Showing posts with label Noam Chomsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Noam Chomsky. Show all posts

Friday, 15 March 2013

Diehard, not.

(I don' care'f I do die do die do die do ... Johnny Cash.)                   Up, Down.                                     Ides 
Contents: David Suzuki & Jeff Rubin, Oratory List, All vs Honey Bees, and Here's for the Pope ... uh?.

Defiance! A refuge, and maybe not the last one neither.
Coming into focus (perhaps). So the Musak® from our Neil is the same, almost in focus: Hey Hey, My My with Crazy Horse in 1991 & this year in Australia, 2013; & Johnny.

Luckily I have kids, some of whom still talk to me; a constitution which has survived considerable abuse; and an abiding willingness to laugh at it all (including myself) - accidents of birth and temperament for which I am humbly grateful.

Can't be posting on the Ides of March without a tip to Julius Caesar (from Act I scene 2):
        Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.
            Caesar: He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass.
 
David Suzuki.Jeff Rubin.There's a lot of good straight talk in this: David Suzuki & Jeff Rubin at University of Western Ontario in October 2012 (45 minutes). If you just want the protein: they speak for 20 minutes each, Jeff Rubin begins at 4:30, David Suzuki at 24:30; followed by a Question & Answer session (45 minutes).

This short clip from the Q&A is where the focus came from: "We need to get down on the ground and actually meet living human beings and engage ourselves in discussion." Yes. Easier said than done but, yes.

But as I consider the audience these men are addressing in the light of the remarks by Gwynne Dyer (below) a light begins to dawn. It is too late to even bother trying to reach the bourgeois burghers and their good wives because the problem is now in the hands of the great unwashed - the under-educated in the West (including the shaken but still smug union members) and the huge numbers in China, India & Africa whose dearest wish is to grow up and somehow (any how) become just like them.

Someone I know, a climate scientist, gets on a plane to go south because the lengthening days in March have inspired him and he wants the warm sun, not when it comes to him, but right now! (Many in my family do the same.) And CO2 be damned!

Keith Marnoch.Some revealing moments in the gnocchi from Keith Marnoch, the host, Director of Media at UWO, who says things like "entertaining and interesting," and "we're hoping for a really good show," and "we hope that you enjoyed yourself." He might have said, "Maybe now you'll get your fricken thumbs out!"

An American pundit (who apparently believes in miracles) writes: "But surely we would all feel better about the future if the full creative power of American capitalism were unleashed on the climate problem." Oh really?! 
Bee suit.Bee suit.
 Collection of good speeches:

Severn Suzuki: UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, June 1992.

 

Lula da Silva: COP15 Part 1 & Part 2 in Copenhagen, December 2009.

 

Ian Fry: COP15 in Copenhagen representing Tuvalu, December 2009.

 

Noam Chomsky: How Climate Change Became a Liberal Hoax, early 2010.

 

Gwynne Dyer: Hot Hungry and Hostile: The Geopolitics of a Warming World (skip to 'Keynote Address') at the BC Power Smart Forum, October 2011.

 

Anjali Appadurai: COP17 in Durban, December 2011.

 

Dennis Meadows: Perspectives on the Limits of Growth during the Smithsonian Institution symposium, March 2012.

 

Jim Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change with TED, March 2012.

 

José Mujica: president of Uruguay Rio+20 in Rio de Janeiro, June 2012.

 

Tim Jackson: Green Growth, Fairytale or Strategy? at Technische Universität / University of Technology in Berlin, December 2012.

 

Naderev Sano: COP18 in Doha representing the Phillipines, December 2012.

 
I don't know if any of this does any good at all; and no way of knowing. No surprise anymore though that none of them speak to me eh? 
Honey Bees.Owen Paterson.Bayer AG, Leverkusen, Germany.Syngenta International AG, Basel, Switzerland.Monsanto Company, Creve Coeur, Missouri.E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Wilmington, Delaware.
We kept bees on the farm - through the propitious arrival of a swarm one day into a bush by the house, and a friend with the requisite knowledge & equipment being handy. And of course Jimmie Rodgers' hit Honeycomb in 1957 when I was 11 permanently spliced honey bees and yellow (Oxum) into the primary sexual circuit, the main bus.

