1/. Angus Petersen with some advice on how to prepare for the polycrisis that's already here...
This is an excellent article, I strongly recommend you read it......
I never thought I’d get here. For years, my writing has been a nonstop siren warning about what’s going wrong in our world: climate collapse, economic instability, and the political rot that feeds both. Friends and readers tagged me the “King of the Doomers,” and I wore it with a grim sort of pride. My job, as I saw it, was to shake people awake. But somewhere between the headlines, the peer-reviewed doom charts, and my kids’ nervous questions about the future, something shifted. I’ve landed in the last stage of climate grief: acceptance.
Now, don’t confuse acceptance with passivity. I’m not shrugging my shoulders and watching the water rise. I’m still furious that my children, and theirs after them (if they even have kids!), will spend their lives bearing the fallout from decisions made decades ago by people more interested in quarterly profits than planetary survival. I’m just no longer pretending that a big enough petition, protest, or policy paper will change the trajectory in time to spare us the worst. Change — real, society-wide, culture-deep change — will come only when the wealthy and powerful start feeling pain they can’t buy their way out of. Until then, the arc of history keeps bending toward crisis.
2/. Lisa Kudrow with a parody of the Republican Press Secretary in 2020.....
So very applicable today to the Barbie in there now......one minute....
3/. David Wallace-Wells on the way our bodies have been slowly altered by plastics, chemicals and many other toxic substances to the point that you may have health issues that you don't know the cause of.
This contamination isn't dramatic, it's like the frog in water coming to a boil.....it's slow but relentless.
Most interesting article.....
Everywhere they look, they find particles of pollution, like infinite spores in an endless contagion field. Scientists call that field the exposome: the sum of external exposures encountered by each of us over a lifetime, which portion and shape our fate alongside genes and behavior. Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it.
There is plastic in salty sea foam freshly sprayed by crashing waves, in dreamy Japanese mountaintop clouds and in the breath of dolphins. When scientists test Antarctic snow or the ice on Mount Everest, plastics are there. When, in 2019, an explorer reached the ocean’s greatest depths in the otherworldly Mariana Trench, he found that plastics had beaten him there, miles past the reach of natural light.
4/. This is certainly how one of our mega-billionaires thinks......
5/. The CEO of Ford Motor is driving a Chinese EV.....and he's worried enough to retool a new plant.......
Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley commuted in a car that wasn’t made by his own company. In an effort to scope out the competition, Farley spent six months driving around in a Xiaomi SU7. The Chinese-made electric sedan is one of the world’s most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a built-in AI assistant—all for roughly $30,000 in China. “It’s fantastic,” Farley said about the Xiaomi SU7 on a podcast last fall. “I don’t want to give it up.”
6/. Trump has permanently alienated Canada......
Canada is living through an era of acute, sustained, profound and abiding rage. The source is President Trump; the object is the United States. The president, commander of the most powerful military the world has ever known, has declared repeatedly that he intends to soften up the Canadian economy in preparation for annexation. Americans, from what I can tell, don’t seem to take this possibility seriously, even though he undertook the task in earnest last week by imposing a 35 percent tariff. The American threat to our sovereignty, so sudden, so foolish, is reshaping Canadian life. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/opinion/canada-america-allies.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
7/. Is this happening to you?
8/. David Wallace-Wells with the uncertain future of our political parties.
He makes some interesting analogies to British elections......
“Twenty years from now, will we be a country of Democrats and Republicans taking turns on who’s in power?” Pete Buttigieg askedrecently. “I’m not so sure.”
Speaking to Mosheh Oinounou, a podcaster and former CBS News producer, the conspicuous institutionalist casually blasted the country’s institutions and proposed that, amid the wreckage, America’s political future was not at all intuitive. “We’re past the point of just believing that there’s some pendulum that comes back and forth,” Buttigieg went on. “I think that both parties should examine the chances of their survival.”
Americans love to decry the country’s limited political menu, and talking up third-party challenges to the two-party system has been a cottage industry at least since Ross Perot. In a time of anti-establishment feeling, there’s additional incentive to hype a crackup, even though structural forces make that chatter look perennially foolish. And I’m not predicting that America’s two major parties are going to actually split up anytime soon. But peek across the Atlantic at the changing shape of our close-cousin democracy in Britain, and the possibilities seem, as Buttigieg suggests, open.
9/. AI is amazing......here's a little parable.....Trump and Putin.....one minute
10/. And somewhere in this vast universe there's a planet like this.....one minute.....
11/. For now the Epstein saga has gone quiet, but the Republicans have laid traps for themselves......it ain't over folks!
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has hit a temporary lull — but rest assured it’s coming back, and it’s going to be ugly for the Trump administration. Major issues remain unresolved and will play out over the coming weeks and months, whether Donald Trump and his Congressional supporters like it or not. And they’ve mostly got themselves to blame.
House Republicans have run for the hills, but they can’t escape the fire they started. Speaker Mike Johnson courageously adjourned the House early for summer recess to avoid a vote on a measure seeking public release of the Epstein files. But days later, the House Oversight Committee, under the leadership of Representative James Comer — who’s perpetually on the brinkof uncovering some massive scandal but never quite gets there — issued a series of subpoenas calling for broad release of documents by DOJ and a series of in-person testimonial depositions.
12/. Arguably one of the best guitar solos ever - David Gilmour with "Comfortably Numb"....five minutes.....
13/. How we will see the future - incrementally, in bits and we will normalise it, even the extreme events.
Most interesting article......
Interest in “what will the future be like” has nearly doubled worldwide since 2020, according to Google Trends, and in a very short space of time, our lives have become saturated with countless tales of what lies ahead.
