Happy Halloween

Since it's in my job description to "corrupt the youth," like Socrates...

Tuesday is not too late to bring candy to class (especially Snickers and Almond Joy).  

Pita doesn’t like Target. Or Halloween. pic.twitter.com/J5prhkJGcr

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 30, 2022

Nell and Pita don’t like Halloween pic.twitter.com/KRi45Sogsw

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 31, 2022

Wore this to class just once, years ago… but the photo recurs eternally. pic.twitter.com/WqekrheP79

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 31, 2022

Today is All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween. It’s believed to originate in the Celtic festival of Samhain, a pre-Christian festival held around November 1 to mark the end of summer and the beginning of winter. It was the biggest holiday of the Celtic year: a combination of harvest festival, New Year’s Eve, and community meeting. Animals were brought in from the pasture and made secure for the coming winter, and some of them were slaughtered to provide salted meat for the winter. It was also a time of year when the veil between living and dead was particularly porous, so the spirits of the dearly departed were more easily able to return to their earthly homes. And it meant that other otherworldly creatures — like fairies, leprechauns, and other tricksters — were more likely to be among us. But even though ghosties and ghoulies wandered among the living during Samhain, the supernatural wasn’t the main focus of the holiday the way it is for Halloween.

As the Christian Church grew, Samhain blended with a Christian holiday known as All Saints’ Day, All Hallows’ Day, or Hallowmas, which was originally observed in May but later moved to November 1. It was a time for believers to honor and remember those who had passed on to heaven. This blending was not coincidental. Early Christian leaders told their missionaries that if they wanted to convert pagans to Christianity, they shouldn’t waste time on trying to suppress their rituals and practices, but rather they should consecrate those practices to Christ and incorporate them wherever possible. This had the effect of establishing Christianity among the pagans — but it also preserved many of the pagan practices instead of quashing them. So Samhain and All Saints’ Day rituals influenced each other and eventually merged, and that is when we begin to see the traditions that we associate with Halloween today.

One such tradition was the practice of “souling,” common in Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages. Poor people would go door to door on Hallowmas and offer to pray for the souls of the family’s dead relatives, in exchange for an offering of food. It mingled with the practice of “mumming”: dressing up in costumes and performing wacky antics in exchange for food and drink, and eventually trick-or-treating became a traditional part of Halloween. WA

Questions Nov 1

1. Any concluding COMMENT on Paul Hawken's Regeneration, and the action steps indicated at the end?

2. How does your view from 2071 compare to KSR's? 

   

3. Despite the disclaimer at the beginning of Ministry (hereafter referred to as MF), do you detect "any resenmblance to actual events, locales, or persons"?

4. Why do you think MF is dedicated to Fredric Jameson?

5. Is it plausible that the worst early impacts of climate change will come in India?

6. Who is speaking, and why, in ch.2?

7. "That first global stocktake [in 2023] didn't go well..." Is this a safe prediction?

8. Will we have anything like the Subsidiary Body known as the Ministry for the Future as soon as 2025? Can we afford to wait much longer for it?

9. Should every member of the UN, and every head of state, and all students, be encouraged to read and discuss What We Owe the Future etc.?

10. More coming soon(er or later)...

 

 

A Weird, Wonderful Conversation With Kim Stanley Robinson
The Ezra Klein Show

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the great living science fiction writers and one of the most astute observers of how planets look, feel and work. His Mars Trilogy imagined what it might be like for humans to settle on the red planet. His best-selling novel "The Ministry for the Future" is a masterful effort at envisioning what might happen to Earth in a future of unchecked climate change. Robinson has a rare command of both science and human nature, and his writing crystallizes how the two must work together if we are to rescue our collective planetary future from possible ruin. In his most recent book, a rare turn to nonfiction called "The High Sierra: A Love Story," Robinson trains his attention on the planet we inhabit in the here and now, particularly on one of his favorite places on Earth: the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California and Nevada. The new book is part memoir, part guidebook, part meditation on how time, space and even politics take shape in a wondrous geological landscape. We discuss why Robinson decided to start writing outdoors, what it was like to experience the Sierras on psychedelics in his youth, what "actor-network theory" is and how it helps us understand our relationship to the planet and to our own bodies, why we should think of climate change more like we do plane crashes, what hiking backpacks say about American consumerism, how we should change our relationship to technology in order to be happier, why the politics of wanting are so confusing yet important, why Robinson is so excited about ideas like a wage ratio and rewilding schemes, how the "structure of feeling" around climate has changed, why Robinson is feeling more hopeful about Earth's future these days and more. Mentioned: "The Most Important Book I've Read This Year" by Vox Conversations "Your Kids Are Not Doomed" by Ezra Klein "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek "Thomas Piketty's Case for 'Participatory Socialism'" by The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow The Echo Maker by Richard Powers Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. "The Ezra Klein Show" is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000569994576

