Darkness at Noon

Thanks to Post No Bills for pointing out this article at TomDispatch to me. It’s certainly worth a read:

I’ve been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we’ve decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century — but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.

The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning — that’s what I told the kids — inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.

You can read the rest of it here.

Having just watch An Inconvenient Truth I’m relieved to see that Ian Campbell has reversed his decision to block the development of the 52 turbine wind farm in South Gippsland.

It makes environmental and economic sense. Moreover there is increasingly a moral imperative for this sort of thing considering the state of climate change.

I finally got around to seeing An Inconvenient Truth today and I must say I was particularly impressed.

A lot of people said that I wouldn’t find it interesting simply because I already had a reasonable grasp of the issue. Whilst I think that I did have a reasonable grasp of the issue as I’ve written reports on it before, even I was taken back by some of the stats – particularly with regards to the melting of the polar ice caps.

The information is presented in a highly accessible way and I take my hat off to Al Gore and this magnificent effort.

After many painful attempts and a database restoration the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice’s blog has a new home here at Darkness at Noon.

Regular posting to resume shortly as well as an explanation of what Darkness at Noon means and why we made the change to come.

In the mean time please update your blogroll.

Thanks to the Creative Commons blog for pointing out that Time Magazine’s person of the year is “you”.

Why “you”?

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Even Linux gets a mention: “…Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux.”

Community collaboration on the scale and in the way that we are currently seeing emerge is something I find really exciting and underpins the central ideas that the Australia Centre for Democracy and Justice stand for. It’s about real democracy.

I also get a bit of a kick out of it as my computer is now 100% Microsoft free, running Linux with a wide array of open source software.

Hello all. Were making a few changes to this blog which may take a day or two to full work out. Please be patient with us – well get there.