, homogeneous; they coyly pretend to obey rules; and if you must speak to a person in one of them you can be assured that she or he is speaking in the proper code.

And another problem is that rhetoric can lead you astray. You adopt the cadence, indulge the embellishments, get into the swing - and then sometimes say things you do not really mean or have not thought quite through. Dangerous - and that, for the record, is what I think happened here. But necessary too - practice makes perfect.

(It is what sometimes, often, always, happens to me - don't believe a word you read here - and practice, unfortunately, has not improved it a bit.)

"There's no there there." Someone famous said that; though they were talking about Los Angeles I think, not the Church.

Or simpler: Do you remember Chickenman? On the radio in Montreal years back? "He's everywhere! He's everywhere!." (Meaning that he was nowhere.)

Are you waiting for magic? Is that it? Are you waiting for a miracle? You and C.S. Lewis? Doh!?

(Did I say? Is it clear that Chris Hedges is important and important to me? Did I thank him for Death of the Liberal Class and the insights it gave me? If not, I meant to. Did I say I am waiting for what comes next from him? I am.)

I set out to draw a line, threading through John Porter's Vertical Mosaic (there is neither preface nor conclusion to it or they would be posted here), through the story of Jean Billard's wife in the 2nd last post, through Gwynne Dyer's article in the last post, to an old memory of a day in Glen Milne's class ("boys and girls are fishin' together") when Jim Weller from Public Works described a hierarchy; the 'planning system' was it? No, it was 'The Project Delivery System' - that must be why I have kept the notes all these years. I didn't even know how to spell 'feasibility' in those halcyon days; and it was Glen who insisted that we learn how to spell 'hierarchy' too.

The line didn't get drawn. I can't even remember where it was headed to. Oh Well.

I stepped out of the quack's office building into a cool December morning at Main & Danforth; she never guessed that her cancer-free diagnosis almost disappointed me. Too early for Sultan to have his excellent shawarma on the go ... so, take the bus and hit the Tim's then, and waiting for the bus, remembering things ... for a moment or two I had a vision which I have now attempted to relate.

A middle-aged woman who works at the Tim's was mopping the floor at the entrance as I went out. I like her - the indignity of working there seems to irritate her and I am glad to see that someone still knows something. It's not easy I don't think. So I said, with a smile, "No rest for the weary." And she came back in less than a beat, also smiling: "The wicked," she said, "not the weary, the wicked."

[there was more, just here, which I took out]

Be well.

(eighth blackbird: VIII / I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know. Lonely Motel: Music from Slide - Addiction: one too many unchecked fantasies / one too many unchallenged assumptions /one too many unexamined beliefs /and you slide into addiction ...)

Dregs:

Some of it sinks; some floats. It runs all the way from side to side and from top to bottom - like Jesus' cross. All the way from the fundament to the tippy-top fontanelle and 7th chakra. From Jesus to Jack Daniels. From shit to shinola.

The 60's leftards who were urging us to abandon we/they distinctions turned out to be right. I can't see any other way. And the necessary compassion (to keep things together), the essential; only the authentic, the original, will do. (Oh no! Not again!? Is this going towards that damned Ivan Illich story again!? ... Yep. Here. :-)

Easier said than done it is - though I have met at least one Occupy-er who tries it out. And me. Yeah, I know it may not seem so, but I am trying too, in my way.

How can you hold in your mind, at once, some beautiful aspect of this planet: I watched two loons once, many years ago in Big Whiteshell Lake east of Winnipeg, saw them swimming, saw them flying, and a peculiar twist when they seemed to join together as they flew which I will never forget, though I am not sure what they were doing up there, fucking? can birds do it in the air?; or, or ... a smile glimpsed on the subway, a child holding on to your finger;

And (at once remember) all of it, a nossa querida Terra inteira becoming unsuitable for human creation, human flourishing, eudaemonia?

I said to my daughter one day, "The world is getting to be an ugly place," thinking of ignorant armies striving by night; and she said, "No it's not dad," thinking (I imagine) of her children, one of them quite new at the time. We were both right; I'd say, maybe she wouldn't.

I often walk beside Lake Ontario, along a beach that is not really a beach (it was put there), but nonetheless I am entranced by the waves and wavelets sliding brightly up and down the sand, all of it sparkling, sometimes. The water, taken in not far from where I walk, but so full of chlorine by the time it comes out of the tap that I have to let it stand for hours before it's fit to drink, and even then, conscious of chemicals in it I know I should fear, do fear. Wondering, as I make my morning coffee, if this deuterium-water stuff boils first?

So.

Appendices:

1. Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?, Chris Hedges, December 5 2011.

Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?, Chris Hedges, December 5 2011.

also at TruthOut

Chris Hedges gave an abbreviated version of this talk Saturday morning in Liberty Square in New York City as part of an appeal to Trinity Church to turn over to the Occupy Wall Street movement an empty lot, known as Duarte Square, that the church owns at Canal Street and 6th Avenue. Occupy Wall Street protesters, following the call, began a hunger strike at the gates of the church-owned property. Three of the demonstrators were arrested Sunday on charges of trespassing, and three others took their places.

The Occupy movement is the force that will revitalize traditional Christianity in the United States or signal its moral, social and political irrelevance. The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

It was the church in Latin America, especially in Central America and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, which provided the physical space, moral support and direction for the opposition to dictatorship. It was the church in East Germany that organized the peaceful opposition marches in Leipzig that would bring down the communist regime in that country. It was the church in Czechoslovakia, and its 90-year-old cardinal, that blessed and defended the Velvet Revolution. It was the church, and especially the African-American church, that made possible the civil rights movements. And it is the church, especially Trinity Church in New York City with its open park space at Canal and 6th, which can make manifest its commitment to the Gospel and nonviolent social change by permitting the Occupy movement to use this empty space, just as churches in other cities that hold unused physical space have a moral imperative to turn them over to Occupy movements. If this nonviolent movement fails, it will eventually be replaced by one that will employ violence. And if it fails it will fail in part because good men and women, especially those in the church, did nothing.

Where is the church now? Where are the clergy? Why do so many church doors remain shut? Why do so many churches refuse to carry out the central mandate of the Christian Gospel and lift up the cross?

Some day they are going to have to answer the question: “Where were you when they crucified my Lord?”

Let me tell you on this first Sunday in Advent, when we celebrate hope, when we remember in the church how Mary and Joseph left Nazareth for Bethlehem, why I am in Liberty Square. I am here because I have tried, however imperfectly, to live by the radical message of the Gospel. I am here because I know that it is not what we say or profess but what we do. I am here because I have seen in my many years overseas as a foreign correspondent that great men and women of moral probity arise in all cultures and all religions to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. I am here because I have seen that it is possible to be a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or an atheist and carry the cross. The words are different but the self-sacrifice and thirst for justice are the same. And these men and women, who may not profess what I profess or believe what I believe, are my brothers and sisters. And I stand with them honoring and respecting our differences and finding hope and strength and love in our common commitment.

At times like these I hear the voices of the saints who went before us. The suffragist Susan B. Anthony, who announced that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God, and the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said, “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” Or Henry David Thoreau, who told us we should be men and women first and subjects afterward, that we should cultivate a respect not for the law but for what is right. And Frederick Douglass, who warned us: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” And the great 19th century populist Mary Elizabeth Lease, who thundered: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” And Gen. Smedley Butler, who said that after 33 years and four months in the Marine Corps he had come to understand that he had been nothing more than a gangster for capitalism, making Mexico safe for American oil interests, making Haiti and Cuba safe for banks and pacifying the Dominican Republic for sugar companies. War, he said, is a racket in which newly dominated countries are exploited by the financial elites and Wall Street while the citizens foot the bill and sacrifice their young men and women on the battlefield for corporate greed. Or Eugene V. Debs, the socialist presidential candidate, who in 1912 pulled almost a million votes, or 6 percent, and who was sent to prison by Woodrow Wilson for opposing the First World War, and who told the world: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who when he was criticized for walking with Martin Luther King on the Sabbath in Selma answered: “I pray with my feet” and who quoted Samuel Johnson, who said: “The opposite of good is not evil. The opposite of good is indifference.” And Rosa Parks, who defied the segregated bus system and said “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” And Philip Berrigan, who said: “If enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.”

And the poet Langston Hughes, who wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

And Martin Luther King, who said: “On some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ And there comes a time when a true follower of Jesus Christ must take a stand that’s neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take a stand because it is right.”

Where were you when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there to halt the genocide of Native Americans? Were you there when Sitting Bull died on the cross? Were you there to halt the enslavement of African-Americans? Were you there to halt the mobs that terrorized black men, women and even children with lynching during Jim Crow? Were you there when they persecuted union organizers and Joe Hill died on the cross? Were you there to halt the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II? Were you there to halt Bull Connor’s dogs as they were unleashed on civil rights marchers in Birmingham? Were you there when Martin Luther King died upon the cross? Were you there when Malcolm X died on the cross? Were you there to halt the hate crimes, discrimination and violence against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and those who are transgender? Were you there when Matthew Shepard died on the cross? Were you there to halt the abuse and at times enslavement of workers in the farmlands of this country? Were you there to halt the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese during the war in Vietnam or hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan? Were you there to halt Israel’s saturation bombing of Lebanon and Gaza? Were you there when Rachel Corrie died on the cross? Were you there to halt the corporate forces that have left working men and women and the poor in this country bereft of a sustainable income, hope and dignity? Were you there to share your food with your neighbor in Liberty Square? Were you there to become homeless with them?

