Chandra Clarke's Blog

Time again for five interesting things: stuff you should know, stuff you might want to take action about, stuff you can share.

Nanoclay – Some very cool research into using tiny clay particles to help restore soil fertility. This will be key to halting desertification, sequestering carbon dioxide, and feeding the world. See also one of my other favourite topics, biochar.

Tiny, But Very Important Things – You probably don’t give much thought to silica gel, but it’s incredibly important to the world economy. Check out this deep dive and impress your friends with your knowledge at your next cocktail party.

Maybe judge some books by their cover? – Apparently some historical books get their nice green covers from a combination of arsenic and copper. A new device from University of St. Andrews can detect toxic pigments.

More reasons to quit Coke? – When this multi-billion dollar corporation isn’t putting artists out of work by making their ads with AI, they’re pumping plastic into our environment at a horrendous rate. How bad, you ask? A new estimate puts the plastic waste resulting from just Coca-Cola products at 1.33 billion pounds annually by 2030. BTW, I wrote a book about this and other environmental problems and what you can do about them. It’s available at Amazon of course, but also at Bookshop.org, a site that supports indie booksellers.

Shocking development – Next time you’re in Panama, you might want to avoid being near an almendro tree. Apparently, they have evolved to be especially resilient to lighting strikes. These same strikes kill off nearby trees and parasitic vines, giving a whole new meaning to that old adage, “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

What cool or actionable thing have you learned or done lately?

Visit the blog at 5 Interesting Things #20.

Me: Oh hi, Mr. Inkjet Printer, please print this out.

IP: No.

Me: Why not?

IP: I’m out of yellow ink.

Me: But it’s a black and white document.

IP: …

Me: Okay fine. *puts in new yellow ink cartridge*

IP: YELLOW INK LOW!

Me: I literally just put that in there. Stop being dramatic.

IP: *huffs* fine.

Me: …

IP: What?

Me: Are you going to print that document now?

IP: No.

Me: Now what?

IP: I’m out of cyan ink.

Me: But it’s a … you know what, never mind. *changes the cyan ink cartridge.*

IP: CYAN INK LO—

Me: Stop that!

IP: *sulks*

Me: Okay, so print the document.

IP: Can’t.

Me: *pinching bridge of nose* What this time?

IP: Gotta check the ink system.

Me: Fine, fine, get on with it.

IP: *whirrs*

*thumps*

*beeps*

*Michigan J. Frog singing*

*screen flashes*

*more whirring*

IP: We’re good. Ink system is locked and loaded.

Me: …

IP: What?

Me: The document?

IP: Oh right, right. Where was that… had it right here a minute ago… you know what? You’re going to need to send it again.

Me: @#$%^&! this is… *click click click* There.

IP: Uh nope. Not seeing it.

Me: It’s says its in your queue.

IP: Nope. Oh hey, look at that. Network connection error. You’ll need to reboot me.

Me: I’m going to put a boot somewhere, that’s for sure.

IP: Pardon?

Me: Nothing. Here, rebooting now.

IP: Zzzzz. Zzzzz. Zzzzz.

Me: *makes coffee, lunch*

IP: *yawn* Oh hi. What’s up?

Me: *click click click* Print this.

IP: Geeze, good morning to you too.

Me: Just. Print. It.

IP: Can’t.

Me: FOR THE LOVE OF … what’s wrong?

IP: No paper.

Me: There is paper right there.

IP: I don’t use that tray.

Me: What do you mean you don’t use that tray?! IT’S THE ONLY TRAY YOU HAVE.

IP: No, I’ve always used the other one.

Me: *sobbing, pulls paper tray out, puts it back in*

IP: There’s the right tray! See, was that so hard?

Me: *click click click* Print this. Please.

IP: Of course! No problem. All of the pages or just some of them?

Me: All.

IP: One sided or two?

Me: double sided.

IP: Perfect, and would you like fries with that?

Me: *reaches for baseball bat*

IP: Okay, okay… gosh touchy touchy. Printing 32 copies now.

