What’s the least you can do to address climate change?

This opinion piece is so on-brand for the New York Times: “I Swore Off Air-Conditioning, and You Can, Too”. We’re facing a serious threat from global warming, so let’s tell all the little people to get off their butts and fix it rather than addressing the systemic contributions of capitalism and the petrochemical industry.

Most of those savings were likely the result of using fans instead of air-conditioning. We also kept other appliances and devices turned off as much as possible because they, too, generate heat. Dishwashers are double trouble, putting out heat and humidity. We don’t have one.

You can’t unplug the refrigerator, of course, but we keep ours set for just under 40 degrees, the highest safe temperature, according to the Food and Drug Administration. And we dry our laundry on the clothesline out back.

When it gets too hot, we lightly spray water on our arms, legs and faces; the water helps dissipate a lot of heat. A quick, cold shower or a little time spent with that all-American favorite, the lawn sprinkler, also can bring relief.

In summer we’ll spend as many of our at-home hours as we can outdoors, in the shady city park down the street or on our screened porch.

Well, fine. I agree with all that. We do many of those things, too — we’ve got an ’emergency air conditioner’ in the window of our bedroom that we’ve used for about a week this year, but otherwise, yes, we mainly get by on low-energy alternatives. I think it’s a good idea to be mindful about how our lives impact the environment, and turning off an appliance now and then is smart and helpful. But does this actually substantially offset the fact that we live in cities that are dependent on the automobile? Worse, we’re surrounded by pervasive marketing telling us to buy massive trucks, that we have to go to a mall with a gigantic parking lot to buy cheap plastic widgets we don’t need made in China, while wearing clothes from Shein that we’ll throw into a landfill next week. There are a lot of sensible changes we could make in our lifestyles that the New York Times would get in trouble with their advertisers if they started promoting them.

OK, here’s the Batagaika Crater in Siberia.

That’s a huge “retrogressive thaw slump”, a hole that is visible from space and is steadily growing as the permafrost thaws and its edges collapse. Here’s a drone photo of the slow-motion disaster:

Spectacular and horrifying.

Permafrost covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.

One study estimated that permafrost thaw could emit as much planet-warming gases as a large industrial nation by 2100 if industries and countries don’t aggressively rein in their own emissions today.

How big is the contribution of this one feature in the landscape to climate change?

In a study published in the journal Geomorphology in June, researchers used satellite and drone data to construct 3D models of the megaslump and calculate its expansion over time.

They found that about 14 Pyramids of Giza’s worth of ice and permafrost had thawed at Batagay. The crater’s volume increases by about 1 million cubic meters every year.

“These values are truly impressive,” Alexander Kizyakov, the study’s lead author and a scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told BI in an email.

“Our results demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs,” he added.

The researchers also calculated that the megaslump releases about 4,000 to 5,000 tons of carbon each year. That’s about as much as the annual emissions from 1,700 to 2,100 US homes’ energy use.

If only everyone in the USA would sprinkle a little water on their arms rather than turning on the air conditioner, we could compensate for that problem. Or better yet, think of all the energy you could save by cancelling your subscription to the NY Times!

Really, though, we need something more than these piecemeal token changes in individual behavior.

“Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Remember Robert Morris? Pastor at one of the largest megachurches in the country, Gateway Church, that draws in a 100,000 suckers every week? Or did you manage to erase him from your memory after learning that he was guilty of molesting a 12 year old girl? If so, good for you, and stop reading because I’m going to remind you of the man.

There have been developments.

Last week, a pastor who oversaw all of Gateway’s campuses departed amid an undisclosed “moral issue,” becoming the latest in a series of changes for the church: The cancellation of its annual conference. The departure of Morris’ successor. The renaming of its Houston campus and an exodus of worshippers.

An “exodus of worshippers” sounds great, and is what I’d expect: empty megachurches as parishioners wake up and realize that it’s all a sham run by con artists and that they can do better with their life than getting their morality from a pedophile. I’m relieved to see that some people did exactly that.

