To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
13
Aug
2021
Sunday August 8, 2021
Seventy-six years ago yesterday, the world’s first atomic bomb seared the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Writer Tom Englehart makes Hiroshima personal.
In a column in TomDispatch, he described a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which, he says, “can obviously offer a visitor only a hint of what it was actually like to experience the end of the world, thanks to a single bomb. And yet I found the experience so deeply unsettling that, when I returned home to New York City, I could barely talk about it.
“While it’s seldom thought of that way, climate change should really be reimagined as the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear holocaust. Hiroshima took place in seconds, a single blinding flash of heat. Global warming will prove to be a matter of years, decades, even centuries of heat.”
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: climate change, Hiroshima, Englehart
1
Sunday August 1, 2021
Along with a majority of Canadians, I’ve had my second COVID-19 vaccination. I’d like to go back to hugging my friends and shaking hands with those who might become close friends.
It ain’t gonna happen. Evolution – which is just another word for “change” – doesn’t work that way.
The dinosaurs probably thought evolution had gone into reverse when the asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula and they all died of hypothermia. They had, after all, been the dominant product of evolution for 170 million years.
But in fact, evolution speeded up. The great annihilation was the great acceleration. It opened up new frontiers for mammals (which includes us) and birds.
How long have we humans dominated life on this planet? I’d guess that until about 10,000 years ago we had no discernable effect at all. Only since we enslaved technology have we turned into the most invasive species this planet has ever known, surpassing even insects.
Tags: Evolution, change, Kurzweil, Moore's Law
24
Jul
Sunday July 25, 2021
“A teenage girl who stabbed a boy to death in downtown Kelowna was sentenced to one day in custody after pleading guilty to manslaughter.”
That was the first sentence of a story in Wednesday’s paper.
It took me aback.
One day? Especially when that one day was the day she appeared in court?
Part of me says that murder, even an unpremeditated murder like this one, deserves punishment. No one should get off with a verbal reprimand.
That is, of course, the principle behind what’s called retributive justice. Make ‘em suffer for that they did.
Tags: justice, rehabilitation, mental health
20
Sunday July 18, 2021
COVID-19 cases have started surging again, in places like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the U.S.. Reports blame the rise on anti-vaccine movements, distrust of authorities, misinformation, and government incompetence.
If I were a coronavirus, I’d be celebrating all of those.
As a virus, I have only one goal – to get inside the cells of as many humans as possible, so that I can take over their cell mechanisms to make more copies of me, so that I can get inside more cells of more humans.
We viruses run the ultimate assembly line. All we need is victims.
Tags: COVID-19, coronavirus, allies
Sunday July 11, 2021
Back in May, Lorna Beecroft posted a photo on her Facebook page of a giant log being trucked down a Vancouver Island highway. It went viral.
“I have never honestly in my life seen a tree that big on a truck ever,” Beecroft said.
The log was almost ten feet – three metres – in diameter. It filled the entire highway lane, all by itself.
Here in the Okanagan, I see lots of logging trucks go by. At a guess, they carry up to 100 trees per load, some of them so small it would be hard to cut a single 2x4 out of them.
But this was just one log. A single giant spruce.
Tags: forests, Old growth, logging, debt