An early work-in-progress dedicated to
helping precipitate the
Great Mobilisation,
circuitouslby provoking a novel by an award-winning author, to provoke a movie etc. of, to help build the mandate for the Churchillian leadership of…y
Dare to be wise!
Kant
Endnote Worthy: The planetary magnitude of the climate polycrisis cannot begin to be apprehended in ignorance of the real possibility of the anthropogenically-precipitated end of the ice houses / ice ages. chart Mahurangi Magazine
Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress first published 20240703
reworked work-in-progress from 20250518
Notes nor endnotes are normally not expected in a novel, much less a magazine. But not only is Light the Fuse : Not the Great New Zealand Mobilisation Novel not your ordinary novel, it is part-factual, part-counterfactual, part future-factual-conditional; and the Mahurangi Magazine has always broken any rules it needed to, in the interests of sanity.
Mostly, however, the decision to go-for-the-doctor with foot- and endnotes, is to spare the reader the myriad rabbit holes that would otherwise litter their way. A beloved longtime reader recently remarked:
I’m not sure if your style of writing is unique or just different, but it always holds my interest— search engine kept idling.
At the risk of causing their search-engine sparkplugs to carbon up, the notes that follow should encourage treasured readers to hop in and out of said burrows at will, and with alacrity. Then, with the overlap of Light the Fuse, the bleedin’ obvious finally dawned—a unified set of end notes:
Aotearoa/New Zealand Aotearoa is used where practicable when referring to the multi-island nation state of that name. Elsewhere, the official name New Zealand is preferred when the nation’s name is employed as a proper adjective, for example:
Hospitality, pre-neoliberalism, was a proud New Zealand attribute. Sadly, hospitality is currently only valued if it is being comprehensively monetised. As neoliberalism is rendered irrelevant by the Great Mobilisation, it is hoped that New Zealanders will rediscover a wholesome role for hospitality in Aotearoa…
Just one style benefit of using both Aotearoa and New Zealand, but separately, is retaining New Zealander in preference to Aotearoan , Aotearoaian , Aotearoaer , or Kiwi . It should go without saying that using Aotearoa–New Zealand would reek of virtue signalling, and be unrelievedly unstylish and cumbersome.
To be continued…
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Style Guide, “Aotearoa and New Zealand…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Across with two cs James Goldie ‘J G ; Butch’ Brown, Mount Albert Grammar, English teacher and ‘Senior Five’ class master, author of the long-prescribed English-language textbook to Cimino:
Just because you come from the country, Cole, doesn’t mean you can spell across with two cs!
Suffice to say Cimino was never going to be the speller the familywhich, hands down, was Cimino’s walking-dictionary mother, Noelene Adelaide Cole née Cimino, and the onetime subeditor only realised, at age 77, he’d invariably chosen to spell choose with one o. Only in hindsight did the possibility that Brown was the form-master of Senior Five—that attended by Cimino—due to it harbouring more than its share of the school’s sporting prowess. Not that Cimino was part of that exalted cohort, except that sheer physical strengthmaybe a footnote or chapter: Cimino never developed the discipline to exercise—beyond youthful push-ups and squats—a perennial tendency to go hard, physically allowed him to fare at least averagely through his misspent adulthood… did earn him a rigorous role in the First Fifteenthe school’s top Rugby football team, of 15 players plus reserves’s training programme.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 7 – Aspirations of a Dumb-Arse Intellectual, “Just because you…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Anti-alien state of America Regarding the above-mentioned 92-year-old’s superior suitability for the role of president—setting aside the small considerations of common sense, inclination, the natural limitations on longevity, and preferred nation-state of residency—his mere country of birth rules him out. Likewise, it rules out the mere 77-year-old, American son Arnold Schwarzenegger, who demonstrated devastating fitness for office as governor of America’s most populous state. In discriminating against those born in Australia or Austria—or anywhere other than their United States—the founding fathers displayed appalling anti-immigrant bias, bequeathing Birther Trump his first brutish bludgeon, 220 years later. Schwarzenegger, hands down, would have made for a hugely more humane Republican president than fellow movie-star Regan.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 2 – Recruiting a Compelling Face, “Anybody can become president”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Continual style improvement With online publishing existing little more than a tenth of the time since Gutenberg, it is unsurprising that many printing-press practices have carried over to the digital. One such practice is to treat all written work as inviolate. While there is a place and need for that, the Mahurangi Magazine has always taken a work-in-progress approach, reasoning that the hapless reader deserves the very best version the publishers are capable of. In truth, the approach was also an acknowledgement of Cimino’s limitations, and particularly of his functioning-perfectionist trait. Where an improvement involves correcting a factual error, however, Cimino’s practice is to record that, typically with a tooltipnote to self: create style-guide entry for >tooltip!, but sometimes with a full mea culpa footnote…
To be continued…
See note
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Style Guide, Continual Style Improvement
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Craving a Mahurangi Minnie the Moocher In the movie version, a Mahurangi Minnie the Moocher , equally infectious, is introduced, and within two or three summers becomes the most anticipated number belted out by the West City Jazz Orchestra, of a regatta evening. Left until 11.00 pm, the Mahurangi Regatta anthem has provided all the incentive needed to keep the long-in-the-tooth from drifting previous toward their berths, afloat or ashore—even a few children are treated to a rare, indulged, up-with-the-olds- ’til-midnight treat. Then, signalling it’s time for all think of sleep, Neal Hefti – Count Basie’s sublime Li’l Darlin’ —positively punched out earlier in the evening—is repeated, but as an achingly lilting lullaby. While not every summer, regular regatta-goers will remember Li’l Darlin’ as the slower, more circumspect piece sometimes played. Its inclusion was the result, earlier in the Mahurangi Regatta big-band era, of one regatta-goer being honoured with an invitation to nominate a number to be rehearsed, possibly to celebrate a milestone birthday—Li’l Darlin’ was unequivocally it .
