Informed by the trope of the paid professional protester that supposedly presents a threat to America’s infrastructure and energy-security rather than the real agents provocateur that have infiltrated the highest offices of government in fact, the state of Oklahoma—whose antagonistic attorney general was recently elevated to agency secretary responsible for environmental protection—is introducing further legislation that could potentially bankrupt not only protestors that cross the fragile and thin-skinned lines of civil disobedience by causing material harm to properties appertaining to said energy-security or businesses working in support of it but would also hold conspirators financial accountable—by ten-fold.
This is a pretty broad-brush in favour of the petroleum industry that’s already managed to health, safety and environmental regulations that have been obstacles to greater profit, and now along with other anti-protest laws defacing equipment with a protest slogan or being kettled into trespassing could carry a fine of one hundred thousand dollars. The dark triad of the title refers to the three universal personality traits that typify intimidation, bullying and toxic leadership: narcissism, Machiavellianism (being duplicitous in statecraft and business dealings and without ethical standards) and sociopathy. This disdain that corporations have for the environment and individuals did not begin with this regime but certainly benefits from it and will spread if allowed to continue unchecked.
Sunday 7 May 2017
dark triad or but our princess is in another castle
Saturday 31 December 2016
shooting-gallery or swords into ploughshares
The always engrossing BLDGBlog informs that the US Department of Defence, who’ve committed to dozens of projects to protect the environment and encourage sustainable practises, is entertaining a proposal by the Small Business Administration that would have the armed forces at least train with ammunition whose bullet shells are biodegradable.
They would contain a small amount of seeds to be released as the casing is broken down, in order to sow the tactile grounds and ranges with native brush and wild flowers. The DoD is seeking out companies with the material expertise to make this a reality and urges people to come forward. Geoff Manaugh goes on to ponder how this initiative—which sounds potentially quite the opposite to the notion of salting the fields of one’s enemies, reminds him of a tree bombing-raid campaign he blogged about over a decade ago that might result in mass-reforestation after wildfires or allow woodlands to reclaim fallow pastures.
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ก️, environment
Monday 26 December 2016
mmxvi: annus horribilis, annus mirabilis
december: Pioneering US astronaut John Glenn passed away, as did America’s TV Dad, Alan Thicke. Doctor Henry Heimlich also left us, as did Zsa Zsa Gabor. Over a billion user accounts are compromised by a once pioneering search engine. Carnage and destruction continue in Aleppo as Syria, all the global powers’ proxy-war, is poised to fall to the entrenched government. A truck ploughed through a crowded Christmas Market in Berlin. Sadly, singer George Michael passed away as well as icon Carrie Fisher with her mother, Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds, joining her the next day.
november: Donald J Trump defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton as the forty-fifth presumptive to the office of President of the United States of America. We had to say farewell to America’s TV Mom, Florence Henderson. Janet Reno died, and we had to say good-bye to Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel on Fawlty Towers. Retro funk and soul performer Sharon Jones passed away as did Leon Russell though not of precisely the same genre. Poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen left us. Fidel Castro expired aged ninety, on Black Friday and cause of death was declared as America’s return to greatness.
september: Meaningful global climate accords held in Paris are put into force, although later in the month carbon dioxide levels surpass anything experienced in the course of human events. NASA launches a probe to study and return with samples from an asteroid with a high potential to impact the Earth—in the twenty-third century, possibly either nudging it closer or pushing it further out of bounds.
august: Gene Wilder left us. Brazil hosted the Olympic Games. The actor that portrayed R2-D2 Kenny Baker sadly departed, as did host and political discussion moderator John McLaughlin. Costa Rica powered itself with renewable energy for one hundred days and hopes to wean itself off of fossil fuels completely.
july: A wholly solar-powered aircraft becomes the first to circumnavigate the globe. We had to say good-bye to Elie Wiesel. During Bastille Day celebrations, an atrocious terror attack occurred on promenade of Nice, setting off a summer of terror across Europe. An abortive coup d’รฉtat rocked Turkey and a political purge followed, exacerbating an already tense situation. The African Union’s fifty-four member nations issue a single passport that allows holders to travel visa-free within the bloc.
