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2007, May 31, Thursday. |
I just downloaded the site stats for the first time in ages. Imagine my surprise when I found that the most popular page by far on the site was (drumroll please):
error.shtml
Yes, my goddam error page - a default placeholder for people who mistype or follow broken links. It was loaded 80,000 times.
Compared to which, my worst wing cartoons (prime content that I put a LOT of effort into ) were seen about 3,000 times each. Pissed, bemused, puzzled, I am.
Then, dear reader, an evil thought came to mind: "change the error.shtml page to an auto-redirect - thereby sending the 80,000 to the latest WW cartoon."
Thank you Satan. Mission Accomplished, heh heh heh.
I guess you guys took a lot of drugs in the 70s, right? America's Bicentennial
Clay Bennett: Clean Air
Our national nervous breakdown has begun. Lady, it started for me in November 2000.
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2007, May 30, Wednesday. |
I've been alluding to my secret project for a while now - so here's a little preview. It's a short animated documentary which explains the ideas behind Peak Oil. The current runtime is about five and a half minutes. It should be finished sometime this year. I may expand the short to include sections on food, energy, finance and population growth --- which would bring the total time to ~20 minutes.
I estimate that all 20 minutes might be complete by September 2008, if I can work on the movie full time, without having to worry about a day-job.
Here are some thumbnails - click on them to see larger sizes. Most of these scenes have already been animated.
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| Opening shot; earth seen from deep space. |
We get closer; this is earth during the cretaceous - millions of years ago. |
Continental drift creates rifts, which become new oceans. |
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| Algae thrive, then die in the hot climate. |
The Algae fall to the sea-bed. |
Rains wash sediment into the rifts. |
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| A chemical reaction transforms the algal remains into oil and natural gas. |
A modern home is filled with oil based products. |
An early "gusher" in texas, in the early 20th century. |
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| A construction worker on a skyscraper in the 1930s. |
Downshot of New York traffic. |
A huge freeway system. |
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| A cross section of an oil well. |
Two stockbrokers, representing the 1973 and 1979 oil crises. |
An oil rig in the North Sea. |
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| Six barrels of oil are used for every one found. |
A modern farmer is dependent on oil based machines. |
Many cities need oil to power their irrigation systems. |
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You may be able to help me make this blasted thing a reality. Click here to learn about some schemes that I've been concocting.
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2007, May 29, Tuesday. |
The Post Apocalyptic landscape will be eerily beautiful, assuming that there'll be some Post Apocalyptic humans around to appreciate it.
One of the greatest mind-f*ck websites is Zapatopi.net - a construction of pure, unadulterated genius. I'm not being hyperbolic. I want this man's brain in a jar: Pleistocene Monorail?
I'd be happier if this statement was sourced, but it has the ring of truth to it. It goes some way to explaining the "going postal" phenomenon:
| Each generation born in the twentieth century has suffered more depression than the previous one and since WWII, the overall rate of depression has more than doubled. A more recent study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2000 and conducted by another team of researchers, showed more than a doubling of depression in women from 1970 to 1992. Psychiatric drug use has skyrocketed as a result. American schoolchildren today are taking four times as many psychiatric meds as all of the rest of the world combined. |
You might want to start with part 1. Don't ask me why they didn't make a "back" button...
I keep thinking that I should be miserable. Given the norms of society, an external observer would think my existance grim. I don't have a permanent home, almost no possessions, no personal/social life worth speaking of, I don't "consume", I don't eat 95% of what's considered "food", I don't go on holidays, I haven't been to a doctor since 1993, and I sleep on the floor.
Yet, I think it's safe to say that I'm "happy". I know I'm not miserable or depressed.
We were given the option of taking a week off work today (unpaid). Oh joy! One week of solitude in the apartment, working on the site, drawing new "Worst Wing cartoons", and watching British TV shows off the internet? Yay! (I'm planning on publishing a new Worst Wing every Monday, until my brain juice runs out. In next week's episode, Jesus gets his divine revenge on Dubya...)
Ha. This ties in with Kevin's latest post on zombie consumers.
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2007, May 24, Thursday. |
Another wee reminder - don't forget to check out the message boards. I check it every half hour, and try to post links and comments throughout the day (East Coast U.S. work hours).
Cartoon: Support the Troops - the Bush Way
Real quotes; here's a few more. (An old link).
The Beatle's "Across The Universe" as you've probably never heard it before.
A cool survival toy: The Map of Doom! (thanks Garfield!)
