MGjr Climate 2012-2013

Posted on December 28, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

MGjr Climate 2012-2013

Just because it is all hopeless
does not mean that you give up.
You go on —
to save your honor —
so to keep your self-respect.

Everything that I believe about humans facing Climate Change is stated here.

Earth’s climate was sacrificed in the 40 years from 1973 to 2013,
thereafter was the Kali Yuga.

Honor:
“By protecting others, you save yourself.”

<><><><><><><>

The Righteous And The Heathens Of Climate And Capitalism
[Swans.com – March 12, 2012]

Can humanity unite to stop Climate Change?

No, and it is too late. The time to have changed industrialization to halt global warming was 1973 in response to the first Arab oil embargo, but that opportunity was spurned. (1)

There is a thirty-year lag between the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and its effect on climate dynamics. Today’s climate is being affected by 1980s emissions. Today’s emissions will alter the climate of the decade of the 2040s. The climate system is a myriad of interwoven processes described by nonlinear differential equations; so, the evolution of climate could have a sudden shift from its current global pattern of stability to another as yet unknown and possibly quite undesirable pattern of stability, when the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide rises above an as yet unknown triggering threshold. (2)

Humanity will not alter course. You can bank on every graspable barrel of oil, and every accessible cubic meter of natural gas being burned. There will always be someone somewhere who will not want to miss out on the advantages of possessing and using fossil fuel immediately to increase their power and wealth (in all the forms in which those two temporal quantities can be accumulated). The impossibility of global cooperation to arrest the anthropogenic emission of heat-trapping gases and vapors is the psychology described by the Prisoner’s Dilemma. (3)

We do not have a Climate Change problem, nor even an unregulated capitalism problem. We have a human development problem. Humanity is insufficiently developed to conduct itself equitably and in harmony with nature. Species come and go, and humanity’s prospects of long-term survival are as uncertain as its likelihood of developing the advanced social behavior needed to adapt to an emerging new climate. Nature will continue.

Just as the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous were insufficiently developed to anticipate the arrival of extraterrestrial rocks, and to devise rocket-borne interceptors to destroy the 10-km-wide bolide that would fall to earth creating the Chicxulub Crater and an environmental catastrophe lasting years, which caused their extinction 65 million years ago, (4) so humanity today is psychologically underdeveloped to anticipate the emergence of a new equilibrium state of earth’s climate, which will result from shifts of atmospheric and ocean currents, the quantity and distribution of ice, the degree of humidity, and the abundance of liquid water. This climate shift will be (is being) caused by the accommodation of excess heat trapped in vaporous organic compounds and molecular gases released into the atmosphere primarily during the 20th century as waste products of industrialization and as a consequence of natural outgassing from warming oceans, tundras, and land masses. (5)

Our problem is one of revising an entire system — industrialization — by which modern human society exploits exosomatic energy. Industrialization may seem as complex and convoluted a system in the realm of human affairs as the earth’s climate is in the natural realm (to which humanity also belongs, though it usually forgets this). It is the sophistication and extent of our exploitation of exosomatic energy (i.e., energy from outside the human body), rather than our use of tools, that distinguishes humankind from the other forms of life on earth.

We know humanity has a direct impact on climate — industrialization heats the biosphere — but our quantitative knowledge of the sensitivity of climate dynamics to anthropogenic inputs is never exact, though it is extensive, highly detailed, of increasing precision, and compellingly persuasive. It is beyond a reasonable doubt. (6)

New knowledge always confronts psychological resistance to altering human inertia: we resist thinking and behaving differently, especially religiously, politically, and economically.

People are accustomed to assuming that climate and weather are constants, that environmental conditions have long-term stability with known regional variations, known seasonal cycles, and which occur within known short-term fluctuations. Our economic activity is based on a traditional and limited set of expectations about local weather and climate, in the same way as we walk with unthinking assuredness on ground we always expect to solidly support us. We do not wish to change our industrialized economic behaviors to “pay more,” or even “pay for” the consequences of our many forms of self absorption called “business,” until forced by external conditions that no longer support our preferred assumptions.

There is a certain moralistic resentment here. Those who are willing to sacrifice “pleasure” today in order to contribute to the “good of society” resent those who remain profligate and “liberal.”

Climate moralists resent the selfish capitalists, the Republican climate-change deniers and the modern “drill baby, drill!” neoliberals. These latter in turn hate the climate evangelists for trying to force their climate religion down neoliberal throats, and for calling to cut off capitalism’s rapturous resource exploitation orgies.

The resentment of climate missionaries by heathen capitalists is mirrored by the resentment of religious fundamentalists and political reactionaries, who seek to forcibly evangelize the atheist and “liberal” masses to “conservative” psychological repressions and monetary obsessions, instead of having their orgies of free sex, free thought, free drugs, free abortions, and socialist politics. Like an American Taliban, these atavistic fundamentalists resent missing out on all the good fun the unrepressed leftist sinners are having; they can only find satisfaction by shutting down the good times for everybody.

I believe a transition to a post-coal and post-nuclear future could be a very exiting and rewarding national effort, one that would offer many young engineers (as I can remember being) fulfilling lifetime careers, and energize the unfolding of a new Renaissance. (7)

However, for minds mired in reactionary and regressive attitudes, either because of religion, or an attachment to money, or xenophobic fear born of willful ignorance, the entire discussion triggers instant panic, as in an earthquake with the ground giving way beneath them. So, I am pessimistic humanity will anticipate climate change, though I expect it will try to adapt after the fact.

Science has given us enough information to “verify” the anthropogenic climate effect; yes, we can always add more data and make our simulations more precise, but we already have more than enough information. Our globalized problem now is simply to arrive at a decision: either act to modify our climate karma, or consciously accept becoming the victims of nature’s future circumstances. At the typical level of current public discussion about climate change politics, the question “what are we going to do about it?” boils down to “who is going to pay for what has to happen, and how do I get out of it, or make money from it?”

