1. I seem to be doing a lot of Sunday flotsams these days.

2. The first requirement for intelligent political discourse is to distinguish political thought from political rhetoric. That is, we have to set aside the buzzwords and loaded language (‘racist’, ‘imperialist’, ‘exploitative’, ‘equality’, and, especially, ‘liberty’) and make it clear what concrete realities we are actually talking about.

To put it another way, we have to be clear whether we want answers or you want support. Do you want to actually understand the issue, or do you want arguments that justify your side’s approach?

3. I will never buy an electric car, or at least not anything like the kind out now. There are many reasons for that, but to my mind the elephant in the garage is the obvious question “What if the power grid goes down?” As far as I can tell, those tooling around in Teslas would be stuck without transportation until the lights come back on. And in a situation where the power is down, you very likely will want transportation.

4. Speaking of which, Spain recently switched to 100% ‘renewable’ energy…and promptly suffered extended nation-wide blackouts. My prediction is that no one who counts will learn anything from this.

5. The last two both involve the same basic concept; people who take their civilized society so completely for granted that they don’t even grasp the concept that it is neither normal nor guaranteed. Consequently, it never occurs to them that they need to do things to maintain it. On the contrary, they eagerly attack the very structures they are absolutely dependent on.

6. When you think about it, our society takes pretty much all the most basic features of human life – communication, medicine, transportation, heat, food production, water, etc. – and bundles them all through a handful of resources organized in rather fragile networks. The goal now seems to be to shift more of those features onto one particular network while simultaneously making that network more and more dependent on less efficient resources.

This bullheaded naivety is almost the defining feature of modern civilization.

7. And to end on a lighter note, here’s a meme collection: