Welcome To Badlands Journal

Bill McKibben’s masterful review of Mark Lynas’ Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency is a timely update on the state of the climate emergency. This is  not exactly a strange subject to Californians at the moment, whose state is under an emergency order due to the dire effects of 12,000 lightning strikes last week. -- blj

8-20-20

New York Review of Books

130 Degrees

Bill McKibben

August 20, 2020 Issue

MERCED (BLJ) – On August 19, the Merced County Public Health department reported 97 people had died from Covid-19. Let those to blame rot in their own private hells. Let the rest of us continue to wear our masks, wash hands, observe social distance, be kind to doorkeepers who poke temperature-taking apparatuses in our faces,  and find some way, regardless of how irritated we are, to take these precautions seriously.

You never know: the life you save may be your own.

We are no longer recording the tallies for number of cases. The American politico-medical system is, to repeat a tiresome but still accurate cliché; a seamless web of incompetence and corruption overlaid with layers of evasion of responsibility – the American system du jour of government in a nutshell.

I asked myself the other day how mass evictions before the General Election would affect voter registration and turnout, and got a fairly grim, if imprecise answer. After reading this and some other articles I think of us on the beach, barefoot, the ocean receding and pulling sand rapidly from under our feet as the last, largest waves in the cycle built out there to return and smash our suddenly fragile shore. – blj

8-7-20

New York Times

Millions of Evictions Are a Sharper Threat as Government Support Ends