All of the “controversy” today about climate change is just the verbalization of the psychological resistance of human inertia: “I don’t want my world to change,” “I don’t want to miss out,” “I don’t want to pay,” and “I don’t want to stop what I like doing.” All these are expressed in class- and group-specific ways, disguised in terms of economic harm and scientific doubt.

And so, like a dinosaur chewing its cud on a lazy humid summer day on the savannas by the Tethys Sea, we may sense a momentary chill as the shadow of a doubt about a dark future lurking unseen among the clouds crosses over us like a bolide streaking across the face of the sun, but that apprehension instantly evaporates as the warmth of our sunny expectations returns to flood our consciousness once again. What we can’t imagine can only erupt as surprise.

The best way to face an uncertain future is joyously, wide-eyed with enthusiasm, like seven samurai united for battle: “This is the nature of war. By protecting others, you save yourself.”

The real challenge for us, humanity, is learning how to consciously evolve.

Notes

1. “1973 Oil Crisis,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

2. “Carbon Dioxide In Earth’s Atmosphere,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth’s_atmosphere

3. M. García, Jr., “Bayesian Bargains: Jail, Shopping, Debt, And Voting,” 30 January 2012,
http://swans.com/library/art18/mgarci39.html

4. “Chicxulub Crater,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

5. “Huge Methane Leak In Arctic Ocean: Study,” 4 March 2010, Agence France Presse,
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g6NkTJSt40nZs4lXD-gLdCZdSndQ

6. M. García, Jr., “Climate and Carbon, Consensus and Contention,” 4 June 2007,
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/06/climate-and-carbon-consensus-and-contention

7. M. García, Jr., “The Economic Function Of Energy,” 27 February 2012,
http://swans.com/library/art18/mgarci41.html

The Righteous And The Heathens Of Climate And Capitalism
12 March 2012
http://www.swans.com/library/art18/mgarci43.html

<><><><><><><>

Changing Climate For Unchanging People
[Swans.com – January 28, 2013]

Climate Change is the entropy of industrialized civilization. It is Nature’s fever from its infection by viral capitalism.

In early January 2013, the National Climatic Data Center in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that 2012 was the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States, with a mean temperature of 12.9º C (55.3º F). The average for the 20th century was 11.2º C (52.1º F), and the scatter of the yearly data points about that century average lies within the band defined by 10º C (50º F) and 12.2º C (54º F).

The globally averaged temperature during 2012 was described as follows in the National Climatic Data Center’s “State of the Climate” announcement:

“The globally-averaged temperature for 2012 marked the 10th warmest year since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 36th consecutive year with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average annual temperature was 1976. Including 2012, all 12 years to date in the 21st century (2001-2012) rank among the 14 warmest in the 133-year period of record. Only one year during the 20th century — 1998 — was warmer than 2012.”

NOAA also estimated that there were eleven extreme weather and climate events in the U.S. during 2012 that caused losses of more than one billion dollars each. Extreme weather events included the drought extending over 61% of the nation (the Great Plains and Hawaii), the heat waves in the Northeast, the extensive wildfires in the Southwest, and the storms along the Gulf and East Coasts: Hurricane Isaac and Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy.

At the same time as NOAA was issuing its “State of the Climate” announcement, a bushfire catastrophe was declared by the Australian government. In December 2012 and early January 2013, during an austral summer with unprecedented high temperatures, fires raged across so much of the states of New South Wales (in which the cities of Sydney and Canberra are situated) and the island state of Tasmania that the smoke plumes massed into a blanket obscuring daylight at ground level, and the view of the landmass beneath it to astronauts orbiting above.

Also appearing in early January 2013 was a massive draft report on climate change in the United States, by the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee (NCADAC) of the US Global Change Research Program. After a three-month period of public review and comment (ending April 12, 2013), and review by the National Academies of Sciences, NCADAC will revise its draft report and submit it to the Federal Government for approval as the Third National Climate Assessment Report. The previous NCA Reports were issued in 2000 and 2009.

The draft NCADAC report is detailed and unequivocal about the many specific manifestations of ongoing climate change occurring within the territory of the United States. The purpose of the NCA Report “is to establish a scientific and credible foundation of information that is useful for a variety of science and policy applications related to managing risk and maximizing opportunities in a changing climate.”

The atmosphere today holds more moisture because it is warmer than in previous centuries. That enhanced fluid mass can be cycled with greater intensity because of the added heat energy, as storms and floods, or withheld with more enduring pitilessness as drought. As global warming continues, we can expect a higher frequency of droughts, heat waves, wildfires, downpours, and tropical storms like those of 2012, and of greater intensity.

Despite the stark assessment of ongoing climate change in the new US Government reports, a multitude of fresh memories of extreme weather events and associated personal tragedies in 2012, and the greater publicity about climate change in mass media today, the issue of implementing a broad and immediate national response to climate change, and then an international response, neither dominates the attention of the American public nor perceptibly impacts the formation and conduct of national policy. Why is that?

Many concerned with the ominous potentialities of climate change believe that the corporate stranglehold on mass media throttles the flow of information to the public about the links between climate change and political economy, as part of a management of the public mind by a national elite so as to preserve popular attitudes of consumption that continue to support, acquiesce to, or be fooled by profitable schemes of finance, commercialism and resource exploitation. To some of the people deeply concerned about climate change, it may seem as if censorship is being practiced out of elite fears of awakening the public and then overturning the economic order.

It is not a matter of censorship, but of mental inertia. For most people, behavior is habitual, ingrained by training through indoctrination (TV, advertising, peer pressure; thought molded by an external agency), and thinking is fashioned after the fact to align with behavior (“I’m cool because I own this desirable stuff,” or “I have substance and status because I am recognized by this class of better people”).

