oxymoron
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In September last year the BOM National weather agency – issued a statement indicating stratospheric warming above the south pole that hadn’t occurred in a century or so. This air dumped across the mid latitudes of the Australian continent and they saw it coming. Cold water off the west coast of Australia (in dynamics with the warm as hell water off the east coast of Africa) only added to the drying of the air mass and the accumulation of searing desert air that has to periodically vent in a large circle. This very hot and super dry air picks up speed as it leaves these seemingly endless thermal storage areas of Australia and then flows over high rainfall forests. These forests produce seed that are largely only germinated by fire so it was always going to happen. The climate is changing but an event like this would have to occur (although less intensely) every so often. The original human inhabitants of this continent were quite aware they weren’t living in humid temperate areas. The landscape has always had periods of drought and that is why fire stick culture was used to burn the place.
When you have the sun’s energy stored in such perfect and efficient vessels (Eucalypts and Acacias and the rest) it is disaster waiting to happen – something TAE is well equipped to understand. It’s like Hubbert’s peak ramping to a cliff.
It is a tricky one for us who know better. We don’t have firestick knowledge and we have to stay still because land is an asset now. But we know this land needs fire. But needs a personal touch. You can’t get agencies to do this right – it has to be the job of family and tribe.
So what do we do?
For now…. build houses that are designed for these events. Cut down and manage trees with wider spacings to mimic pre-european landscapes. And never ask a politician to lead you back to nature…..Thanks so much for the suggestions and helping me relax re the tone…. I really appreciate the thoughtful response to my question and as always – to the crazy fucked-up world today.
There is a high likelihood I’ll be interviewing Julian Assange’s father on public radio in the next week or so and I am nervous about it. Does anyone have key questions they believe I should ask him other than the obvious health issues and state of the man?. I want the listeners to get maximum benefit from the opportunity and I don’t want to screw it up – after all I’m not the towering intellect of Dr D 🙂
Thanks Raul, that poem by Clive is really beautiful. Particularly the middle section where he is aware of his end but becomes more in the present. I hope to take that tone more going forward, been a bit up tight with worldly fools…
That stuff you wrote about Monbiot is true. The meal ticket kills all the truth that he would believe and packages it within that greasy newspaper. Like putting lipstick on a pig. Tell it like it is Ilargi.
Also, when you are planting fruit trees and installing veggie gardens and the rest as your way of generating income – as I do, you do sometimes scratch your head and wonder why so many of us want so many useless and lifeless things like gaming consoles and methamphetamines, I was netting Cherries for one of my clients today and took home a bunch and thought to my self so many of us could actually just do shit like this but we come up with a lot of reasons to eat up a lot of the earths energy.
Very confusing….it’s quite the balancing act – you have to be self-employed to pull it off – that of earning just enough income to have very little or no tax (here in Australia). You also want to get most of your money immediately spent on useful things like buildings, fencing, water tanks and earthworks. Things hard to steal and somewhat diffuse. A few truckloads of topsoil and some bird netting too.
Oh and Ilargi the Nate Hagens article was such a nice summary of things as they are in the human superorganism and gave me a lot of food for thought and a real desire for more action on my end.So thanks for thathttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067#bib0530
I know I’m off topic but that last article by Hagens got me thinking of energy in decline right now.
My chainsaw playing up and was talking to the old timer at the repair joint today, who told me that a life time of fixing small engines has brought him to the conclusion that the fuel is inferior to what it used to be and a major reason for the rising repair rates of high quality brands like Stihl and Husqvarna. But I guess now Morales is out we can get those battery operated ones and throw all the old ‘polluting’ ones in the bin. And anyway Australia is the worlds biggest producer of lithium so we’ll soon be able to visit the “Elon Musk future museum theme park” on our flying vac-bots all the way to Mars baby.I think Raul is right to posit the bullshit thrown at Trump, not because poor Donald needs our defence but because we are looking for the truth in the lies here. Sure Trump is a dickhead but the circus going on to win the minds of the voters is tearing the country apart it would seem. Just make some good policy and go for it. Sell it. DO SOMETHING in opposition.
And as for Dr D’s comments on the climate yesterday – typically ‘yawn’ Northern Hemispheric view – it’s okay, I grew up with it – we are called Down Under after all but It is so goddam hot here it is not funny and I reckon your chilly bidness that is apparently so cold that farming is a drag must be getting eclipsed here by our heat 16 heat records for November broken in a day in One State Alone. 44 celsius in spring aint no cold world. Nope
Not At All Cold. Not even slightly. It’s just fire in every state of our Union down here. Summer is December and January and Feb and it’s not here yet. God Help Us.Nicole, years ago wrote this analogy of when the money and energy start to decline, the periphery gets the life sucked out of it at the expense of the core. The heart steals the blood to keep the brain and the heart alive while the limbs perish.
