To blog or not to blog, that is the question...

A few months ago, I took a pause in blogging. The appearance of Donald Trump as President of the United States took the wind out of my sails, not so much Trump himself, horrid as he is, but Trump as a symptom and a symbol of ruinous decadence. It was like seeing an old friend suddenly getting horribly thin, or finding a loved one suddenly lost in depression, no longer taking care of their appearance, not washing, not changing their clothes. 

One sure thing has come to me from from all of this. I am grateful that I have no children and thus leave no innocent grandchildren to face the world that is coming. I realize that those of us born right after World War Two, in either the USA or Western Europe, have lived to be elderly in a truly Golden Age of peace, prosperity and health that is more than probably going to disappear forever.

In the following weeks and months, I hope to write some sort of coherent analysis of some of the facets of this descent into chaos. For the moment I am collecting articles that my instinct tells me are relevant and that may help me to write something useful in the future. I am posting them to my twitter account. @David_Seaton, if you care to read them and draw your own conclusions.

In the meantime, the only way I can fully express the dread I feel is in poetry.

Today I leave you with this sample:

Futurology

The old and toothless of our tribe

Tell the tale

That before the beginning of time

Even before the mountains began to glow in the dark

An orange baboon ruled the world

And the legend has it

That our land of tears,

Of ashes,

And of dust

Was,

Once upon a time,

A land of hopes and dreams

DS

Götterdämmerung... oh goddamn

"The understanding of [human] warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment report, leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming."
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

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The "net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming". That is the center of the question, "since 1750". That means the Industrial Revolution, which in turn means everything we mean by the word, "modern" and especially the word "progress".

To give an example of how far reaching this is, consider that the two most confronted "modern" ideologies, Capitalism and Communism are only two sides of the same coin. They are in fact just an argument about how to industrialize and who was to get the benefit; neither of them questioning for a moment either industrialization or "progress" themselves.

Someone wrote into the BBC, "Who is going to tell a billion people that they can't have air-conditioning or an automobile?". That is certainly the immediate political question. Telling the whole world that everything we dream of is killing us. Someone is going to have to bell that cat and at the same time offer an equitable vision of this post-post-post world. If the idea is that a few people are going to continue to live with "all mod cons" while the majority are dying of thirst or inundated by the rising seas, than we are going to see universal chaos. Rioting, death, destruction and certain distortions of the business cycle. In a previous post I used the simile of shipwrecked sailors sharing out their provisions in a lifeboat. Dare I say "from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs"? The alternative could be no other than universal homo homini lupus.

So all you disillusioned Utopians, dust off your adolescent dreams of universal brotherhood and justice. It is either your dreams or the hecatomb. DS

Humans blamed for climate change - BBC News

Abstract: Climatic changes seen around the world are "very likely" to have a human cause, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded. By "very likely", the IPCC means greater than 90% probability. The scientific body, in a report released in Paris, forecasts temperatures will probably rise by between 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) by 2100. But another study released on the eve of publication suggests its previous reports may have been too conservative.(...) In 2001, it said that it was "likely" that human activities lay behind the trends observed at various parts of the planet; "likely" in IPCC terminology means between 66% and 90% probability. Now, the panel concludes, it is at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet's surface. "The understanding of [human] warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment report, leading to very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming," observed the scientists. READ IT ALL