Category: The Correction

I don’t know their names

Fifty three dead migrants in a truck on the wolf’s mouth highway; dying of heat prostration in an airless container for a better life is a refinement of cruelty.  Six hundred have died making the perilous crossing from North Africa to Greece and Italy from Tunisia and Libya so far in 2022.

Now think about what happens when those fifty one are fifty one thousand. When six hundred are six hundred thousand.  Nothing will stem the tide of migrants, alive and dead. Between autocratic governments forcing people to starve rather than express their rights and climate change drying up water for even an inadequate life, people will migrate. Technologies will be made available for food, for light, for water, for shelter, but here’s the thing; the gap between what is possible and what gets done is going to be monitored and posited and funded and ideologically supported by and profited on by previously existing academics, disaster scammers, politicians and wealthy families. The best solutions will be stick handled out of the way at the top; we’ll be taxed like beasts to support solutions that actively make things worse and then be blamed for having supported it (however involuntarily) when things go wrong.

It’s why it’s imperative to think about local solutions for problems. No-one’s going to save us; there will be a million photo ops and no help, like Doug Ford everywhere all the time. Something weird is happening inside my brain. Maybe it’s the chocolate. Maybe I’m angry enough to feel really vengeful, but in a new way.

Maybe I’ll go back to write. I have a little bubble of energy left I think. And something else happened today that’s knocked me down, and I don’t want to feel this way, I want to shoulder it off.

 

 

First 2 eps of “Only Murders in the Building” were funny, VERY FUNNY in spots and embarrassing (as in I THREW MY BLANKET OVER MY HEAD IN AN AUTISTIC ATTEMPT TO SPARE MYSELF THE EMBARRASSMENT) anyway, quite witty and in retrospect pretty damned funny, oi the bleedin’ parrot.

R. Kelly American singer, songwriter, record producer, and convicted sex offender got 30 years in jail for raping and otherwise sexually abusing women, mostly minors. I don’t support the existence of the carceral state and believe he should have been forced to give everything down to his shoelaces away to his victims now and anything in future so he gets ten percent or a living wage, enough to keep a car running, and they get everything else and otherwise he’d be allowed to walk free. Jail just makes money for asshole white investors and asshole food service companies and asshole jailers. It’s no place even for a rapist.

I read to my amusement that ‘this here haunted doll for only 60 bucks can be yours because THE LAST BUYER BACKED OUT what no reason did I tell you this doll is haunted’ is for sale. Still, what a bargoon.

I think one of my favourite things about the Slash/Back script is how Canadian it was. It was cadenced completely differently than an American movie. Anyway.

Just in case you think I’ve gone off the deep end, a return to my normal levels of lunacy. I couldn’t find attribution.

KISS FM IN SOME KIND OF PUBLICITY STUNT or possibly because of angry fired people is playing RATM’s Killing in the Name of NON STOP and a) it’s a supremely kick ass tune and b) if it’s not a publicity stunt it’s an interesting choice of tune. anyway, this is six hours and a bit now they’ve been doing this. I think it’s very funny either way. oh well I HAVE NOW BEEN LISTENING FOR MOST OF AN HOUR if this is a publicity stunt I don’t get it and they’re going to collect a CRTC fine for this.

 

not another project, must be AU Monday

It’s called The Trust Issue, and it’s a nested set of received opinions about how to trust the ourselves, the world and how we move through it and eventually out of it. I am thinking of it in terms of being on three scales; personal, familial (via family history, which is basically me saying HEY MA I THINK I FOUND ANOTHER USE FOR THE GAZILLIONS OF PIXELS YOU’VE SLAUGHTERED), and linguistic, but not in any academic sense, just in the sense that I have to use English to actually, like, do anything. English as often noted has many limitations in terms of felicity of precision *and* metaphor, at least for me, so I must perforce be appalled at operating within its tiresomely inevident confines. I know I am stuck here, in English, for I have neither the life expectancy nor the will to become able to write with ease and style in another language. The very idea makes a mockery of trust in any degree, but so be it. I shall scale Mt. Impossible because I dare not leave my room! The idea of actually making it fit into any politics, including the increasingly deadbeat anarchism I claim to claim (know what I mean) is loathsome to me so I am avoiding the political or public sphere, and I don’t think I could do it in less than 20000 words and suspect it’ll be closer to 70K.

JEEEEEZ

 

There is so much misinformation, disinformation, cheerful lies, tankie mischief and plum bullshit out there about Ukraine and the Russian invasion that walking away from twitter feels like pulling your lips away from the firehose.