june: After two decades of construction, the Gotthard Base Tunnel under the Alps in opened. The UK voted to leave the European Union. The promising actor Anton Yelchin who played the new Chekov was struck down far too early. Boxer Muhammad Ali departed.
may: Presidential elections in Austria are too close to call, and the contenders a member of the Green party and a far-right candidate will hold a run-off later in the year. Nationalism is on the rise throughout the world. Super Tuesday’s delegates are awarded to Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump.
april: The pop megastar Prince passed on. Der Sรผddeutsche Zeitung along with a consortium of other news outlets publish millions of leaked documents implicating many heads of state and prominent figures in the Panama Papers scandal. For the first time in history, capital punishment is outlawed by more than half the countries in the world.
march: Coordinated bomb attacks take over a hundred lives in Lahore and Brussels, and ISIS claims responsibility. Sadly, comedian and show-master Garry Shandling passed away. World-renowned architect Zaha Hadid also left us. Myanmar sworn in its first democratically elected president in half a century.
february: For the first time since the Great Schism of 1054, the leaders of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches met and committed to an Ecumenical Declaration. Writers Umberto Eco and Harper Lee passed away on the same day. Heretofore theoretical gravitational waves were observed for the first time. A huge swath of Canadian temperate rain-forest will be protected forever and called Spirit Bear. Bolivia and Peru also reached a deal to protect Lake Titicaca.
january: Davie Bowie tragically passed away, as did musicians Glenn Frey and Natalie Cole. There’s an outbreak of the Zika virus, causing panic in the sub-tropics and prompting many couples to postpone having children, due to the risk of birth-defects. Brutal and powerful Mexican drug-trafficker Joaquรญn Guzmรกn is re-captured after his escape from a high-security detention facility. The International Atomic Energy Agency declared that Iran has complied and dismantled its nuclear weapons programme and instructed the UN to lift sanctions.
Friday 2 September 2016
icebreaker and impasse
The somewhat ironically named Crystal Serenity is the first leviathan of a cruise-liner to haul holiday-makers through the once fabled Northwest Passage (only navigable year around since 2009 due to the arctic pack ice) and recently completed its maiden voyage, as Jalopnik reports.
Not only were guests a bit disappointed to not see majestic icebergs parting before them or penguins and polar bears accompanying them, it seems they also failed to appreciate the infamy of being the first “explorers” here. Aside from stark environmental concerns, as the sea-lanes widen and traffic inevitably increases, it also poses a vexing problem for Canada since the waters are part of the country’s internal territory but the rest of the maritime world has already decided (without conferring first with Canada) that there should be free and unhindered transit for all. Depending on how negotiations go forward, Canada might maintain its fishing and environmental regulations but not the power to bar any vessel entry—saddled with the responsibility for combatting piracy, smuggling and clean-up operations when a spill or a wreck does occur.
catagories: ๐จ๐ฆ, ๐ก️, ๐ช️, ๐ฑ, ๐ข, environment, foreign policy
Saturday 20 February 2016
white-collar or unfortunate incarceration
The duo of guerrilla artists and activities that previously erected a bust of the fugitive intelligence agency whistle-blower contracted a slew of talented prison inmates to create portraits of the biggest international corporate chief executive officers who are above the law—despite their crimes against humanity and the environment, and are more deserving to be behind bars. The pictures of these scoff-laws will be auctioned off with proceeds going to the reformist US presidential candidate, whose platform might erode some of their immunity to prosecution.
Friday 4 December 2015
marchons or rearranging the deck chairs
Icelandic artist and activity รlafur Eliasson working with geologist Minik Rosing have salvaged tonnes of icy obelisks, already doomed to their consummation, from the breaking front of Greenland’s glacial ice sheet and transported to them to central Paris, where delegates attending the crucial COP21 climate conference can witness them melt.
