Arjan Brentjes’s film “Sad Beauty” finds an unexpected source of solace in the age of ecological despair.
Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam
THE BASILISK by Paul Kingsnorth
MY DEAR BRIDGET,
I would not normally write to you in this way. I would not normally write to anyone in this way. I gave up writing letters some years ago after my correspondents mostly stopped replying. When one of my friends sent me a two-line text message in response to a five-page, handwritten letter—to add insult to injury, it even had one of those smiley face things at the end—I knew the game was up. I am not convinced that people know how to write letters anymore, or even to read them. I won’t bore you with the facts about the ongoing measurable decline in our ability to concentrate. You of all people know what the screens are doing to our minds.
That, as you might already have guessed, is the subject of this letter.
Man dressed as the Joker injures 17 on Tokyo train
A man dressed in a Joker costume and brandishing a knife stabbed at least one passenger on a Tokyo commuter train before starting a fire, injuring passengers and sending people scrambling to escape and jumping from windows, police and witnesses said.
The Tokyo Fire Department said 17 passengers were injured, including three seriously. Not all of them were stabbed and most of the other injuries were not serious, the fire department said.
The attacker, whom police identified as 24-year-old Kyota Hattori, was arrested on the spot after Sunday’s attack and was being investigated on suspicion of attempted murder, the Tokyo metropolitan police department said Monday.
The attacker, riding an express train headed to Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, abruptly took out a knife and stabbed a seated passenger – a man in his 70s – in the right chest, police said. Injury details of other 16 passengers are still being investigated, police said.
Police said he told authorities that he wanted to kill people and get the death penalty. Nippon Television said he also said that he used an earlier train stabbing case as an example.
Witnesses told police that the attacker was wearing a bright outfit – a green shirt, a blue suit and a purple coat – like the Joker villain in Batman comics or someone going to a Halloween event, according to media reports.
A video posted by a witness on social media showed the suspect seated, with his leg crossed and smoking in one of the train cars, presumably after the attack.
Tokyo police officials said the attack happened inside the Keio train near the Kokuryo station.
Television footage showed a number of firefighters, police officials and paramedics rescuing the passengers, many of whom escaped through train windows. In one video, passengers were running from another car that was in flames.
NHK said the suspect, after stabbing passengers, poured a liquid resembling oil from a plastic bottle and set fire, which partially burned seats.
Shunsuke Kimura, who filmed the video, told NHK that he saw passengers desperately running and while he was trying to figure out what happened, he heard an explosive noise and saw smoke wafting. He also jumped from a window but fell on the platform and hurt his shoulder.
“Train doors were closed and we had no idea what was happening, and we jumped from the windows,” Kimura said. “It was horrifying.”
The attack was the second involving a knife on a Tokyo train in three months.
In August, the day before the Tokyo Olympics closing ceremony, a 36-year-old man stabbed 10 passengers on a commuter train in Tokyo in a random burst of violence. The suspect later told police that he wanted to attack women who looked happy.
While shooting deaths are rare in Japan, the country has had a series of high-profile knife killings in recent years.
In 2019, a man carrying two knives attacked a group of schoolgirls waiting at a bus stop just outside Tokyo, killing two people and injuring 17 before killing himself. In 2018, a man killed a passenger and injuring two others in a knife attack on a bullet train. In 2016, a former employee at a home for the disabled killed 19 people and injured more than 20.
ARTICLE: https://abc7.com/tokyo-train-stabbing-joker-attack/11187717/
Xen – The Zen of the Other the Audio Drama
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC, and more.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
Buy Digital Album $6.66 USD or more
Xen: The Zen of the Other is a work that follows one man as he attempts to find his way through the jumble of modernity that envelopes us all and threatens to strangle us in its “Tentacles Longer Than Night.”
Cast into a world where the liminal overlaps with the world of paranormal /philosophical speculations, Ezra Buckley struggles to keep his head above water long enough to pluck a jewel of wisdom from the crown of a forest spirit.
In a world devoid of rites of passage, Ezra finds himself on his own as he is confronted with the very real prospect of having a life-changing, Liminal experience in the woods of Big Sur, if he can survive it.
Is it even real?
Is it the legendary Watchers of Big Sur phenomena or something else?
Xen is a work that confronts the questions of identity, modernity, life, the other, and the place for rites of passage in the modern world.
