I've been listening to Brad Mehldau's splendid double album Highway Rider this week, so I'll feature it today along with a few other tunes. Mehldau ranks highly among the finest, most interesting and most innovative musicians of the 21st century. These songs are from Highway Rider unless otherwise noted. John Boy Don't Be Sad Things Behind The Sun — Nick Drake's song, from Live In Tokyo Capriccio House On Hill — the title tune of the album, recorded in 2002 and 2005 Continue reading

I want readers to say something today. Let me know you exist. I see the depressing traffic numbers, but they don't tell me much, outside the fact that my traffic is descreasing over time. Also, my continuing to publish this blog is not a money issue, as several readers seemed to think in yesterday's comments. I'll have more to say about this in the near future. When CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who has the consciousness of a primordial flatworm and the intelligence of cauliflower, went to Oklahoma recently to interview tornado survivors, he got a comeuppance from one of those survivors... Continue reading

A reader alerted me to a video by Swedish academic Hans Rosling. It's called Population growth and climate change explained by Hans Rosling, and appears on The Guardian's Global Development page. That banner should tell you everything you need to know. FYI, DOTE is not supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Anyway, in asking what are we up against? in telling humans the truth about themselves and what they're doing, there is no finer illustration than this Rosling video. The telling (humorous? tragic?) moment comes just after the 2:45 mark. The video runs only 3:19 altogether. You need... Continue reading

The title of this post is all I have to say right now about that subject, other than to say that... this blog, traffic-wise, fundraiser-wise, will never be what it was even a year ago. What would you do in my position? Would you keep publishing? Or would you stop? Let me tell you something. When DOTE disappears, nothing will replace it—ever. People who think they know something believe that— anthropogenic climate change is the problem or, peak oil is the problem or degradation of marine ecosystems is the problem, or ... something else Of course, none of these necessary... Continue reading

A recent study in the journal Fish And Fisheries did not get the attention it deserved. Let's fix that. Science Daily reported on the study in Why We Need To Put Fish Back Into Fisheries (May 19, 2013). Overfishing has reduced fish populations and biodiversity across much of the world's oceans. In response, fisheries are increasingly reliant on a handful of highly valuable shellfish. However, new research by the University of York shows this approach to be extremely risky. The research, published today in the journal Fish and Fisheries, shows that traditional fisheries targeting large predators such as cod and... Continue reading

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely — Lord Acton In March, 2012 I wrote a short post called Democracies Always Fail. It started off like this— Many Americans believe they live in a democracy. They don't. Yes, there are names on the ballot, campaigns are waged, votes are cast, and the winners serve their terms in Washington. But some votes count more than others. Way more. Those who vote with their checkbooks have far more sway than those who do nothing but push buttons or pull levers in a voting booth. The further you move away from the "one person,... Continue reading

This is a brief follow-up to yesterday's important post Bernanke Tells It The Way He Wants It To Be. I recommend you read it if you haven't done so. There are a couple of points of agreement between Ben and me. First, I think technological innovation will continue. Where we disagree is what the consequences of that innovation will be. The second point is more important and fundamental. Here's the chairman. First, innovation, almost by definition, involves ideas that no one has yet had, which means that forecasts of future technological change can be, and often are, wildly wrong. A... Continue reading

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is living proof that delusional optimism is always possible if the person in question restricts their view to exclude any and all inconvenient considerations which contradict it. Bernanke made the case for a Happy Future in a commencement speech to the graduates of Bard College. The chairman scolded "pessimists" for taking too narrow a view of that future. Bernanke's conventional thinking about the future rests upon human ingenuity and the technological innovation which springs from it. There are three fundamental assumptions which typically guide human beliefs about the future. Technological innovation solves all problems. More innovation... Continue reading

