What is it driving this Anti-Vaxxer phenomenon? I too am, I think, healthfully skeptical of the pharmaceutical lobby when it comes to rigour, transparency and the production of medicines as lifestyle accessorisers (potions to counter all those self-inflicted ailments), but I don’t feel that we ought to take for granted the science that’s really enabled population health in manner that’s seen little precedence in human history and risk resurgence of otherwise preventable diseases.
I feel that this anti-science drift, for what it’s worth, which includes the climate-change deniers—and no, questioning does not belie conspiracy but I think rather than educating themselves, some go along with the propaganda they know and see the counter-arguments as mere propaganda, too, evidence fabricated and institutions manipulative—has parallels in the last wave of worry—which although far from hysterical can and has been displaced by this movement of distrust for drugs and doctors. Americans were passionate about being spied upon—though the lack of outrage when they bought the lie that such eavesdropping activity was limited to overseas solicits little sympathy, and the tantrum subsided rather quickly. I am not sure how the revelation was received that the intelligence agencies are not staffed with savants and are bound by the same laws of mathematics that allow encryption to work and remain virtually imperviously to prying, and it was only that the big telecommunication conglomerates giving the secret agents the secret-knock that allowed them to get inside. Service providers may not have willingly surrendered to government pressure but certainly did not disclose the scale of collaboration either, and they managed to escape suffering too much damage to their reputation over public ire. We of course tell on ourselves too, and refrain passing judgment on the real peddlers of snake-oil.
Friday 6 February 2015
catchpenny or clickbait
Friday 23 January 2015
chronostratigraphic units
Mental Floss invites us to explore the planet’s history through this pretty keen time-spiral, produced by a design team working for the United States Geological Survey. This artwork—available also in poster form ends with the age of the Holocene Epoch, beginning about ten thousand years ago and heralds in the beginning of human civilization, but there’s also a proposed name for the current era, Anthropocene, reasoning that the impact that mankind is having on ecology merits a new division—eons, ages and periods all being measures of indeterminate lengths.
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐, ๐, environment
Sunday 4 January 2015
aprรจs moi, le dรฉluge
A brotherly syndicate is apparently poised to rally its religious wing in order to subvert the Pope’s stance on environmental conservation. Business magnates that rely on cheap and dirty exploitation of Nature in order to ensure their profits don’t much care for the Pope’s message and hope to counter any reforms that might come about in policy changes, both publicly and privately.
Some conservative religious leaders have rediscovered a nascent and absolving argument that mankind ought not to presume it can alter God’s creation in any way, and that any ecological crises we witness and choose to append an anthropogenic label on is false and prideful. These rapture-ready flocks, I think, are easily led down the path of such irresponsible, selfish thinking—aprรจs moi, le dรฉluge, “after me, [comes] the Flood” and just might adopt that sentiment of French King Louis XV of self-enrichment at the expense of others and future generations (which a lot of politicians and business leaders have honed). Many in the US already dismiss the Pope’s entreaties for charity and redistribution of wealth as communist-leanings, probably because, thanks to American exceptionalism, even the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and are just waiting to claw themselves to the top. I hope such attitudes don’t spread and this proxy war for the status quo is not prolonged.
Monday 4 August 2014
carbon-sink
The Times of India has a tantalizing little article to re-calibrate the direction of environmental research, turning it back towards carbon-sequestration through a study on ant colonies. Of course, forests and coral reefs perform the same function on a much larger scale than one teeny-tiny bite of breath at a time—trapping whole bucket-fulls of greenhouse gases at once, if left alone.
Careful atmospheric measurements and observation suggests that the creatures make a mortar of limestone to shore up their tunnels and nests. Such examination of ant farms is really a foil to one of the greatest contributing factors to environmental change—behind industrial pollutants and ecological destruction: through mechanised and deep ploughing and tilling, layers of carbon-dioxide that would otherwise mellow underground is released by the acre. I do not believe that the ill-effects of modern cultivation is just the undoing the carefully coordinated work of ants and other chthonic beings.
catagories: ๐ก️, environment
Sunday 2 February 2014
boreal, austral
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐, ๐ข, environment, networking and blogging, travel
Sunday 29 September 2013
stockholm syndrome
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Sweden just released a comprehensive report on global-warming that is unfortunately is being down-played as more alarmist palaver, but is nothing to scoff at or ignore.
