Badges?! We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges!

Some "official shows you their badge". This is interesting. I, myself, have no idea what an "OFFICIAL BADGE" looks like, so I have no idea how to know if this person is legit. For that matter, can you not just print out an "OFFICIAL"-looking warrant?

The Glass Is Half Full of Shit

Think not that it's the hottest summer on record, but will be among the coolest summers for as long as you're still alive.

I find I cannot take the election, or society really seriously anymore. It’s like a Potemkin Village, or a Hollywood backstage, there’s no there there. It just seems so absurd,  like how can anybody take this seriously? Elections? It’s a farce. But this fact is inconvenient, it would render meaningless a bunch of shit. “How dare you mock our elections, how dare you note vote?!! People died for democracy!!”. What. The. Fuck. Is. Your. Point? Our elections are still a fucking farce; a drama played out, a sort of collective illusion. All style, no substance. Corporate oligarchy for all, even the Greens & NDP.

Our society believes in infinite economic growth, which is impossible*. Any discussion that doesn't acknowledge this inconvenient fact becomes pointless, at least to me. We teach this shit in University level economics courses, and it's, at least implicitly, axiomatic in almost every political party, or at least the ones that get more than 4 votes.

But Stu, isn't it arrogant to think that your beliefs, despite being different than so very many people, are true. Yes. Yes I do. You shithead. But every single quarter we MUST consume more and more SHIT, which requires more and more raw materials, more and more energy, more and more pollution. If all these fucking news reports are even remotely true, the biosphere is on its last legs, and we simply cannot cut down more trees, fish more, put more plastic and toxic shit in the Oceans, much less the requirement to increasingly do all these things forever.

Either society seems delusional, or I am. I can only operate by assuming the former.

Abridged Lincoln quote via John Sheridan / Babylon 5:

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion. We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. The fiery trial though which we pass will light us down in honour or dishonour to the last generation. We shall nobly save or meanly lose our last, best hope of Earth."

Try Not To Think About Anything

//

There are a number of analogies I can think of to describe the climate crisis. I think the most apt, and I have the Paris Agreement with this in mind, is shooting your kid in the head, and freezing them, in the hope that science will be able to revive and operate on him in the future, maybe even upload his brain into the Sentient Cloud.

This NewsRoom clip resonates with me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

Some dude, whose name I don't feel like looking up, said something like:
"If you look closely at a piece of paper, you can see clouds."

So, here's what I see if I look closely at the laptop* I'm typing this on:

This nice little thing contains an absurd amount of embodied energy. A bauxite mine in Australia, Rare-Earth mines with child slaves toiling in Africa, a nightmare rare-earth processing plant in Mongolia, diesel-fuelled heavy equipment in the places with the least amount of environmental and labour protection, many trips across the oceans on some bunker-fuel burning cargo ship from mine to processing/refining, and to manufacturing and assembling, covering it in a nice shiny plastic coating, inside a cardboard box, probably with wood from some old growth forest, which is then coated in shrink wrap, and I assume gets palletized, wrapped in more shrink wrap, put in a sea container for another trip across the globe, to some port, to some warehouse, to some distribution centre, then something happened and it was refurbished, then shipped to me. In a cardboard box. With more plastic air-cushions inside. Cool. Also, this thing is meant to be disposable, to be tossed aside, as the battery is not (at least user) replaceable, and there is no financial reason for to keep supporting old consumer products.

In every one of these steps, there are serious long term consequences. But it is invisible to me. I am removed from cause and effect, through both time and space. What effects am I responsible for? What am I obligated to do? Good Fucking Questions.
:wq

*[[Side Note: (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015), one of the last good ones. With a good keyboard. And ports. And a (shitty) SDXC card reader. And MagSafe. Fucking Apple. Fucking First World Problems.]]

Introduction

My name is not Ema Nymton, and I live in an asylum. As far as I can tell, either:

A) I'm suffering from some sort of confirmation bias
B)  the society in which I live is suicidal, insane, and delusional.

I don't think it's possible to really self-detect biases, so I'm rolling with option B.


         I live in a global society that has apparently chosen(?) to destroy itself. And yet everything here is basically normal. Nobody cares, if they're even aware of just how fucked we are.

This is disconcerting. The previous sentence was an understatement.

*Yes, I am a hypocrite. What are you, perfect?*