🌍 ⤑ opining on unread books
Sometimes – that is, on too regular a basis – I buy a book on an impulse, eager to read it right away, and genuinely convinced that, merely by purchasing it, that's what will happen when my future self receives it or picks it up. Be reading it right away, as soon as I have it!
Which happens, but especially in recent years more often than not does not, so many a book in yonder shelf ended up there remaining entirely unread. :l Several of them presumably forever. :( I can't be alone in this behaviour..
At least recently, thanks to the help of more energetically inclined loved ones and relatives, I devised a shelf system promoti.. ehh, no matter – one such book that crosses my mind more often than others lately — leaving this tiny trace of guilt, an echoed whisper of “damn yes, with that one I really ought to have gotten started a miserable decent while ago” — is The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann.
The book's about pushing earth's limits, or abiding by them, is the gist I took away from cover and reviews - in anticipation of reading. In which case I think time proved the prophet right, and the road to hell was paved, in part, with good intentions. Is there any precedent of revoking Nobel Prizes? :l In a most honourable manner, to be sure. Just, like, reassess the candidates with 20/20 hindsight.
Why yet another blogpost utterly TBC, it appears to become a habit. No regrets! :|
🤯 ⤑ adembemende epiodes..
Of all the things I shall have read,
At the Mountains of Madness
matters much. On further reflection, I suppose I haven't read any
H.P. Lovecraft at all,
even though it would appear to be Reading 101. :| An awkward gap in my
cultural constitution. Much like
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
ffs :/ and many more, but let's not digress.
Herewith it's bumped up some on the TO-READ list, as lately I oftentimes truly
find myself climbing mountains of madness — and then tumbling down them, tearing
open some more awkward gaps, this time 'round in my weary, forworn memory; and
tangibly manifested in batter and bruise. :l
Breathaking epiodes come from chemicals, but that may not be the entire story. The likelihood, mentioned elsewhere, of “more things in heaven and earth” cannot be ignored. :l As such, this blog post, too, is utterly TBC.
Lists and lists of things needing doing! What better unnecessary additional reason to finally be diving into Emacs 20 full years late 😔 – literally the ultimate processor of lists, after all. The editor for life. 🌈 But eternal ~koudwatervrees.
🌍 on collapse
❬ According to some nifty software, the below text wall is just shy of an 8m read. The pictures and their thousands of words be adding big time though. 🫤 Bit much then maybe, then again what's a minute or two in the face of eternity, or our demise. ❭
Collective action will not be considered until the impacts are obvious and likely past a point of no return.
..an internet denizen wrote.
We know of the Mayans, and Easter Island. Also, over 3000 years ago, there was the Late Bronze Age collapse. From history.com:
Ironically, the interconnectedness that had strengthened these Bronze Age kingdoms may have hastened their downfall.
Anno 2024, we sure are 🤩 highly interconnected – compared to just ten, never mind thirty years ago. The internet has come a long way. As did we, didn't we!
Our future, now, is blim & greak – to start on a jolly note, before returning to reality and realising our future is grim & bleak indeed. Many bright scientists — for every James Hansen there is an Eliot Jacobson — and many mediocre minds alike can tell you all about it. :l
How bleak could it really be? It does keep the aforementioned scientists up at night, and they would know, wouldn't they. Note that climate disaster is only the most glaring part of our predicament rooted in overshoot.
Take famine: we know of it, though mostly in Africa, or from history. And the bible maybe. But indulge yourself in some mere Gedankenspielerei and imagine such very famine bluntly coming for us and our loved ones, here, in our lifetimes. When supermarkets suddenly no longer appear so super, logistics unraveled due to Houthis (“Anṣār Allāh” they call or consider themselves, “partisans of God” 🤦) or a flu more serious than COVID-19, and crops shrivel in the heat and/or are flooded in one too many places at once.
Or think of refugees nowadays: they die in sad numbers on tragic treks north,
in the Mediterranean or Darién Gap.
When they do make it to wherever they made it, they disrupt societies in which
they end up. Don't even need to bring religion or other bad habits for that –
just their numbers will do. Even if everyone were willing to show humanity the
other cheek ist es einfach nicht schaffbar. See how it works out today, with
just a few million people on their merry way, from 🇸🇾 Syria here
or 🇻🇪 Venezuela there. Imagine a billion 😐 or two people from
🇵🇰 Pakistan, or 🇮🇳 India, or 🇪🇸 Spain,
compelled or forced to leave their home or scorched homeland. Where will they go?
A cynic might mutter they're probably better off dying just where they are..
Truly, and sincerely, all better off, all involved. 😔
Not like we didn't know (but who's this pesky “we”? and what did they know..).
Already in the early 1970's we knew very well of
the limits we ought to
have abided by. Instead we relied on 🙌 technology to overcome and ignore them,
and to do that gobbled are gobbling up fossil fuels like there was is no
tomorrow, disfiguring all that is beautiful and quite simply destroying the
very systems that support us. And while it's hard to fathom, probably just a
few dozen, or hundred sleazy scumbags can be singularly blamed for unleashing
this, the sixth mass extinction,
ongoing, unfolding before our eyes.
#ExxonKnew, for instance.
This past July 21th was the planet's 🔥 warmest day in 100.000 years. Awful numbers keep blowing minds brighter than mine and presumably, though not necessarily, yours. Even high-profile mainstream media like CNN have stopped mincing words. That mere fact could be reason for pause, and then maybe cause for concern – of which, however, around me I discern absolutely NONE. So then что дѣлать? “Наболѣвшіе вопросы нашего движенія”.. Perhaps I shall go spraypaint some landmark, or glu myself to an unsuspecting work of art after all. One of few bucket list items was to go see The Hunters in the Snow for real someday anyway, and 🚆 the train goes a long way.