For Emily High, the 17 years she spent as a church member came to a halt because she felt betrayed, she said.

“It’s anger, it’s all the range of emotions,” High told WFAA. “Being a pedophile, a molester, that’s not OK.”

Yes! Except…Ms High represents a minority.

The church has seen a decrease of 17% to 19% in weekend services attendance, a church spokesperson told CNN.

I can do math. That means there are still 80,000 fools and tools shuffling into those churches every weekend. The Christian grift continues!

JD Vance has so many skeletons in his closets

They just keep tumbling out. It doesn’t do any good to tell him to shut up because, for a young politician, he has spoken volumes of bullshit in his past, and it’s all coming to light. In particular, he does not like women.

In 2021, he was interviewed by The Federalist (big red flag right there).

“To be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country,” said Vance, who is currently the Republican senator from Ohio.

Though he generally didn’t specify the gender of the childless people he was criticizing, the context of his remarks made it seem he was primarily speaking to women.

Citing a conversation that had recently unfolded on Twitter, Vance described a “ridiculous effort by millennial feminist writers” to talk about why there are good reasons not to have children and how some of them were glad they didn’t have kids and even to encourage “people who had had children to talk about why they regretted having children.”

He ripped these unnamed “mediocre millennial journalists” and suggested that if they’re advocating for women to focus on advancing their careers over making babies, they are “pathetic.”

“Not enough people have accepted that if they put their entire life’s meaning into their credential, into where they went to school, into what kind of job they have ― if you put all of your life’s meaning into that, you’re going to be the sort of person who asks women to talk about how they regret having children,” Vance said.

He added, “You’re going to be a sad, lonely, pathetic person and you’re going to know it internally.”

I don’t need to say anything in response. I’ll just quote the early 20th century Japanese feminist and political radical, Kanno Sugako.

“Among the many annoying things in the world, I think men are the most annoying. When I hear them carrying on interminably about female chastity, I burst out laughing…. I greet with utmost cynicism and unbridled hatred the debauched male of today who rattles on about good wives and wise mothers. Where do all of these depraved men get the right to emphasize chastity? Before they begin stressing women’s chastity, they ought to perfect their own male chastity, and concentrate on becoming wise fathers and good husbands!”

Kanno Sugako was later hanged for threatening the Emperor. Vance probably thinks that was righteous.

You need an atheist to explain you should respect grieving families?

If you want to see a classic case study of how the American media has degenerated into uselessness, look at how they’re handling the Arlington scuffle. They’ve been skirting around the issue, trying to avoid the blunt truth: the Trump campaign is run by a gang of boors who are incapable of courtesy and restraint. At least the Columbia Journalism Review tells it like it is.

On Tuesday, NPR’s Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman broke the news that Trump and members of his campaign appeared to violate federal law during an appearance at Arlington to mark the third anniversary of the deadly attack on US troops that punctuated the deeply flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Members of Trump’s staff had sought to film the event for a campaign video, and got into an altercation with an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who tried to stop them. Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign official, strongly denied that any altercation had taken place and said the campaign was ready to release a video to prove his point. (They have yet to release it.) It wasn’t surprising that these two NPR pros with deep knowledge of the military, and sources among veterans, were the first with the news. The Washington Post followed with a story the same day, as did the New York Times. The public took note.

As more publications followed suit, the Arlington stories suffered a dreadful fate: they all started to sound the same. News outlets ended up with articles bogged down in parsing federal law, carefully defining what exactly counts as an altercation, and quoting milquetoast official statements like “There was an incident and a report was filed.”

Look. I’m a heretical atheist who is blunt and sometimes rude about disrespecting religious traditions, but even I know that you have to be kind and circumspect with grieving families (do I even need to say something so obvious?) I spent some time in civilian cemeteries in July, and even there I knew you don’t make a scene. You don’t annoy people in those circumstances, and you don’t make excuses. You apologize, you back away, you stop what you’re doing. Not the Trump campaign!

Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially those with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened—and, crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign team had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.

