Illustration by Mark Garlick, Science Source (via)The dinosaurs dealt with much worse climate change than us (the air was literally on fire) and somehow survived. The terrible lizards got shrunk down to rotisserie size, but they were still alive. After thousands of years, they even thrived, coming back as ‘terror birds’ in time. As I’ve written, we should be so ...
Poverty’s increase in the heart of White Empire, via Stephen SemmlerIn both America and its capital colony Sri Lanka, economists point to numbers to say people are doing fine. Reduced inflation, etc. As the old medical joke goes, “the operation was a success, but the patient died.” Here’s some numbers to tell you why the conventional statistics are lies. Poverty ...
A cemetery in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Photo by meInfinite growth on a finite planet is cancer, and this cancer is terminal now. Has been for a while. I hate to be the one to tell ‘ya. Climate change is just a symptom of the all consuming rot. All the ‘renewable’ cures just move the cancerous growth to different organs. The ...
Baby Yinliang, the dinosaur. “We were surprised to see this embryo beautifully preserved inside a dinosaur egg, lying in a bird-like posture.” — Dr. Waisum MaWill we end up like the dinosaurs? We should be so lucky. The dinosaurs actually survived much worse than us. They were dealing with climate change and got hit by an asteroid and somehow made ...
My daughter at a now empty graveI haven’t worn color since Dinesh Anna died. It’s only supposed to be for a few months, but I haven’t stopped. The mourning period presumably starts with a death certificate, and we haven’t even got that yet. He’s not even buried. They exhumed the body and now — nine months later — there’s just ...
From the Blues Brothers (1980)For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.I was at my Achchi’s house where everybody’s slowly dying. I remember when her road was a dirt road and my Seeya would walk me down it, or maybe that’s a photograph, either way I remember. Now the ...
Thanos having a literal strawman argument when he became a farmerWhen I watch Hollywood movies, I root for the villains. They’re the only ones trying to change anything. They’re certainly the only ones thinking big enough to change something on the scale of ‘the climate’. We don’t need superheroes to ‘stop’ climate change. We’d need supervillains.You Don’t Want ThisSpeaking as ...
Sri Lanka’s 2022 protests failed and things have become even worseSince Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt we have been colonized again. This time by the IMF, with policy run out of the American Embassy with Indians as enforcers. Same colonial shit, different capitalist day. This is marketed as ‘stabilization’ but it’s really just the rich standing on the backs ...
Image of thermodynamics via Granta MagazineIn physics, ‘work’ is the energy transferred to (or from) an object. Not all energy can be transferred to an object, some is necessarily lost as heat. If we keep doubling the work we do every generation (a 2.3% growth rate), the waste heat boils the oceans in 400 years. Work is thus not something ...
The only spirtual machine I’ve seen. Jaffna, Sri Lanka 2010.In 1999, Ray Kurzweil published The Age Of Spiritual Machines. As a teenager, the book had a great influence on me. I actually believed in what he called ‘the singularity’ and I was looking forward to it. This singularity was a point of exponential growth that would be awesome. Evolution of ...
Einstein as the tooth fairyBeing one with the universe is thought of as being a peaceful state, but the default state of oneness is being dead. Resting in peace, as they say. A snake eating you alive can teach you this as well as a sage, but nobody wants that. What we really want is the knowledge of death while ...
The cat and my wife, who claimed to not like catsThey say write what you know and, right now, I’ve got a cat literally crawling all over me. It may not be of particular interest, but he’s in front of the keyboard so this is what you get.Our daughter has always wanted a cat but A) we have a dog ...
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), (Under the well of the Great Wave off Kanagawa) [‘The Great Wave’].As discussed, we have lost the ‘fight against climate change’ before we started, simply from the way we look at the problem. ‘We’ are not the relevant species and ‘fighting’ is not the right metaphor. All of our ideas of ‘victory’ hinge on further domination of ...
The Louis Vuitton Tambour Carpe Diem, a minute repeating watch. $459,000.I write about climate change all the time, but somehow never think about it. It’s like the prospect of my own death. It’s definitely going to happen, but not soon, so fuck it. All the horrors of the future are ultimately like the horrors of the past. Distant.Where I live, ...
Disaster girlThe Limits Of Growth, published in 1972, ran thoughtful computer models of our future up to 2100. The models were explicitly not predictions, but as a 2009 retrospective said,Its predictions have not been invalidated and in fact seem quite on target. We are not aware of any model made by economists that is as accurate over such a long ...
Kent State students gather around a wounded student, 1970. Howard RuffnerThe American education and healthcare systems look mind-boggling broken, but they obviously work for someone. Following the money, these systems persist because make billions for a few corrupt corporations, but I think there’s more to it than that. The ruling oligarchy also benefits from making young people debt slaves, too ...
Isaac Cordal, Waiting For Climate Change, 2019As Renaee Churches writes on Medium, it’s too late to ‘fight’ climate change (itself an oxymoron). Climate change is just one of many exponential problems caused by exponential growth, and you simply don’t have much time before exponential processes get out of control. And that time has simply gone.We have had warnings for hundreds ...
Marvin Mattelson, Corporate Head Hunters, 1980‘We’ are often the subject of climate change pieces. ‘We’ need to do this, ‘we’ should do that, what do ‘we’ do? The royal ‘we’ has unfortunately been dethroned long ago. ‘We’ do not exist in any functional sense and ‘we’ (as in humans) are not even the relevant species to what we vainly call ...
Cloudcatcher, Vevey Switzerland, 2014 by Arno Rafael MinkkinenLike all fights against nouns (drugs, terror), the fight against climate change is a category error. Climate change is a natural reaction to artificial growth. Centuries ago, colonizers incarnated human greed as corporations, and these now ruling AI have done what they’re programmed to do, grow at any cost. ‘We’ are not even ...
The fire loop at a perahera, photo by Nazly AhmedAll the tech bros trying to ‘solve’ climate change miss what I learned from failing Computer Science 102. If you ask a stupid question of a computer, it will just run in a loop, overheat, and crash on you. This is precisely what we’re doing by trying to have infinite growth ...