Successfully commissioning the writing of a Mahurangi Minnie the Moocher would require a miraculously, serially serendipitous sequence of circumstances, and monstrous talent. Organic anthems don’t grow on gmo trees. Masterpieces, however, have been commissioned, Li’l Darlin’ and Rhapsody in Blue being just two famous examples, although the later miracle must be as far away from an exuberant, singalong-able, massed-voices anthem as could be imagined. If this impossible craving was somehow provisioned, and picked up where the mighty Dr Trevor Thwaites’ magnificently craven Minnie the Moocher left off, in 2024, it might be believed that there is yet hope for miracles, mutually respectful democracy, and Mahurangi—never mind precisely how miniscule.
To be further footnoted…
Return to text
Referenced :
Mahurangi Regatta : 2026 Mahurangi Regatta Programme, “Li’l Darlin’…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Resign or Mobilise: With 30 years since the first cop conference—this was just the heads-of-delegations lineup, 2015, Paris—and absolutely no reduction in the annual greenhouse-gas emissions that cumulatively have probably already tripped at least one-too-many tipping points—the demand across-the-board resignations and the immediate Great Mobilisation is as reasonable as it is existentially essential. image Wikimedia Commons
d-Day of Hope d-Day One hundred thirty days—the days between the United Nations resolution and its fatuouswill all due respect to the Permanent Mission of Kiribati to the United Nations first International Day of Hope, on 12 July 2025—is about 100th of the time spent not reducing the annual ratestabilising the annual rate of emissions might sound like a good thing, but it is not. Even if the annual rate is slashed, accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide will remain dangerously elevated for 1000 years or more of greenhouse-gas emissions, much less the accumulated 427 ppmreached in 2024 concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. One hundred thirty days was always going to be a challenge for would-be Day of Hope highjackers, exercised to see the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation begin. Targeting the 2026 Day of Hope, however, would put the d-Day of Hope 495 days out—or, in d-Day military parlance, d-495D minus number of days, as of the creation of this footnote.
Helping to precipitate the first, massed d-Day of Hope demand for an immediate Great Mobilisation has become the proximate priority of Light the Fuse—495 days, and counting, down.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 8 – D-Day of Hope, “In the D-Day of Hope…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Democratic megamobilisation Given the endemic democratic dysfunction, insisting that the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation be waged democratically will seem to many—possibly to most —as less than optimal. Setting aside the serially-misattributed—
Democracy is the worst form of government.
—if the megamobilisation is to happen, it will be because the people demand it, channelled by compelling, charismaticas opposed to populist, Churchillian leadership. Churchill’s verbatim use of the bald, seven-word pronouncement was directly from the writing of initially New Zealand-educated, social anthropologist Robert Briffault (1930) :
Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical. No machinery has yet been contrived to carry out in any but the most farcical manner its principles. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap and demagogy. But there is something even more important than efficiency and expediency—justice. And democracy is the only social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.
Churchill, in his 1947 Parliamentary address, didn’t imply authorship—he deliberately prefaced the dictum with, “while it is said”. He then proceeded to do justice to its source—Briffault’s unbridled critique of democracy, yet adamant defence of it as the only form of government compatible with justice—by following his deft, except-for-all-others-which-have-been-tried paraphrasinpossibly also descriptions of other forms of government contained in Rational Evolution: The Making of Humanity, 1930g with:
…there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
Setting aside the inconvenient, undemocratic pro-House of Lords-intent behind Churchill’s 11 November 1947 speech, the Mahurangi Magazine contends that the answer to Briffault’s entirely-valid-in-1930 contention, the ingenious machinery has long since been contrived. Conceptually, at least, the deliberative and electoral machinery to carry out, and in the most eleand the most transparentgantand the most transparent manner, all the important principles of democracy—including the long-overdue, less-than-superficial democratisation of the political-party system. Only the studiously depraved indifference of political parties and their corporate overlords, stands in the way.
Meantime, mired in the poorly understood Climate Polycrisis, the imperative for democratic megamobilisation is incontrovertible.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Prologue, “democracy-debasing neoliberal ideology…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Rendering Epitome of Global Dysfunction: Had fellow Europeans immediately mobilised to stand shoulder to shoulder with their Ukrainian cousins, Putin would have been faced with murdering tens of millions, or withdrawing. Being left to fight for her freedom with home-built, 150 mm-cable-duct fuselaged drones graphically illustrates Ukraine’s plight, and courage. Climate megamobilisation would bind rather than divide countries, and undermine the world’s serially murderous kleptocrats. rendering Covert Shores
Global government is great Sitting at the intergovernmental level is the inherently undemocratic, un-self-critical un. The pivotal dysfunction is, infamously, at United Nations Security Council level—that, and its membership left open to blatantly, serially war-covert and overt mongerincovert and overtg United States and Soviet Union:
Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.
Setting aside the travesty of those arch Cold War adversaries ever being permitted permanent Security Council seats, Russia was allowed to inherit the former Soviet seat unopposed, leading Volodymyr Zelenskyy to subsequently reasonably demand:
Where is this security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?
