The cycle continues. Things will continue to get worse before they get better from a macro perspective. You may be sippin wine in the sunshine today but it will not last unless you’re a true believer, and most of us are. See you at the water line…

I’m not a pessimist, I’m having the time of my life. But…is that all there is to strive for? Live for? Dream for?

Ben Stewart (Greenpeace):

“The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’

Well said. But let’s end on a seemingly happy moment as we love to do…with moving images accompanied by music…The video has some 80s issues but focus on the lyrics…no apologies for the advertisement….WE DESERVE IT.

Something pertinent I just discovered as I wrote this post. I know how pernicious subtle edits are to art and I found it interesting that the sponsored version of the Grateful Dead video of the song “Throwing Stones” ends with “Picture a bright blue ball just spinning, spinning free
It’s dizzying, the possibilities…” Whereas the song end’s with:

Heartless powers try to tell us what to think
If the spirit’s sleeping, then the flesh is ink, yeah
History’s page, it is thusly carved in stone
The future’s here, we are it, we are on our own
On our own. On our own. On our own.

RIP: A Remix Manifesto

This documentary is the best summary of how wrong copyright, the RIAA, MPIAA, Disney, and lots of other too powerful organizations have got it all wrong. The clip above shows just a couple examples of the illusion of original ideas in music and how groups like our beloved Rolling Stones are a bunch of scam artists that now want to protect something they stole in the first place. Some of us have known this for a long time but didn’t much mind until society started calling us thieves. Ironic since our society is based on thievery. This is an important film, one that people are trying to shut down on YouTube and anywhere else but in reality it will always survive. Hopefully it’s seen by many and remixed by more. That can be done here:

Open Source Cinema

And as Lars Ulrich from Metallica so eloquently puts it: “It’s about control.” See part 3

And if you love Disney, you’ll love this little history of their creativity.

A sample of the creativity attempting to be squashed…

And a proponent from the Ivory Tower….

Lawrence Lessig

This book has the same history. All three of these books – an accidental trilogy, I guess, though I find the word trilogy unappealing – are one continuous book and they all flow from a single question and a single hunger: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? And by death I do not mean something symbolic or metaphoric, I mean the actual death of other peoples and other living things. My life has been spent inside a culture of constant war and of vast slaughter of the beasts of the field and the grasses and forests of the land and of the fish in the sea and of the blue sky I was born under at the tail end of one of those wars. I am of the that culture and yet I am against that culture. I am of my time and yet out of my time. I drive fast down freeways but I have no belief that these roads lead to a future. Nor do I fear or dread the future. But I do fear for my culture and the human beings within and the beasts and plants without it that suffer in silence.

-Charles Bowden

Inspiring. Not to duplicate voor mij but to blaze your own Paskowitz way…

Ludlow was no cobbler. He merely did what he needed to do and right now he needed a new sole for his left shoe, worn thin from the wheel. It needed to be replaced 3 weeks ago but he hadn’t been able to find any tires to craft a new shoe bottom, or to sleep for that matter, during the stretch of “Everest” as the carny leggers called the Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada circuit. It was named Everest after the bio-scare of ‘23 when the larger half could no longer afford even low grade, “McDonald” biofuel. That’s when the leggers emerged as the latest indentured slave. Horse’s, mules and donkey were now for eating so it was up to the leggers to pull the carnival load. Literally. They ran the little wheel, the human powered wheel that powered the ferris wheel for the children of the energy riche. They were the only ones that could pay other people to spin them around on the ferris wheel. After the stop they broke it down and pulled it to the nearest train. This west coast tour had many stops far from the railroad stop so in addition to driving the rides on site, setting up and breaking down, the leggers had many extra miles to pull it all. Places like Moxee, Washington, Lake Oswego, Oregon, McCloud, California and Gabbs, Nevada. And they had very little time to do it all. Hence, Ludlow’s predicament of a growing hole at the ball of his left foot. The hole had allowed for a blister which popped, pussed and became infected which made for a horrible smell.

The bull shit is so thick these days that instead of even trying to engage in a debate, ultra conservative ignoramuses just send their minions to go to town hall meetings and make a ruckus. Don’t engage in debate about health care, just know that it’s wrong and make noise because it’s socialist and fascist, as if something could actually be both. In general, Americans have bought into the lie that as long as something can be made profitable it is “the good.” Anything that is even slightly directed by the government is “the bad.” Ridiculous really. If “the good” had it their way my internet connection would be slower (e.g. less bandwidth) so Fox could spread even more rubbish into the world on my bandwidth, just to name one. Make it stop.

Speaking as a child of the 80s, John Hughes died this week. He made movies about middle class, suburban white kids that wanted to be individuals fitting in (among other things - see above clip of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles). They came from affluent Chicago that could have been anywhere affluent America. But he did capture something that people think they can replicate but I haven’t seen someone do it yet. To some his films could look like some current teenage romance but that would be wrong. The 80s was a strange decade. It was the moment that the marketers perfected how to sell shit to teenagers. Woodstock was the eureka moment of a new, cashed up demographic and by the 80s the strategy was perfected. However, we weren’t clueless, sheep to the slaughter. Not all of us anyway. But none of us are immune. Maybe that’s what John Hughes did so well. He showed emotion in the time of Gekko. America has not left the mindset of Gekko, we just talk about it differently.

It’s not entirely right, but I see a strong connection with John Hughes’ films and The Smiths. It’s the wolf in sheeps clothes and what a beautiful wolf. Machismo and materialism ruled the 80s and Hughes and The Smiths subverted that mentality although Morrissey did it in a much bigger way. Hughes did it by focusing on the sensitive, yet attractive, anti-hero, outsider that could navigate relatively seamlessly through the high school social circles. Morrissey and Marr did it differently, in particular Morrissey. Just watch the video below and you might even cringe when you see him dance. Is he taking the piss? Is he serious? Is he just dancing? Who knows but so many people, macho or not, loved their tunes and had to deal with their emotions, and some with their homophobia, while they danced and sang and cried in their beers. Morrissey challenged all the nonsense just by putting out records. Really good records.

Both were critical, crucial and emblems of the 80s. It’s great that you can go to a bar in the Mission on the 3rd Thursday every month and hear The Smiths on vinyl. A lot of it is nostalgic but The Smiths and John Hughes will be referenced forever by anyone who wants to know about that decade.

Pretty in Pink being shown in Dolores Park (Mission), San Francisco, Saturday, August 1, 2009.

And here’s a great band from the nineties and naughts covering The Headmaster Ritual….

Where were you?

Only time will tell.

Brent Dennen - San Francisco