I once said that Trump was going to single-handedly destroy Earth.
I was wrong.
Alberta’s going to help.
(I guess Danielle Smith hasn’t read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.)
Sep 17 2025
The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts – a fascinating read
The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts is a fascinating read.
Especially section 5 of chapter 5 and chapter 9. I was sitting on my dockraft reading, needing to sop often, look up across the water, and just … think about what was just said.
(It occurs to me that anyone seeing an old-ish woman sitting on a dock, book in hand, would not imagine that she is reading a novel that is a Kant-inspired analysis of human perception/consciousness.)
(And I point that out for any readers who may in future see an old-ish woman, book in hand …)
Sep 07 2025
“… getting exponentially worse …
from Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, Donella Meadows et al. 2004
“Scientists do know that there have been temperature upheavals on earth in the past …
“But the most important message … is that current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane are far higher than they have been for 160,000 years. … There is a significant disequilibrium in the global atmosphere, and it is getting exponentially worse.” p119
Sep 05 2025
your brain on psychedelics
How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan – an interesting read, especially, for me, the chapter on the neuroscience of psychedelics
“It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.” p305-6 Which is why they feel their experiences to be “revealed truths rather than plain old insights”. p305 per Robin Carhartt-Harris
“If it were possible to temporarily experience another person’s mental state, my guess is that it would feel more like a psychedelic state than a ‘normal’ state because of its massive disparity with whatever mental state is habitual with you.” Robin Carhartt-Harris
Sep 04 2025
from The Yearbook, Holly Bourne
“The group chat should essentially just have been titled Adam breathed—applaud.” p29
Was anyone else out there the invisible little sister?
“The end of childhood — realizing adults don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” p55
“My future wasn’t something the family ever really discussed. I guess I was supposed to just figure that out for myself, apply for a loan myself, take myself on open days. Then maybe mention my life-changing decision one night when there wasn’t anything too good on the television.” p135-6
“Like, we only get one life. One. One opportunity at every moment we are given …” p189
“… life is just a bunch of decisions that make you who you are.” p189
“You don’t realize how toxic it is [your ‘home’ life] until you get out. … We think it’s normal, because it is to us.” p229
Yes. YES. It’s not. Normal. Get out and make your own normal. As soon as you can.
“… if you’re told the same story over and over about who you are … it starts to feel true, and therefore it starts to become true …” p404
“… they’d rather feel important than feel happy. … And they don’t mind ruining other people’s happiness in their quest to be important …” p405
Sep 03 2025
People Skills: assuming dishonesty
Apparently, I have poor people skills.
I’m literal-minded and I take people ‘at face value’, which means that I assume that people mean exactly what they say.
Which is to say that having people skills means assuming that people do not mean what they say—i.e., that they are dishonest (or, less likely, linguistically inept).
Which means that having people skills means assuming dishonesty.
Interesting.
Aug 28 2025
An applicable-to-so-many-things exchange
“Matthew, how do you know these things?”
“How do you not?”
(from one of Jodi Taylor’s Time Police novels, but sooooo applicable to so many conversations)
Aug 28 2025
from The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner (1972)
“‘You and your ancestors treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl.'” p112
“‘The rich countries have ruined what they own, so they’re out to steal from the people who have a little left. They want the copper, the zinc, the tin, the oil. And of course there’s the timber, which is getting scarce.'” p137
“‘… one of the latest deep-trawling fish factories designed to bring up squid from the relatively safe bottom water. Surface fish nowadays were either so rare as to be prohibitively expensive, like cod and herring, or hopelessly high in dangerous substances such as organic mercury. …'” p142
“‘ You can’t tell me that when they dumped [those barrels, now bursting] they didn’t know people would want to fish the ocean, bathe in it, build houses fronting on the beach! You can’t tell me the bastards didn’t know what they were doing—they just relied on not being around when the trouble started!'” p165
“‘ … they shit in the water until it’s dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fofrtune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can’t they be made to strain out their own shit?'” p187
“…growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases, and soiling laundry hung out to dry.” p195
“and every day senators and congressmen … pleaded that if such-and-such a firm, which had been run into the ground by its incompetent directors, wasn’t helped, the unemployment index would rise another point.” p197
“… Austin Train’s famous source-books that had taken one, two, even three years apiece to compile, soberly documenting the course of organochlorides in the biosphere, factory-smoke on the wind, pinning down … places where dangerous substances had been dumped … … [B]ut of the the total of 1130 other books cited in the various bibliographies, 16 were withdrawn or restricted. … One book in particular he remembered, a text on accidents with nuclear weapons, which was duly brought to him by a smilig librarian. But when he opened the front cover he found a hole had been carefully cut from first page to last.” p206
“‘The most awful warnings are staring us in the face—the stagnant Mediterranean above all, dead like the Great Lakes—yet we’re so proud of being the richest, the most powerful, the whatever, that we won’t fact facts. We won’t admit that we’re short of water, we’re short of timer, we’re short of—'” p207 (1972, remember)
“‘Who’s going to be sane in this country when you know every breath you draw, every glass you fill with water, every swim you take in the river, every meal you eat, is killing you? And you know why, and you know who’s doing it to you, and you can’t get back at the mothers.'” p217
“‘For example, there’s an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only look at the last presidential election for proof of that. The public obviously wanted a figurehead, who’d look good and make comforting noises—'” p278 (1972!)
