Relentless heat propaganda
Below is a temperature chart put out by the BBC:
That red coloration is deliberate, a not-so-subtle way of suggesting that the planet is burning up. It is not. Two things I will bet BBC never mentions are …
1. It is late July. June is the month in which the Northern Hemisphere receives the most insolation, or heat from the sun. But in our neck of the woods, June can either be a continuation of spring or even added winter, or in some years, dry and hot. By the time August rolls around, the June insolation has settled in. August is the hottest month of the year in the NH. September falls not too far behind.
2. We are in warming phases of ENSO, or El Nino Southern Oscillation. Parts of the Pacific Ocean have exchanged warm water for cool water, and the ocean is heating up. So is the entire planet. Because weather variability deniers insist that every temperature phase is a facet of climate change, the El Nino up-phase for them is God’s gift. It allows them to scream from rooftops about the planet warming up, which is not happening. See for yourself – note the El Ninos of 1997-98, 2009-10, and 2015-16.
Note how outside of the ENSOs, the planet’s temperature is quite steady. As always, after El Nino, there will be a cool-down period, referred to as La Nina. At that point the weather variability deniers will come down off the rooftop, and begin to explain to us how our stable temperatures are merely a lead up to a tipping point. The lies and lying liars never let up. It’s an official propaganda movement, backed by the same hidden forces that put the planet in prison in March of 2020.
Two poems
I am not much for poetry. It just doesn’t reach me, usually. In longer poems, I lose focus and concentration. Someone put the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg up on this blog, or attempted to anyway. I have never read it. It is supposed to be filled with rage and deep meaning. I suppose. Someone has to explain it to me, however.
I do have a bulletin board in my office, on which I have tacked two poems that I like very much. One is the first stanza of If, by Rudyard Kipling, and the last of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. These are well and widely known, as I don’t go deep on poetry, and would only know very well known poems.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
That is, I think, a father offering advice to a son, as the poem ends with the words “And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!” No matter, in the present era it would entail both sexes and some words would have to be altered. I’m OK with that. I think of it as an aspiration – this is how I want to be. This reminds me of how I should behave, or worse, should have behaved when I screw up.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.
It is the repetition of that last line that moves me, as I take it to mean something far deeper than finding his way home on a snowy night. He’s talking about death, and all he wants to accomplish before that inevitable fact.
Piece of Mindful 
Can’t help it- Here are a couple of poems that come to mind by Madison Cawein (1865-1914), the last real poet (before Pound and his dogs tore the craft to shreds)
Old Man Rain
Old Man Rain at the windowpane
Knocks and fumbles and knocks again:
His long-nailed fingers slip and strain:
Old Man Rain at the windowpane
Knocks all night but knocks in vain.
Old Man Rain.
Old Man Rain at the windowpane
Reels and shambles along the lane:
His old gray whiskers drip and drain:
Old Man Rain with fuddled brain
Reels and staggers like one insane.
Old Man Rain.
Old Man Rain is back again,
With old Mis’ Wind at the windowpane,
Dancing there with her tattered train:
Her old shawl flaps as she whirls again
In the wildman dance and is torn in twain.
Old Mis’ Wind and Old Man Rain.
Waste Land *
Briar and fennel and chincapin,
And rue and ragweed everywhere;
The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,
Or dead of an old despair,
Born of an ancient care.
The cricket’s cry and the locust’s whirr,
And the note of a bird’s distress,
With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,
Clung to the loneliness
Like burrs to a trailing dress.
So sad the field, so waste the ground,
So curst with an old despair,
A woodchuck’s burrow, a blind mole’s mound
And a chipmunk’s stony lair,
Seemed more than it could bear.
So lonely, too, so more than sad,
So droning-lone with bees —
I wondered what more could Nature add
To the sum of its miseries . . .
And then—I saw the trees.
Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
Twisted and torn they rose—
The tortured bones of a perished race
Of monsters no mortal knows,
They started the mind’s repose.
And a man stood there, as still as moss,
A lichen form that stared;
With an old blind hound that, at a loss,
Forever around him fared
With a snarling fang half bared.
I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan
Or a breath of dust. I looked again—
And man and dog were gone,
Like wisps of the graying dawn. . . .
Were they a part of the grim death there—
Ragweed, fennel, and rue?
Or forms of the mind, an old despair,
That there into semblance grew
Out of the grief I knew?
*Ezra Pound had work in the same publication as Cawein’s Waste Land in 1913. Eliot ‘took’ inspiration from this earlier work. Discipline was atomized.
LikeLike
I know so little about poetry, but for this one it seems that all the words fit and relate to one another so that each stanza is tightly wrapped. I liked it.
LikeLike
“weather variability deniers,” nice.. Turnabout is fair play, eh wot? I’ll have to remember that to use if I get the denier label tossed at me.
I don’t usually get worked up about all the propaganda, but this piece NC ran had me fuming for a bit –
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07/effects-of-unprecedented-marine-heat-waves-may-be-irreversible.html
Just this unexamined assumption that somehow we live in the best of all possible climates/ times – or that somehow all current conditions of climate, geology, marine life, etc. – whatever their past permutations – must all be frozen in place, as if we control the “thermostat,” or have total mastery over nature… How do they get away with presenting all this as a given, it’s absurd. Of course we ought not to wantonly pollute the air or oceans, but it’s not as if everything would be frozen in stasis, unchanging, if we weren’t here.
LikeLike