So reports of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) touch me deeply (as it were). The latest political evilness of sacrificing the bees to expedient economics by Owen Paterson is here in The Guardian: Owen Paterson set to scupper EU plans to ban pesticides.

This Wikipedia paragraph includes the phrase "sub-nanogram toxicity". A nanogram is not very much - one billionth of a gram. I can hardly grasp the notions of parts per million (ppm) & parts per bellion (ppb) - they escape my imagination. A while ago I mentioned a study (abstract here) showing that less than 5 ppb of bisphenol A (BPA) in the water more-or-less stops reproduction among brown trout. To make a comparison I (awkwardly) convert "sub-nanogram toxicity" into something less than 1 ppm by body weight (100 milligrams for a slightly above average honey bee worker apparently).

These are infinitesimally small amounts! The purveyors of this neonicotinoid poison should be prevented. That they are not - and that anyone sells or uses it at all, knowing what it does ... leaves me speechless. 
Toad: A white elephant departs.Toad: Pigs & sub-pigs.Toad: Pigs & sub-pigs.Aislin: Disneyfy the Vatican! Mickey Mouse for Pope!
Of course, making such infantile montages marks me as a yahoo ... so ...

I sent out one more email suggesting an action to follow up on Suzuki's remarks (short clip here): sandwich boards in Dundas Square saying 'Ask Me." ... And had a response: at least two ready to go out together and more taking an interest.

 
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

                                        Robert Frost.
"Diehard!" I thought.

But within a few hours it became too confusing, overwhelming. I was terrified to see them again, freaked; did not want to be myself anymore; cut my hair, shaved off the moustache & goatee and pulled out.

That's it I guess.

Be well.
 

Irritation at Daylight Savings Time lingers on (usually for months). Send the meddling bureaucrats responsible for it home! Fire every last one of 'em!

Ah! The problem with the keyboard is the built-in mousepad thingy. Too complicated to figgure out how to disable it in Windows7 so - duct-tape & cardboard have stopped the sucker and I am the happier for that.   :-)

Down.

Sunday, 23 December 2012

What ever.

or: Leftard-lib bourgeois sensibility refudiated.     or: Fuck You Very Much!
Up, Down.

Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat.Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat.This is more like it:    Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat began her hunger strike on December 11 demanding real conversation with the government for all native people in Canada. Some details at Idle No More (you may want to turn off your speakers). Best is to listen to Willie Sproule (1 minute).

There is applause in this small apartment tonight for her courage and strength. I have not seen a clear statement from her yet - when I find one I will post it here. Here, this interview on Day 8 tells some of the story; and another interview on Day 11; and an equivocal report on Day 16. What can I do to help I wonder? Maybe I will go there next week to see if I can lend a hand somehow.

Aamjiwnaang Sarnia blockade.Aamjiwnaang Sarnia blockade.As well, the people of Aamjiwnaang have blockaded the CN rail tracks near Sarnia and say they will continue until Harper meets with Spence - details & contact. An equivocal report in the Globe, saying, "... yet to decide whether to challenge a court injunction ..." was flatly contradicted by Ron Plain when I spoke to him. Details on the CN line affected can be found here, and a short video, You've Inspired A Nation, of the Aamjiwnaang action (with Ron Plain).

You can help: send cheques to Ron Plain, 256 Essex Street, Sarnia, Ontario, Canada N7T 4S2; or email RonPlain [at] mail.com for account transfer details.

Idle No More, Michipicoten Wawa.Many others across the country are acting in solidarity. A 12-hour road & rail blockade by the Garden River and Batchewana First Nations is underway in Sault Ste. Marie - some details here. The banner in Wawa (pictured) is a good one. Joe Clark says, "humble and achievable," and gets it right.

YES!

This blog (on the other hand) is a bust, obviously. Three weeks and not a single serious substantive reply to what I thought - and still think - is a BIG question close to the centre of it somewhere: relevant, timely. I can't hardly believe it.    (!?)    You have to laugh I guess.    :-)

It is here: OK THEN, HOW ABOUT THIS?.

