We had a hardware store go broke here in the 80s. They had those little wall signs , with the wall wisdoms. "Don't stand out in the sun if your head melts" "Let all things be done decently and in order" and the one made popular during the Black Plague by those powerless to battle the fates "Eat. Drink. and Be Merry. For tomorrow we may die"
I was hoping for divine or extra-terrestrial intervention but that unopened box of disappointment is not coming before dear ol mother natures intervention will This is all happening in exactly the way the average human mind works the arrogance that we can fix it is just exactly the same arrogance that let us "improve" things to the point of disaster in the first place. Fun times.
The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in. 74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?' Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
We had a hardware store go broke here in the 80s.
ReplyDeleteThey had those little wall signs , with the wall wisdoms.
"Don't stand out in the sun if your head melts"
"Let all things be done decently and in order"
and the one made popular during the Black Plague
by those powerless to battle the fates
"Eat. Drink. and Be Merry. For tomorrow we may die"
I was hoping for divine or extra-terrestrial intervention
but that unopened box of disappointment
is not coming before dear ol mother natures intervention will
This is all happening in exactly the way the average human mind works
the arrogance that we can fix it
is just exactly the same arrogance that let us "improve" things
to the point of disaster in the first place.
Fun times.