Mass pathology

Speaking of the Apocalypse, media numbness and actual threats, artist Chris Jordan talks about unconscious and repressed mass pathologies in his work. Awesome shit:

We're screwed: facts and figures for the apocalypse

The shorter Paul Krugman on climate change:

The US is our biggest problem. China is our second-biggest but fastest growing problem, Europe is our third biggest problem.

More statistics:

China:
1.3. billion people.
GDP: 10.17 trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 3.84 tonnes in 2004, probably a lot more now, given the Δx on Krugman's graph. Maybe as much as 5?

India:
Population: 1.12. billion.
GDP: 4.1 trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 1.20 in 2004. Their economy is the second-fastest growing major economy in the world, with an almost 10 % growth last year, so probably some big movement on this one as well.

United States:
Population: 301 million.
GDP: 13.13. trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 20.4

It looks to my haven't-done-a-statistics-course-in- 10 - years-eyes as if CO2 has a much stronger correlation with GDP than with population. If that's true, then that relationship is asymptotic. As China and India's GDP keep growing at respectively 9.5% and 11.1 % per year, their emission rates are at the cusp of gaining a much, much faster rate of change-for-the-worse.

I mean, I knew we were basically screwed when it came to India and China re: CO2. Just not how bad. (If I'm right.) Obviously, this doesn't tell us anything new, except to underline that there can be no fixing climate change unless the US, India and China are all onboard.

But I'm not a statistician, so I'm hoping that all this means is that CO2 emissions are not correlated to GDP at all, just a heap of other factors which are growing at a far slower rate.

[Update: actually, ignore this post. CO2 emissions are obviously far more complex than a direct correlation to GDP. It also involves technological levels, energy production methods, degree of urbanisation, wage levels and so on and so forth. I was just really tired when I wrote this, and I didn't feel like just throwing all those facts and figures away after I had meticously dug them up after maybe as much as four or five minutes of googling and hyperlinking.]

Correction! Correction! Man not run over by 39-ton truck, merely 33-ton truck!

Pacifism & the left

Manifest publishing of Norway has directed me to these handy little charts from socialistworker.org. Our priorities - that's us as in the species - are just all wrong. We are quite literally spending more money on killing each other than any other thing.

I think the left needs to get back in touch with their pacifist roots. Obviously, we should be sensible about security and not bla bla the errors of Chamberlain bla bla bla appeasement bla bla useful idiots bla bla. I'll be the first to tell you that peace is not just the absence of war. But seriously: why don't we get back to moving towards these long-term goals: the complete elimination of organised violence and a greatly reduced proportion of standing armies? I can't think of a single reason not to. But here are 200 million good reasons.

You Do the Math

Since it's been 6 years since the WTC attacks, I thought I'd repost this thing I wrote back then. I'd have redone the math, but honestly, it hasn't changed at all. At this point it's just a simple matter of attrition and addition. Multiplication, really.

5 years

5 years.
1825 days.
That's 5 long, long years.
On the other hand, Bush only has 861 days left in office.
861 days, 8 hours and 6 minutes.
And 52 seconds (but who's counting).

2973 people died in the September 11th attacks (oh, and the 19 hijackers, but who is counting them? And incidentally, why aren't we counting them?).

2973. That's a lot of people dead for no reason.

Every single one of those one thousand eight hundred and twentyfive days since those 2973 people, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes.

Jeepers, if we were counting, that would be 53 million children. Put it another way: think about that really big class you were in when you were a kid? 30 kids, far too many for the overworked teacher. You're dead. You are all dead, and a thousand other classrooms like the one you were in. Every day for five years.

On the day that those 2973 people died, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes. That number of children also died the day before and the day after. That's like 60 crammed-full jumbo jets crashing every day.

Somewhere between 62.000 and 180.000 people have died thus far in the war "on" terror, according to the Independent. That's at least 33 people every day = roughly 1/1.000th of the WTC disaster, or roughly 1/10.000th of the children who died that day.

The thing we spend the most money on around the world is weapons that enable us to kill other people. We spend $950 billion on this. The US alone spends $441.6 billion on this.

If you take what the US spends every single year on being able to kill other people, and had put it into food distribution, sustainable development, clothes and medicine for those 53 million children (they mostly die from things like diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles and malaria), you could have saved every last one of those children about 200 times over, and still have money left to put them through school for five to eight years.

Also, 2.9 million people died from AIDS last year. Somebody should really be looking into that.

We like to focus on big, dramatic dangers, and because of that, we're less focused on actual problems that are actually killing us. Unlike September 11th, life is mostly not like Hollywood movies. Statistics are realer than anything to the people doing the dying, and there are 30.000 good reasons every day to stop being idiots.

I have a suggestion. It's a really simple and easy suggestion. My suggestion is based on the fact that a) I consider myself as being strongly opposed to human beings, both children and adults dying unnecessarily. b) I think that we are vastly overestimating our need for killing each other.

1) Maybe we can all get together on the children not dying, and the not killing each other unnecessarily?

2) Then we could funnel some if not all of the money and work skills used for the military into non-military work around the world.

3) Maybe we could all get together on the not occupying other countries and killing people there.

4) Points 1, 2 and 3 would lead to other people maybe feeling less inclined to coming over to our place and killing people over here, or having their cousins who already live here not killing people over here. It might even lead to people over there killing each other less, and people over here killing each other less.

5) It would also lead to less dying in general from easily preventable cause, like hunger, AIDS, malaria, diahrroea, pneumonia, infections, terrorism and laser-guided smart bombs.