The closest was an email from a doughty demonstrator, whom I once watched carry a banner for HOURS through the cold and rain, never asking for relief or even, particularly, recognition; but she confused a 'fast' and a 'hunger strike' - a natural mistake, understandable. In October I mentioned the Climate Fast on Parliament Hill. In fact I went there at some cost, but found myself unable to join in for various reasons; watched from a distance for a while and left.

Sadly, unfortunately ... the time for symbolic actions has passed. You can run but you can't hide.

Easiest thing would be to quit, but it's, you know, become a habit now, ingrained; and anyway I have nothing else to do. (See 'costing not less than everything' below :-) Still, I like this exit line and I'll leave it:

Cyanophyta baby!
 
Ecosia.Oops, sorry - I think I was mistaken, didn't read the fine print. It is Bing repackaged; a-and doesn't play very well with Firefox. Just like a programmer of a certain calibre & generation to have no difficulty imagining a total re-invention. :-)

This belongs up front:    Here is something everyone who sees this can actually DO, viz., use the Ecosia search engine and shove a small hard something up somewhere into the soft parts in the machinery of extinction. Yes gentle reader, Google & Bing and the rest, a-and this incessant navel gazing computer/internet addiction - right down to the digital readout on your coffee-maker, uh huh, not to mention all those essential air flights - are unequivocally part of the problem. So - a tiny step.
   [Thanks to Tim Jackson for this tip.] 
Aislin/Terry Mosher puts the em-phasis on the wrong syl-lable:

Terry Mosher/Aislin: swastika hypocrisy.If you want to go using a Nazi swastika in your political cartoon (sir) then best to have your eye fixed on some holocaust-comparable tragedy; which this, awful as it is, is not.

I am a parent and a grandparent. I mourn in visceral sympathy with the parents of Newtown. And there is indeed a holocaust unfolding, which threatens all of us and our offspring; but neither of these tragedies has to do with swastikas - dragging in this kind of imagery is intentional confusion, classical Freudian displacement, self inflicted mind-fuck.

Remember some (more-or-less personal since you are a Montrealer) history: viz. swastikas on flags marched down Park Avenue in the Montreal of the 30's ... Or consider Obama's unseemly haste to splice righteous grief into provisions for the coming martial law. He is silent on putting civilization and all future generations of most every species on Earth (including H. sapiens) into the ditch, and weeps now over the children of Newtown - I am sorry to say that it looks to me like crocodile tears.

I agree that it would be simpler if we could just blame Nazis, or the NRA, or the anarchists, or anyone beyond the protagonist himself for what happened in Newtown. But I don't think that's possible.

And sorry to tell you but the smart money (whatever 'smart' means), following Wayne LaPierre's advice even though he's got it mostly upside down, is buying up farm land AND guns.

[Anyone who sees a callous heart in this ... cry ... misses the mark. It is a mere sketch, impressions towards a nuanced view, trying to make sense of it; nothing more than that gentle reader.

I do not recognize this bit of Aislin's melange. Anyone who does will be thanked for letting me know what it represents. (Ah! The 'evil eye' - thanks to Martin & Paul. AND they inform me that Google image search can do this - copy&paste it into the camera on this. Who knew?)] 
Brad Werner.Peter Haff.Is Earth F**ked?    (In a word: Yes.)

I am not surprised that Brad Werner looks like a refugee from some Brasilian comedy show. He asks the question that is at the tip of everyone's tongue, and in a forum like the AGU, that (I imagine) takes balls. That he then cloaks his answer in ten yards of abstruse & arcane terminology and apologetic mumbling about his (intentional?) personal disorganization is not surprising either. I had to watch it three times before I began to see what he means about 'management'.

I came to it via this (Monga Bay! Imagine that! And no thanks to the AGU for making it easy to find from there). There are two YouTube videos of AGU session EP32b: one shows the people talking, and the other just the slides - I recommend both - about an hour each.

