Resignation

We think we are choosing an opening
but we're only two moves from mate.
We think that we exercise free will
because we are blind to our fate.

We believe we are beacons of clarity
but our reasons confuse and conflate,
and our logic is hostage to pretext
and the slanders we insinuate.

We rally comrades to our banner,
lead them to contest barricades
for a cause that was lost already.
We are just too late, always too late.

We think we are choosing an opening
but we're only two moves from mate.
We think that we exercise free will
because we are blind to our fate.

The rowan berries have turned black

The rowan berries have turned black.
The birds have not been back
to branches they last year stripped bare

as they have done year after year. 
A cursèd crop hangs there.

Its blush has succumbed to a blight
in times that lack sense and foresight,

tomorrows scorched by yesterdays

when we unleashed the flood and flame 

so torrents rush and wildfires blaze

but none are found to take the blame

for decades of delays, delays, delays,

and so our appetites unchecked
mean little birds' must now neglect
the rowan berries that are black.
The birds will not be back.

Earthquake

We thought we washed our hands
with water, not knowing blood
ran clear from the open wounds
of all the worlds we had killed.
Innocence was our guilt,
our crime so complete
that even knowing of its commission
was blasphemy. Imperceptible shifts
in our tectonic virtue - seemingly solid,
yet resting on molten rock - accumulated,
gradually, until the inevitable cataclysm,
which was attributed to an arbitrary,
and inscrutable deity, whose anger
was, at the same time, our absolution,
given we had no-one to blame
but ourselves.

The long walk

A dancer has taken off his mask
in front of uninitiated children.

I remember as a child we would go
with father to the sacred mountain,
and in its foothills visit the ruins
of the dwellings of our ancestors,
and he would visit their shrines
to speak with the intermediaries
who live among the forbidden summits
whence they descend to move among us,
and brother bear and brother eagle,
coyote the trickster, mountain lion,
and sister snake watched from afar,
having their own audience with gods,

but a dancer has taken off his mask
in front of uninitiated children.

White brothers come from the east
for a new and bitter pilgrimage,
not to the beginning of time,
among the relics of our predecessors,
but beyond the limits of endurance
to the end of the fourth world.
The songs that held us up fall silent.
The ancestors are struck dumb. Father
has died and fallen by the wayside
and there is no time to stop and mourn,
and bear and eagle, lion, snake and coyote
turn away from their brothers and sisters
who have fallen through heat or thirst,
hunger or exhaustion, and perished.
They turn away from the sadness,
the dances unperformed, songs unsung,
and our people will lie there now
until the earth claims their dust
and sadness is taken by the wind.

The white brothers speak of destiny
but they would not understand
what the dancer who removed his mask
would tell them to their face:
words that will destroy them.

There is no destiny, only a dance;
there is no plan, only a pulse,
and all things are connected;
there is no fate, no past or future,
no failure to fear, no prize to win,
only right here, now and forever;
nothing is forbidden to those
who revere all things, sin impossible
for those with perfect knowledge;
they may kill us, march us to death,
erase all memory of our existence,
but we will rise again in all things,
our hymns of praise concealed
even in their most guttural insults,
our children swarming in their marrow,
and memory will be restored at last
in the great forgetting
to which they have condemned themselves
by amputating themselves from the world,
making their journey
one from cradle to grave only,
thinking they compel us to do the same,
when the paths we walk will always be
just one of many possible trails
beneath the stars.

Our enemies may prevail,
but even in their hour of victory
they will destroy themselves,
and the spoils will be inherited
by those who met annihilation
on friendlier terms.

Immortal

Once we sorted out the problem of telomere depletion,
we continuously regenerated ourselves, cloned organs
to replace decrepit predecessors inside our own bodies.
We became immortal, and in what seemed just a moment
were overwhelmed by ennui. Our actions lacked urgency.
Mortal life had been a race run in reverse, pursuit away
from a finishing line that eventually caught up with us,
one we ran until we lost, one we stood no chance of winning,
but we had erased that line, and so we stood still at last
and forever, muscles and sinews stiffening into pale monuments
to ego, sadly calcifying in our hubris, condemning ourselves
to stand as a warning to those who think they can restrict
the compass of God to the narrow quadrant of human concerns,
and in that paralysis of insanity some of us remembered,
dimly, in outline, the dreams we were once capable of having,
and craved the futility we had once known and cursed.

You're welcome

I'm not a fallen angel, no,
I'm just king of the sinners:
standing on the shoulders
of midgets, as it were.
You too can have what I have.
I'll show you how.
We agree nothing matters
so you don't mind
if my nothing matters
more than yours, do you?
If you want nihilism
log in to my corporate account.
Nothing is real anyway,
so there's no reason for you
not to indulge my fantasies.
If life is a ledge I'll talk you down.
We need to take a leap of faith.
You go first, please, no, after you.
You need to suffer for someone
so you can suffer on my behalf.
I'll make it easy for you.
Let me upholster Hell for you.
You should thank me really.
I promise to let you think
you are in complete control,
pave paradise so you can think
you are in the driving seat.
I'd do that for you.
You're welcome.

The silence

Hush.
Be still.
Can you hear it?
Once everything has settled down
and falls quiet, can you hear it?
Not the silence. Behind that. Beyond it.
Beyond the hiss of atoms jostling in the air.
Beyond their thermal agitation in the strings
taut and motionless upon your harp. Beyond
all the recursive antiphonies of logic
echoing in your mind, the endless tautologies
of mutual implication, can you hear it?
The Moonsong, the convocation of stars,
the song of being, the thrum of interconnection,
calling from every place to every other place,
each atom grappling itself to all others
with a call that radiates without attenuation,
until the universe itself is an orchestra
embarked upon a divine improvisation
of which we are part. Listen,
and do not write this music down,
for in the loud description within our power
you will only find another silence,
and one that offers no consolation.

Trash

Put me in the bin.
Throw me away. Cure me
of being human and eligible for the mob
that crowds around and treats like dirt
the weaklings it picks out and persecutes
with repertoires of cruelty learned from birth
by heart, all the elegant and refined barbarism
that lubricates our polite pretense of civilisation.
I never wanted to be one of them. I never was
one of them, so stop me being one of them,
strip me of that wrapper and throw me in the bin,

after all, everything is disposable.
That's how we see it. That's how we recognise things
as being of this world: their disposability,
which only gods survive, to which the world is condemned
by us, with every name we give to bird and beast,
so condemn me. Strip me of my humanity. Make me trash
and throw me in the bin, and dump me in the landfill,

where my sharp serrated edges can slash at last,
my broken shards stab, and all the toxic filth
that I have spent a lifetime brewing deep inside
can leak and spill and spoil and poison the soil
where you trespass, the land to which you lay claim,
the land on which you would raise the cities of Man.

Shout

It's not that I don't care:
haven't you noticed the scene I make
when I do express emotion?
The problem is not that nothing registers
enough to make the needle shift,
but that the signal itself is saturated,
my needle always pressed up hard
against the other end of the dial,
not indifferent, but at full scale deflection,
my feelings cramped in constant spasm,
and I can only make myself heard,
on those rare occasions
when the volume is turned down
enough to let me relax a little,
and even then the needle convulses
at the extreme end of its compass
and the only way I can speak
is at the top of my voice.
Otherwise I must remain silent.

Melencolia

Ours is a precarious existence in the margins of love. 
We write letters blank with unconfessed admiration, 
loiter in the anteroom of love's indulgence, waiting,
patiently listening to the laughter of the ghosts within
and then post our missives through the mail drop
to the street outside for a gust of wind to take

and deliver our solicitations to the storm instead. 
We open the door and step outside to cool our heels.
Standing upon the granite cobbles of love's thoroughfare,
we hope for a glimpse of what we can never have,
and it rides past; and at night we wait in the garden
for a candle to appear in the casement to signal safety,
all the while knowing the house has lain empty for generations,
the roof has collapsed, and only owls offer reciprocation,
all the while knowing the only way this vigil ends
is in a cold and empty embrace beneath the Moon.

Second hand book shop

At least the fabled beast of lore
could withdraw to an enchanted castle,
where he could hide himself in a library
with inexhaustible reserves of books
to keep him company in his enforced solitude
while he waited for beauty to find him.