Changes to behavior are fiercely resisted by any person who takes the pattern and style of their learned and imprinted behaviors to define them, to be their self-image. To “force” someone to change their behavior is to force them to re-think who they are, and that is nearly always experienced as a demotion, a degradation: psychological death.

Confronting people with your anxiety about Climate Change as an emergency they must respond to immediately and irrevocably can be received as a demand that they commit psychological suicide: Climate Change means that all your implicit assumptions about the world on which you base your life and self-image are wrong, you must kill your present psychological self (your idea of who you are and how you should live) and accept a new one that fits in with the new climate-change-altered reality coming into being.

One segment of the population will flat out deny the existence of the threat to its psychological continuity, and this is simple climate change denial.

The more liberal resistant people will accept the logic describing Climate Change as a physical reality, but see it as external to their lives. They will block the Climate Change imperative to live differently, to exist differently, by moving the issue of Climate Change far away from their immediate spheres of thought and action, and onto remote domains controlled by forces and institutions they hope will save them. So, they will look to cap-and-trade economic schemes, geo-engineering schemes, anticipated “new” and “hybrid” and “carbon-free” technologies, so they can continue with existing behaviors despite the changing externality of climate, and continue to believe they will be shielded from Climate Change harm. This is why so many affluent people drive the Toyota Prius automobile, with a hybrid electric-combustion propulsion system. The sought-for mental oasis is: “It will cocoon me from the external threat to my inflexible behavior.”

To be clear-eyed about Climate Change requires accepting three facts:

[1] Human-caused Climate Change is real, accelerating rapidly, and inevitable; human restraint on greenhouse gas emissions can only make it “less bad” in the future.

[2] People who are fully prepared to alter their ambitions and their conceptions of how to live, to both adapt to ongoing Climate Change and to mitigate its future development, will be in the minority.

[3] The climate-change-accepting minority will be condemned to live in a world, and in most nations, in which the change-resistant majority will determine the economic, industrial, energy-use and environmental exploitation practices.

The idea that we can globalize a climate-change-accepting mentality into species-wide group-think, and species-wide equitable group response, is illusory. What is real is that indeed psychological globalization has occurred, in that sense our world is smaller, or perhaps more accurately, “condensed,” but the controlling character of humanity’s globalized mind is the simple and primitive brain-fever of self-centeredness, the clutching of acquisitiveness and for control.

Climate will change; people won’t.

Changing Climate For Unchanging People
28 January 2013
http://www.swans.com/library/art19/mgarci61.html

<><><><><><><>

A Review of ‘DON’T LOOK UP’

Posted on December 27, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

A Review of ‘DON’T LOOK UP’

‘DON’T LOOK UP’ is a 2021 deadpan movie satire on human stupidity in ignoring Climate Change by the popular obsession with social media and “fake news,” and by the extreme narcissism of government leaders and their billionaire patrons. This movie is in the same spirit as Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ was about human stupidity regarding nuclear war.

However, since the full arc of the Climate Change story is several decades long, for dramatic punch DON’T LOOK UP has compressed that timeline down to six months — from first detection to final impact — by being an allegorical satire where the real problem of Climate Change has been substituted for in the movie’s story by a planet-killing comet larger than the Chicxulub bolide of 66Mya heading straight toward Earth.

Mass media, Trump-style American government, Gates-Zuckerberg tech fantasy grandiosity and Bezos-Musk-Branson billionaire space privatization fantasy (the last two types of fantasts being wrapped up in one character), are all deliciously eviscerated in this movie.

The serious message at the heart of this movie is quite simple: pay attention to reality. That was also the same message in ‘On The Beach’ (1959) and ‘Dr. Strangelove…’ (1964). The cast is made up of A-list players, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence playing the scientists who discover “the problem” and try to alert the public, and the government to take action. But, the tech billionaire and the bought politicians see a potential profit-making opportunity instead. The character of Milo Minderbinder embodied the same idea of greed blinding the perception of reality in the struggle for and precariousness of survival, in the novel ‘Catch-22’ (1962) and its great film version (1970). The satire in DON’T LOOK UP is exquisite right up past the credits (hint, hint). Enjoy it.

There are so many inside and throwaway jokes in DON’T LOOK UP (many about Trump and trumpians) that I even thought of seeing it again for a 3rd time, in stop motion, to be able to catch them all and write them all down (at least the one’s I can recognize) for cataloguing in a subsequent encyclopedic “like and subscribe” article of my own, as a do-it-yourself-without-tuition-payments master’s thesis in film studies. But I decided to leave that huge task to the future alien archeologists who will land on Earth to sift through the ruins of our so-called civilization, and decipher our remaining media recordings like today’s Mayanologists have deciphered the glyphs inscribed at Tikal, Uxmal, Chichen Itza and many other Central American archeological sites.

So then, here is just one example. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character — the astronomy professor whose student played by Jennifer Lawrence has discovered the comet — is called “Randall Mindy”. In 2004 during the G. W. Bush Administration there was a big scandal because while Bush and his people (Republicans) and their allied media were all saying that Global Warming Climate Change did not exist, the Pentagon had commissioned a secret study of its worst possibilities — which potential consequences turned out to be something approaching the story used in the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: the Gulf Stream Atlantic Current could shut down because of the Greenland icecap melting and flooding into the North Atlantic, diluting the salinity of the cold North Atlantic waters thus preventing the conveyance of Caribbean heat to Western Europe, which in turn could result in an Ice Age type of rebound globally (I’ve described the physics of all this elsewhere: trust me, I’m a scientist).

