?It's the end of the world? etc.
Or: ?catastrophic planetary deterioration Я us?
Recently, I have been castigated by a few good souls for having uttered the sacrilegious notion that cars bigger than a Fiat Panda might not be all that bad.
In order to familiarise myself with that train of tought so to cleanse my unworthy soulless carcass, I decided to turn to the supposedly wise words of such good souls who publish their stuff on real paper. And so I stumbled on this scribble by one George Monbiot, whose works some of you might have read in that protector of journalistic integrity otherwise known as the Guardian. It?s titled ?Meltdown? and was published in 1999, back when ?apocalypsme? was all the rage. It does evoque something a millenarist preacher could have written a thoudsand years earlier (with minor style and detail alterations)
A few shorts exceprts:
(Me wondering how it wasn't made into some documentary, could earn some golden plant or animal effigy in a film festival).
While a serious review of the way we generate, use, and consume matter as well as energy is probably necessary in order to reduce the negative impact of our activities, that requires reasonable scientific research and rational public debate.
Not the kind of thinking such as this idiotic nonesense such as ?flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable (?) as child abuse?; that is definitely the kind of retrograde mediaevophilia, where necro-millenarists as well as post-neo-luddites would feel cosy.
As I seem to recall, there was a sign in a demonstration claiming ?civilisation is genocide?, Pol-Pot (who knew a thing or two about genocides) would have acquiesced, as he wasn't too keen on civilisation himself.
So, should it be a rejection of every device developed after 1430, a generalisation of the Amish lifestyle? Or perhaps doing away with anything beyond pre-agrarian palaeolithic-tech altogether?
Or should we go all the way and drastically reduce our numbers to match that of any other predatory beast of our relative size and weight, giving up even the stone-age instruments, to return to a pristine purtiy of a ?state of nature?.
As for me, I reject any such redemption, and so shall be punished by the global warming/planetary freezing/meltdown/waterworld/doomsday-meteorite/end-of-days, like the rest of us.
Thank you.
Recently, I have been castigated by a few good souls for having uttered the sacrilegious notion that cars bigger than a Fiat Panda might not be all that bad.
In order to familiarise myself with that train of tought so to cleanse my unworthy soulless carcass, I decided to turn to the supposedly wise words of such good souls who publish their stuff on real paper. And so I stumbled on this scribble by one George Monbiot, whose works some of you might have read in that protector of journalistic integrity otherwise known as the Guardian. It?s titled ?Meltdown? and was published in 1999, back when ?apocalypsme? was all the rage. It does evoque something a millenarist preacher could have written a thoudsand years earlier (with minor style and detail alterations)
A few shorts exceprts:
Quote:
The global meltdown has begun. Long predicted and long denied, the effects of climate change are arriving faster than even the gloomiest prophets expected.
(?)
Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering. A car is now more dangerous than a gun; flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable , in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse. The rich are at play in the world's killing fields.
The global meltdown has begun. Long predicted and long denied, the effects of climate change are arriving faster than even the gloomiest prophets expected.
(?)
Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering. A car is now more dangerous than a gun; flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable , in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse. The rich are at play in the world's killing fields.
(Me wondering how it wasn't made into some documentary, could earn some golden plant or animal effigy in a film festival).
While a serious review of the way we generate, use, and consume matter as well as energy is probably necessary in order to reduce the negative impact of our activities, that requires reasonable scientific research and rational public debate.
Not the kind of thinking such as this idiotic nonesense such as ?flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable (?) as child abuse?; that is definitely the kind of retrograde mediaevophilia, where necro-millenarists as well as post-neo-luddites would feel cosy.
As I seem to recall, there was a sign in a demonstration claiming ?civilisation is genocide?, Pol-Pot (who knew a thing or two about genocides) would have acquiesced, as he wasn't too keen on civilisation himself.
So, should it be a rejection of every device developed after 1430, a generalisation of the Amish lifestyle? Or perhaps doing away with anything beyond pre-agrarian palaeolithic-tech altogether?
Or should we go all the way and drastically reduce our numbers to match that of any other predatory beast of our relative size and weight, giving up even the stone-age instruments, to return to a pristine purtiy of a ?state of nature?.