“‘Stop, you’re killing me!'” p273
“‘Yes, for most people nowadays television is their only contact with the world beyond teir daily work.'” p287
“‘Still, men who refuse to train in defense of their country—’ / ‘No, that’s not what an army trains men to do.'” p287
“‘It’s natural for a man to defend what’s dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles—in short, to defend not himself but people whom he’s never met and moreover would not care to be in the same room with him—you have to condition him into loving violence not for the benefits it bestows on him but for its own sake.'” p287
“‘It’s easier to wreck a man than to repair him. … take a look at the crime figures among veterans.'” p287
“‘Doctor, you watch your tongue!’ / ‘… all I’m saying is that my job would be a sight easier if they told us the whole truth. I’m working in the dark half the time …’ / ‘Well, doc, when it’s a case of thousands … all of a sudden …’ / ‘All of a sudden!’ ” p333
Right. Anyone with their head NOT up their ass has seen this coming. for eyars. decades, actually.
“‘When did you last bask in the sun, friends? When did you last dare drink from a creek? When did you last risk picking fruit and eating it straight from the tree? What were your doctor’s bills last year? Which of you live in cities where you don’t wear a filtermask? Which of you spent this year’s vacation in the mountains because the sea is fringed with garbage? Which of you right now is not suffering from a nagging minor complaint—bowel upset, headache, catarrh, … ” p354
Aug 26 2025
from “The Homeless Adjunct”
“V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is because of the high price of college faculty. He has NO IDEA what he is talking about. At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs.”
…
“All around the country, our undergraduates are being taught by faculty living at or near the poverty line, who have little to no say in the way classes are being taught, the number of students in a class, or how curriculum is being designed. They often have no offices in which to meet their students, no professional staff support, no professional development support. One million of our college professors are struggling to continue offering the best they can in the face of this wasteland of deteriorated professional support, while living the very worst kind of economic insecurity. Unlike those communist countries, which sometimes executed their intellectuals, here we are being killed off by lack of healthcare, by stress-related illness like heart-attacks or strokes. While we’re at it, let’s add suicide to that list of killers — and readers of this blog will remember that I have written at length about adjunct faculty suicide in the past.”
Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university. …
Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money …
“Anything not immediately and directly related to job preparation or hiring was denigrated and seen as worthless — philosophy, literature, art, history.”
…
“So what is the problem with corporate money, you might ask? A lot. When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money. Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research. Corporations donate to departments, and get the use of university researchers in the bargain — AND the ability to deduct the money as donation while using the labor, controlling and owning the research. Suddenly, the university laboratory is not a place of objective research anymore. As one example, corporations who don’t like “climate change” warnings will donate money and control research at universities, which then publish refutations of global warning proofs. OR, universities labs will be corporate-controlled in cases of FDA-approval research.”
Aug 26 2025
from The Fall of Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg
“Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself.” p2
Yes! All managers. Tend to forget they serve. Their job is to enable others to do their jobs well. They are merely facilitators, organizers—of resources, schedules, payments …
“Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forcing them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties.” p2
“Generally speaking, search firms [for senior administrators] rule out candidates about whom anything at all negative is said when they investigate candidates’ backgrounds. This practice introduces a marked bias in favor of the most boring and conventional candidates.” p5
“… I am always struck by the fact that so many well-paid individuals have so little to do. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. … While these activities are time consuming, their actual contribution ot the core research and teaching missions of fthe university is questionable. Little would be lost if all pending administrative retreats and conferences, as well as four of every five staff meetings … were canceled tomorrow.” p41
“One activity with which underworked administrators can and o busy themselves is talk. … For example, at a recent ‘President’s Staff Meeting,’ eleven of the eighteen agenda items discussed by administrators at one Ohio community college involved plans for future meetings or discussions of other recently held meetings.” p42
Chap 3 “Managerial Pathologies” – sabotage, shirking, squandering …
fiction