Everywhere we look, we’re presented with another breathless vision of the future. There are those who are optimistic about it, or at least willing to sell us on their future vision, from which they will presumably profit. Corporate strategists in their half-zip fleeces deliver their incredible projections with such bombastic confidence, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the dotted lines on their charts were as real as the solid ones. Our TV screens feed hundreds of hours of future content into our lives, from golden age heroic movies and contemporary dystopian TV shows to the countless news reports and documentaries that paint the future as an utterly terrifying place. Behind all of this, our religious storytellers continue to chug away, delivering their own reliable backbeats of salvation and oblivion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/opinion/future-ai-adaptation.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
14/. The compassionate Steven Miller loves blue cities......
15/. Ready for some intelligent [and scary] Sci-fi TV?
"Alien Earth" has a great review from the Guardian......
It’s usually a bad sign if you’re wondering what the heck is going on in a drama when you’re two episodes in, but there is an exception: you can happily ride on if you sense that, although you don’t know what it’s doing, the show definitely does. Such is the bristling, bewildering, overpoweringly confident aura of Alien: Earth, a new TV take on cinema’s greatest sci-fi horror franchise by writer-director Noah Hawley of Fargo fame.
We are in the year 2120, just the right setting for a show that plays on our fears that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to live in hell. Simple green-on-black text, styled like a computer readout from the 80s, informs us that, in this broken future, corporations have taken over the universe, and which one achieves total domination will be determined by which of three technologies wins a “race for immortality”: cyborgs (enhanced humans), synths (wholly artificial beings) or hybrids (synthetic bodies with human consciousnesses implanted)
16/. Need a good book for the beach......or wherever?
The first novel for adults from the author of bestselling medical memoir This Is Going to Hurt is, unsurprisingly, set in an NHS hospital. Dr Eitan Rose is a hot mess of guilt and self-hatred who buys cocaine from the hospital pharmacist to put in his nasal spray and has a talent for getting himself caught in comically compromising positions. Admittedly, the unexpected death by heart attack of his old enemy, consultant Dr Douglas Moran, does get him out of a tight corner. However, given that the man had just recorded a normal electrocardiogram, Eitan is suspicious – although the police see nothing amiss until his attempts to investigate cause him to become the number one suspect. The mixture of hospital soap, humour – some of it, such as the porter named Cole, rather laboured – and serious point-making won’t work for every reader, but Eitan’s manic energy carries us through what is, on the whole, a zippy and enjoyable read. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/15/the-best-recent-and-thrillers-review-roundup?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
17/. "Dead of Winter" with Emma Thompson.....one to watch out for in a few months......
From the freezing heart of Fargo country in snowy Minnesota comes a quite outrageously enjoyable suspense thriller starring Emma Thompson; I hadn’t realised what a treat it would be to see Thompson handle a pistol with a scope and also demonstrate where on the body you can get shot and still keep moving.
The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre. Brian Kirk directs from a script by screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, and Thompson turns up the accent dial to play a neighbourly and good-natured Minnesota widow. With her recently deceased husband, she ran a fishing supplies store and like him was keen on ice-fishing: venturing out on huge freezing lakes, drilling a hole in the ice, setting up a phone-box sized ice shelter for warmth and lowering the bait and lure. Her late husband sweetly took her on an ice-fishing trip on a certain remote lake for their first date – bittersweet flashbacks bring home the memory – and it is to this lake that she comes on a mission to scatter his ashes.
18/. "Hostage", TV series with Julie Delpy and Suranne Jones......good review, on Netflix.....
Hostage is a political thriller, and observes the conventions in many ways. The pace is absolutely flawless, it’s twisty, it has emotional heft. The British prime minister, Abigail Dalton, played by Suranne Jones, faces her husband, Alex Anderson (Ashley Thomas), being kidnapped. Their marriage is well drawn – “it’s happy, it’s assured, they’re supportive of each other,” Jones says. As we chat in Netflix’s central London offices, she’s always saying five things at once, only one of them out loud. Here, the subtext (I’ve decided) is: it’s actually pretty skilled work, creating a not-schmaltzy, passionate but familiar love match in which all the audience’s hopes and prayers are with the abducted spouse. That’s why normally when fictional politicians are the victims of a family kidnapping, it’s one of their kids. Nathan works for the Post Office and his job is to process mail that has been posted with incomplete or illegible addresses.
One day, Nathan comes across a letter addressed in shaky handwriting to Hashem with no actual address on the envelope.
So Nathan opens the envelope and reads the letter inside:
Dear Hashem
Shalom. I'm a widow of 79 and all I have to live on is a small pension.
Unfortunately, someone stole my purse yesterday with $55 inside and this was all the money I had left until my next pension payment. As you know, this Sunday coming is Rosh Hashanah, and I have some friends coming over for dinner.
Without money, I can't buy any food or drink. I don't even have any family to help me out.
You, dear God, are my only hope. Please can you help me?
Yours Sincerely,
Sadie
Nathan is very touched and shows the letter to all his work colleagues.
When they read it, each one generously gives Nathan a few pounds to donate to Sadie.
Very soon, his collection reaches $50 and the Post Office workers feel very proud (and so they should) to have been able to help an old lady in distress.
Nathan puts the money carefully in an empty envelope together with a short anonymous note:
Dear Sadie
Here is some money to make up for the stolen money.
Enjoy!
He then addresses it to Sadie and mails it.
Soon after Rosh Hashanah has ended, Nathan comes across another letter addressed to Hashem.
So he opens it. It reads:
Dear Hashem
Shalom. How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me?
Because of your gift of love, I was able to put together a lovely meal for my friends.
I told them of your wonderful gift and we had a super day thanks to you.
By the way, there was $5 missing from the envelope - I only received $50.
I think it might have been those shnorrers at the Post Office.
Sincerely
Sadie
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