I don’t care if you found someone who invited you to caper in a graveyard, you’re supposed to be considerate to all the people visiting. Trump was of course politicizing the most recent deaths so he can criticize Biden. It was tacky and inappropriate.

But as any veteran knows in their bones, the solemnity of the ceremony is exactly why the unauthorized photographer had no business being there—regardless of who invited them. Section 60, the part of the cemetery where the incident occurred, is one of the most sacred places for this generation of troops. It is where those who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. Those graves are visited not by tourists looking for historical figures, but by mothers and fathers visiting their fallen son or daughter. In Section 60, wounds are still raw. Political activity there is never appropriate, and under the law, only cemetery staffers and approved photographers are permitted to film or take pictures there.

Readers needed to know that, when you visit Arlington, you might not know exactly what you’re supposed to do when confronted by those rows of headstones, but you damn sure know what you’re not supposed to do. But the coverage this week left many readers with the impression that the whole thing might have been a bureaucratic mix-up, or some tedious violation of protocol. It focused on bland horse-race coverage so common during election season, rather than clearly stating what really took place: an egregious and willful violation of long-standing norms. What was missing from the coverage was a willingness to quickly and decisively state what a grievous insult the whole debacle was to the dignity of Arlington. The sacred had been profaned.

I don’t believe in the sacred, but otherwise, yes: the Trump campaign has insulted the military and the dead. Own it, Donald. Making excuses just makes it worse. It’s time for him to apologize…which may not be possible for him.

They’re not really that big

The headline says, “Giant spiders the size of rats make comeback in UK after nearing extinction, RSPB says“. Nah, I know these spiders. That’s Dolomedes. We call them fishing spiders here in the colonies.

They are large spiders, but not as big as rats…unless you’ve got nothing but stunted, runty, starveling rats out there in the UK, scarcely big enough to put onna stick.

I’m surprised that they (the spiders, not the rats) were endangered — they seem to be doing fine here, in a part of the country with lots of wetlands that get some protection (but not enough) because they’re a haven for game birds. It’s good to hear that Dolomedes is making a comeback, though, in part because the zoos are raising more spiders.

That looks familiar, that’s how I raise my spiders. I hope they have many more vials than that, if they’re hoping to repopulate the whole of Britain.

I don’t think even minuscule UK rats would fit in those vials, you know.

If you want to know what I looked like when I was 4…

…the answer is “ADORBS”. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there.

I uploaded a test clip of a short 8mm film recording, with some minimal processing to make it presentable (little tweaks of the white balance, contrast, a tiny bit of smoothing, etc.) If you have suggestions about how I can clean it up further, let me know.

This is Christmas Eve, 1960. You all remember it well, I’m sure.

Paul Clarence Westad (1917-1989)

I’ve been scanning these old 8mm recordings I inherited from my grandfather, and it’s been a rather distressing experience. It’s the combination of extreme nostalgia and resurrected regret, and the hardest part has been all the memories of my grandfather himself. We had this complicated, shifting relationship that changed for the worse as we got older, in particular, as he degenerated in terrible, tragic ways. He was an important part of my childhood, but when he died in 1989, I couldn’t bring myself to go to his funeral. Yet now, as I see these old recordings, I miss him and wish I could see him again, and also wish I could have done something to prevent his self-destruction.

One constant reminder of our connection is our name. I was named after my grandfather. I was his first grandchild. Strangely, no one called me “Paul” when I was born — I was PZ. I didn’t learn my full name until I was 5 and was sent off to school with a nametag that stated my proper name, and told that I have to answer to “Paul” or I might miss the bus to take me home, which sounded like a terrible threat. After that, my family started calling me “Little Paul” — Grandpa was Big Paul, of course — so now I was facing diminution on top of risking not being able to come home. I have always been confused about my name, my self, and my identity, and I don’t mentally attach a name to myself at all. I’m always just the bewildered narrator trying to figure out who I am.

