Arresting Visuals
Documenting Climate Change by Air, Land and Sea Oh Dear: Photos Show What Humans Have Done To The Planet National Geographic, Climate Change Photos Dry Lake Bed, Bolivia, NY Times
Individual Choices Don’t Really Count
The best way to reduce your personal carbon emissions: don’t be rich There has been much talk about how individuals can fight climate change through making personal choices. Well, finally we have a study, reported by David Roberts in Vox, that proves out how silly most of that discussion has been. The study concluded that …
The Worst Case Scenario, in Summary
Human Civilization Isn’t Prepared to Survive Climate Change If you need to be brought up to speed on the worst horrors possible with climate change, this piece is a good place to begin. Author Luke Darby interviews David Spratt, research director of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Australia. The very broad strokes …
Waking Up
It’s been barely a month since I began my hiatus from the blog, and I feel like Rip Van Winkle. You know that story—Rip sleeps twenty years through the American Revolution and wakes to find everything changed. I took time off in hopes of getting a handle on the daily mutations enacted by our delusional …
Another Thought about the
Marvelous Cat Fight
Rick Wilson, the former Republican strategist turned author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, has always been a noisemaker. His acerbic criticisms of Trump are well documented. Now he speaks out about the recent Trump-Musk debacle and raises an important point many have overlooked because we are all on tenterhooks to find out who’s the biggest …
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Marvelous Cat Fight”
Harris’s Overhyped Interview: We Learned Nothing
The problem was not so much with Dana Bash, though she let Kamala off the hook too often. The problem was that the Vice President kept hiding behind Biden’s coattails and spoke mostly in generalities. She kept saying, “My values haven’t changed.” Dana should have asked, “Well then, what are your policies for carrying them …
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The Devolution of Bad Taste
Bad taste is a complicated subject. I know this because I’ve been exploring it as a subject for a book. If you think about it, we are living in a world dominated by bad taste, however you want to define the term. It used to be that bad taste could be shuffled off by the …
Living Here, Not There
Oaxaca, where I live, is a very transient community. Of the Americans living here, many visit for a few months a year or less, then move back in the summer to enjoy the heat, humidity, and dementia of U.S. culture. Snowbirds, we call them. They come from Canada too. The transiency of this place also …
Coming to Oaxaca
Three days after I arrived here in September 2009, I was with my new Mexican friends celebrating Independence Day in the Zocalo. So were roughly a thousand others, and we were so densely packed that the crowd’s movement moved you. Some pinche ladrón lifted my wallet, containing a lot of cash, recently retrieved from an …
Biden’s Presser
I’m not a media critic, but having just watched Joe Biden’s press conference I thought he did an excellent job. I used to program such events for a former governor in days long past and in a very different climate. So let me give some personal reactions to a mostly successful performance. The present-day climate …
How Bad is Bad Enough?
Emissions—the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading We may avoid the very worst climate scenario. But the next-worst is still pretty awful. ‘Collapsologie’: Constructing an Idea of How Things Fall Apart What if many of the predictions of upcoming climate disaster have been based on faulty premises? What if the worst-case scenario has been way …