In Honor of COP26

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.

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This Sort Of Thing Will Be A Problem

Blogging is not my “job” but it has forced me to become a dedicated follower of news. There was a time years ago when I read the front page of Google news and the New York Times and thought I was pretty tuned-in to what is going on. Since then I’ve learned not to congratulate myself and to seek, instead, the news that’s not fit to print: The Intercept, Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, and local/topical news. Putting customized search strings in Google news is another good trick – in case you’re wondering how I manage to scavenge up so much horror about the F-35 program: it comes to me automatically.

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A New Recommended Book!

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]

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By Now This Should be No Surprise

Recent conversations about small modular reactors reminded me about the US government’s history of leaving and losing nuclear reactors in various places, during the cold war. To be fair, the Soviets lost a few, too. And, even recently – one aspect of the Russian submarine Kursk that sunk in 2000 [wik] that didn’t get a lot of air-play was the fact that a nuclear reactor and several nuclear warheads sank with it. That must have made recovering the wreck interesting, and I’m sure that NATO intelligence was skipping about with glee at a chance to literally dissect a Russian ballistic missile sub. I wonder how many times the Soviets got to perform similar dissections on US gear?

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Like Hitting Yourself in the Face With a Hammer

I recently listened to the audiobook version of a series of lectures and Q&A with Noam Chomsky. If you have problems with being depressed into immobility by world politics and economics, I don’t recommend it. This is a sort-of review of the audiobook, with some comments by me and some quotes, and I plan to, over time, post a few passages from it.

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I Suppose Corruption Is Inevitable

Lacking a better term for it, I mentally think of my deep suspicion regarding civilization as “anti-social” because it is, literally, a distrust of society verging on the belief that maybe civilization will turn out to be a bad idea in the long run. In my darker moments I think that civilization may be a great big hack that was perpetrated by the power-hungry, and those seeking luxurious lives. It’s as if they invented the idea of “lets be a ‘people’ so that they could be king of ‘a people’ instead of just layabout greedy thugs.

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The World’s Governments Continue To Fuck Around

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!

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