As for me, I reject any such redemption, and so shall be punished by the global warming/planetary freezing/meltdown/waterworld/doomsday-meteorite/end-of-days, like the rest of us.
Thank you.
Comments
We are doomed, DOOOOOMMMEDDDD.
or
Those who think we are doomed are friends of the terrorists.
I incline towards the former, but think the child abuse analogy is lame. A better one might be heroin use: it is killing you, but it feels sooooo good.
. . . he says as he plans his next trans-Atlantic flight.
As for humanity, after we get a space-based electricity generation system or better yet, viable geothermal energy extraction, we should be relatively OK. After we have such a stable power source, humanity can go subterranian and completely avoid severe weather.
Originally posted by Immanuel Goldstein
that is definitely the kind of retrograde mediaevophilia, where necro-millenarists as well as post-neo-luddites would feel cosy.
I don't know what he's talking about, but it sure is fun to read! Necro-millenarists?
Originally posted by Fellowship
Trust Jesus...
whatever happened to arguing about religion? those seem like pleasant days long gone. it's all politics, politics, pick your party line around here now. i mean, global warming shouldn't be a right vs. left issue, but it is, like everything else. sigh.
Lenny Bruce is not afraid. Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn -
world serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs. Feed it up a knock,
speed, grunt no, strength no. Ladder structure clatter with fear of height,
down height. Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for
hire and a combat site. Left her, wasn't coming in a hurry with the furies
breathing down your neck. Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tethered
crop. Look at that low plane! Fine then. Uh oh, overflow, population,
common group, but it'll do. Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its
own needs, listen to your heart bleed. Tell me with the rapture and the
reverent in the right - right. You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright
light, feeling pretty psyched.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign tower. Slash and burn,
return, listen to yourself churn. Lock him in uniform and book burning,
blood letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate. Light a candle,
light a motive. Step down, step down. Watch a heel crush, crush. Uh oh,
this means no fear - cavalier. Renegade and steer clear! A tournament,
a tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives
and I decline.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
The other night I tripped a nice continental drift divide. Mount St. Edelite.
Leonard Bernstein. Leonid Breshnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs.
Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You symbiotic, patriotic,
slam, but neck, right? Right.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine...fine...
(It's time I had some time alone)
Originally posted by faust9
Feed it up a knock,
"Speed it up a notch"
Originally posted by progmac
whatever happened to arguing about religion? those seem like pleasant days long gone. it's all politics, politics, pick your party line around here now. i mean, global warming shouldn't be a right vs. left issue, but it is, like everything else. sigh.
Of COURSE it's a political issue. If global warming is true, it means that we need to change LARGE amounts of the way we live our lives. People don't want to do that, and there is an unbelievable amount of money at stake.
Originally posted by midwinter
"Speed it up a notch"
Nope. http://www.remrock.com/remrock/lyric....html?song=its
its "feed it up a knock".
Originally posted by faust9
Nope. http://www.remrock.com/remrock/lyric....html?song=its
its "feed it up a knock".
Bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. Surely someone got that wrong--maybe Stipe messing with someone's head?
Originally posted by midwinter
Bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. Surely someone got that wrong--maybe Stipe messing with someone's head?
Stipe got it wrong, duh.
Originally posted by midwinter
Bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. Surely someone got that wrong--maybe Stipe messing with someone's head?
I've seen REM a couple of times and they've gotten the words wrong at least once. Stipe has said he regrets ever writing the song because REM can't (couldn't) do a concert without performing end of the world. Its a herd song to do right every time but most people don't catch it when they screw up...
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
CHORUS
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Josef Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien Phu and "Rock Around the Clock"
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, "Peter Pan", Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, "Peyton Place", trouble in the Suez
CHORUS
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide
Buddy Holly, "Ben-Hur", space monkey, Mafia
hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no go
U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, "Psycho", Belgians in the Congo
CHORUS
Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say
CHORUS
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon, back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollolah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
"Wheel of Fortune" , Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and Roller Cola Wars, I can't take it anymore
CHORUS
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on...
This is a little easier and more logical.