I just didn’t imagine the heart would have no love and the brain would go insane. The impeachment thingy is the perfect symbol of this.
But we are at that point and so very close to mass debtors prisons – oh sorry that’s right they are here now and they are called the suburbs, where you get carpet and netflix to help you sleep so you can go back to planet raping jobs each morning and get that old trophic pyramid sucking life out of population feed lot centres (called cities on fake news stations) through a tube to the Cayman Islands.
You know I grew up with a single mum with 2 siblings in government housing so I always hated the rich. But now that I am financially independent I hate them even more.It seems to me that the frustration we mostly feel on this site and in this comments room is that we have the enlightened masters above us (Bhudda, Jesus and the Saints etc) and a whole world of liars and cheats and malevolent bullies below us. Bullies who have made it impossible for any, among the dull and dreamy bottom 99% who would like to know or be informed of the truth get even a glimpse of truth and justice. They are all indebted to the banks and spend most of the waking life on the grind. They are all too tired and broke.
I fell like I’m a part of a middle group – the limbo club. Not saintly but not able to look away either. It is a piece of shit situation. I think those funny vids from bosco yesterday were mildly interrupting but christ I needed them.A whole continent on fire. I’ll give you a whole continent on fire – it’s called Australia and so far this year we are at over 1.1 million hectares burnt (2.7 million acres) – California has had less than a tenth of that this year.
The thing is summer hasn’t started yet and Antarctica had crazy high levels of Stratospheric warming this winter so there is a shit load of dry warm air for this season……
I live in the bush myself and I have been tree-thinning (reducing the number of small diameter logs to encourage large diameter logs) for years, so my place has fuel loads well considered but the indigenous people who lived here for 60,000 years managed these landscapes with fire and then we just think it is an english garden or something. Barely a single tree in our forests would even be there if a fire hadn’t germinated the seed. It is a FIRE ecology so if the government is making indigenous practice illegal we have to improvise – forest thinning. Currently comes with huge fines of up to $20,000 but will be mandatory soon because you know large centralised market based systems are so good at living with nature and understanding feedback loops and fallback mechanisms and the rest.
When Europeans arrived they could walk from Melbourne to the Goldfields in a few days as the whole continent was a managed estate. The paintings and letters all describe a park like country. So much to learn.
Centralised systems suck major ass! Give me some autonomy and me and my good neighbours will make this place a paradise – or something close.
Or maybe I’m dreaming. I have been known to be wrong, misguided and misinformed – thats how you know to find me here on TAE 🙂I’m with Maxwell Quest. The banking cartels and the financial system need serious tanking for any meaningful turn around but I don’t see it happening yet. Look in my situation if I want to keep the lights on using little energy – I can make bees wax candles (and bee keeping is giving me the shits right now as it is time consuming). But who the fuck is gonna do that? The Europeans and Americans with their mass inject die-off? The Indians and the Chinese who are just swimming in their free time and wake up each morning with fresh wheatgrass juice shots and a meet with their personal trainers? Nah – we are screwed until a few very unpleasant outbreaks of whatever (omni-violence, genetic weirdness, AI gone bad, wars or maybe – just trending right now – the old climate emergency hashtag/unreliablefood thingy) sinnycool – you are spot on in my view.
Yes John, I believe you are right now I look at it. He would not have killed himself, not that early in the game. He doesn’t appear to have the personality to reflect on his deeds enough to enter any of the stages of grief and would seek only to escape – after all he is an escapist.
Dr D. often wins the internet often. Oh and yeah Dr. D the roads thingy – I have often thought for many years how great areas of Australia are made up of ancient and nutrient/minerally deficient soils. Then roads come along made up of oil and more importantly newer volcanics in the form of crushed up basalt.
Give nature a couple of decades and the water that naturally runs to the side of the non porous road (water collectors) will mix with the plant action just gagging for the moisture under roads as well and then throw in the fertility and you will end up with wildlife corridors.I want you to do it without the straight-jacket, You got the fire in the belly Ilargi,don’t get burn’t out by it. But don’t you dare stop finding this news! With what has happened with Assange I already feel that the media landscape is doomed – like forests and alluvial soils.
You gotta hang in there but just don’t push yourself too hard. Julian would thank you for it.