I did not resent my grandfather at all, though. I thought he was a pretty cool guy. He served in WWII, but he did not like to talk about that at all. He’d deflect, and talk about his aspirations before the war, instead. He grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, but what he wanted to be was an architect or an engineer. He had kept a big dossier of designs and skillfully drafted plans for houses that he’d done as a high school student in the 1930s, and he kept them for his entire life, stored away in a drawer, and only brought out when I’d ask to see them. He did not get to be an architect or engineer.

His family was poor, and could only afford to send one child to college, and that was Lyla, his older sister, who went off to become a teacher. One day when I was very young, I overheard Lyla tearfully apologizing to my grandfather, saying he should have been the one to go to college, that he was the smart one with high promise (I think this was at a point in his life where it was becoming obvious that he was swirling down the drain.) That’s always stuck with me, that education is important if you want to better yourself, and my grandfather is an example of what happens if you’re denied it.

He instead went to work as a farmhand, got married to my grandmother, Nora Berg, and had a daughter, his only child, my mother, Darlene Westad. He enlisted in the army in 1944, where he was recruited as a “Skilled craneman, derrickman, hoistman, and shovelman” and was shipped off to the Pacific theater, where he drove a bulldozer and built airfields under perilous conditions. He never talked about the war, except a few times to mention the horrible conditions and barracks full of lizards and snakes. But then, most veterans don’t like to talk about the war, I’ve noticed.

Before he was mustered out, he’d moved his family out of the frigid farmlands of Minnesota to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and he joined them in 1946. He had bought a nice little house in Kent, Washington and got a job with the state highways department, and built roads in Washington state. By all accounts, it was a very good job, paid well, gave him plenty of time to indulge his hobbies of camping, fishing, and woodworking, and he built a wonderful workshop in his backyard. He taught me how to use a table saw and a lathe and a router there, and we built simple little projects together.

Once I was born and old enough, that is. One of the side effects of the location where he bought his house is that there was this big rowdy family of rogues and rascals living on the other side of the railroad tracks, about two blocks away, and one of the fellows over there eventually seduced his daughter and eloped off to Idaho with her, when she was just 16. Next thing he knew, she was pregnant, and presto, I was born in 1957. I would get hints that Grandpa did not much care for this Jim Myers guy, but the conflict was mostly soothed away, probably because he got to be a doting grandfather. And he was! He was a great and caring person when I was a child.

But then the cracks started to appear. Sometime in the 1960s, he lost the good construction job. He later got a job as a custodian for the Kent school district, and I’d sometimes help him out — I learned how to use a buffer! We kids had no idea what was going on at first, but we figured it out. For me, the light bulb moment was the day my brother and I were left with Grandpa for a while, and he shooed us out to the car and took us on a terrifying drive across town, weaving, nearly hitting a telephone pole or skidding into a ditch, until we reached a small dark establishment on the other side of town, and he told us to wait in the car while he took care of business. We waited. We waited for a long time. We eventually got out and went to the door, which said “No minors allowed”, and we crept in anyway, and there was Grandpa, slumped over a table with three empty shot glasses in front of him.

Oh yeah, Grandpa was a very soggy alcoholic.

We should have figured that out from the fact that every morning, first thing after getting up, he’d pop the top on a can of cheap beer, light up a cheap cigar, and pour the beer with great sloppy gulping sounds down his throat. Then he’d pop another. And another. Most mornings he’d be in a bleary-eyed haze by 10am. His wood shop was neglected. His relationship with our grandmother became increasingly cold and bitter. His grandchildren were sad and disillusioned, only coming by the house to see our grandmother.

Once I went off to college and eventually a career, I became the worst grandson, rarely visiting, actively avoiding him. I missed the worst of his descent, fortunately: he became verbally abusive and hostile, cursing my sisters who still tried to get together with our grandmother and help her out. He was loudly racist and misogynistic and hateful, and even threatened violence, although at that point he could barely get out of his chair to act on it. I heard all of this second hand, because I wasn’t going to go anywhere near the old man.