I didn't have a castle growing up,
and had to settle for loitering in the recesses
of second hand book shops:
Voltaire and Rousseau on Otago Lane;
Caledonia Books on Great Western Road;
and my favourite, Gilmorehill Books on Bank Street
(long since closed, a trendy café now occupying the site,
the fondness of my recollection intensified by absence);
all filled with second hand books,
stacked and piled rafter high, with scant regard
for the safety, let alone convenience, of customers,
by misanthropic owners for whom a sale was a nuisance
and an interruption of their own literary meditations.

I could immerse myself for hours in that affinity I felt
with these books' inopportune neglect and state of ill repair,
their stubborn, malappropriate, anachronistic persistence
upon the shelves, to be handled perhaps once a generation,
wallowing in their abandonment by former owners
to the embrace of time's great hinterland of decay,
to an eternity of glorious irrelevance. I would revel
in the enduring obscurity of these books
in which I could read of fabled beasts of lore,
consigned to enchanted castles, in far off lands,
living all my transmogrifications for me.

Epitaph

I cannot choose the manner of my return,
for if I could I would choose never to leave you.
Time cracks open the tomb. Entropy empties it.
I cannot choose, and succumb to death's decree
that if you should ever meet these atoms again
you will not in them be able to recognise me,
but be consoled: after all, I have not left you,
but been turned by death into forms entirely new.

צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים‎

It is as if God wants us to be silent
but gives us only song as the means;
wants us to disappear completely
and be entirely at peace with Him,
yet leaves us the stridency of free will
to prompt us to approach Him;
wants praise but teaches only insults;
gives us a map of a foreign land
to help us find our way home;
abandons us to beguiling ciphers,
broken promises and brazen lies.
It seems that way if we imagine
Him in our image. Thank God then
that, instead, we are made in His;
our imperfections perfect;
our defects diamonds;
our flaws a crumpled origami
of His divine covenant,
when seen from the other side
of that mirror He holds up,
to make our left hand right,
in which He sees Himself.

Hope

Even in the darkest night,
especially then, when it seems
the Sun has lost its way,
and there will be no respite
from a darkness that seems to well up
irresistibly from deep inside,
overflowing through every pore
and orifice, to spill like bitumen
saturating all our words
and thoughts and actions,
making everything we hold onto
slick, so that we lose our grip,
and fall, with no ground in sight,
with nothing to tether the night,
no leash to restrain its obsidian bite,
every blessing we do not count
becoming a curse, and no light
at the tunnel's end,
because it goes straight down
and we are the pebble dropped
to plumb its depths,
and confirm it is bottomless,
even then,
especially then,
I weep with hope,
pure, unalloyed hope,
a rogue spark struck from the vacuum
by an unseen hand.
These tears you see
are tears of hope.
There are no tears
that are not ultimately
tears of hope. Once the heart
has performed its stripping run,
and spirit flows, I weep with hope,
for we are not what we do
because of our circumstances,
we are what we do despite them.
We are not creatures of acquiescence,
we are creatures of refusal,
strong, affirmative refusal,
and so all tears are ultimately
tears of hope. All tears
are tears of triumph.

Let Eton stand

"Floreat Etona"

- the motto of Eton College

Other edifices may burn down -
royal residences, tower blocks -
but let Eton stand and flourish
for now. Let its playing fields
remain innocent and unmolested
by the trench and barbed wire of Flanders.

Let friendly bombs fall elsewhere,

while old boys address us on the radio,
with whimsical contempt: "floreat Etona
et flagret Grenfell," their polite words
lending fragrance to miasmas of privilege
that stifle all other voices like mustard gas,
or smoke in burning tower blocks, smiling
as they strangle us with their subjunctives
and murder us with their "common sense".

Let Eton stand, its halls intact,
not as some mystery to invite speculation
like the works of Ozymandias,
but to remind us of what it stood for:
six centuries perverting education
into a weapon of class war,
making a privilege of the right
of all who can benefit from it.

You say tear Eton down.
Let Eton stand. Let it fall
into discredited dilapidation.
Let it rest like a derelict wreck
upon the bank of a civil discourse
that flows past it's decaying edifice,
its walls a warning, environs haunted,
precincts shunned by the very children
whose minds it once poisoned
because of the monsters lurking there.

Anointed

We are not minds. We are not bodies.
We are embodied minds. We are thinking bodies.
Beauty, music, cosmos: this is what we are,
not sexbots and simulations, but the opposite.
We confront the true terrifying reality,
embrace incandescent beauty we find in others
until it obliterates all the solipsisms
where our ego found refuge. We are made
of connections that liberate us from ego,
of all the constellations we can see,
all the many beautiful patterns of stars
we observe from our single point of view,
all the artifacts of our brief trajectory
beneath a sky filled with astronomies of self,
beautiful illusions that eventually yield to parallax,

but even once our journeys come to an end,
our atoms dissagregating and recombining
in some other organism, subordinated to another life,
the stars that once assembled to tell our tales
gathering in shapes we no longer recognise,
witnessed according to another perspective,
conquered by an unfamiliar zodiac,
yet we survive, in the possibility of beauty
to which our brief lives gave testament,
for which there is no deletion, no erasure.
We instantiate the universe, we do not record it.
We are the mistakes made by a blind amnesiac god
groping and casting about for the keys to his creation,
but we are also that world saturated with light
which they unlock. This is no contradiction,
unless one one assumes our ignorance is all there is,
and constructs an entire universe out of it.

We infer our individual existence from astronomies of self,
from the way we perceive how the different forms
the universe can take seem to queue up for our attention,
the way sights and sounds congregate like constellations
only we can see. We take the existence of a point of view
as evidence we exist to experience it. We confer on ourselves
the same degree of reality we attribute to our observations,
but there is no logical necessity or inevitability to this.
We merely borrow the uniqueness of our experiences.
Our philosophies insist it was always ours, but it isn't.
We are followed by shadows. We think they are our own,
but all we know is that they seem to follow something,
and we decide it must be us, because what else could it be?
We think we are dancers because we see the shadows dance,
but in the end all the shadows are evidence of is the light.

When I was young I had an epiphany.
I understood my own insignificance.
I was lost in an infinite mist,
and felt myself disappear completely,
and become one with it. I remember finding
the word "glory" most closely approximating
a description of the experience, although of course
that cosmic indifference that annihilates or transforms
according to the spirit in which we choose to meet it
cannot be communicated. Ever since
my entire morality has been dictated
by the extent to which an idea or action
is consistent with or contradicts that insight,
that awareness of my own insignificance.
My aesthetics have been governed
by harmonies through which one can negotiate a path
back to that perfect monotone in which they are fulfilled
and cease to exist. At times the world seemed nothing more
than an interruption of my ecstasy. At the same time,
there was nothing the words of men could rob of beauty,
no condemnation that was not hollow, no gutter
in which I did not find the precinct of eternity,
nothing discarded as broken or useless
from which the superficial evaluations of man did not peel
to reveal the universe in all its beauty. I felt anointed.

Equinox

Imagine, for a moment, the Year swigging seasons from her glass of light, the Sun, ever ready with a refill, laughing as she grows inebriated with Summer, but then she pauses, places a finger upon the rim, and just for a second gets it to sing, and everything stops
and listens to that single clear note.

She tethers and tames my turbulent dreams and haunts my waking hours. Leaves blush
and coyly retreat before rumours of Winter
whispered in the breeze, while veteran crows
in convocation hoarsely rebuke us, and confide
it will get worse before it gets better. That dry chill that hangs in the air for just one half an hour between the seasons insinuates an equinox, like an undecided coin toss,
and by the time you turn your glass to see it, the moment has passed, and clouds grow metallic with all the weather's long neglected wrath, and rather than plot a short course back to port, we now must find our way home through the storm.

The last world war

It is often said that the scale of effort required to tackle the challenges facing us due to the Climate Emergency requires us to go on a war footing. We look at the task in hand and, as we seek comparisons to help us understand its magnitude, we think about the massive mobilisation of people and resources, and the sense of common purpose, that took place the last time the globe was convulsed by war.

But we are already at war, and it is a world war, but is not the third world war. It is the last world war, because it is a war on the world itself.

It is the perfection of war. All previous conflicts may be described as having been disputes about access to resources. This war is prosecuted by the use of those resources. It has been perfected to the point that its scope is now truly total, its casualties are all civilians, and the damage it inflicts is entirely collateral. We have managed to shift all of its costs from our ledgers and declared them to be externalities. This war is civilisation laid bare as death cult.

The peace treaty that will bring an end to this conflict is therefore similarly broad in scope. When representatives of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gather in Glasgow next year at COP26 what is required is not an agreement between people, not a protocol between nations, not another deal enacted between mere humans.

