Another in the series of occasional rants by the Mad Jubilado. Over two hundred kilometers per hour? That’s more than 124 mph! Well, we seemed to be going pretty fast. It was no Shinkansen (the Japanese “Bullet Train”) rocketing the 330 miles from Tocho-Mai Station in Tokyo to Kyoto between 150 and 200 mph. In … More On the Rails Again: Euro Trains are No Amtrak
One of the many drawbacks of living in the intermediated world of industrial consumerism is that we have pretty much abandoned aesthetics. Form and function are mostly industrial products too. Marketing psychology drives them, like almost everything else. Diverse commercial and political interests present a pre-formed world to us on the flat digital screens of … More Aesthetics Abandoned
Can we do it ourselves? If we recycle everything and take shorter showers, install some solar panels, buy low-emissions products, etc., etc., can we avoid climate catastrophe? Sorry. Absolutely not. The problem runs much deeper than that – it involves the entire Earth System. The climate crisis is endemic to industrial civilization itself. That means, … More Individual Climate Ethics and Global Change
Free Trade, Fair Trade, Tariffs, Trade Wars, and all such matters reflect a complex of political-economic issues that will soon become mostly irrelevant. Yet pundits persistently pontificate on their putative principles and pitfalls – within the bubble of business-as-usual. The problem is that all the parties disputing matters of international trade envision the future as … More Some Right Things Done in All the Wrong Ways for All the Wrong Reasons
What’s a lipidologist? Well, immediately we can see that the term’s Latin roots indicate that a lipidologist is someone who studies lipids. Ah, lipids: the dreaded cholesterol, et al. That seemed simple enough. A friend told me that a lipidologist practiced in Santa Fe, the only one in the whole state of New Mexico. Okay, … More The Eccentric Lipidologist Revealed
About ten years after being diagnosed with a non-aggressive prostate cancer and narrowly escaping the surgeon’s knife by finding a real prostate oncologist who shared all the treatment alternatives with me, then undergoing non-invasive yet pretty darn effective treatment, something entirely unrelated happened, or so it seemed. Self-Serving Medical Practice I recall the urologist who … More Seeking Sanity in Science within the Medical Establishment
Looking forward into the future is no easy task. It is hard to decide what to believe will happen next, and nearly impossible to predict a few years or decades down the line. So many variables, so many viewpoints, so many things are just not the same as we had expected them to turn out … More Dystopia, Utopia, or Drift?
It is always unnerving yet comfortably familiar to fly into LAX. I will need to do so again in a month or so. The vast urban landscape from Palm Springs westward to the Pacific shore is amazing to behold, if you really look at it. For about 125 miles, the mostly low-lying “built environment” stretches … More Over the Ultimate City: To Live or Die in L.A.
~ ~ ~ Another in the Mad Jubilado series ~ ~ ~ It seems a lot of retired men take up woodworking. At Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) I have met quite a few. Some are immensely talented and/or just have a huge storehouse of knowledge and experience. As with many fields of endeavor, only … More Craftsmanship for Creative Productivity
It seems that little effort to understand fully the costs and benefits of the transition from fossil fuel to PV energy production has accompanied the rush to install utility scale solar and wind farms. However, it is very important to examine the environmental costs of achieving the environmental benefits of low carbon emissions energy production, … More Hidden Costs Constrain the Benefits of Transitioning to Renewable Energy
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 