Posts by Ian Dalziel
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Anthropocene alert!!
Amitav Ghosh has a really interesting viewpoint.
I just finished his short treatise The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable - I probably need to read it again to fully digest the content, sobering stuff.
He mentions a prescient warning from the Burmese statesman U Thant in 1971:"As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: 'With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas', or, 'They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them'."
It's also a cauldron of other ideas about partitioning in literature, language, empire, Carbon economics, town planning, history and the Anglosphere (Five Eyes members), a bracing dip! ...and only 160 odd pages plus notes
But don't just take my word for it:
"On very rare occasions, a writer marshals such searing insight and storytelling skill that even a well-trodden subject is blown wide open. New connections are made, new futures appear. Ghosh is that kind of writer, and this is that kind of book."
- Naomi Klein -
Hard News: If this was ever funny, it's…, in reply to Ken Double,
Those poor kids were so traumatised they had to weaponise irony and invent Silverchair just to remain psychically intact.
...and as Madge pointed out - 'you know you're soaking in it!'
We are all still soaking in it, - literally and metaphorically...I also think The Go-Betweens were a better psychic panacea for the senses...
;- ) -
Hard News: Drugs, testing and workplaces, in reply to Martin Brown,
‘Anecdata’ is a great word.
Meanwhile the rest of the 'silver surfer' cohort struggle towards the light as we enter our 'anecdotage'....
I remember (I hope) when... -
Hard News: If this was ever funny, it's…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
...if Thiel has contributed anything to the Nats
Access to Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis data-mining perhaps?
One can only imagine.
I'm guessing Cambridge Analytica are gonna be swamped with work, going forward... -
Hard News: Mt Albert: Cooperating,…, in reply to KathrynB,
Labour did put up a candidate in the Northland by-election
Allow me to be your, er, corroboree?:
BONNER, Adrian Paul IND 17
CARR, Joe FNZ 113
GRIEVE, Robin ACT 68
HERBERT, Maki ALCP 94
HOLLAND, Adam IND 16
OSBORNE, Mark NAT 11,648
PAINTING, Rob CLI 39
PETERS, Winston NZF 16,089
PORTER, Rueben Taipari MANA 60
PRIME, Willow-Jean LAB 1,380
ROGAN, Bruce IND 24
http://archive.electionresults.govt.nz/2015_northland_byelection/ -
Hard News: If this was ever funny, it's…, in reply to Adam H,
See the fnord!
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herd it on the grapevine...
'fey gnus' for the bewilderedbeests?
;- ) -
'Fake Reality' was never going to be far behind this new wave....
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No noise complaints about the Pt Chev Bowls Club on Saturday night, I hope?
;- ) -
Dimensional irregularities detected
Potential escalation and proliferation of transuranic elements!!
Life exists, so medium atomic weight elements Sapphire and Steel have been assigned!
…or is it Lady Penelope and Parker?