What is required is that the party that has been missing on the previous 25 occasions is brought to the table, through whatever digital representation of our ecosystems is necessary, whatever metrics and KPIs we can formulate to describe progress in achieving our Sustainable Development Goals. We need next year to make a comprehensive and lasting Peace Treaty with Planet Earth.

And once we establish an equitable and sustainable basis to pursue our individual and collective interests within the constraints this Peace Treaty with Planet Earth will impose on us, we will find ourselves able to make peace with each other at last. For what resources will we have to quarrel over when the energy that powers our circular economies is not generated from scarce fuels extracted in remote locations, but is available at zero incremental cost to everyone.

Digitalisation and the implementation of a Peace Treaty with Planet Earth

We talk a good game about digitalisation to ensure we embed our technologies as effectively as possible in our disparate interconnected infrastructures and nest our systems in a way that minimises friction in our workflow and supports de-siloing of our processes to deliver optimised full life-cycle performance, and so on, and so forth ...

... but there is one literally global system that we need to accommodate all of this in, and we are still neglecting its digital representation in a manner compatible with our procedures, the digital ecosystem where the word "ecosystem" is not just a glib metaphor, and "life-cycle" is a living reality. This concern is discussed by Gavin Starks in "building the web of environmental data" and David Jensen and Jillian Campbell in "the promise and peril of a digital ecosystem for the planet".

As Jensen and Campbell of the United Nations Environment Programme have said, "key decisions are needed in the next 12 months to set in motion a robust architecture and governance framework," from the Climate Action Summit in New York this month, through COP25 in Santiago de Chile in December, to COP26 in Glasgow. We have fewer than 18 months to reach a peace treaty with planet earth. This must be the objective for COP26 in Glasgow at the end of next year.

Because we are currently waging a decades long undeclared war on our environment that sees us dropping the equivalent of hundreds of thermonuclear devices a day in the form of man-made radiative forcing, increasingly manifesting itself in climate change related destruction and disruption.

It is a war we cannot win. It is a war we wage on ourselves. It is a war that is so refined that its only casualties are non-combatants and all the damage it inflicts is collateral.

It is civilisation as death cult, a cult that has brainwashed us so thoroughly we are happy to press everyone's neck down on the altar. Let's start using the words "collateral damage" instead of "externalities" to describe climate change related losses from now on. Let's not be economical with the truth. Let's call a spade a spade. Let's make peace with the planet.

But to understand that peace treaty in the level of detail that will allow us to implement its terms we need "a digital ecosystem for the planet to properly assess the risks and opportunities". We need to turn the Internet of Things into the Internet of Impacts, an Internet of Carbon Footprints, and assimilate objects that represent the environmental consequences of our actions and behaviour into our calculations. As Jensen and Campbell point out, "we are not even effectively measuring global progress against the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals]. A total of 68% of the 93 environmental SDGs indicators cannot yet be measured due to a lack of data".

This is not happening in a vacuum. There is a venerable history to these ideas, going back through the "Digital Earth" concept discussed by Al Gore in 1998 to the "Geoscope" idea proposed by Buckminster Fuller in 1962. So we have no excuse for being unprepared, now that we are confronted by the urgent requirement for a solution. 

Fortunately with protocols like Open Banking and Open Finance we already have a basis to build on, as discussed by Gavin Starks of the pivotal "Icebreaker One" initiative, "bridging the data gaps between finance, assets, policy and science to deliver a zero-carbon future". This will be a "‘coming of age’ for the Internet of Things". As is said, “for this vision to become a reality, public and private sector actors must take deliberate action and collaborate to build a global digital ecosystem for the planet — one consisting of data, infrastructure, rapid analytics, and real-time insights” and "we can only do this with silo-busting collaborations that work together to help bring us environmental intelligence for everything and everyone".

To critics

There are few things worse than bad criticism:
the self-satisfied mumbling and fumbling
of that prowling imbecile bird catcher
who plucks the bird of paradise from its flight,
then complains that it makes a poor paperweight.

Let the bird fly unmolested, and pray, and beg
the gods of the wind to take that pile of papers
that you therefore surrender to their mercy,
that your own words might, for just a moment,
out of the corner of an unexpectant eye,
be mistaken for such a miracle on the wing.

Enlightenment

And in the end we knew the world
was an act of selective blindness.

We were and always had been
saturated with infinite light,

but our awareness limited to collisions
from which we inferred blunt objects.

We called the stumbling and guesswork,
the cascade of implications, "existence,"

but once the blindfolds were removed
we all stood still and saw at last,

in that instant of perfect knowledge,
that we were, and always had been,

one.

"There's no future, and England's dreaming"

It is often remarked, as the SNP contingent at Westminster strives to avert a No Deal Brexit, that it is not Scotland's job to save England from itself, and that the SNP should concern themselves solely with securing Scottish Independence.

Let us set to one side the rather fitting analogy I read the other day, that "if you want a divorce from a psychopathic partner you would still try to stop him killing your kids. The murder would strengthen your case but you'd still have a duty to try to prevent it." (Ian McLean, @embradon)

Scotland's role in saving England from itself is precisely the Whig narrative on which the Union is based. It is central to the story told in the late 18th and early 19th century, as the British Empire established itself, in which England's institutional development provides the basis for world domination, while Scotland's intellect and conscience tempers England's excesses. That is literally the now defunct mythistoire of the UK: a story that preserves a role for both England and Scotland in their joint imperial endeavour; a myth used to legitimise a political settlement that is now unravelling.

Because the interesting part is that the equation no longer holds, even on its own terms: English institutions no longer dominate the world, so Scotland is no longer required to save England from itself. The Union and the Empire are inextricably linked in terms of the mythology used to justify both. When one goes, the other must follow.

There are two responses to this endgame, one obsessed with the past and one focussed on the future. Scotland's Independence movement epitomises the latter, while Brexit represents the former: as John Lydon (former Sex Pistol, and now committed Brexiteer) sang, "there's no future, and England's dreaming."

We are wandering lost and Brexit-blind through the aboriginal dreamtime of Britain's post-imperial nostalgia, through the scriptless pantomime of our punch and judy politics, finding even the lunatic fringe has a lunatic fringe. Except the UK's mythistoire reduces this dreamtime to a nightmare, because England has no other origin myth (indeed the genre of fantasy literature was largely created by Tolkien and others in an effort to redress this deficiency).

Scotland can help guide England towards a more authentic sense of itself, one that is not poisoned by stale nostalgia, by helping usher it through this crisis. Then we can at last create a new narrative to replace the old one tearing itself apart with contradictions, one in which we can meet the future as independent European nations. 

"This album was knocked off"

I've been listening recently to the neglected classic "Clutching at Straws" by Marillion (EMI, released 1987, produced by Chris Kimsey).

For me, this album conjures a post-exam season holiday, camping by Ayr race course with friends, age 17, between sitting highers and finding out the results, a cherished memory of days that will be forever summer in my mind, and fellowship celebrated in drunken irresponsible excess as one can only do when one is 17.

It's also the best Fish-era Marillion album. Fish finally achieves a degree of lyrical maturity, balancing flamboyance with judicious restraint when required to provide a coherent and compelling vision and narrative.

While not a concept album, the opening three song sequence remains one of the finest examples of through-composition in progressive rock. When Mark Kelly's keyboard riff kicks in, in "That Time of the Night," and then over the next few bars Pete Trewavas' bass tentatively finds its way inside the groove, you know Marillion have finally arrived and found their authentic voice, after all the nods in the directions of Genesis, King Crimson, et al. in earlier albums. The instrumental departments play as though governed by a single mind, taking you to the devastating finale and downbeat, physically and morally exhausted outro, ending the sequence with crushing finality rather than cop out fade.

The prescience and relevance of songs like "White Russian" and "Slainte Mhath" only seems to become more urgent after the three decades since they were written. They got right so much about what we still get so wrong. The pop exuberance of "Incommunicado" remains irrepressible, while the reflective and highly personal notes of "Torch Song" and "The Last Straw" still sound pitch perfect.

They achieve heights with this album they were not to reach with Hogarth until "Brave". But "Brave" was the outcome of eight months of retreat, recording in a remote cave in France, presided over by an obsessed and fanatical sound engineer sacrificing sleep to craft a masterpiece. As a surreptitious sleeve note points out, "Clutching at Straws" was "knocked off," written and recorded with a degree of haste to complete an obligation to a record company and get released from a deal, while Fish and lead guitarist Steve Rothery came to blows in the studio and the band ultimately disintegrated.

