Worser and Worser

From the ugly-future files, I bring you Krugman’s latest missive.

Pretty much in tune with what most of us who are paying attention already know.  We’re in trouble.  The predictions are dire.  Expect more sandstorms.  Except that, and here’s where I disagree, it ain’t laziness or inconvenience that’s driving this train.  It’s the sheer wickedness of the problem.   Unlike health care, which should be a moral no-brainer, but which has been hijacked by ideologues, the problems that give rise to climate change are complicated to their core.  They start with assignment of responsibility.  How the hell can it be wrong for me to do what is plainly right for me (namely, buying a lot of great and flashy stuff so that my kids can live the best life possible)?  I’m working on a paper on this topic, among others, right now.  And I should be spending more time on that paper, and not this blog (right now).

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Touching the Void

Gawker brings us Safire’s finest moment: the invention of counterfactual speech writing.  A beautiful eulogy.  Inspiring to millions.

Angst, maybe. Eco, not so much.

What exactly is so ecologically angst-inducing about discovering that some toy you’ve purchased for your child contains lead paint?  The angst stems from newfound knowledge that what you once liked and thought would be good for you, isn’t so good for you.  The same kind of angst might stem from learning that Twinkies are filled more with creamy evilness than tasty goodness, which is true.

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/the-age-of-eco-angst/

Test Subject

Inhofe is a genius.  I’ll use him for my first test subject.

http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/27/inhofe-global-warming-god’s-still-up-there-natural-cycles/

Testing the Waters

One of my colleagues has persuaded me that I should become a blogger.  I’ve been toying with the idea for a long time, and I’m certainly involved relatively heavily in reading the blogosphere, but I’ve not been particularly enthusiastic about spending my mornings and afternoons devising a bunch of good content for others to read.  Yet here I am, now probably getting myself involved too heavily in something I only barely understand, facing down a wall of publication responsibilities that I would be better off attending to.  We’ll see how long this lasts.  Either I get up the gumption to screech out my nasty little screeds to the rest of the universe, or I let things go dormant. So many blogs fail.  Will this one?  Let’s see how the cards fall.