Odyssey.

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Raymond Robinson of Cross Lake Manitoba has joined Theresa Spence on Victoria Island in Ottawa. He began his hunger strike on December 12. Heroes!

The blockade of CN in Sarnia has been stopped by Superior Court Justice John Desotti. Ron Plain (another hero) has apparently declared this a 'huge victory', which it is not; but it is a lesson, viz. flash actions may be more effective.

Au lieu d'un chateau fort dressé au milieu des terres, il faudrait penser a l'armée des étoiles jetées dans le ciel. (possibly Jacques or Raïssa Maritain or Jean-Luc Barré, in the late 60's or so)

My own journey is now through Thomas Pynchon (it's the arthritis); though I would prefer to be walking with the KI or working with the Unist'ot'en in Wet'suwet'en beside Brett and Julien. 

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THE FISCAL CLIFF IS FICTION ... (and the 'Debt Ceiling' as well)

THE CLIMATE CLIFF IS NOT.


Tom Toles has a similar notion.

And a touching vignette from tOad below. His (her?) caption is "Les conséquences de nos chers nombreux conforts manquent cruellement d’un certain réconfort."

Which she (he?) translates, "We nestle in the comforts of progress though distressed by costs in process," trying to rhyme 'progress' & 'process'. But réconfort has a sense of giving courage, strengthening ...    [I'm working on it :-) ]
 
 
 
The real Odyssey (for me) these days is trying to see more clearly what is necessary (as posed a few weeks ago) and somehow stay with the Lucky '13 energy.    :-) 

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Good. Baby steps at least:    Stephen Harper has called for a more-or-less timely meeting on January 11. His motivations undoubtedly included pricking the Idle No More balloon before it could overwhelm him, and a nice estimation of Shawn Atleo's (and most of the rest of official native leadership's) current insecurity and likely increased tractability because of it ...

... but still.

The photograph at the right bears looking at closely; it is worth studying carefully, there's a lot in it - here it is again, larger, in colour - well more than three humble heroes (whom I applaud and support with all my heart).

A few pundits to remember (for good and bad reasons): Christie Blatchford, Jeffrey Simpson, Chantal Hébert, Jason Fekete & Tobi Cohen, and, L. Ian MacDonald.

I wish I could say that I had not heard certain things in the statements of Theresa Spence and Raymond Robinson - if they had not said them I might have been able to pretend they are not true; and anyway they were in extremis at the time if not articulo mortis. But there it is: baby steps on all sides.



In the words of Dennis Meadows: "I think we need something totally different," (just after minute 28 of this video and out of context I know). 

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Down.

Doh doh ... DOHA (!)

The whole shitteree is a death machine, an apparatus for extinction.
Up, Down. 

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Background music from our Jimi.    Contents: OK THEN, Doh doh ... DOHA (!), Fossicking Among Root Causes, Postscripts: Elizabeth May, Peter Kent, Christiana Figueres, Apology.

OK THEN, HOW ABOUT THIS?
Lord Stern uses two phrases in an article today: "it's a brutal arithmetic," and "I am ... just calculating what is needed." He then goes on to make milquetoast of it.

But his words got me thinking: What IS needed? How CAN we force our political masters to speak truth to the science before it is too late?
How about hunger strikers demanding a formal public debate?
One would need some savvy environmental champions and a moderator above any possible reproach ... a-and some individuals ready to lay their lives on the line (for something that just might be achievable).

Eh? Are you ready to step up for that? 

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From Copenhagen to Doha - the UNFCCC clusterfuck (aka UNfuct):

(Thanks to tOad, cartoonist at Le Monde. The thumbnails are clipped - click to view complete images.)

You can follow along if you like with the IISD or ECO newsletters, or on the CYD blog ... or, if you want to see some of the smiling faces on the NGO side, try IISD's ENBOTS newsletters.

[It is incredible and unbelievable but the silly boogers have tried to bar Anjali Appadurai from COP 18. (!?) You can read about it in The Guardian. That said, one wonders why she would want to go there - speaks to the lame alternatives I guess. You can find some of her recent writings on [Earth in Brackets].]

Michael Bloomberg gets it, sort of more-or-less. Barack Obama does not. This speaks as much and more to their relative positions in the power hierarchy as it may to whatever intelligence, understanding, personality etc. they may have. (There is an important lesson here about scale, scope ... discretion.)

'Cryoconite' (the black smear in Birthday Canyon pictured above right) could just as accurately have been called 'dust' - so much for the scientists lost in their own belly buttons - umbigophiles.

Two sad stories from Brasil: (em defesa da ganância / in defence of greed)

BBC: Mass protest in Rio de Janeiro November 26    &    22 billion R$ (more) for Belo Monte (2/3 of it public money).

(Compared with Doha - 1,000 folks at $1,000 per day all in for ten days makes ... 10 million conservatively or just a drop in the bucket. But again, this is public money, extorted from the poor and transferred to the already rich & comfortable & their tax lawyers.)

Government politicians & bureaucrats, labour unions, financial institutions ... and the captivated populations with upturned hopeful faces ... the whole shitteree is a death machine, an apparatus for extinction. Harsh.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Ezra Pound, 1913)

The only bright points I can see just now are the Unist’ot’en/Wet'suwet'en blockade in northern BC and the continuing native struggles at the Belo Monte site in Altamira:


You can learn more about them and donate (that is the very least you can do): Unist’ot’en Camp    &    O Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (MXVPS). 

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Who gets the blame?
It is easy enough to blame institutions such as RBC & BNDES or groups such as the so-called 1%, they deserve it no doubt, but a short meditation on concupiscent consumers (or even, cringeing conned complacent cretinous ... concupiscent consumers) may show that this line of approach doesn't really wash very well.

