Renaming shit instead of fixing shit.

There is a road around somewhere called Stephenson Rd. “George Stephenson was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer during the Industrial Revolution.” One could argue, that what Stephenson did, kicked off the series of events that is at the heart of our climate emergency and the current ongoing mass extinction.

Literally the industrial revolution and the steam engine started what may, within decades now, bring down civilization, kill and displace, maybe not in that order, billions of people, and wipe out most species. Surely, this is the person in human history who did the worst thing…

We had better rename Stephenson Rd, “Happy Sunshine Flowers Of The Truth Of The People Who Love Life” Road, in some obscure language. Cause that is the move that will avert a climate disaster.

ROM

There is a fundamental problem with, “Ontario philanthropists are world-class supporters of educational landmarks like Royal Ontario Museum.”—Save Ontario’s Science Centre

First of all, philanthropy is a symptom of social dysfunction where for anything good to happen, we have to rely on the fickle charity of the rich to bless this or that project or needy individual on a whim. Robust social services and investments for all Canadians are replaced with begging for scraps. This is aristocracy, not democracy.

Secondly, the people rich enough to be philanthropic at the level that pays for the kind of thing that happened to the ROM, they are the same people who are “Conservative” party donors. They are the people who put the corrupt government in power that undermines public services and privatizes community assets to create profit opportunities for those same rich donors. They are the real estate profiteers who are snapping at the land the OSC is in the way of. They got rich enough to be able to play at philanthropy through the very mechanism that makes that philanthropy seem like a remedy to the lack of investment in social programs that their political sock puppets perpetuate.

And thirdly… OMG! The ROM rebuild that resulted in those lopsided black pyramids was a rich family’s folly that made itself ridiculous at every turn. The design was not fit for purpose. It wastes so much space. Somehow they started to build it without considering that the design would have allowed light to damage objects on display, so on the fly during construction they had to replace many of the windows with opaque panels. They literally had not considered if that “space” was suitable for housing the ROM collection.

If you have ever been visiting the ROM when a wave of “philanthropists” is showing up at your museum for a gala, and been part of the crowd of peasants being herded out of the building, while the aristocracy arrive to claim their space, then you have had an object lesson in who principally benefits from “world-class,” 🤦🏽‍♂️ tax deductible, philanthropic investment.

The Good

People will stridently defend their Sunday-school version of Christianity the Good. My mum was raised in the Salvation army surrounded by genocidal missionary zeal. She became a United Church Sunday school teacher. She taught us about how great and good Christianity and Christians are.

Christian Churches ran residential schools until 1969. The United Church publicly admitted that their residential schools were evil in August 1986, when I was 22 and long past tolerating church. The last residential school in Canada was closed in 1997, when I was 33. By then I think my mum had stopped going to church, she had certainly stopped teaching Sunday school.

I was being “taught” in Sunday school while children were being tormented and killed by priests and nuns and ministers and Christian school administrations. My mum was a 50 year old Sunday School teacher when Churches had been filling the mass graves her entire life. And it went on.

It was near the turn of the century when it was in the news a lot when I first talked to my mum about the atrocities of the Canadian Indian residential school system. And she said outright that that could not be true. That could not have happened. It could not have happened because she believed the Sunday-school version of Christianity the Good that she had learned and then taught.

It is a lie.

Low hanging fruit.

fElon tRump had a little incoherent rant about windmills, what did you expect? I am quite certain he no more understands wind energy than he apparently does anything else. But the problem is that in a very general sense, with all possible generosity, he was not wrong. Wind-power is, and will be, a delusional fantasy that has been the cornerstone of NO PROGRESS on depreciating fossil fuel for THIRTY-TWO YEARS. Picking on windmills is low hanging fruit that has been planted right there by, potentially, well meaning Greenish dreamers. And people who do not want Reich-wing christian evangelical extremism should not have left it hanging for the Orange Turd to point at and declare that we can’t have an energy transition.

But we could have an energy transition. It is the thing both tRump and Robert Habeck are obstructing. We could depreciate much of our fossil fuel dependence if we were committed to building an economical source of large amounts of electricity with a minimal footprint. And that revolution would be a nuclear energy transition.

It is genuinely the case that civilization may not survive, in any very recognizable form in another century, unless moderate, sensible people seize that golden apple and call it their own.

Warning: If three goddesses approach you, DO NOT give any one of them your golden apple.

Traffic, not the low spark of high-healed boys.

I would make sense, on local, primarily residential streets, to set the speed to 30… except…

There is a clear contradiction between signing a road or street at a low speed and designing that same road or street or stroad for a much higher speed. Because we have built car-centric car-dependent communities, most people are driving on straight wide multi-lane roads that are clearly designed for much higher speeds than they are posted. So posting them at a slower speed is simply wrong.

And the fact that almost everyone is exceeding low posted limits, in line with the design speed of roadways is an acknowledgement that posting lower limits on high-speed roads is not a solution. Nor is appalling automated enforcement, which should anger any sensible democratic person who doesn’t think they should have a predator-prey relationship with their government.

If you want slower speeds, inevitably you have to design the road or street or community for the speed you want people to drive at.

In the Netherlands there are hardly any speed-limit signs, or stop signs for that matter. Because they have redesigned the actual road/street space to the speed specifications that people should be driving at.