No pressure though ha ha…Hey Raúl, I just became a Patreon (as Thumbnail). I just couldn’t bear the reality of no more debt rattle. I have been selfish for nearly 10 years – not offering any financial support while you have worked away tirelessly to help keep us informed. It is you and Nicole who along with David Holmgren that have put me in this quite strong position – off-grid with water and financial security – over 100 fruit and nut trees and a owner built passive straw house. I had the shit scared out of me by being educated on the energetic, financial and environmental realities of the world by the wiser and diligent among us and I thank you. I thank you very, very much. I would also like to thank the community of commenters here on this site, offering additional and often very insightful information to the rest of us (I’m talking to you Dr D) – we all rally around your work and your generous offering.
The media landscape is just so incredibly corrupt and deceitful these days and I think if you stopped writing I would just turn away from the internet and just work my garden. But then I would not know what was coming …….Dr. D you are such a shining light of reasoning and accountability and may you never stop writing in the comments section. I think it would cost me my readership.
They can’t free Assange until he testifies about Mueller before Congress. A day before the election. RussiaRussiaRussia.
Dr D. I reckon you may have called this. I’ll bet half a bitcoin on itI think people feel paralysis and a bad guy is all they can summon to cope with their sense of not being able to impact the ills facing humanity. They instead should stop shopping, start growing their own food and meet the people on their own streets. Then they wouldn’t need the bogey man.
Not a good time for whistle blowers. 161 years for trying to help poor Australians. Money and power corrupt. https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/ato-whistleblower-faces-six-life-sentences-roughly-the-same-as-ivan-milat-20190226-p510d2.html
Orlov really nailed it this time. Great read. It’s a shame Assange is taking this torture before their powers wane.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Assange and the whole shit-storm that is Orwelling up from below – musing on a fair bit of Dr D’s inspired call to action and the rest. As much as I feel passionate about the subject, it is as if I just can’t handle it. I think the Top Down approach of system change that Julian is looking for won’t save us from these slave masters and most of us are house Negros in the OECD – we just have all this skin in the game and are not ready or willing to unplug and take back our freedoms. We just like all the fatty food and gadgets and shit.
Mollison was a bit the same – wanting to bring down the system in his own way but I believe that Holmgren and David Fleming and Rob Hopkins and Robinson Carusoe have my heart. Band together people, stick with each other and rejoice in the informal economy – do favours, accept help, listen and grow food and keep your head down. Just ride this shit out because there is some collapsing to do and fighting all those bad people is dangerous work and not sustainable.
My two cents ( with a little fear and outrage thrown in )multimillion-dollar series, filmed by more than 600 crew members over four years in 50 countries and narrated by our very own David Attenborough.
Eco-warriors aren’t they – burning so much oil and the rest to show us nature and living in their Thames river apartments as they do. I have always found Attenborough to be quite the hypocrite. How can he tell us to save these beasts when his lifestyle is part of what is killing them. Has he ever kept bees or lived on the land. No he has not he is part of the vacuum that is the intelligentsia of our modern cities. Leonardo Dicaprio, Beyonce – they are all the same – Just live as you tell others to live.I know Dave and live not far from him and I can tell you he has NOTHING to apologise for. Every bit of endowment bestowed on him has been used beyond it’s highest EROIE and I reckon his son Oliver is potentially even more hardcore in his reuse/recycle way of living (and it it fricken awesome btw). If they have a dirty old boot to throw out – it won’t get thrown out – it’s getting used as a planter for winter veg or holding hand made lard or something – I mean it’s insane.
. The ‘apology’ is a very helpful take on the path we have tread and a caution to what’s ahead and I guess it’s a bit of a lament. My take is it’s crap that we haven’t organised ourselves into a better world and there is a power pyramid but like the ice age – waves of death and rebirth crash against these shores. The best you can do is to buy as little as you can (within’ the bounds of sanely navigating the technosphere), hold your friends close and enjoy the journey of aiming for more of a sustainable existence.
Peace out Homies.I mean it’s true, a lot of what CJ says but we shouldn’t forget that these nasty people fear their own mortality as much as we do and in fact have the same end. I wish the world was a nicer place but it is time and it is space. It is a place of endings and separate states. The body is not nice – so now I put down my lament and close my laptop and meditate; but not before one slight rebuttal.
Religion (not that I am a subscriber) can be something that draws one out and away from the focus on worldly things and that is not necessarily a bad thing. I reject CJ’s assertion that people with thoughts and ideas that pertain to notions outside of the temporal universe are obedient to worldly bosses and slave masters. Thinking confined to the ephemeral is a type of jail term Miss Johnstone, and utopia is a fantasy for children who hope extend time.
Stillness and silence however are unbreakable. The individual I am will pass but that within me that animates the breath will not. It makes the water wet. One should not mock the seekers of the eternal as it is a slight on their own hope of an inheritance greater than dust.