Where were you when they crucified my Lord?

I know where I was.

Here.

With you.

Down.

River of Shit - preface.

2011-12-13T00:01:00.014-05:00

Up, Down, Appendix, Slough.

I keep a candle burning during these Cluster FCCCs - a lame ritual for increasingly silly performances - and as I begin this, the last stub from Durban is burning down, a few inches to go.

(Rituals are good - it's ending them is the hard part. Last year I kept a candle lit 'til sometime in January. They sell candles by the box-of-twenty downstairs in the Dollar Store. But ... I'm an addict eh? Oh well. "Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak.")

Gwynne Dyer has got me thinking about women and hierarchies. His essay is interesting; but the last paragraph/sentence is jarring to me - it seems stuck-on, tacked-on somehow, just anyhow, and I am trying to understand where that comes from as well as the rest of it.

... still and all, hierarchies or not: some take no notice, some are caught in the cognitive dissonance and destroyed, some get through it some way - to what I don't know.

I guess the naïve can be lumped in with the mediocre; and coupled with the venal (OED: Capable of being acquired by purchase, instead of being conferred on grounds of merit or regarded as above bargaining for) and our quintessential Canadian complacency they are all but unassailable.

This picture shows our Peter the Poppet as a perfect poster-boy for venality (OED: Prostitution of talents or principles for mercenary considerations) eh? The epitome, the exemplar, a veritable para-dig-em of venal.

And yet she calls him 'principled' somewhere. A-and Elizabeth May says, "I like Peter Kent as a person. He is extremely kind in many ways." What's he got that brings these plump middle-aged moths so eagerly to his flame?

The hob-nobbing k-k-Canadian faith leaders are naïve to the point of lacking all discernment; read it and weep: Willard Metzger, General Secretary of the Mennonite Church in Canada, Words with Minister Kent; and Mardi Tindal, Moderator of the United Church of Canada, Longing for Leadership.

Mardi Tindal later participated in a panel discussion at COP17, put on by the Southern African Faith Communities' Environment Institute (SAFCEI) - one wonders at four white faces representing South Africa, but nevermind that - parts 3, 5 and 7 of this series (just the the 35 minute FCCC webcast grabbed & cut up into chunks, the original is here) show her commitment to the nonsensical notion that Peter Kent 'understands the science':
       1) David Lepage, introduction, 4 min.,
       2) Geoff Davies, 9 min.,
       3) Mardi Tindal, statement, 3 min.,
       4) Andrew Warmback, 3 min.,
       5) Stephen Leahy to Mardi Tindal & general response, 9 min.,
       6) questions & comments, 4 min., and,
       7) Elise Tempelhoff to Mardi Tindal, 3 min..

Worth watching 7) with attention as Elise Tempelhoff asks Tindal in disbelief: "... have you confirmed, that it actually was, the minister?." Mardi stumbles & stutters & says, "Oh yes ... It was minister Kent who convinced me yesterday that he understands the science and spoke about a disaster-in-the-making."

Elise Tempelhoff seems credible - her profile (the translation from Afrikaans takes a few minutes) at Beeld; and various environmental prizes here and there (one from the beer companies, OK - I never said she was Joan of Arc); but her phrasing of the comment to Tindal was enough to convince me that she is at least conscious and thinking and competent, as opposed to Tindal, not so much, whatever.

And I stumble away wondering if I inhabit the same planet as any of these people?

So I turn again to Bob singin' "I wanna let go but I can't let go" in this video from Massey Hall in 1980. I think the singers are: Clydie King, Gwen Evans, Mary Elizabeth Bridges, Regina Havis, and Mona Lisa Young. Back in the 80's I wore out a vinyl record of this as I stitched together quilts from my kids' discarded clothing, pulling all-nighters, volume on bust, neighbours definitely thought I was nuts (and they were right).

And here now; the solid rock turned to sand, imaginary sand at that; hangin' onto ... air (?) but still feeling the same: I ... wanna let go but I can't let go.

Spend all of twenty minutes wondering about going to Rio+20: take in the conference and see the girls and their families; maybe luck into a cheap hidey-hole somehow; fraternize with 'the accredited' as they come fresh from $1,000-a-night resorts in Phuket & the Maldives or wherever they go to relax these days ... Tierra del Fuego maybe (Iceland?); and ask 'em, "When is the funeral then?"

Meh.

(Does it not even occur to Mardi & Elizabeth that a person, say, Peter Kent, can be at once un-principled and charming, and not understand the science and simply not give a rat's ass about understanding the science as long as he gets what he wants (viz. their knickers off)? Were they never in a bar at closing time? Have they never met a bounder? Or is it some kind of misguided Christian forbearance? Have they never read Blake? Are they just too nice, too k-k-Canadian to call the man a criminal when that is exactly what he is?