That the world needed democratic global government should never have been in any doubt. It is both pathetic and forlorn that a 200-year American cleavage to New World Order conspiracy theories—weaponised via the World Wide Web—can poison any prospect of a civilised discourse about how, today, global democracy can be achieved. Meanwhile, the modern God-is-great and maga twin menaces are testimony to the depths of global democratic dysfunction. While waiting for God, instead, for example, of navel-gazing the future of work, megamobilisation must be the work, and the , global, economy.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Prologue, “billions of lives on the line globally…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Hopium wars In the preceding, the Mahurangi Magazine argues that megamobilisation is the best antidote for the net-zero hopium that so concerns Hansen et al. In the absence of megamobilisation, the net-zero-hopium market-forces overwhelm all objectivity, putting civilisation and the biosphere at risk of crossing one too many tipping point and passing the point of no return. What should give humanity pause is that even in peacetime, no climate scientist can provide an ironclad assurance that there is time to prevent tipping points dominoing past the point of no return. Nothing points towards the Climate Polycrisis overwhelming civilisation more than the current part-First World War, part-War of the Worlds waged by Russia against Ukraine, that waged against Gaza by Israel, and other ongoing wars too sickeninas so powerfully and definitively used by, if not coined by, Bruce Cockburn, in the context of CIA-funded covert warsg to relate.as so powerfully and definitively used by, if not coined by, Bruce Cockburn, in the context of CIA-funded covert wars The best contribution the West can make to end the scourge of kleptocracy and war is to demonstrate that it will, belatedly, decisively put civilisation-and-the-biosphere ahead of its own, selfish materialistic interests. Just one example: Boeing is still considered too big to fail despite systematically divesting itself of the ability to reliably design and build airworthy passenger aircraft—in time, coincidentally, for what categorically needs to be the end of the if-I-can't fly-somewhere-balmy-of-a-winter-every-winter-life’s-not-worth-living era. Boeing, reinvented, could find redemption as a public-benefit entity, manufacturing the accommodation modules immediately needed to house the United States’ half-million homeless, and the planet’s three billion by 2030—honest employment for every hardworking quality inspector ever purged or put to the sword by Boeing, and then some.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Prologue, “billions of lives on the line globally…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Ragged Rocks: Noeline gave her lastborn Glover’s Hot Water Sailor , sparking a 14-year-old’s lifelong fascination with typography. Here, splendid bad-rag art serendipitously illustrates that which pretty paragraph line-length algorithms help iron out. sculptor Catherine Griffiths
Hyphenation If working as a newspaper subeditor didn’t cure Cimino’s enthusiasm for comprehensive hyphenation, nothing was going to—newspaper style guides proscribe all but the most essential hyphenation. Magazine style-guides, however, tend to allow for more liberal hyphen deployment, and sheep-for-a-lamb Mahurangi Magazine and Light the Fuse take it into the realms of the radical, not least of all in pursuit of typographical perfection. Magazine-style left-justification can leave yawning gaps in the unjustified righthand side of paragraphs. Judiciously deployed soft-under the bonnet, the HTML soft hyphen entity, code: ­hyphenation however, serenely aids the much-needed civilisation of the right. In time, there is no reason online magazines and books cannot exceed the typographical finesse of the icecap-melting printed form, which is blithely airfreighted globally hither and yon. A bold step in this direction is the leadership shown by builders of the open-source browser engine WebKit. If early-championer Safari succeeds in leading behemothian Chrome, and Edge, Firefox et al into universal deployment of the whimsically named cssCascading Style Sheets, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium property text-wrap: pretty , masterfully balanced, soft-hyphened paragraphs will abound, and diminish the appetite for expensive glossies and hardbacks, and with their eye-wateringparticularly if one has a fig to give for the icecaps delivery charges.
Notwithstanding the above, line-end hyphenation is only resorted to where the raggedness can’t better be addressed by improving the text around it, say to weed out…
To be continued…
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Style Guide, Hyphenation
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Mahurangi Regatta Inc. update Unshared ahead of the 2025 Mahurangi Action Inc. annual general meeting, was the adamant opposition by Mahurangi Cruising Club members to even exploring how well renaming and repurposing Mahurangi Action as Mahurangi Regatta Inc. might work for the many organisations involved, which include the Classic Yacht Assoc., Mahurangi East Residents and Ratepayers Assoc., Mahurangi West Hall and Reserve Inc. not to mention at least 14 visiting yacht and boating clubs, Auckland Anniversary Regatta Inc., and the Auckland Council. The final substantive contribution of Cimino Cole was the annual multiheaded mission of lodging the funding application with Auckland Council’s regional events fund, on 27 June 2025. The application was successful in securing $6000 towards the costs of the 2026 event.
To be continued…
Return to text
Referenced :
Mahurangi Regatta: Renaming Mahurangi Action née Friends of the … as Mahurangi Regatta Inc., “that the renamed organisation be styled…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
MakaurauStrictly, Tāmaki Makaurau, but Makaurau—reo Māori meaning “desired by many”—is Mahurangi Magazine’s longstanding suggestion as the name for the Auckland Council governance region–Whangārei rail-with-trail Just one, hero-project use for green steel is a new, standard-gauge rail-with-trail route between the ports of MakaurauStrictly, Tāmaki Makaurau, but Makaurau—reo Māori meaning “desired by many”—is Mahurangi Magazine’s longstanding suggestion as the name for the Auckland Council governance region and Whangārei, for freight and passengers, and for cyclists and recreational walkers—not least of all, to magnificently complement New Zealand’s national walkway: Te Araroa. At the Makaurau /Auckland end, it would cross the harbour there with the only new crossing that would ever be needed—with the only new Waitematā crossing that could ever come close to being Great Mobilisation-justified.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 8 – D-Day of Hope, “desperately needed green steel…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Mahurangi megalomania manifesto overflow Waiwera Tea and Coffee House | Waiwera Retreat Hotel | Waiwera Retreat Restaurant | Waiwera–Waiwera Mahurangi Coastal Path retreats, and retreat retreatscentre for the study of sea-level rise adaptation | Waiwera faculty of for exampleKoi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures support for this concept is not implied the Centre for Informed Futures | refundable Waiwera water bottle| sail-training, power-generating machine | ruddered, nesting, Mahurangi punts, to allow every young Aucklander to learn to row in two-minutes-flat | Waiwera to Warkworth Mahurangi punt race, during “Waitangi week” with its heroic Aotea ki Mahurangi waka ama ocean race…
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Appendix 1 – Buy Waiwera, “the bathhouse, the tea and coffee house…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Gaza Grotesque: In the perfect vacuum left by this dysfunctional civilisation’s failure to face the Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis, this paving-over-a-genocidal-atrocity utopia proposed by Netanyahu is being provided succour by Biden, Modi, and von der Leyen. rendering Archpaper | pm Office of Israel
Finally, hideously, there’s mega-megalomania Adam Toose begins his Chartbook #284 with:
I have to admit, when I first saw the image, I thought it must be a hoax.
Subtitled “the surreal geoeconomic imaginary of Netanyahu’s ‘economic peace’”, Adam Toose describes a Netanyahu megamobilisation vision of Third Reichian utopianism. It would be hard to invent a counterfactual that better underscored the imperative for humanity to embrace the necessity of comprehensively responding to the Climate Polycrisis, with every ounce of goodness and mercy humans are hard-wired to deliver.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 13 – Beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation, “Netanyahu and Trump…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Megamobilisation powerhouse The key to a small country pulling off the civilisation-and-the-biosphere-saving mission of instigating the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation, unavoidably, is monetisation. The ideal world in which the trillions needed to fund the megamobilisation would be allocated with the alacrity the world’s bankers were bailed out in 2008, doesn’t, of course, exist—how humanity is not seen as too big to fail and accorded the same largesse as banks, is a job for the anthropologists to explain. Meantime, in the interests of pursuing, hell-bent, the avenue that is available to Aotearoa is to manufacture and deliver the products and services the world desperately needs, playing to New Zealand’s strengths. The goods and services desperately needed range from proven, plural-rollIn 1867 in Aotearoa, Māori men were granted practicable, plural-roll universal suffrage, 12 years before the European men there. electoral systems, to high-cube-40-foot-shipping-container-sized accommodation modules, at scale—the latter being just one of the ways planted-forest engineered timber can both sequester carbon long term, and displace carbon-culprits steel, aluminium, and cement. Logs, meantime, exported for use as concrete shuttering, are destined to soon return their hard-won carbon back to the atmosphere.
By becoming a world leader in the field, Aotearoa has a golden opportunity to monetise the transformation of its carbon Achilles heel, agriculture. In that multifaceted challenge, milk powder is analogous to the export of radiata pine logs, and the continued burning coal to dry milk is instructive regarding the fantasy of using less, renewable, energy, as opposed to generating a great deal
more energy, zero-carbon. Hansen, Sato, and Kharecha:
By 2030, there should be multiple options for modern ultrasafe nuclear power that can serve as the needed complement to renewable energies to produce carbon-free electricity.
Rolls-Royce of smrs: From its robust $16 billion-revenue base, the Rolls-Royce Group is likely to be one of the first to market with an attractive small modular reactor—poised to be in Poland, thanks to the slow-turning bureaucratic wheels in the United Kingdom. Rolls-Royce is no newcomer to building small reactors, having powered the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines since 1966. rendering Rolls-Royce
As the climate-tipping-point dominos fall, nuclear-free Aotearoa continues to behave unrepentantly hypocritically. Ideology has been allowed to trump science; twice: In the 1980s, opposition to nuclear-armed-United States-warship visits to New Zealand morphed into anti-nuclear-anything zealotry. In the 2010s, zero-carbon/sustainable energy sources were marketed as renewables, deliberately and disingenuously relegating zero-carbon nuclear power. Ever since, there has been a stubborn refusal to objectively accept that the rapid growth of renewables has neither displaced fossil fuels at scale nor provided the electricity and heat needed to produce, zero-carbon, the aluminium, ammonia, cement, hydrogen, plastics, steel, and the many other materials currently essential to civilisation.
Renewable–sustainable ideology is jeopardising the prospects of civilisation surviving the immediate climate-heating onslaught. Had the renewable, or sustainable, criteria been arbitrary imposed on those leaders who opposed Hitler, the Third Reich would never have been successfully resisted. There was nothing renewable about how the Allies defended democracy. World War II didn’t need to be sustainable, but for democracy to stand a chance it did have to be fought—even if democracy sometimes took a back seatnot back-seat in the sense, of course, of the democratic Great Mobilisation staff-car conceptualised in Chapter 6. Climate, meantime, has killed four million since 2000 but threatens the survival of billions in the coming decades. The twin overriding criteria for energy decisions must be their contribution to the rapid reduction in global greenhouse emissions and to the protection of proximately vulnerable populations.
