The Safety of Civilization is at Stake, Dammit!!!

Four Amish Women Added To That Federal Hair-Cutting Indictment Yes, someone made a Federal case out of it...

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2012\04A: An Urgent Report

Noting the nuttiness of people's fears, the extent to which they are convinced that the world, as usual, is just about to end, I have been noting the nature of those who seem to love the sort of hysteria surrounding the prospect of an asteroid doing us all in.

It's a metaphor, you dopes. A metaphor for whatever fashionable piffle children are being taught to wet their beds over - by which I mean the idea that man can alter the world's temperature through self-flaggelation and feelings of sever contrition, and that a giant human-caused-weather-related wave is coming to wipe us out. Even the landlocked.

I thought I was beavering away in lonely isolation. Now, even storied philosophical figure and popular writer Pascal Bruckner is starting to get worried about our worries (and distracting preoccupations with something that only matters to a haldful of detached activists).

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world’s human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery. No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning.

And so forth, undsoweiter: the fear of wrong simply becomes fear, and redemption, well - if you don't beileve in anything, you won't find any of that either.

The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God’s kingdom. Today’s has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy’s fine novel The Road. How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious and that so many strange predictions flourish?

As far as I'm concerned, if you're preoccupied by human extinction, and have a "love-hate" relationship with the idea, make a good example of yourself and go first. After all, if the life of all of us is a cheap tool to make yourself heard, then your life is unserious and cheap to begin with.

"That was Quite an Outburst"

The Masses are not Revolting

Luís Afonso Assumpção of Porto, PT looks at those that call themselves “radical” in this world, and finds no radical novelty in their thinking, that there is something about them that has never changed, and that there is something akin to a personalization of drama in their actions , but also a consistent laziness and incapacity to deal with life’s challenges.

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote in the first half of the twentieth century (before the Second World War!) A fundamental study to understand what we call "modernity", or a personal description-my-"the intellectual decay as counterpoint to the material and scientific progress. "

It’s called "The Revolt of the Masses"
The edition I have in hand (Portuguese), on page 80 summarizes the fundamental thinking of the brilliant Spanish:

"Everything that follows (note: in the book) is a consequence or corollary of this radical structure could be summarized thus: the world organized by the nineteenth century, to automatically produce a new man, give him a formidable appetites, powerful tools of all kinds to meet them: economic, physical (hygiene, health, better than any time before), civil and technical (the tremendous rise in practical efficiency that the average man lacked in the past) . After introducing him all these powers in the nineteenth century but abandoned him at the same, the average man following his natural character, ended up looking inward. Thus, we find ourselves with a mass stronger that of any other time, but, unlike the traditional, tightly closed in and incapable of dealing with anything or anyone else - in short, restless. The things continue like this, Each day you will notice more across Europe - and, as a reflection in the world - that the masses are unable to leave and drive in any direction.

During difficult times that approach for our continent, it is possible that, seized by suddenly anxiety, we enough good will to deal with pressing matters in the direction of modesty.

But this willingness will fail because because the texture of the radical’s soul is inward and brooding. Because they lack the will and the instincts to deal with real problems in front of them, so they won’t. They will want to follow someone, but will not. They will want to hear other opinions, only to discover that they are deaf. "

In short, the reason they seem like losers, and always have, is because those who call themselves “radicals” are, especially when they do it from a position of attention seeking and do it in the same robotic way so many others have.

Building Design and the Capital of the Berlin Republic

Which is to say, Berlin, but I digress. Jim Hudson’s excellent blog visits Mitte, with photos that transit work from the 1933 to the present, visiting momentarily the flour that grew in the faded husk of the pride and joy of the DDR, trotting down the entirely “destalinized” Doreteenstraße.

Now, it should be noted that German architecture during the period 1933-45 is a complex business, with perhaps more continuity than many of the stripped neoclassical ‘banality of evil’ designs would suggest, albeit that modernism was relegated relegated to industrial buildings, where it survived at all. And one should not forget the need to consider the context of the buildings and the horrors of the regime, to avoid becoming one of those weird people with an unhealthy obsession with the subject. But, well, ooh, I love a good Nazi building, don’t you?

Euros to donuts, I agree, but atuill have a hard time thinking that one can express it openly without gimballing my neck to see who’s listening.

News Digest of the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\10-H

Saying 'nein' to street view
Macleans.ca

In Guernsey, two of Google's Street View cars were vandalized.

Evidence suggests that the writer doesn't realize that Guernsey is not in Germnay. In fact it is not even in the UK, but is a part of England. Go figure it out. I don't have all day to explain these things to you.

News Digest of the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2010\10-G

Film features local beekeper
Addison County Independent

Kirk Webster and his mite-free colonies in an effort to share an alternative look at what people are calling a "global bee crisis" currently in effect.

UM researcher identifies possible cause of bee crisis
KXLH Helena News

The mysterious bee die-off hit North Dakota beekeeper James Browning hard. He lost 40 percent of his 20000 hives last year. "To see those bees die and the colonies empty, no bees in there," Browning said, "it's a gut wrenching feeling."

It's a virus, dammit.

Plantu: “I Detest You, but don’t Stop Spending your Dollars Here”

Feverishly Awaiting Orders from the Mother Ship

As you know, they are having forest fires in Russia. As you might expect, the “real truth©™” is “some other thing” that makes those “in the know” feel that they have some special wisdom that the ugly mass of morons that they imagine their fellow man to be. It always seems to be dispensed by what one can only describe as a modern day soothsayer-charlatan:

As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, "At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries."

The second recurring features required for this kind of thing (that never seems to go away,) is that those that buy into it think that natural phenomena CAN’T be natural, because they are somehow personalized. The proof of this being that it is happening to them.

The primary recurring feature is ignorance.

But Russia isn't the only country suffering form a heat wave this summer. Indeed, the United States is also experiencing record temperatures. On July 24, temperatures in Washington, D.C., hit 37.7 degrees, and local weather services issued heat warnings for the first time this summer.

Areshev agrees that it is also hot in the United States, but notes that the United States is significantly farther south than Russia, meaning that such high temperatures are not so surprising there.

Statistics be damned! Some mysterious, evil Ernst Stavro Blofeld type controls the universe, and the weather at that, and has it IN FOR HIM! Possibly because he (at least believes) that he matters THAT MUCH! It’s the perfect, virtue-less circle.