Here's a funny paragraph on opinion polls from the UK:
| This month the Conservatives score 38% (down two on last month), Labour 30% (up two) and the Liberal Democrats 20% (unchanged). Analysis shows that almost all Conservative supporters stick with their party when they are reminded that Mr Cameron is leading it, but 15% of current Labour supporters fail to stick with the party when Mr Brown is named as leader. Among Lib Dems, 21% move away when Sir Menzies is mentioned. |
I have to wonder about the intelligence of these people. They support their party, until the party leader's name is mentioned. Is it any wonder that campaigns are aimed at the heroically witless?
"I support the Liberals. Always have. They've got the policies I believe in. What's that you say? Their leader is Menzies Campbell? Bugger that, I'm voting for the Conservatives!"
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2007, May 21, Monday. |
Video link (no violence): Why The Military Wants To Keep Our Boys Off YouTube
It's a three day weekend here in Canada (yay). I've been glued to my computer, busily working on the site. You'll see some nifty thingies appearing soon...
I'm not a big fan of plastic - but if we have to have plastic toys, I can't think of a better use than LEGO. Adult fans have long been turning their collections into works of art. (I've got a six square foot Opera House stashed away in a storage pod in L.A.)
Here's a magnificent Alien Chest Burster. Bravo, maestro.
More on Michael Moore's new movie, Sicko. This paragraph jumped out:
| One of the unlikely stars of the film is Tony Benn. Moore says he first spotted the former Labour cabinet minister on an edition of Question Time on the BBC seven years ago. 'I didn't know who he was, but he spoke about student loans and said it would create a generation of wage slaves with debts. He asked: "Why wouldn't employers want that?" |
So many young people I meet now (even in Canada) have student loan debt up to their eyeballs. The worst part is, they take it for granted - as though it's a natural state. It's not. I was very lucky to get booted from Art College (in Ireland, 1986), and land in a paying animation job. On-the-job training beat the lard out of any animation course you might care to mention. I wonder how many kids do worthless courses that will never lead to work - and realise their folly when it's far too late...
Here are a couple of remarkable clips from CNBC, a mainstream financial news network in the U.S., both on Peak Oil:
Oil Supply Shock
Boone Pickens Talks Oil
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2007, May 20, Sunday. |
Land of the free? Freedom of speech? Freedom of travel? Then why is Michael Moore's new movie about about the U.S. healthcare system in danger of being impounded by the U.S. government?
| According to Weinstein, the US Treasury's moves meant "we had to fly the movie to another country"- he would not say to where. "Let the secret service find that out - though this is the same country that thought there were weapons of mass destruction, so they'll never find it." He added that he feared that if the film were impounded, there might be attempts to cut some footage, in particular the last 20 minutes, which related to a trip to Cuba. This, said Weinstein, "would not be good." |
Why the official outrage? Simple: once the light goes on in the heads of U.S. citizens that it will be cheaper for them to abandon their nation's medical system in favour of the fairer one in communist cuba, guess what's going to happen? (Hint: it's called an exodus). People are more scared of death than they are of the State Department - at least for now.
Having followed the Irish, British and American systems pretty closely, one thing is consistent: their utter inability to offer decent health care to their citizens, in spite of the fact that they're rich nations. Cuba, one of the poorest nations on earth, can offer decent health care to ALL Cuban citizens, and has enough left over to treat foreign nationals, and simultaneously export doctors all over Central and South America.
Remind me again, why exactly we pay taxes?
Cartoon: Blair meets Bush for the last time. Byeeee, poodle, and good riddance.
Bad: Southern Ocean saturated with CO2
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Southern Ocean around Antarctica is so loaded with carbon dioxide that it can barely absorb any more, so more of the gas will stay in the atmosphere to warm up the planet, scientists reported on Thursday.
Human activity is the main culprit, said researcher Corinne Le Quere, who called the finding very alarming.
The phenomenon wasn't expected to be apparent for decades, Le Quere said in a telephone interview from the University of East Anglia in Britain.
Reuters Pictures
"We thought we would be able to detect these only the second half of this century, say 2050 or so," she said. But data from 1981 through 2004 show the sink is already full of carbon dioxide. "So I find this really quite alarming." |
10 things you can do about global warming.