Aotearoa, by delivering an anti-nuclear-power mea culpa now, committing to repurposing Huntly Power Station for fossil-fuel-free operation and to installing the planet’s first Rolls-Royce smr, would kickstart the country’s destiny on the world stage as the instigator of the Climate Polycrisis-megamobilisation.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Prologue, “Aotearoa-centric, standout contender…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Megamobilisation vs. mega-mobilisation Setting aside whether it is wise to attempt to appropriate maga, or otherwise dignify it by imitation, the megamobilisation espoused in this article is the antithesis of the mega—Mobilizing an Earth Governance Alliance—approach, which relies upon firstly strengthening global governance architecture. As worthy as such a mission might be, it is directly analogous to waiting for fusion power before radically reducing fossil-fuel burning, with the likes of smr-generated power—on land and sea—pumped hydro storage, in-motion-charging trolleybuses, to mention but a few essential elements of a megamobilisation. The strengthening-global-governance goal—much less democratising global governance—having seen no progress in 77 years, now needs to be a byproduct of megamobilisation, not the prerequisite for it. But worse, backroom-preoccupations such as strengthening-global-governance are the epitome of boring, and an insult to the spirit and intelligence of humankind, which craves something to sink its teeth into. Humanity’s prospects now hinge on whether the some of the myriad exciting projects—such as Onslow, which can slash energy prices while it restores and enhances the South Island’s hydro-compromised lakes. Meanwhile, a 2500-kilometre-rail-with -trail-network-in 10 years would only be comparable to the 1604-kilometre-within-seven-years that Julius Vogel pulled off, until derailed by his detractors.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Prologue, “Aotearoa-centric, standout contender…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Mega-Oppenheimer An epic biographical blockbuster, followed by an epically swashbuckling docudrama series, is surely the surest route to convincing voters at large to demand and participate in the real-world megamobilisation. The production would need to rival Hollywood East in scale and quality, and would need to be as accurate as a non-Navajo Nation-denying Oppenheimer . New Zealand’s initial job would be to produce the book and movie versions of the modello, and mega-modello—beginning, perhaps, with a Mahu mega-modello. The Climate Polycrisis is not a crisis that can be magicked away, regardless of what percentage of the Earth’s 5.1 billion-hectareland and ocean surface is covered with photovoltaic collectors—the sun doesn’t shine at night and Moore’s Law doesn’t ultimately apply even to micro devices, much less to network-scale batteries. The epochal mission must be to mitigate the savaging of billions of human beings, at century timescales. If that can be achieved, humanity will then have the luxury of insisting on sustainability on millennial timescales.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Prologue, “blockbuster…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Birdas published: Birth, but surely wordplay counts for something, given a metaphorical triple-entendre birdstrike could be as disruptive to the growth-for-growth’s-sake as literal birdstrike is to commercial aircraft operations —$1.2-billion per year, globallystrike or Uninhabitable Earth: One generation can bring humanity to its senses, by predominantly refusing to procreate. Population already exceeds the long-term carrying capacity of the planet by 50%. Given that there remains at least a possibility that radically slashing greenhouse gas emissions could alleviate otherwise hellish privations in store for children being born today, it is illogical that it is apparently unconscionable to stop population growth in its tracks, but acceptable to fail to completely curtail, amongst other things coal mining. Aotearoa published as: New Zealand burns an egregious, reported 534 000 tonnes per year to dry milk—and steel and cement manufacture. For Birth Rightits former domain, birthstrikeforfuture.com, is, tellingly, up for grabs to get real traction, however, it must threaten economic growth, at scale—a potentially dangerous action given the global financial oligarchy will likely not go quietly. bbc News
Metaphorical birdstrike That young people apparently can’t grasp en masse that they could readily wrestle power from the prevailing oligarchy, for any purpose, is remarkable. All they have to do, at scale, is to organise the mother-of-all birdstrikes—a birth strike—demanding the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation begin, to give humanity, and its fellow species, a fighting chance to weather the 3rd Millennium Polycrisis. Even without the help of the fertilization president, industrial-scale procreation has seen global population balloon greater than tenfold.
That mere discussion of the possibility of consideration of a pause on proliferation can invite extreme reactions from people who reverently worship Planet Earth is paradoxical, but cannot be allowed to forestall a close examination of the rapidly reducing options for, on one hand, radical reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, and on the other, the means to decently feed, clothe, and shelter any given population. While it has endlessly argued that climate targets can be reached without risking alienating audiences by insisting that population be considered, the inconvenient fact is that, despite the record uptake of solar, greenhouse-gas emissions are showing no signs of plummeting, and meantime, nor has the energy-hungry work demanded by the Great Mobilisation begun—building accommodation for the billions who will be displaced by multi-metre sea-level rise, to name but one⸺herculean , a barely adequate superlative for the magnitude of the task⸺enterprise. It is precisely because of the scale required of the Great Mobilisation that an economy-disrupting birthstrike must be contemplated. The choice is stark: More more-of-the-same stupid, growth-for-growth’s-sake economy, or radical, intelligent, Great Mobilisation economy. A bigger, fairer economy, building for the immediate future, as well as the medium- and long-term.
Breeding Wicked Problem: Nothing spotlights the wickedness of the problem of anthropogenic climate disruption more dramatically than the need to confront the natural, human imperative to breed that is driving the Sixth Great Extinction and the onset of a potentially uninhabitable Earth. Air-flight carbon-dioxide-equivalent values here based on premium economy direct return flights. graphic Mahurangi Magazine, adapted from the Guardian | Wynes & Nicholas, Environmental Research Letters, IOPscience
Until the present biosphere-destroying economy is held to account, those presiding over the corporations calling the shots have no financial incentive to do anything but feed—and profit from feeding—consumerism. If sufficient young people sacrifice—or even delay—their procreative birthright, their message will, in time, be heeded. To being lectured that any hiatus in having babies will wreck the economy, their unwavering response must be:
Yes, it will put your biosphericidalglobal sum of all ecosystems on Earth + suicidal economy out of its misery-making misery, but you will find that our Great Mobilisation economy will do just fine, and we know how to waitVincent Lingiari, quoted in From Little Things Big Things Grow.
There is little doubt that, sooner or later, youth will discover the wit and wisdom to wrestle power from the oblivious biosphericidal oligarchy. What will be unknowable possibly for decades, is whether mobilisation in response to the 3rd Millennium Polycrisis was, by 2025, left so late that civilisation is rendered unrecognisable, and its people all but annihilated. There is no question of not mobilising immediately, and some actions are so patently priorities, no excuse for other than their immediate implementation. The pair of such Great Mobilisation priorities should arguably be ending child poverty and homelessness. While that mission might strike the majority of climate-concerned as utterly off-target, that in itself is a powerful reason for putting poverty first, precisely because it sends the unequivocal message that nobody, and no country, is to be left behind. The Great Mobilisation enterprise is for all of humanity and the biosphere upon which it and its fellow species utterly, unequivocally depends, not to mention the profound degree to which humanity and its fellow species depend upon each other. In the face of the Third Millennium Polycrisis, to fail to mobilise is the definition of collective insanity.
Return to caption
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Appendix 4 – On the Ephemerality of Beaches, “ grassroots population moratorium”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Moccasining against the pricks Mindful of the strict curfew implicit, most of the students were pouring out and on their convivial way, to regroup in hundreds of smaller gatherings the length and breadth of the isthmus.
