Dreamflesh

Via the Peak Energy blog, I just read this interesting debunking (at another “Peak Energy” blog) of Bruce Sterling’s recent bigging up of ethanol as a viable bio-fuel.

I’m not an energy scientist, but it seems like a duty for anyone claiming to be interested in where the world’s at to follow the energy debate as closely as they’re able. I read Sterling’s post a week or two ago, and had problems with it that I lacked the knowledge to properly articulate. The above post seemed to have the hammer skills to hit all the protruding nails that I saw right on the head. Both Sterling’s post and the rebuff are well worth reading to get the optimist / pessimist poles of the argument.

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Where do you start with Ann Coulter? The answer is, you don’t. You smile wryly, realize that life is too short for certain things, and walk away.

However, rubbernecker that I am, I just spent a short time reading about this extreme right-wing American media figure, just to see what the score is, after noticing a reference on the BBC site about her appearance on Newsnight:

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Well, last night’s post was well timed. I swear, I know nothing about it.

(I should stress that I knew nothing about it, as I’m slightly concerned that the bomb-makers seem to be following me. I arrived in the UK last year in the middle of the 7/7 bombings, and discovered that some of the bombs may have been manufactured near my old home in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. Now it turns out one of the properties raided last night was very close to my last home, on Forest Road in Walthamstow. Anti-terror squad take note: next time I move, keep a close eye on the Clifton area of Bristol.)

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‘ In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States. John Mueller, ‘A False Sense of Insecurity?’ ‘

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Getting close to completion of the first Dreamflesh Journal has got me thinking about the print stuff I’ve done in the past. I’ve realised I really should make all my old, out-of-print stuff available as PDF eBooks.

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Being blissfully bereft of television these days, I do tend to miss the odd nugget of goodness that occasionally drifts by in that stream of sewage. DVD rental serves well for intelligent, entertaining trash. And it seems that YouTube and Google Video, copyrights notwithstanding, are stepping in more and more to serve up bizarre and/or wonderful snippets fished out of the rivers of media putrefaction.

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I’m often suspicious of theories and models of the world that are Gnostic in the sense that they posit an original state or baseline of corruption, which must be overcome to achieve harmony, liberation, a good time, etc. Even accepting that a good bit of legwork is necessary in life, I’ve usually had sympathy with theories of people like Wilhelm Reich, where the “core” of life is believed to be naturally healthy and self-correcting, merely distorted by layers of negative conditioning.

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In the past year I’ve happened upon a series of discoveries, of what I now regard as cultural treasures, each of which has posed the question: “How in the hell have I missed this shit until now?” The question is rhetorical, and voiced with a gleeful smile; it’s not pained, regretfully pondering on lack or the sense of having missed out. It comes as an affirmation of a wider sense of the universe being ever-surprising, ever full of novelty, even when you think you’ve seen it all.

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Oxford’s tireless chroniclers of the hypocrisies and hidden realities of big business, Corporate Watch, have recently released a first-of-its-kind report on the extent of the role of UK companies in Iraq since 2003: Corporate Carve-Up.

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I grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire. It’s in the middle of the Lincolnshire fens: uniformly flat, “reclaimed” land that is intensively farmed. Childhood staples, such as wandering through muddy creeks in the nearby marshes, and the ubiquitous concrete sea defence “promenades” at nearby beaches, have taken on a new light as I’ve grown older and learned about the area’s ecological basics. And about climate change.

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