DEEP SCRATCH

Tag: Climate Emergency

  • MMXXV new year message

    MMXXV new year message

    Happy New Yeah I’ll Write Then…

    Dedicated to those who didn’t make it through the brutal 2024, and those who may feel forgotten, left behind or overlooked. The world is a better place with you in it, innit, just don’t get any big ideas, like saving the planet, okay. Phew, it’s a lot, innit, and only increasing as each year rolls by, the older you get the more you have to process, and balance the exponential reality check-book. Selective memory and the swiftly forgotten as a survival measure. You are that which remains, I am that which remains, so here we remain the remains of the day. 

    Here some past present future tensions stretched and shrunk to fit the purpose. Stuff I think about, in review, inner and outer, subjective and attempted objective, half full and half empty looking glass. Hopes and fears, everybody does it. Short term nostalgia trip and honest scribble for any readers who got this far.

    What was real in 2024? I ask of myself and the outsiders. What is true or true enough to get some group of believers or other, on board with the bare cult minimum of effort. New loops lie ahead on history’s rollercoaster, only just finished and designed by a drunken lunatic, and we’re zooming upside down and around, some well strapped in, some with hands in the air, some standing as we go over the top and around the bend. 

    The challenge to keep one’s head, while seemingly others lose theirs to some ideology or other, some big dada or saviour, some scam, yet it’s all many have. A rude and crass “i told you so” or “you’re very wrong” does not help, the result is the same. Creeping insanity, don’t call it genocide, the feeling that you’re the only one who thinks this or that way, locked off, isolated in a world of self doubt and a lack of confidence, well shit, pick up that pen, that brush, that instrument, that rhyme, get it down and out. Now. 

    Write, draw, play, speak, now’s the time. It’s for your own good, don’t expect fame or fortunes, go for sanity and therapy. Order, chaos, complexity, disorder, in various ratios, plus harmony, sense, knowledge, understanding, try to figure it out for yourself first. Test it. Take it easy, the world is not all your problem. Start small, be thankful for what you’ve got, try to make it make sense. Be the altruism and benevolence you wish to see in the world. Yes, these are positive reinforcement messages from my toilet wall. 

    And try to remember, after covid, 80% of incumbent candidates, those currently in office, lost in 2024 elections, worldwide. Change, in a political sense, swept across the chess board like a powerful haunting super fart, turning over unprepared governments like bowling pins, upsetting apple carts and causing distress to many rational thinking people. Populism, powered by collective post-covid, post-truth psychosis, rears its ugly head, in the spirit of vulture capitalism, or disaster capitalism, these ravenous birds of prey snatch away the hungry, disenfranchised, vulnerable and angry into their clutches. Bejewelled birds of prey, covered in priceless diamond rings, rubies and emeralds, the richest birds paid up by the richest apex predator: Musk. 2024 is his year, the year of the Musk man, emotionally derelict, money talks and bullshit walks all over what tatters of the constitution remain after the feeding frenzy by sharks and hyenas, lawyers and crooked supreme justices over decades. And the climate and the climate. Wars and war, arms and arms. Don”t call it genocide, follow the rules of war, arms sales but fly no flags. Arms race, race race. Too many still profit from disaster, from disaster too many turn away. Union strong, truth and honesty strong, small is beautiful, stronger together in 2025. Deeee escalate. What of the tribe and the tale of 2024, the tech fash bros and lurch toward theocracy, a second coming closer, a fake saviour, devil in tanned disguise, as Elvis said. 

    Yet, here we are. So, what’s next you lot? What text, image, sound, video, real, fake, co-created or hallucinated? What what what. Our new duty, or one of em’, is to cohere, to pull it all together into digestible chunks of a bloody big healthy cake, a slice of bitter sweet 2024, on the flipper side there’s Crypto Fash Hyper Crime Family Strokes, or some such new U.S sitcom. United States drama mind creep, season two of the worst unreality TV show ever. Trump, the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist in chief. What now my cuddlies, what now? Well, let the suicide squad enter a hate induced coma. 

    Continue as you were, poet, artist, philosopher, wit, romantic. Forget about the chicken hawk show, conceive of a kind of Buddhist reality construct, where all human beings are like equally coming Buddhas, full compassion for all sentient beings, including them, they, the Trumpers and worse. It’s inside us all somewhere, maybe misplaced or misidentified, the love is there. One way forward, truly, but not so popular in a rage and rant world, is forgiveness, albeit, coated in L.S.D. Love harder and deeper, more broadly. Keep a grip of yourself. Hold onto others tight. Thou shall not kill or swindle others out of their neurons. More self help slogans for your uncle’s garage wall.

    2025 will be a year of pulling away from social media and unpublishing some work, closing accounts and encouraging others to do the same. The time and energy saved will, with luck, funnel into alternate avenues to reach people based on analogue media. Art, craft, performance, workshops, hanging out.

    The AI is not to be feared or rejected, we must organize and use every means at our disposal to build that better world of abundance for all, attained without lies, violence and threats. Continue the work and don’t expect any recognition or thanks because such expectations may cause you to want to quit. Never give up. Work on kindness and sharing, tolerance and spreading love, there’s enough people already working on the opposites to these virtues. 

