Month: March 2025

An Academic Lens on What We Do, Plus Floaty Potatoes

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

This past week I braved the rigors of flying in America (spoiler: flights were thankfully uneventful) to go to Orlando, Florida for ICFA. That stands for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which is put on by IAFA (the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts). I have been going to ICFA for maybe a dozen years; it is one of my favorite conventions. A lot of that has to do with the writers and artists who attend, in addition to the academic professionals who come to deliver papers and be on panels. Possibly the most satisfactory programming–to me, anyway–is when you have academic and creative folk on a panel, sharing perspectives.

What kinds of things get talked about? Here are the titles of a handful of panels and discussions:

  • The Haunted House is a Fruiting Body: Fungus in Moreno-Garcia and Kingfisher
  • Devil’s In the Details: place and personhood in Horror
  • Monstrous Adaptations, Translations and Appropriations
  • A Wolf in the Fold: Werewolves in Modernity and Post-Modernity
  • Accepting, Resisting, and Complicating the Zombie
  • History is Written by…The Power of Alternative History in Fantasy

Plus, there are readings by the creative guests, and a performance of flash plays (disclaimer: I usually wind up performing in the flash plays. This year the plays were so flash they were one minute long, intermixed with improv. It was enormously fun). There are banquets and awards dinners which I usually don’t attend, and a ton of people to talk with.

Part of what I like about ICFA is that so much of the time my head is down and my attention is on my own paper, and I don’t think about what someone trained in reading and understanding text in a literary or philosophical sense might think of what I’m doing. And that’s a good thing: if I thought about that too much I very likely would not write anything ever again. But to see the kind of thoughtful critical treatment of fantastic literature that the participants at ICFA provide is heartening. I came up in a time when SF and fantasy were the decidedly junior members of the literary firm; that’s not the case any more.

Like most conventions, though, the very best time is sitting around the pool (Florida, right?) and talking with friends old and new, talking about writing and publishing and the world. Going out to dinner. Looking for the alligator who very occasionally used to waddle by the lake (I saw him once, years ago. Never since).

The convention runs Wednesday – Saturday night. Most participants leave on Sunday morning, but some of us stay an extra day and have an adventure: go to Gatorland or, as I did this year, head to the Blue Springs State Park to see manatees. There were so many manatees, and their calves! Apparently the local term for manatee is “floaty potato.” It is apt. I honestly wonder about the early European sailors who thought manatees were mermaids–that’s what a long time on a ship will do to your perception.

Anyway: ICFA. Highly recommended.

Witter-time and dissertations

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

For the next few weeks everything’s going to be a bit rushed and my mind may be a tad wayward. I have, you see, put in my notice to submit my thesis. This is my least favourite part of doing a PhD, normally, and a bit worried because right now I am kinda enjoying it. What’s wrong with me? I don’t sleep at all well, and I want it finished, but right now, the revision and thought is rather fun. When it stops being fun, then I’ll know I’m nearly finished.

While our dissertations are not that different to US or UK or European dissertations, the Australian examination process is its own thing. This is because it was set up at a time when distance and cost prevented committees from meeting in person and before modern technology allowed online meetings. Because of this, most Australian PhD examinations are still done through three examiners evaluating the written text. That’s it. I’ve been an examiner, and you are sent the document (it used to be a printed and bound document, but these days printing and binding mostly happen later) and read it and fill in a form and that’s that.

I enjoy examining others’ theses, but do not at all enjoy mine being examined. You sit and wait and sit and wait and sit and wait. Mostly, everything is done within three months… except for my first PhD examination, which took three years. It was also fraught. It left emotional scars and also cost me my first career. It’s very hard to get job interviews when your PhD has been under examination for about as long as it would take to do a whole new PhD.

I have maybe two weeks to finish writing the thesis, then a few more weeks for all the various other stages to be complete. Ticking boxes and jumping hoops.

It’s very good training for fiction writers, actually. I am much pickier about sending manuscripts to publishers because of this training. I don’t wait for an editor to sort my grammar and check for typos and ensure that the house style is met: I do it myself. I’m not as good at these things as I used to be, however. I miss the days of more energy and better eyesight and being really annoyed at stray split infinitives or commas. My thesis still has to have all these things sorted, along with proper citations and formatting. Several of the weeks before I submit, then, are to allow a copy editor to take a look. It’s part of the system right now, and good for me… but I’m determined to see how little work I can leave for the copy edit: it’s a matter of pride.