Me: What?! Nonono, just one copy!

IP: What’s that? Can’t hear you! Too busy printing 320 copies!

Me: *buried in paper*

Visit the blog at Not fit to print.

There are many, many things that are dysfunctional at the moment, but — in north America at least — the job market is egregiously bad. To invoke Corey Doctorow’s phrasing, it seems particularly enshittified, and it’s not serving anyone well.

I say this from both an employee and employer perspective. Let me explain.

My kids have been looking for work. A lot of job search sites, in order to appear useful, are stuffed full of “job ads” for positions that either never existed, or existed once and are long since out of date. That’s because the site has “scraped” (read: copied and pasted en masse) job listings from all over the Internet and slapped them up, usually without the original poster’s permission or knowledge. There they sit, for job seekers to waste time reading and applying to, unless they happen to notice the tiny disclaimer at the bottom.

These sites are also populated by any number of work from home scams, preying on people’s need to make rent, promising easy money and no commute. Of course, rather than properly moderate the content, job sites wash their hands of any responsibility with another tiny print disclaimer.

Then there’s the job sites where the job seeker has to pay a membership fee in order to view jobs, the promise being that they’re vetted and legit. Are they? Who knows? It would be impossible to tell whether your credentials are actually being forwarded and rejected or whether they just disappear into the ether. And by the time you decided it wasn’t worth your time, the company will have made a month or probably two of membership fees off you.

A lot of big companies don’t bother with job aggregator sites because they’re big enough and well known enough not to have to. Everyone knows about McDonald’s, for example. But from an employee point of view, this means you have to search up all these individual businesses, dig up the jobs page, and then begin the application process.

There is no standard for resumes. I mean, there theoretically is, but now some companies require you to upload a PDF, while others make you type all your stuff out all over again via a form on their website. Some want a cover letter. Some don’t. Some demand you upload some kind of identity verification, and you basically have to cross your fingers and hope the site stays secure.

Of course, these big, well known companies get so many applications, they resort to filters and AI to screen the applications. We all know how well those work in real life. How many good candidates have been passed over because they didn’t include a certain keyword in their application?

And references? I’ve written before about how these are really a waste of everyone’s time. Getting references is awkward and time consuming. Sometimes impossible if you don’t want your current position to know you’re looking and your previous positions were a long time ago. And no one is going to put down a reference that isn’t going to sing their praises, truthfully or not, so they really don’t add anything to the process. (Side bar: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard managers talk about how they provided a reference for a troublesome employee solely to help them find a job elsewhere and become someone else’s problem. Which I can sort of, maybe understand but also: yikes!)

I run a small business. From the employer point of view, the job market is equally bad.

If you’re not a big company, you have to post frequently to social media and hope the algorithms show those particular posts to suitable job seekers. Or you have to resort to using job sites. The employer has to pay a fee to list a job on those aggregator sites above. The fees used to be flat, but certain sites now charge on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This sounds good at first, because it looks cheaper. But you have to keep a careful eye on your budget, because if there are a lot of people looking work, your PPC will soon outspend what a flat fee would have been.

A job I posted recently got more than one hundred applications. I got resumes from… a phlebotomist … a furniture sales person… a bakery clerk… and someone who’s only job experience (a decade ago!) was a carnival ride operator. Can you tell what position I posted? Apparently neither could the majority of the applicants. That’s because these job sites make it easy to just throw your resume at absolutely everything. This wastes everyone’s time, but especially the person who has to review all those applications (and it’s why big corporations now make you type everything out in their web form). And remember, employers pay on a PPC basis, so we essentially paid to receive resume sp*m.

Of the one hundred applications, about eight had qualifications that were reasonably close to what we were looking for. Five responded to interview requests. One was a no show, with no explanation.

And of course, AI crap is at play on this side as well. I made the mistake of requesting cover letters for the last position I advertised, and was inundated with letters quite obviously written by some machine based on the job ad, not based on the person’s listed qualifications. Oi vey.

