Notes from the Cafe Fiasco

Spriggs’ Weekly - Week 4, January 2019

Anybody

Well, you have to admit that at the very least Trump has proven one old adage to be true. Anyone really can become President.

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GasTV

The new gas pumps now have LCD screens that aim information at you as you fill your tank. I was topping off the tank this afternoon and the pump was spewing commercials at me, the weather, and the “Word of the Day,” Today’s Word of the Day was “subborn,” as in, to suborn perjury. Seems that GasTV is up on the times.

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Weather Report

 

The week started off being run of the mill January in Boston weather. Then we had a day of record lows (6 degrees)  followed a couple of days later with temperature almost in the 60’s. In between, we had 2 inches of snow and then freezing rain and sleet.

 

Glad that we’re not having that extreme weather conditions that the climate change people have been warning us about.

Sponsorship

Noticed last night that CNN coverage of the Republican National Convention was brought to us by the American Petroleum Institute. Think we're going to hear a lot about climate change this week?

Phil and Climate Change

It is Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil has been doing his thing in Pennsylvania - predicting six more weeks of winter.  But I wonder: is that six more weeks of winter winter or is it the winter that we've had so far that, for us New Englanders, isn't really winter?

Weather a Little Wonky?

Just in case you were wondering how much climate change might effect the kids, here's the latest assessment:

http://www.tgdaily.com/sustainability-features/60291-ecosystems-shift-as-climate-changes

Might be time to consider selling the house "down the Cape" as we say here in Boston.

 

Progress

Looks like the climate change deny-ers are moving along to a new strategy. First, they said that climate change wasn't happening. Then they said that humans didn't cause it. Now, in the face of overwhelming evidence that bad things are happening, they're beginning to say that it doesn't matter if we try to do anything about it or not.

Besides the moral implications of not attempting to be responsible for cleaning up a mess that you created, you have to admire these people for being very creative. While looking like they are changing to accommodate to a new scientific reality, they manage to keep protecting the interests that got us into this pickle in the first place - the people with the money, predominantly the oil and gas industry. Very slick.

Change is not always progress, sometimes it's only adjustment to keep power relationships functioning the way that they are. (Are you listening Barak Obama?)

Practicality

Now these Climate Change people need to get practical and we could solve this problem. For instance, it they could just figure out how to link the atmosphere to the blast freezer that is the tech office in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT that would take care of the problem.

Today's Climate Question

So, they've declared the Climate Bill stalled unto death for this session because one (Republican) senator got bent out of shape that the Senate was going to deal with immigration reform first that he quit giving it his support. This is after John Kerry has made a big deal of the fact that he had everyone from the Sierra Club to the coal industry signed on to the Senate bill and the House bill has been passed from months now.

Ever get the feeling that you're not being told what's really going on?

Supporting Ourselves to Death

Going to visit my friend Linda on the subway last night, I sat on a crowded Orange Line train next to a middle aged woman engrossed in the collection of papers before her. Having little or no sense of propriety, I wondered what was so interesting and started to read "over her shoulder."

What I learned is that it seems that the City of Boston is considering outsourcing the running of the development of it's Climate Action Plan and she was looking at a long complex proposal from a consulting firm about how they would propose to run this multi-committee process. The "lead facilitator" would be making $185 per hour for this work and the "secondary facilitator" would be pulling down $55 per.

Now when Phil Jessup was working 15 years ago to get the Cities for Climate Protection Program at the brand new International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) that Jeb Brugman and a group of us had brought into existence up and running, I doubt that he envisioned that municipal climate plans would grow up to be an industry. I know that I didn't. The CCP that we were trying to grow was a strange idea in the early 1990's. The very idea that cities could develop their own environmental policies for things such as climate rather than wait for their state or national governments was pretty revolutionary. Now I find on the subway that we must have been a success -- people now think that they can make money off the idea.

Of course, there is the question of whether we all really need high priced consultants and complex committee processes in order to save our collective butts. We really already know what we need to do; we just need to put more effort into doing it than talking about it. So we've come up to the second barrier to implementation of ideas: first, you've got to get people to accept that the idea is valid (over coming conservative opposition); then you have to get people to stop talking about it and actually do something (liberal intellectuals tend to want to talk things to death rather than get their hands dirty - this is really the secondary opposition).

So it remains to be seen if all that work that we did years ago will actually come to fruition and save the planet. It looks like the new threat is whether the work will survive people who support it.

Late Fall - Cambridge

So many wet
yellow maple
leaves on the red
brick sidewalk
crushed under
my feet.

Like walking
on a carpet
of yellow
stars.

Cancer: My Part-time Job

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much about the Big C lately.

It's not because it's gone away. It hasn't. Life with it has just taken on the characteristics of a part-time job that you don't like all that much, but have to do because you need the money. These days having cancer is a lot like working at McDonald's. Sure, you don't get the funny hat, but the dull monotony and forced cheerfulness is the same.

Every day I take some time to learn something more about My Disease and I've slowly come to the conclusion that, though there's still much to learn, most of it is contradictory. So, does soy protein really stop the spread of Prostate Cancer? Well, maybe. It has is some mice, but we really don't know how this applies to humans. What's the chance of recurrence of the disease after surgery? Stats are all over the map. What started out being gray has slowly turned positively murky.

What I learn daily is how confused everyone is about what is happening in my body. Of course, this includes me. The more I learn, the less I know. It's a wonder that my urologist can talk about Prostate Cancer at all - he's a Professor at the Harvard Medical School.

So, in order for me to post more about the disease it looks like something dramatic is going to have to happen in my body (Cancer decides to take over and stages a coup; Cancer decamps to warmer climes, etc.), so I can have some sort of heroic struggle to write about. In the meantime, it's trench warfare and, as any student of World War I will tell you, this can be awful and terribly boring all at the same time.

So, in the meantime, I'll keep you up to date with PSA numbers and other aspects of CancerWorld that appear to me but, in the meantime, you want fries with that?