So, songs of a time and place that nevertheless do not date. Give it a listen.

James Kelly: a tribute

So, even in the bruised and blighted crop that represents Scottish Labour's current front bench at Holyrood, James Kelly is discarded. His relegation to the justice brief from economy is seen as a humiliation.

No-one quite epitomises Labour's toxic combination of spurious self-righteous indignation, incompetence and entitlement as well as Kelly. In Scottish Labour's slighting of Kelly I see the horrified reflex of a monster catching sight of its own reflection. In an area where historically one might have remarked that a chimpanzee could get elected if it wore a red rosette, Kelly must surely have made his colleagues wish a chimpanzee had stood instead.

He is a one man argument for not allowing the indefinite election of MSPs on the list, where the only talent they need to demonstrate is one for careerist intrigue. Surely if someone has no discernible ability beyond the repetition of party mantras and the formation of alliances behind closed doors in their ascent of the greasy pole, and has so little appeal to the actual electorate, offering such a poor response to genuine scrutiny, that they cannot get elected in a constituency, they should only be allowed in on the list a couple of times before they get put out of everyone else's misery. We do not need a parliament of back-scratchers.

Of course, Kelly is not the only MSP one might describe this way, but in a field that is exceptional in its awfulness, replete with examples from across both Labour and Tory cohorts, forlorn runners in a race for meaningful impact for whom the finishing line of political effectiveness must remain a distant dream reserved for others, Kelly comes last. 

The term "idiot" is over-used and often misapplied. It originates in the Greek of πεντηκονταετία Athens, "ἰδιώτης" meaning a private person, a layman, an amateur, and crucially, in the case of Kelly, someone with no particular skill or knowledge making them suitable for public life and high office. One might say the word applies to Kelly in both its original and modern sense. In the original sense an idiot was unconcerned with public office, and was the sort of person Pericles might have been describing when he talks in his Funeral Oration of "him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" (τόν τε μηδὲν τῶνδε μετέχοντα οὐκ ἀπράγμονα, ἀλλ᾽ ἀχρεῖον νομίζομεν), although where Pericles is discussing inclination, we refer to ability. Indeed, given how useless he has proved to be, we might wish Kelly had been as disinclined as Pericles describes, and been an idiot in the original sense. However, there is nothing that Scottish Labour offers if not an arena for the ambition of idiots (in the strictly modern sense).

Nevertheless, let us pay tribute to his great achievement: while the likes of Paul Sweeney can only aspire to a tragic and deluded lack of self-awareness, James Kelly demonstrates how to raise this chronic inadequacy of Scottish Labour politicians to the level of sublime, Aristophanic farce. Kelly's refusal to sit down when instructed by the presiding officer introduced, or rather exposed, a fundamental absurdity of his existence. The phrase "ceci n'est pas une politicien" seemed to hover implicitly over his head. His opposition to the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act has proved to be a terrible own goal (not that his Labour and Tory colleagues, for whom sectarianism and bigotry remain something from which to make political hay, mind). His repeated abject failure to comprehend his own economy brief led Nicola Sturgeon to say “after so many years in this parliament, that he doesn’t even have a basic grasp of the basic principles of government and budgeting is really quite staggering.”

On a serious note though: Scottish Labour's self-serving, shallow analysis of genuine challenges; their deployment of terms like "working class" to mean simply those to whose votes they felt entitled; their hollowing out of left-wing discourse, turning every rhetorical instrument their movement has bequeathed them for interrogating the circumstances and promoting the interests of their constituents into a toy to be broken at the hands of a petulant child; their exploitation and fetishisation of structural disadvantage to make it a Shibboleth of their private club; their reduction of the moral high ground of politics to mere real estate to which they presume to hold sole title; this is all perfectly embodied by this inadvertent, over-earnest, unwitting and quarter-witted comedian.

One can only wish him well in the forthcoming contest for leadership of the Scottish Tories, whither one imagines his ineptitude might lead him.

Tsar Bombs per day - a unit for measuring climate change

The Climate Emergency is a war we are waging on the Earth, a global vernichtungskrieg we have never officially declared but that we have been prosecuting for decades.

So I find it useful to use the Tsar Bomb - the most powerful thermonuclear device ever detonated (with a yield of 50 megatons) - as a unit for representing the quantities of energy involved in climate change related phenomena.

The additional radiative forcing due to carbon emissions in recent decades - that is, the amount of energy associated with heating the planet due to the greenhouse effect - amounts to about 100 Tsar Bombs per day.

In comparison, Hurricane Dorian is currently releasing several hundred Tsar Bombs worth of energy per day. These events are becoming more violent partly due to additional energy being deposited in the system as a consequence of global warming.

Remember that when reflecting on the destruction left in the aftermath of a hurricane. The arsenal with which Nature devastates our cities is supplied in part by us ourselves.

Describing the yield of a thermonuclear device invokes an analogy with TNT (the megaton) that emphasises the scale of the destruction caused. It is instructive and appropriate to invoke an analogy with thermonuclear devices to describe the destruction caused by the Climate Change.

We don't need no inducation

Our ability to think critically is being systematically undermined.

We are familiar with the education system. We are all to some extent products of it:

• Perhaps we cherish memories of the worlds of knowledge it introduced us to, the refuge from social isolation it offered, and remember the transformative impact of its discipline and rigour as we learned how to think critically, acquire and evaluate evidence, formulate logically coherent conclusions, and apply these to the fulfillment of compassionate systems of values and priorities in a just and equitable society in which we could all invest. 
• Perhaps we harbour only resentment for the way its structures thwarted our potential, failed to recognise our talents or acknowledge our inclinations, and limited our ambitions, as it directed us down paths determined for us by others. 
• Either way, we recognise the central importance education has had in our lives. 

But there is another system in operation, constantly working in opposition to education, which we typically fail to recognise, but which we are also products of. This system does not seek to enlighten us or equip us with the ability to understand and appreciate our circumstances. It seeks to diminish and disable our ability to think critically.

It may seem frivilous, but we might call this system the "inducation" system, in contrast to the "education" system. It is concerned with turning us inward, rather than outward, focussing us on feelings rather than facts, cultivating a sense of entitlement that is spurious and solipsistic, encouraging us to make demands rather than enabling us to co-operate, stimulating individual appetites rather than collective concerns, making us seek gratification rather than justice.

Rather than require us to undertake a course of study, it offers us easy explanations in terms of conspiracy theories, denialism, and other glib, facile contrivances. These confirm to us that anything more difficult to understand, for which the effort of hesitant, uncertain investigation and study would be necessary, is just a ploy to keep us in the dark about what is really going on. A sense of absolute certainty vindicates complete disregard for genuine knowledge.

The inducation system does not operate in schools and colleges. It does not demand your attention or effort. It will do all your thinking for you. It is present in every commercial, where you are invited to make decisions based on analogical reasoning and association. They appeal to reflex rather than reflection or reasoning. The immediate objective is to sell you a product, but the long term aim is that your ability to critically appraise anything atrophies.

Whereas an education system develops experts, the inducation system turns us all into "imperts" - people whose instant opinions, conditioned by constant disinformation and instant gratification, is given greater weight than the opinion of someone who has made a career of being well informed on the same subject. Our impertinence is given priority over their expertise.

What is the purpose of the inducation system? It has, in one form or other, always been with us: wherever and whenever there are vested interests that are threatened by rational scrutiny, the inducation system is there undermining the basis for the exercise of that scrutiny. Rather that inviting us to discover and explore the possibilities of our own development, as an education system does, the inducation system closes down those possibilities and prepares us for indoctrination.

All that is different recently is the technological basis for the inducation system. While we initially had high hopes that modern digital communications technologies would liberate the educational potential in all of us and make it more easy for this to be fully realised, free from the material constraints that may have previously inhibited it, what we now realise is that the inducation process has been the main beneficiary of these technological innovations. It has become turbocharged by how technology enables the validation of every recalcitrant incel appetite and the absence of conscience or consideration of others.

We are not computers, but they seek to programme us nevertheless, deploying the most insidious behaviourist calculus to install a response to whatever kneejerk and dogwhistle serves their purpose. We are embodied intelligences. Our autonomy resides in our bodies, and the way we experience and respond to a world of which we are inextricably a part. However, to control us, they must usurp our autonomy and reduce us to disembodied encoding that can be manipulated according to their calculations and algorithms. Therefore we must be rendered stupid, so that we surrender our autonomy and our bodies themselves, that our exploitation may be automated.

