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Monthly Archives: May 2011
Ozzie Climate Politics – dirty ugly thing
On a day when the Climate Institute begins a gamble on the power of celebrity (Cate Blanchett) to help create the support needed for a carbon tax, (cue Pavlovian attack by Murdoch press, as David Horton says) we have more … Continue reading
Posted in activism, apocalypse, climate
Tagged Australian Financial Review, Laura Tingle
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Cyberpsychology , Behavior, and Social Networking
OK, I suppose I should not be surprised. I mean, the seriesoftubes HAS been with us for 15 years (more, really) Cyberpsychology , Behavior, and Social Networking is ranked 5 out of 55 in the “Communication” category of the JCR … Continue reading
Resilience and the golden goose-icide
Don’t over-exploit limited and slow-growing natural resources. Or There Will Be Trouble… (our fairy tales used to tell us this). Here’s a quote from William Gibson’s speculative fiction novel “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” In the passage below the existence of State-sanctioned … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, competence, natural world
Tagged Carl Folke, Fikret Berkes, greed, resilience, stupidity
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Resilience, football teams and fluctations
I’m reading a lot on resilience and the “management” of ecological services. One point that comes up time and again is that efforts to control ‘outputs’ of one particular thing will be successful in the short-term, but then require bigger … Continue reading
Posted in apocalypse, natural world
Tagged analogies, ecosystems, football teams, resilience
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The sage on the stage…
I have been reading a website called Nature Bats Last (hat tip to Leaving Babylon). I have just stumbled across a bunch of excerpts that the author, Guy McPherson, had posted from a book he wrote on education. The phrase … Continue reading
Expert teasing of expertise
Oh, this is great stuff. “Experts” (as in, pundits and so on) are no better than the proverbial dart-throwing monkeys, and often worse… Louis Menand’s review in “The New Yorker” of a book “Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? … Continue reading
The lyrical psycho-boyfriend rule
Pop songs should not include lyrics that you can imagine a psycho stalker boyfriend saying to his ex- as he stabs her to death. The whole creepy co-dependency thing… Can’t remember now what the song was what inspired this thought, … Continue reading
Woohoo! I’ve been guest-posted
I’ve long admired the Daily Maybe, a UK site that has a great mix of posts. Some are lengthy electoral analysis about the possibilities of left/Green policies/politicians gaining traction. Others tackle hot issues (his piece on “the right to know … Continue reading
Tie economists’ pay to carbon reductions
I suspect one or two of you may not have found time to read my tl:dr post about Wednesday night’s public lecture “Mitigating Climate Change: How and Why the economists changed their mind” Towards the end, I wrote; I have … Continue reading
Show me the Monet: the BBC and UK activism
The sophisticated and respected UK publication Viz has a phrase for women who look good at a distance but are a bit of a mess up close. The phrase is “Monet.” Right, now that I’ve alienated approximately half my readership … Continue reading
Posted in activism, climate, competence
Tagged sexism, tactical exhaustion, Viz, zombie repertoires
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