![]()
The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here
With a new global summit approaching, communities in the southern United States are calling attention to the disaster scenarios they currently face.
The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here
With a new global summit approaching, communities in the southern United States are calling attention to the disaster scenarios they currently face.
In the new global reality, where each passing year is the hottest on record, the final month of summer foretells calamity. It’s always hot and volatile in the dog days between mid-August and mid-September, but the past few years have dialed those elements up high. Heat waves, droughts, storms, floods, and other extreme events have garnered increasing attention. The largest wildfire in California’s history is now raging almost a year after the previous record holder hit the state. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma ravaged the Gulf Coast and Florida in late August last year. Hurricane Maria became the second-most deadly natural disaster in contemporary American history when it passed over Puerto Rico last September. And the 13th anniversary of the Louisiana landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the largest such storm, is on August 29.
Climate change is not a future problem. Climate change is a current problem. Yet the United States—despite this recent history—has pulled back from a number of already insufficient commitments to reversing emissions and global warming. Faced with this vacuum, American nongovernmental organizations and states have stepped forward with campaigns designed to reinvigorate climate activism and policy making. But they have a long way to go, especially in connecting a mainstream climate movement with the majority of the victims of those disasters.
One of the major initiatives put together as President Donald Trump began to withdraw the White House from climate leadership is the Global Climate Action Summit, which will take place in September. “This summit’s happening in San Francisco, California, but it’s something that was requested several years ago by the United Nations,” says Nick Nuttall, the summit’s spokesman. A collective of non-state actors organized the event, Nuttall says, with the goal of “bring[ing] together leaders from state and local governments, business, and citizens from around the world to demonstrate how the tide has turned in the race against climate change.” As Nuttall told me, the general idea is to recapture the energy that preceded the 2016 Paris climate agreement, in which most of the world’s countries agreed to pursue policies that would curb global temperature growth to just 2 degrees Celsius.
However, the problem with many climate summits—and much of the mainstream climate movement, generally—is that many of them focus on a future target, planning for and attempting to avert doomsday scenarios that might play out over the course of decades or a century. The mainstream paradigm often views climate change as a collective risk, and pushes people to action by selling fears of future societal collapse and environmental ruin. Both can be averted if politicians and people work together and with urgency, the common argument goes; if we all pitch in, we can avoid the worst. …
Dams and reservoirs can’t save us. This is the new future of water infrastructure.
TOILET TO TAP
In the recent past, humans thought of freshwater as a constant. Sometimes there was drought, and sometimes there was flood, but water levels always returned to normal eventually. So we built dams and reservoirs, hulking infrastructure they imagined as a bulwark against the pains of any short-term variation, on the assumption that the dry times would end and the basins would refill.
But these gigantic objects are becoming dinosaurs in a new climactic age, characterized by growing human demand for freshwater and worsening, lengthening droughts. As Michael Hightower, a research professor of civil engineering at the University of New Mexico, puts it: “You don’t see people building new reservoirs, because they know there’s not going to be water to put in those reservoirs.”
That means water engineers need to radically rethink the traditional approach to water infrastructure. They will need to get creative. In some cases, it may mean going back to basics and installing cisterns in backyards to harvest the rain. In others, it may mean doing as the astronauts have done since the advent of space travel: drinking one’s own recycled urine.
That’s because water, especially in dry places, is finite. Rivers and streams and lakes usually originate as snowmelt or rainfall, and in dry parts of the world, those sources are in decline as droughts strike harder and more regularly. Meanwhile, human populations are growing, and using freshwater faster than it can be replenished. Potable water is a rare commodity and growing more precious by the decade. …
Facebook removed 652 fake accounts and pages attempting to influence US elections
HEAVY MEDDLE
More bad news.
Facebook has taken down 652 fake accounts and pages ahead of US midterm elections, the company announced in a blog post late Tuesday (Aug. 21). According to Facebook, some of the removed accounts were part of ”coordinated inauthentic behavior” originating in Iran and Russia.
These are the latest in a growing number of accounts Facebook has identified as using the social network as a political weapon. Last month, the company detected and removed 32 pages, also for “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—though in that earlier case, none of the pages were explicitly tied to Russia or Iran.
Since the 2016 US presidential election, when a Kremlin-linked group called the “Internet Research Agency” turned to Facebook to spread misinformation and stir conflict around divisive social issues, the company has vowed to clamp down on bad actors. But today’s revelations demonstrate that suspected foreign agents are still attempting to use the platform to meddle with US elections.
Facebook’s disclosure comes on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement earlier this week that it had seized six domains created by notorious Russian hacker group APT28 to spoof government websites and conservative Washington think tanks. Experts believe the domains may have been created in advance of a phishing attack, where spoofed email addresses are used to send malware-laced emails. …
Entertainment That Changed The World In Unexpected Ways
Entertainment is always influenced by the world around us. The thing is, sometimes it goes the other way, and a movie, show, game, or whatever will have a big influence on the world. And we’re not just talking about fandoms. It turns out that major parts of our daily lives actually have their roots in pop culture.