Here's why I love Irish Politics: Michael McDowell is the Tanaiste (Deputy Prime minister) in a two party coalition government. He's the leader of the PDs; the larger coalition partner is Fianna Fail. The General Election is this Thursday, and the FF/PD government seems likely to lose. Here's an bizarre account of an altercation he had on the campaign with a Green party politician:
Yesterday he staged a limp rehash of an election stunt that worked five years ago...On May 4, 2002, Mr McDowell shimmied up a lamp-post in Ranelagh to post his placard "One-party government? No thanks!"
It was widely heralded as one of the strokes of that campaign as, up to that point, Fianna Fail had been strolling to a clear majority.
A similar ground-breaking stunt had been mooted by the PDs in recent weeks.
We learned just how similar shortly after 2pm yesterday when Mr McDowell and Liz O'Donnell shimmied up a lamp-post in Ranelagh to post their placard "Left-wing government? No thanks!"
Nobody present managed to stifle a yawn.
Thankfully, the unlikely figure of John Gormley came to the rescue of the assembled media.
Brandishing one of Mr McDowell's election leaflets, Mr Gormley pushed through the reporters until only a flimsy microphone stand separated him from the lamp post lover.
"I have a booklet here from you. You say here that we're going to raise corporation tax. That's a lie. Withdraw that. I'm not taking any nonsense from you. You think you're going to intimidate me," Mr Gormley stormed. "You're losing it," replied a bemused Tanaiste.
"No, no, you're the one who's losing it," Mr Gormley retorted, the two balding, bespectacled gladiators less than a foot apart.
"Michael, I'm sick and tired of this. It's just smear and negativity. That's all you can do. Where are your positive ideas? It's bye-bye to the PDs.You are history."
But when Mr Gormley took out his phone to answer it, the Tanaiste shot back that it was "your friends calling to tell you not to make a fool of yourself".
Mr McDowell, who took the whole thing in surprisingly good humour, tried to get back to his script, which claimed that Labour would be dictating tax policy if the alternative coalition was elected, but Mr Gormley remained where he was, sniping when he could.
Then Fine Gael candidate Lucinda Creighton appeared on the tiny Ranelagh Avenue with her own poster.
"Don't want single-party government?" it asked, alongside a picture of Mr McDowell, "Well, thanks to him, it's a reality".
The Tanaiste promptly vamoosed. |
National politicians climbing lamp-posts. I love it...
Carolyn Baker: PROPHETS HAVE BECOME HISTORIANS
| As an historian, I often wonder just when historians a hundred years from now, if there are any left on planet Earth, will date the beginning of collapse. Will they mark its beginning with 9/11, Katrina, the declaration by an aggregation of scientists from dozens of nations that global warming is indeed occurring, the disappearance of the honey bees, the plasticizing of the oceans, the current deaths of hundreds of seals in California from the toxicity of ocean waters, the bursting of the housing bubble, the extinction of another 30% of species beyond the current 30% extinction rate, the first nuclear terrorist attack on a U.S. city, the proliferation of pandemics worldwide, World War III, the crash of the U.S. stock market, the inundation of coastlines and entire nations with rising oceans? Or maybe today, as scientists confrimed that a chunk of ice in Antarctica the size of the state of California, had melted? |
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2007, May 18, Friday. |
Oy, tired. If you purchase anything from the idleworm store, I'll get anything from 5 to 10% of the sale. It's a painless way to support the site. If you don't like the items I've posted, you can buy whatever you like on the main amazon site via this link. Don't consume too much.
First, a laugh, as you'll need it: Wonder Woman Vs. The Willy. (via growabrain)
Tom Whipple: The Peak Oil Crisis: Alarms are Sounding.
Polymers are Forever
Summer of Gasoline Shortages (Via latoc)
Oxygen supplies are needed for Indian traffic cops.
This is well written, long and grim. Pivotal Moment in the Green Scare
In such an alienating environment, more and more of them were turning towards pharmaceutical drugs in order to cope with this life they had inherited from the corporations. Time and again, the few who attempted to stop this "progress" -- this process of turning the world into a giant Wal-Mart -- were defeated, one community after another destroyed, physically, psychologically, the forests decimated, the common areas gone, even the sidewalks.
