Here’s another fashionable article about green energy. It appeared yesterday on the Bloomberg web site, in the “Green” section. Bloomberg.com, as you may know, is the corporate and media aspect of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s empire. It pretty much reflects Mr. Bloomberg’s world view, which is very pro-business and pro-wealth, but mixed with a tincture of liberal concern and even a bit of corporate “wokiness” of late. So of course there is a “Green” division of Bloomberg Media, which reports on climate change and how business is adapting to modern environmental concerns. And why not, given that there is money to be made by somebody!
Given all of that, I wasn’t too surprised to learn from the title of this article that “Replacing Coal Plants With Renewables Is Cheaper 80% of the Time”. And as if that wasn’t enough, the subtitle goes on to tell us “A new report shows that the economics may not even support running U.S. coal plants, let alone building them.” Wow, sounds like the revolution is under way! If the economics now line up so powerfully in favor of green energy, then who needs AOC (Congresswoman Andrea Ocassio-Cortez) and Bernie (Vermont Senator) and their “Green New Deal”? It’s all over but the shouting (and maybe a few billion dollars of financing deals and construction projects) . . .
In a nutshell, this article reports on the results of a recent report from a non-partisan climate and energy research group called Energy Innovation. The first few paragraphs of the article make it sound like the end is nigh for fossil fuels. » continue reading …
NY Times columnist Tom Friedman just had a very good article on whether a war with China is inevitable, as retired Admiral James Stavridis and former Marine and intelligence officer Elliot Ackerman forecast in their new best-seller “2034: A Novel of the Next World War“.
From the title, it’s obvious that Stavridis and Ackerman are positing a war with China occurring in 13 years. But why not now, given all of the sabre-rattling military exercises that the Chinese have been holding near Taiwan? Some US naval experts predict that China will start the invasion (and presumably a big war with the US) before 2034; earlier this year, US Admiral Philip Davidson, former commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, stated that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could attack Taiwan within six years – by 2027. Shortly thereafter, his replacement, Admiral John Aquilino, testified before Congress that China might attack even sooner than that — “closer than most think“.
Friedman gives a good reason why it may take over a decade for China to make its move. They aren’t likely to start a fight with us until they are confident about winning. In recent years, they have invested a lot into their military, and many believe that they are reaching parity with the US in terms of military capability. But Friedman makes the point that they still have one area of deficiency; their industrial economy » continue reading …
I’m going to post a really short thought tonight, something that might even fit on Twitter! OK, yesterday I was hanging around with my brother at his house, and we were watching a show about NFL quarterback Tom Brady. Perhaps the #1 QB of the past decade or two.
My brother has an insatiable appetite for professional football, and now uses much of his free time watching game repeats and mini-documentaries about now-retired coaches and players on the NFL channel during the spring and summer months. (He misses the XFL, an off-season football experiment which was killed off by the COVID pandemic last March — although the owners claim they will bring it back in early 2022).
So we were watching the show about Brady’s shaky start followed by so many brilliant accomplishments since 2000, and I couldn’t help think of another tall, thin uber-white male with similar work ethic, physical endurance, soft-spoken personality and technical virtuosity. That would be Neil Armstrong, the famed test pilot and NASA astronaut from the 60’s and 70’s. The guy who figured out how to land the Apollo 11 lunar module after it became apparent that NASA’s detailed plans for the landing weren’t going to work — and with only a few seconds of fuel left! Yes, Armstrong “read the field” just as well as Tom Brady does, and made some split second decisions that won the game. Both were (and in Brady’s case, still is) great quarterbacks!
So, just an odd observation — Tom Brady and Neil Armstrong. White American males aren’t in vogue like they once were. Sure, white males have a lot of bad stuff to answer for. But some of them really did raise the bar with regard to arete, skill and resourcefulness. I’m not much of a hero-worshipper, but I will give Tom and Neil their due. They did get their **** together, didn’t they.
Not long ago, someone from my Zen group asked me about an essay that I had allegedly written regarding “the search for the perfect bagel”. Although I may have exchanged some thoughts on bagels when our group had an informal dedication ceremony several years ago when we moved into a new location (where I brought the bagels), I didn’t remember writing anything about a perfect bagel. To me, “perfect” and “bagel” amount to an oxymoron! Bagels just aren’t supposed to be perfect. Bagels are clearly a wabi-sabi kind of food. Their beauty is in their incompleteness, in their variation, imperfection and individual flaws (so long as the flaw isn’t an insect in the dough). Searching for a perfect bagel is like searching for a perfect human life. Bagels are like humans. I.e., flawed, fleeting, but capable of beauty often in idiosyncratic and unexpected ways. Bagels are a food that mimics the Zen enso (the brushstroke circle). So are donuts, but they try too hard to be perfect with all of their sugar and glazes and pretty colors. Bagels are more like the enso simply because they are imperfect and unassuming.