Then we can dutifully toil at the tasks they have trained us to perform, work that enriches others but does not fulfil our potential or satisfy our curiosity, then return home to consume sensational celebrity gossip from screens of various sizes and dimensions, and populate our fantasies with the degraded lifestyles to which our aspirations are now to be limited, and imagine that we are happy. 

No more heroes

Caesar Flickerman presenting BBC Newsnight, bringing you the latest news and comment on this rapidly developing story at some point in the not too distant future. 

You either play a long game or you lose in the long run. The person who plays the longest game typically wins, even if the strategy is simple survival, even if the approach is just outliving your opponent.

What we are seeing today is the outcome of decades of strategic thought and action, going back at least to the 1970s, possibly earlier. We are seeing out in the open what has been planned in meticulous detail behind closed doors. The objective is not just to undo the post-war consensus, but to overthrow the Enlightenment. Right wing strategists like Steve Bannon have publicly admitted as much.

Those who think this can be defeated on the streets are fantasists. The left has been hollowed out by careerism and has surrendered its playbook of radical action to the right. The opportunity to stand firm was squandered long ago. The most recent outrages are part of long standing plans.

Be smarter than this. Don't play into their hands. We're only one or two moves from check mate. We need to fundamentally rebuild public discourse and restore confidence in critical scrutiny rather than indulge in superficial theatrics. Otherwise all we'll achieve is a reality TV revolution in a popcorn politics that has been reduced to a spectator sport.

We have to distinguish between two different kinds of situation. In one there are clear, well defined, limited and achievable objectives regarding circumstances that affects a specific group of people. It could be rent, pay and conditions, suffrage, the closure of a community facility, the opening of an unwanted facility, the manufacture of weapons to be used on a group of people, and so on, where a collective response can achieve and has historically achieved those objectives: "a knife-and-fork question [...] a bread-and-cheese question,” as leading Chartist Joseph Rayner Stephens put it.

But the circumstances we find ourselves in are not an example of that kind of situation. It is an example of another kind of situation, one where vague abstract open ended identity driven aims ("working class"? Brexit? Scottish Independence?) motivate a self-defining community of interest. The most, and the best, that can be achieved by taking to the streets under these circumstances, is to express common purpose and bolster morale.

It won't achieve anything beyond that, and what's worse, that space for dissent, in this instance, has already been surrendered to others who have adopted those tactics for other ends, and have been able to do so because those tactics were so devalued by the left when they were used simply to provide platforms and vehicles for the individual egos and ambitions of careerists. The left have treated the moral high ground like real estate to which they alone hold the title and from which they alone can extract rent in the form of votes and adulation for so long they have squandered any claim to possess it on the basis of principle.

We need to fundamentally rebuild public discourse and restore confidence in critical scrutiny precisely so that we can develop clear, limited, achievable objectives that serve as vehicles for rational common purpose and priorities and compassionate values rather than the individual egos of various saviours.

Once we strip away the post-war consensus and the achievements of the Enlightenment what we find is that corporate impunity is the new absolutism. Where previously despots legitimized their rule with the divine right of kings, and then the will of the people, and then the blood of the people and the soil under their feet, despotism now seeks to legitimise itself with an appeal to consumer choice. Our latest dictatorship is sexy, looks great, tastes good. We're lovin' it.

Government now exists only to provide cover for corporate lobbyists and public relations firms. We should address our petitions, not to 10 Downing Street, but to 55 Tufton Street, the registered address of a number of "think tanks" routinely featured on television news and current affairs programmes which are funded by undisclosed donors to develop reports that prepare the ground for corporate seizure of public space and assets.

This does not stand up to rational scrutiny, so our very ability to think critically must be degraded. Denialism and conspiracy theory are elevated over logically coherent argument based on demonstrably reliable evidence. This is the single theme running through big tobacco, climate change denial, lunar conspiracy, and flat-earthers.

The fulfillment of Pavlovian appetites installed and encouraged through associationist advertising takes precedence over mutual responsibility to uphold common values of compassion and dignity.

Post-rationalists develop a philosophy founded on assumptions that can be summed up in one word: contempt. They take the resentment people feel as a consequence of being alienated from the ability to identify and articulate their own interests and confer on it ontological significance, portray is as inevitable, and thus construct a system that perpetuates the very alienation giving rise to it. And so self-serving inclinations are turned into a self-fulfilling incel credo that purports to explain our experiences to us, and eradicates any sense of obligation that would make us hesitate to accept the limited choices we are told represent freedom.

Climate change deniers are typically intelligent but insecure and marginalised men for whom the claim that they've not been fooled like everyone else is appealing. Their disingenuous denialism is supported by a post-rationalist emphasis of feelings over facts. The bad faith with which they will defend the denialist position comes from this need for vindication and makes them useful idiots of the corporate lobby. They are people whose experiences lead them to pity no-one but themselves, and, in their sorry solipsism, feel they have nothing to lose if the world burns.

And it literally burns: as obsolete and redundant representations of wealth retreat in the face of the inequality and environmental devastation they have caused, to formulate new ways to assert themselves, wildfires manifest their scorched earth policy. These are people who will throw the baby out with the bath water, because they can always buy a new baby from somewhere.

Women are turned into consumable items to compensate men for and distract them from their own disposability, and misogyny flourishes. Our autonomy resides in our bodies: we are intrinsically embodied intelligences. Those who would overule that autonomy and control us must encode us in disembodied, behaviourist ways. And so we are subordinated to systems in the name of liberation, pointing and clicking on copied and pasted figments of fragmented desire, and intimacy is reduced to masturbation. Our data are harvested and compassion yields to conditioning, common purpose to individual gratification. The only part of us that can't be uploaded into this vision of humanity is the very part of us that makes us human, but this does not perturb those who profit from it, who gave up that part of themselves long ago.

People who talk about the "working class" are playing a long game that was played out long ago. What does "working class" mean? Am I working class? My father built ships on the Clyde and was a communist. I have three degrees, a good job and a nice house. I've sniffed glue by the canal and snorted coke in the Village. While I sympathise with the objectives, all class war seems to be articulated in terms too narrow to include me. To everyone who claims to be "keeping it real" I would point out it seems there is no room for me in their reality. So what is "working class"? People who fetishise their own misfortune, and the misfortune of others? People who claim some suffering is virtuous because it entitles "working class" heroes to adulation and the Labour Party to votes? People who watch Love Island? People who consume public services? Am I "working class"?

Defining it in terms of disadvantage simply makes those self-identifying as "working class" vulnerable to the Strasserist manipulations of the far right, because the far right will always be able to formulate easier answers to the questions they ask than those with any genuine concern for the truth. The long game we need to play must stimulate dissatisfaction with easy answers. It must value the litmus of truth over the knee jerk and the dog whistle. The long game we must play needs to rebuild public discourse from the ground up. We don't need any more heroes. We need people to think for themselves. That should be our long game: humanity. 

Desert

I have always felt an affinity
with remote and austere places.
In their silence and wide desolation
I can open up my hollow chest,
expose my aching emptiness,
and let all its accumulated echoes escape,
like a century of bat-winged palpitations
evacuating their stale excrement-encrusted cave
into the broad, crisp sterility of an indifferent night.
I wander alone in the wilderness, eyes wide,
once pebble-eyed sockets fit only for city sights
now celestial spheres, inflated with starlight,
imagining encounters with lost messiahs,
still trying, in their sacred hobo vagrancy,
to find their way back from botched temptations,
stumbling upon salvation in the cold camp fire ash
littering the places where retraced steps intersect
when you have inadvertently doubled back
across the map of nowhere that unfolds
endlessly from the soles of your feet
one step at a time. Sand is ground glass dust,
all of yesterday's shattered mirrors pulverised
underfoot, and at night the stars still shine
from the other side of solitude, glistening
along a sharp edge seen lengthwise, the night
a blade that cuts me adrift from time
and sacrifices me to eternity, my heart
a blood moon hoisted high, no longer beating
but squeezed in the fist the world has become
and then discarded upon the sand, empty at last.

The sieve and the hourglass

There is a bottleneck in the way we process information acquired by the senses. This bottleneck becomes even more narrow when we try to communicate what we know to others. We can only use language: a limited lexicon of utterances that must be arranged in accordance with syntax to deliver a semantic burden to someone who can only listen one word at a time.

