Image of homelessness from the now-defunct Italian blog Moving & Learning

“April is the cruellest month”, TS Eliot wrote, in The Waste Land, exactly 100 years ago, after Ezra Pound forced him to change it from February. It’s the month when hopes for a new beginning, for brighter days ahead, are so often dashed. Lots of evidence of that this year. An attitude of generosity might help. From James Parker in the April Atlantic:

It’s primal, it’s biblical, it’s the moral physics of the universe in action: The have meets the have-not. In the subway, on the street, at the traffic light, along the underpass, anywhere in America. What happens next?

You, patently, have. Warmth, comfort, accessible hygiene, a fridge, a place to go, a buffer or two against intolerable pressure. The person in front of you, patiently, has not. A look suffices to tell you that. Their lack imprints itself upon your abundance. And they’re asking you for money. Do you give it? Should you? Must you? Do you want to?

We can dispense immediately with the traditional canard: They’ll only spend it on drugs. What a pernicious mingling of Ayn Randian screw-’em-ism and liberal faux concern. Maybe they will spend it on drugs. Or maybe they’ll spend it on a new copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, to replace the one that disappeared when their campsite of two years was deconstructed—in their absence—by park rangers. The point is, how they spend it is none of your business.

Let’s get back to the encounter itself. Awkward, isn’t it? The system of which you are a functioning part has thrown the person before you into a transparent condition of penury and exile. Perhaps you feel a flickering of shame. And then a flickering of annoyance at the flickering of shame. Jesus Christ, their hands are out and their tin cups are rattling—why can’t they leave you alone? Affluence is no picnic. You have a prescription to refill, a phone to upgrade, and a car to get repaired. This pullulating need—it’s too much.

Here’s my tip: If you’re temperamentally indisposed, keep your money. A penny was given a poor man “grudgingly,” wrote the French Catholic mystic Léon Bloy, “pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe.” So don’t do that.

But if you are inclined to give, then give wholeheartedly. Not for charity, not for empathy, not for any groaning abstraction, but that the divine economy of giving might circulate through you unobstructed. Through your glands and through your veins. The person before you needs money, and you need to give it. Unplug the wellspring of life, and hand it over.

COLLAPSE WATCH


droughts predicted for the 2030s, per Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, via NBC news; purple and red signify areas of severe and extreme drought

The time for action…: The IPCC has released its latest report on the fight against climate collapse, requiring at a minimum the halving of emissions within the next eight years. They dare not tell you it’s already too late. But if you read carefully…

Richard Heinberg: Is “Cap-and-ration” just another way of saying “We’re fucked”?: Richard’s newest ‘Museletter’ explains the energy and ecological implications of the Ukraine war, and then outlines what he believes is the only method of achieving the IPCC’s urgent goals in time, and concludes:

If cap-and-ration proves to be politically unattainable, then we should be honest with ourselves about the consequences. Without cap-and-ration, the world’s policymakers will most likely continue to dither with proposals that appear to reduce emissions without actually doing so. Horrific consequences from those emissions will ensue. And young people around the world, whose lives will be tragically impacted, will give up on policy solutions and look for other strategies.

Both poles break heat records, some by up to 30ºC: For the few that hadn’t heard just how crazy and frequent once-unthinkable weather anomalies have become.

Meanwhile, the Neros fiddle: In Canada, Trudeau announced approval of a major new oil mega-project off the east coast. In the US, a Federal Reserve Board nominee withdrew her nomination because Republicans said she supported a transition to renewable energy, which they described as politically unacceptable.

LIVING BETTER


Edward Snowden, from Relax It’s Only Art: “people don’t realize how hard it is to speak the truth. to a world full of people that don’t realize they’re living a lie.” Original source of the image is not cited.

Sci-Hub lives on: The wonderful research publishing service Sci-Hub, started by Kazakhstani student Alexandra Elbakyan, continues to circumvent attempts by greedy “academic publishers” to shut it down, and makes scientific and medical research available to all, for free.

Relax it’s only art: The Facebook group displays provocative, inspiring, beautiful, outrageous, brilliant art in many media. The photo above for example.

The illusion of being alone: Indrajit Samarajiva waxes poetic on solitude and individualism — social, political, existential. A moving reflection.

