…well…this is special…pull a DOT together when the broadband’s out

…ok…well…there was a thing about permissions I remember from somewhere…that feels appropriate

There is, however, one thing on Instagram that makes my skin itch and fills me with a strange blend of self-hatred and general misanthropy. It’s when a creator of content offers me permission for something they assume I experience shame over, without, of course, knowing me and my singular bucket of shames. I’ve come to think of this as “permission culture,” and it comes from all sorts, including clothing companies, mental health professionals (self-designated and otherwise), celebrities, and at least a few women I—and probably you—went to college with.

“It’s OK if your house isn’t clean… It’s OK if your old jeans don’t fit… It’s OK if you don’t make your kid’s birthday cake… It’s OK to be lazy… It’s OK to be motivated… It’s OK if you are a mom who works… It’s OK if you are a mom who doesn’t work,” and a hundred other configurations, including the ne plus ultra of permission culture, “It’s OK if you are not OK.”

Permission culture is the love child of confession culture and self-care culture. “Confession culture” being the early-aughts phenomenon of someone, generally a woman, publicly sharing intimate details about the hard and ugly parts of life; “self-care culture” being the later-aughts phenomenon, adapted and extrapolated from the much more political writings of activists like Audre Lorde, in which someone, generally a woman, encourages others to protect themselves from the hard and ugly parts of life by doing everything from napping to taking expensive vitamin supplements. Both strains of discourse were born out of a real need to permit women more honesty about the stresses they experience and what it takes to heal from them. Permission culture bundles the two together, marrying confession with therapy, all to a depressingly hollow effect. Once upon a time, everyone needed a therapist. Today, everyone wants to be a therapist. I don’t think we are better off.

…&…I’m not inclined to argue with the premise of the piece…which is largely about how it impacts the fairer sex

The premise of permission culture is: Women don’t know how to be upset or express themselves when they are upset, women all feel oppressed by domesticity and having children, women all feel oppressed by diet and fashion, and, most of all, women are victims to productivity culture. That many of the most frequent granters of permission to escape productivity culture seem to be diligent brand builders themselves is an irony hard to miss.

…but…I don’t think you’d need to look too hard for the odd bloke who’d find it a familiar refrain…not in a tenuous sense like “it’s ok if your internet’s out & you’re meant to produce a post”…but…there’s a reason that in acronym alphabetics CALM stands for campaign against living miserably…& iirc that one was aimed at the fellas…&…we could go a few rounds on what’s up with the OK part

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/are-you-okay/

…but…there was a serious reason it came to mind

But it’s not the gentle hypocrisy of online personas, which is nothing new, that bothers me. Instead, it is the way the “It’s OK…” formula infantilizes its audience, acting as though our very real and textured struggles with how to be a person and live a meaningful life can be fixed with such simple solutions. In the logic of permission culture, those of us making decisions about whether to make holiday cookies, seek a promotion, or attempt to lose weight are all just waiting to be liberated by someone on our phones telling us that “society” doesn’t need us to do anything we don’t want to do. I often have a very good list of why I should do something, and a good list of why I shouldn’t do something, and while gendered societal pressures surely affect me, they are but one of a constellation of factors that make up my messy existence.

Permission culture has a particularly big blindspot to our feelings of obligation to others […]

…&…for reasons which ought to become clear…I’m going with it going for “”I’m OK with that”, too

I know there are good intentions here. I know it well enough to feel a bit bad writing this. You could say permission givers just want to help. But so did all the women’s magazines I read in my teens and 20s. For decades I was told what to do, what to worry about, and now I am regularly told what not to do and what not to worry about. They may sound like two different melodies but ultimately are the same old heard-this-one-before song in which womanhood is presented as a universal narrative with one set of enemies and one set of redeemers, instead of a billion particular realities.

While permission culture, as I’ve experienced it at least, mostly addresses women’s concerns, there is a branch of it that transcends gender and is focused on mental health. The “permission” in these scenarios is to feel uncomfortable feelings. Some name these feelings specifically, while others prefer to keep the discomfort vague, as is the case with the aforementioned and extremely popular “It’s OK not to be OK.” While the rest of permission culture irks me in a mostly intellectual, it’s-my-job-to-poke-holes-in-things sense, this one actually hurts. My pain comes from the fact that for the past six months I have not been OK, for reasons that are not my story to tell. Seeing yet another influencer or brand telling me It’s OK not to feel OK makes me feel like someone has come face to face with the tragic nature of life and brushed it away, like crumbs off a table’s edge. If only it were so easy.