At one point I thought it might be a hoax - but the presenters seem to be bona fide (if not on the quality of their presentations): Peter Haff at the Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University; and Brad Werner at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. 
Noam Chomsky:    This interview (Noam Chomsky: How Climate Change Became a 'Liberal Hoax' - 20 minutes) was filmed sometime after Scott Brown and the Republicans took over Ted Kennedy's US Senate seat, so ... early 2010 or thereabouts. (Why cannot the people who post these videos provide proper provenance details?)

I have not seen a better overview. (And some more insight into 'management'.) 
Tim Jackson:    Tim Jackson engaged in a sort-of 'debate' with Ottmar Edenhofer at TU (Technische Universität / University of Technology) in Berlin on December 3 this year - 'Green Growth, Fairytale or Strategy? Climate Lecture 2012':
Blurb at PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research);
Tim Jackson, details at University of Surrey;
Ottmar Edenhofer (World Bank economist/bureaucrat) details at PIK;
Video 1 (~40 minutes) Tim Jackson;
Video 2 (~40 minutes) Ottmar Edenhofer;
Video 3 (~40 minutes) discussion with Petra Pinzler.
And another video (~50 minutes) of Tim Jackson delivering a comparable lecture at Vooruit Ghent in 2011 (when he was not recovering from immediately recent surgery).

He says:

This is not an economy in which the kind of transition towards low carbon technology and sustainable industry is going to be achieved. It is an economy that relentlessly pushes us to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.
Or try this - 
Guy MacPherson:    His blog and a presentation (~50 minutes) late in 2012 sometime, maybe November. I think he exaggerates 'a bit' for rhetorical effect - but not (in my admittedly insane perspective) enough to make any difference to the central argument - that global economic collapse is our last faint hope. 
Stephen Leahy.Stephen Leahy.It's not news:    Stephen Leahy is climbing up the journalistic ladder. His latest in The Guardian comes pretty close, not to 'news' by any means - sadly, this information is not at all new - but to more clearly quantifying things. The research he quotes is securely locked up behind a pay wall at Nature: 2020 emissions levels required to limit warming to below 2 °C, Joeri Rogelj, David L. McCollum, Brian C. O’Neill, & Keywan Riahi. They admit (apparently) to being 'optimistic' in their estimates.

We're looking at 52 gigatonnes (billion metric tonnes) this year, we need to see 41-47 gigatonnes by 2020, so-oh ... emissions must peak in the next few years, let's say 2015 for round numbers. (Not 'growth in emissions must peak' but, absolute quantities of emissions must peak - quite a difference.)

This completes a circle in a way; I object (below) to Leahy's equivocal mewlings on Doha at Straight Goods, but his comment here on Brad Werner's 'Is Earth F**ked?' is, let's say, in a different 'register':    "If people don't march on their capitals demanding action over the next two years the next generation is really are [sic] f**ked. And we don't have a proper clue what a +4C world would be like to live in. (Hint: for many it's a 'kick your feet up and die' scenario) [sic]". 
As tais fotografias ...

1946: from V-2 #13.1966: from Lunar Orbiter.1968: from Apollo 8, Earthrise.Oh yeah, it used to make me misty, proud, part of something bigger than myself, great; sort'a like Caetano but not so advanced.

Even when I first saw 'Earthlights' there was still some'a that goin' on - and by then I had heard Caetano's song Terra (from Muito, 1978). I made this translation in 2003 or 2004 sometime I think.

'Earthlights' by NASA.But - there's always a 'but' eh? - now it horrifies me and more with each day that passes.

Some of these Gaia nitwits go on about H. sapiens as a virus, as something the planet will (soon?) be well rid of. It's a tempting vision but I am not one of those who take it up - simply because it would be turning on the most beautiful experiences of my life: children being born, love (what I know of it) - and this ain't no bogus bourgeois sentiment neither!

Screengrab from ZHAW's air traffic animation.This air traffic animation (made four years ago already) is more of the same - it comes from ZHAW (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) where you will find a link to the original.

Or this one - atomic explosions from 1945 to 1998: I find the original by Isao Hishimoto too long (15 minutes), so here is an accelerated version (4 minutes) of part of it. And at least two more nuclear bomb tests since 1998: by North Korea in 2006 & 2009.