    Sincerely wishing you all a piece of peace pie, success, health, healing, learning, giggles and clarity in 2025. 

    www.deepscratch.net

  • Spaceship Earth: Buckminster Fuller at MIT

    Spaceship Earth: Buckminster Fuller at MIT

    The earliest known use of the term[1] is a passage in Henry George‘s best known work, Progress and Poverty[2] (1879). From book IV, chapter 2:

    It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, “This is mine!”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth

    First, I’d like to explore a few thoughts about the vital data confronting us right now — such as the fact that more than half of humanity as yet exists in miserable poverty, prematurely doomed, unless we alter our comprehensive physical circumstances. It is certainly no solution to evict the poor, replacing their squalid housing with much more expensive buildings which the original tenants can’t afford to reoccupy. Our society adopts many such superficial palliatives.

    https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship_Earth
  • It Feels like (AI) summer

    It Feels like (AI) summer

    You can feel it in the streets
    On a day like this, the heat

    Childish Gambino, (Donald Mckinley Glover) It Feels Like Summer.

    Seven billion souls that move around the sun
    Rolling faster, faster, not a chance to slow down
    Slow down
    Men who made machines that want what they decide
    Parents tryna’ tell the children please slow down
    Slow down

    Childish Gambino, (Donald Mckinley Glover) It Feels Like Summer.

  • Conservative Lies And The Sewage Briefing

    Water companies made £2.8 billion of collective profits in 2020 and discharged raw sewage 400,000 times – for more than 3.1 million hours total. Shockingly, these figures are low-end estimates.

    Liberal Democrats, The Sewage Briefing.

    UK Conservatives seem to be caught up in a net of partygate lies like a gaggle of rotten trout, soaked in the stench of disgrace, the sewage party of neglect under the misdirection of Boris “Crime-minister” Johnson. A party that has failed to protect our rivers and waterways, and stood by as water quality regulations and waste disposal regulations are abused, leading to the current country wide outbreak of algal blooms and so loss of plant and species diversity. (See George Manbiot) If you want to see your local environment thrive vote for a Liberal Democrat or Labour representative. Read their proposed actions concerning the Stour, plus those actions already undertaken, and compare with the current gang of scoundrels and their legacy of environmental neglect. HS2, Brexit, PPE Scandals, etc.

    Our rivers and seas are being transformed into open sewers by greedy business and useless governments.

    George Manbiot, This Stinks.

    My rhetorical questions: Where is the evidence of conservation activity to protect our local waterways? Why are we still allowing sewage and farm waste to flow into rivers and waterways? Who is responsible? How do we bring justice and protect and enforce? Where are the alternative plans for waterside developments and ecological centers, new nature reserves and wildlife habitats?

    With increasing frequency, warm weather brings algal blooms. Water that should be crystal clear becomes a green or brown slop of diatoms (microscopic algae).

    George Monbiot, Shitstorm.

    It’s a fact that most cities and towns in the UK, and worldwide, are often named after or were settled next to a river. Stourbridge is one such town, the river Stour is one such river. There before any human settlement, and treated like a handy public waste disposal system, the river stour has paid its dues throughout the industrial revolution, right up to the present day. From washing the dye from carpets in Kidderminster to the Holloware Metal Industry of lye and the Iron Forgeries and Foundries of the Black Country. We all owe the river Stour for assisting with the local industry neatly moving our waste elsewhere.     

    Rising up by the Clent Hills near St Kenelms Chapel and Well, the water is relatively clean and pollution free, yet on its way east across to Haelsown to the Dudley Metropolitan Borough it picks up waste. It weaves through the past heavy industrial area of Cradley Heath, Lye toward Stourbridge, its namesake, and on through Wollaston, Amblecote to Stourton. From my observations, the bulk of pollution comes from the remaining industrial areas, plus whatever the water authorities allow to be added from sewage outlets and pipes that feed into it. I should know, I’ve climbed up a number of them and witnessed first hand the strange liquids, foams and discoloration in the River Stour, mostly from Stambermill before the Viaduct over 20 years.

    I welcome the new volunteer initiatives to clean up the river, and a healthy competition to show-off your local piece of the Stour, and which can lead to cross party support for the initiatives. Everybody benefits from a clean river, not least the fauna and flora that live in and around the river the gradual return of native species wiped out by industry and neglect over the last 200 years is a cause for optimism. But rivers need active defense units, ever vigilant of plots and schemes to undermine their value, or simply ignore them. They are the life blood of any town or city.  

    From my research, the Liberal Democrat Party have by far the best plan of action to transform the river and bring highly needed criticism of the current mismanagement and neglect of the Conservative Party. Read The Sewage Briefing now.
    Besides the long list, as long as the river Stour, of repeated failures of the Tory party, their lack of support and unwillingness to protect the Stour and all waterways in the UK is a single reason enough to send your vote elsewhere, either Liberal Democrat or Labour. Register to vote, use your vote, use your voice. Put pressure on those polluting the river and those who support the continued contamination of the UK water-ways, driven by profit over public interest.  

    The privatised water companies, granted local monopolies on supply, extract vast dividends and salaries while investing as little as possible in pipes, sewage systems, reservoirs and pollution control. Instead of stopping leaks or discouraging overconsumption, they draw down the groundwater that feeds our rivers.

    George Monbiot, Watery Grave.

    The future fight to save the planet and humanity starts at home in your locality. The lasting legacy of environmental work and the re-greening of our towns and cities is a lasting legacy to be truly proud of. Your kids will respect you for it. With some imagination, furthermore our waterways can become functional family attractions, the source of food and a habitat for wildlife: fish, insects and plants. Consider Mills have previously been powered by the river too.

    Why not make the environmental crisis a cross-party issue, and the demonstration of looking after it competitive, with incentives, work opportunities and a myriad of social psychological benefits. 

    –Steve Fly

    We will encourage communities to act for their local river and surrounding habitat, creating a legacy of engaged individuals who will help protect it long into the future. In addition, we will generate awareness of small, everyday changes which we can all make to contribute to improving the condition of the river.”

    Love Your River Stour