The Pentagon had commissioned this report in 2004 because they wanted to plan ahead “for the worst”, which is always what they use to get them the most money from Congress (also, there is another sly joke in the movie about a money shystering Pentagon general). Word of that secret Pentagon report leaked out quickly in 2004 and there was a public furor, so the Pentagon declassified it and made it public (you can find it online somewhere). That report was call the “Schwartz-Randall Report”, after the surnames of the author-researchers contracted to produce it. RANDALL = warning the world despite official efforts of being muffled.

Maybe “Randall” is just a coincidence, but I’m inclined to think that the writers of the movie’s story and screenplay, David Sirota and Adam McKay, are much more crafty than just simply haphazardly lucky.

For me another chuckle is the whole idea of framing the social phenomenon of Climate Change denial as if we are all like the dinosaurs 66Mya not looking up at their extinction triggering comet/meteor streaking in, to plunge into the Yucatan then and into the Pacific in the movie.

I wrote that exact idea (climate change = our extinction meteor, ignored) explicitly in an article in 2012, and implicitly in 2013 (they were published at Swans.com). So I figure Sirota, McKay and Leonardo all owe me BIG — but I won’t get paid because that’s not how success works among humankind. And — I admit — it’s even possible that somebody else might have had the same idea before me. But remember, when you do know of a prior statement of “your” idea, that never giving credit for it and successfully disguised plagiarism of it are the essence of career advancement in “the intelligentsia” of our advanced society. (I may be using a little bit of irony here.)

So for sure I love the movie, everyone in it did an absolutely superb job, and I can see every actor got a kick playing their characters, and played them to the hilt. I particularly like the Jennifer Lawrence character, not because of the young cutie pie factor the movie marketeers undoubtedly wanted her to bring into the picture, but because she spits flaming bullets at all the usual culprits, shredding those assholes, and she does right by her portrayal of Millennials, who are always being dumped on with betrayals by media depictions of them, and by the “old fuck” financial string-pullers vampiring off them.

My wife says I am like the “Randall Mindy” astronomy science guy (I do have an expired science Ph.D., from Princeton no less, and a Millennial kid), but I’m not such a nebbish, I don’t need mood pills, and there’s no way some Cate Blanchett type (the old people’s cutie pie for this movie) is going to gush on me, as shown humorously in the movie with Leonardo and Cate (I most definitely am not gush-worthy).

So all in all, a great great movie (because I agree with it), worthy of a Stanley Kubrick had he’d been alive to make it (call this one Dr. Strangelove II), a credit to all the multimillionaires and Oscarites who acted out the parts with verve in front of the cameras, and will get to crow about it in their charity foundation websites or hit songs, later — not a tax writeoff I can get, but oh well — and there is even a self-parody joke about this movie within this movie! DON’T LOOK UP is especially a credit to the story and screen writers, however-much they stole ideas from others or thought them up all on their very own (as if we all really lived in an intellectual vacuum).

So, great film, and great that we’ve at least gotten this far in really doing something “actual” on climate change. The sky’s the limit and we’ve now finally almost gotten to liftoff. The alien archeologists will really love this show.

DON’T LOOK UP (trailers)
https://www.netflix.com/title/81252357

<><><><><><><>

Don’t Let It Get You Down

Posted on December 27, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Don’t Let It Get You Down

Let me tell you something. You may have a wife, or husband, or somebody you’re legally married to, and maybe also parents, and children, or family people you have dependent on you, and you fret, you worry, and anticipate that they may tangle you up in another drama or crisis or legal or emotional mess, and it may drag on and on and on, and weigh you down, and suck up your time, and drain your bank account, and eat up your paychecks, and gobble up you house, and you just want to figure out how to plan for a smooth getaway without sacrificing your love of your needing ones or making you feel guilty about betraying them, and no government, or bank, or church, or relatives, or EMTs, or hospital, or friends, which don’t actually exist, are going to land johnny-on-the-spot like Superman or Batman and rescue you when the disaster finally strikes and knocks you flat, because everybody else is in the same suspended hazard as you are and has no slack in their lives to worry about anybody else, or they are filthy rich and making book on the general misery so no way are going to be sympathetic to nobodies like you, and so you ask yourself: will I and my people be okay?, will we make it smoothly all the way?, can I just get a clear sign not to worry?, can I know that all will be safe?, can I be sure that they won’t wig out? So, let me tell you the truth: everybody — is — fucking — nuts. Count on it. Best you can do is be ready to jump to it when the shit hits the fan, and to dance with the disaster without freaking out, and let go of what you’ll need to accept is being ripped off from you, and forget having anyone care about your personal emotional drama on it all, or about getting the right mood pills and needles to cocoon you in evaporating amnesias, because there’s no out from the zone for you however much you would like to think there is, and you’ll need to do all that letting go so you can keep going on and keep as much of your sanity as you can manage, without giving up. So that’s the truth: there’s no hope and don’t give up. Maybe you’ll win life’s lottery and all will be fine, just don’t plan on it. Maybe it’s all part of God’s Plan for you to bring you a deeper truth out of a world of pain, well that’s all bullshit for suckers so forget it: nothing good comes out of pain and suffering, at best there is only relief if and when it stops. And after that, recovery?, well that’s just good luck; bad luck is called “relapse,” end of parole, back in the slammer, yeah you were framed, wasn’t everybody? But aren’t some people guilty because they’re stupid? Yeah well, everybody’s stupid to some degree or other, and face it we have all decided that we have to die way sooner than we really have to because we have to stay stupid, we must, because that is who we are. We call that freedom, rights, comfort, even religion. See what I mean: stupid. So there you have it: everybody’s fucking nuts, you live in their insane asylum, there’s no way out and we’re all going to die alone together from now until the cows come home. There’s no hope, just don’t let it get you down, and don’t give up. Might as well enjoy the show. Now, can I get an “amen?” Oh, and don’t forget to “like” and “subscribe”!

