Tag: climate change

The Appalling Silence – and you did nothing…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few years humanity has faced a number of challenges and on the whole has been found badly wanting.

If anyone imagines that the American financed mass killing of people and near complete obliteration of Gaza is just and proportional they are deluded and their moral compass is well and truly fucked. What do you do when a so-called ally oversteps the mark? It is easy to collude and remain silent, to kowtow for scraps from the dinner table of the debt ridden US economy. The West’s inaction and response to the events in Gaza has not been its finest hour. The precedent has been set by the extensive US vengeance for having been caught napping at 9/11 just like the Japanese got nuked for Pearl Harbour.

The world we live in has changed for the worse in the last two decades. As climate change kicks in and disasters proliferate the me-first approach to global problems will not cut it. Maybe when Mar-a-Lago starts to swim people might listen.

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At the moment humanity is very short-term. The attention span of a fruit fly with ADHD prevails. There is reaction, knee-jerk and people are fearful of opinion. People are shit scared to say boo to a goose. They will do just about anything to get “likes”.

What results is a mind numbing mediocrity of compliance and conformity with “they” in which ever flavour. Humanity is very risk averse and lacks moral fibre. Its backbone is dissolved into jelly.

The damming verdict of the generations to come might be,

“You suspected all along, your predictions were valid AND you did nothing, fuck all, sweet fanny Adams. Really?”

This then will be known as the age of human chinless petty self-centred indifference.

Inaction today, avoidance, stores problems for tomorrow. The ruling “elites” have made it very clear to the millions of Muslims in their country where they, the entitled elite, stand. The evidence is incontrovertible and will be long remembered. They know upon which side the bread appears to be buttered on.

From time to time when we watch the news a sad tear comes to eye. Humanity, an oxymoron, is only very selectively humane.

Did not the apartheid and genocide of the last century teach us anything? Apparently not…

Ever since the British invented concentration camps they have been rolled out again and again. If we are very cynical, we might call them a “safe zone” rather than a “killing field”. It sounds more humane; cleaner, we could even use fabric softener to take away the stench.

There are none so blind as those who do not want to see, who refuse to see.

I am not sure what it might take for people to wake up and actually do something. After all we can Netflix and Uber Eats ourselves into type 2 diabetes, which is less risky than sticking our necks out.

I am genuinely sad at the pathetic Western response to events in Gaza. But it is a sign of the times, the prevailing me-first don’t rock the boat mentality.

Opression always has in its hateful enactment the seeds of its own ultimate downfall.

That is a fundamental law of the universe. The universe has a longer attention span.

The Problem of Both And

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

This “problem” can be found on all sides. It stems from the desire to have both one thing and another. It has a root in idealism but also in an unwillingness to choose or decide.

At the moment relatively wealthy humanity is accustomed to having multiple up to date electronic devices, frequent new cars, foreign holidays involving air travel and conspicuous consumption which is sometimes diarised for show in social media. Yet in the back of the mind there is the spectre of anthropogenic climate change. There is a weak desire to slow this down. People want both their current way of life and to limit the ravages of global warming. Most approaches to planetary heating back “solutions” which do not significantly impinge on current lifestyle.

This is an obvious fallacy.

But it is one that is not addressed because in affect it is taboo and politically very unpopular. In wanting both and decisive action is delayed and put off. The advocates of striving to limit climate change themselves travel by air. People cross their fingers and hope we can limit climate change without changing our behaviours. The fairy godmother of technology will wave its magical AI wand and ta-da we have a solution for global warming. In the meantime, business green washes to keep the greenbacks rolling.

There is an awful lot of kidding and people are willing to be kidded because their conscience is assuaged by flashy on tone public relations. Look the oil manufacturers and producers are transitioning to green alternatives…😉

“Phew, I can have my holiday in the Maldives after all…”

Elsewhere I have predicted that the impact of climate change needs to get catastrophic before humanity wakes up. By which time it will be very late, perhaps too late.

We saw it coming, we did fuck all.