Even though the multidisciplinary study that took several years to comply and analyze has few new startling revelations (trashing ecology is startling and shameful enough) and merely is another bleak assessment in the same traditional, it does serve to confirm our worst fears. In that there is nothing new in it, however—too, the skeptics and the procrastinators remain inured and unconvinced, though their contention with this fact-finding mission defies unity and leaves little open for objection. There is no one country or political persuasion that presents a the ultimate roadblock or challenge to policy but rather commitment to halting and healing the climate is a matter of individual priorities and choice, though national fronts and dogmatists can certainly be a source of opportunities and threats. Disparagingly, platforms—whether critical or regaled with the best of intentions, tend, I think the mutilate urgency, and rather than considering that the house is on fire, and still pits one group, bundled with all sorts of tangential priorities against another, rather than accepting a cold and disquieting fact.
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐ช️, environment, foreign policy
Wednesday 29 May 2013
seaquest 2013
More statutory notifications of intent to furlough (beurlaubt) US federal works are being distributed within hard and fast guidelines, though some agencies have chosen to be proactive instead of reactive in meeting this mandate.
Monday 25 March 2013
hypnos
While I fully believe that there are many abiding mysteries, I don’t often heed my own dreams. Forgettable brilliance is just that—I reason, and probably indicative of the dose of self-therapy, the stepping back that one needs or doesn’t need at the time and conducted in a nebulous way, behind the scenes. I indulged a strange succession of dreams, however, recently, relaxed and running some onerous administrative tasks on my computer, including defragmenting the hard-drive.
Sunday 23 September 2012
fungible or cap and share
It was a drastic enough move on the part of the American government to charter an airline and revitalize a military airport in order to bypass the European Union air transportation carbon emissions scheme, in effect since the first of the year. Most air-carriers grudgingly accepted the extra costs and simply passed it off to passengers, but apparently it did not behove the US legislature not to take a cheap shot against EU environmental regulators and showcase a rare moment of cooperation among a divided and paralytic Congress.
Rather than working to craft its own emissions standards (which would exempt any nationally flagged carrier from having to pay the tariff), the upper house instead risks a trade war by acquiescing to the airlines and passengers unformed rumblings and is moving to shield US companies from the tax. Flagrant disregard for the rules of others that America—or any other country—disagrees with or does not find serviceable at the moment seriously jeopardizes its relative standing and credibility. The United States has already attempted to steamroll the world’s playbook just in the past few months with its anti-piracy treaties re-programming the exchange of information over the internet, putting the onus on foreign financial institutions of reporting and taxation for citizens abroad and insistence for going along with its grander designs for its Tournament of Shadows, security-theatre, etc—not to mention the despoiled disappointment shown when the rest of the world is not in lock-step with US interests, like America withholding its UNESCO dues when the international body admitted Palestine. The world is a wonderful and frightening place, but it does not need the theatrics or tantrums of some wilful and gigantic baby wallowing through the business of others. Without recognizing the ecological merit of the EU airport scheme one bit, the champions of the Senate, merely said, without blushing at that, Europe had no right to tax American fliers in order to pay down their own debt problems. While I do not want to believe that the author of that rationale actually thought there was any veracity to that justification, trying to appease or play along with that mode of imperialism presents some unique challenges.
Saturday 10 September 2011
confabulation, conflagration
The unprecedented scope of the wild-fires ravaging central Texas is a frightening thing, already in superlative year for natural and man-assisted disasters, though recent record-holders are quickly outdone and not allowed to bask in their glory or infamy for very long. The latest in the series of governors from that state have invited scorn and courted wrath and maybe there is a parallel, close relationship--the ability to peer into his soul, between the current sitting governor and presidential aspirant and the Russian leadership.
Monday 29 August 2011
ready, steady, go or goodnight, irene
Thursday 28 April 2011
lolly-pop guild or double-dog-dare
I wonder if tornados were in the science of the Land of Oz thought of as wormholes--not primative and primeval but a gateway as sophisticated and as exotic as a blackhole with transdimensional engineering. Such a romance of the twister or really even meteorological interest in their precise cause has not really seemed to have transpired. Having grown up a little in that so called "Tornado Alley" (which is a great huge swath of land--growing wider it seems, and not one lane reserved for tournaments at the Bowl-a-Rama, like the name suggests).