<><><><><><><>

Anthropocene Joyride

Posted on December 23, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

National Research Council, 2011: ‘Understanding Earth’s Deep Past: Lessons for Our Climate Future.’

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Anthropocene Joyride

The Anthropocene geological epoch began when human activity first had a GLOBAL impact on the planet’s environments. That was in late 1965, when the first evidence of a human-caused effect was detected EVERYWHERE, indicating a simultaneous global impact by human activity.

That evidence was the signature of radioactivity (Carbon-14) from nuclear bomb test fallout incorporated into tree rings for the year 1965 (within October to December) at all latitudes and longitudes. Atmospheric nuclear bomb explosions were set off from 1945 to, primarily, 1963. The peak of such activity was an orgy of bomb tests by the U.S. and USSR in 1962. [1]

Prior to 1965 many species had had geographically limited impact on altering environments, like pre-columbian humans in North America making pastures out of forests in Appalachian valleys, herd animals making permanent migration trails, and grazing animals nibbling bush down to grasslands.

But all previous geological epochs were set by planetary geophysics, such as with the coalescing of continents into the supercontinent Pangaea (335Mya) and then its breakup (from 175Mya), and the comings and goings of the Ice Ages, the last one starting 2.58Mya, and ending 11,700 years ago.

While we now know that human activity can have a simultaneous global impact for setting off a planetary geophysical process — global warming climate change with biodiversity losses — we do not yet know if human activity can set off a different planetary geophysical process to counter global warming climate change and biodiversity losses.

It is obvious that the only credible global climate stabilizing process available is the socio-economic revolution of abandoning nationalistic fossil-fueled capitalism, and replacing it with an international democratic socialism whose industrial and technological elements are powered by renewable energy, which does not emit greenhouse gases. [2]

Such a necessary transformation of organized human society is most definitely a challenge to the political processes of Earth’s 193-odd nations, and to the ambitions and prejudices of their political classes, their wealth elites, and their general populations. The practical problem facing climate stabilization activists is to overcome these political difficulties as soon as possible. Admittedly, this is a monumental task, and some fear it impossible. Even so, defeatism here is ignominious while engagement in this cause will at a minimum salvage personal honor, and most optimistically secure humanity’s long-term future.

So for now it is best to think of humans as in the driver’s seat of the Anthropocene Earth Car with the foot mashed down on the gas pedal connected to a powerful fuel-injected engine, but with the brake lines cut. Time of impact is unknown, but terminal speed will be high.

Notes

[1] The Anthropocene’s Birthday
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/02/23/the-anthropocenes-birthday/

[2] The Improbability of CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-co2-removal-from-the-atmosphere/

<><><><><><><>

Answering Job Today

Posted on December 22, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Answering Job Today

Evil is a refutation of God. The existence of the former indicates the nonexistence of the latter. That is, of a caring, good, loving, all-powerful God. This fact has been recognized since the days of Job, if not earlier. Real God either is not caring, or is not good, or is not loving, or is not all-powerful, or any combination of these, or does not exist at all.

The tortured replies to Job since Biblical days, which try to reconcile the contradiction of the existence of evil in the world and the undeserved sufferings inflicted on innocents, with the simultaneous existence of a caring, good, loving, all-powerful God, are simply not credible. What is credible is an atheism that accepts the statistical workings of chance to sprinkle the world of human experience with good and evil, bad breaks and lucky breaks, which often are completely independent of a person’s supposed merits — if lucky — and supposed just deserts — if a victim, or a convict in the eyes of others.

The fact that those statistical workings are not perfectly random has been recognized as the concept of karma, and with Biblical epigrams like: “those who live by the sword, die by the sword,” and with real world statistics showing that your likelihood of being killed or injured by a gun are much higher if you live in close proximity to a gun, regardless of who owns it.

But neither the idea of karma, nor the idea of retribution for sin, which is espoused by Biblical apologists and other religious fundamentalists, can justify an inflexible assignment of guilt worthy of earthly punishment allowed by a Supreme Divinity onto clearly innocent people who are visited by undeserved evil. Victims of genocides, mass bombings as terrorist attacks or in campaigns of war, victims of epidemics or who contract fatal diseases like cancers in young children, are not guilty and do not deserve a punishing evil.

There is no “good” or divinely guided “lesson” that comes out of the experience of suffering the visitations of evil into your life, there is only relief if you survive. The people who walked out of the Nazi concentration camps, and lived on, did not deserve the punishing evil they went through; and their subsequent freedom and new resolutions about how they would conduct themselves thereafter, if they had any such new resolutions, were not “a good” or “silver lining” or surprising and compensating benefit that came out of their punishing experiences, that renewed freedom was just simply the relief of surviving. So, the idea of “a good” coming out of “an evil” is pure bullshit.

In this world we have people who do evil, and people who do good, and for each category not all of those in them may do whichever all the time. A fair generalization is that most “normal” people have times in their lives of doing evil — of varying degrees — and times of doing good — also of varying degrees. A dramatic example easily visualized is that of the military veteran who was a killing machine during a war and became a devoted humanitarian after. Billions of simple examples are all of us “normal” people who have at times hurt others with intentional cruelties, and at other times been caring, nurturing helpers selflessly relieving the pain and suffering of others.

There are really only three kinds of people: those who are suffering, those who inflict suffering, and those who relieve suffering. The nature of human society is determined by the relative proportions of these three populations, and we must recognize that any particular individual can be in two of those categories simultaneously at any given time, and maybe even all three. If I were tasked to state just one rule that each person was supposed to follow, as the purpose of individual life, it would be: spend as little time as possible causing suffering. What I would wish is for human society and its governments to be designed entirely for the relief of human suffering. As we know, today human society is designed for the few to profit from the sufferings of the many. And the workings of that design are increasingly killing off the species of the designers. The aspects of those sufferings that are projected into Nature have produced a blunt counterattack by Nature, a fever called global warming climate change, to disinfect Planet Earth from the human pathogen causing the planetary illness, a broad-spectrum disinfection that includes the sacrifice of many harmless organisms.

