??yer thots??
As Kate says, "You Can't Fix Stupid" (well, probably lots of people have said that). And as Kentlee was wont to say, back in the day, "Money Goes Where It's Appreciated". Both have the Ring of Truth.
Much of the last couple of months of reading has fed into the thots of the moment. Start with this podcast: Mark Blyth at Radio Open Source, about 30 golden minutes. Many lovely summary insights, just one of which [the example of 'going off the grid'] is
Even to go off the grid, you need everybody else. And what we've done is we've built a society of complete mutual dependence. Ideologically we think that we're frontier libertarians. You know what we're really like? We're like housecats. Housecats think that they're fiercely independent, and they're completely oblivious to the complex structures that actually keep them alive. And that's essentially who we are. We're housecat libertarians.Another Radio Open Source podcast that's relevant to present situations: A New History of Humanity (re: Graeber and Wengrow, which I continue to read --see a just-in review)
Another book I've found eloquent as ethnography of the present day: Wildland: The Making of America's Fury (and of course you doubtless already know about Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America and American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good, right?
My friend Bryan Alexander is one of those futurist chappies, and in this piece he writes a review of Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock, which I recently read, along with Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For the Future. Cli-fi, who knew?
I'm not sure if you'd be able to access the next 3, but I've captured the text just in case:
The Age of Apocalypse and Indifference: We Should Probably Care More About the End of Human Civilization. So Why Don't We? (text captured)
Catastrophe is the New Normal. Are We Ready? What Life Will Be Like in an Age Where Catastrophe is the New Normal (text captured)
A century of Criminality: How the car and gas industry knew about the health risks of leaded fuel but sold it for 100 years anyway (text captured)
Arctic Ocean started getting warmer Decades earlier than we Thought (Sarah Collins)
And Maria Popova is always worth reading:
Dreams, Consciousness, and the Nature of the Universe
Against Neoliberal Dogma: Art And Creativity
Neoliberal thinking also promotes the idea that everything has to conform to maximum efficiency. Again, how or why would you apply such an approach in a creative field? A priori you don't even know what you're going to run into. That is the very essence of being creative: to discover something, to allow oneself to be surprised. Maximum efficiency cuts out surprises (because they might waste time).
Mapping 100 Years of Tornado Data
Mapping Climate Change Conflicts: How Climate Fuels Deadly Conflict
And from today's New York Times, Rising From the Antarctic, a Climate Alarm (probably not accessible without subscription, but very well done... worth the $$$)
...a simulation model created by adding a change resistance subsystem to the World3 model of Limits to Growth. This is necessary since the crux of the sustainability problem is how to overcome change resistance..
COVID Timewarp (Alison Snyder)
It's not that we haven't Been Warned. I'd cite
And of course there's more. Finish for now with two trenchant quotes that fit into this somewhere:
Wit is more than a mere cleverness or ingenuity... one's capacity for puncturing the commonsense mythologies of one's culture, making surprising connections between disparate phenomena ... and regarding the resulting big picture (that one has in this fashion discovered) ironically.
(The Adventurer's Glossary)and
The field of agnotology (the study of deliberate spreading of confusion) shows how ignorance and doubt can be purposefully manufactured... (viz.) environmentalist Bill McKibben on Twitter in regard to climate change: "We spent a long time thinking we were engaged in an argument about data and reason …. But now we realize it's a fight over money and power."
(Language Log Word of the Day)