On July 30th of this, the year of our Lord 2024, The Guardian reports on coral bleaching once more, for good measure. Coral reefs made for breathtaking pictures, and do so again as they succumb to marine heatwaves – life gone, death beyond repair. April 2025 addendum: “84% of the world's coral reefs hit by worst bleaching event on record.” 😶
“We’re coming out of a couple of decades where we made predictions,” said Prof Tracy Ainsworth, the vice-president of the International Coral Reef Society. “Now we are at a point where we hoped we would not be. Now we’re asking, what do we do now?”
If there is one thing to internalize, it is that there is no fixing things
anymore, no way out of our predicament. This can't be stressed emphatically
enough: this is a time of consequences. A loved one told me not to “lose
myself in admiring the problem” – a wise take and sidestep I probably needed,
but of little solace, and no use. Attitude is irrelevant, resolve regrettable,
in the face of this unfolding polycrisis. It's not just conceited to believe all
problems can be solved – it is exceedingly ill-advised to assume so and act,
even stake everything, upon the assumption. Bending nature reality to our
every whim & will simply never made sense, as evidenced by the evidence time and
again.
Only today, 21/5/25, I noticed (by way of some quick Ctrl+f) that nowhere
in this slab of text I verbatim mentioned the tragically misguided disposition
toward 🦾 TECHNO OPTIMISM. One does not create something out of nothing –
how hard is that to get? Nor! does one 🙌 pull CO₂ out of the air, and surely!
it is unwise to assume technology 🙌 will exist! out of thin air, and even! if
it would, when would it? And when it would, would one store the CO₂ in plastic
bottles or rather wooden boxes? In sandbags to stack up against the rising tide?
It cannot exist, let alone to scale, ergo even if all humankind were somehow committed to save itself – like the US economy transformed itself to end WW II, or all of us did our bit to fix the hole in the ozone layer – by now no commitment could prevent the end.
🥀 “Geen mens die nog weet hoe het einde begon”?
Zeker wel. 🎶
Let's, for good measure, drop yet another stunning holiday postcard frommm.. 🇨🇦 Manitoba this time. Good thing we have those seeds stashed in 🇳🇴 Svalbard! Where they will safely remain, so when Europe freezes, they will sav.. we will plant.. Hunger won't b.. hmm.
Meldet sich, related to inadvisable unfounded hope,
another quote 😑 with
ENOTIME
for context:
“L'homme moderne, au lieu de chercher à s'élever à la vérité, prétend la faire descendre à son niveau.”
Our undisputable ingenuity has had plenty of time to prove its worth or use, but never managed to slow us down, never mind stop us from circling down the drain. Some problems & hoe vaak nog moet hier Frits in herhaling vallen just can't be solved. The humility to acknowledge this behoves us all, and our failure to do so has only exacerbated the kerfuffle, turning problems into a predicament.
Embrace the predicament! Sounds corny, but words oh words. Truly embracing it requires not just willingness, but also, amidst the incessant hustle and bustle foreground noise of an imposed lifestyle, the ability and time to try to get a proper picture and adequately assess the state of affairs. I suppose it then takes a decent while to regain one's bearings, maybe surfing some unfamiliar Kübler-Ross vibes in no particular order.
This entire kerfuffle obvi doesn't leave us with nothing left to do, quite the contrary, we'd just do well to reconsider our efforts. The sooner, the better, because in the meantime we are running out of precious time, and wasting resources of human and other kinds. Green growth is such an obvi oxymoron. Resources are finite, planned degrowth a fantasy. Unplanned then, the degrowth will be forced upon us, and quite dramatically so, because there really seems to be. no. way. of. stopping the machine.
We should try to foresee what the future holds, and then figure out how to mitigate the misery as best we can, in unfavourable circumstances already showing, and baked in to get unfavourabler still for decades to come. 🫥 It somehow reminds me of that.. guy forced to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity. As always, Wikipedia assists us with a think, because –
“The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself.”
Frits, 5/8/24,
and 424 CO₂ ppm
PS: But then, if all this were punishment.. Did not Jesus die for our sins? 🤔 What if he died in vain? What if we'll have to atone for them ourselves. 😐 I'll go find me a nice boulder already, and next time those Jehovah's Witnesses come knocking, I have some serious questions to their answers. 🥸
21/5/25 PPS: “Limits to Growth was right about collapse”, according to the internet? No shit. The aforementioned loved one – whose latest comforting Signal message might as well have been written by an LLM 🫥 – told me, even keeps telling me “smart people are working on avoiding that”.
Wanting to avoid coming across as antagonistic for she sake of it, I haven't yet managed to inquire further about those people, and their work: who they are, what they have been doing all this time, or indeed what it is they reasonably believe they can and are trying to avert.. In my youth I certainly often must have come across as antagonistic for the sake of it, but my worn soul has long shed most all hubris. Only incomprehension remains, living as a faux first-world Sisyphus, life a dreamy pointless punishment. “Sicker!”, quoth Cassandra.
7/9/25 PPPS: Perhaps
for many the 'X' in XR is another, i.e. 2nd bridge too far.. To
even consider its existence, never mind the fact it may well be a bridge, or
river — “Lethe, wasche die Wunden rein..” —
to be crossed. Then mayhaps
this yet another Reddit post
should trigger another post here, then, again. Again! And again..