SO, a month since the last blog, and an awful lot happened since then. Normally would have been reason enough to jot down a few thoughts, but I guess this is one of the consequences of daily life being a grind: it demotivates beyond the scope of working life.
Big thing at work has been the destruction of the project we've been working on, sacking of Robert, etc... So I'm not sure still whether they'll sack me or promote me, though it now looks like the latter. Either way, I don't see a future there and it looks like time to move on...
In the world at large there have been a couple of headlines that have grabbed attention; both important and both illustrative of the nature of the media and the world's politicos. The uprising in Burma was of course impressive, even if the crushing was as sadly inevitable as I hoped it wouldn't be. The scum that fell on board, like Bush, supporting "democracy", and the scrabbling of the media to promote this as the next democratic revolution, was angering to those of us who fought for disinvestment over years. Time to dig out the Beer is Murder attitude here I guess. The horror stories coming out of Burma now are sick as we could expect. And the trumpetting of modern technology, which ensured that the world's eyes were on Burma, has turned on itself as the military intelligence in Rangoon scours the YouTube videos and sends out its death squads in the night. The online support needs to learn a lesson about the nature of resistance and oppression: their publicity has cost blood and tears. The people of Burma need to learn, like the rest of us old farts, about the value of masks and a well-placed petrol bomb in place of a prayer wheel.
And then today, AL Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Prize for Peace. This in the year that the Arctic Ice Cap shrank to such an extent that the North-West Passage opened for the first time in perhaps 120,000 years. And still I read comments from well-informed amateur meteorologists such as "why wasnt all this brought to our attention 10 years ago, 20 years ago when the issue was first starting?". Damn, if peoples' ability to block out their ears isn't even more impressive than their ability to place their self-interest above the interests of the community and the species as a whole. Ten or twenty years ago? Fucking moron.
I'm still really hoping for a freezing cold winter to maybe flip the feedback the other way: frankly I'd rather snowball earth than Venus at this point. But the talk even in the news now is of the feedback loop, of ice-albedo loops, and it's urgent and terrifying what might be upon us.
I'm getting older, and it seems that I've finally become negative about my species, and I would like to get out of that particular feedback loop. I was singing 'Anna' to Ayla the other day. "Ayla, de wereld is niet mooi" I sang. "Papa" she said, "de wereld is wel mooi".
"Papa, the world is beautiful".
Still what I said years ago: the great sadness is not that we can achieve so little, it's that we can achieve so much.
Oh, and Hurricane Jerry turned into the most pathetic wanky little subtropical fish storm seen in many a long year, so so much for predictions and I guess he'll be back round in a few years...
