Getting too close ...

Getting too close to a black hole proves Einstein's Theory of Relativity passes the test yet again.

The team created six virtual black holes, with masses between 100,000 and 50 million times that of the Sun. Each of these black holes then had encounters with eight main-sequence stars, with masses between 0.15 and 10 times that of the Sun.

They found that the main factor that contributed to a star's survival was the initial density of the star. The denser the star, the more likely it is to survive an encounter with a black hole. In the video above, you can see these encounters play out around a supermassive black hole 1 million times the Sun's mass. The stars with the highest density are yellow, and the lowest are blue.

The team also found that partial disruptions occur at the same rate as total disruptions, and the proportion of the star's mass that is lost can be described surprisingly easily using a simple expression.

In an indirect way, this reminds one of Icarus and his getting too close to the sun while escaping Crete. 

Jacob Peter Gowy's The Flight of Icarus (1635–1637)

Fantastic "beests" :)

It's all about the wind is it not? :)

Strandbeest Evolution 2020 provides an overview of the beach animals of the past thirty years. Over time, an evolution has taken place, which is visible in successive generations. Ultimately, I want to release these animals on the beaches, where they will lead a life of their own.

Every spring I go to the beach with a new animal and during the summer I do all kinds of experiments with the wind, sand and water. By autumn I will be a bit wiser when it comes to surviving on the beach. Then I declare the beast extinct and they go to the boneyard.

I associate looking back in history with black and white movies. Looking back in silence. No music.

But the Strandbeest evolution will certainly continue for the next thirty years. www.strandbeest.com

In essence ...

Every year, the artist lets new and ever-more complex “species” loose to see how they weather the challenges of their surroundings. His aim? For these creatures to be completely self-sufficient, continuing to exist without any human support. “My inspiration comes from the theory of evolution, the beach, nature, and life itself. The fact that we came into being out of nothing is a constant source of wonder to me,” Jansen says.

Change is the only constant - The Tao

Water water everywhere

Michele Lapini / Environmental Photographer of the Year 2021

This eerie pix of a house surrounded by water says it all regarding global warming.

Unraveling a thread ...

 Fisher’s career has been built on equal parts passion and self-promotion. “See, you create events out of nothing,” he says.Photographs by Olaf Otto Becker for The New Yorker

This wonderful NewYorker pix of a Fisher designed maze conjures up Alice in Wonderland as Alice's travails required her to navigate a maze of a different kind. :)

The Blenheim Palace maze, which Adrian Fisher co-designed in the eighties, 

is now featured on Britain’s five-pound note.

The oldest hedge maze still in existence is, coincidentally, the one with which I am most familiar. As teen-agers, my brother and I lost at least half a dozen French and German exchange students within the clipped evergreen walls of a small yew maze tucked into an odd triangle at the northern edge of the gardens of Hampton Court Palace. The Tudor palace, which lies southwest of central London on the banks of the Thames, was a favorite residence of Henry VIII, who received it as a gift—albeit one offered under some duress—from Cardinal Wolsey, his chief minister. Today, the palace is perhaps best known for its maze, the lone survivor of three or four labyrinths built there around 1690, as part of a substantial redesign that converted what had previously been an orchard into a fashionable new garden called the Hampton Court Wilderness.

At the time, a hedge maze had been an essential element of European formal gardens for centuries. The first evidence of a labyrinth formed from hedges can be found in a record of the removal of one on a royal estate in Paris in 1431. An anonymous courtly poem written in England in the late fourteen-hundreds describes a group of women “disportying” themselves “in crosse aleys” before enjoying a carefree “walke aboute the mase.” In paintings and engravings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hedge mazes are populated mostly by couples; according to Saward, the maze historian, the air of privacy created by their shady twists and turns made them an ideal location for romantic dalliances. (As Dillamore and I walked past a champagne cork nestled at the base of the hedge, he told me that the maze is a popular spot for marriage proposals.)

But the notion of mazes goes back further in time with the Labyrinth and the 

the Minotaur.