Instantly incensed on hearing that preying on Auckland university students was the sport of rookie city police, Cimino, as he swayed up the curving driveway sidewalk towards the venue’s entrance swung a surprisingly well-aimed moccasined left foot into the passenger door of each passing patrol car. Cherishing the glow of a blow struck for freedom, and academia, the unworldly suburban-house carpenter’s euphoria evaporated the instant he felt the strong fingers of a pair constables clamp his biceps. Minutes later, sat in the back of one of the two slightly bruised squad cars, Cimino, from dancing like nobody was watching—to Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow? —was suddenly stone-cold sober. The officers, disconcerted that they hadn’t bagged a student, tested the crowd. One spotted a cocky car-keyring-jangling specimen and bellowed:
You’re not driving in that condition!
Wouldn’t dream of it, officer.
…shot back the suave-beyond-his-years bona-fide university student.
The hastily resumed police car emerged just in time to see, farther up the road, the entitled mark climbing in the driver’s side of his spotless, late-model Volkswagen. Tailing the two students at a distance, all that could be observed, disconsolingly, was the picture of propriety. Subsequently tiring of witnessing anything resembling dangerous driving, the squad car pounced and blasted the broad, deserted, crosstown connecting road with its siren. The quarry demurely pulled over, politely winding down their respective windows in anticipation. How many yes-sir-no-sirs or the like were proffered Cimino couldn’t judge from his limited backseat vantage, but after a lengthy inquisition, the officers returned, plumped back into their seats, the younger lamenting:
Ah, I was just waiting for him to take a swing at me.
Had the constables know then that, later that morning, a judge was going to unhesitatingly let off the neatly suit-white-shirt-and-tied, first-time-offending former telephone-salesclerk with a suspended sentence, the night might have taken a less comedic turn. The goading and cudjolingcoined: cudgelling/ cajoling—alluding to the “entice into a cage” etymology of cajole may have resumed, redirected at their meagre bycatch. Mercifully, it didn’t; possibly by the grace of a looming end-of-shift. At Central, after an eternity of processing—the full photographing, fingerprint-taking, belt-stripping malarky—Cimino made the best of his cell bunk, rattling hungry. But there was not even to be bread and water, much less a cuppa; Cimino was awoken at 0600 hrs and shown the door. Walking through the empty central city streets back to his suburban digs provided much time for self-examination, and mental preparation for his 1000 hrs court attendance. Freshly showered and cravenly cleanshaven, and chauffeured…
To be continued…
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Acknowledgements, “By the time police arrived…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
No place like home Also incomprehensible to any futurethat should possibly be “near future” but risks reading as student of near future, as opposed to student in the near future, studying the history of the early 2000s student will be the drivel published about the supposed inevitability of mankind needing to prepare to leave Planet Earth in the dust for more alluring destinations. A smidgen of perspective is suggested: If the current billion-year balance remaining of Planet Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere sounds trifling, animal life has existed here for only about the last 0.64 billion years. Was the Great Mobilisation mounted, and it was successful in salvaging a survivable planetary climate, the best billion years, entirely arguably, could be yet to come. For further perspective, species Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idàltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness has existed for only about 300 000 years, or a mere 2000th of the time since the likes of jellyfish first evolved, or little more than a 15 000th the lifetime of the planet.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 8 – D-Day of Hope, “incomprehensible to any future student…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Life a Beach 33 150 Years Back: Migration map used with the 2019 article illustrated a coastal route possible 14 700. With science having pushed the timing of coastal back so spectacularly, in such short a time, a map the updated the Smithsonian article seemed called for. Predominance of human settlement in the proximity of the coast is ancient. Although 33% of North America’s coastline is sandy or shingle beaches, the Pacific Northwest is decidedly less so, which strongly suggests the migrants were skilled users of coastal seaworthy watercraft. Alarmingly, as the Arctic neared its 2019 winter maximum, the Bering Sea was virtually ice-free, and should be frozen right now, in April, but isn’t. map from Gandy, 2020, National Geographic Magazine
Upper Paleolithic life a beach Life for Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idàltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness, it seems, has always been a beach, in very significant part. Given that sea level jumped about 60 metres between 12 000 and 7000 years ago, evidence of the coastal migration into North America is not often stumbled upon, along today’s—until recently—remarkably long-stable shorelines. It seems reasonable to conclude that muchif not most of prehistoric human migration was led by coast-dwelling people. Regardless of whether life’s-a-beach is literally in human dna, failing to communicate that global-heating-caused-sea-level-rise has precipitated their eventual irretrievable loss, would be the mother of Great Mobilisation own goals. Coastal population, meanwhile, is increasing disproportionately with Cosby et al, 2018 calculating:
Ultra-coastal≤ 10 km population encompasses 14.6% of the global population on 4% of the landmass.
As the last significant landmass to be colonised by humans—circa 1280—Aotearoa has a rich oral record of coast-wise migration, bookending evidence spanning the 70 000-year Southern Dispersal route scenario. The saga over conflicting human-dispersal hypotheses makes a compelling case of paucity of evidence not being evidence of absence. That, coupled with New Zealand’s absurdly pertinent distinction of being the last significant landmass to form, from the sunken remains of the failed Zealandia continent, provide a unique vantage from which to command the attention of the world-weary, and not for the first time in the young country’s history. Grist, if any further was needed, for the Light the Fuse premise.
It is entirely probable that, from Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idàltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness’s earliest development and dispersal, littoral environments profoundly shaped the human physique. As with the orthodoxy regarding the peopling of the Americas, paucity of contrary fossil evidence may have protected older hypotheses. Either way, it is certain that polymath surgeon Peter Rhys Evans’ AttenboroughSir David, The Waterside Ape, BBC, 2016-praised The Waterside Ape: An Alternative Account of Human Evolution will not be the last word on the roundly anthropologist-derided suggestion. Overturning orthodoxy is a famous for its holdouts; it is even possible, for example, that the last laugh will go to those who long questioned the running-flapping-arms cursorial hypothesis of the evolution of avian coelurosaurI am with Sibusiso Biyela: dinosaur, “terrible lizard”, is the mother-of-all animal-group misnomers, having evolving from small bipedal reptiles weighing around 2–5 kg. The more closely bird-related clade, coelurosaur, is merely “hollow-tailed lizard”—birds.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Appendix 4 – On the Ephemerality of Beaches, “Upper Paleolithic”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Polycrisis to end all polycrises To presume to improve upon plain Polycrisis as the most useful name to describe the 20th century civilisational and biospherical juncture is to challenge no less a formidable thinker than economics historian Dr Adam Tooze. The Mahurangi Magazine ’s justification for this temerity is three-fold. Firstly, anthropogenic global heating trumps all other crises with its incontrovertibly unique combination of irreversibility and extinction-multiplying consequence. Secondly, climate-action mobilisation is beyond urgent—climate-action mobilisation must be optimised in every action designed to address the contemporary polycrisis. Thirdly—purely semantically—there have been numerous polycrises; there will likely be only one, planetary, Climate Polycrisis. Having said that, Light the Fuse unapologetically suggests squaring the circle with Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis.
To date, the received social-psychology wisdom has lectured the imperative to not alarm the audience, lest it be stampeded past collective action into collective despair. By that measure, Winston Churchill, today, would be being browbeaten to withhold any mention of the war, much less, fighting GermansWe will fight them in the hills. in the hills. Fortunately for humanity, Churchill wasn’t claiming that the Britain wouldn’t be overrun, but stating she would never surrender, and unambiguously backing that up with massive military and industrialfamously, with the help of Beaverbrook mobilisation.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Prologue, “to be emphatically named.”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Punctuation As with hyphenation, newspaper style guides urge a minimalist approach to punctuation, some large-circulation publications going so far as stipulating single quotes in lieu of single and double typogprettyraphic quotes. Probably needless to sayin all likelihood, in respect to even the occasional Mahurangi Magazine reader, this publication takes a punctuate-and-be-damned approach—in return, it welcomes reader’s lovingly suggested corrections and improvements. A far-from rare criticismthank you sincerely Mike of Cimino’s writing is the sentiment that are too many commas and not enough periods. Because a policy of continual improvement is practiced, the ratio does trend towards the reader-friendly—early readers, in effect, leaving the sheep tracks progressively easier to follow. Commas, periods, em- and en-dashes, and myriad other punctuation marks, are given their own headings.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Style-Guide, Punctuation
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Liquid Fuel from co2 Breakthrough: Although not the first to produce liquid fuel from carbon dioxide, Dr Ziyun Wang, right, in collaboration with researchers at Chinese institutions has developed a cost-effective alternative, particularly applicable—presumably—to powering those public transport modes that can’t practicably be grid-powered—intercity buses and inter island ferries spring to mind. Least said, meantime, of the far from affordable, sky-high cost of hydrogen-fuel-cell mobility. image University of Auckland
Rotary-valve 5-stroke modular generator Conceivably, the rotary-valve of Jim Clark–Bruce McLaren-astounding New Zealand engineer Ralph Watson could be married to Gerhard Schmitz’s stringently fuel-efficient 5-stroke to form the double-compound-v 3 heart of the ch2o2specifically, formic acid liquid-fueled small modular engine-generators required, at-scale, to zero-carbon-power everything from interisland ferries and intercity buses, to bulldozers. Regardless of their precise pedigree or configuration, such generators are needed in numbers commensurate with the Anthropocene biosphere’s current burden of one billionpredominantly private, 1.31 billion in 2020 light vehicle fleet, projected to be 2.21 billion by 2050 – International Energy Outlook 2021 private light vehicles—unless the profoundly inspired inside-out Wankel of Soviet-trainedDr Nikolai Shkolnik considers he was advantaged by his broader-than-American engineering training Dr Nikolai Shkolnik and his mit-trained son Dr Alec Shkolnik is indeed so superiorly thermally efficient—and can be made sufficiently clean-burning and reliable—that it does succeed in burying all new forms of the reciprocating piston engine, after its 312-year-and-counting reign. Same-same, in respect, and with the greatest respect, to the implausible-sounding Patented 1-Stroke double-swashplate, horizontal square-four engine—in either its silken opposed-8-pistontantalisingly, 8-piston but 4-cylinder!, or muscular unopposed-4-piston, configuration. In a halfways rational world, the megamobilisation global procurement process would already be scoping the Schmitz–Watson modular generator, possibly sized to power a householdor modest private light vehicle—essential in the deeply unfortunate localities where reliable grid-electricity is no longer, was never, or is never likely to be, reliably available.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 6 – Kerb-Pitching Staff Car, “Rotary-valve 5-stroke modular…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Engine of Our Great Mobilisation Dreams: In the twin once-you-see-it-you-can’t-unsee-it, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that sentiments of the magnificently enlightening, anonymous Bosnian YouTube content creator, the rotary-exhaust-valved-2-stroke solution of Alpha-Otto Technologies is genius. It also illustrates why the Great Mobilisation demands intelligent, technological collaboration, as opposed to endless, biosphere-dooming zero-sum, blind-market-leading-the-blind, business-as-usual, laisser-faireism. screen capture Alpha-Otto Technologies