Could (and still can) be worse

	Prof. Katharine Hayhoe ⁦‪@KHayhoe‬⁩ Less than 20 years ago, the world was headed for a >4C warmer world by 2100. The amount of change that would occur under that much warming, that fast, was almost unimaginable and certainly unsurvivable for human civilization + a large percentage of the world's species. (thread) pic.twitter.com/nZCLzwkwwS   10/30/22, 1:27 PM

The New World: Envisioning Life After Climate Change

…In the United States, extreme heat will stretch from Texas and Louisiana up through the Midwest, where by the mid-2050s, a report from the First Street Foundation suggests, more than 100 million Americans would be experiencing at least one 125-degree day each summer. According to another report, moving from 1.5 to 2 degrees would mean the number of people experiencing a severe heat wave at least once every five years would roughly triple worldwide... nyt mag

A way to get solar energy — no rooftop panels required — is making headway in Illinois

·         Nara Schoenberg Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO - There are no shiny black solar panels on the roof of his condo building, but Paul Dickerson is enjoying the benefits of clean energy just the same.

Dickerson, 73, of Oak Park, has signed up for what is known in Illinois as community solar — a program in which residents subscribe to nearby solar farms, reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and receiving discounts on their electric bills.

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This Ancient Grain-Sowing Method Could Be Farming’s Future

The traditional practice of mixing crops was nearly wiped out by industrial agriculture, but maslins are poised for a comeback.

THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Zamede Asfaw was growing up on a farm in eastern Ethiopia, he soaked up plant lore and other traditional knowledge the way a tree takes in sunlight and converts it to energy. “I knew the crops, and the wild plants, and the fruits and other things,” says Zemede, who goes by his given name. The practical methods he learned covered every aspect of farming: Instead of stone walls or wire fences, plant field edges with darker crops so the bold colors of red sorghum, for example, create a clear border between the family’s plot and that of a neighbor. Leave a few wild olive or acacia trees in the fields to harvest sustainably, over time, for firewood, animal fodder, or building materials. And instead of sowing the seeds of a single grain in orderly rows, spread a mix of grains all over the field, “mimicking nature so crops have random distribution patterns, as in natural forests,” he says. Once harvested, these grain mixtures could be turned into many things: nutritious bread, a kind of roasted-grain trail mix called kolo, beer, and the potent clear spirit known as areki.

Now an ethnobotanist at Addis Ababa University, Zemede conducts field research in northern Ethiopia. The dominant grains grown there are different from those in the region of his youth—his family grew sorghum and maize, while the northerners prefer barley and wheat, better suited to their mountainous highlands—but the principle is the same: “We’ll plant the things that go together and are compatible with each other,” Zemede says. “Our farmers are good at mirroring nature.”

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Yes, greenlands Ice Is Melting but…

OPINION

A trip there changed my mind about climate change while reinforcing

my belief that markets, not government, provide the cure.

By Bret Stephens
Photographs by Damon Winter

Mr. Stephens is an Opinion columnist. Mr. Winter is a staff photographer on assignment in Opinion.

ILULISSAT, GREENLAND — On a clear day in August, a helicopter set me and a few companions down on the northern end of the Jakobshavn Glacier in Western Greenland, about 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The ground under our feet seemed almost lunar: gray silt and dust, loose rocks and boulders, and, at the edge of the glacier’s face, mud so deep it nearly ate my boots. To the south, the calving front of the glacier known in Greenlandic as Sermeq Kujalleq periodically deposited enormous slabs of ice, some more than 100 feet high, into the open water.

I asked the pilot to give me a sense of how much the glacier had retreated since he had been flying the route. He pointed to a distant rocky island in the middle of the fjord.

“That’s where the glacier was in 2007,” he said.

Over the course of the 20th century, the Jakobshavn Glacier retreated about 10 to 15 kilometers. Over just the next eight years, it retreated about the same amount, according to the oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Later the front advanced a little — a function of complex dynamics partly involving ocean currents — before resuming its retreat.

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What Is Underneath the Complaints About Solar and Wind?

We need to come together and stop sniping.

October 27, 2022 by Anthony Signorelli Leave a Comment

Child labor. Rare metals are needed. Poor battery technology. Baseload power requirements that renewables can’t meet. End-of-life recycling. Effects on pollinators. Dependence on China. The arguments against wind and solar go on and on. To which I can only say… Really?

The planet is burning up. Millions already suffer from climate change, and millions — even billions more — will do so as well. We have an obvious solution to emissions that will make people’s lives better. And all you have to say is, “Nyet”?

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World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies

Key UN reports published in last two days warn urgent and collective action needed – as oil firms report astronomical profits

by Damian Carrington Environment editor

Thu 27 Oct 2022 13.37 EDT

The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe.

Collective action is needed by the world’s nations more now than at any point since the second world war to avoid climate tipping points, Prof Johan Rockström said, but geopolitical tensions are at a high.

He said the world was coming “very, very close to irreversible changes … time is really running out very, very fast”.

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SCIENTISTS ALARMINGLY DECLARE "WE ARE NOW IN A MAJOR CLIMATE CRISIS"

Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt - A team of researchers is warning that the Earth is already facing "Code Red" in a paper released just ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Egypt.

"Humanity is unequivocally facing a climate emergency," wrote a group of scientists led by William Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon State University. "The scale of untold human suffering, already immense, is rapidly growing with the escalating number of climate-related disasters."

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Beyond CatastropheA New Climate Reality Is Coming Into ViewBy David Wallace-Wells

Photographs by Devin Oktar Yalkin
Captions by Charley Locke

Oct. 26, 2022

 

You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives.

Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming — a change disruptive enough to call forth not only predictions of food crises and heat stress, state conflict and economic strife, but, from some corners, warnings of civilizational collapse and even a sort of human endgame. (Perhaps you’ve had nightmares about each of these and seen premonitions of them in your newsfeed.)

Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. (A United Nations report released this week ahead of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, confirmed that range.) A little lower is possible, with much more concerted action; a little higher, too, with slower action and bad climate luck. Those numbers may sound abstract, but what they suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.

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GM says it will power all of its US sites with clean energy by 2025

Michelle Lewis

- Oct. 26th 2022 4:20 pm PT

General Motors (GM) today announced that it has finalized agreements to power all of its US sites with clean energy by 2025. 

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Invasive Jumping Worms Are Spreading Throughout the Country

written by Taylor Cunningham October 25, 2022 9:13 pm

There is a new invasive species threatening ecosystems around North America—Asian Jumping Worms.

The pest first showed up in Wisconsin and in parts of New England in 2013. And they quickly spread the states as far south as Georgia. And in that short time, they’ve already caused irrefutable damage.

Unlike most worms, the Asian jumping variety doesn’t help to enrich the soil. Instead, it has a “voracious” appetite for humus, which is a dark organic topsoil that’s formed by decaying insects, animals, and leaves. Plants, fungi, and other soil life depend on humus for nutrients such as potassium, calcium, and phosphorus.

A lack of humus affects all layers of the food chain. Without enough, soil-dwelling insects have nowhere to live, which means birds that eat those insects also suffer, and so do the birds’ predators and prey.

“Soil is the foundation of life—and Asian jumping worms change it,” Mac Callaham, a Forest Service researcher and soil expert, wrote in a Southern Research Station blog post.