A more satisfying hypothesis is that almost the entire human species is mad. Homo Grǽdum is insane, off the rails, berserkers!

Two short excerpts from two eminent and perspicacious observers on that axis:

Northrop Frye, 1968:

There are two contexts in which the question of mental health exists, and they are directly opposite to one another.

The first is the therapeutic context. Here society is the norm, and the individual suffers from some psychic disability that prevents his full social functioning. All forms of mental illness, including the schizophrenic and the manic-depressive, come under this category, and their antisocial actions range from committing suicide to murdering public figures.

In the other context, society as a whole is sick and paranoid, and mental health can be attained only by the individual as a result of some detachment from the hysteria around him. Some societies, like Nazi Germany, are more obviously insane than others, and some are more obviously controlled and manipulated than others. But the same principle, that the mob is always insane and that only the individual can be sane, is always present.

Society itself, of course, cannot distinguish the mentally sick person from the healthy person who repudiates its own sickness. ... Frequently individual detachment and neurosis are found in the same person, and many forms of rejection of social values have themselves their neurotic aspects. ...

Martin Buber, 1948:

The doctor who confronts the effects on the guilty man of an existential guilt must proceed in all seriousness from the situation in which the act of guilt has taken place. Existential guilt occurs when someone injures an order of the human world whose foundations he knows and recognizes as those of his own existence and of all common human existence. The doctor who confronts such a guilt in the living memory of his patient must enter into that situation; he must lay his hand in the wound of the order and learn: this concerns you. But then it may strike him that the orientation of the psychologist and the treatment of the therapist have changed unawares and that if he wishes to persist as a healer he must take upon himself a burden he had not expected to bear.

I have been learning what I can of the holocaust, the Shoah; two books in particular stand out: Bauman's 'Modernity and the Holocaust' (from Cornell) and Agamben's 'Remnants of Auschwitz' (from Zone Books).    I wonder if the 21st C (not to be outdone by the 20th) will trump all previous evils by killing every living thing on the planet north of blue-green algae?

A.S. Byatt's Ragnarök: The End of the Gods (review here, available from Canongate) is worth reading several times.

It goes without saying that Buber's remedy, prescription, what you will ... operates only between two individuals, or at most in a small group ... which brings me back (again again again) to Ivan Illich (wanting to end, you know, on a positive note here today) and the Good Samaritan.

(It also goes without saying that this cannot be done alone.)

Be well. 

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A postscript (of course):    Elizabeth May's press conference of November 29, too long and meandering but still ... here is the video. She ends by saying, "Any honest person in political life who has looked at this science should be screaming from the rooftops ..."

I would say not only those in 'political life' but every one. That they ... we ... are not (screaming from the rooftops), proves, conclusively and categorically to me at least, the diagnosis of madness, insanity, death wish. 

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2nd Postscript:    I guess some of Peter Kent's words on the subject should be knitted into Madame Defarge's scarf:

Our Economic Action Plan 2012 focuses on the drivers of growth and job creation—innovation, investment, education, skills and communities—underpinned by our commitment to keeping taxes low, and returning to a balanced budget by the end of this Parliament.

While the federal government is working to be a partner with the private sector in economic growth, my role is to ensure that this growth happens in an environmentally responsible way.

Putting 'growth' and 'environmentally responsible' in the same sentence in this way is an insult to anyone with even rudimentary arithmetic - the statement is categorically, ineluctably, incontrovertably ... impossible! False! These silly boys, so 'smugge and smoethe' (such schmucks) are nitwits! How can everyone not see it?

Peter and his master, Stephen Harper, are so deeply enmeshed in the ideology of denial ... but really (as a once-upon-a-time good 'ol boy myself, I have to say), denial (and concomitant defiance) are such ancient and effective strategies and could even be admired if the consequences in this case were not so dire and general - involving as they do the entire planetary civilization.

An interview has turned up with Dan McDougall, Canada's negotiator in Doha, as he mumbles and chokes out the party line. The interview originates with CCTV, but since things come and go quickly on the uddernet I have posted a (poor) copy on YouTube.

Might as well get to know him a bit; here is the blurb from Environment Canada: Mr. Daniel (Dan) Edward McDougall.

"Keep your hand upon the throttle, and your eye upon the rail," goes the old hymn Life’s Railway to Heaven. It's growth or be damned!

In some future, when the shit really hits the fan, these politicians and their lackeys may be dragged out of their comfortable hidey-holes and lynched as the environmental criminals they are - by another, even more devolved generation of Canadians, maybe the last, not nearly so polite and reserved (more like Clockwork Orange) - but it will do no more good then than it would do now: by then it will be too late, and now it would only play into the law-and-order agenda which is doing just fine already (in the face of a declining crime rate). 

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Last and final:    There was (is?) a genius in some South African ministry - the person who designed the eloquent logo for the Durban meeting last year. And there is obviously another - who selected Louise Bourgeois' sculpture Maman for the entryway to Doha.

Such thoughts are difficult, as evidenced by J.M. Coetzee's convocation address at Witwatersrand this week. Of course sex has nothing, or very little, to do with it.

If Christiana Figueres were the son of the (then) President of Costa Rica the spectacle of quintessential bureaucratic (mindless) glee would be no different.

Much better, coherent, summaries have been provided elsewhere by Kumi Naidoo and Elizabeth May. 

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Apology:    Oh yes gentle bourgeois burghers I am rude & impertinent (and lost and despairing), but do not fear - it could be worse don't you think?

Here, we can all have a laugh with Monty Python's Argument Clinic, which is, one presumes, where Kent and Harper and the rest of the cabinet learned their rhetoric skills. 

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Down.