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 ...
Sandbags on the approach to Velana AirportWhen you fly into the Maldives you feel like the Mafia. “Nice place, shame if something happened to it.” And you’re the thing that’s happening to it.In the Maldives you can see both climate change and the impossibility of averting it within your own eyes. In the city of Male I saw sandbags around ...
This dog, Lilly, is actually the worst. You’ll get it by the endI always thought that middle age would be a bit embarrassing, like getting fat around the middle. While this true, it’s also proved to be completely unimportant. Being middle-aged means what it says on the tin: being in the middle of other age groups, not in the middle ...
A statue of Princess Vihara Maha Devi, a symbol of a long-lost time when elites actually sacrificedOnce upon a time — during our most recent collapse last year — Sri Lanka’s rich sacrificed along with the poor. I am rich and we sweated without AC or even fans. We took public transport and even bicycles. We planted food ourselves. The ...
What do these fuckers know about winning a land-war in Western Asia (Europe)? Photo from 1954NATO wants to blame Ukraine’s failure on its legacy Soviet thinking. But the Soviet Army (and early Ukrainian Army) were quite competent compared to the horror-show counter-offensive NATO has unleashed. This failure is not because Ukraine failed insomuch as NATO gave them bad advice and ...
Democracy the vodka in a bomb-shaped bottle (a concept) seems about rightI live in an Asia’s oldest democracy and right now we have a completely unelected President and a despised Parliament, and this is apparently democracy. Democracy™, a marketing exercise atop rank oligarchic evisceration. In our country, the ruling oligarchs are crushing the poor and selling off the country to ...
You can’t see because it’s refreshing, but this sign says ‘control your anger on the roads’America — marketed as the land of the free — is actually the land of autonomy. And its most avaricious avatar, the automobile. America was unsettled through violent expansion and, when they reached the far ocean, they were stuck with the same unsettling gnaw, deep ...
Mercutio Mathews, RIP (years ago)When our dog was dying, I asked the vet if our dog was dying. He said, “as long as you’re shitting and eating, you’re fine.” I think about what he said often. It’s the closest I’ve come to the meaning of life.I think about children, how you immediately have to feed them or they disappear. I ...
I’m walking around the St. Louis mall like a pharaoh inside his pyramid. This place is full of all the goods a provincial potentate could ever need, and it’s completely dead. This mall is a mausoleum. It’s like a tomb with a Cinnabon.It’s not even the malls are such a bad idea. Fundamentally it’s just the idea of wandering down ...
The first corporate AI like the VoC used ‘sustainable’ technology like wind and solar exclusively. “A senior merchant of the Dutch East India Company, presumably Jacob Mathieusen.”Colonialism began with renewable energy. Wind to sail across the world, solar to grow cash crops, and human blood, sweat, and tears to grow them. For the violent and resource-poor tribes of Europe, ‘blood ...
William Blake’s The Circle of the Thieves, dude getting devoured by six-footed serpent. What happens to wage thieves, inshallah.I’m at the Modern Café and I order two beers. The cashier turns the console around and it asks for a tip. For what now? There isn’t table service here let alone tables to sit at. Of course, this interaction is even ...