Horrifying! What else can you call it? I would like to see one correlating the spread of background radiation from nuclear power plants with, say, the IQs of five-year-olds - but they keep those statistics well hidden. 
The advantage in watching these animations is to take several steps back from 'climate change' without quite getting so far back as 'the subject/object split in Graeco-Roman thought'.

And this is useful because the problem is NOT JUST CLIMATE CHANGE, or ocean acidification, or methane dispersal from melting permafrost and clathrates, or species extinction, or powerful poisons everywhere around and within us - arsenic in the rice, BPA in the water, cumulative low level radiation - ... or, or, or ...    It is ALL of these PLUS human social and political inertia and the reasons for those: greed, concupiscence, incontinence, ... and so on.

It is HUGE and you have to stand back to see it.

... em que apareces inteira porém lá não estavas nua e sim coberta de nuvens. 
Yvo de Boer, Bali 2010.Yvo de Boer, Copenhagen 2009.Yvo de Boer, Bali 2007.Yvo de Boer:    A tough man who occasionally weeps.

No tears from our Yvo at Doha though. He was in on the 'Global Business Day' - here is the press conference that followed (~20 minutes) - a competent highly paid consultant completely under control. He was quoted in The Guardian: "It's not going to happen, with developed countries in the financial state they're in. We need to be realistic," and he subsequently wrote this, also in the Guardian.

I could say that he saves his tears for worthy occasions, unlike, say, Barack Obama - or something.

But the reason he has been on my mind is that for one reason and another - and I am sorry to leave you guessing, it is just that space does not permit - I identify with him. Moving to KPMG was the rational choice when he saw that the UNFCCC was/is going nowhere - though he never said it, and didn't burn any bridges over it.

I am not even a tiny fraction so clever. When I saw what I was involved in all I could do was walk away into what amounts to ignominy, beggary. ... So, there is some envy in this small salute to him as well.    :-) 
Arsenic in the rice.    Yup, Lundberg ... one of the FAQs on their website says 95 ppb; but somewhere else they say 3-5 mcg (micrograms) per 'serving', which for a 110 gram serving I compute to be ~30 ppb - doesn't correlate, so who can say ... 'some' arsenic then.

Drinking water standards in the rich Western countries run ~10 ppb. Trying to get my head around ppb is difficult. And of course one tends to consume more water than rice.

A report on the effects of Bisphenol A (BPA) on trout reproduction ('Effect of bisphenol A on maturation and quality of semen and eggs in the brown trout, Salmo trutta f. fario', by Franz Lahnsteiner et al. in 2005: abstract, and the full report is buried in this pdf.) showed that 5 mcg per litre (which I compute to be 5 ppb) just about put a stop to procreation for those fellas.

Grant you, BPA is not arsenic - just trying to get a sense of proportion y'unnerstan'. Anyway ... that's it for rice on my plate; and I expect that's it for the $50 million a year that Lundberg were turning over (and an interesting ethical problem for them no doubt).

What about local organic potatoes I wonder? 
Internet non-events:    Naderev Sano.Madeleine Diouf.There's no 'there' there! 10,000+ hits on YouTube for Naderev Sano of the Phillipines speaking at Doha. ... Well, what does that mean I wonder? Nothing and less than nothing. The version without lip-synch gets twice that, 20,000+ and some dreck called 'Girls Fails' gets 80,000!

Look closely. Naderev is getting 15 minutes of fame - he deserves better. Madeleine Diouf looks like she might be an incarnation of Iemanjá.

Doha viewed as a ball mill - the kind they use to make talcum powder.

A hundred or so people pass by here daily, more sometimes. Mostly they are looking for T&A. Lately an image of a more-or-less unclothed young woman being painted by a Montreal makeup artist has held entire sway: Rémy Couture and his Inner Depravity (at the bottom of it). Not surprising; visualizing the un-dead should be a growth item - I can't watch all those vampire movies but I think I understand where they fit.

Malvados: O poço dos desejos / The Wishing Well.Malvados: O poço dos desejos / The Wishing Well.
The Wishing Well

A wish?
To be able to criticize the world without making the least effort towards changing it.

Presto! A social network!