The downtowns closed, one after another, replaced by alien landscapes only accessible by car. What was left of the gutted former cities of places like New Jersey was populated by impoverished, unemployed people surrounded by abandoned and boarded-up buildings, the downtowns replaced by soulless suburbs indistinguishable from each other except that the chain stores appear in a different order depending on the town, if the word "town" can accurately be used to describe these places. v When it seemed like there couldn’t possibly be more highways, there were more. When it seemed the strip malls couldn’t possibly be uglier and more impersonal, they became bigger, uglier and without the modicum of public space the first ones often had. When it seemed public transportation couldn’t possibly get any worse, in so many places it ceased to exist altogether. When it seemed the general population couldn’t get any less healthy that it was, somehow pharmaceutical drug use increased even more, people got even more obese, and there was yet another spate of high school massacres to add to the last series.
And so many people just seemed to accept this new reality. New generations were born that never knew life could be any different. The concept of a neighbor, a front porch, or a bicycle became a thing of distant memories and old movies. The cancer rate grew and then it grew faster, but people would say this is how life is, cancer has always been with us, it just wasn’t diagnosed before. It’s easy to prove that this isn’t true, since there are societies outside the US to compare ourselves to, but nobody talked about that on TV, and most people never heard about these places, never traveled to them. Wal-Mart doesn’t pay people enough to take vacations outside of New Jersey, let alone to other countries. But they do pay just enough to keep the car running and to get the next prescription of Prozac.
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This sums up our civilisation:
There in the west, there at the end of the continent, I went north. Like so many other people, when I first visited Muir Woods just north of San Francisco it changed me forever.
It was like going back in time, way back. The forest felt alive, sentient. The trees were so massive they blocked out the sky. Some were two hundred feet tall, ten feet wide, unlike anything I had ever seen or heard of.
Someone from an environmental group was handing out literature there. Almost the entire west coast had been full of forests like this, up and down the coast, from the ocean to the mountains. These were some of the very few that remained. Many of these trees had been there since before Columbus first began pillaging the Americas. Some of them were older than Jesus.
Many of the remaining few were in private hands, belonging to energy corporations that had inherited their vast expanses of land through theft, bribery and government handouts, corporate welfare. The rest was on "National Forest" land. Most of it was being logged at a rate faster than the logging of the Amazon.
And what was being done with these indescribably majestic trees? These magical beings that took my breath away, that had such an impact on everyone I ever brought to the coast to see them? These ancient creatures that converted me to paganism overnight, that filled me simultaneously with calm and excitement, hope and despair, that made me feel truly whole for the first time. Were they at least making beautiful musical instruments or homes with these forces of nature?
Toilet paper. They were making toilet paper.
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2007, May 16, Wednesday. |
My goal: not to have to work in an animation studio again, thereby enabling me to work on idleworm full time (updates several times a day, and cartoons once a week instead of once a year). In order to make this feasible, I'll continue to live as cheaply as possible. No booze, little food, little electricity, low-rent, etc.
Furthermore, I'll be trying to eke a little money from idleworm, to keep me from the evil of wage slavery. Right now the site is costing me about $100 a month in server space and electricity. I'd like to reverse that, and have it bring in $100 a month - at a minimum. If I can generate $200 a week, I'm free. I can live on that. Here's THE PLAN:
I've signed up for google adsense, so you'll see some of their stuff appearing over the next few days and weeks. Nothing hideous, I promise. That should generate $30 - $50 a month, depending on traffic.
I've started a simple store, where you can buy books via amazon. I get a percentage of each one sold through the site. I'm only pushing books that I've read and owned, and can vouch for.
I'm going to develop the "animation" section of the site, and see if I can sell animation tutorials (as my Flash techniques are pretty spiffy, and I writes good too).
I may hold my nose and sell some stuff through cafepress. I really don't want to, but I just don't know how much longer I can stomach working on commercial projects. It's getting harder by the day.
My hosting company has a good referral program. I can make from $75 to $100 for each customer I recruit. Hell, I'd already signed up two friends before I knew they offered this program. So, I'll see if I can coax any of you readers into that. Just one sign-up a month, and the site's costs are paid.
A more sophisticated donation system, whereby generous donors (cough, ahem) receive drawings by yours truly (original sketches and suchlike).
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This plan may be moot, as the global economic system seems to be on the brink of collapse...but better late than never.
Today's cryptic links:
But...
Make.
Choose!
Spin.
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2007, May 15, Tuesday. |
Wonderful stuff from Joe Bageant:
Sure, they may kick a lot of Republicans asses out of office next election. Big friggin deal! For my people, the same feudalist deal is on the table as ever: work hard, kill when you are told to, trust your betters, and everything will be all right. Plenty of highly politicized leftists and their meeker kin, the last hopeful Democrats, came up as hard as anyone I’ve described here. The Democratic Party definitely doesn’t want them showing up like bikers at a cocktail party and talking real populism. Because there ain’t no big money campaign contributions behind populism.