This is a pretty powerful statement and it’s highly recommended you visit the link and see more of Eliasson’s projects, but none to my mind was as stirring as the subdued Paris en Marche, when after the public rally was cancelled due to heightened security concerns and gatherings were banned, thousands brought pair by pair shoes to stand in for the absented protesters.
Friday 21 August 2015
stadials and glacials
Listening to a really engrossing panel discussion of geologic ice ages and the usual state of affairs of the planet Earth—how the drama has gone on for รฆons without of intervention or influence and what level of detail can be teased from the rock and sediment of how the inaccessible past looked, I felt a little sad that although those taking part in the discussion saw no need for some moralising postscript because it still felt rather grubby and contrarian to be talking about the topic, though strictly in the framework of billions of years and the science of geology, without addressing the weather—and made one feel like a climate-change denier. People tend to shy away from taking about vaccines, evolution or the politics of race, irrespective of the setting, to avoid controversy and being tagged with such a label and science suffers, as does the way such things are debated and understood in the public sphere.
The language of academics seems almost more relaxed than the choice words of journalists and pundits, and I was delighted to be instructed. For the past fifty million years or so to the present day, the Earth has been experiencing an ice age, by the definition that there is permanent ice at one or both poles, and the Earth has been making the transition from Icehouse to Greenhouse conditions for all its history. Though the intensity of the cycles have varied and have gotten somewhat less extreme out of consideration for the living organisms there to witness these shifts (and the Earth has been mostly a hot-house—with only some fifteen percent of the geological record attesting to a colder climate), researchers believe that it’s the cusps of these changes that drive evolutionary development, the emergence of the creatures that would become us corresponds with switch that began about fifty million. The imbalance of climatic change—or the reason there are such variations in the first place, has to do with geography driven by tectonic shift: without a landmass near or at the top or the bottom of the world there is no polar ice and oceanic currents also play a big role, like the blockage of the Isthmus of Panama or the massive southern sea that encircles Antarctica that keeps warmer water at bay. Whereas Icehouse Earth has presented in the distant itself more like icy Europa and Greenhouse Earth has been a far more watery and steamy place, the carbon-dioxide that human industry and occupation has released into the shrinking wilds has pushed our greenhouse gases beyond the levels that Nature can tolerate in an Ice Age—as my sanctimonious coda. I wonder how the New North will fare?
Wednesday 20 May 2015
time-lapse or moraines and drumlins
catagories: ๐ณ๐ด, ๐ก️, ๐ช️, environment, travel
Friday 6 February 2015
catchpenny or clickbait
What is it driving this Anti-Vaxxer phenomenon? I too am, I think, healthfully skeptical of the pharmaceutical lobby when it comes to rigour, transparency and the production of medicines as lifestyle accessorisers (potions to counter all those self-inflicted ailments), but I don’t feel that we ought to take for granted the science that’s really enabled population health in manner that’s seen little precedence in human history and risk resurgence of otherwise preventable diseases.
I feel that this anti-science drift, for what it’s worth, which includes the climate-change deniers—and no, questioning does not belie conspiracy but I think rather than educating themselves, some go along with the propaganda they know and see the counter-arguments as mere propaganda, too, evidence fabricated and institutions manipulative—has parallels in the last wave of worry—which although far from hysterical can and has been displaced by this movement of distrust for drugs and doctors. Americans were passionate about being spied upon—though the lack of outrage when they bought the lie that such eavesdropping activity was limited to overseas solicits little sympathy, and the tantrum subsided rather quickly. I am not sure how the revelation was received that the intelligence agencies are not staffed with savants and are bound by the same laws of mathematics that allow encryption to work and remain virtually imperviously to prying, and it was only that the big telecommunication conglomerates giving the secret agents the secret-knock that allowed them to get inside. Service providers may not have willingly surrendered to government pressure but certainly did not disclose the scale of collaboration either, and they managed to escape suffering too much damage to their reputation over public ire. We of course tell on ourselves too, and refrain passing judgment on the real peddlers of snake-oil.