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“Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospect; it has to be shattered before ascertained.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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Humanity has a monkey with its hand in the cookie jar mentality. Inside the cookie jar are lovely cookies. We put our hand in it to extract the cookie but we cannot pull it out with the whole cookie in hand. The villagers are coming with sticks. We are so tempted by the cookies; we do not want a beating by the villagers. What to do?

This is a catch 22 which stems from greed and desire. In the absence of desire, there is no dilemma. Drop the cookie and get the hell out of Dodge. But it is a lovely cookie with banana and chocolate chips….

I cannot have both the cookie and avoid a beating.

No desire, no greed, no problem. Let go. Do a runner.

Most catch 22s stem from wanting something, some desire or some ambition. They are based on preferred outcome. In the absence of these the dilemma dissolves; it is a figment of mind and emotion.

Humans have a face in a jar problem. Inside the jar is their face, their social self-image, which they are clinging on to. They may want to resolve a relationship or ameliorate it but they are burdened by their face which they hold clenched in their fist. They are unable to shake hands whilst their fist is clenched tight around the mask of face. So, for most of their lives they walk around with their face clenched bare knuckled in fist and never know the freedom of an open palm free of social encumbrance. They may want to save both their face and a relationship. However, this is impossible, humans are stubborn and before long, it is too late.

You can see this human folly all around you.

Life is not a quantum superstition state. Sooner or later the both-and must be measured and collapse into either-or. The coherence of the both-and is finite. Decision is not something people are fond of.

Sometimes nature, the universe, or a planet will make the decision for us…

Wanting both-and is greedy.

LIFE is way bigger than petty human want and desire…

Insuring Against Apocalypse

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

“Climate-related extreme weather events will become both more frequent and more violent, resulting in ever-scarcer insurance and ever-higher premiums,” a US Senate report on the insurance market warned just last month. “Climate change is no longer just an environmental problem. It is a looming economic threat.”

The big insurers – State Farm, AllState and Farmers, among others – insist they have no choice but to raise rates because of factors including sky-high construction costs and what they call “catastrophe exposure”, especially in California where they face regulatory hurdles unmatched in other states. The industry points to State Farm, whose credit rating was downgraded last year, as a casualty of these pressures.

The Guardian

“Driven by a desire to maximize profits, property casualty insurance companies … have engaged in a troubling trend of dropping California homeowners’ insurance policies like flies,” said the complaint, filed in San Diego County Superior Court. A spokesperson for Liberty Mutual declined to comment on the litigation.

The inability to get coverage is reflected in the number of policies picked up by California’s FAIR Plan, which as of September had about 452,000 policies, up from a little over 203,000 four years ago. FAIR Plan’s website says its claims exposure is nearly $6 billion in Pacific Palisades alone.

“The situation has been a train wreck coming down the track for a while,” said Rick Dinger, president of Crescenta Valley Insurance, an independent brokerage in Glendale.

Los Angeles Times

“There’s been a mass exodus of big players from the market in these parts of California,” Ben Keys, a real estate and finance professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told a conference Friday.

“We’ve seen enormous non-renewals recently,” he said.

On Wednesday, California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, announced that homeowners in areas affected by and around the fires would be protected for a year against non-renewal and cancellation of coverage.

This type of measure protected more than a million contracts in 2024.

In 1968, the coastal state set up a public insurance scheme, called FAIR, for homeowners who could no longer find a private insurer.

This “band-aid” was supposed to be temporary while people moved from one insurance policy to another, but has now expanded well beyond its intended use, lamented Keys, pointing out that its exposure had risen from $50 billion in 2018 to more than $450 billion today.

To bring companies back on board, Commissioner Lara has also initiated a reform process authorizing them to increase premiums on condition that they do not apply any geographical exclusions.

France 24

My hypothesis is that climate change will render larger and larger areas non-insurable or exorbitant. As a rule of thumb people lending mortgages require insurance for the collateral upon which the mortgage is based.  

The press I have read today suggest that many US insurers are being more argumentative already about settling claims in full. Premiums have sky rocketed and others are not offering renewals, they are dropping customers with force majeure risk.