Look at it this way: Black America suffered lynchings, police dogs and fire bombings just to shit on the same toilet seats as white Americans like you and me, and ultimately waste their lives in front of computer monitors next to us on the same electronic plantation of the gulag global economy swallowing America and the rest of the world. |
via latoc, a shocking article on the volume of plastic in the oceans. Jan Lundberg is right - we should regard plastic as "filth".
And now he faces...The Final Curtain...
A memorial to the dead soldiers in Iraq has run out of space. The memorial was put up in 2006.
Meet The Craggers.
More very bad news: Kuwait's proven oil reserves at 48 billion barrels Back in the 80s, all OPEC nations miraculously "discovered" huge reserves of oil (to allow them to sell as much as they wanted under newly introduced OPEC rules). Nobody believed the miracle figures, apart from the Economists and politicians, of course. The game is up.
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2007, May 11, Thursday. |
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse |
British cartoonist Steve Bell is on a roll - having way too much fun portraying Blair-as-Bambi-as-Hitler, trapped in his bunker, with his loyal henchmen:
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2007, May 10, Thursday. |
Ah crap (or carp), what's next? Ebola like disease is killing freshwater fish.
Don't worry though, the wheat will sustain us ...or not.
Fewer kids will cool the planet.
I've got The Secret: to Hell with the sick.
Via Growabrain : The Top 15 Most Embarrassing Photos of George W. Bush
Gary Brecher: Who Won Iraq?
At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I've already said that Dick Cheney's DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole. My theory is that they took a fiery young Revolutionary Guard from the slums of Tehran, dipped him in a vat of lye to get that pale, pasty Anglo skin, zapped his scalp for that authentic bald CEO look, squirted a quart of cholesterol into his arteries so he'd develop classic American cardiac disease, and parachuted him into the outskirts of some Wyoming town. And that's how our VP was born again, a half-frozen zombie with sagebrush twigs in his jumpsuit, stumbling into the first all-night coffee shop in Casper talking American with a Persian accent: "Hello my friends! Er, I mean, hello my fellow Americans! Coffee? I will have coffee at once, indeed, and is not free enterprise a glorious thing? Say, O brethren of the frosty tundra, what do you say we finish our donuts and march on Baghdad now, this very moment, to remove the Baathist abomination Saddam?"
It took a couple years for Cheney-ajad to get his American accent right and chew his way into Bush Jr.'s head, but he made it like one of Khan's earwigs, got us to do the Ayatollahs' dirty work for them by taking out Iraq, their only rival for regional power. Iraq is destroyed, and Tehran hasn't lost a single soldier in the process. Our invasion put their natural allies, the Shia, in power; gave their natural enemies, the Iraqi Sunni, a blood-draining feud that will never end; and provided them with a risk-free laboratory to spy on American forces in action. If they feel like trying out a new weapon or tactic to deal with U.S. armor, all they have to do is feed the supplies or diagrams to one of their puppet Shia groups, or even one of the Sunni suicide-commando clans. |
Here's a great post from Ran Prieur, which sums up much of what I've come to believe. He deosn't do permalinks, so you'll have to find his post for May 6, 2007:
The 2008 presidential race is getting interesting! Basically, the framing of the whole discourse gets deeper in bullshit year after year, until all it takes is one candidate who stands up and talks straight, and the internet goes wild and the dominant media have to suppress it. This happened to some extent with Nader in 2000 and Dean in 2004. This year the Democrat to watch is Mike Gravel (pronounced gravEL), who is apparently the only Democrat -- the only Democrat -- to pledge not to start a nuclear war, or in propaganda-talk, "preemptively use nuclear weapons."
And the Republican to watch is Ron Paul. You might have seen that ABC news put up a debate poll that listed every candidate except Paul, and when they were swamped with complaints, they added Paul and he blew the other candidates away. He's pretty bad on the issues, but I would probably vote for him over the leading Democrats just because he owes nothing to the ruling powers. In reality, I expect not to vote but to endorse the batshit crazy Rudolph Giuliani over Hillary Clinton, so he can finish Bush's job of destroying the American Empire and making the right look bad.