The whole system is not only broken, it’s ridiculously adversarial. And it makes the standard Boomer advice (“just get out there and bring in your resume directly to the owner, shake their hand”) absolutely laughable. Those days are long gone. Corporations don’t take resumes from people off the street anymore, and small business owners don’t have the time to meet everyone looking for work. Keeping resumes on file isn’t terribly useful either, unless you have a good system for dating and purging them, otherwise you waste a lot of time reaching out to people who found a job elsewhere since they came to your establishment.

How do we fix this? I am going to throw the question open to the comment section. Give me your best ideas, or if the system is working where you live, tell us why and how. And if you don’t have anything about that, talk to me about your job seeking or job filling experiences.

Visit the blog at The job market is broken.

I was reading an article about jhāna last week, and one of the things it suggested in that type of meditative practice was to access a feeling of joy. The idea was to go back to an experience that brought you joy, and remember what it felt like, and then try to replay that feeling — not the experience that brought it — in your head and body.

Of course, feelings of joy have been a bit thin on the ground lately, so I had to go back in the memory file for a few. As I was going through them, I realized they had something in common. Here’s three of them:

Rock scrambling and hiking in the cool forests of the Bruce PeninsulaWatching the tree tops sway in the breeze, after a swimComing out a hot dojo after an hour-long practice, into a cool autumn shower, the smell of petrichor in the air

All of them brought me a sense of euphoria and all of them involved being outdoors after some physical activity.

Obviously, the fact that exercise and fresh air is good for you isn’t a revelation (at least, I hope it’s not). But in a system that works to keep us chronically online and indoors, and a society that constantly tells us that consumption should be the source of joy, it’s easy to forget how wonderful the alternatives can be.

Will getting outside and away from screens make all your troubles go away? Of course not. But it certainly will help restore you, and perhaps re-anchor you. And if there’s anything we all need right now, it’s an antidote to feeling unmoored.

I’m reminded, ironically, of a meme going around online right now that talks about The Parable of the Choir. It goes something like this:

A choir can sing a beautiful note impossibly long because singers can individually drop out to breathe as necessary and the note goes on. Social justice activism should be like that, she said. That’s stuck with me.

So, get outside if you can. Ideally, out of the city, or to a good urban park with trees. Perhaps a beach to listen to the waves. Failing that, outside somehow, even if it’s just to a patch of safe-looking grass with your socks off. Mute the phone. Get a brisk walk or a jog in, if you’re able. If not, sit and watch the treetops sway. Heck, even being still at night, listening to the rhythms of the city might do the trick.

Drop out to breathe.

And grab what joy you can.

Visit the blog at No really, touch grass.

There are scientists out there working on a Unified Theory of Everything.

By this I mean they are trying to come up with this Really Big Idea that explains things like how the universe came into being (was it delivered by FedEx or dropped off by some gigantic stork?) and why stars go “twinkle twinkle” instead of flashing something useful like “eat at Mars.”

Now I’ve read some of the work in this field and it is really quite interesting. However, it seems to me that it has a long way to go. This is because they’re not asking the really important questions, such as: Why don’t M&M candies melt in your hands? and  Why does toast always land jam side down?

Therefore, in the interest of advancing scientific research, I am starting a list of things I think need immediate investigation.

Chandra’s Universal Law#1: People who own dogs apparently cannot hear them barking at 2 a.m.  Yes, I admit to harbouring some dogi-cidal tendencies lately. You see, there is a dog in my neighbourhood that barks incessantly, every night, beginning right around 2 a.m. and continuing until about 6 a.m. Worse, the dog seems to have a limited vocabulary: it repeats the exact same pattern of barks over and over and over again.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I love dogs I am mush when it comes to puppies. And yes, my own dogs have been known to bark. In fact, one of my own dogs was very hard hard to shut up sometimes because she went deaf, but there was a period there of, I swear, selective hearing. A typical front-porch conversation between myself and my dog went something like this:

Bark.

Taffy, be quiet.

Bark! Bark!

Taffy, cut that out.

BARK!

Taffy! Don’t make me walk all the way over there!

BARK! BARK!

TAFFY! SHUT UP!

BARKBARKBARKBARK!

*me walking in front of her and clapping loudly to get her attention*

Woof.

.

.

.

Woof. (she liked to have the last word you see)

My point with all of this, is that I tried to do something about my dog. Other families can have a dog bark for four hours straight right underneath their window and not hear it, while the rest of the neighbourhood can practically recite the canine canto by heart.  Are these people missing gene #345, otherwise known as I-HRK9? Are they missing the chemical 5,7-dihydroxydogamine? Do they need to have subwoofers installed? Only research will tell.

Chandra’s Universal Law #2: All service personnel make and break exactly 3.7 appointments with you before actually showing up at your door. We currently have a problem with our water softener — the problem being, that it is oozing salty water all over our basement. The upside is that the salt residue is making really neat-looking circular patterns on the floor. The downside is . . . no wait, that was the downside.

We called for service of course, and received a hearty “we’ll be there first thing Monday morning!” Seeing as it was a Thursday when we called, we thought this … quite convenient.

Of course, come Monday, we foolishly believed that someone would actually show up, and took the morning off work to let Mr. Service Person into the house. Morning turned into afternoon turned into evening turned into a phone call: “Hi, couldn’t make it, will be there Wednesday.”

As for Wednesday, see above paragraph.

A new appointment was made for Friday afternoon, and gosh darn it, wouldn’t you know it but Mr. Service Person called to let us know that he had been called away to an emergency.

Hmm.

Gas lines leak, phone lines get shredded and electrical wires come down…. but … well, I’m struggling to think of examples of water softener emergencies. I mean, besides salty water leaking all over the place? I am sure however, that the fact it was a beautiful Friday afternoon just before a long weekend had absolutely nothing to do with it.

If this keeps up, I shall soon be able to offer tickets to the Clarke Salt Marshes.

But to get back to my law, it seems to me this happens far too often and with too many service companies . . . . cable, telephone, power, you name it. Do service personnel take special training courses on how to raise and dash hopes? Is there some physical constant preventing service companies from sending out help on a night shift or — gasp — a 24 hour basis?

Questions worthy of scientific inquiry indeed. After all, if we can lob money at “cross cultural studies of the semiotic management and transformation of facial features in the make-up and masks of performers” then surely we can toss money at these questions.

So pay attention you graduate students out there, Chandra’s Universal Laws will soon be on your final exam. Stay tuned for more.

Visit the blog at With a tip of the hat to Murphy . . ..

“They said the presidency wasn’t a business. I made it the most successful business in history.”

Are YOU ready to make the presidency great — for your wallet?

Let’s cut the crap. You didn’t get into politics to “serve the people.” You got in to win. To dominate. To build an empire. And guess what?

The presidency is the best business opportunity in the world.

In my new course, “The Art of the Presidency,” I show you — step by beautiful step — how I turned the Oval Office into the C-Suite of my personal brand. You’ll learn how to do it too.

What You’ll Learn Inside:Brand Power 101 — From red hats to fake gold bars, I’ll teach you how to license your name to anything that moves — and charge a fortune.Mega Merch Profitability — Learn how to source from the cheapest factories in China, including where to get the best Made in the USA labels. Media Manipulation Mastery – Turn every “scandal” into a viral fundraising opportunity. The haters are your marketers.Family First Capitalism – Appoint your kids, funnel power, and keep the wealth in the dynasty, where it belongs.Grift Without Guilt – Hotels, speaking gigs, foreign guests, Super PACs. I show you how to do it all and call it “patriotism.”The Indictment Advantage – Facing 91 charges? GOOD. Watch your fundraising explode. I’ll show you how to milk the martyr complex.SPECIAL BONUS MODULE:Golf Grift: How I Made MILLIONS by Charging Taxpayers to Visit My Own Resorts

Here’s the genius:
When I wanted a break? I went golfing.
Where? At my OWN resorts.
Who came with me? Secret Service and all of my staff.
Who paid for all their food and lodgings? YOU did, directly into my bank account.

