Environmental books recommended by Thor:

Nonfiction: http://amzn.to/amFFLD

Fiction: http://amzn.to/9ClWCo

Do they know?

Ever wonder if leading politicians and bureaucrats have actually been briefed, that they actually understand how completely humans have fucked the world, but are just playing along to avoid a general panic and rebellion?

All of those still out there "informing the public" and trying to get politicians on-board: what if they already know, and are just pretending they don't get it, keeping up a front, so that great changes wont happen in their life-time, and they can go on comfortably as before. After all, they are very comfortable in "power", with big pay-checks, position, homes and families--why rock the boat? Maybe they just want to live out their days in the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed...

You would think they would get a decent briefing when they take office...

BP spills coffee

60 minutes: string of mishaps and bad calls caused Gulf disaster

Eye witness report from before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and expert analysis: watch vidio from CBS 60 Minutes. Reported problems in the weeks and days before the explosion set the stage for the tragedy, given the bad management responses.

Now an internal BP-document shows that the company has estimated that as much as 100,000 barrels of oil (about 16 million liters) may be gushing from the well every day--much higher than the numbers the Government has been quoting.

Can't make it right

How are you going to compensate the birds and the fish, the invertebrates, and the animals that live in the marshes and eat the fish and the crustaceans? Sadly, the delta, the Gulf, and the marshes were pretty screwed even before this oil spill. The last thing they needed was this. The Resistance is long overdue.



Read "The Most Important Fish in the Sea", by H. Bruce Franklin. For a primer on the Resistance, read Derrick Jensens "As the World Burns: 50 Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial". (See Environmental Books.)
But most of all, don't stay in and read: GO OUT AND DO SOMETHING!

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
One brave deed is worth a thousand books."

-Edward Abbey

Naomi Klein on the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in the Gulf: http://bit.ly/9xLwVb



Oil stained wave

Birding Hortobágy...

(Hortobáby images by Paul Chatterton)

Physics envy

Norbert Wiener on economists:

The success of mathematical physics led the social scientists to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive peoples adopt the Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parliamentarism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infitesimal calculus... To assign what purports to be precise values to such essentially vague quantities is neither useful nor honest, and any pretense of applying precise formulae to these loosely defined quantities is a sham and a waste of time.

(Norbert Wiener, 1964. God and Golem, Inc. MIT Press)

New heat record for Asia

Wednesday May 26 the town of MohenjuDaro, Pakistan, set a new heat record for Asia: 53.5°C (128.3°F) (Pakistan Meteorological Department).

The human death toll has been high recently in the heat wave affecting South Asia.

(http://planetsave.com/blog/2010/06/05/hundreds-killed-in-india-from-heat-waves-new-hottest-temperature-record-in-asia/)