Hollowed-Out
I propose this as a metaphor for a large country whose institutions are being hollowed out.
U.S. and Texas: It is too Dangerous to Vacation in Mexico
Texas Travel Advisory regarding Mexico:. See also here for similar U.S. warnings.
The Texas Department of Public Safety warned Americans to skip spring break vacations in Mexico, noting that ongoing violence poses a significant safety threat.The warning —which adds to State Department advisories not to travel to large swathes of the country — comes in the wake of the kidnapping of four Americans in Mexico earlier this month. There's a "Level 4: Do Not Travel" advisory for Tamaulipas, the Mexican state the Americans were in when they were kidnapped.
In the meantime, here are the numbers of murders over the past year in various American cities:
Portland Oregon: 93 Philadelphia: 516 San Antonio: 231 Saint Louis: 200 Memphis: 288 New Orleans: 280 Chicago: 697 Houston: 435 Washington DC: 203 Kansas City: 167
Using Asbestos to Protect you from the Cancer
I didn't know this until today:
It's a good thing we stopped doing extremely dumb things a long time ago.
Leonard Nimoy’s 1978 Warning: The Imminent Ice Age
Things looked icy and bleak in 1978. But then it didn't happen, like so many other things that have been predicted. What is the lesson we can learn from this failure? When we make predictions regarding complex adaptive systems, perhaps we need more humility. Perhaps we shouldn't act like we are sure of things when we aren't.
What Happened to the U.S. Supply of Energy?
Energy shortages throughout vast stretches of the U.S. are not due to weather, which can be expected to be cold in the winter. They are because of poor planning and recklessly implemented ideology. Michael Shellenberger explains:
No individual person has been more influential than New Yorker author Bill McKibben and 350.org. McKibben and 350.org activists have generated large amounts of news media publicity for their pro-scarcity agenda by blocking natural gas from being piped from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and other states to power plants that could keep people across the United States warm this Christmas.It’s not just 350.org but also groups like Sierra Club and Earthjustice that have used the court system to block natural gas pipelines.
In July 2020, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy announced that they had canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have piped natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia and North Carolina.
Dominion and Duke blamed a decision by a U.S. District Court judge in Montana for overturning a federal pipeline permiting process that had been used for decades to allow oil and gas pipelines to cross wetlands and bodies of water
Climate activists also blocked a proposed, $7 billion, 300-mile long Mountain Valley Pipeline to bring natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had fought for the pipeline but despite his remarkable power in Congress, as a swing vote, he was unable to overcome resistance by other Democrats. The pipeline is 94 percent complete.
The power of the climate movement in shutting down reliable sources of energy, and natural gas pipelines, comes from its success in persuading a large share of Americans that climate change represents an existential threat.