So searching for a perfect bagel is like searching for Zen. The journey and the search are worthwhile, but you will never manage to recognize it and hold the perfect bagel in your hand. Every real bagel has Zen in it. But you can never see just what that is.
If I had to write a story on bagels, I would reflect on how and when they have intersected with the path of my own life. I first tasted bagels in my grandparents’ unheated apartment in Passaic when I was maybe 7 or 8. I didn’t really like them. They were plain » continue reading …
[I haven’t posted in a while — been in a late pandemic funk. The world changed so much — and it ain’t going back to the way it was before the pandemic. Gonna have to get used to a whole new world, in some ways better, but in many ways worse. But, the nature of politics won’t change all that much from the sorry state they were in last March. So let me post a thought on that subject.]
Biden’s presidency seems to be paralleling the Obama presidency. Both started out with a Democratic House + Senate, and both got a big economic recovery bill right off the bat. Obama did a pretty good job of dealing with repairing the underlying problems in the US financial system, and Biden is doing a good job of dealing with the underlying pandemic problem.
Then they started working their first big policy-related spending bill — Obama health care, and Biden “infrastructure plus”. Things got bogged down, but with a lot of struggle, Obama got his initiative passed on a partisan basis, and Biden may well » continue reading …
Was pondering Buber’s I and Thou at work not long ago, and had recently listened to Teaching Company lectures on nominalism vs realism in the Middle Ages, along with the Christian mystical tradition of the Middle Ages. The lecturer has a very interesting classification system for mystics — but of course, are those categories “real” or nominal in and of themselves? Probably nominal, i.e. “in name only”. The lecturer himself admits that his classifications are ad hoc, many other academics would disagree.
But as to what is real, what is fundamental: Buber appreciates that existence / being, as we know it, requires relationship, and relationship requires some level of dualism. To talk of “oneness”, of monism, is to talk of an abstraction. Perhaps our minds, tuned as they are to abstractions, can conceive of one-ness in some weak, distant fashion (see thru a glass darkly).
But our lives and everything we know of in the universe lives in relation to something else, we live in a sea of duality. If there is an “edge of the universe”, if the universe is like a ring of connected things, and then » continue reading …
OK, let’s get a bit risque and explore the links between human sexual experience and transcendent meditation states / mystical experience. That’s a topic that I don’t see discussed very much, but I believe that it is really important for a better understanding of both human sexuality and meditation states / mystical experience, and their ties to the neuro-structures and processes of the brain. And also in relating all of that back to the ongoing speculations regarding trans-scientific / metaphysical conceptions of “deep reality”.
[Well, actually there is a recent book that relates to this topic called “Transcendent Sex” by psychologist Jenny Wade. Also, an on-line PhD thesis says
That sexuality and spirituality are related has received extensive philosophical and theoretical attention from various disciplines (e.g., Aging and Development—Ammerman, 1990; Medicine-Anderson & Morgan, 1994; Christian Theology—Bilotta, 1981; Chavez-Garcia & Helminiak, 1985; Dychtwald, 1979; Feuerstein, 1989; Grenz, 1990; Moore, 1980; Nelson, 1981, 1983; Sex Therapy–Mayo, 1987; Schnarch, 1991; Psychology-Francoeur, 1992; May, 1982; Moore, 1994).
Well, I sure wasn’t aware of that!]
When we get into the arena of eroticism, we need to define some ground rules. And not only because of my desire to maintain decorum and avoid uncomfortable moments, not only from the fear of “getting too personal” and getting lost in taboo. » continue reading …
What will be the long-term effects of COVID on the nations of the world? Aside from the price in lives and suffering, it will obviously sap a lot of economic wealth from most of the nations of the world. How will that change the course of history in coming years?
Europe, USA — big hit, big deficits
Russia — probably also got pulled down, will lose economic and hopefully military power
Third world — set back by many years
Asian nations — not as bad as the west, but still many costs
China — unfortunately, they got out quickest and recovered the soonest. SO, it appears possible that China’s strength and position in the world will be strengthened relative to the US, Europe and fellow Asian nations; it will gain more military strength and be even more dangerous and domineering.