Friday 23 January 2015
chronostratigraphic units
Mental Floss invites us to explore the planet’s history through this pretty keen time-spiral, produced by a design team working for the United States Geological Survey. This artwork—available also in poster form ends with the age of the Holocene Epoch, beginning about ten thousand years ago and heralds in the beginning of human civilization, but there’s also a proposed name for the current era, Anthropocene, reasoning that the impact that mankind is having on ecology merits a new division—eons, ages and periods all being measures of indeterminate lengths.
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐, ๐, environment
Sunday 4 January 2015
aprรจs moi, le dรฉluge
A brotherly syndicate is apparently poised to rally its religious wing in order to subvert the Pope’s stance on environmental conservation. Business magnates that rely on cheap and dirty exploitation of Nature in order to ensure their profits don’t much care for the Pope’s message and hope to counter any reforms that might come about in policy changes, both publicly and privately.
Some conservative religious leaders have rediscovered a nascent and absolving argument that mankind ought not to presume it can alter God’s creation in any way, and that any ecological crises we witness and choose to append an anthropogenic label on is false and prideful. These rapture-ready flocks, I think, are easily led down the path of such irresponsible, selfish thinking—aprรจs moi, le dรฉluge, “after me, [comes] the Flood” and just might adopt that sentiment of French King Louis XV of self-enrichment at the expense of others and future generations (which a lot of politicians and business leaders have honed). Many in the US already dismiss the Pope’s entreaties for charity and redistribution of wealth as communist-leanings, probably because, thanks to American exceptionalism, even the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and are just waiting to claw themselves to the top. I hope such attitudes don’t spread and this proxy war for the status quo is not prolonged.
Monday 4 August 2014
carbon-sink
The Times of India has a tantalizing little article to re-calibrate the direction of environmental research, turning it back towards carbon-sequestration through a study on ant colonies. Of course, forests and coral reefs perform the same function on a much larger scale than one teeny-tiny bite of breath at a time—trapping whole bucket-fulls of greenhouse gases at once, if left alone.
Careful atmospheric measurements and observation suggests that the creatures make a mortar of limestone to shore up their tunnels and nests. Such examination of ant farms is really a foil to one of the greatest contributing factors to environmental change—behind industrial pollutants and ecological destruction: through mechanised and deep ploughing and tilling, layers of carbon-dioxide that would otherwise mellow underground is released by the acre. I do not believe that the ill-effects of modern cultivation is just the undoing the carefully coordinated work of ants and other chthonic beings.
catagories: ๐ก️, environment
Sunday 2 February 2014
boreal, austral
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐, ๐ข, environment, networking and blogging, travel
Sunday 29 September 2013
stockholm syndrome
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Sweden just released a comprehensive report on global-warming that is unfortunately is being down-played as more alarmist palaver, but is nothing to scoff at or ignore.
Even though the multidisciplinary study that took several years to comply and analyze has few new startling revelations (trashing ecology is startling and shameful enough) and merely is another bleak assessment in the same traditional, it does serve to confirm our worst fears. In that there is nothing new in it, however—too, the skeptics and the procrastinators remain inured and unconvinced, though their contention with this fact-finding mission defies unity and leaves little open for objection. There is no one country or political persuasion that presents a the ultimate roadblock or challenge to policy but rather commitment to halting and healing the climate is a matter of individual priorities and choice, though national fronts and dogmatists can certainly be a source of opportunities and threats. Disparagingly, platforms—whether critical or regaled with the best of intentions, tend, I think the mutilate urgency, and rather than considering that the house is on fire, and still pits one group, bundled with all sorts of tangential priorities against another, rather than accepting a cold and disquieting fact.
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐ช️, environment, foreign policy
Wednesday 29 May 2013
seaquest 2013
More statutory notifications of intent to furlough (beurlaubt) US federal works are being distributed within hard and fast guidelines, though some agencies have chosen to be proactive instead of reactive in meeting this mandate.
