Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

“If we're going to do what I think we need to do, we need to do it now. If we wait until they close the noose on us again, we're finished.”

“You talk a lot about 'evolution' in The World in Six Songs, but maybe it would be more accurate to talk about humans as the products of devolution, of a relentless pursuit of perfection in stupidity and arrogance. Even religion today has lost its ability to pull us out—now it's all warrior gods. My song 'Strong in the Wrong' is a direct attack on these subversions of religion.” - Joni Mitchell

“Have you ever had one of those days when it becomes painfully apparent that the universe is deliberately screwing with you?”

“Knowledge is emotion. Some people say that science just is, that it is merely a collection of facts and measurements that exist outside of the realm of emotion and caring. But I disagree. Of the millions (perhaps infinity) of possible facts about the world we memorize, document, and pass on to others, we select those that we think are important, and this is an emotional judgment.“

“I'm realist enough to know my opinion won't carry the day, not in the US, not in China, and not in lots of other places. There's real harm that will come to real places and real people as we build out this new energy future. And so for me the question becomes how that harm compares with the ongoing harm of our present system.”

“You have some utilities, like in Mozambique or Madagascar, that see it as a threat, and are trying to claw it down. But the realization is, this [solar transition] is happening anyway, whether you like it or not. If you fight people, they'll just go clandestine and install it without letting you know." - Joel Nana, South African energy analyst

“Sorrow does have a physiological purpose and it may be an adaptive response, which is to help us conserve energy and reorient our priorities for the future after a traumatic event.“

“Our job is to flood the world as fast as possible with electrons from the sun and wind, confident that the very availability of clean, cheap power in bulk will drive the rest of the process. In the US alone, as The Economist pointed out, we have a terawatt of new solar capacity just waiting to be connected to the grid if regulators can get out of the way.”

“The optimist thinks a brewing conflict might be solved by diplomacy. The pessimist thinks fighting is inevitable, and that may bring about his own destruction. Our brains evolved the responses to joyful music making that they did because joy can be a reliable indicator of a person's mental and physical health.”

“Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you cary of a final line, a border or limit."

“Over time, I think, that switch [to solar and wind power] will make it easier to steer the machine in smarter directions, but that's not the main job at the moment. Emergency-room doctors don't waste a lot of time worrying about their patients' poor lifestyle choices—they do what they must to save their lives, perhaps with the hope that given a second chance their patients will choose more wisely.”

"This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it."

“Relying on energy sources that are abundant instead of scarce—the sun and the wind each day produce thousands of times as much energy as we could ever use—could even reconfigure our ideas of competition and conquest. Unlike oil and gas, sun and wind can't be hoarded.“

“Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don't those people know what we've been through? We were scared to death. We still are. […] This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is under serious threat. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media.”

“We create because we cannot stop ourselves from doing so. Because our brains were made that way. Because evolution and natural selection favored those brains that had a creative impulse, one that could be turned toward the service of finding shelter or food when others were unable to find it; toward enticing mates to procreate and care for children amid competition for mates.“

“And if you venerate the pibe, insist on the urchin ideal, can it really be a surprise when those pibes fail to grow up, fail to take responsibility, believe above all else in the value of mischief?”

“We'd been living under a dictatorship since 1964, and all the country's companies, schools and clubs were run along military lines: someone at the top gave the orders and you just did what you were told. We had to invent democracy by doing democracy.” - Walter Casagrande, Brazil

“The flow is constant. Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.“

“It's vital we learn to navigate interactions marked by conflict, and practice standing firm in the face of negative reactions from others. As long as we haven't abused anyone or violated their rights, it's okay for our actions to make others unhappy. After all, neurotypical people step on conversational toes and continue breezily along all the time.”

“Ever since, there has been a sense of soccer trying to recapture the spirit of 1970 […] The 1970 World Cup looks different from every subsequent World Cup because not every surface is covered in advertising. The marketing was not slick, the presentation was imperfect, and in that ramshackle aspect there was perhaps a charm: The soccer, by and large, came first.”

“Here, overtly, was the imperial lion transformed into something cheeky and welcoming—but it was also a commercial ploy, a mascot whose image could transform anything from T-shirts to tea towels into a salable souvenir: imperialism first defanged by an increasingly classless irreverence and then repackaged as commercial junk.”

“What is a love story without immense columns of flame rising into the Florida night?”

May was the Tallahassee + We Shall All Be Healed chapter.

“Brazil is a land of myth, a place where objective fact struggles for traction, and few have been so mythologized as Pelé.”

“But when we look at time as a series of cycles or spirals with goals that are ever-shifting, we can recognize that the learning and reflection we put into an aborted project (or even into masking) often pays off, just not in the way we expected. Every disappointment or failure teaches us something about what we want, and what is best for us.”