A Big Bad Brick Wall
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Maybe it won’t matter anymore.
Paul Beckwith, doctoral student in climatology at the University of Ottawa, posted the following on Google docs on August 27:
(https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByLujhsHsxP7OXliVnN4T3lnekE/edit?pli=1)
By his analysis, the Arctic sea ice will be gone by September 30. Yep, that’s September 30 of this year, 2012. I can’t interpret all of the data, but his comments in red are instructive. The last slide in the set tells you what he thinks this all means.
I’ve been watching the Arctic ice numbers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (www.nsidc.org). They are nowhere near as radical as this guy. On the 27th they announced a new record low ice area, but also a slowing of the melt rate, consistent with the usual minimum date of Sept 10-20, not the Sept 30 this guy talked about.
IOW, the NSIDC, and my squint at the curves say a new record low, 20-25% below the previous record, but still more the 3 million km^2 at the 2012 minimum.
I know of no one who is feeling secure or confident about the future. Yes, people watch their TV’s and pretend all is well or as well as it is going to get but there is a realization and era has ended and an unease over what is to come.
You don’t have to trade currencies or follow the latest remarks out of Brussels or Frankfurt to know Europe is crumbling. Just the continuous summits and proliferation of acronyms being introduced as ‘solutions’ reveal there is no solution and that all that is taking place is a desperate effort to avoid the inevitable.
We are going to a place the world has not really been since the collapse of the Roman Empire. A world without a new hegemonic
power or ascendant civilization just the decay of the West and no other culture strong enough to defeat or replace it. Maybe not a new Dark Ages but a far more chaotic and poorer world than before.Why can’t you guys be positive for a change? Yes, there are a large number of catastrophies ranging from the puny social ones (like the putrefying finanacial and polictical systems) to the awe inspiring natural ones (like climate change). And yes, the scale of these have been amplified by our gross incompetance over the last 150 years or so.
Humanity has made big changes in the past when our backs are to the wall and we can make them again. There may be large chuncks of society that fail this test but there will be pockets that succeed brilliantly because we see through the murk and pick up on the possibilities.
We are not hard wired for instant gratification. We have been trained. This can and will be dropped off with all the other chaff when things get real. I wont be stealing from my neighbour, I’ll be breaking down my fence and planting a really big vege patch.
I will care about what is happening elsewhere too. Who knows, this might be the birth of a new version of humanity. One that has shuffled off the self interest closed (and rather vicious) loop and recognises we are together here – I couldn’t give a rats about the perpetraitors, their world is not mine.
Chris Hedges interview, “Empire of Illusion”. Hedges says, “I think societies that lose that capacity to separate illusion from reality die.” He says America is “clinging to fantasy, to magical thinking.” It’s a great listen – 27 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHle_turjes&feature=player_embedded
Puff – “Why can’t you guys be positive for a change?” Perhaps because they live in reality, perhaps because they see that the people who are running this game show are narcissistic, short-term thinkers who sit squarely on the sociopathic end of the personality spectrum. It’s hard to be positive and feel secure when they have a choke hold on the world.
Ilargi – thank you for another brilliant article!
Hi Folks,
Its a case of boiling frogs. The grand game of extend and pretend is about to … well end. Why people can’t see it is because the day to day process is so slow as to be imperceptible. In economic terms the ‘game’ of extend and pretend has been playing since the early eighties; since then to keep the industrial bubble blowing a second debt bubble has been blown up inside it. And its only when you look back over that time period that you can truly see the scale of the changes. Given the decadal time spans it should come as no surprise that the frogs (economies) are only now beginning to pop as the waters start to boil. The soup :sick: will be ready soon…
L,
Sid.Just another brick in the ‘wall’…
L,
Sid.Everyone I know is feeling good about the future. Truly the best is yet to come. Technology gets better all the time. Nothing to worry about. They all believe I am crazy, nutty, and out-of-my-mind. One day, they will wake up…too late.