That’s right — I created a system where taxpayer dollars paid me to golf at my own properties. Lodging, meals, golf carts, the whole deal.

You’ll get the full blueprint:

How to direct federal staff to your propertiesHow to structure billing “by the book” (wink)How to make every vacation a cash-inHow to still call it “official business”

They called it a scandal. I called it a business model.

Ready to Rumble? What You Get:12 Step-by-Step Video Modules PDF Playbook: “Turn Every Handshake Into a Wire Transfer”Bonus Audio Track: “How I Turned My Florida Digs Into a Presidential Paywall”Certificate of Presidential Hustle – Hang it next to your fake university degree.Who Is This Course For?

This is for:

Rising politiciansFormer celebritiesBillionaire hopefuls with a credit card and a dreamInfluencers with no shameDictators who need a PR facelift

If you’ve got charisma, ego, and absolutely no problem monetizing the American flag, this course is for you.

Investment: Just $997

(Or 3 payments of $499.99. Because we believe in choice — especially for offshore accounts.) Enroll now and get my exclusive e-book:

Fake News, Real Profits: How to Monetize Media Meltdowns for Maximum Gains

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

Sign up TODAY for an extra hidden secret special awesome bigly module:

Joint ventures (JVs) with other grifters!

Why pay for advertising when you can cross promote with conspiracy theorists, Faux News, podcasters, Twitter bots, rocket bois, and other assorted misfits and miscreants for FREE! Activate the ragebaited manosphere to your cause! And learn how to have all of them take the fall if things go sideways!

WARNING: SPOTS ARE LIMITED

I can’t teach everyone how to fleece a nation. The IRS is watching. The DOJ is watching. The haters are always watching. So click fast, patriots.

And remember…

“Why retire when you can golf your way to government cash forever?”

Visit the blog at The Art of the Presidency: How to Turn Power Into Profit (Legally… or Close Enough).

As I type this, a certain orange person and his enablers have taken a flawed, but mostly positive economy and smashed it headlong into a brick wall, while simultaneously destroying decades of stable trade relationships with allies. All the while, absolutely gutting the vital government services that millions of his citizens depend on.

The people mostly likely to be hardest hit by these moves are the people who have so far counted themselves as his biggest supporters. And who will, if the last ten or so years are any indicator, continue to be his biggest supporters, even through all the suffering to come.

Which leads to an obvious question: why do people so often work against their own best interests? Even when there is plenty of evidence to show that it will definitely be against their best interests? Even as they suffer the consequences in real time?

The phenomenon isn’t restricted to the US. In Canada, a provincial premier with an objectively terrible legislative agenda and track record recently swept into a third consecutive majority government. In the UK, a majority voted to leave the European Union with the terrible economic consequences that were predicted materializing almost immediately.

Lots of people have tried to explain the last several years. Pundits have tried to point at education, income, gender and race divides, with little success, as neither orange guy’s fans nor Brexit supporters fit neatly into any demographic.

The concept of “low information voters” goes a little further to explain the phenomenon. These are people with one or more jobs, kids, elders who need care, busy social lives, those who get their news from the occasional TV or radio sound bites, people they know, and whatever memes cross their social media feed and that they happen to see. They have an incomplete understanding of very complex issues, and if they take the time to vote, they do so based on whatever caught their eye.

But this concept doesn’t explain the folks who have the time and resources to be Very Online (and I count myself among them) and thus, also have the time to access to the whole world’s knowledge base and should by rights be “high information” voters. How is it that anyone can personally check the stock market tickers directly in just seconds, and we still have people claiming “fake news!” when someone posts about markets crashing?

The answer, I think, can be found in Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler’s short book, Useful Delusions; The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain.

The authors talk about how self-deception has actually been critical to our evolution. Roughly speaking, the first kind of self-deception is the kind required to do forward planning. In our hunter-gatherer days, the mammoth might not be right in front of us right now, but we can deceive ourselves temporarily to imagine that it is, and then plan how we might, as a group, take it down. Likewise, humans can’t fly like birds, but we can deceive ourselves temporarily to imagine ways in which we might fly, and thus invent things like airplanes.

The second kind of self-deception allows us to cope with our mortality. We are, as far as we know, the only creatures aware of our inevitable biological fates. Yet, we also have the same sort of visceral fear/survival instincts as our fellow critters. So, we come up with all sorts of mental coping mechanisms (those self deceptions) to allow us to live out our lives without losing our minds.

This vital ability, self-deception, also leads to our greatest follies. The ability to engage in self-deception can lead us straight into self-sabotaging outcomes. That’s why we continue to consume too much sugar when we know it’s harmful, why we persist in driving drunk even when people (including ourselves) are horrifically injured or killed because of it, and why we can be convinced to vote for destructive policies.

And it’s something that us (too often arrogant) self-proclaimed rationalists must start accounting for in politics. A quote, with italics added by myself for emphasis:

“Foregoing self-deception isn’t merely a mark of education or enlightenment — it is a sign of privilege. If you don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Virgin Birth, it’s because your life does not depend on your believing such things. Your material, cultural, and social worlds are providing you with other safety nets for psychological and physical needs. But should your circumstances change for the worse, were the pillars of your life to buckle and sway, your mind, too, would prove fertile ground for the wildest self-deceptions. There are, as we say, no atheists in foxholes.” (page xvii).

The words cultural and social do a lot of heavy lifting in this quote, particularly as they pertain to political situations like the orange man. This is why his support crosses gender, income, and racial lines. Cultural and social norms, for some of those supporters, are changing — quite rapidly in their view — in ways that no longer provide them the safety nets for their psychological needs. Whether you liked or approved of the previous cultural or social or even economic norms they adhered to is irrelevant. The point you have to take note of here is that the self-deception they engage in is a kind of defensive mechanism against perceived threats to their way of life.

And in some cases self-deception applies to defending their physical needs too. Those folks who have seen good paying jobs disappear overseas, wages stagnate, or their lives otherwise degraded by corporate interests, pollution, or opioid addictions, or any of the other modern plagues. They’re angry about this and don’t know what to do about it.

Put another way: it’s hard, if not impossible, for the vast majority of people to have the time, capability, and willingness to understand why and how their lives are changing for what they believe is the worst. They will instead latch onto and cling to an explanation that makes the most sense and takes the least effort to hold.

It’s why the women who have been failed by modern medicine flock to ‘woo’ cures for their debilitating menopausal symptoms. It’s why the unemployed guy in the trailer who’s seen his friends die from fentanyl can easily be persuaded the brown folks brought the drugs in and took his job as well.

When these explanations are coupled with an us vs them ‘greater cause,’ like religious disputes, cold wars, cultural wars, or actual combat, they are infinitely harder to shake.

Another quote:

“It’s fine to hold secular, cosmopolitan views. But when rationalists look down on people who crave the hollow panaceas of tribe and nation, it’s like Marie Antoinette asking why peasants who lack bread don’t satisfy themselves with cake. They fail to grasp what life is like for most people on the planet.

People gain a sense of meaning and purpose when they submerge themselves in the myths, stories, and rituals of their tribes. In the face of impermanence and loss, our groups remind us that a form of immortality is within reach.” (page 171)

Not only have our current systems evolved to make it that much harder to have the time to understand anything, those same systems make it so much easier to find those ‘simple’ explanations as to why your life isn’t what you thought it would be.

People with vested interests in preserving the status quo (because they’re profiting handsomely off it) will happily supply lots of ‘easy’ explanations, usually in the form of scapegoating a minority. Further, our systems allow you to quickly find and fall in with people who cling to those same explanations. A tribe, in other words. A political tribe. A conspiracy theory tribe.

On social media in particular, the end result is that its much easier and more satisfying to post an opinion (or meme, or video, or article) and gain the approval (through ‘likes’ and supporting comments) of your self-selected peers than it is to research and fact check any of it. And being challenged by anyone just invokes the human tendency to get stubborn, lash out, and double down.

