Topic Tuesday #153 2015/06/23 "A Climate for Writing"

Topic Tuesday #153 2015/06/23 "A Climate for Writing"

Ladies and Gentlemen of my readership, we have had quite the week since I have conversed with you on topical matters. The news has been rather heavy, week over week and it has taken its eventual toll on me, thus I am unable to fully articulate the gravity of the activity on the world stage. I am not silent on it, as you can tell by my other posts and the continued activities of the ORly Radio Podcast. The news has hurt me and has moved me to alternative action. In as much as we have seen through time - adversity, even if it seems tangential to this writer, fosters creativity. This last week it was not the news of the Charleston murders that hit me the hardest. Though they are certainly shocking and deplorable, I have been desensitized to the bigotry and violence to those of color by those with a far paler character. No, what has moved me to some sort of action and kept me awake is the future.

I would consider myself a rational person and a man of facts and perspective. I have grown to trust the scientists that work in their chosen fields and have come to know many of them. They value the same things I do. Facts and the truths that they describe. The recent news that the figures were wrong and corrected on the so called pause in global warming was a hammer blow. I didn’t expect it to be so, as I had a feeling that this sign of climate change was not up for taking a vacation, but still, I had hoped that nature had a trick or two that would explain it and it would not be a miscalculation. Sadly, the results indicate that we were incorrect with initial findings and that the world may have warmed much more than was anticipated in other models and it was not getting any better.

Credit: NASA.

The data that they used to make these statements came from a big data project, NASA Earth Exchange (NEX). It’s data is available to the public. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2293/

“The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe.”

I have concerns. I am a future minded person and they are painting a rather hot picture of the future, a future that if I am not a part of, surely my offspring will be. So I have to prepare them for the reality of climate change, rising oceans, hotter summers, colder winters, floods and droughts, and the people that deny it could happen. This is the tall order that keeps me up at night, and I figure if I am going to be kept up, I might as well be creative and productive with it.
This is the inspiration for a story I am going to write. It may be horrible and completely un-entertaining and worthless to some, but I will learn a lot along the way about how to write and communicate a narrative of discovery and adventure - one of surviving a changing world.
National Novel Writing Month is approaching you know.

Time to get to it. Let me know what you think.

Topic Tuesday #105 2014/07/22 "Orwellian"

Topic Tuesday #105 2014/07/22 "Orwellian"

Ingsoc (English Socialism), is the regnant ideology and pseudophilosophy of Oceania

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

1984, written by George Orwell and published in 1949, is the quintessential dystopian novel. There are some fascinating political concepts that are critical to the work. Manipulation, omnipresent surveillance, perpetual war, historic revisionism. Thoughtcrime, as a concept, was not new to Orwell. Nor was the concept of Big Brother. It's easy to make parallels to historic events, people, places, and the story itself.  As we approach the 30th anniversary of this novel, we have sadly seen many of the concepts put into practice.

For instance, the NSA prevalent global surveillance efforts exposed by Edward Snowden.

We can look to North Korea for a Big Brother figure in their Supreme Leader.

The United States has technically been involved in a state of conflict (even if WAR was not declared, the body count sure continued to escalate), since it declared independence from Great Britain, with an exception during the extreme isolationism of the Great Depression in 1935-40. To be conservative, 21 years have had no "real" war like activities since 1776. Highly debatable. 

The working poor have always represented a form of indentured servitude in the world, especially when we look at fully socialized systems that Orwell was involved in. The wage slaves are free to make their narrow range of choices.

And the ignorance... Oh the ignorance... It is amazing how so many people believe whatever is served up by their favorite talking head pundit about world events, economics, and what to buy. It is remarkable how similar the world we live in now is to the Orwellian existence of  Winston Smith.

Don't forget the oxymoronic and yet fitting Ministry of Peace (War), Ministry of Plenty (Rations goods), Ministry of Truth (controls information and edits history), and the Ministry of Love (which monitors, arrests, and tortures/alters dissidents.) The theme is continued in the language of Newspeak combined with Doublethink and Doublespeak, where words have dual meanings that are not only contradictory but exist and are meant simultaneously. 

The work is so iconic, it took on a life of it's own in the term, "Orwellian". As an adjective it describes it's targeted noun with looming official deception, secret pervasive surveillance and manipulation of the facts by a authoritarian/totalitarian/all powerful state government/agency.

In a world (this one by the way and said in the movie trailer voice), where we can predict many behaviors (and may be approaching the ability to read minds) the godlike ability to read your mind and rout out "thoughtcrimes" becomes a real fear. When all your email is read, calls are recorded, movements monitored, and certain agencies rewrite history books for our children, it is not difficult to make comparisons and think that someone has been using the novel as a playbook, and not the warning that it clearly was to a rational person.

1984 has another great thing going for it. It has been on banned book lists and legally challenged for being "subversive" and "corrupting". This makes me smile, as it is ironic, given the content of the book.  

Remember kids, read your banned books!

Big Brother is watching.