…yeah…it was this part…for…like the lady says…more reasons than are mine to tell…but…even if I leave those out there’s one in particular that’s been standing out for me the last few days

…turns out…I’m not ok with that…& I’m not really ok with the people who say they’re ok with it…particularly the ones who won’t listen to people telling them they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about…which is another thing I might get to if I can manage to somehow upload this through my phone or the internet gods decide I don’t deserve purdah after all…but…to finish up with the one thing before steaming into another…more or less

While shame around pain is a problem, the actual pain is the problem. When I tell my friends and family members about my pain, I don’t desire permission, so much as empathy. I want them to tell me, to feel alongside of me, that what I am experiencing is really not OK, to acknowledge that while such pain is indeed a part of life, our instinct to desire a kinder, gentler path for ourselves and others is what makes us human. To acquiesce to the not OK-ness is to give up; to want more and better for ourselves and others is what it means to really give a shit.

…turns out there’s a decent chance I “really give a shit”…not that I’d equate sounding off hereabouts with having any sort of meaningful impact on outcomes of that order or anything

I’m aware that this is asking too much from parasocial relationships. I don’t think this level of attention and empathy I described in the previous paragraph could ever take place in something designed for public consumption. The tragedy of permission culture is not that it lacks the deep attention and empathy of offline connections—in that, it never stood a chance. Instead, it is the way it masquerades as care, while being entirely bereft of curiosity for anyone involved. Care without curiosity is no care at all.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/01/influencers-complaint-instagram-culture-essay.html

…but…I’m not just sick of people who decide their answer before they hear the question…it’s the part where the answer they claim…would oppose their fucking answer if they fucking walked their talk…& not just in the sense that they can’t tell a world-class blood & treasure bargain when it’s bleeding right the fuck in front of their faces

Why U.S. aid for Ukraine is a bargain [WaPo]

…& I know I had to waft back to december for the pat headline but the point stands…& when you throw this part in

How every House member voted on aid to Ukraine, Israel and more [WaPo]

…& overlay this bit

Here are the U.S. congressional districts benefiting from Ukraine aid [WaPo]

…the rank hypocrisy of the rank & file required to keep filing those #teamGOP returns is frankly fucking with me…not that they can exactly remember how to hold the ranks

Republicans erupt into open warfare over Ukraine aid package vote [Guardian]

…still…despite iran mentioning nukes only the other day & israel feeling the need to slap back tehran seems to be turning the other cheek even if it’s only to talk out the other side of their mouth…so…those hostilities remain less open than they could be even if they are front & center of a lot of folks’ thoughts about now

In breaking their fragile truce, Israel and Iran have opened a Pandora’s box [Guardian]

…&…the middle east is not unlike the markets in the sense that it pays to be wary of anyone who says they have it figured out…particularly if they turn out to be looking to sell you on something…but…as primers go…this isn’t awful?

A Cheat Sheet to the Middle East’s Web of Friends and Enemies [NYT]

…the numpty brigades who want to tell you they know where the line should be drawn because it all comes down to simple binaries & they’re here to tell us why their line has the right of it rather than just representing the right…even if their rationales weren’t as incoherent & they didn’t spend most of their time being…well…they’d be the sort of assholes that make people say shit like

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.

…so at this stage it’s hard to tell how many of them have gone nose-blind to the stench of the bullshit they’re peddling…& how many of them know but keep shoveling that shit with abandon…either way…their idea of focusing is like looking down the wrong end of the fucking telescope

G.O.P. Intensifies Scrutiny of Voting: ‘We’re Keeping a Close Eye on You’ [NYT]

…motherfucker…how is it the only ball you can seem to keep your eye on is the fucking idiot ball?