Roman mosaic picturing Theseus and the Minotaur. Rhaetia, Switzerland

When the Bronze Age site at Knossos was excavated by explorer Arthur Evans, the complexity of the architecture prompted him to suggest that the palace had been the Labyrinth of Daedalus. Evans found various bull motifs, including an image of a man leaping over the horns of a bull, as well as depictions of a labrys carved into the walls. 

Theseus in the Minotaur's labyrinth, by Edward Burne-Jones, 1861

Unraveling a thread indeed. :)

Happy T Day and ... pigs fly

MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, speaks to reporters outside federal court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, June 24, 2021. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Every family seems to have a crazy uncle. For the repugs, it's Mike Lindell, the pillow guy stating Agent Orange will be reinstated "soon" as Trump was robbed of a second term according to "reliable" sources like QAnon and the millions of Trumpers holding onto the belief that pigs fly and Trump will again be president in the "very near future".

It’s Thanksgiving, and with respect to any relatives who may have colorful takes about vaccine mandates, critical race theory, and the Rittenhouse verdict, the craziest uncle of 2021 is, without a doubt, Mike Lindell.

The pillow baron has for a year now been claiming vociferously that the 2020 election was rigged, that he can prove it, and that it won’t be long before everyone realizes the truth and Donald Trump is reinstated as president of the United States. Lindell most recently trumpeted Thanksgiving as the date Trump will be back in office. He has promoted a 96-hour holiday weekend livestream in which he will unpack “the historic U.S. Supreme Court complaint on the 2020 election” he says will reinstall Trump in the White House. (The livestream got off to a rocky start.)

The sad part of this scenario is the fact millions believe this take to be true.

The idea that Trump will return to office has been spreading throughout the MAGA movement since January. A Politico/Morning Consult poll published in June found that 29 percent of Republicans believe this is actually going to happen by the end of the year. A YouGov poll conducted in early November found that 28 percent of Republicans believed it was either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” Trump would be back in office by the end of the year.

In other words, millions and millions and millions of people have, like Lindell, lost touch with reality to a truly terrifying degree. Many of them are determined to stay out in orbit, perpetually setting and resetting dates Trump will definitely, this time, return to power. It can be a little hard to track all of these deadlines, so here’s a guide to one of the year’s most unhinged conspiracy theory rabbit holes, which doesn’t appear to have a bottom.

It's turtles all the way down.

The saying holds that the world is supported by a chain of increasingly large turtles. 

Beneath each turtle is yet another: it is "turtles all the way down".

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Magritte with “Femme-Bouteille,” his oil painting of a nude on a glass bottle, in 1955

Rene Magritte is a favorite of yours truly as wit and playfulness permeate his work complete with whimsical titles such as Ceci'n'est pas un pipe or The Treachery of Images. :)

When René Magritte was a little boy growing up in Belgium in the early 1900s, he had a friend called Raymond who lived a few doors down. Raymond recalls going over to play at the Magrittes’ house, where René’s father Léopold kept a room full of “white metal containers of Cocoline”—a new, coconut oil-based form of margarine which he sold for work—“and advertising posters, too.” Raymond remembers the Cocoline well, he once said, “because René and I played with it, climbed on it, made tunnels through it, and we were coated, coated in it, it was like lard,” and he got in big trouble. 

This image, of two little boys absolutely spackled with goo, appears on page 11 of Alex Danchev’s new biography, Magritte: A Life, and would not leave my mind until I had turned the final one. It seems to contain everything about the Surrealist painter’s life and work, in miniature. For one thing, it wouldn’t have happened without the extreme laxity of René’s father: Magritte and his brothers were hellraisers, Danchev explains, who showed all the local kids pornography, frequently yelled “Fire!,” and were rumored to have killed a donkey. And yet he grew up into a painter whose ideas are precise and elegant, and a man who wore bowler hats every day and lived a punctilious and bourgeois life in a Brussels suburb.

For all the grown-upness of Magritte’s artworks, with their highbrow symbols and bowler hat formality, they have a naughtiness about them, and Magritte had a naughtiness about himself, Danchev suggests, a quality that uses a child’s respect for nonsense to break apart the ordinary function of symbols and words. Underneath the apparent respectability of his paintings, so smooth in their rendering of elegant references to semiotics and psychology, is a bad child, uncatchable and still uncaught, writhing with glee in the surplus fat of the twentieth century.

