OF COURSE, YOU WILL IGNORE THIS.
DISARRAY EVERYWHERE.
When I, from my perch somewhere in the Western World, with increasing concern and compassion, survey the global scene, then I see disintegration, confusion, turmoil, uncertainty, indecision, restlessness everywhere.
Examples aplenty. The USA and Trump, his boasts and threats, his egomaniacal character, his disregard for Climate Change, his appointments of deeply controversial people to key positions, assuring only more unease and anarchy, then I know that such global threats as heat, poverty, hunger, drought, will not be on his agenda. In Trump’s cabinet billionaires set the tone: immediate tax relief for them, while deficits soar.
Looking elsewhere, I see Germany politically and economically on the ropes;
France is no better. I see the Middle East in a momentous muddle, its danger quotient enhanced by the sudden Syria turnover. Who is next? Iran? Saudi Arabia? The world, vested on regularity and financial order, has been abandoned to hit-and-miss policies, is at a loss what to do, with environmental dangers and threats multiplying, while gold has a ride into the stratosphere.
Of course, you will ignore this, even though…..
What really disturbed me was a headline on the ARCTIC NEWS website. Have a look. Here’s what you will see:
Did a Terminal Temperature Acceleration event start in December 2024?
Please note “Terminal”. The people who contribute to this website, are trained scientists: they have access to the latest sources and weather statistics. They carefully weigh which words to use.
Well, ‘terminal’ is defined as a condition, signaling the end of something: it also applies todiseases that lead to death, incurable.
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, something often done near the end of a year, it is generally assumed that 2024 was the hottest ever recorded. With signs of increased sunspots activities, with a new El Nino on the way, with polar ice rapidly disappearing, and thus no albedo effect – less ice reflecting sunrays back – the sun heat will be absorbed by the Polar seas, dislodging the methane there, speeding – yes speeding – Global Heat.
Of course, you will ignore this, even though……
Welcome to the new World Disorder.
Welcome to the new World Disorder, and my claim is that this state of affairs while lead to ever greater chaos and an unheard state of unwinding of law and order.
Of course, you will ignore this, because ‘There is no alternative.’
“There is no alternative” (TINA) is a political slogan originally coined by Margaret Thatcher, the PM of UK some 35 years ago.
She claimed that liberal capitalism is the only viable system. Politicians used TINA to justify policies of fiscal conservatism and austerity.
Now ‘There is no alternative’ to our ‘energy-dependent’ society, so the ‘telos’ the ‘END’ can be predicted with the utmost accuracy.
And then there is another reason: We are losing our reasoning capacity.
In recent years, an abundance of academic research from institutions including Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford and King’s College London found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening our attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included “attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources”, “memory processes” and “social cognition”.
All this brings me to “The Second Coming”, a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, influenced by the carnage of World War I (1914-18) and the Spanish Flu, which killed some 30 million people, often the young adults.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Of course, you will ignore this, because ‘There is no alternative.’
John the Baptizer comes to mind: “Prepare the way of the Lord”. Are we doing that, willy-nilly?