20. Entry by Timon DJ Spajic
19. Entry by Volstead-Rankin
18. Entry by CornishPlasty
17. Entry by scandata
…
Nabisco ‘Frees’ Its Animal Crackers After a PETA Protest
Roam free, animal crackers!
The cookie boxes belonging to snacking stalwart Nabisco are getting a redesign to remove the bars that caged the circus animal-shaped treats, thanks to a push from animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PETA.
The little cardboard animal cracker boxes used to depict circus animals in boxcars with bars on them. Now, the packaging design will show a zebra, elephant, lion, giraffe and gorilla running free and living in harmony in what appears to be an African savanna.
The newly-designed boxes are on sale now.
PETA had written to Nabisco parent company Mondelez with a mockup design without bars and an explanation that circuses often mistreat animals. Illinois, where Mondelez has its headquarters, became the first U.S. state to ban circuses with elephant shows at the start of this year. …
Where Is Your Consciousness?
Try describing the location of your consciousness and see what happens.
Where is your consciousness? Can you describe its location? For the sake of the experiment, let’s define consciousness simply, as an awareness of oneself in the world. A lot of writers explore the location of consciousness–Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison. But how do their fictional explorations translate into the lives of real people?
This is not a scientific question. It’s personal, or phenomenological (to use the philosophical term). I’m not asking where your consciousness actually is, but where it feels like it is. Because the feeling may be telling. Anecdotally, people have told me they feel their consciousness in their foreheads, in the brain itself, in the heart, the solar plexus, surrounding the body, and nowhere at all. It seems worthwhile for a group of humans interested in psychology–readers here–to compare notes about their experience of consciousness. If you’re interested, use the comments section to describe the location of your consciounsess, or to reflect on the idea that consciousness does or doesn’t have a location.
We talk about our inner lives. We wonder would happen if people could see into our minds? Literature professors talk about the ways novelists represent the interior lives of characters. Consciousness, we imagine, is to be found somewhere inside us. If you plug the word interiority into Google’s Ngram–an ingeniously specialized engine that will show you how often the word has been used in print over a particular number of centuries or decades–you’ll see a steady rise in its use since the 1960s, its use still increasing steadily today.
But what container holds the experience we call consciousness? Is the idea of an interior life a metaphor? Can we find consciousness in our bodies? In our brains? Might a soul or spirit have physical dimensions? Might we find consciousness in there? Or is consciousness placeless, along with its cousins memory, emotion, and mind? …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes isn’t just a major Donald Trump defender — he’s also taking a page out of the Trump playbook and attacking his local newspaper as “Fake News.”
In June, Nunes launched an unusually long ad — running more than two minutes — against the Fresno Bee, for its coverage of a controversy surrounding a winery in which Nunes is invested.
“Sadly, since the last election, The Fresno Bee has worked closely with radical left-wing groups to promote numerous fake news stories about me,” Nunes says in the ad, giving no proof for the claims of collusion.
It was a rare campaign expenditure for Nunes, who isn’t seen as particularly vulnerable in his deep-red Central Valley district. But it was heard by enough voters in the district that Fresno Bee reporters received an uptick in hate mail, angry social media posts and voicemails denouncing their reporting and the paper.
Mackenzie Mays was the Fresno Bee reporter who wrote the original story on the winery controversy. In response to Nunes’ ad, she received voicemails calling her and her colleagues “corrupt bastards” — but she said it wasn’t the first time she’s gotten hate from readers, and their attacks have only gotten more vicious recently — since Trump was elected.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
The Daily Show revisits some of Donald Trump’s biggest Twitter scandals, including “covfefe” and calling Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man.”
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Tonight’s episode is a look back on the last year of worldwide reckoning with the #metoo movement, and how someday those people will be held accountable.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
庭でキャンプごっこ。Maru&Hana taste a camping feeling in the garden.
FINALLY . . .
The Simpsons’ Kwik-E-Mart Opens First Permanent, Real-Life Location
If you’re a fan of The Simpsons, and you’ve ever wished you could taste-test a Squishee or a Lard Lad Donut for yourself, the time has finally come.
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina now boasts the first real-world Kwik-E-Mart, the convenience store at the heart of the fictional town of Springfield for thirty seasons and counting. Designed to look and feel just like the store on the long-running animated series (though with less expired food), the Kwik-E-Mart opened less than a week ago and is already attracting visitors from all over the country.
Aside from the delicacies one might expect, like Heat Lamp Hot Dogs and Buzz Cola, fans can also buy a vast array of show-related memorabilia, featuring the likenesses of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, not to mention a host of other familiar faces from the series.
The owner of the Kwik-E-Mart in the long-running series, Apu, is featured inside his store, too, of course. As visitors leave they’re greeted by a mural one of Apu’s signature lines from the show: “Thank you, come again!” …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?