El Paso is one of those few but not insignificant number of American cities that I’ve been to so much I feel like I’ve lived there when I actually haven’t. Work and fun travel will do that progressively over time. More than anything what drew me to El Paso was the people. I really miss working with those folks and their families a lot. I’ll probably never go there for work again, but whenever I find my way back to El Paso the people are always there.
Still, that doesn’t mean El Paso lacks for things to do on your own. In Franklin Mountain, El Paso has a hill that literally bisects the city, and gives it its name. It’s a good hike, and one that if done on a weekday has the always enjoyable trait of being one you can accomplish without seeing a single other human being, which always adds a nice poetic touch to the hike.
the always typical and delightful: I want to climb that.
I can’t remember what this small structure was, but I think it was a power company site back when such things were needed
east El Paso, it’s hard to tell in this shot, but this portion of the mountain has three or four feet of hiking room, with a very clear one way trip doom fall on either side of you, it was fun
The best way to improve the climate is apparently to jet set the richest most important arrogant people on the planet into one place and get them to talk and produce nothing but bland platitudes for days. Make no mistake, lots of promises will be made, but nothing will be done.
All these countries will promise to be net zero by [insert any date here] and a bunch of corporations will produce squishy statements about how they’re committed to [insert any sanitized public relations talking point here] but it will just be hypocritical window dressing.
If they were honest, they would all scream and cry and then burn down the exhibit hall. Or better yet, not show up at all. Because the honest truth is there is no coherent plan to fight climate change. It’s all a pipe dream.
The global pandemic, the most catastrophic economic event in nearly a century, caused only a very small fraction of a dip in global emissions. Take a gander at this chart:
The economy of almost every country on the planet was detonated, hundreds of millions of people sent back into poverty, and life stopped for months on end due to lockdowns. And that cut emissions only a fraction of what they’ve risen to in the last two decades. So what’s it going to take to get emissions back down to year 2000 levels? Well, if the pandemic is a guide, I guess the answer could only be to destroy the entire human race.
The way out of this mess is apparently to replace all coal, gas, and oil with wind and solar. But these make up only a fraction of the overall power structure and it’d be 2189 before they could fully take over. Which if you believe the projections by that point the planet will be on fire and visible as a glowing molten rock from Saturn.
Then you hear the estimates that wind turbines have to cover an area the size of India. Because the planet has plenty of open space in its populated areas, right? And the same nutcases who are calling for net zero are also bizarrely anti-nuclear, because clearly this net zero power source is evil, you know, if they can’t do math.
To me this is the height of unseriousness. The planet needs nuclear power in order for the math to work, but Germany, Japan, and just about any green activist of consequence wants nuclear gone. They might as well just admit they’re selling an idea worthy of a druid occult ritual where they promise, just promise you the blood of a deer will cure your cancer. Which of course, it won’t. Unless you’re a druid reincarnated from 345 BC, then it’d work, or so I’m told.
Even the Paris accords acknowledge that they only way humanity can keep temperatures below a rise of 2 degrees Celsius has to involve “negative emissions”.
This is the idea of carbon capture and other such things that stop or even remove carbon from the atmosphere. Without significant negative emissions, the math doesn’t work either and over 2 degrees Celsius happens. And as of today, I think the total amount of carbon capture per year is less than what’s put into the atmosphere per day.
So then you get lunatic moonshot ideas of seeding the atmosphere with sun blocking chemicals, or throwing a giant sun shield between the Sun and the Earth. This Bond villain lunacy couldn’t possibly backfire, honest. I mean, we can trust the planet’s elites to not make mistakes, can’t we?
Hey to me the climate change argument is just noise. Believe in climate change or not, because it doesn’t matter what you actually think. You’re just going to have to adapt to the weather, regardless of what happens.
What does matter is the planet’s elites have only nonfunctional, delusional answers and plans which won’t work. It’s complete theater. Enjoy the ride, those who are driving are idiots.
As useful to the human race as a demolition derby event
For about ten seconds as I walked to the train this morning I got treated to the joy of watching a sparrow duel some kind of bug. They danced around the concrete as this bug (I couldn’t tell what kind) tried to get away from the sparrow. The bug lost.
Then the sparrow flew away in a burst, likely to go hang out somewhere and eat in glory. This will likely be the most enthralling thing I watch all month.
I had thought it’d have been great to get a video of this. But it happened so fast. And, as previously written about on this blog, sometimes the best memories are the ones where you don’t take a single photo or video.