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Greta’s podcast

Greta Thunberg's climate podcast, episode 4- https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001df4d?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Willow Project

	Sierra Club ⁦‪@SierraClub‬⁩ To drill for oil & release 250M tons of CO2, ⁦‪@conocophillips‬⁩ plans to artificially refreeze the Arctic's permafrost that the #ClimateCrisis melted. The irony is hard to miss & the logic is hard to find. Tell ⁦‪@POTUS‬⁩ to stop the Willow Project today. #StopWillow   10/26/22, 1:21 PM

New Electric Car Research Suggests Charging Isn't What Should Worry You

Marian Weyo/Shutterstock

BY NADEEM SARWAR/OCT. 25, 2022 11:21 AM EDT

When it comes to electric vehicles, one of the biggest deciding factors is the range offered on a single charge. To a large extent, that's a valid concern. There's a reason people still prefer gas guzzlers, because they can be taken off-roading and long-range voyages without having to worry about finding a charging station on route. However, research based on EV owners' charging behavior and daily driving habits suggests that those concerns needn't be the core deciding factor before one decides whether to purchase a gas or electric car.

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First wild bison born in Britain in over six millennia as Bronze Age beast returns to Kent

Wild European bison are believed not to have roamed UK forestry since the Bronze Age. After being hunted to near-extinction, a surprise pregnancy has brought the first indigenous one in thousands of years.

By ALEKS PHILLIPS

18:37, Wed, Oct 26, 2022 | UPDATED: 18:59, Wed, Oct 26, 2022

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Record-breaking transparent solar panels pave way for electricity-generating windows

Groundbreaking solar cells could be used in windows, greenhouses and glass facades, as well as in the screens of portable electronic devices

Anthony Cuthbertson

5 hours ago

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/solar-panel-world-record-window-b2211057.htmBottoml of Form

 

Scientists have achieved a new efficiency record for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs), opening up new commercial possibilities for transparent solar panels.

Transparent Solar Panels Reforming Future Energy Supply

SOLAR MAG Feb 29, 2020 EST

New solar panel technologies are set to transform the global solar energy landscape. Some of these promising technologies are already in the advanced stages of development, and could hit the market fairly soon. With these innovations, solar is no longer going to require extensive land parcels or unsightly roof spaces.

Photovoltaic glass is probably the most cutting-edge new solar panel technology that promises to be a game-changer in expanding the scope of solar. These are transparent solar panels that can literally generate electricity from windows—in offices, homes, car’s sunroof, or even smartphones. Blinds are another part of a building’s window that can generate electricity.

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Noam Chomsky: Policies promoting climate change are ‘a resolute march toward suicide’

October 26, 2022

In 2020, veteran left-wing author/professor Noam Chomsky teamed up with Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for the book “Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet.” Chomsky views climate change, along with a global increase in far-right authoritarianism, as one of the worst dangers the world is facing in the 2020s.

Two years after that book was released, Chomsky is still sounding the alarm about climate change and calling for an aggressive and comprehensive Green New Deal. And Chomsky and Pollin had a lot to say about that subject during an interview with Truthout’s C.J. Polychroniou published as a Q&A article on October 23.

Polychroniou asked Chomsky and Pollin to address, “governments’ failure to slow or even reverse global warming,” adding, “Isn’t the evidence already overwhelming that the world stands on a climate precipice?”

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TPA

  Tennessee Philosophical Association

53rd Annual Meeting: Oct. 28-29, 2022
Vanderbilt University 

 Keynote Speaker-

Gordon Hull, UNC Charlotte

How Epistemic Injustice can help us understand problems in AI

 Abstract. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems increasingly purport to deliver knowledge about people and the world.  Unfortunately, they also seem to frequently present results that repeat or magnify biased treatment of racial and other vulnerable minorities.  This paper proposes that at least some of the problems with AI’s treatment of minorities can be captured by the concept of epistemic injustice.  To substantiate this claim, I argue that (1) pretrial detention and physiognomic AI systems commit testimonial injustice because their target variables reflect inaccurate and unjust proxies for what they claim to measure; (2) classification systems, such as facial recognition, commit hermeneutic injustice because their classification taxonomies, almost no matter how they are derived, reflect and perpetuate racial and other stereotypes; and (3) epistemic injustice better explains what is going wrong in these types of situations than does the more common focus on procedural (un)fairness.