It seems like a contradiction in terms, but isn’t. The connections that animated Magritte’s freakish imagination are there, in the graphic language of the Cocoline containers and posters, which predict his graphic design practice, Studio Dongo, and the Cocoline itself—a substitute for a substitute, neither solid nor liquid—presages Magritte’s love of making the ordinary grotesque. But most of all, it’s the fact of play.

Totally agree. :)

Everything happens ...

 It's all probabilistic, right? :)

Factor of 10 ...

 

Seems there's a factor of 10 regarding all life in terms of size. The smaller the organism, the greater the number and the factor of 10 regarding the numbers of the life forms in question, rules.

Life in the ocean, they discovered, followed a simple mathematical rule: The abundance of an organism is closely linked to its body size. To put it another way, the smaller the organism, the more of them you find in the ocean. Krill are a billion times smaller than tuna, for example, but they are also a billion times more abundant.

What was more surprising was how precisely this rule seemed to play out. When Sheldon and his colleagues organized their plankton samples by orders of magnitude, they found that each size bracket contained exactly the same mass of creatures. In a bucket of seawater, one third of the mass of plankton would be between 1 and 10 micrometers, another third would be between 10 and 100 micrometers, and the final third would be between 100 micrometers and 1 millimeter. Each time they would move up a size group, the number of individuals in that group dropped by a factor of 10. The total mass stayed the same, while the size of the populations changed.

This applies to all life, land or sea but thanks to man, the factor of 10 goes away. 

But now humans seem to have broken this fundamental law of the ocean. In a November paper for the journal Science Advances, Galbraith and his colleagues show that the Sheldon spectrum no longer holds true for larger marine creatures. Thanks to industrial fishing, the total ocean biomass of larger fish and marine mammals is much lower than it should be if the Sheldon spectrum was still in effect. “There was this pattern that all life seems to have been following for reasons that we don’t understand,” says Galbraith. “We have changed that over the last 100 years or even less.”

But if we change how we do business on planet earth, nature recovers.

The good news is that fish species can bounce back. “They are extremely resilient,” says Ken Andersen, a marine ecologist at the Technical University of Denmark. In September, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature moved four tuna species further down its list of threatened species after their populations started to recover, thanks to stricter fishing quotas and crackdowns on illegal fishing. “It’s easier to stop overfishing than it is to stop climate change,” says Galbraith. “If we fish less, if we allow ecosystems to recover, we can maintain that.”

By 2050, we can turn things around if we have the will and vision to make it happen.

Depleted marine life across the world’s oceans could recover to healthy levels in just 30 years if major threats such as climate change are dealt with, a study has said.

Researchers from multiple universities studied the impact of successful conservation interventions around the globe and found that while human activity has had a deleterious impact on the oceans, marine life tends to bounce back from damage very quickly.

Nature finds a way if we let it.

It "ain't" over

Salzburg, Austria, on Monday. The country went into its fourth nationwide lockdown and will make Covid-19 vaccines compulsory.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Covid, the virtu that keeps on giving is not giving up by a long shot. A long winter looms ...

BRUSSELS — Austria went into a major lockdown on Monday to try to break the strong fourth wave of Covid spreading across Europe, while the German health minister, Jens Spahn, warned  that by the end of this winter “just about everyone in Germany will probably be either vaccinated, recovered or dead.”

Any questions?

Late Fall

The onset of winter looms.

JFK in his own words

With only a hours to live, JFK reaches out to the crowd, Fort Worth, TX, 22 November 1963. 

Photo credit: Cecil Stoughton / The White House / JFK Library

JFK, the last president with vision, had wit, style and intelligence to the nth degree. Flawed as we all are but also good in his own way, Kennedy was truly special without question.

On this anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy, we once again present a collection of quotations from his speeches.They show a man who would have been able to profoundly change the world… if he had been allowed to live.

These few excerpts display Kennedy’s wit, perception, and originality, and tell us something about the world at the time. The world was very different then — and very much the same.

Painting by Bernie Fuchs

Exploitation 101

 A mine near Kolwezi, Congo. The country produces more than two-thirds of the world’s cobalt, 

a key ingredient in electric vehicles.