This audio-play version of Xen includes a fully hyperlinked ebook for reference use.
credits
released October 29, 2021
Xen: The Zen of the Other
Written by Ezra Buckley. You’ll have to decide for yourself if that’s a real name or not.- thepsychopath.org
Background information by Cameron Whiteside, if that indeed is his real name.- whereiscameron.wtf
Produced by P. Emerson Williams- pemersonwilliams.wordpress.com
The voice of Joseph Matheny performed by himself- josephmatheny.com
The voice of Ezra Buckley performed by Chris Gabriel aka memeanalysis- memeanalysis.com
The voice of Ralph performed by P. Emerson Williams
The voice of Tiamat performed by Anna “Maiya” Young- www.godmonsters.com
The voice of Racoon 1 performed by Iskandar Sakut abn Mayu (aka Eian Orange of Z(enseider)Z)- eianorange.zenseiderz.org
The voice of Racoon 2 by performed Deb Petrochko – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(mythology)
The voice of the waitperson performed Missy G – afieldofred.wordpress.com
The poems of Ezra Buckley read by Joseph Matheny
Xen: The Zen of the Other- Copyright 2021 Joseph Matheny
All Rights Reserved
Christianity and Cultural Collapse with Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. In this episode we discuss his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Western cultural collapse, modernity, hell and spiritual belief in contemporary society. Kingsnorth’s blog can be found here: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ — Become part of the Hermitix community: Hermitix Twitter – https://twitter.com/Hermitixpodcast
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Climate change set to worsen resource degradation, conflict, report says
LINK TO ARTICLE: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/embargo-climate-change-set-worsen-resource-degradation-conflict-report-says-2021-10-07/
A vicious cycle linking the depletion of natural resources with violent conflict may have gone past the point of no return in parts of the world and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, a report said on Thursday.
Food insecurity, lack of water and the impact of natural disasters, combined with high population growth, are stoking conflict and displacing people in vulnerable areas, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think-tank said.
IEP uses data from the United Nations and other sources to predict the countries and regions most at risk in its “Ecological Threat Register”.
Serge Stroobants, IEP director for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa said the report identified 30 “hotspot” countries – home to 1.26 billion people – as facing most risks.
This is based on three criteria relating to scarcity of resources, and five focusing on disasters including floods, droughts and rising temperatures.
“We don’t even need climate change to see potential system collapse, just the impact of those eight ecological threats can lead to this – of course climate change is reinforcing it,” Stroobants said.
Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts.
Conflict in turn leads to further resource degradation, according to the findings.
Six seminars including governments, military institutions and development groups last year returned the message that “it is unlikely that the international community will reverse the vicious cycles in some parts of the world”, IEP said.
This is particularly the case in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, which has seen more and worsening conflicts over the last decade, it said.
“With tensions already escalating, it can only be expected that climate change will have an amplifying effect on many of these issues,” the report said.
(This story corrects to remove extraneous word from headline, no change to text.)
A Danish Museum Lent an Artist $84,000 to Reproduce an Old Work About Labor. Instead, He Pocketed It and Called It Conceptual Art
The museum said it will eventually want its money back, but the artist, Jens Haaning, has no plans to acquiesce.
A Danish artist was given tens of thousands of dollars by a museum to reproduce an old sculpture. Instead, he pocketed the money and called it a new conceptual artwork.
Take the Money and Run is the name of the piece by artist Jens Haaning—as well as a rather straightforward description of it.
For its current exhibition, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, lent Haaning 534,000 kroner ($84,000). Per their written agreement, the artist would exhibit the banknotes themselves, effectively recreating a pair of artworks he made in 2007 and 2010 that represented the average annual incomes of an Austrian and a Dane, respectively.
However, when the museum opened up the box containing Haaning’s piece, they found two empty frames. The banknotes were absent.
Influencer Society and Its Future
Swallow the Ted pill on Unabomber stan TikTok
“HELLO FELLOW TRIBE MEMBERS.” The friendly greeting is superimposed over a familiar image of a rust-colored A-frame cabin with a green roof. Below it, a teen waves and strikes poses along with the on-screen text while percussion music plays in the video’s background. “Some of my beliefs: unga bunga > ooga booga. the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. anti civ CHAD. i cannot wait to tear down some power lines with you guys!”
