Endings and beginnings: always good times for leaning back in one's chair, squinting at the middle distance and indulging in turgid wiffle. CiB'll hopefully get back to actual topics at some point, but for now I've just got to go with the turgid.

A little over two weeks since the thesis got handed in, the ol' noggin is starting to poke a whimpering nose out into the world again. Five years, that trip was. Learned stuff? Probably. Mostly I just majored in the universe.

Well, that's not strictly true. Exactly the opposite too: something so arcane ended up in the thesis that I can't really explain it to myself, let alone anyone else. Having no viable answer when someone asks what your PhD's about: fairly normal while you're doing it. I'm finding people to be less patient with non-answers now I've actually written it all down and handed it in. Still, I'll leave talking about all that until after the viva. Who knows how that'll go?

In the meantime: what the hell happened to the world? I was tunnel-focused on the PhD for a while there, and when I looked up, everyone was running round in circles wailing. Is the world ending? Yes? Oh. Well... I shall manfully, er, man the keyboard, up to the power outages at least. They'll take my cordless mouse from my cold dead etc. If the power does go, I'll probably just sit here anyway. What else am I gonna do?

You can tell there's a crisis brewing: there are gurus everywhere. Pontification indices are through the roof. A marketplace of Ideas and Systems lines the walls of the black hole we're being sucked into. You can pick n mix any bunch of them: who knows what might work? What I like about the Occupy Wall Street movement is its simplicity. It trails all the usual protest baggage, and I sincerely hope the SWP are still doing their sterling work of bus-putting-on while wondering whether it's that shift in class consciousness they've been so patiently waiting for.

But the simplicity is inescapable. There's been a massive, furrowed-brow pause after everyone - everyone - saw the financial sector get thrown truly unbelievable amounts of money. The numbers were large enough that it didn't seem possible it was real: surely just created by fiat, not the same stuff used to pay for healthcare, jobs? The effects, of course, have turned out to be quite real. One of the most collosal state bailouts in history (proven effective) has somehow segued into Attack of the Tories, and not just in the UK.

I understand almost none of it. I've been trying, but there are still wopping great blobs of ignorance stuck to my visor of, er, understanding. Heh. It's taken two weeks, as I say, for me poor brain to develop any sort of curiosity, but - wow - it's improving a bit now, and isn't the world offering up a whole heap of brain-food? Well done world for all that collapsyness.

The most fundamental question is still as I nihilistically moaned after watching Age of Stupid: are we any better than bacteria in a petridish? It's a nihilistic-sounding question, but it isn't. If it turns out our intelligence helps us not at all, we'll just enter into a collapse phase - maybe a death phase if we're ingeniuous enough to properly sterilise the planet. Our ability to see it coming or invent ways to avoid it may have zero effect. We'll just get to watch. We'll combine that with a little denial that any limits exist at all: some of the bacteria in the petridish will argue the petridish itself is a socialist subterfuge that does nothing but limit true bacterial potential - shortly before they run out of nutrients or choke on their own waste.

After the Indonesian Tsunami, there were no shortage of clerics willing to blame their flocks for straying from God. No amount of actual physical evidence is going to convince some people. Perry doesn't feel obliged to pause even for a moment, despite his state burning (though it's good to see scientists boycotting his state's attempt at direct scientific censorship. I'm sure WUWT would have covered such a blatant, direct attack on free scientific speech... oh, no, turns out they didn't.)

Ach. None of that helps, does it? The gurus are all shouting at the same time, power structures are doing what they do. People like me are here blogging, or knocking up goodies for our own guru CVs, depositing at the bank of whuffie. How - how - do we get from here to... where? A hundred year's time with carbon output stabilisation well behind us? There's probably enough carbon in the ground for us to carry on if we like: peak etc won't save us. Easily 1000ppm by 2100, and who knows how high we can aim if we really put our minds to it?

As Denning so awesomely spent 15 minutes at Heartland pointing out, too many people are AWOL from the debate: `the petridish is socialist'. It would be good to have them back. (Or it would be good for someone to convince me that somehow heading towards 1000ppm co2 by 2100 is just fine, we need do nothing.)

I found myself looking back to old journal after I finished and was rather surprised how much I wiffled about God. The whole God thing's cropped up before, but only because atheists are angry at God for not existing - and that gives secret pretend atheists like me cover for writing about it. What's odd is - talking of beginnings and endings - I started this ridiculous academic trek from South to North over fifteen years. 1996, a box-room in Bournemouth, winter drizzle on the skylight, just getting ready to go the job-centre having moved there the week before. And through so much of that time, up to relatively recently, I'd openly use the word, and clearly didn't consider myself an atheist. I look back and wonder: did it all just fade away?

It's probably more just that the word has too much baggage. But I thought I'd better mention it cos I suspect there's going to be more wiffle about it here. To quote Vinay: 'When they say `why?' what am I supposed to say? That I thought that the god I saw in all beings needed a place to live and something to eat?' Hmm, dunno if that's it. Dunno what I'm on about really. Brain bit like porridge.

Weeelll... not going to go down as the most eloquent blog post ever, but thought it best to get the fingers moving. I'll try and focus a little more from now on. Must do better.

The Pin of Doom (red, bottom right) nears its journey's end. That board started the year with nine months on it. That was about nine months ago, coincidentally enough. The Pin of Doom took little steps, the months fell away. It feels a little like I might be stuck in a thesis-version of Zeno's paradox: I swear I can only ever get half-way toward hand-in.

In another coindinkidink, we got two romanesques in the veg box today. I think I shall probably not make a habit of blogging about the veg box contents.

Right: onto the next halfway-there....

Comment on Jonathon Jones' article about the Shard: "and nobody thought to burn it down while they had the chance. You just can't get the rioters these days."

Funny, earlier today I was wondering what would have happened if anyone had headed for parliament or the City rather than Foot Locker? Well, it would have clearly counted as political. Does Parliament have armed guards?

I'm also noticing in myself a slight reluctance to post anything like the above: surely I'm now on a sliding scale towards going on a social networking site and almost nearly hinting that I think the Shard should be attacked. Which I'm not. But I wouldn't necessarily like to joke about it since I'm now somewhere between zero and four year's worth of naughty by even hinting at it. And since it seems any carefully developed system of sentencing can just be set aside if our political masters deem it inconvenient. (We'll see how the appeals get on, I guess.)

Neither Cameron or May seem in the slightest bit interested in even maintaining a pretense of political separation from either the courts or the police. They're happily carrying on a theme running all the way from Thatcher's coordination unit for national police during the miner's strike, really taking to heart the sort of utterly self-assured, cheery vandalism that NuLab nailed so well. It's like watching the entire political establishment go senile.

Just watched `age of stupid' for the first time. Plenty of the politics of the film up for question, but the basic message? Pete Postlethwaite's future archivist says -

We wouldn't be first life-form to wipe itself out. But what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly.

Not that I think we'll wipe ourselves out, but - we did it knowingly? Texas suffers its worst drought and a strong contender for the U.S. presidency thinks prayer is the solution. That's pretty much exactly our approach as a species. We will carry on right through to the end of this century convinced that reality is whatever we want to believe it is.

I hope Hayek is wrong. I suspect he isn't. He thought the idea of social justice was a dangerous illusion. His suspicion of intellectual elites, of engineers and scientists, had the same source. If he's right, the totality of human society - the fabric that actually sustains us - is far beyond whatever intellectual structures we believe ourselves capable of creating. We're ants at best.

Watch the path that global carbon output is taking. The (perhaps far from adequate) two degree target? See the pic I've included from the Copenhagen Diagnosis. If you like, be amused by the gap between accusations of corruption against climate scientists and the awesome silence following, say, Roy Spencer: `I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.'

So I can't help but think Hayek's right, and Age of Stupid is right too: we're entirely capable of wiping ourselves out, because at root we're no better than bacteria turning the ocean anoxic. We're unique only because we get to understand why it happened. Only because we get to watch.

Just to settle any qualms the universe might be having about the hard-earned tax-payers' money spent on my education: here's a most pathos-imbued moment between two of the poor little proto-blobs I've been torturing. Green blob likes red blob. A lot. In a slightly smothering way. Red blob is far from sure about this.

Combined with the random pics, how could anyone refuse to give me another degree? Five weeks, five days until they kick me out on the street, should probably get on with it.

I don't think I've got the hang of this `develop your online presence' thing.

Via MT's linkfeed again, a spread of opinion from the UK press on the 'bling riots'.

My favourite is Philip Johnston in the Telegraph. The riots were -

Via here, to Cameron a while back:

The model visualisation spat these out yesterday. Something to do with firms bidding prices to zero, and people consuming near-infinite amounts. Beyond that, I have almost no idea where they came from.

I'm just gonna hand 'em in and call it done I think.

The Tea-Party tail has done some pretty impressive dog-wagging. Question: what does this do to claims that the whole movement's just corporate astroturf? I'm pretty sure no-one in U.S.business wanted to risk default, and it's still possible the AAA rating will get downgraded by one or two agencies. (Interesting little tidbit here on whether institutions requiring AAA holdings would have to drop U.S. assets.)

But maybe... it's all just a cunning plan. Given that recession equals a drop in carbon output, perhaps they're actually eco-warriers in disguise. Admittedly, a damn good disguise, but it would explain a lot.

A secret dictatorship has been ruling us all. It is impossible to hide from, and has been controlling our lives for as long as humans have existed. Try to challenge it, and it will drop you from a great height. There will be nothing you can do. Its forces are everywhere, in every direction you can think of looking. It never, ever drops its guard.

For centuries, people have fought an underground war against it, seeking to free themselves in whatever way they could. There have been small victories, from those who worked tirelessly in terrible danger to seek cracks in the system. But whenever a crack is thought to be found, the forces are there again, slamming it shut. Democracies crumble before it, whole peoples are made to do its bidding. There is no hope of reprieve. There is no escape.

We must join with it. It would be wise, my friend.