Reality

History is amazing cool stuff. And it can be quite interesting and insightful to learn about ancient philosophical and mythological thought. It can inform your understanding of why some peoples did some things. For instance the concept of Karma was used to justify the caste system.

And I can easily forgive historic people, who could not know better, their cosmological myths.

Prior to the deciphering of the first Rosetta stone people had no way of knowing any actual Egyptian ancient history because no one could read hieroglyphic or Demotic scripts. But many decades of archaeology and translation have given us a real history of Egypt that precludes the biblical account. Exodus is an entire fiction. And while in 1799 it was reasonable for a person to “believe” that account, we have known better since about the 1840s. Today such belief is wilful ignorance.

And I enjoy listening to programs about, for instance, Greek philosophy or Karma. But I find it genuinely disturbing, especially in our current bizarre emergent threatening christian nationalist political context, when at the end of a discussion about a bunch of interesting but entirely made-up beliefs, well educated persons, who have presumably successfully defended original research and a doctoral thesis, then go on to talk about a load of made-up nonsense as if it is somehow still relevant, or worse, truth.

Hot air

A service guy the other day informed me that the future of energy was heat pumps and natural gas. Setting aside that we need to stop burning natural gas, and pretending for the sake of the argument that heat pumps are gonna be useful for large numbers of households in urban areas, not contesting either idea. It turned out, he corrected me, that what he meant by “heat pump” was in fact an air heat exchanger.

And not being the quickest wit on Earth, I regret not having thought fast enough to reply that where he was standing, next to the hot water heater, thirty years ago he would have had to be careful not to very painfully hit his head, which I did several times, on a great big air heat exchanger.

We called it “the monster.” It was absolute shit and I feel certain consumed more joules of electricity than it saved in heat. At some point in the 90s I think, maybe later, I finally disconnected the stupid thing, lowering it carefully to the floor with ropes and pulleys, it was heavy. When the stupid Godzilla intestines that connected it were also removed it was a day of celebration.

There are still some legacy damages to the house from that dumb chapter. Zero out of ten. Would not recommend.

A consideration of how careless of sustainability we have become.

“Although Polybutylene piping may last up to 30 years, many polybutylene plumbing systems fail in as early as ten years.”

This house where I am, quite a bit of the plumbing is passing SEVENTY years old. And sure, it has required alteration and maintenance. But the only part that I can think of ever having failed was the kitchen sink drain. And that is to be expected as they get wrecked by food residue. But ff sake, drains are NOT under pressure.

Imagine the same house, had plastic water pipes been a thing all along. The water, probably a hot-water line first, would certainly have been expected to “fail,” that is burst and flood the house and need replacing, by as early as the mid 1980s. But even with that hopeful 30-year service lifecycle, the system would have been expected to need replacing, AGAIN, by ten years ago or so. Which service would have been precipitated by another plumbing-failure water spectacular.

But that assumes that you get 30 years out of a plastic pipe. I see 25-year warranties, and my mind goes back to the phrase, “many polybutylene plumbing systems fail in as early as ten years.” Who in their right mind wants to rip out and replace all the plumbing in their home every 30 or 20 or 10 years. It’s madness.

And I suspect the madness, like so much plastic-pushing, is because we use so much oil, so much more than we did a decade or two or three ago, that we have to do something with the horrible waste sludge that comes from oil processing, that can be stabilized and made safe by making it into more and more and more plastic.

In the mean time, if you are designing a home with pressurized plastic water pipes, maybe put all of that behind easy-access panels, cause that shit is gonna need frequent replacing… ideally with copper.

Every decent candidate…

…will face the exact same attacks.

It literally can never matter who Democrats, that Centre-Right party, run. It can never matter who Centrists run. It could never matter who some imaginary Left run. Reich wing extremists will slander and lie and abuse and formulate an endless stream of defamatory misinformation custom built for rabid consumption by angry deplorables. And they will turn that shit cannon on any and every opposition candidate or leader.

The evils imagined in the Left, which is anything less-far-Right than the craziest fringes of the GOP, is no different than panic about the “Jewish Problem” in the 1930s. It is a kitchen tool for whisking up the meanest and most credulous into a useful foaming froth.

When they have no valid policy points, Cons will just print “Fuck Joe Biden” merch, or in Canada, “Fuck Trudeau,” merch using the same exact design.

And that is enough. Because “Conservative” campaigns are not appealing to virtue or decency, logic or reason. They are appealing to the worst, most despicable, weaknesses in human nature. And it works on a population so poorly educated. So superstitious. So bigoted. So anti-intellectual.

Induced Traffic Demand

Every single person who drives has directly experienced that no matter how many highways you build, no matter how many lanes you add, they ALWAYS become congested. They always, quite quickly, end up over capacity, or way way over capacity.

None the less, too many people, who ought to have noticed that this does not work, will try to solve traffic congestion and shorten trip times by building more highways and more lanes, which inevitably causes more congestion.

It ought not to be necessary to repeatedly explain induced traffic demand, to anyone who has witnessed it with EVERY highway expansion that ever happened.

FFS. More roads, more highways, more lanes will always make traffic worse. It is as inevitable as gravity.