Why Myanmar’s War Matters, Even if the World Isn’t Watching [NYT]

…& that shit might as well be a “for instance”, even

‘Messianic spell’: how Narendra Modi created a cult of personality [Guardian]

…there’s people out there who think modi got vlad to hit pause on hitting ukraine just to give some indian students the opportunity to flee the scene…which reminds me of the time a lot of years ago that an acquaintance who was schooled in the USSR as-was told me the tale of the cuban missle crisis the way they were taught…in which the joke was on the west because that shipment wasn’t the first & a bunch of those missiles sat pointed at the US from cuba before, during & after…& how ever since I’ve tried to be on the look out for ways in which the things that don’t come up because we all consider them settled aren’t always in the alignment we blithely assume them to be…&…like the US…india’s “only one place, right?”

Six weeks, 969 million voters, 2,600 parties: India’s mammoth election explained [Guardian]

…just like what it means to “deal with” china is straightforward

It is the world’s second-biggest economy, the next big threat to global security and a country ruled by an authoritarian regime that is increasingly making its power felt beyond its borders. But the most important part of China is the population of 1.4 billion diverse, tricky and resilient people whose choices are often very distant from the decision-makers in Beijing. These books are an introduction to the forces that have shaped China’s recent past and the people living in its present.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/18/five-of-the-best-books-to-understand-modern-china

…it…kinda infuriates me, to be honest…when you get people who make out that they don’t need to account for anything they don’t think will materially impinge on their personal experience…which they seem to believe is magically insulated from the rest of the fucking world…who respond to suggestions that #thingtheywant comes with a massive side of #thingnobodyshouldwant to the point where any fool could see their bit is the fucking side dish & they’re giving the fucking farm away by just sticking their fingers in their ears & chanting “la, la, la – I can’t hear you…”

As the third year of Russia’s war in Ukraine dawns, China finds itself struggling to maintain its delicate balancing act. Beijing’s stance of strategic ambiguity – neither condemning Moscow’s invasion nor offering overt military support – is being tested by the war’s mounting costs and implications for China’s global interests.

On the surface, China has emerged as one of the principal beneficiaries of the war. Its purchases of discounted Russian energy have provided the Kremlin with a vital economic lifeline amid Western sanctions. Moreover, the depletion of United States and NATO weapons stockpiles has led some to argue that an extended war could give China’s military a strategic advantage over rivals who are burning through their arsenals in their efforts to support Ukraine. Yet, the European military buildup, spurred by the ongoing war, could pose a significant challenge to any Chinese military ambitions. This dynamic suggests that a prolonged war in Europe may not be in Beijing’s best interest, contrary to some interpretations.

…but…inscrutability being one of their best-selling exports since time immemorial & all…who the fuck can really say?

This miscalculation has forced Beijing to grapple with the sad reality. Rather than showcasing how a superpower can easily subdue a smaller neighbour, the war has exposed the risks, costs and potential for catastrophic miscalculation.

Economic factors are also straining China’s position. Though benefitting from Russian energy exports, Beijing has seen its global trade interests disrupted by sanctions, supply chain shocks, threats to shipping routes, and instability in key markets. Ukraine’s far-reaching attacks on Russia’s infrastructure and nuclear sabre-rattling only amplify these risks.

Moreover, China’s pursuit of narrow self-interest through the war is prompting scrutiny and blowback that could hinder its strategic ambitions. Secondary sanctions on Chinese firms accused of undermining Russia sanctions will likely expand, while transits through European ports and airports may face greater inspection. Such “long-arm” tactics by the West could foreshadow harsher treatment should Beijing move overtly against Taiwan.

…could be one thing…or the other…or both…or neither

Crucially, recent signs point to China recalculating its stance. Xi’s first call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in April 2023 marked a surprising turn, given Ukraine’s expected elimination per Moscow’s plan. Beijing’s continued role as the top buyer of Ukrainian grain under the grain deal and even after its collapse underscores its pragmatic trade interests.

These realities are starting to shape China’s rhetoric and actions. Li Hui’s diplomatic tour has amplified Beijing’s calls for a ceasefire and negotiations – an implicit acknowledgement that the war has veered off its expected course and is no longer aligning with China’s interests.