I wonder what percentage of LA home owners have gone bareback with no insurance.

Who is going to fund the rebuild?

Perhaps many will have to sell a still smoking plot of land.

Trendy neighbourhoods may lose their trendy status if houses burn down.

Tempest Ciaran caused us around 3500 euros of damage here. The insurers were helpful and reimbursed 80%. But they made a slightly threatening sound that we should make sure that all our trees are safe and tended by experts. That this was our responsibility. We have ~100 trees. The French government allowed the insurers, by decree, to increase their premiums.

The insurance policies will get “funky” said one article. Implying complex wording and perhaps multiple small print exclusions.

There is a non-virtuous cycle, no insurance, no mortgage, no house build.

Places with the street names like Water Lane hint at flooding.

We had to, as a prophylactic, pump out our vide sanitaire, a kind of basement over the weekend. When we went to the local hardware store, the shelf which once contained water pumps was de-stocked.

Water Wind and Fire, water and wind, wind and fire.

I’ll predict that during 2025 there will be even more quasi-apocalyptic events, which will have an ever increasing impact on economies. People will be unhappy that although they live in a risk prone region, the risk materialises.

They will be upset that increasingly they cannot insure against apocalypse.

Agenda for the 2025 Council Meeting

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to modern technology there would be no need for the council to use telepathy, there are Teams and Zoom etc.

I’ll speculate on some agenda items, prompted by the previous post.

In the news recently has been the devastating boxing day tsunami in which ~200,000 people disincarnated. This is a reminder that humans are puny on a planetary scale. With advanced nuclear weapons humanity could further destroy the planet. There may not be impunity from planetary process. It is clear to me that those enamoured of/by acquisitional materialism are slowly eroding the effort to mitigate climate change. The effort is being undermined by self-interested parties for various motives.

The most obvious mitigation for planetary heating is a nuclear winter. This would be a planetary response to nuclear war. We are not far off nuclear war. The impact would be global and of a scale not seen since a putative asteroid impact 65 million years ago.

Climate change must be an agenda item.

Humanity has never before been so immersed in illusion and glamour. This is largely due to social media and the petabytes of high definition images and video. This has a massive environmental impact. This is perhaps the biggest problem for the incoming New Age. Humanity is also wanking itself stupid to porn. The first initiation is about getting this kind of obsession under control. There is much work to be done to figure out how to address this.

Gigabytes are peddled alongside fentanyl.

Fear of missing out, FOMO, has perhaps surpassed fear of death.

The United Nations has been severely undermined of late most notably by the USA and Israel. But others like Russia have had a hand too. Responsible intelligent world citizenship has been replaced by partisan interest. An institution forged in the fire of war is losing its teeth. The lead provided by the USA is not an enlightened one.

America is therefore a problem and an agenda item. WTF happened to the USA?

Sixth ray personality at its polarised worst. Luckily the sixth ray is on its way out.

Which is worse antisemitism or islamophobia?

There seems to be an increasing problem with mental health. In the grand scheme of things minds are rejecting modern ways of living. This is probably a good and necessary phase.

People do not realise that debt is bad. Money supply is finite. In the “West” the demographic time bomb is starting to explode. There are not enough people in work to tax to pay for the care of the elderly.

Humanity needs to learn that it cannot have its cake AND eat it. Sooner or later some stark choices will have to be made.

The USA is making a strategic mistake in forbidding sale of high technology to China. It is literally forcing China to develop its own technology. If China invades Taiwan and TSMC stops production the world economy will go into free fall. I don’t think attempts at bullying China are wise.

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There are a number of pinch points which could spark planetary crisis.

The problem of insurance.

People buy insurance in order to get recompense when something goes wrong, when they fail to have life on their own terms. People feel entitled to recompense, to compensation. With increased climate “disasters” insurance costs will mount perhaps exponentially. Some places are already uninsurable and there is not enough money for governments to endlessly rebuild after planetary havoc. I suspect that perhaps it is only the Dutch who are taking flood defence sufficiently seriously.

