What the Zeitgeist Wants
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Deluge (1933) — Early disaster movie featuring prolonged scene of tsunami destroying New York.
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Meanwhile, here in Texas we gird for the coming water wars by deploying ever more intimidating grilles on our pickups. Slideshow proof here.
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Without Water, Revolution The Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when drought, a fast-growing population, a repressive and corrupt government, and sectarian and religious passions combine.Insightful Tom Friedman piece from the May 18 Sunday NYT tracing Syria’s current political devolution to the long drought inadequately addressed by the Assad regime. Now consider this in the context of the “Water in the Anthropocene” video posted by Justin Pickard and reblogged below, and Geoffrey Parker’s new history of the seventeenth century as a General Crisis wrought by climate change (that wasn’t, like ours, self-inflicted).
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As datasets build upon one another, the film charts Earth’s changing global water cycle, why it is changing, and what this means for the future. The vertical spikes that appear in the film represent the 48,000 large dams that have been built.
Water in the Anthropocene—a fresh angle on understanding human-induced climate change.
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In his new 900-page opus, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, historian Geoffrey Parker postulates that climate change—the “Little Ice Age” and its century of calamitous storms and aberrational temperatures—can be proven to have been the root cause of the century of war, revolution, and “General Crisis” that characterized the period 1610-1688. Do these amped up storm chasers know they are auspices of the incipient twenty-first century Zeitgeist? Chances are that the future will look a lot like a remix of an Oklahoma tornado video with smartphone warporn from the guerrilla streets of Aleppo.
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“I thought the favelas would be much worse.” — Diego Baronio, cited in ‘Gringos in the Slums’ (2013) -
“One of the greatest inventions in the world is telephone calls on treadmills. That is my dream for all Americans.” — Dr. James Levine, cited in Susan Orlean, ‘The Walking Alive’ (2013) -
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The FBI is pretty annoyed they can’t figure out how to do this with Facebook and Google. Radio Patrol, December 15, 1942, by Eddie Sullivan and Charlie Schmidt, as Officer Pat helps the Chief of Police in their imaginary town bust the saboteurs with the aid of young Pinky and his loyal dog Irish. Pinky is the only one still living, apparently, living in Boca Raton trolling Internet porn and getting fleeced of his dribbling Radio Patrol film serial royalties by Jamaican lottery scams.
