The Nature of Things

Here's some of what I've been reading while the world of journalism is focused on collusion and conspiracy. ~~~ One of my early literary loves was Daphne du Maurier. There was a time as a teenager when I tried to read everything she had written. She occupied a pedestal in my literary pantheon, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, Tolstoy, Agatha Christie, and Zane Grey. (I was an eclectic reader even as a teenager.)  In time I fell out of love with Grey, but I've retained a fondness for my other early loves, especially du Maurier. How I loved her gothic thriller/romances! The books were wonderful and so were the movies based on the books. I devoured them all.  So, I was happy to see an appreciation of her writing in The New York Times recently. Pahrul Seghal's "In Praise of Daphne du Maurier" reminded me of all the things I loved - and still love - about her writing. ~~~ The Pew Research Center continuously conducts polls about all sorts of things. The results of ...

Clearing out my reading file this morning, here is some of what I found. ~~~ A recent paper published in the "Journal of Climate" dealt a setback to climate change contrarians . To support their claims of no or unimportant changes in the planet's climate, these contrarians have pointed to some select regions of the atmosphere that haven't changed much, ignoring all other evidence, i.e., rise in ocean temperatures, rise in Earth's surface temperatures, melting sea ice, and on and on. But the new paper corrects and revises upward the temperatures they have relied on as their evidence. Even in their "select regions" it's getting hotter. ~~~ Of course, Game of Thrones fans know that "Winter is coming," but it didn't come fast enough for the filming of the upcoming season to go off on schedule, and so the season was delayed from its usual beginning in April until July. But Jon Snow (Kit Harington) reported that even that was problematic. He...

I get most of my news these days from trusted sources on the web. I've given up on broadcast "journalism" with its reliance on punditry and its false equivalence. When I run across an article that I want to read but don't have time for, or don't want to take the time for at the moment, I send it to my reading file for later perusal. Today I am clearing out my reading file. Here is some of what I've been reading and thinking about lately. You may discern a pattern... ~~~ Our president is a liar. This is a verifiable fact. (You remember facts? "A thing that is indisputably the case," says the dictionary.)  People have actually taken the time and effort to verify it. People like David Leonhardt and Stuart A. Thompson who, last Friday, published a definitive list of the man's lies since his inauguration in January. It is mind-boggling. The Toronto Star also has been keeping track of his lies and they calculate that he has told an average of 2.1 lie...