Even in the hypothetical ultimate world-society designed entirely for the relief of human suffering, we would still have the occurrence of natural disasters and eruptions of diseases, to visit evil — bad luck and cruel fates — upon undeserving victims, but we would also have minimized the reach of what can be termed “evil” into the continuation of human existence. That would be so much better than any orthodoxy about God, and any organized fantasy with restrictions and prejudices, called “religion.”

I am a great believer in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, proclaiming a freedom of expression, which also means a freedom of religion. Every individual should have the freedom to fashion their own belief-system for mediating their personal relationship with eternity, basically the story they tell themselves to console them for having a finite lifespan with a certainty of death. No one else should be allowed to compel you to live under the restrictions — called religion — that they proclaim as preeminent and under which they say they live (for there is so much hypocrisy here) and to which they want everyone else to submit.

So, I don’t care what you believe in order to assuage yourself to the inescapable eventuality of death, I only care about how you act as a member of our joint civil society. We can craft purely secular just laws to specify the limits of acceptability on human actions in civil society, and we can do our duty as members of human society to obey those laws for each other’s benefit. Ancient traditions have recognized this obvious principle as ahimsa with karuņá, and the moralistic Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It was also recognized in the early 20th century by the anti-capitalist Spanish Anarchists of the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) as: “no property, no god, no bosses.”

It is by having communities of people committed to their mutual relief of unavoidable and haphazard suffering, as the design purpose of human societies, that we most effectively confront evil and limit its extent in the world. And that is Paradise in reality.

God and Country
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/02/15/god-and-country/

Darwin’s Living Legacy
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/02/13/darwins-living-legacy/

Asian Philosophies, Oppenheimer, & the New Age
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/03/28/asian-philosophies-oppenheimer-the-new-age/

An October Sunday Reflection
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2021/10/18/an-october-sunday-reflection/

<><><><><><><>

Dear Miriam

Posted on December 20, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

My Letter to a Dissident Palestinian Writer, Who Asked

You are finding the limits of acceptability in a restrictive, oppressive society. Your frustration is confusing to you, because you want to be recognized, celebrated and elevated (“famous”) by the Guardians of that society, for your writing that shows that society to be flawed (extremely deeply flawed), and those flaws are designed for the express purpose of giving power to those Guardians.

Waking up from your confusion occurs when you come to this realization: by limiting, diminishing and denying yourself you can submit to the role assigned to you by the Guardians, and in that way be “accepted,” OR you can realize that to do work and art to the limits of your abilities and knowledge means you have to hide from, evade, or leave that restrictive society.

This is the realization that all dissident and progressive writers, artists and musicians come to, and have come to during all of human history. Examples in more recent times are the writers of Samizdat (underground) literature in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc (like Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Roy Medvedev, and many more). Samizdat writers had to have their books smuggled out of their countries (which they were not allowed to travel from, except on occasion for permanent exile). An Israeli example is Mordechai Vanunu. In the U.S.A., we have Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning (who changed sex from male to female, and thus could never survive in an Arab culture), Edward Snowden (in asylum in Russia), and have had many others throughout U.S. history.

Internationally, we have the case of the Australian Julian Assange, who will be extradited from Britain to the U.S.A. for publishing (on the internet, from Europe!) the truth about U.S. drone killings of civilians and journalists in Iraq (information supplied by Chelsea Manning, a war resistor). The Guardians here in the U.S.A. want Assange to suffer and die, and will prosecute him under an ancient U.S. “espionage law,” which is being applied to a foreigner who was outside the country!!

My advice to you is to have a clear understanding of what you are doing, and who will be threatened by it (that feeling of threat being defined in the minds of the Guardians, and not the minimal annoyance you think it is, for the Guardians are extremely and unreasonably sensitive to “the threat” of the mass of people seeing them “negatively,” and as the total frauds, exploiters and slave-masters they really are).

Albert Einstein had to leave Nazi Germany because the Nazis couldn’t accept “a Jew” changing the understanding of the physical universe. Many African-American jazz musicians and writers (like James Baldwin) had to leave the U.S.A. because the White Supremacy bigotry against Blacks was too extreme for them to be able to practice their arts. And so it is with many other thinkers from many countries, to this day.

It strikes me that you are very fortunate compared to most women of your country, you have the financial and legal means of wide travel, foreign living, university education, participation at a high level in cultural and literary events, and the ability to project a glamorous image fashionably dressed and posed in many photographs. So you have much more opportunity to become an international person than the typical Palestinian. It seems that you can live well, beyond Palestine and the Arab World, by expanding your mind and your art (which is writing in your case, and perhaps also TV commentary).

By the phrase “expanding your mind” I mean questioning all your assumptions and training (“education,” “indoctrination”) about EVERYTHING, including religion. You have the freedom to choose how much you are willing to allow all that prior “cultural indoctrination” to limit you as a person, with the complete realization that all such limitations of you as a person — as a woman, a Palestinian, a writer, a thinker, a political activist — into the norms dictated for you (and your sisters in womanhood) by the Guardians, are what is required to “fit in” to the society as ordered by the Guardians.

If “fitting in” with your birth culture (or “the herd” as dissidents would say) is most important to you, then accept submission. But, if all those limitations (enslavement, really) are not acceptable to you, then act accordingly and don’t complain about the fact that you are in a struggle against oppression, and are at a relative disadvantage to it. But in making that struggle you are uplifted by knowing that the oppressive Guardians have not conquered your mind or your self-respect. It is that which makes them more fearful than anything else.

