Apocalypse December 2023
Santa Fleece
Timmy’s on the Veltins. Just a lad in a dress handing out disco biscuits. It is hard to kill him, or he dies slowly. Your life is even more expensive… Life is always expensive. The world is in this room. The whole stress response is probably 150 million years old — same cortisol molecule in fish, reptiles, birds. Echo systems, ancestral. Effort seems to work backwards. I don’t know how much you’ve got your ear to the ground but… Every minute that passes, the wait time goes up by another minute. The mechanical process has replaced the rhythm of the human body. You just want a clear steady purpose. Try to remember that everyone else just sees you as a person, composite. I am a spirit, one part of a spirit, in the vehicle of an animal. I’ve used this prop of paper and pen to remind myself of what I need to say… Yeah, good good good good good. Fuck this off. Why does it need to make sense?
I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. Toss a coin and cover it up. An expression of your lack of knowledge, that depends on the observer. Constitutive luck, the deterministic and the perhaps genuinely random. Monotheism is the invention of desert pastoralists, rainforest dwellers invent polytheistic religions. More vulnerable to theft than hunter-gatherers, so they develop warrior classes, cultures of militaristic honour and revenge (1). Spices and materials and crafted products, to oil. As long as the inflation rate is positive, prices are increasing. Most of our senior managers are linked to a diversity group, we’ve really pushed that. We look at timezone, it’s a good place. We look at language, it’s a really good base. Wealthy families, ultra high net worth individuals. They got nine hours a day to do social anthropology with each other. We want to have thought of something, but we haven’t. According to Fortune magazine, 70 percent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation. Our intuition is not working. I think that’s because we’re not very good at big numbers.
On the and of one. A day without coincidences is somehow more unlikely. Biden tells Israel its indiscriminate bombing of civilians is hurting international support. If the Hamas threat justified this scale of response then why are you not able to show us anything concrete? Look at all these names, this stuff. How am I ever gonna get caught up? Blinken says you need to evacuate fewer people from their homes, be more accurate in the attacks, not hit UN facilities. Now you say? Repeatedly we have to endure this lag until the power people come around. Reassuring ourselves that we’re doing good, instead of the overall thrust causing all the issues and the breakdown. Tide turns, launch a propaganda charm offensive, promise the world. It works until it doesn’t, when the people see you lying, the words all evaporate.
On the and of four. United States vetoes Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, and immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. When you’ve got a so-called adoring mass in front of you, it’s a perfect target for that kind of disgust. Harei Zahav (Golden Mountains), a settlement development enterprise is advertising for Gaza settlements: a house on the beach is not a dream! We have begun clearing rubble and fending off squatters. Protests in Tel Aviv after military admits killing three hostages in Gaza by mistake. During combat in Shejaiya, the IDF mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat and as a result fired toward them and the hostages were killed. Waving a white flag. Netanyahu: Together with the entire people of Israel, I bow my head in deep sorrow and mourn the fall of three of our dear sons who were kidnapped.
Years of being despised by lords has made a boaster of him. For ye have turned judgement into gall. Race and sex. Class and religion. Trump tells rally immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. Sunak accused of toxic rhetoric after warning of overwhelming migration to Europe, that “enemies” were deliberately driving people to our shores to try to destabilise our society. It’s happening. The stage is being set, writing’s on the wall. We are a reasonable country, but our patience has now run out. Downing St. says our Parliament is sovereign, and it should be able to make decisions that cannot be undone in our courts. Monbiot goes on Question Time to explain how the whole point of the Rwanda policy is not to try to solve anything. The only thing this is giving the working people of this country is to show that somebody else is worse off than they are.
Pretty extreme, even for the time. Skeptical of the effectiveness of all this partisan discourse, each communicating to their own side. Individualised media makes us think we are discussing and re-confirming the truth of a thing, when by design we see only half. There is no right and wrong, only my interests versus yours. Every interpretation has its weaknesses, its points of interest, its missing pieces. The effects of pollinator declines are not easily reversible, because plants have already started to change. Undoing thousands of years of evolution in response to a phenomenon that has been around for only 50 years. Cop28 president Sultan Al Jaber, also chief executive of UAE’s state oil company, says there is no science behind demands to end fossil fuel extraction, that a phase-out of coal, oil and gas would take the world back into caves. Show me the solutions. Stop the pointing of fingers. Stop it. Says his firm will continue investing in oil. Just a lot of squandering going on. First all sea life disappeared and then the water. And when life is over unite us again where parting is no more in the kingdom of your love.
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(1) Robert Sapolsky
