You already know I despise marketing, advertising, and the people involved in it. The reason is simple, as I have said before: in order to do advertising you generally have to promote something as being better than you know it to be.
I’m pretty sure they won’t listen, now.
A decade ago, when people spoke in hushed tones about the potential climate disaster, one scary harbinger was the break-up of the Thwaites Glacier. They used to call it “the doomsday glacier.”
[Read more…]
The old saying is that one should not watch how politics are done, or sausage is made. I’ve seen the latter and it wasn’t too bad, but a visit to the cheese caves in Roquefort, France, put me off cheese for a long time. The smell was unforgettable. I imagine that I’d feel the same way about politics if I sat in on some meetings.
The COP26 meetings are over and they turned out exactly as expected. There were some particularly horrifying moments, such as when Nobel Price recipient Barack Obama, who earlier said:
“You wouldn’t always know it, but it [oil production] went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas – that was me, people.”
… decided to lecture everyone about how bad fossil fuels are. You can’t make this shit up.
As I predicted, the aspirational goal of +1.5C is in the toilet: coal and oil producing countries are talking about “tailing off” new production, meaning “we’re going to keep drilling and digging and we’ll tail it off in a decade or two once it’s no longer our problem because we’re old people and we’re going to slide into our graves and leave you kids holding the bag.” +2.5C is the new aspirational goal and, frankly, I think humanity will blow that one, too.
My official policy on book recommendations is, briefly: you will find it worthwhile or I’ll refund your money. [stderr] I note that nobody has ever taken me up on that offer in many years (I had a similar offer on my personal website before I started stderr here) so either my recommendations are awesome, or nobody cares. And, my official recommended books list, with this new entry, is [stderr]
Mario Savio:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
I’m referring, of course, to humans.
In Zen practice, a koan is a puzzling question or comment that a student is given to meditate upon, usually intended to help them break out of dualist-mode thinking.
US corporate bankruptcy laws are tuned to make it easier for polluting companies to walk away from their mess, wash their hands, and move on.