This leads to some odd moments. I was supposed to rewrite a paragraph yesterday, and instead I spent ten minutes analysing the text and seeing if I really needed my second footnote. This is not a document with many footnotes, unlike my History PhD. Different disciplines have quite different requirements. I used to have so many footnotes that I wrote 103 footnotes into my first novel. The editor had me take some out…. But it is still a footnoted novel. Back then, we had to assess the space for footnotes on each page: it wasn’t automatic. It’s ironic that now the word processor does this, I only have very occasional footnotes.

My first PhD was formatted by me, myself and I on a MacSE. Two floppy drives and much blue screen of death. That machine cost me 25% of a year’s scholarship. It was that long ago. I would print my drafts out on a dot matrix printer, and took discs into the university printer to print the final and photocopy it. The printed copies were then bound and sent to examiners, one of whom was in Canada. My then-thesis contained a vast amount of Old French and a little Latin, which totally thwarted any spellcheck by anyone who was not me.

Everyone was so impressed I was working on the computer all by myself back then. That’s how long ago it was. Desktop computers were exciting and new and I was able to do all the things myself. I typed other people’s theses in the last year of my undergraduate life. Not many theses, but I was a fast typist and accurate and now… I’m neither.

I wish I could claim age for this loss of skill, since I was an undergraduate over forty years ago, but the sad reality is that when I joined the public service it was at a time when there was much mistreatment of young women with typing skills. So many of us developed RSI. In my case, my supervisor was really annoyed that I had a PhD and he didn’t, even though I was still waiting for the examination results. He would give me pages of typing at 5 pm. “It’s urgent,” he claimed, which is how he skipped sending it to the typing pool. I was a policy analyst, not a typist but he would give me the work and then go home. A small sliver of his personality helped make up the composite boss-from-hell in one of my novels. So, so many people who read that novel tell me that they had that boss.

I am wittering, aren’t I? This is avoidance. I need to finish editing the Introduction and Literature Review. By the end of today, I have to apply one set of comments to the whole thesis. Then I have marked up text to sort out. Then another set of notes. I have until the weekend to have done all of this and I am, right now, procrastinating. Most of my Monday was spent clearing urgent stuff so that I could immerse myself in sorting out the thesis. That was also procrastinating. I’m nervous of Chapters Two and Three and Four, you see. Very nervous.

Breathe, but Safely

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

During the pandemic I figured out that Covid and many other diseases spread through the air and could be minimized and contained with good indoor air quality methods. While I was far from alone in this understanding – I learned about it from some very smart people – those with the clout to make sure we improved air in every place from schools to public buildings to offices and other workplaces ignored or minimized the problem.

As a result, many of us still find it necessary to wear masks in a lot of indoor spaces, something that is not only annoying, but actually under attacks. Far too little has been done to improve indoor air quality despite the fact that the benefits go much farther than avoiding contagious diseases and include improved cognitive functioning and avoidance of health problems caused by chemicals trapped in poorly ventilated spaces.

So when I stumbled on Carl Zimmer’s book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe while browsing in a bookstore, I was intrigued. I knew Zimmer was a science writer for The New York Times, and the book seemed to have thorough reporting.

What convinced me to buy this thick book in hardback rather than wait until it was available in the library was the blurb from Ed Yong, who called Zimmer “one of the very best science writers” and noted that the book would leave readers “agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late.”

I almost never buy books based on blurbs, but since Yong is a brilliant science writer and a man of fierce integrity when it comes to his profession, I had no doubt that he was giving his honest opinion.

And he was right. Air-Borne is a superb book that shows deep research into the history of the things that float in our air – much more than viruses – and of the people who have struggled to show us that we need to pay attention to what we’re breathing.

I was already outraged before I read it, but looking at the history increased my fervor. So many scientists came up with valuable clues to how viruses, bacteria, and fungi spread through the air only to be pushed aside or overlooked.

The book starts with a 2023 concert by the Skagit Valley Chorale, the choir in Washington state that experienced a super-spreader event that left two people dead after they met to rehearse during the early days of the pandemic. The number of people infected at that rehearsal was one of the things that made people realize this virus was air-borne.

Zimmer was at that concert with a CO2 meter in his pocket, trying to gauge if he needed a mask. As someone who often travels with a CO2 meter, since the amount of CO2 in the air gives you a good idea of the ventilation in a space, I recognized a kindred spirit. Continue reading “Breathe, but Safely”…

In Troubled Times: This, Too, Shall Pass

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

I first posted this in April 2023. It’s a good reminder.

I started a blog series, “In Troubled Times” after the 2016 presidential election. Folks I trusted said that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. That’s true now, too. You can read the first installment, “Becoming Allies,” here.

I came of age in the 1960s, demonstrating for civil rights and marching against the Vietnam War. I never burned my bra, but I volunteered for Planned Parenthood in the years before Roe v Wade. I am not bragging about my activist bona fides. I was one of many, and rarely in the forefront. However, I remember all too well the feelings of both elation and futility. The energy and inspiration of being surrounded by thousands of like minds, filling the streets of San Francisco, chanting and singing. We thought that if we could sing loudly enough and joyfully enough, we could change the minds and hearts of the nation’s leaders. And then came a day when many of us realized they were not about to listen to us. The war raged on, now captured on television in our living rooms.

That feeling of powerlessness was one of the driving forces behind my debut science fiction novel, Jaydium, by the way. My heroine is initially trapped on a dusty, barely-habitable planet at the back end of nowhere, and through a series of shifts through time and parallel dimensions, she ends up on an alien planet where she has the chance to change history by stopping a war. It’s about both re-engagement and the quest for peace (and I was tickled when Tom Easton of Analog praised the latter as unusual and laudable.) Writing it reflected my personal journey from withdrawal to participation.

I vividly remember how, in the late 1960s, my father, who was born in 1907 and lived through two world wars, pogroms, the McCarthy witch hunts, and more, would talk me down from desperation. When I was in a panic about the Cold War maneuver of the moment, he never dismissed my concerns; he was just coming from a broader perspective. And he was right. We got through those years without blowing the planet up.

Now I find myself in the position of being an elder—a crone, if you will. My earliest political memories date from the mid-1950s, including the terror of HUAC, the pervasive suspicions, racism, misogyny, and antisemitism that no one questioned. When I was a bit older, the anti-communist hysteria had faded somewhat (depending on where you lived), but not the rest. And always, in the years before oral contraception, sex meant fear of pregnancy. I knew girls in high school who got sent out of the country and returned the following year or so without their babies. Later, in the late 1960s/early 1970s but still before Roe v Wade, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood. And heard many stories. Looking back, I cannot believe how ignorant I was about so many other issues.

I do not mean to brag about my life experiences or to enter into a contest of which times were worse. Each generation faces its own trials, and each generation is convinced that theirs are world-ending, worst-ever scenarios. This is one of many reasons why we need generational memory (not to mention history books!)

Goethe wrote: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” It’s horrible that we have to fight these battles over and over, playing eternal whack-a-mole with the agents of hatred. That’s why we need all the allies and moral ammunition we can get.

I am mindful of the old joke, “In my day, we walked to school. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.” I see no benefit in comparing one disaster to another. For the person affected by a catastrophic event, whether it’s an attack on them as a member of a vulnerable group or a purely personal tragedy, loss is loss, fear is fear, and grief is grief. Instead of belittling someone else’s pain, we have the opportunity to use our own as a wellspring of compassion and understanding. The lesson from history is not that those times were more terrible than those we face today. It’s that they passed. Sure, you might say, they were taken over by new, awful things.

But sometimes, either by a cataclysmic change or the slow progress of justice, things get better. Not all things, not for everybody, and not all at once. Small victories add up to shifts in consciousness. One of my antidotes to despair is to complete the following sentence:

“I never thought I would live to see…”

  •  People walk on the Moon
  •  A Black person become President
  • Same-sex marriage become legal
  • A woman Vice President

Now fill in your own.

I believe that many of the crises looming over us are reactions to those victories. Two steps forward and one step back. But the movement of history is on our side. Rights once gained are not easily (permanently) revoked. Once marginalized groups are accepted as deserving of respect and dignity, it’s a lot harder to take that away.

Right now there are many attempts to take away human rights and dignity. And lives, often for trivial excuses. It seems we are living in a time when vicious, outrageous, hate-fueled behavior is on the ascendency.

These times, too, shall pass.

In the meantime, we are called upon to protect the vulnerable and minimize the harm inflicted on them.

A Taste of the Everyday

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I’m writing this very early on my Monday. It will be Sunday in the rest of the world for a very long time yet.

Most of my Sunday was supposed to be spent meeting many deadlines. Instead, I and my body came to uneasy truce: if I didn’t do much work, it wouldn’t give me much pain. When I wake up, later this Monday, I have all that back work to catch up on. It struck me just now that I don’t talk about all the types of work I do. If I tell you Monday’s work, then I have to finish it all, right?

