If there were one motto that everyone should be required to contemplate, it's this one.

When they discover that we have tried fairly hard to reduce our footprint on the planet, people generally get apologetic and explanatory (as if I want to hear their excuses! but I try to be nice).

Generally there are two big strategic points - "Thing are fine, because he Earth is so big that humans can't really change it," and. "It doesn't make a difference, because we're doomed."

What really rots me is in the last five years, I've met a lot of people who start with, "Things are fine," but the moment any evidence is trotted out, they fold like a cheap suit and immediately jump to, "We're all doomed" - right from denial to despair, conveniently skipping over the "action" part.

This is wrong. A better world *is* possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkI-ebQF264

I am completely anti-fascist. My grandfather spent years in a Fascist PoW camp, though he lived to tell the tale. Today I live in a city that was occupied by Fascists who then dragged away tens of thousands of our citizens to torturous deaths in death camps.

I am firmly in favor of antifa and everything it stands for.

However, somehow the translation from anti-fascist to antifa abstracted the etymology to the point that the opposition to Fascism part was lost. For example, a persistent slander is that Antifa means “Anti First Amendment”.

And to be honest I really think…

A lot of the time I didn't know the material, and even in this case where I do, I always learn some exciting detail from your pieces. Keep up the good work!

So far all the articles I've seen about Prince Philip have been much nicer than he deserves.

Except yours. Yours was bang on.

I was pretty sick of the royals already, but when they wouldn't exert themselves to the slightest degree to prevent Brexit, I realized that they were permanent parasites who would never lift a finger to exert themselves, even when the health of their own country was in the balance.

(Obama sucking up to the royals is just business as usual for the empty suit. Obligatory disclaimer that the thoroughly mediocre Obama was still a lot better than the monster Trump.)

The "cloth mask to ward off evil death particles," or surgical mask, has a proven history of effectiveness for over a century.

Occam's Razor would look back at the past, see a series of pandemics going back to the dawn of history, and conclude that COVID was yet another one.

The fact that humans have done badly in the fight against COVID despite the inconsistent precautions we have taken certainly does not prove that things would have gone better if we hadn't taken the precautions.

One of the things that's very clear is that a sizable minority of the Western population will not cooperate with what would appear to be common sense public health measures because of deeply-held delusional worldviews. That some countries are pushing back is logical consequence of this horde of arrogant ignorant drooling mindless fuckwits who are a danger to themselves and others.

BUZZ! Not quite right.

In fact, there's a Law of Conservation of Momentum, so the Earth can't lose momentum (without transferring it elsewhere, but there's no elsewhere in this scenario).

(Nor is the momentum mainly caused by water, but by the mass of the Earth itself, but that's irrelevant.)

In fact, the reason the Earth slowed down a little was because of the Law of Conservation of Momentum!

Momentum is mass times velocity. But the further a mass is from the center of the Earth, the faster it rotates - exactly like a record, where the center point is motionless…

Fascinating and somewhat scary article.

I have watched the live music scene slowly shrink over decades, a victim of gentrification but also of competition - not just from DJs, but also from other genres that have grown from nothing over decades, like video games and the Internet in general.

When I first started playing NYC clubs with my band in the 80s, your weird avant-garde band that wasn't wildly popular would still make you a couple of hundred bucks for a couple of sets - enough to pay carfare for everyone and have a nice meal out of it …

We loved this movie.