Of all the contemporary internet’s innumerable hovels, few are as bewildering as the shambly shanty of Tedpilled TikTok. There, content creators meet the platform’s trending memes in a densely ironic effort to elevate Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Through song imitations, dialogue reenactments, reaction videos, voiceovers, and dances, TikTokers broadcast the incarcerated terrorist’s views about the necessity of dismantling industrial society through property destruction and murder.
Using the hashtags #tedpill, #tedk, and #tedkazcynski—which have collectively garnered millions of views—the Tedpilled place photographs of the Unabomber in “duets” with other videos, creating a counterpoint between Kaczynski’s views and the supposed excesses of influencer culture. With the Wombo.AI, they face-morph Kaczynski into goofily singing songs about Fortnite. Elsewhere, shaggy anarchists riff on the #DontBeSurprised trend—in which TikTokers share images representing their hopes and dreams with the text “Don’t be surprised if one day I just . . . ”—juxtaposing the peppy indie-folk song “Go Down On You” by The Memories with pictures of Ted Kaczynski standing next to his off-the-grid cabin. Light-hearted jokes about personal body counts and depopulation fantasies coexist alongside more earnest defenses of anarcho-primitivist politics.
To swallow the “Ted pill” is to embrace the romance of a return to a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
It’s a strange, if organic, world. It blurs the line between the hyperbolic adoration of online stan culture and a critique of the same, all unfolding in the vernacular of the young and extremely online: Ted was right. Ted is daddy. Ted is a based God. In one since-deleted video, a mop-topped kid mouths along to a hip-hop song and points to a text bubble reading, “the Industrial Revolution lowkey be cringe,” followed by a string of emojis. Another entry in the canon is labeled “ted is so fine i’m sorry”; in it, a doe-eyed teen who has superimposed herself over a photo of a young, fresh-faced Unabomber sits in front of the stars-and-stripes while lip-syncing the Counting Crows “Accidentally in Love” (originally composed for the motion picture Shrek 2).
To swallow the “Ted pill” is to embrace the romance of a return to a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It is to reject modernity, agriculture, and civilization itself. It offers a dystopian diagnosis of modern life, embracing a utopian fantasy of some prelapsarian state-of-nature. More paradoxically, Ted-pilling means using TikTok—a culturally dominant, globalized, Chinese-owned social networking techno-bauble—as a means of agitating for a radical political philosophy that is, among much else, vehemently anti-technology.
As climate pledges fall short, U.N. predicts globe could warm by catastrophic 2.7 degrees Celsius
New Glasgow commitments, if implemented, would result in a 12 percent emissions cut by the decade’s end, well short of what is needed to curb global warming
LONDON — The United Nations warned Friday that based on current action plans submitted by 191 countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is on track to warm by more than 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
The findings come as President Biden gathered the world’s biggest emitters to the White House Friday to try reach an agreement among some of them to cut methane — a potent greenhouse gas — 30 percent by 2030.
The U.N. report offered good and bad news as it synthesized the latest projected emissions by individual countries, as forecast in their “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDC) reports.
So far, 113 parties to the U.N. climate accord, including the European Union’s collective of 27 countries, have submitted 86 new, updated and often more ambitious projections. Together these nations account for about half of total emissions. If they carry out their current plans, they are on track to produce a 12 percent reduction in heat-trapping gases in 2030 compared to 2010.
That’s the good news, said, Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of U.N. Climate Change, in a news conference Friday marking the release of the report.
But taken as a whole, the 191 nations that are parties to the U.N. climate accord would contribute a 16 percent increase in greenhouse gases in 2030 than 2010.
Espinosa called these numbers “sobering.”
“It is not enough, what we have on the table,” she said during the news conference.
1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed | Eric Cline
Consider this, optimists. All the societies in the world can collapse simultaneously. It has happened before.
In the 12th century BCE the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean—all of them—suddenly fell apart. Their empires evaporated, their cities emptied out, their technologies disappeared, and famine ruled. Mycenae, Minos, Assyria, Hittites, Canaan, Cyprus—all gone. Even Egypt fell into a steep decline. The Bronze Age was over.
The event should live in history as one of the great cautionary tales, but it hasn’t because its causes were considered a mystery. How can we know what to be cautious of? Eric Cline has taken on on the mystery. An archaeologist-historian at George Washington University, he is the author of “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.” The failure, he suggests, was systemic. The highly complex, richly interconnected system of the world tipped all at once into chaos.
“1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed” was given on January 11, 02016 as part of Long Now’s Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world’s leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can: