Year 3, Month 5, Day 22: You Are Unastonished. I Am Unsurprised.

Sigh. Whocoodanode?:

The largest-ever United Nations conference, a summit billed as a historic opportunity to build a greener future, appears to be going up in smoke.

U.S. President Barack Obama likely won’t be there, and the leaders of Britain and Germany have bowed out. The entire European Parliament delegation has canceled.

And with fewer than six weeks to go until the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, negotiations to produce a final statement have stalled amid squabbling. Logistical snags, too, threaten to derail the event.

Feel that? You’re getting fisted by the invisible hand. Sent May 13:

Even as global climate change brings ever more unpredictable and extreme weather, there’s still something we can count on with near-absolute certainty: as the news from scientists gets steadily worse, so too will the paralysis of our national and global political systems. While hasty geopolitical action is usually ill-advised (as many Iraqis would confirm), the climate crisis demands a far more robust response than platitudes. The United States government can barely even muster tepid affirmations, hamstrung as it is by obstructionist Republicans and their enablers in the mass media.

Cui bono? Any person or organization that stands to benefit from a civilizational disruption of this magnitude would have to be sociopathically focused on short-term returns rather than long-term continuity — oddly enough, an exact description of the corporate “persons” currently bankrolling climate-change denial and undermining any attempts to build an international response commensurate to the magnitude of the emergency.

Warren Senders