…&…it may have got fashionable lately to make out everything to be allegorically a three body problem & all…but like that join-the-dots crib-sheet effort about the middle east kinda illustrated…it’s more like three body problems made of three body problems all the way down…so this is barely one of them when all the nesting dolls & stalking horses & stuff is accounted for

Moreover, Russia’s recent $25bn grain agreement with China emerges not as a testament to unity but as a revelation of Moscow’s strategic anxieties. This move aims to curtail Ukraine’s grain export channels to China, challenging the trade between Kyiv and its main trade partner. This step by Moscow paradoxically unveils a deeper narrative. It signals Russia’s intent to tether Beijing closer, perhaps too closely for an alliance purporting to stand on equal footing. If Russia feels compelled to make such compensatory economic arrangements with China to retain its favour, it runs counter to the image of a close, unwavering alliance of mutual support that both sides have attempted to project.

Of course, powerful counterpressures still bind Beijing to Moscow. Historical ties, ideological opposition to US hegemony and NATO expansion, and concerns about alienating Russia and reinforcing perceptions of Western bias will continue shaping China’s calculus.

But the war’s human, economic and strategic costs are mounting. With each escalation, China is being forced to confront contradictions between its rhetorical commitment to sovereignty and its tacit enabling of Russia’s breach of Ukraine’s territorial integrity on a massive scale.
[…]
Ultimately, the Ukraine war has presented China with a stark choice: double down on propping up a diminished Russian state or pursue a new reality by engaging seriously in peace talks to end the war. The protracted war has strengthened potential rivals, exposed China to novel sanction threats, disrupted its economy, and drained its principal partner of resources and military capability. While Beijing may seek to render Russia a sanctioned, pliant puppet regime wholly dependent on China, doing so carries immense risks of secondary sanctions and reputational costs. Alternatively, China could lean into its recent subtle diplomacy – an uncharacteristic departure from its aversion to “global policeman” roles – as a sign it has grown weary of a war that is increasingly damaging rather than beneficial to its interests.

Of course, these options are not mutually exclusive. Even as it cautiously explores off-ramps to the war, Beijing may simultaneously work to bind a weakened Moscow closer as a vassal state. But extending the war indefinitely would be fruitless for China, needlessly burning the resources of both it and its would-be subordinate partner.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/4/17/is-china-growing-tired-of-russias-war-in-ukraine

…sure…big, bad, bare-chested vlad would sooner wrestle a bear than admit to being the vassal…but…you can only front it out on so many fronts before you wind up backed up against your home front…hence that thing from just the other day

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/19/authoritarians-vladimir-putin-propaganda-factchecking-democracy

…so…high & low…near & far…I’ve about had it up to the proverbial “here”

​​​​As a journalist, you usually go to the front line to find the news. But sometimes the front line finds you. This happened to me not once but twice on Thursday, as an epic battle over freedom of expression on college campuses unfolded from one end of Manhattan to another.

The first was when I happened to be on the campus of Columbia University, speaking at a class. While leaving the classroom, I came upon a tent camp that had sprung up on one of the campus’s lush lawns. It was, as college protests often are, an earnest but peaceful affair. A few dozen tents had been pitched, and students hung a sign reading “Gaza solidarity encampment.” Their tactics were a mild echo of those of an earlier generation of students, who effectively shut down the campus in April 1985 to demand that Columbia divest from South Africa — protests that were in turn an echo of the 1968 student takeover of the university amid the broad cultural rebellion against the Vietnam War.

…& how that might not be the 80s reference you keep running into

…he maybe isn’t the first place I’d look for an analysis of orwell…but the dude has a pretty solid point…he does on the whole seem not to hit record without at least one or two of those…which alone probably ranks him a better person than me, when you get right down to it…but…I think I could quibble about the extent to which anything about 1984 could be meaningfully referred to as an afterthought to the author as opposed to the reader without worrying about whether I need to quibble with what he says in that one…&…I forget if it was in that one…but I think it was…the line about how in the realm of foreign policy there are no good guys…I’m kind of all in on…the part where it’s all about “power”…I might have tried to refine a little into things like influence & agency…who gets to have things go the way they say just because they say so…because there are all sorts of permutations & combinations of “power” but that’s the part that generally goes iron-fist-in-velvet-glove with the sort we call “ruling”…as opposed to leaving that up to “the powers that be”

I was stunned to learn, less than an hour later, that Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, had asked the New York Police Department to clear the camp, which had been established less than 48 hours earlier. What followed was the largest arrest of students at Columbia since 1968.