Gilmar: Espera!! / Wait a sec!Gilmar: Espera!! / Wait a sec!

Wait a sec!

I'll post it on Facebook!






 
Owt for Nowt:    I just like the sound of it: aught for naught, áht for náht ... "An' if tha does owt for nowt, do it for thysen."

Nothing is as it seems. Did Alice say that?

The ideology of positive thinking makes anything such an easy out, eh? Then there is the even more insidious ideology of not (no never!) crying Wolf!

I tried to comment, politely I thought, on some equivocal Doha coverage by Stephen Leahy over at so-called Straight Goods saying, "If wishes were horses beggars would ride." I guess they didn't understand; perhaps something in it frightened them (?) and they didn't publish it - stopped by the (union-member?) moderator.

Christmas?! Bah Humbug!

'A mentira tem pernas curtas mas vida longa, então vai longe.'

Beginning the segue towards 'time': Solstice is past and the days are getting longer now, but ... imperceptibly. 
Rentiers/Rentières:    People, humans, do think, but only when forced; and even then, most of it just serves ... inertia, of one kind and another.

I was going to leave it at that; and then came across this (though he stops well short of anything substantive):

... the tendency of even the best systems to degenerate as rent-seeking special interests grow on the body politic like barnacles on a ship’s hull, and civic virtue yields to human frailty.    (Turning Points, Niall Ferguson in the NYT)
I know about this, to my cost ... I could tell a long story about my time as mayor of a small town in BC, maybe another time. (There is one about the kid who taught me to say, 'Fuck you very much!' too - in a kind of Elvis-impersonator style; and how I came to the phrase 'what ever' - a long list ...)

Rentiers, bankers, government freeloaders both elected and hired, even Charles Taylor in his plea for codes at the end of the excerpt below ...

Eventually though, pop goes the weasel; like an artery hollowed out by diabetes, or an umbigo - getting 'soft in the middle' as Paul Simon sings somewhere, or blindness punctuated by flashes as pieces of the retina detach ...

"He cursed me when I proved to him that a whisper said not even you can hide." 
The meat of the matter:

Since reading Ragnarök (a number of times) I have started following A.S. Byatt more closely. (I did read all of her novels years ago.) Here is her introduction to The song of songs, which is Solomon's.

She just gets nicely started and then ... stops. (?) And it is incredible to me that she does not pick up on the obvious similarity between 'Shulamite' and 'Shunammite'. (?)

A bit of background: We (protestants in Upper Canada) were taught that 'The Song' had to do with Christ and his church. Bollocks of course, utter bollocks; but the lies you are told as a child do tend to stick.

So here is a fat old fart, well beyond hope or desire for romance, finally getting just a little clearer on an essential story.

There is supporting controversy I had not imagined:

Shulamite: Principal character in the Song of Songs, although mentioned there in one passage only. According to the opinion of some modern critics, the Shulamite was the bride of a shepherd; but her beauty kindled in Solomon a violent passion, and he endeavored to win her for his harem. As to the etymology of the name, it would seem that it means "a native of Shulem," which place, according to Eusebius, is identical with Shunem. This view is supported by the Greek version, which evidently was made from a Hebrew text having 'שולם' ('Shulem') instead of 'שונם' ('Shunem'). On the theory that the term "Shulamite" is equivalent to "Shunammite," some critics have gone so far as to identify the Shulamite with Abishag, who after David's death became prominent in the court of Jerusalem.    (The Jewish Encyclopedia)
'Smerge' is a term invented by a colleague of mine many years ago to describe an operation in computer drafting: short for 'Sheet Merge'. I use it towards other ends as well: in this case, a number of texts, just slammed together into the same stew - Presto-whiffo! Whammo! Kick-bust-fuckId-up! - to see what it tastes like. The texts in this case are:
Byatt's essay on 'The Song of Songs', here;
The relevant passages in the KJV:
       First Book of Kings, Chapter 1, and,
       The Song of Songs;
T.S. Eliot on time, 'Four Quartets', pdf, or listen to himself (~1 hour);
Ivan Illich on The Good Samaritan via Charles Taylor;
A quotation from (possibly) Jacques Maritain, here;
Wendell Berry on resurrection, here, or listen to himself (~3 minutes);
Northrop Frye on resurrection 'The Double Vision', complete here; and,
Northrop Frye on 'interpenetration' (I heard him say it somehere).
That's it. I'll leave it with you. (There will be a test next time. :-) 
I want to close with something about despair:

