… Abramoff has a long history of climate activism. Last year, she chained herself to the White House fence to bring awareness to the climate crisis, and later marched with a group of activists down a major freeway in Washington DC, stalling traffic during rush hour. In November, she chained herself to the entrance of a private jet terminal in North Carolina.
She also has already experienced the consequences of radical activism. In December of last year, Abramoff interrupted the American Geophysical Union meeting, calling on fellow scientists to join her in climate activism. In response, she was expelled from the conference and lost her job. “I’m all for decorum, but not when it will cost us the earth,” she wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. …
Update from my hotel room after Day Two of my pilgrimage.
My legs ache. Pulling 30km a day is grueling. But I’m going to push onward tomorrow, at least until Ingolstadt. Cause even if I feel like I’m getting too old for this, I’m not getting younger.
Ahh, 1989. I was studying political science and the professor gave us Vaclav Havel and others but mostly the newspapers. Also that year I remember Reagan getting elected. All the end of the decade memorials.
Thanks. Of course. I did vote in 1988, but am not great on details I guess in 1989 turning to 1990 was just retrospectives. I remember them like yesterday because I drove to Chicago from Long Island with my girlfriend’s family and we watched them in her aunt’s house.
Reagan left office in Jan. 1989 with the election of George H.W. Bush, but yeah he got a lot more credit for the fall of wall and USSR than warranted and I still remember the dirty dealing that kept the Iran Hostages captured until the inauguration to humiliate Jimmy Carter. Still angry about that. Then the Iran/Contra thing with the same assholes. I did spend some time in Nicaragua after that… but in 1989 I was working days as a construction worker and going to school to eventually get a journalism degree right in time for the internet to undermine the economics for newspapers.
So, Vaclav Havel - do you think his literary work aged well? I remember it being awfully misogynistic, but I suppose he was a product of his time.
No, I don’t think it aged well. At the time it was so exciting to read about this foreign world through the eyes of a real member of the intelligentsia. I tried reading some now and stopped. Then again I tried re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera and failed at that too. Post apocalyptic times and limited attention, perhaps.
Yeah, Milan Kundera, same thing. And yeah, there was a hunger for a different point of view from actual dissidents. And, yeah a feeling of hope for the future.
What makes me feel old (besides my fucking back in the morning and also not being able to read the cooking instructions on the back of shit) are these kids on YouTube who have never seen any movies from before 2000-something apparently.
Come on, kids! I devoted massive amounts of time in the 80’s and 90’s to finding and watching all the movies from before my time that I could get my hands on, and now it’s so much easier to do! You don’t even have to leave the damn house!
Searching at the video store was much more enjoyable than scrolling through the pages and pages of junk the streaming service algorithms put in front of my face, though.
I could say that it was the death of the auteur director-led films and the ascension of the everything-is-a-franchise-with-a-built in market, but that’s probably not it and I don’t want to put myself in the position of saying, “everything was better in my day.” Because there were a lot of bad movies in the '80s and '90s. We did get the benefit of the video store as @anon58741709 said and could choose from the great films from the '50s to the '80s from around the world. Which was great. Even better now, online, but you do need to wade through a lot of dross.
I think there’s a lot more that kids today have endless entertainment options and spending 2 hours invested on one thing is a lot to ask.
Johnson took over from Livingstone as mayor of London, just in time for the bike rental scheme L started to actually appear, and for J to claim credit.
Biden didn’t reverse Trump’s pull out of Afghanistan, so everything bad about the withdrawal was B’s fault.
I guess in 1989 turning to 1990 was just retrospectives. I remember them like yesterday because I drove to Chicago from Long Island with my girlfriend’s family and we watched them in her aunt’s house.