First the Belgians, then the Americans & now the Chinese are taking the wealth from the Democratic Republic of Congo as de facto colonialism is an idea too powerful to ignore when it comes to money and power in the pursuit of raw resources, in this case cobalt, a material key to driving ever forward the development of new technologies in hopes of ameliorating the impact of global warming.

China’s pursuit of Congo’s cobalt wealth is part of a disciplined playbook that has given it an enormous head start over the United States in the race to dominate the electrification of the auto industry, long a key driver of the global economy.

But an investigation by The New York Times revealed a hidden history of the cobalt acquisitions in which the United States essentially surrendered the resources to China, failing to safeguard decades of diplomatic and financial investments in Congo. The sale of the two mines, also flush with copper, highlights the shifting geography and politics of the clean energy revolution, with countries rich in cobalt, lithium and other raw materials needed for batteries suddenly playing the role of oil giants.

The MIC's key to US ineptness regarding China tells volumes if one reads between the lines.

The loss of the mines happened under the watch of President Barack Obama, consumed with Afghanistan and the Islamic State, and President Donald J. Trump, a climate-change skeptic committed to fossil fuels and the electoral forces behind them. More broadly, it had roots in the end of the Cold War, according to previously classified documents and interviews with senior officials in the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.

Kisanfu is a new cobalt and copper mine being built by a Chinese conglomerate in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For more than a decade, the vast expanse of untouched land was controlled by an American company. Now a Chinese mining conglomerate has bought it, and is racing to retrieve its buried treasure: millions of tons of cobalt.

At 73, Kyahile Mangi has lived here long enough to predict the path ahead. Once the blasting starts, the walls of mud-brick homes will crack. Chemicals will seep into the river where women do laundry and dishes while worrying about hippo attacks. Soon a manager from the mine will announce that everyone needs to be relocated.

“We know our ground is rich,” said Mr. Mangi, a village chief who also knows residents will share little of the mine’s wealth.

Raison d'été for cobalt ...

The gray metal, typically extracted from copper deposits, has historically been of secondary interest to miners. But demand is set to explode worldwide because it is used in electric-car batteries, helping them run longer without a charge.

Woke is NOT WORKING ...

Maher's right. The dems need to pull their fingers out of their tuchus because their message is NOT WORKING. The 1s Amendment is being abused by both conservatives and liberals alike but the dems using Woke as the right to not offend anybody is patently offensive to many and now, this self righteous take on being socially "sensitive" is creating a potential midterm disaster of biblical proportions. Get real or the repugs are going to take over the country big time, including the presidency in 2024. Think about it, I know I have.

Night Vision + 1

1am

Early Morning

Mirror Lake

Rt Angle

Crescent

Teeoff @ 11

Who's in command here?

The song For What's It's Worth and the film Apocalypse Now ask unanswered questions about a dark reality filled with dread and mystery. Something rather disquieting to think about, right?

There's something happening here

But what it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there

A-telling me I got to beware

[Chorus]

I think it's time we stop

Children, what's that sound?

Everybody look what's going down

There is a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s bleak masterpiece Apocalypse Now that came to mind in the aftermath of the Glasgow climate conference and Wednesday’s big oil lease shindig for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico.

Captain Willard, played by an impossibly young Martin Sheen, has dragged a boat crew deep into the Vietnam jungle in search of his target, Col. Walter Kurtz. The boat arrives at the Do Lung Bridge, the scene of what appears to be a permanent battle, and the night is split with explosions, rifle fire and the screams of the dying. Willard goes in search of the commanding officer, only to find a handful of U.S. soldiers cowering behind an earthen wall. “Hey soldier,” he asks one hollow-eyed troop, “do you know who’s in command here?” The soldier stares at him a moment and replies, “Yeah,” before turning back to the darkness.

The implication is clear: You’re not in charge, captain. Neither am I, or any of these others here. Those voices out there in the gloom beyond the perimeter, the ones moving unseen in great force? They’re the ones running this nightmare.

We are so screwed ...

The system is broken

Paul Gosar and Kevin McCarthy (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images

The system is broken. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., rallied his caucus to near-unanimously oppose a censure vote against  Rep. Paul Gosar for his anime-style video depicting the Arizona Republican killing his colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, R-N.Y.

