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| Downtown Denial City |
This particular war takes place inside the mysteriously growing skulls of Americans (some of them anyway).
Which ideologically isolates Americans further, since most of the world now accepts the reality of global warming induced climate change (Scientists Urge Rejection of Keystone XL Pipeline).
Additionally, the scientific data and consensus gets stronger and stronger every day (What We Know).
But, like a certain date that a convict on death row tries to be unaware of, the criminal Oil-Qaeda delves deeper and deeper into denial while the authoritarians and Stockholm Syndrome sufferers grow more certain that the day of reckoning will never come.
Anyway, here is the post from today's date in 2010, just to show once again that when some folks enter a trance they do not come out of it:
Yesterday Ecocosmology Blog had a post about a global warming scientist, a geologist, who had predicted, over 2.5 years before it erupted, the current volcanic eruption in Iceland that has shut down air traffic in Europe.
A while back Dredd Blog had a post about a lawsuit concerning global warming, where the plaintiffs won a temporary appellate victory against oil companies.
They had sued oil companies for causing global warming, which caused storms to increase in severity, damaging their properties when hurricane Katrina hit the coast.
They had lost in the federal district court, had won the appeal heard by three judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but had lost in their opposition to having it re-heard en banc (before all the judges on that court).
The case is now pending an oral argument hearing before all of the judges of the Fifth Circuit, while both sides prepare their briefs and prepare for that oral argument.
It seems to me that if the Fifth Circuit judges knew of the scientist who predicted catastrophe in the exact place it happened with the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the case could be made stronger that environmental damage was foreseeable to oil companies, like cancer was foreseeable by tobacco and asbestos companies.
The tobacco and asbestos companies historically had lied under oath before congress, their lawyers had continually argued that the damage to individuals was not foreseeable, and therefore not a "proximate cause" of the injuries which the plaintiffs suing them had suffered.
The tobacco and asbestos companies eventually lost that argument so their practices were modified by the judicial system.
This would be a good time for that to happen to the oil complex because they are stuck in the exact same mindset as the tobacco and asbestos companies were ... "what damages ... what proximate cause".
It is still National Poetry Month, so ....
by Arthur Rimbaud
As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:
Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets
Nailing them naked to coloured stakes.
I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with
The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.
Into the ferocious tide-rips
Last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,
I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas
Never endured more triumphant clamourings
The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
For ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights!
Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,
The green water penetrated my pinewood hull
And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,
Carrying away both rudder and anchor.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;
Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!
I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts
And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,
And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw!
I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors.
Lighting up long violet coagulations,
Like the performers in very-antique dramas
Waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds!
I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows
The kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of undreamed-of saps,
And the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus!
I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells
Battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows,
Never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans!
I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas
Where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds!
I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
Where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm
And distances cataracting down into abysses!
Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where the giant snakes devoured by vermin
Fall from the twisted trees with black odours!
I should have liked to show to children those dolphins
Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.
- Foam of flowers rocked my driftings
And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.
Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings
Lifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward me
And I hung there like a kneeling woman...
Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls
And droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,
And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage
Drowned men sank backwards into sleep!
But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,
Hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,
I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water,
neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up;
Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,
I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky
Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious,
Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot,
Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,
A crazy plank, with black sea-horses for escort,
When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows
Skies of ultramarine into burning funnels;
I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues' distance
The groans of Behemoth's rutting, and of the dense Maelstroms
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities
I long for Europe with it's aged old parapets!
I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor:
- Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? -
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.
I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,
Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,
Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.
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