This mind-set of compensation needs to go. Karma is karma.

There needs to be a massive paradigmatic shift away from hedonistic acquisitional materialism. It is consumption and economic growth which is directly casual of planetary heating. Such a change is unlikely unless there is a major crisis. There needs to be a whopping great wake up call. Cancer is a growth too. The paradigm of economic growth needs to change to one of genuine and affordable sustainability. This growth mantra needs to be replaced.

Seems to me there will be plenty to discuss…

Impermanence and Complacency

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have had eight decent length dreams in October so far this year. I haven’t published them because recognisable individuals are in them. These are out of the blue as I haven’t spoken to/with them for well over a decade. I don’t really know what to make of them. They may be pointing at something going on in the “real” world.

In the Toltec tradition the “place” of dreams is the South. I spent quite a bit of my early life in the Southern Hemisphere and can get on well with Kiwis, Aussies and South Africans. I was a part of the itinerant barman subculture in London for a number of years. In the Toltec tradition people have a predilection for stalking of dreaming. I am the latter. Dreams can re-present possibilities in the web of life, a kind of aperture in space-time where events might manifest. These apertures do not stay open forever. They close and what once might have been possible ceases to be. Failure to act on the appropriate time scale makes things no longer possible.

I’ll make a statement, there is a tendency for arrogant people to be complacent and get caught napping.

One could argue we have seen this take place recently in the middle east, at 9/11 and Pearl Harbour. People who think themselves invulnerable, important and powerful can get surprises.

Impermanence as a concept is logical, nothing lasts forever. But people do not get it. To truly attain impermanence is to understand the eternal now. Impermanence lessens the manacles of clinging and attachment; it exemplifies the preciousness of time. Many imagine they have all the time in the world and are slow to get around to things which they prefer not to do. Timely action delayed reduces likelihood of positive outcome. Impermanence teaches appreciation and the fact we only borrow things for at most a lifetime.

People who work in universities need to be seen and heard in order to get promoted. They need to have measures of esteem; they need a web presence and various public metrics. They have a semi-permanent web footprint. Several ex-students of mine have commented to me that I am now hard to find on the internet. I was on Research Gate. They won’t give me an account now. I was on LinkedIn. I have no need to be seen, to be present. So, I can build up a profile, write a blog and then bin it. They are impermanent things. I do not cling; I have back-ups of text on the off chance I might need it again. People can imagine that one will want to remain in touch and contactable. They may be complacent about this. The nature of academia is that it is a large heavy slow moving object with momentum, it is not fluid nor are research funding mechanisms, the turn around time is quarterly at best. There are institutional and annual rhythms. If one is institutionalised life dances {slowly} to that beat. There is assumed a quasi-permanence.

It is perhaps non-standard to suggest that attainment of impermanence gives one a sense of urgency at the same time as detachment from outcome, specifically desired outcome. The land of “there is always tomorrow” runs out. The world of mañana means possibility and opportunity lost.

Carpe diem is interred in a mausoleum.

There is a saying attributed to Buddha; “The trouble is you think you have time.”

People spend their time unwisely and there is a lot of wasted time, escapism and avoidance.  Complacency about time is brought about by the illusion of permanence. “It will always be there tomorrow.”

There is vast global complacency about climate change because of the illusion of permanence. People do not get that our mode of living is subject to change and over the next decade it will become obvious. Instead of cooperating to reduce consumption the mantra of economic growth underpins jaded economic dogma. People indulge in petty vengeance games where hundreds of thousands of tonnes of high explosive munitions are detonated to get revenge by obliteration. How much energy and carbon dioxide has been released in Gaza, in Ukraine?

Has that cooled the climate?

I suspect that humanity could well be on its way to being shaken violently out of its complacency as the weather patterns get ever more extreme and chaotic. Humanity, especially in the rapacious West, has taken so very much for granted and for a long time.

Pride often comes before a fall.

Before long the aperture in space-time in which to meaningfully act on climate change will close. It has already started.