Just sayin’the answer is to not go to war. If Syria was an island in the Mediterranean – what would you do? Die from bombs on your head or take a chance on the sea. So much of this issue is about people being able to work their shit out at home. Without guns.
Yeah the plastic thing….. We are all doomed really. Only so many years before we run out of synthesised fertilisers and then what do you do with 8 or 9 Billion and barely a single wild space left to plunder for survival. I fear it will be a reality that people taste a bit like pork in the end…
Heavy man.Gee whiz Carl Duisburg was a real piece of shit for sure!
I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about media bullshit and how total it is these days and it got me pondering the very direct correlation between debt and slavery and how many journos wanna keep up the house repayments and pay the kids medical bills or afford food basically which I guess puts em in a position where they kinda do what they’re told.
It’s like the Central Bank Money printing just works on so many levels to keep every one ‘on message’. Cos if you are say 30 and you are paying off a house in Sydney and want to work in news then you can’t be too far from the office most of the time and that means you are paying off a house that costs 1 million dollars! The editor says to you that the thing you wrote about Yemen and the American Military just isn’t gunna cut it so clean up your act or you’ll be looking for another job and you have to think to yourself – Am I gunna wait tables or just scrap the idea of telling the truth? I mean I have a family to feed……
Any thoughts?Thanks so much for this article. Raul – you, and your like are Julian Assange. Where would we find facts or perspectives without the tireless activities of you and your like. I for one salute you and imagine a world where alternative media is shut down entirely and think of these words – “There will be blood”.
As for reality. In the framework of understanding laid down by those of us enlightened. We are either asleep or awake – which really has nothing to do with this world as we see it. But while dreaming I would at least prefer to call bullshit – bullshit!
Any system under too much pressure will break. Like a river red gum tree in a long drought that simply drops an entire limb, (sometimes hundreds of years grown) to save itself – I hope society will do the same with usury.
A plunge in birth rates at this stage may not be a bad thing. Just sayin’
I had Opening by Phillip Glass played for my wedding a decade or so ago. I need no convincing of this man’s astral talents.
Dr D. you are a breath of fresh air. My sweet ranting Nicole Foss avatar of the comments section. Always so spot on and more often than not very educative. I’m always more than excited to read your essays when Raúl posts them too. Keep up the clear eyed world watching while I hopefully lapse into meditation and the emptiness of a thoughtless mind hole.
Well hopefully.“The most recent [Facebook] scandal has served to expose a broken and unbalanced ecosystem” Facebook and the like is how we are breaking the ecosystem.
Orlov’s Shrinking the Technosphere is so spot on. There was a time when messages were delivered and written in paper and were made from trees. And when the forests lost too many trees it was at least possible to plant more of them. How the hell are we going to plant device seeds? ‘Oh my lithium and cobalt mine’s have run dry, could we plant a new one on Antarctica?’Spiritual pursuits, good food, clean water, hot sex, conversation, family, meaningful work and music. Fuck apps and convenience and research and all this endless race toward the betterment of civilisation. Consumerism is for losers yo. Boring vacuous losers. Meet your girlfriend in a bar over a few too many drinks and get some strength you paranoid androids.
Oh My God.great links today Raúl, feels like we are coming up on something…. The debt is not going to remain easy to get your hands on and people are gonna cash out and call in what they are owed.
I don’t think the coral story is entirely temperature related. 200 years ago the eastern side of Australia was a great big bio-filtration system – now it’s pumped with fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, huge volumes of soil sediment washed there in the wet season from tree removal etc. Hardly a pristine environment for fish and coral. It’s a shame because on a very dry continent you would think cutting down the rainforests to plant a type of grass would be illegal or punishable by death but apparently under the watchful eye of mother england you can do what the hell you like. I guess Europeans were pretty cool with species extinction already so didn’t seem like a big deal to them….
A quote from Jacques
“What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease? It’s a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species…It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable”.[15]It will be nice and quiet though won’t it. And if a globalised population falls and there’s no one to hear it then did it really fall? People are so myopic and we are all just a bit too clever to be particularly hopeful here aren’t we. If it’s any consolation a lot of my anecdotal observations have shown me that insect populations are very high in our forests in Australia because our fertility here is just so pathetic that large scale chemical farming is an option for only small parts of the island continent. We are clearing a shit load of trees here though so it’s still just a matter of time. Bummer. And we had a nice reef when the Beatles broke up but it’s pretty shit now. Jacques Cousteau wouldn’t bother with it.
Dr D., I reckon it’s called predation. It’s not like just visiting TAE or similar site more than once doesn’t put you on some ‘watch’ list. The autobots just keep running their scripts. And we keep moving up the red flagpole.
