December 28, 2017

Santa’s Chariot of the Sun

Santa carries the sun of the dying year in his reindeer-drawn sled through the sky of the longest night, distributing the lights and gifts with which we kindle the sun of a new year out of the sparks and embers of the old.

November 26, 2017

Excerpt from La Belle Sauvage, Volume One of The Book of Dust

Excerpt from La Belle Sauvage, Volume One of The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman:

The lawns all sloped gently up to a great palace, glowing at every window, where people (too small to see in detail at that distance) moved about as if at a ball or a reception for important guests. They danced behind the windows, they stood talking on the terrace, they wandered here and there among the fountains and the flowers in the garden. Scraps of a waltz played by a large orchestra drifted down to the travellers on the grass, and scraps of conversation too, from the people who were walking to and fro.

On the other bank of the little river there was . . . nothing to see at all. A thick fog covered everything beyond the edge of the water. From time to time something would make the fog swirl and seem about to part, but it never did. Whether the opposite bank was like this one, cultivated, beautiful, wealthy, or whether it was an empty desert, they couldn’t tell.

[...]

The path to the palace led through the gardens, among the little trees with lights, past the beds of roses and lilies and other flowers, past a fountain with glowing water and then another with water that sparkled and a third that sprayed up not water but something like eau de cologne – and after all that, the travellers seemed not a yard closer to the building on the hill. They could see every window, every column, every one of the steps leading to the great open door and the glowing space inside; they could see people moving about behind the tall windows; they could even hear the sound of music as if a ball was in progress; but they were just as far from the palace as they were when they started.

‘This path must be laid out like a sodding maze,’ said Alice.

‘Let’s go straight across the grass,’ said Malcolm. ‘If we keep it right in front of us we can’t go wrong.’

So they tried that. If they came to a path they crossed it. If they came to a fountain they went round it and carried straight on. If they came to a flower bed they went right through it. And still they were no closer.

[...]

Wandering towards them was a little group of two men and two women. [...] They were young and elegant, dressed for a ball, the women in long gowns that left their arms and shoulders bare, the men in black and white evening dress, and they each carried a glass. They were all laughing and talking in that light happy way that Malcolm had seen lovers doing, and the dæmons, all birds, fluttered around or settled on their shoulders.

‘Excuse me,’ he said as they approached, ‘but . . .’

They ignored him and walked closer. Malcolm stepped right in front of them.

‘Sorry to bother you, but d’you know how we can—’

They took no notice whatsoever. It was as if he didn’t exist except as an obstacle in the path. Two went one side of him, laughing and chatting, and two went the other, hand in hand, murmuring into each other’s ears.

[...]

He found that he could return to the canoe in just a few steps. Somehow that wasn’t surprising.

[...]

[Malcolm climbs a tree for resin to repair his canoe ...] Then he looked out of the tree and across the great lawns and flower beds as far as the terrace and the house beyond it: gracious and comfortable, splendid and generous. He thought that one day he’d come here by right, and be made welcome, and stroll among these gardens with happy companions and feel at ease with life and death.

Then he looked the other way, across the little river. And he was high enough in the tree to see over the top of the fog bank, which only extended upwards for a few feet, as he now discovered; and beyond it he saw a desolation, a wilderness of broken buildings, burned houses, heaps of rubble, crude shanties made of shattered plywood and tar-paper, coils of rusty barbed wire, puddles of filthy water whose surfaces gleamed with the toxic shimmer of chemical waste, where children with sores on their arms and legs were throwing stones at a dog tied to a post.

[...] Bonneville! It’s him!

[...]

‘That’s the place where people go when they forget. You seen the fog on the other side?’

‘Yes. And I saw what was behind it.’

‘That fog’s hiding everything they ought to remember. If it ever cleared away, they’d have to take stock of theirselves, and they wouldn’t be able to stay in the garden no more.’

November 11, 2017

Seven megatrends for global warming ‘hope’ – five of which are bunk

At The Guardian on 8 November, Damien Carrington wrote “The seven megatrends that could beat global warming: ‘There is reason for hope’

1. Methane: getting to the meat
2. Renewable energy: time to shine
3. King coal: dead or dying
4. Electric cars: in the fast lane
5. Batteries: lots in store
6. Efficiency: negawatts over megawatts
7. Forests: seeing the wood

#1: Methane not only has >20 times the greenhouse effect of CO₂, it persists in the atmosphere only ~10 years, whereas CO₂ persists for hundreds, ie, the emissions from coal burning in the 19th century are still out there and those from coal and oil in the 20th century and today will not diminish for hundreds of years.

Alas, besides #1, and except for #6 (using less energy), the other points are bunk.

#2: Intermittent and variable renewable energy (wind and solar) do not significantly reduce emissions, because backup sources are required. And such diffuse energy sources require massive amounts of land and materials to collect any meaningful amount: real adverse effects being the cost of theoretical-only benefits.

