I’d go backfor just a moment,perhaps as longas one day and a night,enough, I think,to relish what I lovedabout Long Island summers: Scents of ragweed,seared grasses,almost-too-sweet rosesin the heavy summer air… Glittering waters,hot, hot sandand tiny shellshiding in the dryingseaweed margin of the tide… Early morningssun like a glowing peachsoft-lit hazy cool’til nearly 10… And …
Author Archives: Ciel
Calm Down, Dems!
The intensity of the Dems freaking out over Biden’s poor performance on the ‘debate’ stage is directly related to the intensity of fear and loathing they–and many of us–feel at the possibility of the Republicans’ succeeding in the culmination of their long-game authoritarian take-over of America. They’ve been working in the shadows, and not very …
Surrender Is Not an Option
I was thinking about the writers of the US Constitution. They didn’t have everything right, like not actually recognizing that women and people of color are actually whole human beings, and they were mostly all slave-holders. But they were the most educated men of their time. They were philosophically sophisticated, very broad-minded for their time. …
Tribalism is killing us.
It’s all very well to have your own tribe, to build it up and maintain it with your own beliefs and ideas about who you are and what is your relationship with your universe, your deities, the other people you share the world with. It is beautiful to celebrate your worldview with dances and art, …
footnote: Global Warming & Snowball Earth
Just today I have been watching LIFE ON OUR PLANET, a new documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman I surveys the origins and progression of life on Earth. It covers in far more detail, graced with Freeman’s compelling voice, some of the very same geologic history I presented in my essay here. I am tickled by …
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Global Warming and Snowball Earth
Ironically, the warming of the Earth bringing about melting of polar ice–which decreases the salinity of polar waters thereby slowing and possibly even halting the North Atlantic Conveyer current which brings the warm Gulf of Mexico waters up past the British Isles–sets up the British Isles for winters lasting through the year, for years, as …
Binging Monsters
I finally got it, why I binge-watch crime shows. People love stories, not just for amusement, but to show us the way through the dark forest, the way through the terrible haunted swamp, the way to deal with monsters. Crime shows are stories about how the monsters are caught and stopped, how the monsters are …
The Cost of Abandoning Eden
We have been operating for so long on such simplistic, egoistic notions of how the world works, our place in it, what other animals and even things are and can do… When we traded in instinct for intellect, maybe we also lost a sense of the connectedness of everything, of the wonderful intricacy of all …
Money
Money is a battery for storing the energies produced by human work. It’s a transformer, too, changing human work into stuff. When the potter trades pottery for the farmer’s grain, it is a device for equalizing any difference in the relative values for the goods generated by the work. In itself, it has no value, …
THE GUEST OF HONOR
Old Bilbo Baggins is eleventy-one! For a hobbit, indeed a respectible age. Though he loves to sit out with his pipe in the sun He acts like a lad in his tweens, not a sage! For a hobbit, indeed a respectible age He’s well on his way now to match the Old Took! He acts …
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 