Lost in the forest ...

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(Hansel & Gretel will be featured in the next post.)

Trying to discover the name of the person who designed the Durban COP logo - got as far as knowing that he or she is indeed a South African bureaucrat in some ministry, then silence.

Nanabijou, Sleeping Giant:




It may help understand some of the following to know that I think of the UN as a Baobab:
 
[But not Yvo de Boer for the record. He's no baobab! Gave it his very best shot and left when it was time to go.]





Of related interest: The IPCC AR5 attribution statement, and Gwynne Dyer in the Georgia Strait, When feedbacks are triggered, climate change becomes a runaway engine (a commentary on the IPCC's AR5).

My commentary: in AR4 it was 26 words, now it's 54 - just more than twice as many words. Fire them all!

The monster of corruption

 
 

[Thanks to Gord.]

 



Internet at a popular price

[Consider Frye's primary & secondary concerns: "Primary concerns are such things as food, sex, property, and freedom of movement: concerns that we share with animals on a physical level. Secondary concerns include our political, religious, and other ideological loyalties," (from 'The Double Vision' (Chapter 1).


On my street there was a beggar who spent the entire day discussing everything. He put out all of those thoughts thinking that they were important, but rarely did anyone pay attention. / Now he's just another Twitter user.

Ambiguities & ambivalence:

Pachamama is a powerful myth: but portrayed as a ghoul? as Medusa carved into the walls of our parliament? as a sometimes violent highway-snake that eats whole forests? I like Pachamama, and Iemanjá (and of her Orixá cohorts, Oxum particularly :-) ... but looking at these images has reminded me that, like Pandora, the myth cuts both ways ... or at least two. Not entirely benign, these myths. Take scientists f'rinstance: Some of 'em - Peter Sale as an exemplar, a veritable paradigm - are honourably & passionately engaged. More are working coldly for cash - possibly to provide their families with a third car - developing 'better' bee-killing insecticides. more 'effective' fracking fluids &c. It's not really that difficult to see why those who recognize the environmental apocalypse for what it is are not always heard - don't have much 'stroke'. Up-front admission of complicity might help. ... Can't say. Remembering in this context the scientists as they figured in Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast'.

 

Don't eat TIPNIS.



Delightful nubiles of various shades ... selling sneakers? socks?
 
Nubile selling chain-link fence? Or (pretending to sell) herself?
 

The Love Clairvoyant: --I had a vision of worms eating rats ... but we're not here to talk about politics.

 
Comics from the 10's:

Sir, it is forbidden to smoke under the marquee.

 

First Computer, 1964: The dolphin is a cetacean.
Computer Net, 2011: I think the dolphin is a fish. / It's a whale. / Hahaha, who cares?

“Deep. Sinister. And they’re all in on it together.” “Too paranoid for you?” “Not me, paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much.” Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 2013.   Thomas Pynchon's remarkable novel Gravity's Rainbow is a book that seems to me to have grasped a central principle of this situation. The human being, this novel tells us, is instinctively paranoid. Northrop Frye, The Double Vision, 1991, 2 - The Double Vision of Nature.   We await silent Trystero's empire. Anyway Pynchon is getting old, late 70's now. First typos ever, spotted in 'Bleeding Edge' (and those were the high points).

 
Bottom line:

Charles Embry of Sundance Roofing played by Tracey Walter in 'Erin Brockovich'. A footnote to 'Deadbeat misogynist asshole' posted previously, and closing the bracket on 'Mauer im Kopf' above. I posted a short clip illustrating the point on YouTube.

Full moon comin' up on the 18th - the Hunter's Moon. The full moon and associated changes in tides figgure symmetrically in the mythology of human afairs among fisher folk; births, deaths and such events.

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