“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)
August 2025 archive
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.’” …
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 …
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 …
Aug 24 2025
from ” Required awareness to handle climate change is impossible” by Godofredo Aravena
“Based on my experience, average human has, let´s say, a six-dimensional perception of the world. Own body, family, house, job, grocery store (stores in general) and neighborhood. Anything beyond this limits, it is outside of a truly understanding (something happens out there, but nobody dares to find out what and how). Nation is a distant …
Aug 22 2025
“… and when they notice the screams …”
“And we keep making these choices, every day, choosing dams over salmon, oil over whales, cars over polar bears, death over life. And when I say we keep making these choices, I do not mean you and me — we have essentially nothing to do with it — I mean the politicians and CEOs who …
Aug 21 2025
from Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn about Work from the People Who Do It, Karen Messing
First, note that the title really should be “…from the Women Who Do It” Second, a great read along with Caroline Criado Perez’s “Invisible Women” Chap 2 “The Invisible World of Cleaning” – very enlightening for those who’ve never had a cleaning job, including about the idiocy of those in management positions “… the village …
Aug 18 2025
Dear Americans-who-blame-us-for-the-smoke
Dear Americans-who-blame-us-for-the-smoke: “If Canada can’t get these wildfires under control, they need to face real consequences … We won’t sit back while our air becomes a health hazard.” So says Rep. Calvin Callahan from Wisconsin and others from Iowa, Minnesota, New York, and North Dakota who filed a formal complaint. Against Canada. Excuse me? EXCUSE …
Aug 16 2025
from The Hunger of the Wolf, Stephen Marche
“Capitalism can be good, proper, brutal fun, the biggest schoolyard game in the world.” Indeed. Schoolyard. “What do you think she would be like in bed?” “I’ve nevr met her.” “How would that matter?” So telling.
Aug 15 2025
from “Losing Earth” by Nathaniel Rich
from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news “The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate …
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