The war is costing Russia something on the order of 8 billion dollars a day, and they just had about half their access to the global banking system cut off. More sanctions are coming. People are protesting daily in every major Russian city (there were at least 5K in St. Pete’s alone !!) and through the entirety of the former Soviet Union, where the resistance of the Ukrainians has put steel in spines. Putin has announced that he wants the territories of the former Soviet Union back and guess what, most of the former slave states are not impressed. And from what I’ve seen there have been protests in every large city in soidisant Canada. If the rest of the sanctions come, Russia has funds for about a month more of this before they have to go to the international equivalent of Vinnie the Fish for the rest of the warchest. Germany spat in Putin’s face and sent anti tank/helicopter weapons to Ukraine. So much for Germany staying neutral! They spat twice hard when they blocked the pipeline from Russia, too, and announced plans as to how they’re going to get along fine without their gas and oil. The German public is not united in this but the poll numbers are high enough that the Ukrainians can continue to lean on them.

And Russian boys are dying in hundreds in Kharkiv right now. They ‘took’ the city and the Ukrainians took it right back.

Putin is now so desperate that he’s calling up the nuclear troops and setting them to do ‘exercises’ which is basically him grabbing his dick and saying LOOKEE HERE. Do I believe that he will use nuclear weapons? Maybe. But he’s already the kind of person who can’t wander out incognito because about a quarter of the population of Russia would be blithe on vodka for a week if they could have a chance to shiv him. To be the aggressor in a nuclear war would not cement his popularity. NATO is on alert which means that US branded troops are now free to move in Europa.

Jeff tells me that the space authority in Russia is threatening to drop shit on people they don’t like from orbit and once again, if it’s the Russians wanting to start a war from space they aren’t going to like the results any more than the poor bastards underneath whatever they drop. Biden’s as much of a Killocrat as the next one, but if ever there was a casus belli that would be it.

Of particular interest to me is the Ukrainians and Americans releasing intel that the Russians are planning an explosion somewhere in Russian controlled territory that they can blame on the Ukrainians so they can send more troops and really crush the resistance. Russians commanded by Putin did the same fucking thing for the Chechen war, blowing up apartment buildings across Russia in the runup to the Chechen War in 1999. The wikipedia article says that nobody really knows who did it but I’ve seen enough evidence to convince me, and if you need convincing please check how the timing of it is what catapulted Putin from the prime ministership into the Presidency just a few months later. NOT AN ACCIDENT.

Apart from Switzerland, which is landlocked, there isn’t a single European country currently allowing Russian flyovers.

On to a more pleasant subject. Jeff is a very good brother and roommate. After I lost my cell phone (coming up on 18 months) he loaned me his spare (non activated) cell phone, so I have an alarm and a clock and gaming platform and something to take into the bath when I want to play solitaire and soak. I dropped it numerous times and it quit. Apologetic and abashed I immediately took it to him and within minutes he had restored it to life. I do not deserve. But I am very happy.

50 cm of rain over the next day. BLOOP

 

 

the Barrowtown pumping station is about to fail

it’s apparently the second biggest pumping station in North America

and if it fails

surrounded as it is with 150 volunteers packing sandbags as fast as they can

Sumas Lake will reappear after 97 years

50% of the eggs and dairy for BC will be gone, possibly never to return

and collectively we will have lost one of the most critical pieces of farmland in BC history

 

you need a million calories a year and 5000 litres of water

LATER

anyway the mayor and chief of police in Abby have reported that the pumping station is holding but it was a near thing

 

supply chain woes

Cars can’t get chips.

Brexit is grinding food and gas supply in the UK.

Experts say DO YOUR HOLIDAY SHOPPING EARLY. Thanks, but no.

Many companies which manufacture the small small things that go in other things are experiencing labour shortages due to the pandemic, which adds to the mess

Transportation costs for goods is skyrocketing.

Weak investment in gas and oil is making it easier for weather events to further disrupt supply and impact demand.

Power supply issues in China are ongoing and will not get better. The problem with industrial power supplies to factories etc. is that when you need power to melt plastic into molds and it stops, you lose the entire run of plastic. I mean you can melt it down again with a little shaved lead – lead is a great plasticizer ha ha – but the colour and the finish will change and then you have to resell it in a different market where there isn’t as much fuss about how much lead there is in the plastic. Or you have to scrap it. And prices go up.

War between Taiwan and China is getting closer – 38 Chinese jets made an incursion into Taiwanese air space recently and the Chinese are making it clear that the South China sea is theirs and other claims will be ignored with prejudice. Alas, that means a global war, and it will be really strange to see American Pumpkin Spice moms getting upset when they can’t get their Christmas Chatchkes thanks to war in the South China Sea.

