“The planet, I argue, has appeared as a new kind of political object. I’m not talking about the Sun-orbiting body of the Copernican revolution, or the body that the first astronauts looked back upon in the 1960s: Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, or Carl Sagan’s ‘lonely speck’. Those are the planets of the past millennium. I’m talking about the ‘planet’ inside ‘planetary crisis’: a planet that emerges from the realisation that anthropogenic impacts are not isolated to particular areas, but integrated parts of a complex web of intersecting processes that unfold over vastly disparate timescales and across different geographies. This is the planet of the Anthropocene, of our ‘planetary emergency’ as the UN secretary-general António Guterres called it in 2020. The so-called planetary turn marks a new way of thinking about our relationship to the environment. It also signals the emergence of a distinct governable object, which suggests that the prime political object of the 21st century is no longer the state, it’s the planet.”
From Aeon, A new Earth rises.
I was recently reading a book on the meditative aspects of fly-fishing, so I guess I was primed for this article.
“America may be a nation of immigrants and their descendants, but around the world, those who migrate are in the minority; a very small percentage of people live outside of the country where they were born. After all, you have to be quite brave or desperate (or both) to strip yourself bare and offer yourself to the whims of a distant land.”
Immigrants, immigration? Yes, but through the eyes of an earlier version of ourselves, the fish, like the steelhead trout, that returns to its home after its journey to the sea.
From the Browser, What Rainbow Trout Know About Relationships
Winning an argument, especially on the Internet, can be easy – it is simply a matter of deflecting, altering the subject, and claiming the truth when it is more truthiness than fact. A German philosopher of the early to mid-1850s, Arthur Schopenhauer, compiled 38 winning strategies – still very much in use today.
Schopenhauer's 38 stratagems, or 38 ways to win an argument
“It’s a myth that gun owners despise regulation. Instead, they tend to believe that government regulation should have two purposes—deny guns to the dangerous while protecting rights of access for the law-abiding. The formula is simple: Criminals and the dangerously mentally ill make our nation more violent. Law-abiding gun owners save and protect lives.”
Two pieces by David French. The first is an original piece, What Critics Don’t Understand About Gun Culture, explaining why he carries, and the second, in response to Uvalde, Red-Flag Laws Can Save Lives. You may or may not agree, but at least he offers an explanation and a solution that we might actually get passed now.
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