The same thing is now beginning in France, with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. The European system is much better than the American system, but both of them are circling around the same whirlpool. Socialism is a temporary compromise between central control and benevolence, which ultimately cannot exist together. The only spiritually sustainable system is one that rises organically from activities that individuals and tribes find intrinsically rewarding. And the easiest (but most painful) way to get there from here is to elect right wingers to run the control system off the rails. |
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2007, May 7, Monday. |
Those of you who use Photoshop or GIMP may be interested in this plugin, which allows you to recolour your photos to match an Old Master painting.
Via Growabrain - Our Lives Are in the Hands of Cynical Strangers
I've been playing with ubuntu over the weekend. It's a Linux distro. You download a 700M iso image, burn it to a CD, and you can boot your PC directly into Linux, without overwriting anything on your harddrive. You can install it fully too, if you like. The disc has GIMP (a free photoshop alternative), OpenOffice (Word alternative, also free), and Firefox. They've done a great job on the interface - Granny could use it to answer email. It reminds me a bit of BeOS (a very cool OS that didn't make it). Give it a go if you have an old PC lying around. It worked fine on my old 500mhz P3.
A sequel to the zombie movie "28 days later" - "28 weeks later". Must...watch...zombie...movie... Seems it's got a subtext about U.S. military involvement. The Americans come to England to "liberate" it from the zombies. And it all goes swimmingly!
OK kids. Fun's over. Time for your Monday mornin' Kick In The Balls (KITB):
Ooh, this looks like fun: Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity and Overshoot
Fiddling with figures while the Earth burns
Lovelock’s warnings may seem remote (and he hasn’t always been proved right) but with Britain basking in record spring heat he says our scepticism about the damage we can expect from global warming is understandable. “Britain and Scandinavia are becoming green oases. In 2050 or soon after, most of the world may be scrub and desert and most of the oceans will be denuded of life, but temperatures here will remain very tolerable. The downside of that is that we risk becoming like a lifeboat with millions of refugees trying to settle here.”
He is not alone in predicting a huge northwards shift in human populations: in his new book, How the World will Change with Global Warming, Professor Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic academic, predicts how population centres will move north.
“The Arctic ice cap is melting. When it goes it will open up new shipping routes, new fishing grounds and new oil fields,” said Valsson. “The Arctic Ocean will become the new Mediterranean with Siberia and Canada as the centres for human culture and civilisation.”
Lovelock is fond of recounting how, on a recent lecture tour of America, he was accosted by earnest academics seeking advice on whereabouts in Canada they should buy their second homes.
Behind such comic anecdotes, however, lies the grim possibility that billions of people face a miserable life and death as humanity finds a new equilibrium with the Earth. At 87 Lovelock acknowledges that he is unlikely to be one of them. His concern is for the generations represented by his nine grandchildren. “What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.” |
Via lifeaftertheoilcrash.net: The Smarter Emergency Kit
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2007, May 6, Sunday. |
One of my running obsessions is the decline in standards of western civilisation. Having stumbled upon this wiki of speeches, I spent some time comparing the use of language over the last two centuries. Here are the final words of Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet, prior to being sentenced to death:
| My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice-the blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled, through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy, for purposes so grievous, that they cry to heaven. Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my cold and silent grave: my lamp of life is nearly extinguished: my race is run: the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom! I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world--it is the charity of its silence! Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done. |
Eek. Goosepimples. Contrast this with any modern politician - for this example, I'll use G.W. Bush's eulogy for Reagan:
| And Ronald Reagan believed in the power of truth in the conduct of world affairs. When he saw evil camped across the horizon, he called that evil by its name. There were no doubters in the prisons and gulags, where dissidents spread the news, tapping to each other in code what the American President had dared to say. There were no doubters in the shipyards and churches and secret labor meetings, where brave men and women began to hear the creaking and rumbling of a collapsing empire. And there were no doubters among those who swung hammers at the hated wall as the first and hardest blow had been struck by President Ronald Reagan. |
Emmet's language is poetic, epic, tragic. Bush's is clumsy and prosaic - filled with comic book simplicity: "REAGAN GOOD! EVIL BAD!"
I'm not trying to cast aspersions on Bush; his speech-writers are no different from Gore's, Obama's or Clinton's. He has to use the vernacular of our age.
Again, compare the Bush passage (or any modern political speech) with Frederick Douglass, writing about the slave trade in 1852:
The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.
In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathised with me in my horror.
Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave-markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight. |
I suspect part of me responds not just to the superior language, but to the fact that Emmet and Douglass felt the words they wrote and spoke. I can't imagine them being coached by spin doctors and image consultants.
