Grains of Sand

Analogies and stories

2009-11-27T14:05:00.008Z

Paul Kingsnorth compares Copenhagen 2009 to Munich 1938. He's not the first to be pessimistic. James Lovelock, for example, was among those saying something similar about ten years ago. And yes, of course things may get a little bumpy in future.

I agree with those who warn against seeing COP15 as a last chance. My own hackneyed historical analogy of choice relates to a letter sent by Winston Churchill to British officers on 4 July 1940 at a time when German invasion seemed imminent. (I have the copy that was sent to my grandfather, who was Naval Liaison Officer with Army Eastern Command.) It says, basically, don't panic and don't give in.

Moving beyond hackneyed historical analogy, Robert Butler at Ashdenizen notes this from Steve Waters:

Climate change seems to elude dramatisation, perhaps because it presents not only a challenge to the habits of everyday life, it challenges the habituated imagination itself, it challenges the very bases of story-telling.

Distant light

2009-11-23T23:28:00.001Z

Light reveals nothing about how far it has travelled. A ray of light arriving from a distant star makes no more fanfare on its arrival than does the glint reflected of the rim of a cup.

-- Simon Ings

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

-- Galileo Galilei

Climate birthers

2009-11-23T06:38:00.003Z

George Marshall on the attempted Swift boating of climate scientists

'I'll show you my birth certificate' doesn't work as an answer to 'Bastard' because that's not what the insult is about. This is bear baiting not a pursuit of truth

P.S. 23 Nov George Marshall in The Guardian, and George Monbiot.

A grand day out

2009-11-22T17:43:00.004Z

A knight carbonic on the seafront, Tywyn, 11am today.

After a gale

2009-11-20T13:55:00.002Z

Down by the beach, the Burn of the Waters, rushing seaward, is impossible to cross. My step stones have disappeared, the burn is running twice as fast and wide as usual. I detour up to the road, where the water pouring under the bridge just about remains contained by its banks. The beach itself is still being pounded by the breaking waves, flinging spray high into the air, but their ferocity has subsided and old greying foam has left a tidemark along the stones. At the end of the beach, the higher black rocks are covered by a denser whiter mass of foam like discarded fleece.

-- Christine Smith

Which is it, Mr Miliband?

2009-11-20T13:51:00.002Z

I have had a copy of the infamous Bybee memo for months, and this allows us to consider which of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" the British government would rather keep under wraps. As identified by Bybee, the 10 techniques are:

(1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard.

-- from Britain's torture cover-up continues by Clive Stafford-Smith

Got Hope?

2009-11-20T13:48:00.003Z

Gandhi was killed by fanatics. Mandela's legacy is at risk. But both of them, along with others, provide hope that tribalism, bigotry and hatred as prime movers in human affairs can be overcome some day.

Six

2009-11-18T08:45:00.003Z

I used to doubt that a 6°C rise global average temperature this century was likely. Now a study indicates it may be a plausible scenario. [1]

CO2 emissions have risen by 29% in the past decade, and 2% in the last year despite the economic downturn.

Concerns such as 'peak oil' look more misplaced than ever as there is more than enough coal, oil (if Dan Yergin is right) and natural gas to send things over the edge.

[1] P.S. Richard Betts says:

Year-to-year changes in the global economy have quite an effect, and it's too early to discern longer term, robust changes. However, if we continue to let emissions rise without mitigation, there's a strong chance we'll hit 4 °C and beyond. If we want to be staying below 2 °C then it's true to say we've only got a few years to curb emissions.

On old photos

2009-11-16T12:37:00.003Z

I have long wondered why the photographs of people who have been dead for several generations, especially those whose identity is unknown, are often so poignant. [1]

An idea articulated by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop may cast some light on this. Hofstadter suggests that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains rather than being limited to just one brain -- that is, a human identity is a phenomenon of relationships between people, not something that exists on its own.

An analogy could be made with the nature of a secret. As points out, it is not (as we may tend to think) something that exists within a person's head, but rather a relationship between two people. [2]

And so with some very old photographs. The people to whom they were significant, precious are now themselves dead and so are those who knew them. The network, the circles of relationship are broken forgotten faded.

Footnotes

[1] See also A short conversation...

[2] This point is well made by a Dutch academic here.

Leviathan

2009-11-16T12:29:00.004Z

A debate here on Hobbes in Hebrew.

But how much is there really to learn? Israel's 'mad dog' strategy -- readiness to use overwhelming force up to and including nuclear weapons -- suggests little has escaped attention with respect to the use of violence for ends of state.

And among supporters such as Christian Zionists in the U.S., the state has substantial numbers of citizens governed by religious belief in support of a civil power.

