January 4

 Nice and sunny today after a cloudy and wet four days. The soap opera of electing a Speaker of the House. Three votes yesterday and McCarthy still waiting. Will Rogers once said "I don't belong to an organized party. I'm a Democrat." Well, that might be edited nowadays from Democrat to Republican. One of the commentators on the news this morning noted that this is the culmination of a decades old process of "neutering" the legislative leadership.

This CNN article is another cautionary tale about the airlines and luggage. And the airline involved providing lousy customer service until the media becomes involved isn't Southwest. If, and that is a big IF, I will ever fly again, not likely since I haven't flown in 50 years, I would take carry on only. If I had too much to do that I would ship the excess ground to my home.

Michael Campi at Medium has an interesting post. I have suspected for some time that we are long past the time when we (as a world society) can do anything to either stop outright or even roll back the damage we have done and are still doing to the environment/climate. He says

There are an ever growing number of fluffy people trying to see if they can capture some market share by writing, seemingly endless, articles on how we can “save the planet” or how we can “make a difference” or how we can “make better choices” and the simple truth is…

…we can’t.

The sooner that sinks in the better. There is nothing we can do.

We have several problems. First, there really isn't a "we" to do the job. Too many who want a standard of living like what the richest nations boast and have an argument that the West grew rich on the backs of the rest of the world. And we have industries and those who have interests in them whose status and wealth depend on a continuation of "business as usual." Second, even those who are loudly proclaiming that "we" need to change aren't showing much willingness to sacrifice their comforts to make that change. The "we" they are talking about is everyone else. Third, even if, by some miracle, people managed to go to zero carbon emissions it will be several decades before the levels of CO2 in the  declines. But we also have to deal with other greenhouse gasses that the warming temperatures are releasing. Also, the Amazon rain forest, which was a carbon sponge, is now releasing more CO2 than it absorbs. Our entire lifestyle depends on heroic consumption, wasteful production using dwindling resources, and releasing greater amounts of CO2. Changing a culture is like changing the course of a supertanker--it doesn't happen all at once.