“It’s understandable that people don’t think a transition will be just, because they’ve never seen one play out. Any just transition that looks to transition workers into training for jobs building wind turbines that might exist a hundred or two hundred miles away is a lost cause. I don’t think we deal with the climate crisis at the scale it …
Inequality related to racism, voting, happiness, income distribution and taxes – Feb 2021
“The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” Once the civil rights movement expanded America’s conception of “the public,” white America’s support for public goods collapsed. People of color have suffered the most from the resulting austerity, but it’s made life a lot worse for most white people, too. McGhee’s central metaphor is that …
Herbert Marcuse
By Matt Taibbi, Feb 2021, Substack Earlier this week I published a long criticism of One-Dimensional Man and Repressive Tolerance by Herbert Marcuse. In reviews, I always try to keep in mind the quote by Kurt Vonnegut, that anyone who gives way to rage in book criticism is “like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or …
Systematizers
While everyone has a Systemizing Mechanism, it’s tuned especially high in people who are inventors and in those drawn to fields like science, engineering, music, competitive sports, high-level business and often, too, in people with autism. By Christine Kenneally, NY Times Book Review, Dec 2020 THE PATTERN SEEKERSHow Autism Drives Human InventionBy Simon Baron-Cohen At the end of the 20th …
Highlights from Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor (on the kindle) – some highlights are cut off because you can only highlight so much at once and not consecutive things, generally Location: 664 To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves …
It’s time to start prosecuting executives for crimes they commit on behalf of their companies
Getting Away With Murder by Jed S. Rakoff December 3, 2020 issue NY Review of Books. A Review of Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcementby John C. Coffee Jr.Berrett-Koehler, 198 pp., $34.95 in his new book, Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement. Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School who is widely regarded as one of the …
Highlights from Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions
Notes/Excerpts from Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions by Denise Fairchild, Al Weinrub, Diego Angarita Horowitz, Isaac Baker, Lynn Benander, Strela Cervas, Ben Delman, Anthony Giancatarino, Vivian Yi Huang, Derrick Johnson, Cecilia Martinez, Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, Anya Scholman, Sean Sweeney, Maggie Tishman, Miya Yoshitani, and Ashura Lewis. Last accessed on Wednesday July 18, 2018 Location: 79 The first is …
A Crime to Want Something Different: US countering democratic and reformist changes processes in 22 countries with leftist extermination
The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & The Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World (2020) Vincent Bevins: The Jakarta Method is rounding up and killing huge numbers of unarmed leftists, in the service of establishing a specific type of social order. By eliminating these people, this potential opposition, you clear the way for authoritarian capitalism at home and the creation …
Thanksgiving and mourning, the American “rhetoric of rising”, slipping out of the labor force and more
Thinking about how to take a decolonizing approach to Thanksgiving, we are reminded that for many Native Americans it is a Day of Mourning. Here are some pieces on the erased history of Thanksgiving, suggestions on how you can support Indigenous American communities this year, a few potential Thanksgiving recipes from Native chefs, and an interview with Native author Tommy …
Breaking with the Defunct Idea of Development: Re-embedding the economy in people and the biosphere,
By Daniel McCurdy, Alliance for Global Justice. October 3, 2020 | CREATE! A longer version of this article was included in the book “The Revolution Won’t Be Stopped: Nicaragua Advances Despite US Unconventional Warfare” published by the AfGJ. Go to p. 123. One of the particularities of tourism in Nicaragua is its democratization. Since the Sandinista government won elections in 2006 and came to power …