[…ok…here goes the will-it-upload-through-a-phone part…assuming it does I’ll keep chipping away at seeing what sort of shape I end up leaving this in…but it may be as slow as my connection?]

For the students I spoke to, the invocation of safety was especially galling because the arrests themselves were an act of violence, and the fact that many students reported receiving emails informing them that they were suspended and temporarily barred from their dorms, effectively rendering them homeless.

“The only violence on campus was the police carrying people away to jail,” one student told me. “It was an absolutely peaceful protest. Last night we had a dance circle. There has been nothing aggressive or violent.”

Others told me they felt Shafik’s message was clear and chilling.

“Some people have space to have pain,” one student at the protest outside police headquarters told me. “Others don’t get to have pain.” She said Muslim students, along with Arab and Palestinian students of all faiths, had been unfairly targeted on campus, describing an incident in which a private detective showed up at the dorm room door of a Palestinian American student.

Another student chimed in: “There is no hearing in Congress about Islamophobia.”

The previous day, Shafik had prostrated herself before the bad faith brigade that is the Republican-led House of Representatives. In testimony before the House’s education committee, Shafik seemed determined to avoid the fate of two other Ivy League presidents whose shaky performances led to their ousters. She intimated that she would not hesitate to discipline pro-Palestine professors and students for speech, and suggested that using the contested chant “from the river to the sea” could be cause for disciplinary action on its own.

In a world where almost any kind of advocacy on behalf of Palestinian self-determination risks being interpreted as antisemitism or a call for the destruction of Israel, her statements cast quite a pall.

…& when you throw in the doxxing-except-for-legal-purposes antics of that twitter account I stuck a thing about into the last one of these I wound up with…well…micro/macro…& I could probably go on about it all day…if there weren’t so many other fucking problems that would imply not having time for

I am old enough to remember when our public conversation was preoccupied with the coddling of college students, their unwillingness to confront hard truths and their desire for safe spaces, shielded from challenging ideas. Many of the voices who for years ridiculed the safety concerns of Black, brown, Indigenous and queer students are notably silent as an iron-fisted university leader sends in cops in riot gear to arrest college students for passionately engaging with political life and taking a stand on an important moral issue. If our richest universities, cosseted by tenure and plumped with their ample endowments, cannot be citadels of free speech and forums for wrestling with the most difficult ideas, what hope is there for any other institution in our country?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/opinion/columbia-protests-israel-gaza-crackdown.html

…if sticking by your guy means…among other things…you think we have time for deliberately murdering one another wholesale instead of merely as a side-effect

The White House may soon be recaptured by Donald Trump, who called the climate crisis a “hoax” and even when backing off that assertion insisted, “I don’t know that it’s man-made.” He has demonstrated his thinking again and again, as when he told a scientist, “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch.”

There has recently been a great deal of reporting on Project 2025, a 900-plus-page road map for a second Trump administration assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation. On climate, the report is succinct: “The Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”

The report recommends a repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which would shred the tax credits that have led to hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in clean energy, the jump-starting of factory openings and the creation of jobs in virtually every corner of the country. Also lost will be investments in environmental justice, those measures that aim to reduce pollution in marginalized communities, provide affordable clean energy and create jobs in low-income neighborhoods. As for electric cars, which are critical to meeting the nation’s climate goals, the report recommends an end to all federal mandates and subsidies.

A second Trump administration would most likely grant permits for fossil fuel drilling and pipelines basically anywhere it has the say-so, scrap the methane fee on oil and gas producers and dismantle new pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants. It would almost certainly revoke California’s waiver to approve higher standards under the Clean Air Act, seek repeal of the Antiquities Act used to protect endangered landscapes and attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act.

…that pernicious thing where the misuse & abuse of hyperbole & inverse-definition-of-terms by the sort of people who think a “woke” agenda would be a problem even if you took the original meaning of the term makes it hard to get across the true weight of describing a thing without exaggerating that is about matter & matters at a scale comprehensive enough that there’s nowhere it isn’t about…& the sheer visceral horror of what those powers that be done been & done to one another & the people they claim to be looking out for the interests of…those back burners are killing us…increasingly literally

But perhaps most ominously, a Trump presidency would impede Americans’ ability to find out what’s being done to them. Project 2025 proposes dismantling and privatizing parts of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency that studies and monitors the climate, and using an executive order to “reshape” the Global Change Research Program, apparently to muddy its assessments of the pace of climate change and the potential impact. We would walk into this new dark era with a blindfold on.