Shipping containers are scarce, because after the shutdown, when demand started up again– thanks to economic stimulus packages — it started up so fast that the supply chain has quite literally never caught up from 2020. Fewer containers are in circulation because NO ONE WANTS TO PAY the diesel to get them back from where they carried masks to Africa. Nothing is being shipped back so they are still in African ports. I can’t believe this bullshit, but there you go. That boat getting grounded in Suez didn’t help and something similar is almost certain to happen again as the conditions that caused that grounding have not been corrected and very large boats are still being allowed into the canal.

Shipping costs for a SINGLE CONTAINER FROM CHINA TO THE US WEST COAST HAVE GONE UP BY 13 TIMES SINCE 2020. This is making it cheaper to ship empty containers even if there’s demand because companies with capacity can’t afford the offloading time (many ports are hopelessly snarled because COVID killed or reduced their staffing levels at the same time that the jolt provided by the stimulus happened); they’ll get more money at the Chinese end if they dead head it. So eventually those empty containers in Africa will be worth the cost to transport empty but that hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway. It isn’t time to start hoarding, that never helps, but the baloney alarm is really close to going off. Pandemics have always made for violent social and political change and this one’s no different.

 

Matt Buckley sculpted this octopus

Thank you Gaia for the inspiration

So before I turn you over to my latest creation, and the tune hasn’t stabilized so I likely won’t post it today and even more likely will never post it.

Spoken is italics, everything else is sung

what a spanner ( OMG
what a spanner Jesus threw
what a spanner – oh my God
what a spanner Jesus threw

well of course you can say
that science got there first
‘cause of course, you know science,
always making shit up, not wrong am I
the fact is that I know
for sure
religion came first

cause whenever I hear stories
of bears watching the sunset
and animals of different species helping each other
because it’s built-in
after that I think
‘you know, religion obviously jammed through that cognitive door first, yippee’
and where does that leave us

what a spanner ( OMG
what a spanner Jesus threw
what a spanner – oh my God
what a spanner Jesus threw

and of course I think some more
and if Jesus wasn’t born
there wouldn’t be a Bible
which its adherents raise
as proof of their devotion
consider the religion
from which the Bible sprang

Hey, they didn’t fucking proselytize
and that’s when my bell got rang

Across the earth Indigenous
had practices specific
to all the places that they cared for
in balance and pacific
but when the Bible said to go
and preach to all the nations
Jesus underwrote some wars
and war on all relations

Christians know
this mortal sin
However much
they hide it
We were crushed
in a conqueror’s fist
Til Gaia’s truth*
defied it

I’m leaving Islam out of this shitkicking because I wasn’t raised in a Muslim country. Even though I’m an atheist I’m ethnically Christian.

*That would be science, folks, in case my creaky metaphor didn’t make sense. The working together of science and Indigenous cultural and religious practices is one of the ongoing great stories of the 21st century.

tiresome

My enthusiasm for walking in public parks ceases when I’ve had to truck (bagged) dogshit into the bin.

I’d been enjoying the break in the rain, up in Hilda AVENUE park, hullo Burnaby, can’t even get the park sign right, took a walk, took my pickerupper, and was ridding the children’s play areas of nasty sharp bits of plastic, candy wrappers and cigarette butts and feeling might’ pleased with myself and then something that looked like it came out the hind end of a golem living on dog food was sitting there in a thin pink plastic bag. I binned that and what I’d collected and I dragged my ass home. People suck.

We did a shop, got milk and a few other things.

Another very lazy day, except I made weird pizzaâ„¢ for supper mostly so I could self-calm by eating raw bread dough and cooked myself up beef strips with onions and Peggy’s tomatoes with a tiny amount of taco seasoning for breakfast and damnation it was fine. Now I could have cold pizza (fresh chopped tomatoes, bocconcini balls, fresh chopped onions and scallions, capers, chopped olives) or oatmeal, let me think on it.

Indi Samarajiva said Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.

15,561

Countdown to a US Civil War

Forty days. The world already got slammed by a pandemic. So I was right, who cares. To be right without helping set the world right isn’t enough, until you understand that no single person can do it anyway.

I’m not alone and the world will eventually get ‘better’. What that world will look like no one knows. Not even someone raised on the future, like I was, can know.

I got a phone call from Alex yesterday and after he told me that he played with Henry with magnets and it was big fun at school, he requested cinnamon buns with no glaze.

Can do little critter, can do. And I will. Daughter is collecting them after work today, so about 1 pm I will start the dough.