Finding the right balance between resistance and submission is too personal a choice for anyone else to presume to tell you what to do. That is your choice on how you want to live your life. My only point is to be clear what those choices are, and what each requires of you in terms of thinking, “mind expansion,” the keeping or releasing of old ideas and “education,” and of physical, emotional and financial actions required by each such choice (such as of where to go, or stay, and live).

I presume you have asked many others about this, and from their answers you may get some useful suggestions. Finally, let me say that I have 2 daughters (age 40 and 22), and I have always guided them to be fierce rather than submissive, to be: safe, strong and free. Also, about me, had I been living in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc (before 1991), or were I living in the Arab World now, I have no doubt that I would have been exiled, shot or beheaded.

Because the differences between your ideas and mine about life, culture and the universe are so vastly apart, it may be possible that you might find some of my statements unintentionally offensive. Believe me that I have no desire to offer offense, but I only intend to be as truthful as I know how (and another person’s truth can be hard to accept). If you find any of my words helpful, I will be glad, but if you do not then there is no blame to you and no offense taken by me.

Also, I apologize to being restricted to the English language in communicating with you, but I do not know any Arabic at all, except for the wonderful Arabic Numerals.

<><><><><><><>

Warmth of Light Beyond Words

Posted on December 17, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Warmth of Light Beyond Words

Today, I saw the early dawn sky over the ridge on the far side of my canyon lighten from deep dark to softening grey, through the freshly rained-on forest standing on my downslope. Then the sky diffused into soft blue. A burst of brilliance on the east point of the ridge-cusp signaled the emergence of the Sun. That sharp white light streamed out to me skimming the glistening green of the forest floor below me making the new sprouts carpeting the ground radiate their green glow and igniting the uncountable number of droplets in the forest to sparkle. The clarity of the cool air made every surface that light fell on crystalline sharp down to vanishing detail, and the warmth of that light penetrated into me and everything as I watched it pass the coiling swirls of my breath’s evaporating condensation rising slowly into the advancing day.

The sound of dawn was a scattered chorus of birdsong, some distant and some quite close, like the hummingbirds twizzling and twittering as they buzzed boring through the air and sending me their acknowledgments for the sugarwater I hang from the eave of the house in glass feeders. My cat, who is a fluffy splotch of night, fixed his knowing yellow searchlight eyes on me as a brother of the dawn outside the house then looked up to a hummingbird he knew he could never reach and with a flick of his tail walked off into his jungle. To have a true knowing connection with an animal it is necessary to always show them a consistency of kindness that gives them complete freedom. The same is true of making a true knowing connection with another human, but humans are less reliable in their behavior than are other animals.

If someone asked me for an understanding of the human world by dividing it into just two categories, I would have to give them as: those who are suffering, and those who relieve suffering. We each spend parts of our lives in each category, and sometimes in both at once. If I were then tasked to state just one rule that each person was supposed to follow, as the purpose of individual life, it would be: spend as little time as possible causing suffering.

Our human world is steadily and unevenly dying because we resist allowing ourselves to fashion societies and their governments that are designed entirely to relieve suffering. Were that so, I cannot see how Nature would not favor us with environments that were paradises despite their majestic ferocity.

I came back into the house to spend some hours writing this while looking out my large window at the expanding morning, and just as I was finishing my cat nosed his way past the door of my room, jumped up on the bed next to me, and I stopped writing to very slowly and gently stroke his lush black sheen just as he likes for quite a while, as he arched his back into my hand and then gradually coiled up laying down. He moves as smoothly as an eddy of smoke in still air. He would look into my eyes and bob his head, and I knew he wanted me to run my dull claws across the back of his neck and back along the line of his lips, as he began the deep internal vibration we call purring. His inner eyelids closed as his eyes rolled back while his outer lids closed, and he smoothed down his shiny fur with his rasping tongue before resting into an elegant quiet stillness.

It is all here wherever you are: to see, to know, to feel, and to be. That is my one wish for everybody.

17 December 2021

<><><><><><><>

Officially Old, Once Gifted, Now Joyfully Grumpy Marxist

Posted on December 16, 2021 by manuelgarciajr

This is a compendium of recent items of mine, because I like seeing them together this way.

Shoveling Snow, Mowing Lawns

When I was a kid I used to earn spending money by shoveling snow off other people’s driveways, in winter, and mowing their lawns and planting their trees in summer. This was the ’60s. Winter snow was great fun to go sled riding in, on the biggest hills I could find, some pasture and some very wooded. I’d sweat inside my sweater and coat doing the work, and the play, and it would then freeze hard on the way home (it used to be cold back then). When a job or play finished after sunset the walk home through the hush-white quiet was quite wonderful, especially if moonlit. In December there would be Christmas lights on houses casting their colored lights out from star-like pinpoints. I’d think of music, like Rachmaninoff, on such walks: magical. The summer lawn jobs were an altogether different experience. First off, it was always hot and muggy; you’d get sweaty and grimy doing the job, and also hay fever. But the one compensation was the panorama when you got paid. The suburban housewives were always in stretch-tops and shorts not doing housework inside, and come to the door, often a step up, with Cinerama at eye level. Once one came to the door and stood there with a cocktail in her hand and a Gloria Grahame smile on her face. That was my tip. Others would be out back in their bikinis sunning themselves by their pools. I’d have to go back there when there would be no answer at the door. I had repeat customers for a few years because I was cheaper than the professional services, with snow-blowers, gardening trucks and power tools. But my favorite customer was an old wheelchair-bound disabled man who had a painting studio. He showed me how to paint clouds, with oils, correctly. A great tip. Honest work always deserves just and decent pay, but sometimes the tip is the best part of the job. [1]

Response to Peter Byrne, my 92-year-old mentor

Peter Byrne:

Eureka! I’ve finally understood what separates me from Manuel. While he worked the lawns with teen zeal in the Pacific breeze, I, earlier, mowed the grass in Chicago’s Holy Olive Cemetery. I learned about capitalism from the grave up and became a lifelong pessimist. He, no grave dodger, gathered all the bad news and nevertheless managed a sliver of optimism. More power to him.

