Month: December 2024

Last day of the year, and there’s not much to celebrate, aside from the corner store remaining open. Short of a miraculous awakening to reality the climate situation guarantees today’s children will face environmental collapse, and might even find themselves fighting WW III. Democracy is rotting away, and cost of living is forcing an ever increasing number of people into poverty and homelessness. Our politicians don’t have the strength of character to call a genocide a genocide, and as for the corporate and tax-payer-funded media, they have been caught with their undies down disseminating Israeli propaganda.

I remember a comment made by David Suzuki on his way to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, “If past civilizations can teach us one thing, it is that they all disappeared.”

Anyways, good luck to our young people.

No even remotely related image, but rather a fun one, that’s Leonardo da Vinci’s housemate Gian Caprotti da Oreno, better known as “Salai” or as Leonardo’s friends described him, “diavolo in un corpo.” Reportedly Leonardo was never as productive as after this “devil in a body” had moved in.

Happy New Year.

Gaza

Killed: at least 45,399, including 17,492 children

Injured: more than 107,940 people.

Missing: more than 11,160

Numbers sourced from AJLabs.

Today at our weekly demo there were three 50 meter long banners with the names of the dead.

Some seek to ban these peaceful demonstrations, the same who enable this massacre. Don’t fear us – it’s God who will spit your name from His mouth.

We can be positive about the quiche not going flat, but where things matter most there’s not much cause for optimism. Below is a graph of global temperature anomaly since 1940.

Australia, like most nations, waffles on about putting children first, protecting the vulnerable, and building a better future for all, but the graph proves that’s a load of crap. Notice how the rate of warming has increased since the mid seventies, and especially the past two years which have left scientists scratching their heads, and praying it’s not indicative of a catastrophic increase in the rate of warming. There’s no reason to believe this acceleration will not continue because what needs to be done is not happening. Here in Australia the federal government set a target of 43% reduction in emissions by 2030, and five years out we are nowhere near on track to meet that target.

Below is another graph, which makes simple why the planet is heating up at an accelerating pace. It plots energy in and energy out, and it should be blatantly obvious that if the same amount is coming in and less going out the result will be a rise in temperature, but that’s a bit too much like rocket science for many. Maybe they do get it but their wants outweigh children’s right to grow up on a healthy planet. They are no different as criminals than drug dealers.

To S.A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness.
Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage
ours for the moment
Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape,
and the blind worms grew fat upon
Your substance.
Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house,
as a memory of you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow
Of your gift.

T.E. Lawrence.

Selim Ahmed (S. A.) was the companion (?) of T. E. Lawrence.

Below a photograph of Lawrence at about the time when he and with Arab troops took Akaba from the Turks in 1917.

Currently reading his “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” Certainly sheds light on the present situation in the Middle East.

But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

George Orwell, Polemic, January 1946.

That’s the conclusion to Orwell’s essay, “The Prevention of Literature.” Worth reading and prophetic.