It's frightening to see the degeneration in such a brief period of time. People were still speaking with that same eloquence into the early 1900s. My best guess is that it's a result of industrialisation. Push button, pull lever, push switch. Repeat. Clang, click, whirr. Combine this with the removal of classical latin and greek from the curriculum, to be replaced with "media studies" or "self-esteem hour", and presto:
"Ah Laahk Chocolate. Ah laahk deh Preznit. Waat's awn Teevee tonaat? Amercun Ahdul? Yippeeee doo!"
3.6 million British people suffer from malnutrition, the result of a junk food diet:
Alarming levels of malnutrition have been recorded in Britain, The Independent on Sunday has learned, prompting further medical concern at the effects of the nation's addiction to salty, fatty, junk food.
Despite high-profile campaigns by the Government and celebrity chefs to improve eating habits, new figures reveal that there has been a 44 per cent increase in hospital cases of malnutrition over the past five years.
Amid estimates that up to 3.6 million people are suffering from malnutrition, including conditions found in sub-Saharan Africa, MPs and doctors last night called for action to tackle poor diets, and for all patients to be screened for malnutrition. They called for the Government's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) guidelines to be made compulsory.
In 2002, 2,729 people in English hospitals were diagnosed with malnutrition. Last year, the number had risen to 3,931.
The British Association for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition estimates malnutrition costs the NHS more than £7.3bn a year, double the annual obesity bill. Doctors estimate that up to 6 per cent of the population could be suffering from malnutrition and serious vitamin and mineral deficiencies caused by poor diet. Most do not have their conditions identified.
Experts said a reliance on pre-prepared food and failure to eat enough fresh fruit and vegetables is depleting levels of essential micro-nutrients. The deficiencies are found in teenagers, the elderly, adults and babies as young as 18 months. They warn the balance of nutrients is also disturbed by binge drinking, excess sugar and drug use.
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It might be time for a visit from the Weston A. Price foundation. Processed sugar and flour isn't food...
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2007, May 2, Wednesday. |
I know we're deluged with "don't eat this, don't drink that" on a daily basis. That said, THROW OUT YOUR NON STICK COOKWARE (better yet, do what Matt Savinar recommended, and mail the buggers back to DuPont).
How to Green your Sex life.
Disgusting: We Shop Until Chinese Workers Drop; and frustrating, if you try to find a product NOT made by Chinese slave-labour. I'd recommend some kind of, I don't know, worker's revolution, but we all know how the last one worked out...
Wie Meiren was a standard-issue gulaosi, the kind you can find in every Chinese town. She was a 32-year-old woman with three kids who left her hungry village and travelled to Dongkeng, where she got a job assembling the toy cars for the British kids’ market.
There, she was expected to work 360 days a year, from 7.30am to as late as 9.30pm, with only a half-hour break for lunch and fines for taking too long on the toilet. As in many Chinese factories, military drills were often yelled: “Long live the company!” If anybody argued back to the managers, they could be punched in the face.
One day, Meiren had a family crisis at home. She was forbidden by her bosses from going to take care of it - so she became angry and fainted. She forced herself to keep going to work for the next fortnight, but eventually she became so exhausted she collapsed - and died before she reached the hospital. The autopsy indicated gulaosi - heart and organ failure caused by extreme exhaustion. |
China: America’s Banker
FDA ORDERS DETENTION OF ALL VEGETABLE PROTEIN PRODUCTS FROM CHINA
What the? Chinese Disneyland? IS NOTING SACRED? Never mind the slave labourers, poisoned food, etc., SEND IN THE LAWYERS! It's WAR, BABY!
Honeybee Die-Off Threatens Food Supply
Humourous: The Self-Locking F-22 (thanks, Bogy!)
Violent Acres: How the Me-Generation Ruined Modern Conversation
The very day we became obsessed with the self esteem of our children is the first day shit started going downhill. We told our children they were unique and special and perfect. We insisted that the world would one day find them beautiful and smart and glib. We told them their individuality was their greatest asset and refused to criticize them even when it was sorely needed.
The end result? A generation of children who are endlessly fascinated with themselves who can’t, for the life of them, understand why the rest of the world isn’t as enamored by their utterly uniquely genius minds as they are.
Teaching our children to be confident is one thing, but we took it too far. Our children are infatuated with themselves, sometimes to the point of delusion. With so much of their love and energy devoted inward, how can we expect them to feel love for another?