On Monday, McCarthy claimed that he called Gosar and was reassured that the violent film was not a direct threat or meant to incite violence, but rather to connect with young supporters. "I called him when I heard about the video, and he made a statement that he doesn't support violence, and he took the video down," McCarthy told CNN, his first comments since the video's release last week. "He took the video down and he made a statement that he doesn't support violence to anybody. Nobody should have violence [against them]."

McCarthy, of course, stopped short of condemning Gosar's conduct. On Wednesday, he led his GOP caucus in a vigorous defense of Gosar on the House floor against a Democratic resolution to censure Gosar over the video.

Orwell's Politics and the English Language is apropos is it not?

Addendum, Gosar reposted the video. 

Scamming the realm

Counterfeit 100 dollar bill, dated 1974 but probably made later. Over-stamped with "Contrefaçon" on both sides. On display at the British Museum, London

Scamming the realm, especially when funding wars, has been a stable of governments for a very long time. 

Photos of Roman coins from the republican to the imperial periods characterized. D – Denarii, A – Antoninianus. Dates are approximate.

Wiescher turned his attention to Roman denarii in 2019. The Roman silver denarius was the backbone currency of the Roman Empire between 200 BCE and 300 CE, according to Wiescher. During Nero's reign, the coins were required to be 92.5 percent silver, in order to protect the currency against inflation and devaluation. Despite the emperor's reputation for tyranny and debauchery, "Nero was a one of the most fiscally responsible of his progenitors and successors, sticking to the laws in the way of having the coins minted," said Wiescher.

But the analysis of coins from 250 BCE to 350 BCE showed declining percentages of silver. According to Wiescher, the Roman mints gradually debased the denarius, deliberately, to increase their profits and make it easier to finance ongoing wars in the empire. The mints relied on certain metallurgical techniques to hide the lower percentages of silver to keep inflation at bay. By 295 CE, the silver content was just about 5 percent.

A 20-shilling bill, date August 10, 1739, printed by Benjamin Franklin.

Seems Ben was also vigilant in trying to preserve the viability of currency using inkss and art to do the deed.

In light of that early history, it's appropriate that Benjamin Franklin is featured on the US 50-cent piece and 100-dollar bill, given his efforts to promote printed currency and combat forgeries in Colonial America. By the time he was 23, Franklin was a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette and eventually becoming rich as the pseudonymous author of Poor Richard's Almanack. He was a strong advocate of paper currency from the start.

For instance, in 1739, Franklin's printed currency for Pennsylvania deliberately misspelled the state's name. The intent was to set a trap for counterfeiters, who presumably would correct the misspellings in their forgeries. Franklin also made his own inks. He used a mercury sulfide red ink, as well as bone black ink (made from carbonized animal bones)—or at least that's what he advertised. His own personal mixed inks seem to have been pure graphite, per Wiescher. X-ray analysis of the British paper copies showed the phosphorus and calcium signatures of bone black ink, but Franklin's original banknotes don't have that signature.

There's a reason Ben's on the 100s IMHO. :)

Weaponizing Ignorance

 

Judge Royce Lambert said Jacob Chansley's role as a leader among those who went into the Senate chamber and disrupted the electoral vote tally compelled a serious prison sentence. | Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Weaponizing ignorance, a term "accidentally" coined by this rube, has been around since the beginning of time as this age old approach to gain or maintain power works, especially when using the us against them stratagem, often without proof, as man is tribal without question. The art of lying also applies as seen by Ramses altering history with the Hittites or Hitler demonizing the jews. 

His battered troops withdrew from Kadesh, but Ramses wasn’t about to let a little truth tarnish his perceived triumph. On temple walls across Egypt, he ordered the creation of murals depicting him single-handedly defeating the aggressors. In reality, after years of negotiation, Ramses II eventually signed a peace treaty with the Hittites. It was the earliest peace accord whose text has survived.

By using simplistic slogans and monosyllabic words, somebody like a Goebbels can get the public riled up, especially when the people in question are ignorant as it doesn't take much to take advantage of those who lack the education needed for critical thinking, something George Carlin talked about with power and eloquence in his great The Real Owners of the Country riff showing why the weaponizing of ignorance rings true. 

