Obama-raum and the New Southern Strategy
In a stunning revelation yesterday, Rush Limbaugh revealed the suspicion that the Obama Administration has directed the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, to develop a...
View ArticleUSGS: Mercury in EVERY fish in EVERY stream tested
The USGS released a report last week that is quite stunning in its implications. The major findings from USGS Mercury in Stream Ecosystem studies of 291 stream systems across the US are that...
View ArticleNow or Later?: Logs, Coal, even Healthcare
Humans have been trained by our DNA, our evolutionary imperatives, our technology, and our commercial culture, to pay attention to "now." Video games, political distraction, even intoxication --...
View ArticleQuestioning the culture of Science
This will be a mulling, musing diary, rather than one positing a stance; asking more questions than providing answers. I was driving in Canada last Sunday, listening to the fabulous CBC. I was...
View ArticlePunctuation Police: It's not "it's," it's "its"
In Devilstower's otherwise majesterially beautiful This Corporate Life, a review of a marvelous book promoting a key reality about society, I noticed a great instance of the problematic punctuation...
View ArticleWatching predators collapse
Two stories in the last week really chilled me: the likely collapse of the grizzlies in Canada, and the likely starvation of walruses in Alaska. Scared the hell out of me, because of what else I've...
View ArticleI'm an expert -- wait, no, I'm an amateur re environmental collapse
I had the delightful, horrific, and satisfying experience today of discovering that I'm an amateur. Over the last two plus years, I've read easily more than 15,000 news stories on the converging...
View ArticleCredulous Rubes: the wingnut marketplace
Duh. I've finally twigged on why the right-wing noise machine has such volume, and makes so much money. It's because advertisers -- on wingnut radio, television, and Web -- want access to credulous...
View ArticleCO2 *reverse* -- what would it look like?
Because my buddy of 30 years and I have been watching and bequipping "environmental collapse" stories for two years, we have learned that there's a fairly predictable trajectory of the Truly Scary...
View ArticleThe burden of knowledge
I've discovered I can't talk to my wife, my kids, or my friends about what it is I now know. Surprisingly, I can talk to my 80-year-old Mom, but that's about it. I spend an hour or two a day -- and...
View ArticleThe "Promise Economy" and the status quo
For more than a decade now, the almost-poetic tonalities of "The Promise Economy" have resonated in my head, as I've watched that economy evolve. "The Promise Economy," as I see it, is the economy of...
View ArticleBurns, Haggis, environmental reconstruction, and metaphors
Haggis is a dish served on a long plate. It inserts sheeps' lungs, organs, and spices into the sheep's stomach, bakes appropriately, and is provided to a "Robert Burns night" group (with or without...
View ArticleDamn we're good at it.
What other species has changed the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere and the biosphere, in only a couple hundred years? What other living critter has so successfully transformed entire...
View ArticleGeoengineering vs. Superengineering
A wide array of geoengineering 'solutions' to the catastrophic rise in atmospheric CO2 have been proposed recently: automated cloud ships plying the oceans spraying fine mist into the air; jillions of...
View ArticleOok and Eek Eat Up the World
We humans have a deep tradition, one that goes back to our earliest days, huddled around the fire, trading Ook and Eek jokes. That tradition is "use it up and then move on." The problem, of course, is...
View ArticleScientist: 'There's still time' to save the oceans
This morning, as I generally do, I was scanning and searching out news on our burgeoning environmental collapse. News to make a tweetish quip about, trying to infuse some humor into what is a quite...
View ArticleI never write about HCR
My gig is environmental collapse. What the hell am I talking HCR for? But hearing Obama's words: But we also know what the future will look like if we don’t act – if we let this opportunity pass for...
View ArticleBeck and Survival Seeds: unintentionally correct
The laughter about the Survival Seed Scam and the "Crisis Garden" promotions of one of Glenn Beck's advertisers -- seeds in sealed cans that can be buried so they're not confiscated by the evil...
View ArticleScary predators
Since Ook and Eek were sitting around the fire grunting about how to kill that cave bear, predators have instilled fear in humans. Killing scary predators seems like rational policy. Wolves and sharks...
View ArticleSaving the economy by burning it
I've been mad about this for days. The UN's CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) meeting in Doha is again demonstrating -- not unlike the travesty of the Copenhagen climate...
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