Mr. Trump is at heart a billionaire doing favors for other billionaires by cutting their taxes and eliminating or not enforcing rules that protect the rest of us from asthma and cancer. During his four years in office, he managed to dismantle or degrade over 100 environmental rules, which brought real-world death and suffering. The medical journal The Lancet estimated that in the year 2019 alone these policies led to 22,000 excess deaths from heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, among other causes.

…I mean…if you think being a single-issue voter makes sense…maybe because god told you…or more likely a rep for god you took at their word for it coming from the one true source…the issue of the ability of creation to continue to support the existence of people according to the rules of the physical universe that presumably the creator coded up this way for a reason…what with how it’s an incomprehensibly complex system we barely grasp the emergent properties of & all…you’d think that might be in contention for the game of “there can be only one”…but…I dunno…it’s hard to swallow…but I can’t help feeling that turning your back on the part where it takes all sorts is a famous way to wind up on the slippery slope of living long enough to become the villain & all…but…it’s getting real fucking hard to ignore the suggestion that the world might be better off without some people…& that the remaining people might be better off with the world being better off…& the catch-22 part is that the people who sound like that’s the train of thought they want to call the bandwagon…are the ones the rest of us would be better off without…& frankly that part is fucking with me this morning the way something’s fucking with my broadband…so…I get it when people say stuff like

My advice is to not tell yourself comforting bedtime stories about the political resiliency of that law when so many of its benefits lie in the years ahead.

One can hold up a document like Project 2025 and shout from the rooftops just how extreme it is. One can attempt to use numbers to describe this danger. But everyone will fall short — and, surely, I’ve fallen short — in describing just how frightening a second Trump presidency could actually be.

Do not limit your imagination.

…but…no offence…if you think I’m better off not limiting my imagination then your imaginings of my imagination are suffering from some serious failures of imagination…because I try pretty hard to limit that fucker & I can barely contend with the crap it furnishes my mental landscape with as it is…so…I get it & all but the “stark reminder” approach has been echoing with overtones of understatement for me for longer than I’d care to admit

History will fork, and in a single day our window of opportunity for keeping the climate crisis from spiraling out of control could very well slam shut. Global emissions must peak this decade and begin a rapid decline for the world to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic warming. When I began writing my novel, we had something like 20 years to accomplish that task. After the election, we will have 62 months.

…when you think about it…whether or not we could pull it off…trying seems like a no-brainer…& not without some fairly pervasive advantages

As those industries of decarbonization spread to every state and to many congressional districts, people’s lives and livelihoods increasingly will become intertwined and invested in clean energy. When a Texas congressman can’t survive an election in a solidly Republican district without the backing of the wind and solar industries, when a battery factory in Hardin County, Ky., is employing 5,000 people, when the fossil fuel economy is falling to the zero-carbon infrastructure we demand, that will change a politician’s calculations. The increasing political and economic clout of those clean energy industries will challenge the fossil fuel status quo. We are at the beginning of an absolute revolution of the American economy that will send manufacturing soaring and pollution plummeting.

…but…the forces arrayed against that path…even the ones not directly blowing shit up figuratively & literally on what is precipitously close to being all fronts…are legion…&…replete with money, power & influence…their very own unholy trinity, you might say…if maybe you were feeling a little salty about the contribution of those inclined to bet heavy on a life everlasting someplace they were right about everything that the living never get to see

Any climate hawk could try to encumber my argument with caveats, unaddressed pet issues and whatabouts, but as far as our shared atmosphere is concerned, there are only three pieces of relevant information: who Joe Biden is, who Donald Trump is, and the urgency of the crisis before us. While it’s true the United States continues to produce record amounts of fossil gas and near-record amounts of oil, these numbers reflect the all-of-the-above energy policies of the past 15 years. The Inflation Reduction Act and several critical regulations from Mr. Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency will drive the decarbonization that should put us within striking distance of our Paris climate agreement target by 2030, something that seemed unfathomable four years ago.