It is rather a painful and frightening reality that one becomes weirdly numb to, and as I see that the storm system is making headlines and talk in Germany, it seems impossible to relate to someone who has not experienced it firsthand, the inchoate weather forecast, the sirens, facing it bravely--daring it almost--from one's front porch. The loss and destruction currently are unimaginable, and now I worry and believe that we have entere an age--and not just palavered by connectivity and profiteering, where all these tragedies are in long-form, when the affects of each catastrophe and disruption are understood and recorded, analyzed by those same palaverers, economically, risk-adverse and records ever to be broken. It is maybe also an age where such disasters are not uncommon and factored in, like sitting on the front porch and daring the winds.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก️, ๐ช️, environment
Tuesday 11 January 2011
flotsam and mackintoshes
The gradual warming trend here is melting the accumulated snow and the cold, cold ground and rivers cannot accommodate much more of the water. It is strange to think that the chief weapon against flooding the world-around is the humble sandbag and neighbours helping neighbours, and not something novel, unwieldy and dangerous like Ice-9, especially considering the weather-weirding factors that are most likely contributing to the extremes.
European communities along major rivers, particularly where the waters have been straightened and manicured for shipping and are more prone to flooding because of these alterations, are equipped, however, with impressive retractable retaining walls, steel panels that rise out of the harbour automatically and as articulated as the sluices of the canals that they guard. It is potentially tragic and certainly nerve-wracking but always handled with poise and steadfastness, and not the same breed of stubborn prospectors on eroding beach-front property. Venice and Amsterdam have endured below sea level for centuries, recognizing that the constructs and artifices encroaching on the environment bring the floods regularly, and even harnessing the power of the waters wanting to be untamed.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก️, ๐ช️, environment
Wednesday 5 January 2011
bird of prey
Being in a speculative mood, like the mounting legal footraces big banks are running to minimize damage, from snatching up domain names that could be potential outlet for disgruntled and outraged customers, what could the next big shocker be? From bypassing real estate registrars, instituted centuries ago to prevent kings from easily seizing the lands of his subjects, gambling with the money of others, squandering public treasure, and bald thievery, what could possibly be the gasping news that might make these great houses blush? Months ago, a major credit card company, was shown to practice discriminatory rate hikes based on customers' shopping habits: if a card-holder frequented an establishment that demographically suggested poor credit-worthiness, like discount stores, the card-holder might see his or her interest rates rise. Maybe the banks are doing the same, but taking it a step further and selling one's shopping lists to marketing departments, captured through ubiquitous bank cards. What other depravity and betrayal could be put on full display?
Wednesday 22 December 2010
annus miribilis or choose your own adventure
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill and its terrible environmental legacy with the industry and consumer choices and policy that perpetuate these disasters.
The Health Care Reform initiatives in the US, that showed America's strange sort of envy at odds with the true aims of the effort.
US Mid-Term Elections and reversals of power, that was harrowing for what was sometimes characterised as a weary and disappointed electorate.
The US economy and world-wide economic crisis with the bailout and contributing factors that precipitated the collapse and wherein lies the blame and the lesson.
The devastating earthquake in Haiti and the recovery effort.
The popularity of the so-called "Tea Party" movement and its influences in US politics, part appeal to libertarianism and part to militantism.
The drama, tension, technological wonder and cooperation that led to the rescue of the trapped Chilean miners.
The US government leaking like a sieve in the most sensitive areas, call and response.
The ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the private toll war-making exacts.
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐ช️, ๐ฑ, environment, foreign policy, holidays and observances
Tuesday 22 June 2010
but you can't have Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam without Spam
catagories: ๐ก️, ๐ช️, environment
Sunday 6 June 2010
ancient chinese secret, huh?
This is still the year of the Tiger, and I wonder if some of what's happening around the world would have been predicted according to the trends expected in the lunar year. Hindsight is delightfully useful in these sorts of things. Soothsayers forewarned that it would be turbent for global economies and the Tiger is the steward of things chthonic, elemental and buried. The same soothsayers urged investment in gold and other metals, which was not really going out on a limb with that one.