Tragedy

2009-11-13T23:26:00.000Z

The Pentagon has provided $3.7 million for an independent production company, Theater of War, to visit 50 military sites through at least next summer and stage readings from two plays by Sophocles, “Ajax” and “Philoctetes,” for service members.

-- NYT

Shadows of unforgotten ancestors

2009-11-13T18:11:00.000Z

In one sense, we know more about the French Revolution or the Stalinist reign of terror than those who were involved in them, because we know what they led to. With the privilege of hindsight, we can inscribe these events in a broader narrative, making more sense of them than Robespierre or Trotsky were ever able to do. The price of this superior knowledge is impotence. There is no way we can use this knowledge to undo past catastrophes. We are like men and women frantically waving at history from a long way off, powerless to intervene in its crises and convulsions.

Yet we are not entirely impotent. It is up to us to ensure that Michelangelo and Thomas Mann, say, did not belong to a race that ended up destroying itself. They themselves, being dead, are powerless to prevent that tragic denouement, whereas we are not. We can make a difference to their stories. We cannot undo the fate of those in the past who fought for justice and were murdered for their pains. But we can rewrite their narratives by our own actions in the present, and even give them a classical happy ending.

-- from Waking the Dead by Terry Eagleton

Death wish

2009-11-13T09:11:00.003Z

If you can't imagine why anyone would want to watch entire continents destroyed -- "2012" is not the movie for you. For "2012," needless to say, lacks all reasonable perspective. It's the kind of movie that expects that audiences, shortly after watching the entire population of India subsumed by a tidal wave, will urge on a fluffy white dog as she crosses a chasm and leaps into her owner's arms.

-- Dan Kois

Heat

2009-11-11T00:18:00.002Z

Take all the power stations in the United States. Together, they produce almost 5000 gigawatts of electricity - enough to boil several billion kettles simultaneously.

Now imagine building another five power stations for every one that already exists in the United States. That is about the amount of electricity generation that the world is on track to add over the next 20 years. And three-quarters of the new stations will use fossil fuels.

-- Energy agency warns of 'irreparable' damage

Brothers in arms

2009-11-11T00:14:00.003Z

In the margin of a page on Lapham's quarterly is this from Thucydides:

The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools.

Andrew Bacevich, both soldier and scholar, is neither coward nor fool. His analysis of Afghanistan (republished in Harper's this month) stands.

Tear it down

2009-11-09T19:35:00.003Z

Deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.

-- Slavoj Zizek

New nuclear in Britain

2009-11-09T08:43:00.003Z

UK government fast tracks nuclear power, never mind the extraction footprint, without having worked out what to do with the waste, and reckless of cost.

One path leading to another

2009-11-08T17:44:00.004Z

Road shining like river uphill after rain.

-- a line found on a slip of paper in Edward Thomas's diary after his death at the battle of Arras. RM

Loose nukes

2009-11-08T13:32:00.001Z

The Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

-- Seymour Hersch

G_d's work!

2009-11-08T07:38:00.002Z

Rejoice and thanks be to G_d, I am saved. Lloyd Blankfein has explained that G_dman Sachs is doing G_d's work on Earth. Verily, His beneficence is infinite. Praise be unto His Name!

And here was me thinking that, as Jon Jost put it, there was some kind of racket at work. Cursed be my evil past. I once was blind but now I see.

Blankfein: New Pope, or greater manifestation of a Higher Power?

U.S. unemployment, on a broad measure, is 17.5%

Pinker or Lanier?

2009-11-06T07:49:00.001Z

For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress.

-- Steven Pinker

If the new world brought about by digital technologies is to enhance Darwinian effects in human affairs, then digital culture will devour itself, becoming an ouroboros that will tighten into a black hole and evaporate. Unless, that is, the Pirates can become immortal through technology before it is too late, before their numbers are overtaken, for instance, by the high birth rates of retro religious fanatics everywhere. This race for immortality is not so hidden in the literature of digital culture. The digital culture expressed by the Pirates is simultaneously nihilist and maniacal/egocentric.

-- Jaron Lanier

Blockade

2009-11-05T15:34:00.001Z

The Israeli blockade on Gaza includes a ban on toys,reports Lawrence Wright.

Strange planet

2009-11-04T15:56:00.002Z

The Tao-Rusyr caldera and Kal'tsevoe Lake on Onekotan, one of the Kuril Islands.

Look no rabbit

2009-11-03T23:54:00.000Z

Writers are sometimes likened to illusionists, but I'm not sure that's the right analogy – for the illusionist the rabbit is in the hat and the trick is to disguise how it got there. For the writer there is no rabbit, and there is no hat, and there never was and never will be.

-- Samantha Harvey

Waste

2009-11-03T23:30:00.000Z

The 65th bomb killed Olaf Schmid