Originally posted by faust9
I've seen REM a couple of times and they've gotten the words wrong at least once. Stipe has said he regrets ever writing the song because REM can't (couldn't) do a concert without performing end of the world. Its a herd song to do right every time but most people don't catch it when they screw up...
I don't doubt it. I saw the Green tour in what, 87? 88? although Document was the last album of theirs I bought (after owning nearly everything from Murmur up). Document seemed to be a serious turning point for them, a step into the big time and, at the time, it seemed they weren't too happy about some of the requirements.
Traveling across the Atlantic for meetings when you have video conferencing and the Internet available is a waste. Automobiles are OK as long as the manufacturers create machines that are efficient. Personally, I think that a frugal lifestyle with minimal dependence on global economy would help if we run out of oil tomorrow. Encouraging and developing local economies / industries will help as well.
Nope it's feed it off an aux speak.
It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
That's great it starts with an earthquake birds and
snakes an aeroplane and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane listen to yourself churn world
serves its own needs dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak grunt no strength Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire representing seven games a government
for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it'll do. Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a candle, light a votive. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.
The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel
fine...fine...
(It's time I had some time alone)
I have no idea which version is right (do R.E.M. really know themselves?) but this is my fave.
Originally posted by crazychester
I have no idea which version is right (do R.E.M. really know themselves?)
I've heard Stipe in an interview talk about his misheard lyrics, and sometimes he likes the misheard versions better, and starts using them in live shows.
Originally posted by Fellowship
Trust Jesus...
Trust Jesus . . . fill her up . . . premium
A very good review of several soon to be published SCIENCE books:
"BE AFRAID, BE VERY VERY AFRAID
At least for the moment, ''The Day After Tomorrow'' -- 20th Century Fox's new movie about catastrophic climate change -- has reawakened public anxiety over global warming and broken through the thick crust of American denial. Unfortunately, the movie does for climatology only what ''Independence Day,'' also directed by Roland Emmerich, did for cosmology. It delivers summer blockbuster thrills and the kind of hyperbole -- a tidal wave pounding through Manhattan -- that makes the whole problem easy for skeptics to dismiss. All across the country, ''The Day After Tomorrow'' has started debates the movie itself cannot resolve -- debates, all too often, between the prejudiced and the ill informed.
As it happens, several significant new books on the environment are also about to appear, or will be published later this summer, and they could settle the debate right now -- if people take the trouble to read them. They range from anecdotal, first-person accounts of vanishing Peruvian glaciers and Pacific islands slipping beneath a rising ocean, like Mark Lynas's High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis (Picador, paper, $14), to profoundly sobering studies, like James Gustave Speth's Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (Yale University, $24). For the most part, these books don't advance new arguments, because the arguments essentially haven't changed. As Speth writes, ''Our use of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- together with deforestation have increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping 'greenhouse' gas . . . and thus begun the process of man-made climate change.'' This is not news. According to Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, the authors of the updated Limits to Growth (Chelsea Green, cloth, $35; paper, $22.50), the ecological burden of humanity had already outstripped the carrying capacity of the earth two decades ago -- as the first edition of this book, originally published in 1972, warned it would.
What is news is the nature of the evidence. There are signs that global warming and environmental degradation are accelerating much more quickly than anyone expected even 10 years ago, and thus our ability to reduce the scale of climate change is swiftly diminishing. As Speth argues, ''Our first attempt at global environmental governance'' -- the international efforts leading up to the Kyoto Protocol -- yielded very little, thanks largely to opposition from the United States. ''Our second attempt,'' he writes, ''may be our last chance to get it right.''
The question that haunts Speth's book -- all of these books, really -- is, why? Why have Americans refused to face up to the evidence of global warming? The answers are both political and economic. But Ross Gelbspan, a former Boston Globe reporter and editor, makes the case that the news media are also guilty. In Boiling Point (Basic Books, $22, to be published in August), he argues that on matters of scientific fact, journalists employ an essentially unfair idea of ''balance'' -- treating global warming as though it were still a matter of open conjecture, with equal weight on both sides. As a result, the story of global warming as reported in the American press largely reflects the political manipulation of the story, not the science. Accurate coverage, Gelbspan writes, ''would have reflected the position of mainstream scientists in 95 percent of the story -- with the skeptics getting a paragraph at the end.''