Or is it more perverse than that? Is it the ghost of Sylvia with "Every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you."

There are no ghosts. If it is at all it must be the spirit not the ghost - it's a spiritual thing, eh?)

Be well gentle reader.

Slough:

"The infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind, ..."
Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, 34ff.

Deceived? Milton was a man after all - so it could be either not strong enough or entirely misleading. At least mother is not capitalized.

(It's not me. I'm not that smart or well read. I downoaded Inspector Morse and things turn up - this is from episode 1 in 1990, 'The Infernal Serpent'. Morse's sidekick is a Geordie. If you have been paying attention you may have noticed some of that idiom here lately.)

Appendix:

1. Weird fear of free women still panics some, Gwynne Dyer, December 10 2011.

Weird fear of free women still panics some, Gwynne Dyer, December 10 2011.

aka:
       The fear of free women in Middle Eastern monotheisms,
       Women and Monotheisms, and,
       Fundamentalists and their obsession with sex.

One should not mock the sexual obsessions of Islamic fundamentalists; it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

When a senior academic in Saudi Arabia, Prof. Kamal Subhi, declares in a report for the Shura Council, the kingdom's legislative assembly, that allowing women to drive would spell the end of virginity in the kingdom, it doesn't really require further comment. But let's offer a few comments anyway.

In the report, Subhi describes sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state where "all the women were looking at me. One made a gesture that made it clear she was available. This is what happens when women are allowed to drive."

I regret to report this doesn't happen to me in coffee shops. It doesn't even happen to me in bars, although I am generally reckoned to be the most handsome man of my generation. (The late Jurassic generation.) It doesn't seem to happen to any of my male friends either, although most of us live in the decadent, post-Christian West, where women drive all the time.

Maybe it's just that none of us are as amazingly good-looking and sexy as Subhi, or maybe Arab women are incredibly lascivious and immoral. But it seems more likely he was just imagining it all, in which case another possible explanation presents itself.

Perhaps he has a mentality so sex-obsessed and so fearful of women that these feverish imaginings seem perfectly normal to him. And they are quite normal among Islamic fundamentalists, like the Nour Party in Egypt that demands strict prohibitions against mixed bathing, "fornication" and the appointment of women to leadership roles - and got a quarter of the votes in last week's election in Egypt.

But the point is not that Muslims are weird; they are all too normal. All the "Abrahamic" religions, as Muslims call them, have traditionally been sex-obsessed and terrified of women, and the fundamentalists among them still are.

Take the increasingly influential and importunate Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews of Israel. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week told an audience that included Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor and Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni she was shocked by the growing discrimination against Israeli women. She even compared the separate seating for women on some Jerusalem buses to the humiliation of Rosa Parks, the black American woman who made history in 1955 by refusing to give up her bus seat for white passengers.

Clinton also compared the behaviour of some Israeli soldiers who recently walked out on a performance by female singers to the attitude towards women in Iran. But God - at least, the God worshipped by the Haredim - is enraged whenever men listen to women singing, so of course they had to leave.

As for Christian fundamentalist attitudes toward women, here's the Rev. Pat Robertson, one of the most influential U.S. television evangelists: "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Not to mention drive cars and hang around in coffee shops, making come-hither eyes at aging academics.

Where does all this weirdness come from? Other societies and other religions have been just as patriarchal and disrespectful of women: it wasn't much fun being a woman in traditional Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian societies either. But nowhere else was there the same male sexual panic, the profound, ingrained fear of free women that infests all the Middle Eastern monotheisms. Where does that come from?

I started to write this next paragraph three times, and then admitted to myself I really do not know the answer. It's clear from the fragments of history that have come down to us from 5,000 years ago that there was an intense struggle in the ancient Fertile Crescent between the old female fertility cults and the new male-centred religions, which celebrated war, hierarchy and blind obedience.

The male religions triumphed everywhere: by 3,500 years ago, male hierarchies ruled everything, both on Earth and apparently in the heavens. But why was the struggle so much more intense in the Middle East, and the outcome so much more hostile to women, than in most other places? Dunno.

It doesn't matter, really. You can't unpick the history; you have to start from where you are, even if you'd much rather start from somewhere else. And the fact is people can overcome their history: most Jews, Christians and Muslims today do not have extreme anti-female attitudes. The reason we have a special name for those who still do is evidence enough that they are a minority in the present populations, if you actually needed it.

Fundamentalists are a big minority in countries like the United States, Israel, Egypt and Iran, but a much smaller minority in countries like France, Turkey and Russia. In some places their numbers are actually growing at the moment, but the long-term trend is sharply down.

By today's standards, all Jews, Christians and Muslims were fundamentalists 500 ago.

Down.