My understanding is that Scandinavians self-medicate liberally.

There's no such thing as original sin - Elvis Costello

If it's any consolation at all, many of my small circle of friends or associates seem to be undergoing sometimes wicked depression at the moment.

As if Germany's no. 1 goalkeeper throwing himself in front of a train wasn't some symbol of the times.

i'm convinced that constant association with news of the hijacking of our systems, coupled with our relative impotence to do anything about the insanity, affects us all in ways so subtle we don't notice it, especially as it's been so bad since Bush and before the Iraq war.

One reason i constantly try to upload music and film stuff, and comment about sports or something seemingly "surface," is to try and negate this epidemic of depression, mild or otherwise.

Call me crazy, but i find the concept of hibernation "cuddly."  Worth aspiring to. Then i remember (sometimes) how amazing life can be when lived fully.  Hang in there Nomad.

Skennah Kowa

You know what Rabindranath Tagore said...

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

China's dark, satanic mills?  Seems like environmental impacts are "externalities" in China also.  In these cases they are externalized all over the people shown. Just part of the "competitive advantage" China enjoys vis-à-vis "The West." And this makes sense to their elites and to ours. The long run won't be very long for many of these folks.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Amazing photos Nomad.  Sad, but makes one very angry.  At least me angry.

about a decade ago, i wrote a screed masquerading as a "real time novel" called Drydock.  At one point, in the middle of my time as a shipyard carpenter sometimes working the poisonous holds of oil tankers

How You Get Oil

i wrote about a writer friend of mine, Mark Hertsgaard, who'd written a book about global environmental devastation called Earth Odyssey. Here's the clip, showing i was indeed pretty fuckin angry...

    This film is writing itself, and eye can't help but smile the smile of every live writer in history, every writer alive in truly living, from the gut.  Standing on the foredeck of the Eureka, i imagine some twenty years younger Hollyweird exec telling me my script doesn't capture a working class environment strongly enough, and me busting his jaw, in super stop motion, one crack at a time.  Rumi and the Dalai Lama are sitting on the cap rail, legs dangling over the Bay, pointing at me, and laughing, no, splitting their sides at how much i've forgotten, how far i've fallen.  Like busting the jaw of any film exec would ever get a film made, not to mention i'll be reincarnated as a mercury-poisoned carp, but i've been listening to too many motherfuckers day after day on this boat to care about whether i'm remembering the path to full illumination, or whether i've gone to full looney nation, like the rest of this insane reincarnation of the death of the Roman Empire.
    ---
    Find myself praying for a market crash.  Know it's going to be painful, that people will be hurting, but also knowing that people are already hurting, that civilization hurts, that we're stretching the life support capacity of the skin of the planet, in ways that are so immediate it's not visible to the dot.com hordes smothering that brilliant city in the distance.  We're going under, Readers, me just in the advance, and you do nothing to make it right.  How is it you don't understand?
    Why don't you listen to the heroes amongst you?
.....
    Mark Hertsgaard, a hero risking torture in some primitive Chinese prison, for wandering into a industrial zone of such high pollution he might be doing permanent damage to his system, just so he can bring you the story of another act of surfacide to the skin of our Mother.  Earth Odyssey, his publishers call the book, as if putting your life on the line in the name of environmental truth is some travelogue with a message.  Sneaking into an industrial washout leaking torrents of permanent poison into the river is no travelogue.  Why aren't you listening?  "Within seconds we saw ahead of us a broad stream of bubbling water cascading down the hillside.  The astringent odor of chlorine soon attacked our nostrils, and once we reached the streams edge the smell was so powerful we immediately had to back away.  Downstream, where the factory's discharge was emptying into the Jialing, a frothy white plume was spreading across the slow-moving river."  He risked his life to tell you that, and you're blindly believing that the NASDAQ hasn't finished it's monumental mesmerization of all of you.  Here's a writer spanning the globe to document the horror inflicted on the source of all of our lives, at great personal peril, and you can't stop buying tickets for Schwarzenegger movies about the perils of absolutely nothing.

    Want some logic?  "By 1997, the world's forests were, for the first time, losing more carbon than they were absorbing."
    Really got you where it hurts, right, or must we wait for the Bubble to Burst?

    Hertsgaard traveled to war zones in Africa, documenting the human devastation of drought, pestilence and war, much of it with roots in environmental destruction, again, with his life on the line.  He tracked poisons in Eastern Europe, and the devastation of the Danube.  He went to the far reaches of distant america, to the Hanford nuclear reservation, where radioactive particles, like the Indians before them, are isolated in desolate ignorance from reminding you that they're still alive, and will be for hundreds of generations, if you don't make life uninhabitable for any of us by then.  He documented that in China, where the coal that's twice as destructive as the other fossils is burnt unchecked, in vast quantities, 1.9 million people a year die from the effluent.  In case you're wondering, that's a statistic from those radical environmental activists, the World Bank.

    Are you beginning to catch my drift?

Skennah Kowa

Really amazing photos.  I keep thinking something's gotta give in China on this, but nothing ever seems to happen.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

http://www.eurotrib.com/comments/2009/10/20/91545/657/65#65

ET - you even read it before reading it on ET.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

no need to wonder what hell is like, or even to think it awaits beyond the grave... these folk are inhabiting it right now.

and that's what it looks like, and almost all of us are complicit and responsible, a chilling fact to take on board.

i believe these crises such as global warming/climate change can have only one good reason for existing: that we learn that we're one family and need to pull together and work out our differences humbly.

because any thinking feeling person can see this will not stand. we moved on from it and now china is where we were before the ecology movement existed.

perhaps there is a chinese dickens or two describing it.

Eventually physical reality trumps narrative. It can just take a long time. Derrick Jensen

Have you seen this?

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

but I cannot help but wonder what is next for these two?

Mr Crathern said the jump was "epic".

"It was everything I've lived for - amazing," he said.

Bigger, wider piers?