Category: Planet Earth

  • Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

    Once again I turn to the “historian and philosopher of economic thought” (quoting Wikipedia) Philip Mirowski and his eponymous book discussing How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. The book seems tailor-made for Covid-19, although it applied to the financial crisis in 2008. Back then, when many of us were worried, or should I say “frantic”,…

  • Birds

    There aren’t many encouraging stories these days. Maybe I know of one, though. (Mind you, I make no promises.) My story starts grimly enough, with a headline that began to pop up here and there some time last spring: “Millions of songbirds vacuumed to death every year during Mediterranean olive harvest”. If you google it,…

  • “We”

    While Australia is burning, I listen to a radio programme titled “What will the next decade bring?” Two enthusiastic men, both of them social scientists with PHDs about “future prospects”, believe it or not, gleefully exclaim that in the course of the coming decade “we” will be colonising planets. That word, “we”, is just about…

  • Taxes

    Do you pay taxes? I bet you do unless you are unemployed. Basically, in order to avoid paying taxes, you have to be very well-to-do. Of course, you could try good old-fashioned tax evasion and risk getting caught. But you’d better be sufficiently well-healed to employ a battery of lawyers to protect you in court.…

  • Caution

    I have written elsewhere on this site that we all should do our utmost to form a protective ring around the “Reporters sans frontiers” (RSF) and other journalists who risk their necks to tell us what is going on. At the same time, I abhor those who kill, maim or otherwise persecute people on the…

  • Please, please, please turn the ship around

    Janet doesn’t want to have children because she cannot bear the thought of the future she imagines would await them. Her mother angrily tells her not to be “so silly!” though she cannot explain what’s so silly about her daughter’s well-founded fears. The fifteen-year-old in the house next door is playing truant today, to go…

  • I was wrong

    Climate change is picking up speed and impact like an avalanche, wiping out one poor community after another. It’s ineluctable consequences can no longer be downplayed as something we can take in our stride, because we can’t. Or rather, rich nations still can, but by 2050, those of us who are still alive may wish…

  • To the slaughterhouse

    Mine is a green country. Not politically green, albeit, but green as in pine trees, mountain rivers and grasshoppers. No, I don’t live in Greenland, which is not green, as it happens. Moreover, my country is only green for four months a year, and I grew up wearing long woollen underwear for the remaining 8…

  • A new year

    What if we lived in a world where the powers-that-be set out to eradicate children who were less than excellent students, women who were less than very sexy, men who were not both muscular and smart? Such a policy would be far more radical than mere eugenics, (cf. Nazism and Joseph Mengele), yet enterprises in…

  • Failed attempt to delimit humanity

    You know about the rabbits and the foxes, don’t you, about how there were lots and lots of rabbits in Rabbitland, until along came a couple of foxes, one of each sex, as it happens, and they thought the local rabbits were delicious. They ate and they ate, and they mated too, and their offspring…