On lev­els rang­ing from the poten­tial­ly exis­ten­tial to laugh­able, the state of the world can be summed up  this week in  one word:
ABSURD (noun)…”the state or con­di­tion in which human beings exist in an irra­tional and mean­ing­less universe.”

 The most impor­tant and on a sub­ject mat­ter lev­el, least deserv­ing of the cat­e­gori­sa­tion, is the COP30 cli­mate summit.
For­get top­ics like “car­bon cap­ture” to reduce glob­al warm­ing CO2 dom­i­nat­ing the atmos­phere. This sum­mit is best summed up as “cor­po­rate capture”.
The lob­by­ing group “Kick Big Pol­luters Out”, (KBPO),  cal­cu­lat­ed that “…fos­sil fuel lob­by­ists sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­num­ber almost every coun­try del­e­ga­tion at COP30”. Pro­por­tion­ate­ly, that’s a 12 per­cent increase from last year’s sum­mit, and “… the largest con­cen­tra­tion of fos­sil fuel lob­by­ists at COP since KBPO start­ed analysing con­fer­ence attendees.”
That’s despite new research show­ing glob­al car­bon emis­sions from fos­sil fuels are pro­ject­ed to reach a record high in 2025, and “ strong evi­dence that clean tech­nolo­gies help reduce emis­sions while being cost effec­tive com­pared to fos­sil alter­na­tives.”Add that to the inane pom­pos­i­ty of U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s admo­ni­tion to the UN that cli­mate change is  “the great­est con job ever per­pe­trat­ed on the world”, and “absurd” seems a mild char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion for what’s not happening.

                        SCIENCE BE DAMNED

On a less­er but no less telling lev­el of absurd in the face of sci­ence and real­i­ty, is Kim Kar­dashi­an, sure­ly one of the more absurd fig­ures to occu­py  a place of ongo­ing promi­nence, being tak­en seri­ous­ly for ask­ing whether a comet des­ig­nat­ed inter­stel­lar object 3I/ATLAS was sent to our solar sys­tem by an alien intelligence.
Worse, she was in essence giv­en cre­dence by  a not­ed Har­vard astro­physi­cist turned social media flavour of the moment, who pon­dered whether on Decem­ber 19, when the comet will be 170 mil­lion miles away; “Will 3I/ATLAS send mini-probes towards Earth as Christ­mas gifts to humanity?”
Sci­en­tists who make it their busi­ness to do so deter­mined that the comet  is bil­lions of years old and orig­i­nat­ed out­side our galaxy.
Since it would take an object trav­el­ling at the speed of light 100,000 years to trav­el half way across the bit of space Earth inhab­its, it hard­ly seems like­ly 31/ATLAS was designed to inter­act with mere earth­lings exact­ly when they cel­e­brate an event a rel­a­tive­ly minor pro­por­tion of them believe took place a mere 2000 years ago.

                  FAKE IS TRUE IS FAKE                         

But then, how to make sense of it all when obvi­ous­ly real news is con­sid­ered fake, and fake real?
Over the past week, I have what seen looks like  a growth indus­try of sup­posed cell phone videos of passer­by heroes con­fronting louts harass­ing senior cit­i­zens, vet­er­ans and oth­er vul­ner­a­ble persons.
That would be heart­en­ing, except they are so well-framed, steady and unin­ter­rupt­ed, they can’t pos­si­bly be any­thing but staged, or AI.
There were also dozens of  “heart­felt moments” videos: Bruce Spring­steen or Kei­th Richards giv­ing up their First Class seats on a plane to an elder­ly, deserv­ing per­son, an ele­phant sav­ing a leop­ard cub in a swollen riv­er, a giraffe doing the same, and at least three ver­sions of an alpha male moun­tain goril­la hand­ing a small child that fell into its enclo­sure back to a beam­ing parent.
All of them gar­nered innu­mer­able “Likes”, which seems to me an indi­ca­tion that absurd as it may seem, click­ing the “Thumb up” icon has become Pavlovian.
                        IT OUGHT TO BE OBVIOUS
But those are minor on the absurd scale.
As  a recent report by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion not­ed:“AI offers new effi­cien­cies and oppor­tu­ni­ties, yet its deep­er inte­gra­tion into dai­ly life requires care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion to ensure that AI tools are safe, espe­cial­ly for adolescents,”
To think that the genius­es who designed and con­stant­ly improve and expand AI at what at times seems comet-like speed, can­not recog­nise the need for such safe­guards, and build them into their cre­ations, is as absurd as believ­ing the pri­or­i­ty of fos­sil fuel indus­try lob­by­ists at COP30 is alle­vi­at­ing glob­al warm­ing caused by their paymasters.
To end on a less somber type of absur­di­ty, when Brits are fed up with some­one inces­sant­ly yam­mer­ing, they’re prone to say: “Put a sock in it”.
The absur­di­ty of “fash­ion” has offered us a less aggres­sive alter­na­tive —  “Put it in its sock”.
The fash­ion guru who designed the black turtle­necks worn by Steve Jobs (I nev­er knew that mate­r­i­al and stitch­ing apart, all black turtle­necks were the same, no mat­ter whose name was on the label) has “designed” a sock to hold an iPhone.
For any­thing between 150 and 250 dol­lars, any­one can have one.
How many are sold will be an indi­ca­tor of  the lev­el of absur­di­ty we have reached…at least this week.
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