Seriously undersquare rotary-exhaust-valved multi-fuel two-stroke In a non-dysfunctional world, sufficient billions would already have been thrown at exploring the potential of Alpha-Otto Technologies’s genius rotary-exhaust-valved two-stroke for the large-scale production of several options to be imminent. Many motorheads—including this writer, whose long-time friend is a large-vessel marine engineer—have lived their lives in abject ignorance of the fact that the world’s largest internal-combustion engines, such as those that power the vast bulk of shipping, are two-stroke. Testing the efficiency extremes of say an electrically supercharged 500cc, contra-rotating-balance-shafted, seriously undersquare—big-ship bore/stroke ratio of 0.384in the league of the 25,601.8-litre Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C—single-cylinder, would be brilliantly illuminating. That such a two-stroke engine might potentially compare acoustically with the unforgettable authority of the jap-powered Brough Superior, is a dark-soul-of-the-night-dispelling hope that would be impossible to put a price on—the modular multi-zero-carbonzero-carbon-emission-liquid-fuel engine of the Great Mobilisation, electric-hybrid powering everything from small marine vessels and auxiliary-in-motion-charging-road-vehicles to off-grid work camps.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 6 – Kerb-Pitching Staff Car, “rotary-exhaust-valved-2-stroke…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Six-degree-separated v 9 liquid-fuel-head fantasy A 6° v might not sound like any sort of v-cylinder head-turner at all, but a bank-angle of 6° might be as much as makes sense, given anything more would put the cylinder heads in the bank of big low-pressure pots too far away from those of their counterparts in the high-pressure bank to be efficient, much less be serviced by a single, rotary-valve valve-train. The almost-inline v 9’s potentially infinitely harmonisable exhaust acoustics, however, might sonorously compensate for its less-than-Detriot-90° v8 machismo.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 6 – Kerb-Pitching Staff Car, “V 9 modello staff car…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Straw boss Having misheard straw boss as store boss—an entirely understandable mondegreen given the saturation airplay Tennessee Ernie Ford’s version of Sixteen Tonswritten and first recorded by Merle Travis, 1946 was receiving in 1955—Cimino’s quest to obtain evidence of the existence of the song Light the Fuse , heard just that one time in his childhood, eluded a subsequent quarter-century of sporadic search-engine deployment. Although the actual term store boss is not used in Sixteen Tons, his two-plus-two-equals-store likely came from the last word of the last line of the song’s four-times-repeated chorus:
I owe my soul to the company store.
Surely, a mining company store had a store boss.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 1 – Light the Fuse, “straw /store…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Straw dynamite , although it is unlikely Cimino had ever heard the term:
Paleine or Straw Dynamite is a mixture of nitrocellulose, made from straw with nitroglycerine; it is manufactured in Sardinia and Belgium.
A Handbook on Modern Explosives: A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture and Use of Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Nitro-Glycerine, and Other Explosive Compounds, Including Collodion-Cotton Manuel Eissler mining engineer, 1897 p. 69
Setting for a spectacularly abortive black-powder blasting exercise, implicating multiple generations of its males, was the family’s next hometown. Background music of the episode was the crescendo-crashing Rapsody in Blue , emanating from the ultra-acoustically bright Waiwera mineral pools kiosk—the signature Bill Chick extensive glazing of which survived the incident.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 1 – Light the Fuse, “straw /store…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Winstone Road Reunion
Graham Hutchin’s title for the reunion of his mid-1960s house-mates Cimino Cole, Russell Young, and Jane Watts née Cole, hosted by he and his wife, Jenny, at their Hamilton residence on the occasion of Jane’s 2024 six-week visit from Hollywood, California. Winstone Road was the address of the PuketāpapaPuketāpapa, Makaurau (Mount Roskill, Auckland) house, rented from Cimino’s employers—two-men-and-a-boy carpenter/builders of low-rise houses and apartments. Cimino had long since forgotten the property’s address, although could have navigated there at a pinch.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Chapter 1 – Light the Fuse, “straw /store…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Waitangi regatta week Few, today, are aware that for the decade before World War II brought the Mahurangi Regatta to a halt, Waiwera hosted its after-match function. Held in the still extant, wonderfully named Waiwera Gaiety Hall, Waiwera provided the hospitality and entertainment that Scotts Landing couldn’t readily, after losing its unmaintained wharf. The Mahurangi Regatta, meantime, having reached peak private-light-vehicle access, is in the process of being reinvented, as a regatta week, culminating in an Aotea ki Mahurangi waka ama ocean race, possibly on Waitangi Day. The ocean race planned by Mahurangi-based Ngāti Maraeariki could reinvent Auckland Anniversary weekend the finale of a Tātaki Auckland Unlimitedpreviously ATEED—Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development-scale, “Waitangi week”. This is because of the part of the huge, international following enjoyed by the event’s inspiration—Hawaii’s Moloka'i Hoe—would beat a path to Mahurangi. Designed from the ground up to revolve around public transport and low-key, family-affordable camping, for many young Aucklanders, it would be their end-of-the-golden-weather opportunity to learn traditional camping, canoeing, sailing, and boat-building, skills.
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Appendix 1 – Buy Waiwera, “the sublime Mahurangi Regatta.”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
Waiwera mineral-free pools Had the supercilious engineer and his impenetrable industrial chemist had their way, future pilgrims to Waiwera would have bathed in electrically heated town-supply water—cyanuric-acid-stabilised and chlorinated. Their professional answer to the vexing complexity alleged was a comprehensive non-starter with the owner—although water would have been heat-pump heated, the owner was of a generation…
To be continued…
Return to text
Referenced :
Light the Fuse : Appendix 1 – Buy Waiwera, “naturally heated mineral water…”
Endnotes top | Endnotes bottom
‹ Bibliography | Style guide ›
Return to top of page | Endnotes
Disclosure The author of this novel modello is no longer the secretary of Mahurangi Action Incorporated or the Mahurangi Coastal Path Trust. The content published here, however, is that of the editorially independent, independently funded Mahurangi Magazine.
Dedicated to helping light the fuse of a democratic Great Mobilisation.
Copyright ©2025 Mahurangi Magazine.
All rights reserved.