The challenge is to expressing in a sequential manner information that has been processed in a parallel, acquired and sifted through the distributed apparatus embodied by our brains. The items we seek to communicate are related to each other in an instantaneous manner distributed over an embodied intelligence, prior to being encoded in a way suitable for transmission over the narrower channel of verbal communication.

We need to preserve a relationship between successive items that is initially manifested in their simultaneous apprehension. We need to turn a sieve into an hourglass while preserving everything we learned from the sieve. We literally need to find a way of putting one after another a series of coeval ideas that initially emerged together, without breaking the relationships between them.

The way we navigate this process of preserving these relationships and negotiating with the constraints of speech is logic. Coherent verbalisation of the information we extract from the world with our embodied intelligence requires logic. However, it must be understood that logic is not intelligence. It is merely a solution to a specific problem in information theory.

When developing an artificial intelligence it is tempting to believe the first structure you encounter, sequential logic, is atomic or primitive and more complex, sophisticated structures must be built from it. But the only reason it is first structure you encounter is because it is the last thing someone thinks before they verbalize an idea, after the process of encoding everything that remains unspoken, the real primary process of information acquisition.

It stands to reason that any system that is based exclusively on sequential rather than intrinsically parallel, distributed, embodied processing, is a very limited representation of intelligence, and certainly insufficient for any universal or general description of how we think. 

Amazon

The air is thick with lies
used to sell us things,
and the world burns.

We can't see clearly
through the fog of adverts.
We can't see the wood for the trees,
We can't see the should for the need,
the spurious must haves that deceive,
and the world burns.

We take our axe to Yggdrasil
for a thirst no rain can quench.
Oil and water separate
into plastic bottles
and designer effervescence,
and the world burns.

Our response to the crisis
is posture and affectation.
Deadlines are set, promises made,
all while the world burns,

The world burns, and we are told
we want a better fire,
we want everything the fire provides,
but more, newer, bigger, improved,
sexier, shinier, elite, exclusive,
and the words that we could use
to contradict this lie
have been stolen by the arsonists.
It is too late. We no longer care.
All we want is stimulus and reward.
We are enslaved by freedom,
bought and sold
by the choices we are given

until all we can do is agree,
and immolate ourselves
for their entertainment,
douse ourselves with petrol
pulled from the remains
of long dead creatures,
squeezed from the Earth like an orange,
sucked from the marrow of strata
cracked open and exposed
to a storm of greed,

and once everything is soaked,
it is ignited with a spark
of renegade desire
kindled by private shame
whispered to our secret selves
by the false digital priests
to whom we confessed our appetites,
and the world burns,

and the empires that arise
from the ashes of our ecocide
are death cult fantasies, dancing
through the twisting wildfire smog
to seduce the void
while the world burns.

Ricefield Code of Practice

1: Materials will be sourced locally and sustainably.

2: Artistic work will be project-driven rather than personality-driven.

3: Projects will be collaborative. They will not be vehicles for individual personalities, ambitions or profiles.

4: The work produced will be essentially ephemeral and intangible. Its value will derive from immediate experience and participation rather than the ability to commodify and exploit it commercially.

5: Projects will engage the community and invite their participation.

6: Projects will demonstrate by example how participant's lives are filled with art whether or not they realise it, and will seek to provoke people to be curious about how the art in their life may be locally and sustainably designed and made, rather than designed and made remotely in a way that supports an unsustainable and environmentally detrimental consumerist vision degrading the created objects, their creators, and their audience.

7: The artistic contributors will live the values demonstrated by their work. They will form the vanguard of the new way of living.

8: The work will build narratives that allow people to understand their situation relative to the Climate Emergency. The aim of these narratives is to develop common values and visions of a shared future around which participants can develop the social culture change necessary for the achievement of a sustainable and equitable material culture.

9: The community will be engaged in the creative process to support their ability to develop a sense of hope through self-expression.

10: Projects will provide creative opportunities for all, and will seek to support non-commercial underground activities rather than the careers of individuals through the generation of mainstream commercial opportunities.

11: Projects shall not be considered the work of an individual through which any artifacts produced may acquire a commercial value through association with a recognised personality. All work shall be attributed to all participants and collaborators as a collective.

12: All artifacts generated by a project must be compatible with a circular economy and shall be recycled or shall perish through natural processes that are not detrimental to the environment. No objects shall be created that can be owned and exploited commercially to perpetuate an unsustainable way of living.

13: Any record of activity or output of a project that persists will be made using digital media to which access is unrestricted and which are supported by sustainable infrastructure, for example, data services entirely reliant on renewable energy for their operation.

14: Projects shall be valued on the basis of creativity and experience rather than anything that can be accumulated as an increment in the linear progress of an ultimately unsustainable economic enterprise. As such, projects will demonstrate concepts of value and growth compatible with sustainable objectives aligned with circular economics, and resistance to concepts that articulate and perpetuate unsustainable linear economics.

15: Nothing shall be made whose value may be subject to speculation.  

16: Projects will celebrate the natural world and invite participants to reflect upon its beauty, its meaning for them, their place in it, and upon the consequences for the environment of our activities individually and as a society.

Merry GERSmas

Both Daily Telegraph journalist Simon Johnson and Tory MSP Rachael Hamilton believe the GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland) figures released today show Scotland accounts for more than half of the total UK deficit.

This apparent anomaly (and their willingly gullible acceptance of it as fact) is an artifact of a system that attributes a massive surplus to London and the South East. The total UK deficit is the sum of the net fiscal balances of countries and regions, and the massive surplus for London and the South East nearly, but not quite, balances the sum of the deficits everywhere else, as you can see in figures published by the Office for National Statistics. Consequently, the total figure is where we end up after a number of negative and positive excursions.

If we disregarded London and the South East, the corresponding calculation for the rest of England would suggest it accounts for nearly 200% of the UK deficit. Setting aside for one moment the ridiculousness of such an evaluation, if in addition to GERS, there was a GERE(xLSE) (Government Expenditure and Revenues England (excluding London and the South East)) it would account for more than twice the total UK deficit, according to Simon and Rachael. I'm not convinced people from the rest of England would accept an assertion on the part of Simon and Rachael that these figures demonstrate conclusively that they could not survive without London and the South East. I'm not sure Tories in England would gleefully state their friends and neighbours are all subsidy junkies as readily as Scottish Tories do.

Nor should we infer too much from these figures about the fiscal position of an Independent Scotland. As the ONS itself points out, "the country and regional public sector finances statistics [...] may not be an accurate representation of public finances should fiscal powers be fully devolved among UK countries and [...] do not provide information on the spending and revenue of [an] individual country". That is to say, the same figures that are used to demonstrate UK compliance with Copenhagen criteria that require the deficit to be within 3% of GDP explicitly cannot be used to say an Independent Scotland would not comply, even though unionists, amplified by the BBC and the media, routinely attempt precisely that.

The anomaly, of course, is the attribution of a surplus to London and the South East that nearly equals the net fiscal balance of the rest of the UK combined. The implausibility of the Scottish deficit is really a consequence of the ridiculousness of London's surplus. How does this happen? This is illustrated very effectively by the example of provided by CommonSpace of "a PFI police college in South Lanarkshire, which has a capital value of £17 million but has cost £110 million, with the vast majority of those expenses going from the local area to the City of London"

If, for example, the "financial superstructure" discussed in the article by CommonSpace as an example of financialisation had as its address "Police College, Jackton, South Lanarkshire," rather than "3 More London Riverside, by Tower Bridge, London," and other flows of cash were treated similarly, the deficit would be transformed, because "the accounting firms and the banks for all the different accounts and charges examined (there were far too many to investigate), were also all registered in or near central London, or in the United States, Canada, or in various tax havens".

It would be good to see a more detailed breakdown of this more widely, to try and get some sort of grasp on reality, not just for the sake of Scotland, but to review these finances with granular and forensic attention to detail, accuracy, and financial structures like those discussed in the example given, but for the whole UK rather than an individual transaction. I expect what we would find out most likely won't resemble what we are told, and we most likely won't like what we see. I wonder how much ends up offshore?

Whatever the outcome of such a review, I doubt the reality of the situation it would reveal could remotely be described as "pooling and sharing".

Stop digging

When you are in a hole, you don't set some future deadline to stop digging. You stop digging immediately.

When you are on course to hit an iceberg, you don't set some future deadline to order the helm hard to starboard and set the dial to full astern. You take immediate action.

The Climate Emergency will not be addressed by setting deadlines like 2050 or 2045 or even 2030, as if it was an exam we could cram for at the last minute. We are in a hole. We need to stop digging immediately.

