Remain Determined, Take A Vacation
"When somebody sees Austin and says how beautiful and wonderful it is, I always say we had to work hard to get it this way, and we have to work hard to keep it this way." -Mary Arnold
Pick any cause you care about. Poverty, hunger, the unhoused, the environment, education, immigration, human rights, human trafficking, loss of civil liberties, prison reform, animal welfare, funding for public media, access to healthcare, and so on. Everything is at risk, all at once. Or so it seems.
What we know for certain is the powers that be have successfully flooded the zone, and now we, The People, are treading water or swimming for shore.
Flooding the zone has turned out to be an incredibly effective media and political strategy. By unleashing an unrelenting firehose of Presidential decrees—many of them unlawful—day after day, and constantly updating the livestreamed drama, Trump and his MAGA mouthpieces fully dominate the narrative, leaving many Americans off-balance, confused, and lacking the will to chew on today’s pile of shit.
But chew we (somehow) do.
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Do you know what’s hiding in plain sight in Don Trump’s ‘Small Ugly Bill’? According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the mandatory sale of millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service Land.
If passed, the proposed legislation would require 3 million acres of public land chosen from a pool of 258 million acres across 11 Western states to be sold over the next five years.
“In Utah and the West, public lands are the envy of the country,” said Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the environmental nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “But Utah Senator Mike Lee is willing to sacrifice the places where people recreate, where they hunt and fish, and where they make a living — to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.”
For now, National Park Service land is spared from this heinous money grab.
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Artificial Intelligence is an energy suck of epic proportions. Full stop.
Just three years from now, AI could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households. Consequently, tech companies such as Meta, Amazon, and Google have announced plans to utilize nuclear power. All three have joined a pledge to triple the world’s nuclear capacity by 2050.
Have we lost our freaking minds?
Source: MIT Technology Review
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Here’s a guy, a thought worker no less, who doesn’t rely on AI to get his work done.
Steven Budden Jr. of Chapel Hill, NC, loves classic typewriters. He repairs them, sells them, and writes about them at ClassicTypewriters.com.
There is something quintessentially radical in using a typewriter.
I don’t know exactly what it is, but returning to technologies designed to last a lifetime in the midst of a throwaway society constitutes a revolutionary act.
Tip of the Stetson: Terry Gardner
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We recently spent a week in Florida, and I was able to step away from my routine of too many screens and return to the relative peace of an analog world.
When I’m offline, I recognize that wars continue to be fought and that immense, unjust suffering continues to happen. But by limiting the onslaught of bad news, I am not completely overwhelmed with negative thoughts and feelings.
This small but deliberate space I create on vacation allows me to assess the state of the world and my place in it more evenly. When I can listen to the waves from the Gulf of Mexico, find balance in nature, spend time with family and friends, paint, and read books, my perspective changes and my outlook brightens.
While we were out of town, heavy-duty trucks parked on our extra lot and damaged some of the Prickly Pear cactus I planted there last winter. I should say that I didn’t exactly plant them. I uprooted them from the front yard and just tossed them over there with the shovel. They plant themselves. That’s how hardy they are.
Now, just a few weeks from being smashed by an earth roller, the Prickly Pears are starting to stand up again. These are incredible plants.
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Recently, I started researching Austin conservation groups and the history of the movement to preserve land, water, and wildlife in Central Texas.
It seems the problems we face today are updated versions of the same issues we have always faced. Rampant greed and injustice, and a lack of foresight, are like that—they don’t just go away. As we take action today, I’m reminded how it helps to draw on the wisdom and lessons of those who’ve come before.
“Origins of a Green Identity,” a documentary by Karen Kocher and Monica Flores, introduced me to people like the Chairman of the Austin Parks Board, Roberta Crenshaw, and the Director of the Austin Parks and Recreation Department, Beverly Sheffield. I’m glad to know their names, understand their stories, and appreciate the impact they had on improving the quality of life for generations of Central Texans.
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Thanks for being here now,
