2554. The day starts

As we get closer to crunch time on climate, war. and economy the amount of writing, much of it very good, is increasing rapidly. This means that good readers have a hard time prioritizing what they have next to read and good writers may not, in the chaos of that tsunami of text, find readers.

This morning I started reading a twitter account about the use of Uber like software to direct cannon firings in the Ukraine. The munitions, canon and software become a complex lethal system to which people are only minimally attached and become collateral damage as the intent of firing is to take out weapons and not so much aimed at people. The old military informs spoke to the ego and had a sense of presence and direct combat had a meaning to it that has been lost, replaced by wartime uniforms that hide the person and, I suspect, increase loneliness. Fifty thousand or more dead in the Ukraine? Well, we had the Ach tsunami and the loss of I think about 250,000. Scale is a problem for us.

Then I downloaded Kim Stanley Robinsons’s new book The High Sierra, A love Story.. Lots of history of the earth creation as a super dynamic earth moved toward its current but not final state. I think of the charm of the old view that a sun centered galaxy and Freud’s view that most of what we do is not conscious were blows to the human ego and now add that the a earth is just a cup of cooling - or is it heating? - coffee.

Then Piketty’s new book A Brief history of Equality. (note not inequality.). In the first few pages I though he does not go back far enough and then on the next he quotes plato. How to handle the cognitive dissonance of fixing equality while climate is heating? India is indigestible

All of which is to say, time is closing in on us. Imagine a baseball sized ball of clay and put two black dots anywhere on the surface or inside. Now press the ball onto a table top. The two points move away from each other. That is what is happening as society collapses and, despite the internet, we are further from each other and connections are lost. Outside the dew in on the leaves the sun breaks though night and the roses are blooming so much that the weight collapsed an old bush whose branches are almost two inches thick. In tough times Orwell planted roses and the book Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit, tells the story. He gone, the roses continue.

And it’s not even 9 am.