Monday 25 March 2013
hypnos
While I fully believe that there are many abiding mysteries, I don’t often heed my own dreams. Forgettable brilliance is just that—I reason, and probably indicative of the dose of self-therapy, the stepping back that one needs or doesn’t need at the time and conducted in a nebulous way, behind the scenes. I indulged a strange succession of dreams, however, recently, relaxed and running some onerous administrative tasks on my computer, including defragmenting the hard-drive.
Sunday 23 September 2012
fungible or cap and share
It was a drastic enough move on the part of the American government to charter an airline and revitalize a military airport in order to bypass the European Union air transportation carbon emissions scheme, in effect since the first of the year. Most air-carriers grudgingly accepted the extra costs and simply passed it off to passengers, but apparently it did not behove the US legislature not to take a cheap shot against EU environmental regulators and showcase a rare moment of cooperation among a divided and paralytic Congress.
Rather than working to craft its own emissions standards (which would exempt any nationally flagged carrier from having to pay the tariff), the upper house instead risks a trade war by acquiescing to the airlines and passengers unformed rumblings and is moving to shield US companies from the tax. Flagrant disregard for the rules of others that America—or any other country—disagrees with or does not find serviceable at the moment seriously jeopardizes its relative standing and credibility. The United States has already attempted to steamroll the world’s playbook just in the past few months with its anti-piracy treaties re-programming the exchange of information over the internet, putting the onus on foreign financial institutions of reporting and taxation for citizens abroad and insistence for going along with its grander designs for its Tournament of Shadows, security-theatre, etc—not to mention the despoiled disappointment shown when the rest of the world is not in lock-step with US interests, like America withholding its UNESCO dues when the international body admitted Palestine. The world is a wonderful and frightening place, but it does not need the theatrics or tantrums of some wilful and gigantic baby wallowing through the business of others. Without recognizing the ecological merit of the EU airport scheme one bit, the champions of the Senate, merely said, without blushing at that, Europe had no right to tax American fliers in order to pay down their own debt problems. While I do not want to believe that the author of that rationale actually thought there was any veracity to that justification, trying to appease or play along with that mode of imperialism presents some unique challenges.
Saturday 10 September 2011
confabulation, conflagration
The unprecedented scope of the wild-fires ravaging central Texas is a frightening thing, already in superlative year for natural and man-assisted disasters, though recent record-holders are quickly outdone and not allowed to bask in their glory or infamy for very long. The latest in the series of governors from that state have invited scorn and courted wrath and maybe there is a parallel, close relationship--the ability to peer into his soul, between the current sitting governor and presidential aspirant and the Russian leadership.
Monday 29 August 2011
ready, steady, go or goodnight, irene
Thursday 28 April 2011
lolly-pop guild or double-dog-dare
I wonder if tornados were in the science of the Land of Oz thought of as wormholes--not primative and primeval but a gateway as sophisticated and as exotic as a blackhole with transdimensional engineering. Such a romance of the twister or really even meteorological interest in their precise cause has not really seemed to have transpired. Having grown up a little in that so called "Tornado Alley" (which is a great huge swath of land--growing wider it seems, and not one lane reserved for tournaments at the Bowl-a-Rama, like the name suggests).
It is rather a painful and frightening reality that one becomes weirdly numb to, and as I see that the storm system is making headlines and talk in Germany, it seems impossible to relate to someone who has not experienced it firsthand, the inchoate weather forecast, the sirens, facing it bravely--daring it almost--from one's front porch. The loss and destruction currently are unimaginable, and now I worry and believe that we have entere an age--and not just palavered by connectivity and profiteering, where all these tragedies are in long-form, when the affects of each catastrophe and disruption are understood and recorded, analyzed by those same palaverers, economically, risk-adverse and records ever to be broken. It is maybe also an age where such disasters are not uncommon and factored in, like sitting on the front porch and daring the winds.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก️, ๐ช️, environment