Friday, 7:30 P.M., 114 Furman Hall, followed by a spirited reception

 

 

Sessions: Saturday, Furman Hall

9:00 am through 4:40 pm

9:00-9:55 a.m.

Author Meets Critics – The Politics of Black Joy
Lindsey Stewart, The University of Memphis
Comments by Tempest Henning, Fisk University; Lucius Outlaw, Vanderbilt University; Tiffany Patterson, Vanderbilt University
Furman 007

Social-Epistemic Problems with Intellectual Grandstanding
Lucy Vollbrecht, Vanderbilt University
Commentator: Zach Auwerda, The University of Memphis
Furman 209

The Escaped Prisoner’s Story
Charles Cardwell, Pellissippi State Community College
Commentator: Courtland D. Lewis, Pellissippi State Community College
Furman 109

Living and Gaming—Experimenting with Nguyen’s Account of Agency
Wangchen Zhou, Vanderbilt University
Commentator: Ryan Gabriel Windeknecht, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Furman 217

10:05-11:00 a.m.

Author Meets Critics – The Politics of Black Joy (continued)
Lindsey Stewart, The University of Memphis
Comments by Tempest Henning, Fisk University; Lucius Outlaw, Vanderbilt University; Tiffany Patterson, Vanderbilt University
Furman 007

Humean Collective Identity
Zachary Auwerda, The University of Memphis
Commentator: Jim Fieser, The University of Tennessee at Martin
Furman 209

Disagreement over the Beautiful Grounded in the Ethical
Jennifer Lowell Vanderbilt University
Commentator: Qingyang Cui, Vanderbilt University
Furman 109

Secularistic But Not Secular? An Analysis of the Philosophy of William Connolly
Bill Meyer, Maryville College
James Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University
Furman 217

LISTEN

Pluralizing Migrant Psychology: A Non-Homogenous View of Selfhood Across Borders
Ashleigh Morales, The University of Memphis
Commentator: tba
Furman 132

11:05-11:10 a.m.

Business Meeting:  Elections for President and Secretary; Furman 109

11:15-1:05 p.m.

Lunch:  On your own (see insert in conference packet for local eateries)

1:10-2:05 p.m.

Collateral Damage: Black Ideologies Formed Post-Enslavement
Natalyah Davis, The University of Memphis
Commentator: tba
Furman 007

Always Look on the Bright Side of Crisis
Courtland D. Lewis, Pellissippi State Community College
Commentator: Kelly Cunningham, Vanderbilt University
Furman 209 

Metaphysical Infinitism and Theoretical Virtue
William Welchance, University of Virginia
Commentator: John Stigall, Howard University
Furman 109

The Private Servant of the Public as a Privately Educated Public Servant: Foucault and Habermas on the Role of the Public Intellectual
Bernardo Alba, The University of Memphis
Commentator: Bill Meyer, Maryville College
Furman 217

2:15-3:10 p.m.

Nature’s Revenge? On the Coronavirus and Natural Evil
Daniel J. Smith, The University of Memphis
Commentator: Emanuele Costa, Vanderbilt University
Furman 007

Fallacy Accusation and Meta-Argument
Scott Aikin, Vanderbilt University
Commentator: William Welchance, University of Virginia
Furman 209

The Ascetic Ideal, the Threat of Nihilism, and How to Transcend
Qiuyue Chen, The University of Memphis
Commentator: Bernardo Alba, The University of Memphis
Furman 109

Revitalising Baier: Trust Beyond Beliefs & Attitudes
Kelly Cunningham, Vanderbilt University
Commentator: Cheri Thomas, University of Tennessee, Southern
Furman 217

3:25pm-4:20pm

Author Meets Critics – Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers
Brian Ribeiro, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Comments by Lucy Alsip Vollbrecht, Vanderbilt; Andrew Cling, University of Alabama-Huntsville; Scott Aikin, Vanderbilt
Furman 209

Author Meets Critics – Aristotle’s Vices
Audrey Anton, Western Kentucky University
Comments by Dan Larkin, Georgia Southern University; Alyssa Lowery, Vanderbilt University; Andrew Burnside, Vanderbilt University
Furman 217