We have most likely already passed key tipping points, triggering positive feedback mechanisms that could propel us beyond 4°C warming within decades. Loss of albedo and "methanocalypse" - the catastrophic release of methane from permafrost and ocean sediments - have already begun.

The 0.8°C warming that has occurred already over the last half century represents a rate of warming that is orders of magnitude more rapid than the end of the last ice age. In five decades we have reversed the cooling that occurred over the preceding five millennia since the Holocene Maximum. Bear that in mind when people attribute global warming to solar activity. The end of the last ice age and the cooling since the Holocene Maximum are most likely dominated by orbital forcing. Attributing changes of a similar order of magnitude observed over the course of only one or two generations to solar activity is the most palpable denialist fantasy.

The only events on geological timescales that offer any precedent for what is occurring are the likes of asteroid impacts.

The radiative forcing of our climate due to human emissions of greenhouse gasses has nearly doubled over the last 30 years. That radiative forcing is equivalent to detonating a hundred 50 megaton Tsar Bombs a day. We are effectively waging an undeclared thermonuclear war on the planet, and have been for decades. Were it not for the absorption of this heat by the oceans the Earth would already be a sterilised desert 20°C warmer than it is now.

The situation is not irretrievable. However, we need "massive reallocation of capital" (according to Mark Carney's, governor of the Bank of England). We need offshore wind to become the new offshore tax haven, and attract massive investment. We need people to plant 2,000 trees per funeral in memorial forests rather than raise headstones in cemeteries. We need insurance companies to start pricing their climate change related losses into the premiums for technologies that contribute to them. We need to change from a culture of encouraging recycling (or committing discarded materials to recirculation within a sustainable post-scarcity circular economy) as somehow praiseworthy, to discouraging "decycling" (what we currently consider normal, which is the opposite - removing discarded material from sustainable recirculation to pollute and degrade our environment) as profoundly antisocial. In general we need to:

1) Plant over a trillion trees in the next decade.
2) Install over 10 terawatts of new renewable generation capacity over the same timescale.
3) Radically overhaul infrastructure to ensure clean energy penetrates all sectors of our economies.

The capital is available: direct and indirect subsidy of fossil fuels accounts for over 5% of global GDP. Renewable energy technologies appropriate to the location they are installed already undercut fossil fuels in terms of the cost of energy. As they further penetrate our economies, so that zero fuel costs and deployment at scale drive down incremental costs, this will drop further. The World Bank and the IMF are already committed to significant divestment from fossil fuels. Insurance companies are exposed to such significant climate change related losses that the must re-orientate their models or collapse, taking the economy down with them. If the elite want to stand any chance of preserving their privilege without the self-defeating prospect of having to violently appropriate the world's dwindling wealth, they need to transform the way the value of their assets is represented from unsustainable to sustainable forms compatible with a more equitable and just society. 

But from the point of view of shared priorities and a co-ordinated programme of capital investment, we have until about the first quarter of 2021 to get things in place, to get our ducks in a row. We have 18 months to save the world.

The alternative is a world over 4 Celsius degrees warmer than today. There are currently about 6 billion more people on Earth than that world could support. So deferring decisions about climate action today equates to having to make a hypothetical decision in the future about which of your children get to live. Our inaction today is imposing a Sophie's choice on our future selves.

That's a choice you don't have to make. Responsible stewardship of our planet means there is room for everyone. But we must start now.

Grouse

An afternoon in August 

walking on a north Lewis moor, 

and I'm seeking the shelter of a shieling

to rest for a while and eat my sandwiches. 
A stone's throw takes an hour to traverse
across ditch and bog, and to be dry shod
is now a long-forgotten dream that circulates
in imagined steam rising from wet socks 

upon a stove in some uncertain future. 

Still, the sun compensates us 

with ungovernable beauty:
swift shadow-clouds stampede across low hills

contoured by trenches like open wounds

where peat is cut. Suddenly the heather explodes.

A grouse erupts from its hiding place
as I accidentally set foot one inch too close,

straying across a trip wire of proximity.
My heart recovers and I watch it fly.
What mad idyll of blood prompts idle fools
to pull triggers on glorious days like this
and put an end such a spontaneous escape bid?

Let the grouse fly into in a future 

where wounds close and time heals scars left 

in the season of our trespass.   

Jump cut

This is a new feeling:
not love, but grief.
The one I love lies dead.

I struggle to express myself.
I handle his tools: his bow and quiver;
the axe-head he knapped from flint,
kneeling by my side in the cave mouth
while the fire cooked what we caught
together; the agate necklace he wore.

His possessions have a new meaning
now that he's dead. They serve a new end.
They are something of him that lasts
and will carry a sense of him
that he himself can no longer bear.

I try to press this new meaning
onto the old words we once used
merely to talk about here and now
and what to do next
so I can describe a better place
where he can still live,
even after I too have gone,
and can no longer sing his exploits,
a place among the ancestors
who were like him once,
where we all must go some day.

These new meanings of old words
turn the objects they describe
into possessions fit for the ancestors,
so nothing belongs to this world anymore.

We dig a grave and lay his body in it,
and place his possessions with him,
and speak to the ancestors,
saying he is worthy of their company
and asking them to receive him,

but they do not hear us. What we do not know
is that we do not speak to our ancestors.
We speak to our descendants,

and not just because they are the ones
who will at some point open this grave
and find the artifacts we placed in it
rather than ancestors who are, after all, dead,

but because this new way of speaking
by the side of a hole in the ground
lets them make the tools they need
to build cities in the sky.

In setting things aside
we make possessions of them,
so that nothing in the world
will ever be the same again
and by imagining a past
that ancestors can inhabit
we have filled the future
with infinite possibilities,

and the grave we dig, all the graves,
in which we lay forty thousand generations
between now and then
collapse together to form one single grave
through which we burrow to the future
where our descendants build a launch pad
and the flames of a Saturn V rocket flare,
pouring a libation of fire upon the past,
as we embark upon a journey
not to the underworld,
but to the stars.

Stop recycling

We should stop recycling.

At least, we should stop calling it "recycling". It should just be business as usual.

We shouldn't talk about recycling, we should talk about decycling.

If "sustainability is the new normal," then the exception to the rule is not the disposal of material in a way that allows it to be recirculated into other economic activities, but in a way that removes it from the cycle of re-use in a sustainable circular economy irresponsibly to contribute to environmental degradation.

So when we are disposing of things, lets just assume we are "recycling," unless what we are doing is unsustainable, in which case call it what it is: decycling. The word that denotes a deviation from business as usual should be "decycling".

Words matter. They express and perpetuate assumptions and ways of thinking. When we call this activity "recycling" we implicitly assume it is the exception rather than the rule, extraordinary rather than normal, meritorious rather than quotidian, requiring a special word to describe it. This is a habit we need to break. It should be normal and everyday. It should not require the second thought we give it by using a word that assigns particularity to what should be mundane and unremarkable.

If we have to talk about it we could refer to it simply as "cycling," if that did not invite ambiguity.

The only realistic economy is circular. Linear economic models are elaborate fictions invented to account for the consequences of market failure and the general impoverishment caused by the narrow definition of wealth accommodated by their growth models. One might as well invoke deities or supernatural phenomena to explain the weather or a natural disaster. Linear economics placates imagined entities attributed with similar scope and prowess and ignores the real processes that determine our fortunes, even to the point of our ultimate and irrevocable ruin through climate change and environmental degradation.

The circulation of material in a sustainable manner should be assumed normal and only circular economics accommodates all influences that govern our material well-being. We should work on the assumption that everything is part of a cycle of continuous re-use. The creation of waste in a way that puts it beyond use and sequesters it from circulation should be what is considered delinquent and deserving of a special term: "decycling," the removal of material from economically valid cycles of re-use by disposing of it irresponsibly to the detriment of the environment.

So rather than encourage recycling, we should discourage decycling. Rather than take rubbish to a recycling point, we should refer to landfill and dumps as decycling points. Rather than think of the receptacles for materials for which we already have in place procedures for re-using as recycling bins, think of those receptacles for materials for which we have not put in place such procedures as decycling bins.

Behaviour that degrades the environment should be seen as antisocial. That's the kind of thinking our language should reinforce. The concept of decycling helps to achieve this. 

Bubble

When people say "fair and square"
they normally mean the squareness
corroborates and emphasises the fairness.
Everything adds up. All sides are equal,

but when I say "fair and square"
I mean things are fair despite being square,
despite the corners that burst my bubble,
which is obviously what is meant
by "squaring the circle".