To most scientists, global warming is a truly successful hypothesis. The evidence overwhelmingly shows, as predicted, that human behavior is altering the climate, with potentially catastrophic results. And yet it seems strangely difficult to scare or reason or argue Americans, the critical audience to reach, into recognizing the truth and acting on it. The world's population is trapped in a malign paradox. Instead of taking the lead, the United States -- the country with the highest emissions and the most excessive consumption, as well as enormous potential to produce innovative energy technologies -- knows and seems to care the least about global warming. Short-term self-interest is a powerful buffer against reality. So is the lobbying of the fossil fuel industries and the complacency of an administration that lives in thrall to them.
As the object of our collective fears, the environmental fate of the earth isn't nearly as rousing, or as pinpoint precise, as our old fear of the Bomb. The Bomb was hard to beat. We'd already seen what it could do at Alamogordo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini. We'd watched Peter Watkins's ''War Game'' and read Jonathan Schell's ''Fate of the Earth.'' Only a few people had the Bomb, and none of them were you or the next-door neighbors. Your personal decision not to drop the Bomb had no effect on the problem. In time, the people who did have the Bomb came to understand that having it meant they couldn't use it. Using it would have meant a sudden break with history, a cataclysmic rending of reality as we knew it. Fear of the Bomb was also easily aroused. It was a fear of death, charring, radiation sickness and of something much larger too: the evisceration of society and global environmental destruction, all of it spiraling outward from that first incendiary flash. Once the powers-that-be found the will to step away from the nuclear precipice, the threat diminished abruptly -- though it will linger as long as the Bomb exists.
a new Manhattan Project to develop low-impact energy technologies and a revolutionary commitment to global equity -- it too promises social and economic collapse. Climate change is a slow Bomb, and it has already been detonated. You and I and the next-door neighbors are all part of the problem. And even if we all shifted course immediately and began sharply reducing the causes of global warming, it would take many years before those actions began to register significantly. All the more reason, of course, to begin now -- to have begun 30 years ago.
We are well past the threshold of inevitable change and on the cusp of climate destabilization. As Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich note in One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (Island Press/Shearwater, $27), ''Extreme weather events, such as heat waves and fierce storms, have become more common and are appearing in places where they have never been seen before.'' Concerted international action could help mitigate the worst effects, and many nations are well ahead of the United States in facing the issue. But the hardest part is assuming responsibility for the future. James Speth has served as an environmental adviser to Presidents Carter and Clinton. He writes that our absorption in the present -- our selfishness -- is in conflict with one of the ''central principles of environmental ethics -- the proposition that we have duties to future generations.''
The prospects for controlling our impact on nature are not good. What it will take isn't just a change in habits of consumption, yours and mine, or an international protocol, or smaller cars and better mileage. It will take an enormous reduction in carbon dioxide emissions over the next few decades -- a far cry from the minor cuts proposed in the Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush has rejected anyway. What stands in the way is custom, ignorance, sloth, greed and fear.
In a way, the true puzzle of global warming isn't the mechanics of man-made climate change -- the feedback loops, the damage to the ozone layer, the shift in oceanic oscillations, the melting of the ice-caps, the desertification of formerly productive agricultural lands. Those can be studied and understood. The true puzzle is human nature. In every one of these accounts of climate change and environmental degradation, the authors note the inertia of the global system, whether they're talking about economic or climatic models of the future. But there's another kind of inertia built into the system too, and I know no better account of it than a passage from Isaac Asimov's ''Foundation,'' the opening novel in his classic series about a science called ''psychohistory,'' which combines psychology and statistics. ''The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia,'' says Hari Seldon, the ancestral hero of the foundation. ''To be changed it must be met with something possessing a similar inertia.''
This is a way of saying we live as we have always lived. Sometimes -- like now -- nearly everyone is aware of dramatic changes in the world. Yet we continue to live in the assumption that we can ride out the changes without changing ourselves, coasting, as we have always coasted, on the historic wave of human development. What it will take to wake us up is a wave of equal size traveling in the opposite direction. That wave is already on its way."