What can we do about this? The solution might be twofold.

First, we need to start meeting people where they are. Your elected officials should be expected to understand macroeconomic concepts like tariffs. That’s what we pay them to do! Crapping on the average Joe Citizen because he doesn’t understand these same concepts isn’t the way to go, though. Kindly explain, sure, if the situation allows. Point and laugh, no. That’ll just get the double down reaction I mentioned above.

Second, we need to offer people something better. At the societal level, we don’t have ‘good’ big causes. Much of Earth has been explored; what’s left, like the deepest ocean voyages, is accessible only to people with access to specialized equipment. And much of the era of exploration involved destroying the people and animals in the area of “discovery” anyway.

The space race is long since done, and wasn’t as unifying as the movies would have you believe. Climate change is a huge issue, to be sure, but unfortunately we’ve set a precedent where the most noble action available to the individual is to chuck something into a recycle bin (instead of say, join the tree planting corps in the wilds of Peru). Hard to write soul-stirring ballads about rinsing out that tin of beans.

We need big, positive visions of the future. Ones that find a way to include the people voting for the orange guy. Visions that allow everyone to be prosocial instead of self-sabotaging.

Visit the blog at Explaining the inexplicable.

Time again for five interesting things: stuff you should know, stuff you might want to take action about, stuff you can share.

Flower power: Ever heard of phyto-mining? Or Phyto-remediation? It’s the process of using plants to extract things from the soil. New Scientist is reporting on an Albania start up farming plants to harvest carbon-neutral nickel from the soil while simultaneously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Long distance repair: NASA successfully fixed Voyager 1… at a distance of 15 billion miles from Earth. If only service reps in my city were as good…

Should we call them chippers … instead of choppers? Quiet, electric helicopters are here at long last.

Steppe right up: Proof we can fix things when we try. The rare Przewalski’s Horse has returned to Kazakhstan, thanks to an initiative by the Prague Zoo to reintroduce the animal.

Mmmm: Healthier, more sustainable chocolate? Yes please!

Visit the blog at Five Interesting Things #19.

As I wrote in a previous piece, Steve Bannon’s playbook is: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Bannon’s strategy here, one employed with great success by Trump so far, is to disorient the public, destroy trust, and blitzkrieg the press (and social media) so no one knows what to focus on or fight. The idea is to scare you into staying home and keep you staring at your phone in horror.

Meanwhile, the broligarchy is also busy trying to erase history, by banning books, changing curriculum, and doing things like refusing to even display photos of accomplished women.

It’s long past time we stopped letting this happen. We can’t depend on corporate-owned media or social media to save us.

If the playbook is to “flood the zone with shit” then we need a concerted, coordinated effort by progressives and large progressive organizations to “flood the zone with truth.”

This is important because it will:

Counteract the “doomscroll” feeling on social media which leads to defeatismEnsures that there are multiple sources of truth so they can’t succeed in erasing facts and historyContinue to feed the multiple AI with facts, because we know they’re scraping social media to train these LLMs

For this to succeed all of the progressive organizations need to start publishing more content and encouraging people (like you) to post it on all social networks (including Twitter). The content needs to be about:

MOST IMPORTANT: Signal boost what people and organizations are doing to fight back so that we know what’s being done (and where we can help). Change the doomscroll to a very specific how to get organized scroll. People need to know what to do.Facts about climate change, history, and social justicePump stories of people succeeding in pushing backWhat other countries are doing to fight climate change and advance progress because there’s more to the world than the USFact checking online trolls instead of depending on the platforms to do it

We also need the financing and backing of progressive billionaires (like Mark Cuban), perhaps even to engage bot farms of our own to push this stuff out there. 

We need high profile celebrities to push this stuff too. 

If you agree, share this with your networks, with progressive organizations, tag important people with it online.

Visit the blog at It’s time to “flood the zone” with truth.