L'Inconnue de la Seine

You were in the wrong place
at the wrong time, and "ended badly,"
as they used to say in polite salons,

pulled from the river and displayed
in the morgue, unrecognised,
unclaimed: so why do you smile?

Did a spasm of facial muscles
at the moment of your death,
capture this expression by chance?

Or, as your last breath
escaped from your lungs
in bubbles to the surface,

did you see in each,
as in a dream, a vision
of all the lives that you will save?

Or was your premonition
one of all the endless kisses
your death mask will enjoy

that compensate your corpse
for betrayal and disappointment
you knew in life, overlapping

in that instant on your lips
when you became the ghost of love,
pain and regret all washed away.

(After the anonymous 19th century suicide whose death mask was used to model the face of "Resusci-Anne" the first CPR practice dummy)

Corncrake

No nightingale here, unmelodious
but cherished neverthless,
hoarse herald of evening: I sit
enjoying the calm pristine Atlantic air,
and the long-lingering sunset
of a Hebridean midsummer midnight
as it attenuates the dwindling day
just out of Erebus' reach,
listening to the corncrake
in the gloaming, it's song
the stiff hinge of memory:
a bed-end gate to the machair
where we played, running along
the top of moss-mortared walls
at the abandoned black house
throwing stones at wild dogs
to keep the pack at bay.
Now a discarded stove reclines
in rusty retirement, and old cars
are abandoned sentry posts of dusk.
I too once thought myself extinct,
but found myself again, like you,
hidden in the long grass.

Climate change is market failure

Around 6.5% of global GDP is spent annually directly and indirectly subsidising economic activities, such as fossil fuel production and consumption, that have caused and continue to cause the Climate Emergency.

At around five trillion dollars per annum, this is more than enough to pay for the transition to sustainable alternatives on the timescales necessary. What is required is the installation of more than ten terawatts of new renewable energy capacity, the planting of over a trillion trees, and the modification of our infrastructure necessary to ensure clean energy penetrates all sectors of our economies, all within the next decade.

Switching makes sense, because the costs are less than what we save by making the switch. Only a broken market would impede this transition.

The market has failed to assimilate into its models the various challenges and opportunities associated with the transition. It identifies them as negative and positive externalities. Climate change is considered a negative externality: a price someone else has to pay. Renewable energy is a positive externality: free, abundant energy originating ultimately from the sun, representing a zero incremental cost.

This failure to adequately represent these influences in our models, but to disregard them as externalities, is an artefact of linear economics. A circular economy internalises these impacts, by definition.

Think of climate change as a bond you have been subscribed to without your consent, and one that returns a negative yield. You will need a source of free money to pay for this negative yield or you will go broke. The “fuel costs” of renewables is this free money. Without assimilating these costs and revenues in our model the system crashes.

Another analogy (because non-circular economics is little more than an analogy to which we attach unwarranted levels of significance) would be to consider risk. No insurance company can accommodate decadal variations in risk profile following a linear model that reviews insured losses on an annual and incremental basis. Exposure grows until the insurance industry's own “sub-prime” moment occurs ... and again, the system crashes.

From both these points of view, climate change is a reality check that tells us our economic models are not fit for purpose.

Market mechanisms can be mobilised to establish the foundations of a more sustainable approach. Indeed, they may be the only levers that remain available to us that can be operated quickly enough. These mechanisms can identify the sustainable practices that preserve wealth rather than see it destroyed. Our role is to facilitate this process of identifying and executing these practices. At the moment the wheel is lashed and the course is set for the rocks by measures such as fossil fuel subsidies.

So, for example, cars that rely on fossil fuels will be uninsurable by 2025, if the climate change related insured losses incurred by running them were factored into the premiums. Insurance companies are indirectly subsidising their own downfall otherwise.

However, all that is required to generate the electricity necessary to power the entire fleet of vehicles presently used in a median sized country such as Scotland or Denmark (roughly 2.5 million vehicles of various classes travelling on average 30 km per day), were they electrical vehicles, is about one hundred of largest class of offshore wind turbines currently being installed (10 - 12 MW sized machines operating at typical offshore capacity factors, geographically dispersed to accommodate individual intermittency).

Failing to plan for these transitions is bad for business. It is symptomatic of the inertia and stagnation associated with positions that are entrenched rather than agile. As I have discussed previously, wealth is only preserved by the continual transformation of the way it is represented. Otherwise, it is doomed to obsolescence and the inescapable financial consequences of environmental degradation.

It has been suggested that we should dispense with the idea of economic growth altogether, and that we have encountered a natural limit to what is possible in terms of growth as a result of its environmental consequences, such as the collapse of biodiversity and the Climate Emergency. I would say that growth is still possible, but the focus must be on growth through innovation rather than exploitation. Perhaps we could term it the spiral economy: circular sustainability, combined with growth through innovation, rather than unsustainable expropriation of resources and disregard for the negative externalities this incurs.

We have reached a limit in terms of material resources and the energy to manipulate them. However, there is no limit to the ways in which we can conjure value from these through innovation, as long as we do so within a sustainable circular economic context. What climate change tells us is that we can no longer export the consequences of our market failures. There is nowhere left to dump them. The only option now is to deal with them by fixing our broken markets and growing those markets through our own imagination and inventiveness.

Teflon

I admire my scars and burns.
I regard them with pride.
I compare and contrast them.
I look at them and see evidence
of brushes with danger,
encounters with fire, steel, or glass
twisted, broken, and heated
in ways that hurt. I see survival.
I see evidence of effort,
of attempts to do things,
albeit ones ending in mishaps
that left marks. I see purpose.
I see meaning. I feel worthwhile.
I understand the story they tell,

and then I try to think
of the memories of events
that left no mark, of kisses,
of being touched and held
with care and tenderness,
and I can't:
they slip right off my skin.
I don't understand that story.
They have no meaning
because I'm worthless,
but I will make every effort
from now on
to learn
how to make them stick.

Vox pop

"Send them back.
You know what I mean?
That's just my opinion,
but they come over here,
get all the houses,
all the doctor's appointments,
all the school places.
That's just what I heard."

"They're benefit scroungers,
claiming asylum, and they work
all the hours God sends
to put their kids through uni.
Doctors and lawyers.

"[I hate myself,
and it's all their fault,
and somebody else's problem,
you know what I mean?
Please tell me
you know what I mean!]"

"Someone should do something.
That's just my opinion.
They're all paedophiles,
aren't they? 
That's just what I heard.
You know what I mean?
That's just my opinion.

"[I can't be bothered
finding anything out
or thinking anything through
so my toxic ignorance
is now your problem,
and I will feign pride
in what secretly disgusts me
about myself
in order to force you
to deal with it.]
You know what I mean?
That's just my opinion."

Pons Sublicius

Global temperatures are now approximately 0.1°C above the Holocene Maximum.

To put that in context, consider the ruins of Skara Brae. Neolithic Orkney was a civilisation that flourished during the Holocene Maximum for that latitude. One illustration of the consequences of climate change is the decline of Neolithic Orkney. The climate deteriorated over millennia, probably due to orbital forcing.

Crops failed and people abandoned their settlements to retreat behind the walls of hill-forts as society fell to acrimony. Better acclimatised invaders destroyed their temples, evicted their gods and scattered their ancestors' remains.

Eventually their language and customs were entirely forgotten. When Pytheas ventured north from Marseille to "Orkas" he spoke with strangers. It was as if they had never existed at all, until, five millennia after their heyday, a storm set its shoulder to a sand dune to reveal the ancient hearths around which they must once have complacently gathered. 

We're going in the opposite direction now, and we are going much more rapidly, witnessing a pace of climate change over decades that took centuries and millennia to elapse previously, due to the artificial forcing we are now applying through carbon emissions.

Look at the rubble of Skara Brae. Now look at your house, your workplace, your temples and churches. Think of the songs that stir your heart, then think of the silence that now prevails over the hearths of Skara Brae.

We stand upon the Sublician Bridge, like Horatius and his companions, asking ourselves "how can man die better, than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods".

But we do not face an Etruscan army, we face the consequences of our own actions and inaction, and the "fearful odds" are those we have imposed upon ourselves. Nevertheless, urgent action is once again required for our salvation.

The demolition of the bridge won't save the city. Nothing short of its complete re-foundation on sustainable principles is required. Otherwise the fate of Skara Brae awaits.