How we think about problems: Albert Bates muses on Daniel Schmachtenberger’s theory about how we usually think about problems in an illogical and unsatisfactory way that too often leads to technological solutions that actually exacerbate the problem.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Image by the multi-award-winning artist and cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, from the film The Wall

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism Part 1: Short takes about the Ukraine war you likely won’t read in the mainstream media (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism Part 2: Short takes on other corporatist things going on while we’re distracted by the war:

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

CoVid-19 Becomes the Pandemic (mostly) of the Unvaccinated: Short takes:

  • Not much new to say. The politicians have muzzled the health experts and abandoned most mandates. Biden has mismanaged the pandemic as badly as Trump did. (Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.) It’s still insane, as the predicted and inevitable sixth wave gets underway, not to wear a mask indoors, and not to get vaccinated and a booster. And equally insane, at this critical juncture, to abandon testing regimens. Early mandates and the vaccines may have halved the death toll, but it’s still rising globally at, per best estimates, 10,000 people dying unnecessarily every day — that’s over 3M more people per year on top of the ~14M who’ve already died from this terrible disease. This does not bode at all well for how we’re going to handle even worse crises as global economic and ecological collapse worsens.

Inside the palace with MBS: The crown prince of Saudi Arabia is more complex than you might think, and he’s a hero to millions of his citizens who’d suffered under the brutal and arbitrary Wahhabi religious police, which he has all but abolished, and struggled with harsh restrictions, especially for women, or were victimized by rampant corruption, which many think he’s dramatically curtailed. But he’s no hero and has terrified his opponents. A great article by Graeme Wood.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon from Will McPhail‘s own website

What do we want our children to learn from us?: Indi writes about the loss of our capacity to imagine. In another fascinating article, he muses about the relationship between ritual and hierarchy/caste.

Bullshit job title generator: Absolutely hilarious. See if your job’s on the list. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

How to fix Daylight Saving Time: Hank Green humorously ponders our incapacity to get rid of twice-annual time changes.

Standard model of the universe fails again: The model, which was already riddled with holes (not all of them black) suffered another setback this month when, based on 750 trillion observations, researchers acknowledged that the W Boson particle actually has a mass far greater than the model predicts. Of course, the response of many scientists was to question or fault the measurement process.

From the Beaverton (spoof headlines of the month):

  • “Canada to ban foreign homebuyers who refuse to set up dummy corporations.”
  • “Vanilla yogurt holds slight lead in Conservative leadership opinion polls.”
  • “Oscars present lifetime achievement award to Toxic Masculinity”
  • “Poll asking Canadians what we should do in Ukraine reveals majority of Canadians not military strategists”
  • “Nation’s conspiracy theorists celebrate False Flag Day”

Dancing religiously: Responding to a global challenge, hundreds of religious groups have made videos of their congregation leaders dancing to the South African hit song Jerusalema. Some of them got the moves. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


image by Anton Batov, from a series on how Egyptian hieroglyphics might translate into modern language

From Cornel West, on what’s wrong with America and the Biden administration:

You’re not dealing with deportation. You’re still locked into a very knee-jerk defence of NATO so that the militarism still goes on—everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow. He sends the Secretary of State, telling Russia, “You have no right to have a sphere of influence,” after the Monroe Doctrine, after the overthrowing of democratic regimes in Latin America for the last hundred-and-some years. Come on, America, do you think people are stupid? What kind of hypocrisy can anybody stand?

That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster—of course, he is. But so were the folk promoting the Monroe Doctrine that had the U.S. sphere of influence for decade after decade after decade after decade, and anybody critical of you, you would demonize. Yet here are you, right at the door of Russia, and can’t see yourself in the mirror. That’s spiritual decay right there, brother, it really is.

From Nina Khruscheva, great-granddaughter of Nikita, who lives and works in the US, and says she despises Putin, about the situation in Ukraine, in an interview in The New Yorker:

I think it could have been done differently. In my experience, once again—you’re writing for The New Yorker, so I’m supposed to be very politically correct here, but I’m still going to say it. I’ve never seen America be a gracious victor because once it wins, it just jumps on your grave like there is no tomorrow; even the dead bodies would come out with anger. So yes, it was not a gracious winner, and being the only superpower only added to an American sense of superiority, which certainly influenced the Russian approach. I’m not taking away from Russia’s own responsibility, its own horrendous anti-American rhetoric because it was a loser. It just basically maligns the winner, and America as a winner maligns the loser. They are mirror images in a sense.

From Tom Waits’ website:

After a rain in New York all the dogs that got caught in the rain, somehow the water washed away their whole trail and they can’t get back home so about 4 in the morning you see all these stranded dogs on the street and they’re looking around like – won’t you help me get back home, sir, please – excuse me sir – excuse me sir – can you help me find my way back home – all makes and models, the short ones, the black ones, the tall ones, the expensive ones, the long ones, the disturbed ones, they all just want to get home.

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

We are just monkeys with money and guns.

From Confucius: “The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”

From Indrajit Samarajiva:

This was supposed to be about apocalypse skills to teach my children, but what do I know? My main skills are filling out forms and filtering search results, and that’s not really relevant now. I’m starting from the same place as my own children, and I’m old and slow. So I guess it’s not about raising children anymore. We have to raise each other now.

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