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Category Archives: death
Plenty more fish not in the sea
This is very very interesting and depressing stuff. http://www.hogsalt.com/wp-hogsalt/2013/04/the-stades-last-stand/ The tl;dr. We trash the joint. Then invent new technologies to trash new joints. See also Marvin Harris’ “Cannibals and Kings“. And Charles Tilly’s “Coercion, Capital and European States 990 to … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, death, economics, fear, natural world
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Entering the bargaining phase – “guided transition” #climate #kublerross #wearetoast
There’s this tiny moment in film The Bourne Ultimatum that keeps echoing in my head. Bourne has met up with a journalist (played by Paddy Considine). He gets vital information. The journalist is a bit clueless. Bourne says “You have … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, death, fear
Tagged bourne, climate, disasturbation, keeling curve, Seventh Seal
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Of Gods and monstrous supermarkets #Barthes #FT #HarryEyres #Fetishes
“I’ve always thought, and argued from time to time, that the appeal of supermarkets was largely mystical, or, in the sense used by Roland Barthes, mythological. The mystique or mythology is a combination of unlimited material abundance and modernity: these … Continue reading
Posted in death, Financial Times, economics, a little self-knowledge, fear
Tagged Fetishism, Financial Times, Harry Eyres, supermarkets
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China crisis – 38% reduction in food production at 2C temp rise #climate #china #food #doomed
Hat-tip to Sam. Emphasis added.
The media, Iraq and the melting Arctic
Ten years on from the murderous and illegal invasion of Iraq, and none of the perpetrators have been punished. Cheney, Bush, Blair, Howard etc. all walk free. And now, in one of those cheap-to-produce retrospective (Ctrl C + V on … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, climate, death, fear
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Anthropologist: “Empire tells great stories” Awesome article! #Eritrea #Academia #Ritual
You can’t do excerpts on something this good. You have to just put in a hyperlink and leave the click decision to your reader(s). http://thedisorderofthings.com/2013/03/18/in-praise-of-question-marks-reflections-on-critical-methodologies-narrative-voice-and-the-writing-of-the-political-the-limits-of-language/ Hat-tip to Mrs Towers.
Posted in a little self-knowledge, activism, bureaucracy, death, politics
Tagged academics, Eritrea
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Of futility: allotments, hoses, and leakage
At the allotment yesterday* I got a strong whiff of the futility of it all. This stuff actually happened, pretty much as I recount it below, with merely a soupcon of poetic license. There was a visitor just checking out … Continue reading
Posted in a little self-knowledge, activism, climate, competence, death, fear, narcissism, natural world
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Off-the-scale badness (no, not #Manchester for once). Beijing, going through an Industrial Revolution all of its own…
Often I rant about the smugosphere. Today I post about the smogosphere. Dirty coal, doncha just love it… (NB, story is from Jan 12, 2013) BEIJING — One Friday more than two years ago, an air-quality monitoring device atop the … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, death, economics, fear
Tagged Beijing, China crisis, Smogosphere
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The poor will always be with us. A habitable biosphere for hominids? Not so much.
My Bright Friend (MBF) made the “obvious” – but not banal – point that social movements are not used to ticking clocks, to the concept of it being – at some point – Simply Too Late. She means that social … Continue reading
“I was elected to lead, not to read” – post-literate apparatchiks and the End of Civ
I may be mis-quoting the Simpsons Movie. Meh, whaddya gonna do? This leapt out at me from an article by Laura Nader. “While we were working, no matter what we sent to Washington, we would be asked for more tables … Continue reading
