Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

If cynicism leads to passivity, we walk off the cliff . . . The choices are stark: either you give up and help ensure that the worst happens or you become engaged and maybe you will make things better.

— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy

I can’t sing

my lungs are full of ugly

I look down and there are no paws

any sec I could step off a cliff

I think I’ve always felt this way

the smoke makes it clear

— Henry Hoke / Open Throat

… the odd incongruity hit him: he was in his own country, but somehow his country was not his country; an imperceptible mutation had changed people and things into their mirror image; everyone and everything was there, but they weren’t themselves, Cuba was not Cuba.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Map Drawn by a Spy

Power systems do not give gifts willingly. In history, you will occasionally find a benevolent dictator, or a slave owner who decides to free his slaves, but these are basically statistical errors. Typically, systems of power will try to consolidate, sustain, and expand their power. That’s true of parliaments, too. It’s popular activism that compels change.

— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy

Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”.

The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels . . . The heating is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and the damage to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate around the world until coal, oil and gas are replaced.

— Damian Carrington / “Hottest year on record sent planet past 1.5C of heating for first time in 2024” / The Guardian

I love the scratch of celluloid
and a low-register noise,
the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb.

— David Roderick / “Self-Portrait as David Lynch”

If you’re a CEO or on a board of directors, you’re supposed to make a profit. You don’t pay attention to the costs to others. And in the case of the environmental crisis, one of these costs may be destroying our species. It’s an externality, so therefore it’s a footnote. Of course, when it comes to the environment, there’s nobody to run to, cap in hand, to ask for a bailout. In a financial crisis, the taxpayer can be bamboozled into bailing you out, but not in the environmental crisis. 

— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy

What I’m Listening To: 

Waiting for the firestorm
Waiting for the false alarm

— Yo La Tengo / “False Alarm”