Apocalypse May 2022

Skeuomorph

Mona Lisa caked! Content caught me, competition for attention. Peel my eyes away from the Depp-Heard Rorschach test. For shame, for my sins. Lump sum. Look. This is where you want to be! Challenging headlines, some difficult results. Privacy campaigns are warning women that data on their menstrual cycle collected by health apps could be used against them if they had an illegal abortion. Fox wants to know Why Are We Feeding Illegal Babies? What baseness… what baseness everywhere one looks.

Let’s face it, Starmer’s Labour is milquetoast, doesn’t stand tall for any future vision. Neoliberalism is milquetoast. Technical standard. Blot out my brain. Why bother with the rules and halfway freedoms at all? To manufacture legitimacy, for the oppressor’s own sake, his belief, at least as much as them, the oppressed. Campaigns which focus on talking or tackling stigma in response to mental health are deeply entangled with the interests of neoliberal capitalism, in diverting attention away from the social and economic conditions which produce and maintain distress (1). More people with more commodities, conflating welfare and comfort with more commodities, success and social progress. On that they have never earned the benefit of the doubt; whether that actually was the best way of running things in the 20th Century is now besides the point.

BJ warned by his political strategist Lynton Crosby that the British economy won’t get any better before the current term runs out in 2024. Look at the man’s debate. The clown, not taken seriously, but inasmuch as every craft develops idiosyncrasy, a certain depth of thinking. The thinking here is specifically between the lines of the audience’s accepted truth, or the mark’s, prejudice and acceptability, expectations, psychological predictability. Mind control, suggestibility, it’s actually a position of great subversive control. The craft is being provocative, riding the right side of the line socially. The party doesn’t matter, says one Tory MP. The party can rot as far as he’s concerned. The man’s got nothing to lose, never has, he doesn’t care for anything, except a desire to forestall the future, reckoning. Power to punish. Kissing up and kicking down. The strength of weak ties, rule of law suckered into bipartisan politics.

These are cosmic probabilities, regrets. Extinction of the smaller peoples, their forced assimilation unknown and unsung. Russians might be in favour of the conflict, but they don’t actually want to fight. Grain shortages, blackmailing global famine. Naftali Bennett says he accepted Putin’s phone apology, after Russian foreign minister Lavrov claimed in an interview that Hitler had Jewish blood and that the most rabid antisemites tend to be Jews. Incendiary, unforgivable remarks that sparked outrage in Israel. Why would the country maintain a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion? Attempted erasure of the Ukrainians as a people oh right I see. Lukashenko said using nuclear weapons in Ukraine was unacceptable because it’s right next to us — we are not across the ocean like the United States. It is also unacceptable because it might knock our territorial ball flying off the orbit to who knows where, he said. Whether or not Russia is capable of that is a question you need to ask the Russian leadership.

Cloudburst. Waste generator machine. Same setting years apart, decayed. Looking ahead at vital international, industrial-scale cuts to fossil fuels and carbon emissions, sound warning bells of major transition risks. Money monoculture of privatised returns. Market-versus-state rivalry. Transformative assets versus functionless investment. Financial institutions have $681 billion of potentially worthless assets; US and UK individuals own 86% and 75% of the potentially stranded assets respectively (2). (In contrast, in China 80% is owned by the government.)

The economy exists within the biosphere, so embrace evolution. Tend, rather than aiming to predict and control the economy’s behaviour. First Earth — the living world — powered by energy from the sun. God created us in His image, and we are bringing about the apocalypse, meanwhile inflicting extinction on all other lifeforms, so gradually as almost to be imperceptible, but not quite. In His image, manifesting Hell on Earth. Death knell. Millions of people going to Heaven, filing complaints — God’s not without a sense of irony. Because it’s going to get a lot worse fast.

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(1) Dr Amy Chandler

(2) study published in the journal Nature Climate Change