So my dog, sigh, finally broke through the knowledge tomb door and discovered should could, in fact, and did, in fact, like to eat cicadas. She napped two of them off my brother’s deck during a happy post-covid Memorial Day barbeque. She grabbed them before any of us could intervene. Her pro level digestion took care of those two poor bastards just fine. It’s just gross, and probably unhealthy if consumed in volume.
Now she walks around the apartment courtyard with her tracking radar on as she attempts to locate further cicadas to eat. I have to watch her like a hawk. But, per prior post, most of the cicadas in my apartment courtyard didn’t survive the first few weeks.
And now apparently the government is saying that folks with seafood allergies shouldn’t eat cicadas. I’m not even going to try and wrap that one around my brain, how a cicada can make the body react as if it was a crab?
Also, I somehow (only somewhat) get the whole eating insects thing. Lots of cultures do it. Likely, in order for all humanity to eat meat / fish long term at least some insects will need to be a part of planetary diet, etc. But, sorry, I can’t do it. I don’t get it. Maybe you have to be raised with it? I sure wasn’t.
Nature is insane. If you were to submit to a book publisher a concept of a bug that emerged from the ground only every 17 years, was born, went through its life cycle, and then died in only a few weeks they wouldn’t place your bizarre work in fiction or science fiction, but fantasy.
My brother and his friend were joking about what other great mysteries lie buried beneath the Earth’s ground. Why not dragons or some other type of crazy mythical creature with a shelf life of 3,573 years underground? Who are we to say our stone age ancestors were wrong with their ideas of crazy creatures.
The cicada serenade sure does take me back. There are several broods that impact various geography throughout the globe. Their appearance can range in periodicity from 1-17 years or at least so I’ve read. 17 years ago I wasn’t even living in America so I missed this brood’s last ride.
One of my childhood houses backed up against an agricultural preserve with a ton of woods. The serenade would last for weeks and there were probably millions of them back there, nostalgia. I live in the city now so I can hear them but they’re a good ways off into the suburbs where there are more trees.
So I can’t really hear them loudly, the ones that were born in the apartment courtyard all emerged and seemed to all die very quickly. The apartment groundskeepers came in and swept out all their corpses and none have emerged since so I guess in my area the journey is over for this brood as a failure. Although if that was the case, how did they get into the ground here locally 17 years ago? Not sure.
I guess that’s the attrition rate inherent in any of nature’s concepts whether it be bugs or turtles or rabbits. I wonder how many of this brood gets to fulfill their purpose and how many die out first? It’s all crazy. But also, I sure am glad my dog has decided that while she likes to sniff the cicadas, she didn’t desire to eat them.
Nature’s awesome, I get a kick out of it when I’m not enslaved by a square screen that masters my life via my jobs. One of my jobs called me last night a 3:17 am. It was my boss, he had a hanky over the receiver at an inner city pay phone so he sounded like a drunk Vader, he screamed profanity at me for 39 seconds, then said in a normal voice, “See you tomorrow. We know you won’t quit.”, and then hung up. This is a pretty routine occurrence, so I just drifted back to sleep until the alarm woke me.
I often wonder why I don’t watch more nature television. It’s probably because I don’t have cable or a streaming service subscription. But I was at my Ma’s a few months ago and stumbled on an hour long program on Japan’s southern islands narrated by the Downton Abbey beauty and I was enthralled.
Anyways, it must have been a quasi religious experience if you were the first person to document [insert any new animal, fish or plant here]. I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of stuff in the rainforest we’ve yet to find, but it’ll be some new fern or insect or whatever. This is cool, and important, but not quite the same. Nobody’s ever going to find a brand new hippo sized creature on Earth. We’ll have to wait until we colonize other planets to find such new things, and then get on with destroying their biome too.
This one’s neat, it’s the “smallest reptile on Earth“. “The male Brookesia nana, or nano-chameleon, has a body of just 13.5mm.” He lives in Madagascar.
Just get a load of this surly little asshole. Look at him, it’s too good. He’s so, utterly, uninterested in mankind. His face just screams a whispered, “Fuck you.” Before he very slowly, lazily walks away to eat more mites.
By the year 2090, when humanity is done mutilating itself by some means, this little guy will be all that’s left. The radiation from the bombs or the impact of the end game pandemic will transform him from the smallest reptile into a godzilla sized monster. He’ll be the size of the building, but still a surly asshole. He’ll stare down at the last human alive, he’ll be smoking a cigarette, and wryly say in his booming but quiet voice, “Our turn now. Bye.”
The Arcturus Project 