November 14, 2023

Knowing how to fall without breaking your neck is an important life skill.

More important, actually, than not falling.

November 2, 2023

We should just stick with the names Adam and maybe later his "helper" Eve gave them...

... as later inventoried by Noah and his family on the Ark.

My personal take is that the author of that was possibly being sarcastic too. Name all the animals? Are you fucking kidding me?

Naming all the animals really wasn't a possibility before Carl Linnaeus applied eighteenth century accounting technology to the task.

Personally, I'd like to know what names people who lived here in the Americas gave these birds before the European invasion. I'm certain these birds had Native American names. Naming is what humans do.

May 16, 2023

I used to be an anti-nuclear activist, and a radical one at that.

When I first started posting on DU I was a little less radical, but still on the anti-nuclear side of the fence.

I thought renewable energy could save the world.

Alas that experiment has been done and the numbers are in. It's clear that aggressive renewable energy schemes in places like California, Denmark, and Germany have failed. They're not economically viable without substantial fossil fuel inputs, especially natural gas. No amount of hand waving about batteries, hydrogen, pumped hydro, or any other energy storage scheme changes that. It has to do with thermodynamics. Human laws and creative accounting can't change that.

California, for example, already has many gigawatts of solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage schemes. You can subtract fossil fuels out of California's energy mix and model any sort of renewable energy utopia you like. None of them look good, none of them scaled up can support eight billion people.

If we don't quit fossil fuels now billions of humans are going to suffer and die because of global warming.

It's not much better if we switch to fully "renewable" energy sources. Billions of people would suffer and die, mostly for lack of food, clean water, and adequate shelter.

We've worked ourselves into a corner. Eight billion humans are dependent on high density energy sources for food, shelter... our very survival. Most of that energy now comes from fossil fuels.

The only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, which we must do, is nuclear power.

Claiming that renewable energy will save the world is just another flavor of climate change denial.

Many of the arguments I hear from renewable energy enthusiasts remind me of the arguments I hear from Creationists. These arguments somehow make sense to the creationist, but they make no sense to anyone living outside their bubble.

For many of the anti-nuclear activists I used to work with, some of them I'm still in occasional contact with, their activism was essentially a religious belief. Atomic bombs and atomic power were the apple in the garden of Eden that Satan was tempting mankind with.

It might not be coincidence that I first met Helen Caldicott when I was an impressionable (and slightly psychotic teen) in the community room of a Lutheran church. That's how I fell in with an anti-nuclear crowd. They could use a university library researcher and dumpster diver. I loved university libraries and dumpsters.

Like any otherwise sane human I abhor nuclear weapons. I remember as a kid the cold war nuclear drills, diving under our desks when the alarm went off with our butts facing the windows, ready to kiss our asses good-bye. I'm glad my children only knew the fire and earthquake drills. The earthquake drills were similar to the cold war drills, but you got to leave the classroom when the shaking stopped. When I was teaching we had a big earthquake, and we spent most of the rest of the day out on the playground until the buildings had been inspected for serious damage. That wouldn't have been the case if the USSR had dropped a bomb on us. My students and my children didn't worry about "The Bomb" as I had as a kid. There is some sanity in the world, all these years since Fat Man.

As I've said, I've changed my mind about nuclear power. In a world where toxic wastes of every kind imaginable, most with a half life of fucking FOREVER, I'm not going to worry about a little plutonium unaccounted for amidst the horrific death toll of a tsunami. I'm absolutely certain worse shit was spilled in the tsunami, carcinogens and mutagens of all sorts, but it was the kind of familiar shit we ignore in our daily lives.

January 12, 2023

"Those places" are selling something they don't have.

That, and their abusive practices is what makes them criminal.

So long as our society, in general, believes that punishment is an effective form of behavioral modification we are fucked. It isn't.

The way to deal with teenagers who believe they know everything and can support themselves is to provide them with reasonably safe opportunities to prove it.

Our society should provide opportunities like that for children whose parents can't manage it.

As a parent once you've gotten yourself into a power struggle with your teen you've lost. If you feel you have to hire someone to kidnap your teen in the middle of the night, you've lost big.

Two of my siblings ran away from home at sixteen with highly dramatic exits, which is a family tradition, going back centuries as I discern. Fuck you mom and dad, what do you know? All four of my grandparents were like that. But channels of communication always remained open.

Myself, I put my parents through a worse hell, no channels of communication open, leaving them to assume I was taking care of myself which wasn't true in any way. I was learning how to be a feral human dumpster diving for food some days. But I'd long trained my parents, since I was first a psychotic teenager, not to ask whenever I showed up on their doorstep battered and bloody.

What made all the difference was they accepted me, simple food and shelter at first, especially when I wasn't talking.

When I was 12 years old I knew fucking everything, all the secrets of humanity and the universe. With puberty my mind went completely sideways and I didn't gather most of it back together until I was 25 at least.

I think all we humans are the same to some greater of lesser extent.