Saturday, February 20, 2021

Weekend Reading: Just a Few Links Edition

I stayed up too late last night watching the final three episodes of Picard. So I am tired today, but have no one to blame but myself. I enjoyed the series, but it didn't quite do what The Mandalorian did for me, which is give me something I genuinely looked forward to each week. I can't really say why The Mandalorian did that and Picard didn't. I think it might just have been baby yoda.

Anyway, it is going to be a beautiful weekend here, so nice that it may be warm enough for some hammock time tomorrow. It feels weird to be looking forward to hammock time when so much of the country is still freezing, and Texas is recovering from a catastrophe. I am heartbroken by the stories of people who have died due to the winter storm and failure of the electric grid. 

As I read the news from Texas, I found myself thinking of the opening scenes from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, in which a terrible heat wave kills hundreds of thousands of people in India. We aren't to that level of climate catastrophe yet, but we will get there if we don't take action - both to reduce carbon emissions to slow down climate change and to prepare our public and private infrastructure for the coming disasters. 

We need to elect better leaders who will take the threat seriously and take action to prepare us instead of just trolling their political opponents on social media.  Much has been written about what Ted Cruz could or could not have done to help in Texas instead of flying to Cancun (here's a straight writeup on that), but to me the biggest tell in that incident was the fact that Cruz didn't want to go learn first hand what had gone wrong so that he could try to write legislation to prevent future catastrophes. I am not sure what he thinks his job as US Senator is, but apparently he does not think it involves working on legislation to help his state and the country prepare for the challenges ahead.

OK, let's get to the links. I don't have many this week, but here's what I have:

Here is an interesting interview about why (and how) we should make our cities bird-friendly.

This is a very succinct statement of why we need to keep up our efforts to stop transmission of SARS-CoV2 right now:


In recommend listening: Krista Tippet's interview with Ariel Burger and Ezra Klein's interview with George Saunders both touched on the theme of what it means to live a good life, and gave me a lot to think about

And in things that made me smile:

This thread reminded me of my Nana's receipes which were also often quite sparse on the instructions:

I wouldn't say this made me smile... but it was interesting: Blue dogs in Russia.

Here's your bunny for the week:


Have a good weekend, everyone!


1 comment:

  1. You'd think the bare minimum responsibility for an elected Senator would be to be PRESENT for a disaster of this magnitude and Cruz couldn't even manage that. I find it also outrageous that on his return, instead of getting to work, he spent hours working on rehabbing his image and lying in the process instead of being a decent human. Just awful. But it did highlight how horribly gerrymandered the state is, which I didn't realize before this.

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