The weather finally turned warmer this past week. Some music is seasonal for me, for example, classic jazz in the winter, lighter fare in the spring and summer. This week I've been listening to Spyro Gyra, a fusion band formed in Buffalo in the 1970s. They're still around, still doing it, all these years later. Many of the tunes I wanted to play were not available on youtube. Too bad. Heart Of The Night — from their 1996 album of the same title Incognito — from their 1982 album of the same title As We Sleep — from Heart Of... Continue reading

I noticed some time ago that some of my own comments were getting filtered, and thus did not appear on the website. I only recently discovered where those missing comments went, and was taken aback to discover that the Typepad software marks some perfectly good comments as "spam". I now look at the "spam" comments every day to see if such mistakes were made, and correct them. Just today, I rescued a perfectly good comment by JohnWDB. Otherwise, if your comment doesn't appear on DOTE, that means that it is temporarily in "spam" limbo, it really is spam, I deleted... Continue reading

You know I don't make this stuff up. If you were to tell people that the technology exists to manipulate the workings of people's brains, they may not believe you. No, no, I would believe it! I thought it was called propaganda & advertising. But this is something else. That sort of thing is the stuff of cheap sci-fi B movies. If someone in the real world were to try to develop it, that's exactly the sort of scenario where they'd send James Bond in to stop them before it got too far. But the fact is that this technology... Continue reading

This is the third and final day of my spring fundraiser. If you value this website, consider making a donation via the Donate (Paypal) button on this page, or by sending a check or money order to the PO Box I gave you in Tueday's post. Thanks — Dave [Tony Judt's book Ill Fares the Land] has a touch of prophecy in the authentic sense of that term. Prophecy is not about foretelling the future; it is about warning those in the present that unless they change their ways, they are unlikely to have much of a future at all... Continue reading

This is the second day of my spring fundraiser. If you value this website, consider making a donation via the Donate (Paypal) button on this page, or by sending a check or money order to the PO Box I gave you in yesterday's post. Thanks — Dave In the United States, going to college often means taking on a boatload of debt. It's not hard to see why. College tuitions and fees have been rising far beyond the official inflation rate for decades. That trend has not abated much in recent years. Tuition and fees at U.S. public universities rose... Continue reading

* Or, Why I'm In The Wrong Business Before I tell you why I'm in the wrong business... Money is an issue I'd prefer not to deal with, but there it is—we live in a world which requires us to have it. If you value what I do on DOTE, please consider making a contribution to keep it going and bolster my flagging enthusiasm. After 40 months of writing this blog, I don't have to tell you what I offer here. If you've read DOTE for any length of time, you know I'm not trying to sell you some bill... Continue reading

Scientists are keeping busy. There are grants to get, tenured positions to be secured, and mass extinctions to model. Nature Climate Change recently published another effort along these lines called Quantifying the benefit of early climate change mitigation in avoiding biodiversity loss. Here's the abstract. Climate change is expected to have significant influences on terrestrial biodiversity at all system levels, including species-level reductions in range size and abundance, especially amongst endemic species. Endemic species are plants and animals which are isolated, range-restricted (e.g. island or peninsular species) and found nowhere else. However, little is known about how mitigation of greenhouse... Continue reading

It's Sunday, always a slow day on DOTE, so why not indulge my intense desire to bash Paul Krugman? But surely we know that Krugman is a fool! Why bash him further? I'll try to explain. Paul Krugman is just like any defender of the status quo, only more so. In my book, that makes him the King of Denial. When Krugman tells us that we need more inflation need more money printing need more fiscal stimulus he is telling us, in effect, that the United States is not broken in any deep sense. All we need do is follow... Continue reading

Today I am featuring jazz singer Diana Krall. This is a reprint of my July 7, 2012 Remedy. I added another video, So Nice. I need to mellow out. I've always loved her work. Diana often sings ballads from the jazz standards songbook. That's fine with me. It also might interest you to know that she's married to Elvis Costello, who sometimes produces her records. Don't forget to support great music. Here's the playlist. Besame Mucho Let's Face The Music And Dance The Look Of Love Just The Way You Are So Nice (live in Rio) Continue reading