I am working on a developmental edit for someone. I’ve done all the thinking, and just have to write up and send the comments.

I have to go to the Copyright Agency website and do my annual update of publications. Also, for an entirely different purpose I need to start my list of workshops and talks given in the last year. I have a reading of one of my short stories to send to an organisations that makes them available to blind people (I’m losing my eyesight, so it makes me very happy to share my work this way) and someone else has asked for an excerpt from a novel.

I have to send (very belatedly) my Patreon newsletter. Then there’s an article to write, a table of contents to put into some sort of draft order for an editor to consider, and some of my old non-fiction is needed for an entirely new purpose. I have about 20 urgent emails to answer. Even with my bad day, I dealt with 18 urgent emails today. I am hoping there won’t be a rush of emails tomorrow and that all will be fine.

Add as many hours of dissertation to this as I can do (which depends both on what comments I receive and whether my eyes are up to close scrutiny), and that’s a fairly typical day’s work. What people never tell us as writers is the amount of administrative stuff that creeps into the day and makes life complicated when there is less energy than time. Add editing and copy-editing to the pile and everything can really add up.

If I get all this done by early evening, my reward is to meet up with a friend online, about 5 hours before this post goes live. In other words, if tomorrow behaves itself, everything you’ve just read about is in my past.

The wild wind that was keeping me awake and in pain has finally died down. Even the birds are silent. Also, it’s cool outside. I shall sleep and dream that, when I wake up again, I can do all the things I’ve planned.

It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

In the wake of the dodgy crowd rampaging through the United States government, it is sometimes hard to remember that there are others – mostly corporate others – out to wreak havoc in our lives.

But there are and while we’re organizing in various ways to try to preserve the valuable parts of the United States, we need to remember to address these problems at the same time. Yeah, it’s all exhausting, but we really don’t have a choice.

If we don’t push back, we’re ceding the planet and its resources – resources that belong to all of us and that, if properly used, would provide us all a good life – to the kind of destructive forces who consider ordinary people to be NPCs (non-player characters in gaming).

But we’re real and we’re players and we cannot let them run the world. So here’s a list of some of the things to be concerned about in addition to the grifter, his pet broligarch, and the dodgy minions:

Tech Enshittification:

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, and while the use of it is expanding, the crux of it is that tech companies woo in users of various types by various means and then start making the product harder to use. So first it’s easy to get on Facebook and you see all your friends. Then it’s easy to advertise on Facebook, which annoys the other users but makes the business people happy, and then they screw over the business people and now nobody’s happy, but everyone’s stuck there.

Right now this is personal to me, because I’m going to have to buy a new phone since I can’t replace the battery (even though I was told I could when I bought it) and Microsoft is throwing AI garbage into Word and I have to figure out how to keep some version of Word so I can read and use all my files (thousands of them) without AI cooties.

I’m sure people can tell me all kinds of things I can do about both things, but all those things require a lot of extra work. I just want to be able to keep my perfectly good phone and easily get software that isn’t contaminated.

The truth is that all tech is full of crap these days and you have to spend excessive amounts of time paying attention to it instead of just having a nice tool you can use. It’s enough to make one nostalgic not just for Word Perfect and the early days of Google search, but for a fucking typewriter and an encyclopedia.

“AI”:

AI is either the greatest new thing – as long as it can suck up all the energy, water, and money it needs – or an existential threat, or something that is useful for a few things, but is not going to either save or destroy the world. I hold with the last of these, but people are still throwing lots of money at it. Check out Ed Zitron’s newsletter Where’s Your Ed At to see where that is going.

The Network State:

This is truly scary stuff. Some of the broligarchs want to build libertarian cities that don’t pay any taxes or provide any services within the the boundaries of various countries. I’m not sure how they expect to get utilities and other infrastructure, though I suspect they plan to steal it from the actual governments in place. It’s pretty clear these cities are only for the super-wealthy and that the rest of us would be admitted only as gig workers or worse.

I recommend Gil Duran’s newsletter The Nerd Reich for keeping up with these people. They tried to do something last year up in Sonoma County just north of the San Francisco Bay Area, but the first attempt failed. No doubt they’ll be back.

This is like the sovereign citizen movement – the people who proclaim a separate government and claim they don’t have to pay taxes – except that unlike the sovereign citizens, who are cranks, these people have real money.

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a good example of what these people are planning. Continue reading “It’s Not Just the Grifters in Government”…

Raised in a Barn: Good House Keeping

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

The world overtook me this week, but here’s a piece from the past.