#3: Coal use is not diminishing, only slowing in growth. Where it has decreased, it is being replaced by cheap natural gas (half the CO₂ emissions but lots of methane leakage at the wells; also most practical backup for wind, except that forces the generators to operate at about half the efficiency they are otherwise capable of).

#4: Electric cars are only as "green" as the grid they get their power from (and see #5).

#5: Batteries reduce efficiency (see #6). For example, an internal combustion engine is a lot more efficient that burning fuel to make electricity (with two-thirds of the energy lost as heat) to charge batteries to then move a car. And like electric cars, they are an environmental disaster on a large scale.

#6: There is a shortcoming here, though, in that demand for energy continues to grow with increasing population and wider technological prosperity (i.e., more of the world living like the richest), offsetting increased conservation and efficiency.

#7: The article calls for rather than cites ending deforestation. It does not mention that much of it is driven by animal agriculture (another, besides #1, of its contributions to climate change). It mentions palm oil plantations, but doesn't mention that those are for "green" biofuel. It doesn't mention the cutting driven by demand for wood as a "green" source of electricity and heat.

Cf:Wind and Solar Power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat” By Eduardo Porter, New York Times, Nov. 7, 2017

September 26, 2017

Don't waste your time with distractions from pulling down statues, taking a knee, punching nazis

C. J. Hopkins writes (excerpt):

Now, despite what the Russian propagandists will tell you, this recent outbreak of fascistic behavior has nothing whatsoever to do with these people’s frustration with neoliberalism or the supranational Corporatocracy that has been expanding its global empire with total impunity for twenty-five years. And it definitely has nothing at all to do with supranational political unions, or the supersession of national sovereignty by corporate-concocted “free trade” agreements, or the relentless privatization of everything, or the fear that a lot of people have that their cultures are being gradually erased and replaced with a globalized, corporate-friendly, multicultural, market-based culture, which is merely a simulation of culture, and which contains no actual cultural values (because exchange value is its only operative value), but which sells the empty signifiers of their eviscerated cultural values back to them so they can wear their “identities” like designer brands as they hunch together in silence at Starbucks posting pictures of themselves on Facebook.

No, this discontent with the political establishment, corporate elites, and the mainstream media has nothing to do with any of that. It’s not like global Capitalism, following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. (its last external ideological adversary), has been restructuring the entire planet in accordance with its geopolitical interests, or doing away with national sovereignty, and other nationalistic concepts that no longer serve a useful purpose in a world where a single ideological system (one backed by the most fearsome military in history) reigns completely unopposed. If that were the case, well, it might behoove us to question whether this outbreak of Nazism, racism, and other forms of “hate,” was somehow connected to that historical development … and maybe even try to articulate some sort of leftist analysis of that.

This hypothetical leftist analysis might want to focus on how Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to Despotism, and is essentially a value-decoding machine which renders everything and everyone it touches essentially valueless interchangeable commodities whose worth is determined by market forces, rather than by societies and cultures, or religions, or other despotic systems (wherein values are established and enforced arbitrarily, by the despot, the church, or the ruling party, or by a group of people who share an affinity and decide they want to live a certain way). This is where it would get sort of tricky, because it (i.e., this hypothetical analysis) would have to delve into the history of Capitalism, and how it evolved out of medieval Despotism, and how it has been decoding despotic values for something like five hundred years. This historical delving (which would probably be too long for people to read on their phones) would demonstrate how Capitalism has been an essentially progressive force in terms of getting us out of Despotism (which, for most folks, wasn’t very much fun) by fomenting bourgeois revolutions and imposing some semblance of democracy on societies. It would follow Capitalism’s inexorable advance all the way up to the Twentieth Century, in which its final external ideological adversary, fake Communism, suddenly imploded, delivering us to the world we now live in … a world where a single ideology rules the planet unopposed from without, and where any opposition to that global ideology can only be internal, or insurgent, in nature (e.g, terrorism, extremism, and so on). Being a hypothetical leftist analysis, it would, at this point, need to stress that, despite the fact that Capitalism helped deliver us from Despotism, and improved the state of society generally (compared to most societies that preceded it), we nonetheless would like to transcend it, or evolve out of it toward some type of society where people, and everything else, including the biosphere we live in, are not interchangeable, valueless commodities exchanged by members of a global corporatocracy who have no essential values, or beliefs, or principles, other than the worship of money. After having covered all that, we might want to offer more a nuanced view of the current neo-nationalist reaction to the Corporatocracy’s ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the rest of the planet. Not that we would support this reaction, or in any way refrain from calling neo-nationalism what it is (i.e., reactionary, despotic, and doomed), but this nuanced view we’d hypothetically offer, by analyzing the larger sociopolitical and historical forces at play, might help us to see the way forward more clearly, and … who knows, maybe eventually propose some kind of credible leftist alternative to the “global neoliberalism vs. neo-nationalism” double bind we appear to be hopelessly stuck in at the moment.