MG,Jr.:

The breeze was Atlantic, wafting across Long Island for East and West Egg to Fire Island, but all else is true. I wanted to “save the world” by unlocking nuclear fusion, and championing solar energy systems any do-it-yourselfer could assemble. I also wanted a Ferrari, so youthful (and very unrealistic) optimism for sure. But even “knowing the score”, from an 11-year-old during the Bay of Pigs (cutting me off from my desired “homeland”) on through the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (when both the Havana and NYC branches of the family were targeted for the fryer), and all through my junior high and high school years following the daily news of Vietnam and Laos, trying to steel my mind to somehow cope with the draft I was invited to join at the peak of the war, 1968-1969, I knew the score and that optimism was whittled down to a sliver. Life thereafter only whittled it down to a hair, but I had sweet kids who needed positive dreams to grow into their own happy lives, so I hung onto that hair and tried to shine its luster into the wider world, for them. But, they’re all grown and gone now, as of this year, and I am now purposeless, and have fallen quiet because that is the best “positivity” I can offer the wider world — the Eloi — whom I am left to watch drift thoughtlessly into their unnecessary but self-selected certain fates. My creativity is exhausted, as is my “knowledge”, I have nothing left to “teach”, so silence is good for me since I have nothing of value to offer, and it won’t matter anyway, just as it never mattered for the Eloi I offered my arts and works to since the beginning. What I have for compensation now are my physical senses with which to observe the flow of Nature about me — today the rain onto my forested canyon, and the tweeting of the hummingbirds ever vigilant to make sure I keep their sugar-water feeders fresh, other days with sun and hawks wheeling overhead — and I have books to read so my mind can wander in other worlds, both real and fictional, that writers with sound hearts and clear minds wrote to speak their truths to the ages. And I have music. My art now is entirely in seeking to know, just for myself. And also to remember, just for the pure pleasure. Sometimes, there is even another wise soul to talk to. So it goes. [1]

Quantum mechanics is the condensation of existence out of nothingness, which statistics coalesce into continuity and causality, to roil as an ocean of heat that expands into entropy dissipating all memory into a fathomless frigidity of unbeing. God is in the hopes and hubris of man, Goddess is in the anxieties and emergent life by woman, the Afterlife is the Afterdeath of Consciousness dissolved and reabsorbed. Humanity will flourish to the extent it is generous, and it will perish to the extent that it is selfish, enlightenment is to know, salvation is to do, every Heaven is ringed by its necessary Hell of exclusion. Your only glory can be to light a brief candle in the eternal dark, whose afterglow carried in your heart would be your peace on sinking back into the emptiness. Reincarnation is the eruption of knowing from unknowning, the birth of future and past embraced, to diverge on each side of present until they merge once again into the embrace of nonexistence. Wisdom is the glare of sunlight streaming through a rain-bejewelled forest onto the eyes of dreamers lost in their shimmering illusions, moonlight shattered into sparkling ripples on the dark sea of night breathing silence, the entwined songs of life eddying and cascading, rivers to the sea, rains to the mountains, I am all that can be: a moment of the fountain.

Response by Peter Byrne:
“And don’t be discouraged if your fingers get burnt lighting that candle.” [2]

Freedom versus Slave Mind

White Supremacy will end with human extinction. The angry rage of conservatives and fundamentalists, in the face of godless skepticism, is really an anguished cry of: “don’t make us question our bigotry!” For working class people who can’t think better, White Supremacy is a psychological compensation for an inferiority complex. That complex is learned from infected parents, and indoctrinated into one by a capitalist class society intent to exploit and enslave people by controlling their minds with a programming for obedience to higher authority, a sense of inadequacy and neediness, and with race- and ethnicity-based prejudice, to cause disunity among the great mass of the working class. Working class white supremacists are simply abused children passing on their abuse to younger generations and lower seniority workers and employees: ignorant slaves seeking to compensate for their hidden lack of self-respect by trying to depreciate and enslave others “below them”. The capitalist upper class propagates this mass psychology illness of low self-esteem, neediness and bigotry, because it is the method by which the union of the rich few control the disunion of the poor many. “Divide and conquer” was how the Roman Empire was ruled, and so with America today. Ending White Supremacy before human extinction occurs would require a Marxist Revolution to full Communism. A first step to that political goal is Labor Union organizing so the Labor Union Movement expands to the point of controlling the national economy. Then a Social Revolution can occur, which ends all interpersonal prejudices. Such a political-social progression is the only way militarism-imperialism can be overcome, and Climate Change finally seriously confronted. Such a Paradigm Shift is deemed “impossible” by capitalist indoctrination in the Slave Mind. And it may be unlikely in your lifetime, but that does not prevent you from working toward that Paradigm Shift — The Revolution — beginning with your own transformation out of Slave Mind, and then with the activism and organizing you may choose to do. The Revolution is not merely a desired socio-political event at some time in the future during the course of human history, it is a living process carried within the individual lives of people who have freed themselves from Slave Mind, and by their living examples push back against the oppressors’s imposition of Slave Mind and its White Supremacy illness, even onto the last day of human existence if that is to be our collective fate. Be joyful in your freedom. [3]

Notes

[1] Shoveling Snow, Mowing Lawns
12 December 2021
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2021/12/12/shoveling-snow-mowing-lawns/

[2] I
14 December 2021
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2021/12/14/i/

[3] Freedom versus Slave Mind
16 December 2021
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2021/12/16/freedom-versus-slave-mind/

<><><><><><><>