We all expected that he was well on his way to a gradual decline and death, and I was resigned to the fact that I’d someday get a call to tell me that Grandpa had a heart attack/slipped into an alcoholic coma/choked on his own vomit, but no! Fate had a cruel twist for him and was about to send him into a new Hell.

Remember the cigar? Grandpa was a non-stop, heavy cigar smoker. It made gift-giving easy, because we’d always just get him a box or two of those cheap Ben Franklin perfectos. He’d chew on those things all day long, and we collected those empty cigar boxes, which were great as pencil boxes, or places to store my dead bug collection, or bricks for building fantasy castles. Our house was full of them!

He was diagnosed with an oral cancer, and of course he neglected to do anything about it until his jaw was rotten with it. He was hospitalized, and the only thing they could do to save his life was to completely remove his jaw. I heard that my grandmother fainted when she saw him after the surgery — he looked like some zombie ghoul from EC comics. They removed one of his ribs, sculpted it, and implanted it in his hip to grow, and would later give him a reconstructed jawbone, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

He was a chronic alcoholic who hadn’t been sober in years, and now he was going to have to dry out cold turkey! He was wrecked. He had the DTs. He suffered hellishly with the combination chemotherapy and alcohol withdrawal. I, the bad grandson, didn’t go anywhere near him at this time. Other members of the family bore the burden.

He survived, and I saw him a few times in his later years. He was still sitting in the same old easy chair, but now instead of a can of beer he’d have a can of Ensure. He wasn’t cussing anyone out, because he could barely speak with this weak, toothless, chinless bridge of reconstructed bone for a jaw. He was hollowed out and empty eyed.

He later went into the hospital for further cancer treatments, got up to try to walk to the toilet, and had a heart attack and died.

Well, that was a depressing story.

At least I still remember the good grandpa who taught me how to measure and cut wood, who gave me his old drafting tools, who had a boat and took us out fishing, who every weekend would get together with his elderly parents to play cribbage with them. And who also, most relevant right now, bought an 8mm camera in the 1950s because he wanted to record memories of his family, especially his grandkids, and who taught me how to run the projector, and how to splice and repair the film. He told me I was supposed to preserve these movies for the whole family, and now I guess I am.

Too many Christmases, and not enough Christmases

I have finished watching all these 8mm recordings my grandfather left to me, which have been converted into 8 20-30 minute mp4s. At some point I have to edit these down to make them presentable, because a) they’re in random order, b) the clips within each mp4 are in random order, and c) we are not a family of cinematographers or directors. Here are a few challenges for me:

  • What I’ve got is the story of the whole Myers family from 1958-1985. Except there is no story, it’s a hodge-podge of brief moments.
  • A lot of it is told from the perspective of doting parents and grandparents who are thrilled about their kids. It’s going to have limited appeal.
  • The filmographers are terrible. They don’t believe in dwelling on a single person or group, but jitter all over the place.
  • The actors all suck. The camera gets pointed at them, and what do they do? They stop, stand, and stare. The action freezes.
  • There are long stretches where the camera pans over scenery. The actors may suck, but at least they’re alive. Do I really need to see that hill? I can tell when my dad is wielding the camera, because he really likes lingering over the landscape.
  • There are a limited and repeated set of circumstances that trigger the family to haul out the camera: mainly, Christmases and summer vacation. There are too many Christmases, and sadly, not enough Christmases. Also, every summer we all immediately crowd into a tiny wading pool.
  • The biases are obvious — they used the camera a lot more when it was new. That means I have a lot of video of me at age 1 toddling stupidly about, but not as much of my baby sister Lisa. If I edit this to match the representation in the shots, it’s going to look like a vanity project.
  • Way too much sweetness. Seeing my great-grandparents laughing and hugging and kissing in their 90s was a bit overwhelming. We really had a happy family, but it’s exaggerated because the sadness and loss was never filmed.

I have a 3-day weekend coming up. Maybe I’ll be able to put together a short video from a small slice of this mess over the weekend — something that my surviving brothers and sisters will appreciate, at least. I have a project!