I suffer with it, greatly; but somehow - southern sense of humour inherited from my father? stamina? constitution? also from him, I don't know - it does not get me quite all the way down, does not quite vanquish. A few days or a few weeks and something ... changes - it is always a surprise how little it takes; an infolding yes, and a seed provided to infold as well. [I can't seem to get this right ... anyway, it happens.]

Recently I heard from one of the few Toronto activists who speaks to me at all - and the author of some of the very most imaginative gambits I have seen anywhere - saying that he has withdrawn to try to recover, 'heal', but a long time now, six months or a year already. A friend quotes The Book of Job to me (via Joni Mitchell). Others I know try to establish some kind of (what seems to me corrupt, false) balance - eating local food to compensate for extended air flights and such like.

So.    ...    Look here! Events of the next few years will determine the future of our entire (planetary, not just 'Western') civilization and possibly of our species as well; and we have all got front-row seats, there is no back-bench to be found; and this makes the choice rather simple really: either "Curse God, and die," as Job's wife counsels, or (curse God and) get on with strengthening what ever remains, that may be ready to die.

(I do believe it also requires at least some collaboration, even with people you may not like very well.    :-)

"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late." Here, have another listen to Bob & Jimi.

That's it gentle reader, best I can come up with tonight, be well. 
Postscripts:
¡Ya Basta!¡Ya Basta!Motivated reasoning: an emotion-biased decision-making strategy used to mitigate cognitive dissonance. (Probably cuts both ways too.)


As usual the post is done and the point not made. Or maybe it is sort'a made but too literary, too implicit; or just too knuckleheaded, too stupid, too mad, insane - missing some fundamental foundation out of the spiritus mundi archetypes, out of the 'social imaginary'.

Oh well.

I used to do business with the Mennonites - selling them windmill parts. I loved being around them. Nothing to be taken for granted though, no room for complacency - the joke that goes, "A Mennonite can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scot and make money," is ... close.

Over the years of it I came to the conclusion that some of the strength I found in them and admired came from Matthew 18, verses 15 & 16. Someone told me that it is an important scripture for them - this was not 'official' or even 'insider' information y'unnerstan', just gossip, second-hand; and don't mistake me - I am not quoting it as if I am some kind of Christian. I've mentioned it before including a few months ago, in August: here (where the insidious verse 17 creeps in like a snake).

So. Scripture or not - if you can't get an honest response anyhow then you are doomed, doubly doomed, and diddled.

There was a club in Ottawa, 'Le Hibou' I think it was, and Gordon Lightfoot sang there one night when Red Shea was still with him. We had front-row seats - I can't remember how that came about. He must've sung 'Chimes of Freedom' I guess because until today I thought that phrase 'too personal a tale' was his :-)
 
Down.

Saturday, 31 December 2011

Even the (colossal) sun has spots.

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.

Elsie Moll Stevens by Adolph Weinman, maybe.Elsie Moll Stevens by Adolph Weinman, maybe.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.

Noam Chomsky, April 2011.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.

Change in net-worth, 2004-2010.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?

Pintando os dedos.Pintando os dedos.(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.

¡Ya basta!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).

Line & hand in Chauvet cave.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.

Deportation of Greenpeace.Gambling on the Future of the Planet.Africa & poor nations scream while the Rich and Getting-Rich bicker.See you at COP-Out 18 or COP-Out 19 or 20 ... it depends.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.

Zuma with showerhead rapes Free Speech.Zuma with showerhead rapes Justice.Zuma with showerhead.Zuma with showerhead.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.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 ...

City of Oakland logo.City of Oakland logo.City of Oakland logo - New Dreams, New Ways.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).

Mayor Jean Quan & Police Chief (acting) Howard Jordan.Mayor Jean Quan.Mayor Jean Quan.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.