Self esteem brainwashing dooms people into becoming narcissistic assholes who genuinely believe the whole world revolves around them. |
Wow. I don't think Tolkien would be allowed into America, were he alive today:
"The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets," he wrote to Christopher in another wartime letter. "It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be."
This I think is the Tolkien who survives, the cantankerous, politically unclassifiable, anti-globalization Tolkien who is clearly our contemporary -- jibes against feminism included. In trying to return a lost sense of myth and mystery to his little corner of the world, he also sought to make the globe as a whole less small, dull and flat. He lived in a provincial suburb for virtually his entire adult life -- he was a Christian after all, and accepted that this is a fallen world -- but fought against the spreading ideology of suburbanism more fiercely than any black-clad rioter smashing a Starbucks window. "There is only one bright spot," he added in the "Anarchy and Monarchy" letter, "and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations ... But it won't do any good, if it is not universal." |
The above is page 8 of a long Salon article. Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
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2007, May 2, Wednesday. |
There's a nasty anti-CFL campaign underway, designed to scare people from using the bulbs, based on their mercury content. Mercury is bad, unquestionably, but the alternative is to use incandescents, which will pump a lot more mercury directly into the atmosphere, where it can freely enter the food chain. Tuna anyone? Anyhow, here's a nice debunking of the scaremongers.
The CFL vs. incandescent debate should be moot once LED bulbs come down a bit in price, and up a bit in power. Of course, one could always use candles and olive oil lamps.
Former CIA director Tenet comes clean on the Iraq invasion. Too bad it took four years, thousands of dead Iraqis, the loss of American prestige, 3,000+ dead soldiers and Tenet's use as the fall guy for him to discover the joys of honesty.
J.H. Kunstler made me rightly furious last year when he supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (which didn't work out too well, as things turned out). However, nobody is better at describing the strange decline of building standards in America: Compost Nation
| The design failures of these things might be attributed to a loss of knowledge and a lack of attention to details, but I think a deeper explanation has to do with the diminishing returns of technology. We've never had more awesome power tools for workers in the building trades. We have compound miter saws, electric spline joiners, laser-guided tape measures, and many other nifty innovations, and we've never seen, in the aggregate, worse work done by so many carpenters. For most of them, apparently, getting a plain one-by-four door-surround to meet at a 45-degree miter without a quarter-inch gap is asking too much. In other words, we now have amazing tools and no skill. What you wonder is whether the latter is a function of the former. Is the work so bad because we expect the tools to have all the skill? |
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2007, May 1, Tuesday. |
Maddox is back, with a tirade about: stock photo models.
This made me laugh (in a good way) - especially following my recent decision to move to Portland, Oregon. A couple try to find a good place to move to in order to prepare for the coming crash:
| This list launched an Internet search binge that took us (virtually) to every corner of the world. We looked at Europe, Africa, South America, the US, Canada, Australia... short of Antarctica, we seriously researched everywhere. Many places were quickly eliminated based on cost, stablity of government, resource depletion, natural hazzards, even language. We came back over and over to the USA, France, Italy, and Chile. Eventually, it was down to France and the USA... then just the USA. From there, we ruled out non-coastal areas, metropolitan regions, areas prone to natural hazzards like hurricanes, and places that had high property costs. We were living in Portland, Oregon at the time, and after our exhaustive search we found ourselves literally where we started from: the Pacific Northwest. |
Haw Haw. Bush's police state methods are ruining the American tourist industry, to the tune of $94 BILLION DOLLARS. How many wars would that pay for, me wonders?
| America is rated the world's most unfriendly destination for foreign travellers in a recent global poll. The War on Terror (which includes a $15 billion fingerprinting program that humiliates every visitor to America's shores and has yet to catch a single terrorist) has destroyed America's tourist industry, killing $94 billion worth of tourist trade, and 194,000 American jobs. |
More on the bee die-off. The most depressing thing about this is the list of potential killers - climate change, cel-phones, GM crops, pollution, velloa, etc.
Here are some grim links from the lifeaftertheoilcrash breaking news page; daily reading if you're addicted to panic attacks and heart palpitations, as I am:
Watching television harms toddlers, says psychologist
Robert Rubin on the Dollar Possibly Losing Its Status as International Reserve Currency
Forgive me for being blunt, but the U.S. dollar is sinking into the toilet
The Coming Currency Shock
Six steps to Hell
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A new Worst Wing: The God Couple.
A new episode of The Worst Wing: Jedi.
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