When I was a kid and my family lived in New York City but spent weekends and holidays at the Barn, guests were a way of life. At the beginning, that meant that everyone stayed in the old farmhouse across the driveway which had come with the property. It was probably a late-Victorian vintage, but not the charming vintage. More the utilitarian-structure-built-by-people-with-no-taste vintage. Its lack of curb-appeal aside, it was a perfectly serviceable house with heat, water, and electricity. And walls. All of which, in the early days, the Barn lacked. So we, and our guests, would kip in the house, sometimes three or four to a room (kids on camp cots), then rise and go our Barnish way.

The house, as I’ve said, was ugly, but it was not without its interest. In the attic we found all manner of weird, dusty, flyspecked treasures: framed academic certificates awarded to people whose names were rendered in such tortured ornate penmanship as to be unreadable; huge old school maps, one of them so old that it predated the Gadsden Purchase (1854!), unwieldy ugly dressers and chairs. Unlike the Barn, the house was not a refuge for livestock, but there were–or had been at some earlier time–mice, and their nests. Downstairs there were three or four small bedrooms (the one I slept in had cabbage rose wallpaper which I, at five, thought the height of elegance). Below that, the kitchen (with coal burning stove!), living room, and dining room, where my parents’ old paperbacks and furniture went to die. I have a strong, visceral memory of those paperbacks, with their lurid covers (even Mill on the Floss was rendered shocking! by the art and copy) and musty smell. Those books, which had names like Keep the Aspidistra Flying, were yellowed and crumbling and seemed very exotic to me, may account for my early onset book-lust.

Until we got plumbing in the Barn, which involved dowsing and drilling and many exciting things, we carried water across the 200-odd feet from the house to the Barn, where the electric stove and refrigerators were almost the first things to go in. Picture a make-way-for-ducklings line of family members, each with his or her pot or pitcher of water for cooking or washing up. O! Pioneers! And of course, unless you were really committed to roughing it, you retired to the house for the private use of plumbing.

At night, the kids would be tucked into bed in the house; then the parents would retire across the driveway to the Barn for whatever revelry seemed good to them. My brother and I were used to this, but guest-kids often had a problem going to sleep in a strange house in a strange place with strange sounds outside, and would start crying. It fell to me, as the hostess and presiding child, to cross the pitch-dark lawn to the Barn and alert the parents that one of their offspring was freaking out.

The minute the Barn was at all habitable, we shifted our base of operations over there. This left a perfectly serviceable ugly farmhouse, abandoned for daily use. My brother and I used it for hide and seek; we were the only kids I knew who had a whole house to play house in. But as we got older those games palled, and the poor house was left to become colder and more empty, until my father declared it an eyesore. He’d never wanted the farmhouse. So he put an ad in the local Pennysaver: free house for anyone who would move it away. When he got no takers, he sweetened the deal: free house and a quarter acre of land to anyone who would move it away. That got someone’s attention: the house was raised up off its foundations, ready to be rolled away. Except the taker defaulted: he couldn’t afford to move the house. So now we had a house up on jacks, and it stayed there for months. Without foundations, the once sturdy house began to droop toward the middle, at which point, like a car with a sprung frame, it was declared a junker.

What to do with a dead house? In the end, Dad offered it to the local fire department, and they came over and had practice fires: light ‘er up, put ‘er out, light ‘er up, put ‘er out. What was left was ploughed into the foundation, and seeded over; within a remarkably short time there was lawn there, and you’d never have known there had been a house there. Those school certificates and the map without the Gadsden Purchase Dad gave to the local historical society, and then there was no trace of the house at all. It was all a little bit like a structural version of A Star is Born–with the upstart upstaging the old veteran. I still remember the smell of those books, and that cabbage rose wallpaper, though.

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

The changes in the US are reaching out over the world. Added to the increase in antisemitism and many more people are looking through a red veil and seeing hate or despite when the reality is we’re not communicating clearly. Whether I’m right or wrong or entirely evil in whatever I say, I feel like a mouse with cats both visible and invisible, just waiting to pounce. Some of my friends have gone quiet, which is sensible. I am sometimes not so quiet and a random cat pounces. The cat might be pouncing because I’m vermin or because they’re hyper-aware and see me as vermin, but either way…. they pounce.