It’s worth dissecting how we achieved such progress. This stunning victory was made possible only by Stacey Abrams’s tenacious work in Georgia to flip two U.S. Senate seats in 2020, giving Mr. Biden a Senate majority on top of a House majority (which he narrowly lost in 2022).

Work is also underway on the state and local levels. In the last four years, Democrats have led efforts in Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan and Washington to pass ambitious climate laws when voters demanded it. In major cities, we see aggressive action like Minneapolis’s Climate Equity Plan and Chicago’s push to end natural gas hookups for new construction.

From small cities like Athens, Ohio, which has a citywide carbon fee, to high school students campaigning for solar panels and electric buses, citizens can drive the movement to electrify everything and crush demand for fossil fuels. State public utility commissions remain ignored players with their hands on the controls of enormous amounts of carbon, ripe for campaigns to elect or appoint climate-oriented members. Whether we’re voting for president or state legislator or dogcatcher, we should vote for a dogcatcher who recognizes the imperative of the climate crisis.

The lesson being that the only thing that has worked, and must continue to work, is democracy at every level. None of us have the option to be cynical, to disdain electoral politics or to pretend we’re not making a distinct moral choice when voting for a third-party candidate or sitting out an election.

…well

When We See the Climate More Clearly, What Will We Do? [NYT]

…baby steps

Scottish government scraps climate change targets [BBC]

…but even so…doing not enough is surely a more worthy thing in which to die in the attempt than stamping our collective feet to the floor & hitting the gas in the “fire all your guns at once” sense of the thing?

Climate is not just another issue. I do not deny that we live in a complex and precarious world or that our consciences are torn by a web of domestic challenges and geopolitical upheavals. But we are in denial if we do not recognize that this is the crisis that will define this century, and if we fail, the entire human future. Our fossil fuel system is driving the planet to a set of conditions that humanity has never experienced, where even the imagination of novelists will fail us.

A Planetary Crisis Awaits the Next President [NYT]

…& all due respect to barthes & all…but it probably does mean something that that line about the imagination of novelists failing us comes from the pen of a novelist whose recent novel is about that shit going sideways…the way a few of them have been on about for…oh…quite a while, really

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/death-of-grass-john-christopher

…that one’s from the 50s…but…”dark satanic mills” ringing any bells?

Earth raised up her head
From the darkness dread and drear,
Her light fled,
Stony, dread,
And her locks covered with grey despair.

‘Prisoned on watery shore,
Starry jealousy does keep my den
Cold and hoar;
Weeping o’er,
I hear the father of the ancient men.

‘Selfish father of men!
Cruel, jealous, selfish fear!
Can delight,
Chained in night,
The virgins of youth and morning bear.

‘Does spring hide its joy,
When buds and blossoms grow?
Does the sower
Sow by night,
Or the ploughman in darkness plough?

‘Break this heavy chain,
That does freeze my bones around!
Selfish, vain,
Eternal bane,
That free love with bondage bound.’

…in blake’s telling…that was the earth’s answer…& I don’t claim to speak for the earth…although…I confess this intrigued me

Bid to secure spot for glacier in Icelandic presidential race heats up [Guardian]

…&…maybe I’m just a clod…but with all the ripples turning into standing waves from the brigading hordes of glass-house-dwelling pebble-slingers & all

‘Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.’

So sung a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

‘Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.’

…still blake…the clod & the pebble

…well…before I reach the tapped out state in which lo, this the field of my fucks to give lies barren before me…about this “garden of love” business

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

…another long dead english fella with a penchant for bons mots once claimed that to be tired of london was to be tired of life…& this bit’s from blake’s “london”

In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

…anybody want to clue me in to how we’re determining the appropriate nature of our use of restraints?

Are your kids being spied on? The rise of anti-cheating software in US schools [Guardian]

…only

Why Every Website Wants You to Accept Its Cookies [Vox]

…I’m confused

The Holdouts in the Quest for a Better Power Grid [The New Yorker]

…so I’ll take what I can get

Scientists’ experiment is ‘beacon of hope’ for coral reefs on brink of global collapse [Guardian]

…but…at the risk of putting my foot in my mouth…when it comes to the “think of the children” part…& the sort of people who like to think in terms of dead babies that are divinely ordained to usurp the autonomy of them as might bear them…but doesn’t keep score of the spillage written off on the seed side of the equation…where most of these male pillars line up to be counted…I apologize if you’ve had more than enough of that beau business for one day…not to mention more than enough of me…but…those single-issue crusaders…you know…like this guy?