Some bullshit goes far beyond the ordinary, and when the question is what will humans do to rein in carbon dioxide emissions?, you are very likely to see it. So it was not terribly surprising to find some astonishing bullshit in the Reuters story U.S. envoy sees new plan energizing global climate talks. The source of the bullshit was Todd Stern, America's climate negotiator. The United States' new proposal to let countries draft their own emissions reduction plans rather than working toward a common target can unlock languishing U.N. climate negotiations, the U.S. climate change envoy said on Tuesday. [Todd... Continue reading

phony (defined) — not genuine, fraudulent In a report with a misleading title, Gallup says Americans' Confidence in the Economy Ties Record High. If you look at the polling results, you will find out that the confidence of rich and well-off Americans is rising, but the confidence of those "beneath" them is not. The confidence "spread" between those making at least $90,000/year and those making less has not been this wide over the last 17 months. We don't have far to look to explain the difference. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA, DOW) recently soared above the 15,000 mark, a... Continue reading

File this story under We Don't Make This Stuff Up. Kiera Wilmot got good grades and had a perfect behavior record. She wasn't the kind of kid you'd expect to find hauled away in handcuffs and expelled from school, but that's exactly what happened after an attempt at a science project went horribly wrong. On 7 a.m. on Monday, the 16 year-old mixed some common household chemicals in a small 8 oz water bottle on the grounds of Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida. The reaction caused a small explosion that caused the top to pop up and produced some... Continue reading

In its preliminary estimate for GDP in the 2nd quarter, the BEA announced last week that the economy had grown 2.5%, which was disappointing to many because it fell below expectations. I found this text buried in the middle of the Los Angeles Times report on the GDP print. Consumer spending in the first quarter jumped at a 3.2% annual rate, the fastest since late 2010 and nearly double the pace of last year's fourth quarter. This reflected pent-up demand for goods and services and the recovering housing market. "The strengths in consumer spending are now attributable to gains in... Continue reading

It seems to me that this honey bee situation is getting pretty serious. The money quote in Elizabeth Grossman's Declining Bee Populations Pose A Threat to Global Agriculture comes at the end. “There’s going to be a shortage of bees in this entire growing season,” James Frazier, a professor of entomology at Pennsylvania State University, said of the U.S. situation. “The ability to replace bees that have been lost has been exhausted, so there’s a very large question mark about next year. Whether we’ve reached a point of no return, we don’t know.” The point of no return. Let's back... Continue reading

My, my, how time flies. I first wrote about Colony Collapse Disorder and declining commercial bee populations on March 24, 2010. I followed-up in 2011 with There Go The Bumblebees, which looked at wild bee populations. 2012 passed without a bees post, a situation I am going to rectify tomorrow. I've reprinted both older posts below — Dave Honey Bees Are Dying Three years ago, honeybees started disappearing in the United States and other countries. Hives that had been thriving were suddenly found to be devoid of bees. The epidemic of catastrophic bee losses is called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).... Continue reading

I was going back through my Remedy notes file, and thought it would nice to play some of my favorite movie clips. I don't usually do movies here because it's very hard to find stuff that hasn't been removed due to copyright, but some stuff is still available. Here we go. "sometimes the magic works..." — Little Big Man (1970). When Chief Dan George refers to "human beings", he means Native Americans. White people don't count "I'm mad as hell ..." — Network (1976). Peter Finch's famous speech. One of the all time greats. "the hoofer's club" — The Cotton... Continue reading

A young reader "the Dingo" wrote a comment this week which came with a request. Dave, I have been following your blog for a while and have read (nearly) every one of your posts. And I think I have a good handle on your sensibility—and I like it. The human race and the planet needs your "common" sense now, more than ever. I know you probably don't do requests, but I'm curious--if you could one day write up a post in which you outline what your policy would be, if you could somehow had influence in the levers of "power".... Continue reading