I’m surprised that so many commentators haven’t realized what is motivating their comments.
Wiki.:
The term nostalgia describes a sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.Hi Folks,
Actually, with regards to positive/negative views, its a case of treading the middle way. Yes we do need to be positive, but also we do need to be realistic and acknowledge the situation for what it is as best we can. Like the rock opera of Pink Flyod’s the Wall, in the end after all it is about our own inner walls:
Yet in the end, Pink’s story becomes less about a singular rock star and more about us, the audience, and the world we live in. Similarly, the characters in Pink’s story are just as universal as its protagonist. While they are never given names throughout the entire album, their roles in Pink’s life define their personalities as Mother, Father, Teacher, and Spouse, possibly mirroring those very same characters in our lives. These could very well be our Mothers, Fathers, Teachers, and Loved ones. Accordingly, Pink’s story could be our own. In a sense, Pink’s story IS our own. Though the details are no doubt different, the underlying themes of humanity and its subsequent degradation as a result of personal and societal disconnection are universal. These themes apply to our lives and our world just as much as they apply to Pink’s fictional (yet just as authentic) story. Just like the “bleeding heats” in “Outside the Wall,” Pink Floyd has taken it upon themselves to convey this timeless story of personal decay, perhaps in the hopes that these omnipresent patterns, these cycles of violence, might be averted. Such is the ultimate aim of art: to illuminate, to edify. Pink’s story is finished. He constructed his wall, fell into moral decay because of it, and ultimately destroyed this isolating barrier. Our story, however, is still taking place. What happens to Pink soon becomes nowhere near as important as what happens to us. How do we live our lives? Are we currently constructing or tearing down those hindrances that produce disconnection and degeneration? How do our personal walls contribute to those of our nation, our world? How much of the world’s ills are we really responsible for? Most importantly, which versions of Pink will we choose to be?
As for Roger Waters, the man whose autobiographical blood and bones prop up the flesh of the character Pink, the story is similarly unending. Leading up to his 2010 – 2011 world tour with the Wall 30 years after the album’s original tour, Waters spoke of his own wall to Rolling Stone magazine, saying “It comes down brick by brick. That’s what growing up is. I would suggest [growing up is] a dismantling of our wall, brick by brick, and discovering that when we let our defenses down, we become more lovable. I’m not saying I’ve discarded my wall or walls entirely,” he concludes. “But over the years, I’ve allowed more of it to crumble – and opened myself to the possibility of love.”Both Pink and Waters, it would seem, finally found their way home.
L,
Sid.The wall isn’t the Thing to think about if we want to see the future. What we have to focus on is the Hole in the wall. It is just about the size of a human being, and the only things we will be able to take into the future are those that we can carry and still crawl through the Hole. The more we try to make the Hole bigger, the more likely it will collapse and end our species. It is US that must change, not the Wall.
A while back an angry person wrote me telling me I was tripping the system. Generally, although the anger turned me off, curiosity of what this meant pushed me on to find meaning to what he/she was saying. Through many comments back and forth I got a gist of what tripping the capitalist system actually means.
There are those who believe the markets and the whole capitalist system is only just psychology. Nothing has meaning. If people are happy and stay happy markets are up, and if not markets are down. The dirty 30’s was only the fact that people in general were depressed.
Obviously this understates the markets greatly. In fact everything will come to some sort of real value in the end independent of all the investors happiness or sadness. If you are invested in a carriage building in the 1900’s all the happiness in the world will not change the fact you are going to lose everything invested in carriages.
But I find this delusion so great and so strong that it should not be underestimated. What are people thinking will carry Europe through? What will remove our debts and make everything good? Why are resources limitless and growth endless? Positive thinking – yes positive thinking can do all these things and more!!
We must restate the demise of our system more positively so as not to trip the capitalist system. Of course from this perspective those who speak negatively are the cause of the problem and who need fixing.
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