And I need to think of nicer things. Not the cyclone. It was not, as cyclones go, a very big one. In fact, it was hardly a cyclone at all. The parts of SE Queensland and NE NSW it hit, though, included much flat land that was easily saturated with water. People talk about the hills of Brisbane, and yes, they are pretty. But Brisbane airport is 3m above sea level and it’s not the only part that’s so close to sea level. When there’s too much rain, the land becomes saturated quickly and Brisbane floods and the floods do not roll down the mountains to the sea… because a large part of the city has low elevation. On the Gold Coast, there is very little beach left, but beach can be restored. So far, all my friends and family in that region are fine, which is something.

You need some good news, right?

The first bit of good news has to do with water… from the opposite end to floods. There is a new book (ebook right now, and I’ll make a formal announcement when the paperback comes out) that talks about water and that intends to raise money to help people in very dry areas (Sahel-dry) manage water. I have an alternate history sarcastic little piece in it. You can find the ebook here:  Yemoja’s Tears

The second bit of good news is that later this week is Purim (the feast of Esther) and it’s obligatory for me to get drunk. This year I think I need it.

The War on Infrastructure

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra’s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works.

One of the key messages I got from that book – outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams – was that infrastructure makes modern life possible. We have hot and cold running water in our houses. A flick of a switch gives us power.

Flick another one and you’re online, having a video chat with your friend on the other side of the world.

At the moment I’m reading another book – Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne – and while that’s a book that discusses germ theory and contagious disease (indoor air quality is another passion of mine and you’ll hear more about this book another time), it made me realize something else: so much of the infrastructure we rely on is incredibly new.

In discussing some experiments that required collecting air samples high in the atmosphere by airplane, he mentioned Charles Lindbergh’s flights in the 1930s when he was scouting out routes for commercial airlines. Because in the early 1930s, we didn’t yet have commercial air traffic across the oceans.

I’m sure if you were born in the 21st century, 1930 seems like the dark ages. But there are still people around on this planet who were alive back then. It’s not very long ago.

We’ve become very accustomed to a lot of this infrastructure – including flying from continent to continent – in a short period of time.

We really don’t want to lose it. As Prof. Chachra points out:

We’ve created these collective infrastructural systems that make our lives, as we know them, possible. Any future with limited, reduced, or even more frequently interrupted access to them is recognizably worse than our present, if not downright dystopian.

She was speaking about climate change, which is already taking a toll on our infrastructure. It’s also been eroded due to poor maintenance over the years. In Oakland, where I live, a lot of water pipes are over a hundred years old because it was just over a hundred years ago that the water system was firmly put in place.

And while a hundred years isn’t a long time to have a municipal water system, it is a long time to rely on the original pipes.

But now we’re facing a third attack on our infrastructure, one that is causing much more immediate damage than even climate change and neglect. I refer to the chainsaw destruction of the federal government by the broligarch in chief and his grifter in the White House. Continue reading “The War on Infrastructure”…

In Hopeful Times: Robert Reich on Optimism

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

 At the beginning of Trump 1.0, I began a series entitled “In Troubled Times.” With the onset of the war in Ukraine (aka The War of Russian Aggression), I shifted to “In Times of War.” Today, Substackian Robert Reich offers reasons for cautious optimism. Let’s feed that hope!

This is a very brief summary. Click on the link to read the whole thing and to subscribe.

Friends, If you are experiencing rage and despair about what is happening in America and the world right now because of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, you are hardly alone. A groundswell of opposition is growing — not as loud and boisterous as the resistance to Tump 1.0, but just as, if not more, committed to ending the scourge.
1.Boycotts are taking hold.
2. International resistance is rising.
3. Independent and alternative media are growing.
4. Musk’s popularity is plunging.
5. Musk’s Doge is losing credibility.
6. The federal courts are hitting back.
7. Demonstrations are on the rise.
8. Stock and bond markets are trembling.
9. Trump is overreaching — pretending to be “king” and abandoning Ukraine for Putin.
10. The Trump-Vance-Musk “shock and awe” plan is faltering.

In all these ways and for all of these reasons, the regime’s efforts to overwhelm us are failing.

Make no mistake: Trump, Vance, and Musk continue to be an indiscriminate wrecking ball that has already caused major destruction and will continue to weaken and isolate America. But their takeover has been slowed.

Their plan was based on doing so much, so fast that the rest of us would give in to negativity and despair. They want a dictatorship built on hopelessness and fear.

That may have been the case initially, but we can take courage from the green shoots of rebellion now appearing across America and the world.

As several of you have pointed out, successful resistance movements maintain hope and a positive vision of the future, no matter how dark the present.