Jason and I are heading up to Poughkeepsie this weekend to visit my mom. We almost didn’t go, due to… well… a state of emergency being declared in virtually all of eastern Pennsylvania and the city of Wilkes-Barre being evacuated. Apparently, it’s all good now, though I don’t know for how long. For those of you at home, yes, this is also global warming. And that means that floods like these are not flukes, but signs of things to come.

For most of America, the trend appears to be more and more rain.

Superman is gay! Superman is Jesus! Superman is a dick! SUPES ON A PLANE!!!

Yeah, I saw Superman Returns. I couldn’t avoid it: Jason and Mike hauled out two different Superman t-shirts (Mike in the traditional blue, red, and yellow, Jason in “Man in Black” silver) and talked about it almost nonstop. Before long, even I was excited about it. That’s a pretty impressive feat; Superman has always been kind of “iffy” to me. He always seemed bland, lacking in personality, cheesy, over-the-top. Even with no past interest in comics, I could get behind Batman, Spiderman, and the X-Men when their movies came out. But Superman remained a silly, nationalistic antique to be enjoyed on the same level as those old 50’s educational films at Prelinger Archives.

“The Smoky City” was a major industrial center of the United States in the 20th century. During World War II, Pittsburgh produced more steel than all of Germany. The steel industry centered on the Three Rivers put Pittsburgh on the map, but the Bessemer process that made steel production economical also required a great deal of coal. The smoke turned the skies black; the fires and molten metals from the steel mills made a hellish glow. Pittsburgh was the emodiment of the Industrial Revolution, and as such, cut of the same mold that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s infernal vision of Mordor. The photo to the right was taken at noon.

I certainly do, but the ecology of magic is about balance and give-and-take. Call it the “Law of Equivalent Exchange,” if you like. What I’m talking about here is something different: getting something for nothing, creating things from whole cloth, in violaton of the basic principles of the universe, like the conservation of mass-energy. In many ways, that’s precisely what civilization promises—and what it is doomed to never deliver. Once, we had perpetual motion machines; today, we have “alternative fuels,” billed as alternatives to our fossil fuel consumption, as a way to keep our civilization going on forever.

“…and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” So wrote Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. Anthropology has shown this to be an entirely false description of the state of “primitive” society, but it seems to be an increasingly accurate description of civilized life. The first element, “solitary,” is an important element to consider, but one that I’ve generally tried to stay away from for one simple reason—how do you prove that civilization isolates people? It seems that the scientific evidence is starting to come in.

Peter Canby’s “Heat Wave” in The Nation is an excellent bit of perspective on global warming. Having seen An Inconvenient Truth this weekend for its Pittsburgh debut, Canby’s piece is an excellent counter-weight to remind us of what global warming actually entails: not annihilation, but adaptation.

Today is World Refugee Day, an occasion promoted by the United Nations High Council on Refugees (UNHCR). There was some controversy last year about the definition of the word “refugee.”

In some dictionaries the definition of refugee is simply “one seeking refuge.” But other dictionaries include the qualifier that the word is usually applied to a person crossing national boundaries because of persecution. Even the etymology of the word contains examples of applying only to trans-national evacuators, and to those who don’t leave their borders.

Óðinn, chief of the Æsir, was a very complex god. He was a god of poetry, madness, healing, magic and prophecy; he was the leader of the Wild Hunt; he welcomes the heroes of Valhalla and prepares them for Ragnarök; the Valkyries serve him; he is called the betrayer of heroes, because he arranges the deaths of mighty warriors so he can have them for Valhalla; he is a shapeshifter. To find a consistency in Óðinn’s character, one must turn to shamanism: the shapeshifting, mad, poetic, prophetic magicians who oversaw the balance of life and death in forager societies. In many ways, Óðinn is an excellent stand-in for shamanism itself. Several stories tell of how he made great sacrifices for knowledge, a common shamanic theme. For example, Óðinn went to Mimir’s Well, near Jötunheimr, as Vegtam the Wanderer, and sacrificed his eye to learn the past, present and future—leading to his knowledge of, and preperation for, Ragnarök. There is a myth recorded in the Rúnatal, a section of the Hávamál, wherein Óðinn is hung from the world tree, Yggdrasill, and pierced with his own spear. Most shamanic traditions speak of an axis mundi that the shaman climbs, or descends, to gain access to other realms of the spirit world. In this myth, Óðinn sees the runes reflected in the water beneath him, and gains not only written language, but the magical powers of the written word.

On Saturday, a conference—”Reaching Atlantica: Business Without Boundaries“—concluded in St. John, New Brunswick. There, a number of major corporations, including Irving Oil, BMO, Air Canada, Aliant, CIBC, Ganong, Shell, and ExxonMobil, met to discuss the Atlantica initiative to create “the International Northeast Economic Region (AINER),” a “free trade” market zone straddling the borders of the United States and Canada. Atlantica Watch says this initiative would like to see “provincial and state legislation which eliminates the minimum wage, promotes union regulation, and encourages massive reductions in social and public service spending.” That may well be true, but there is a deeper and far more interesting element in this. Businesses often mimic natural systems to a sufficient degree, and are sufficiently competitive, that they can serve as canaries for civilization as a whole: when collapse begins to reach its inflection points, businesses will feel the pinch first.

When slave owners tried to justify their practice, they came up with things like drapetomania—a psychological disorder that only affected negroes, causing them to flee captivity. A whole psuedo-science arose around the need to generate apologia for such a despicable practice. Today, the boundaries have moved forward, and today’s despicable practice—the second-class citizenship given to homosexuals—finds itself in similar need for pseudo-scientific hogwash to justify the bigotry that forms the basis of our systems of control and exploitation. Much of this defense consists of repeating patently untrue “facts,” over and over again, until they seem like they’re true. I’ve become sick of this perverse strategy and the damage it does to real human beings, so here’s a little fact check for some of the more common lies that the religious right has been repeating over and over again in the hopes that slander repeated often enough will become true.