In 1986, a fellow by the name of K. Eric Drexler wrote a book called Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. What got a lot of hype at the time was a small section describing the potential for a catastrophic scenario, where tiny self-replicating machines could get out of control and consume all of the world’s biomass. Technically called ecophagy, the media latched onto another term coined by Drexler for the problem: grey goo.

Thirty-eight years later, grey goo is here and it is consuming the world. It’s just not what we thought it would be.

We know it by the horrendous term, “content.”

“Content” is produced by corporations that are mining universes like Star Wars and Marvel and spinning out whole plodding series on the thinnest of premises.

It’s churned out by studios in the form of endless reboots and remakes.

You can find it in music where you have producers heavily “sampling” older riffs, or doing covers and tributes, pushing out remasters or the same pieces stamped into different physical media.

In the book world, it’s the endless “retellings” of old tales.

In video games, it’s the casual gachas, the idle miners, the merge puzzles. Mindless diversions. Tap. Repeat. Tap. Repeat.

And it’s not confined to media.

You can find it in the grocery stores where in one aisle you have Greek-style pizza and in another aisle you have Greek salad with pizza-flavoured pita chips. Or that product category known as “all-dressed” which is another way of saying “we sprayed it with every simulated flavour we had.”

Even our cities, at least in North America, are monotonously same-y. The same franchise restaurants. The same clothing outlets. The half dozen styles of cars in the parking lot, painted in mostly dull colours.

Everything is converging into mushy sameness.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with remixes, mashups, blends etc. But our reimaginings have been increasingly light on the imagining and heavy on the re for a very long time.

And now we are also awash in AI slop, in which the corporations have hoovered up all the available material — with or without creator permission — and devised programs that allow anyone to use the program crank out more “content.” The AI we’re getting is anything but intelligent. It’s predictive text on steroids, incapable of understanding what its producing: soulless, unoriginal, bland, and extremely hazy on the details. And as the Internet fills up with more of this slop, crowding out anything new, interesting, or original, the content sampling machine will be hoovering up it’s own slop and then producing… well, sloppier slop.

Yet corporations are already laying off their creative staff, turning to AI in the hopes of cranking out even more slop even faster.

The grey goo that eats the world.

And you and I, the consumers, are finding it increasingly hard to escape.

Have you noticed the shrinking importance of search? I know that something like Netflix must have a catalogue of thousands of titles, but I have to hunt for the search function in the interface and I have to know what I am looking for and type it laboriously with my remote. Otherwise, I am served the same twenty or thirty items just reshuffled under different labels like Watch Together or Bingeworthy or the ubiquitous Recommended for You.

Why is it recommended for you? Because every single click, every single pause in the scrolling, accidental or intended, every single reaction emoji … all of it has been an A/B test, designed to learn to serve you more and more of the same mush. Not because it’s good, and especially not because it’s good for you, mentally, emotionally, or intellectually.

It’s about engagement, which is a euphemism for being hooked.

Hooked by reels. Stories. Shorts. Serials. Smaller and smaller slices of content to keep you from noticing how much time is actually passing and to keep you consuming.

This steady diet of grey goo has turned us into rats, mindlessly pressing the lever for a reward. It’s collectively dulling our ability to do much more than spit out hot takes and snark, or slavishly repeat catch phrases we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s got what plants crave.

It has eroded our ability to focus and think which were — when you look at the totality of human history — seriously underdeveloped traits to begin with. And it couldn’t be happening at a worse time, as we collectively face some of our biggest, most complicated problems.

Not only are we suffering from a failure of imagination when it comes to coming up with solutions, some of us are being radicalized — by endless repetition of lies and half-truths into fighting against the very changes that would make life better for all us.

Is there a conspiracy to keep us stupid? Maybe. Bread and circuses has long been a strategy of the ruling class to keep the masses distracted. And certainly the people intent on banning books and muzzling teachers are happy enough with this state of affairs. Or perhaps this is just a natural consequence of a system that’s evolved to optimize for profit over every single possible public good.

It really doesn’t matter. What’s important is that we stop letting it happen.

Visit the blog at The grey goo scenario is happening.