Serving as vice president in the most pro-life administration in American history was one of the greatest honors of my life. Of all our accomplishments, I am perhaps most proud that the Supreme Court justices we confirmed voted to send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history, ending a travesty of jurisprudence that led to the death of more than 63 million unborn Americans.
[…]
Which is why I believe the time has come to adopt a minimum national standard restricting abortion after 15 weeks in order to end late-term abortions nationwide.

…now…I’d ordinarily assume it went without saying that I don’t personally believe this is an arena in which politicians have any fucking business…pregnant lady &…whoever she picks to so much as know about it…’nuff said…unless we need to fucking spell out the part where she gets to have that include any & all medical provision…possibly with illustrations in crayon…particularly for all the guys out there who can’t get past the part about how those weeks are counted in the first fucking place…but…I haven’t got much of a leg to stand on there…because something about the numbers getting juggled kinda missed me in a way that initially had me pulling up short at this part

While Democrats often hold up Europe as a model for America to emulate, the vast majority of European countries have national limits on elective abortion after 15 weeks. Germany and Belgium have a gestational limit of up to 14 weeks. A majority of European countries are even more restrictive, with Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Greece, Austria, Italy and Ireland banning abortion on demand after 12 weeks.

When it comes to abortion policy, America today appears closer to communist China and North Korea than to the nations of Europe. By prohibiting late-term abortions after 15 weeks, America can move away from the radical fringe and squarely back into the mainstream of Western thought and jurisprudence.

Mike Pence: Donald Trump Has Betrayed the Pro-Life Movement [NYT]

…&…well…turns out it was via one of those clips from the beau dude that I clocked the lies, damn lies & statistics bit that had been passing me by while I was busy being pre-occupied by things like…an urgent absence of urgent care

When Pregnant Patients ‘Become Radioactive to Emergency Departments’ [NYT]

…& maybe it’s only news to me…but

…it’s about 2mins in that he gets to it…& he starts off talking about a 16-week ban…for reasons he explains in the 2mins…but…what he talks about…with respect to the people who are all about this & right across the numbers…sounds to me a lot like the reason pence can call upon those european examples at a 15 week line…still loses those people…that’s still throwing away dobbs without using it for what they spent all that time laying the groundwork for…if you can’t be bothered to watch the clip…by CDC numbers…based on pre-dobbs access to the procedure…a ban at 13 weeks would prevent in the region of 6% of those…& their god is a black & white kinda deity…so the other 94%…he’s going to hold that against them come their precious day of judgement

…meanwhile…as the GOP attempts to triangulate while pivoting its ass around the car they’ve lockjawed onto…the mid-range of the window they’re attempting to sketch would be around the 20-week mark…which is all of 1%…1% made up in large part of what would under the less entirely-batshit (all things being relative & all) versions…be in the realm of carved-out exceptions related to preserving the life/health/viability of the mother

…so…complacency doesn’t seem like the smart play…but…at some point…we need to be able to speak to the people who keep ensuring we all keep getting fucked by those powers that be…&…what with how least said soonest mended took the last train to the coast a bunch of lions-led-by-donkeys years ago & all…whatever else you think about the guy…I think these (the one refers to the other so I figured they came as a pair) might have a point or two when it comes to pulling off a feat I’m finding I’m not as proficient at as I flatter myself I used to be

…could be we might want to look into renegotiating some covenants…speaking of which…I don’t imagine whatever haul I might contrive by way of a coda is going to fulfill my atonement quota…but…for the second time of asking…from this time next week through the following sunday it’s going to be me that’s out of service rather than my broadband…so there’s 4 of these that I need to beg, borrow or steal somebody’s time to cover

…pretty please

…with a cherry on top?

[…whoops…nearly forgot I hadn’t filled out the tunes bit…forget my own head…if it’d STFU for a minute…anyway…here’s me facing the music, then]