In George Orwell's masterful Politics and the English Language, the manipulation of language to defend the indefensible looms large whereas, in this case, passive and polysyllabic text is used to confuse and bamboozle the public in order to remain in power. 

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin, May 10, 1933. — US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

When one burns books, the weaponization of ignorance becomes personal as seen by what the Nazis did in Germany in 1933 and ... in the US in 2021.  Think school boards and some politicos, right?

Frequently banned books include "The Handmaid's Tale," "George," and "To Kill a Mockingbird." Amazon; Rachel Mendelson/Insider

For centuries educators, religious organizations, and parents have long sought to control what children and adults read by banning literature. Books are challenged as an attempt to restrict materials, with claims commonly based on opposing political viewpoints, explicit content, LGBTQIA+ content, or violence.

Weaponization of ignorance also sums up entries like QAnon, a far right conspiracy movement promoting theories lacking in substance and common sense, some of which were used as rallying cries in the Jan 6th debacle where several people were killed or injured by an incensed mob of Trumpers over the big lie that the reelection of Agent Orange was stolen by Joe Biden & company. 

Since Election Day of last year, the GOP has been in sustained panic. Trump lost handily at the polls in an election that saw him compete for bombast but not technocratic accomplishments. Trump banked on the false belief that loud superseded competent and came up short. In defeat, he decided to claim the election was stolen. Trump tried—with zero success or credibility—to argue the whole affair was rigged and should be set aside. Having exhausted even his most ardent allies, he then urged a mob on Jan. 6 to descend on the U.S. Capitol to force Congress to discard the results. Despite some harrowing hours, that attempt failed too, Congress rejected Trump’s antics and Biden was confirmed the winner.

As for QAnon ...

The return of JFK Jr., like most of what the QAnon conspiracy predicts, is totally bogus. 

The belief that he's still alive and acting as a secret confidant for Trump started in 2018, according to a QAnon expert who uses the pseudonym Travis View. Like much of what the Q followers believe, it began with a post on the anonymous image-board 4Chan. A person calling themselves "R" posted a picture from 1996 of JFK Jr. with Trump. After that, QAnon believers not only thought JFK Jr. was miraculously still alive, they also claimed he'd be Trump's running mate. There are even some people in the movement claiming they themselves are JFK Jr.

Weaponizing ignorance indeed.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength - Orwell/1984

Luminosity + 1

State of play

Crescent

God rays

Aperture

Mirror Mirror/rev II

Convergence

Toons

Here's looking @ you kid

Puff the Magic Dragon

A little bit here, a little bit there

Up, Up & Away

Ted's excellent adventure

Red vs Blue

Channeling Aeolis

One does not experience days like this, particularly regarding the usually calm waters of Long Island Sound except for 11/13/21 when Aeolis, the god of the winds decided to show up on a warm sunny day for the ages. Enjoy.

The Omega Point ...

Event Horizon

ca·tas·tro·phe

/kəˈtastrəfē/

Learn to pronounce

noun

noun: catastrophe; plural noun: catastrophes

an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering; a disaster.

This pix of the setting sun indirectly relates to climate change and what it means for humanity as the cumulative effects of global warming are largely ignored by the press and politicians because the scenario envisioned is disheartening to say the least. From environmental degradation to the collapse of biodiversity, this uncharted territory of change portends a unimagined dark future thought not possible until now. The recent COP26 conference does not begin to address the hellscape that's coming as the monies and technological efforts to ameliorate this slow motion catastrophe is simply not being addressed at the levels needed to make a difference due to the fact GW's a wicked problem of incredible complexity and ... man does not change until a monumental catastrophe of Biblical porportions occurs.

To whit ...

Humanity needs to ditch coal to save itself. It also needs to keep the lights on.

The Omega Point ... 

The Omega Point is a supposed future when everything in the universe spirals toward a final point of unification.

Man's continued existence?

We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough, the blur of technology. This is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point, a leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question: Do we have to be humans forever? Don DeLillo, Point Omega 1?

“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” - Einstein

To be continued ...

The Hunter's Moon