Long Thoughts

God is the Steady State out of which the Big Bang is spoken.

Don’t miss out on the end-of-world clearance on all remaining 2022-2025 Renaults pic.twitter.com/Z8efbAYDLa

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 3, 2022

TWO BY TED GIOIA: I Presided at the Birth of Google – by Ted Gioia So I couldn’t have predicted, back in 1999, that Google would engage in mass surveillance and operate as a trillion-dollar broker of its own users’ private and sensitive data. I couldn’t have guessed that the company would kneel down before totalitarian regimes in its constant search for bigger markets and more profits. I couldn’t have foreseen that pirates and crooks of all stripes would use Google as a tool in their own criminal enterprises. I never imagined that Google would deliberately fill up its own search results with advertisements and worthless links. But those shameful eventualities were all implicit in an enterprise that chased after financial returns above all other metrics. If that’s your goal, core principles and altruistic values come at too high of a price.

Jack Kerouac at 100: Part 1 (of 2) – by Ted Gioia Long before Kerouac wrote On the Road, Kerouac had already fantasized about a liberating journey. His mother decorated his boyhood bedroom with the nursery rhyme motto: “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” and he apparently took the admonition to heart at every phase of his life, whether eluding tacklers during his brief but promising football career—which might have blossomed into genuine stardom at Columbia University until a broken leg and his own restlessness derailed his sports ambitions —or later moving to his own personal beat on the roads of America. . . .

And it’s even worse for John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow—maybe the three most celebrated American novelists of their day, yet now missing in action from course syllabi, magazine essays, and (most telling of all) bookshop shelves. Much the same might be in store for J.D. Salinger and even Ernest Hemingway, who both hang on as important names, but are more often mocked than praised in the overheated world of social media lit crit. Harper Lee might even get cancelled, a mystifying development for a writer considered so forward-looking just a short while ago. Philip Roth still has devoted fans and a seemingly impregnable reputation, but in a strange twist, his high-profile biography got pulled from the market just 15 days after release.

seriously Mexico, what happened pic.twitter.com/DTnpoaeFdX

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 31, 2022

Here is the abstract (with my paragraphifications and emphasis) from the peer-reviewed paper “The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality” appearing in Political Geography by someone named Sultana. –

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways.

The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts.

Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions.

This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Stelvio Pass is a mountain pass in northern Italy bordering Switzerland. At 9,045 ft. above sea level, it’s the highest paved mountain pass in the Eastern Alps, and the second highest in the Alps. pic.twitter.com/jYwzobVYjs

— Dr. Clayton Forrester (@DrClaytonForre1) June 2, 2022

Intellectual Insanity The vitae of Grzanka (seen wimping out below)  A career spent in Gay Bars of one form or another and it becomes, what? admirable? “2007-2008 Queer Research Team Graduate student member.” Really. Really? As in: ‘We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow this house up from a little sausage balloon to make kiddy hats to a huge hulking Hindenberg of “Queer Research” making a nose-first landing into the burner on your kitchen stove.

This was perhaps the most utterly insane scene of the entire documentary, hands down… @MattWalshBlog pic.twitter.com/qF9MXvsmtv

— Kyle J. Maxwell (@khendriix_) June 2, 2022

Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans boasts at the World Economic Forum about the development of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor what you buy, what you eat, and where/how you travel. pic.twitter.com/sisSrUngDI

— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) May 24, 2022

BREAKING: Photo of off-duty Border Patrol agent Jacob Albarado who borrowed a shotgun from his barber in the middle of a haircut and ran into the school in Uvalde with his wife and daughter inside pic.twitter.com/M9xGXpxjTo

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) June 2, 2022

We have learned a lesson from the horrific tragedy in Uvalde:

Government will mandate that your children be vulnerable, hold you back at gunpoint while they are murdered, and then try to lie about it.

And then they’ll tell you that it all happened because you own a rifle.

— Spike Cohen (@RealSpikeCohen) June 1, 2022

Landlords Rehab Image Through ‘Housing Provider’ Rebrand  Last month, the real-estate reporter Rebecca Baird-Remba was writing an anodyne story about a commercial lease when an automated suggestion popped up in Google Docs. “Inclusive warning,” it read. “Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers.” The word was landlord. Google suggested she instead try property owner or proprietor.

Sedan Crater –  The 1,280 by 320 ft (390 by 100 m) crater was created on July 6, 1962 by a 104-kiloton-of-TNT (440 TJ) thermonuclear explosion. The device was buried 635 feet (194 m)[  below the desert floor in Area 10 of Yucca Flat and was the largest cratering shot in the Plowshare Program. The explosion created fallout that affected more US residents than any other nuclear test, exposing more than 13 million people to radiation.  Within 7 months of the excavation, the bottom of the crater could be safely walked upon with no protective clothing and photographs were taken.  Russian thistle, also known as tumbleweed, is the primary plant species growing in the crater along with some grasses. Analysis in 1993 observed that the original perennial shrubs once living there had shown no recovery. 

daily timewaster: That Stationwagon!

We learned two things this month:

1. Everything you suspected was true.

2. No one will be held responsible.

– Clinton ran the Russia collusion hoax
– Voting machine were hackable
– Transitory inflation was a lie
– Mask mandates don’t work (NYTs article)
– Biden family = crooks

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 1, 2022

Salted egg chips? Inside the Bay Area’s cult-like following of  “exotic” potato chips: A new snack flavor can keep the proles occupied for a week.   via  @HappyHectares Yonex Jones’ newest music video shows the San Jose rapper alternately riding on top of his truck and standing inside of it to sell bags of Spicy Sour Doritos that are only made in Israel. A glass counter display presents an array of chips that aren’t readily available in the United States, like Chinese Chicken Cheetos from China, Esan Hot Pot Lay’s Chips from Thailand and Nacho Cheese Doritos from Korea.

Asian supermarkets like 99 Ranch have long carried international Frito-Lay snacks, and thousands of Asian chips hit Bay Area homes through local delivery every month, according to the Fremont grocery app Weee! They have a cult-like following among customers who feel compelled to collect each new flavor, like catching Pokémon — especially those that are more complex than the average American offering. And more recently, the so-called “exotic chip” industry has crossed over into hip-hop. (See The Chronicle’s taste test of these chips here.)

Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed. 1828