Had a dream that I was working for retired Obama, and we had to go fetch his friend, admiral Feuer (no idea where the name came from) at his home, just down the street from Obamas’, and take a train to DC. He gave me his home address, in Riverdale, and told me how sensitive that information was, and I said, of course. He felt bad that I’d have to take a taxi to Bronx and not be reimbursed, but I was so thrilled that I didn’t care. I was looking forward to the time on the train when I was woken up at 5am.

And now, we are watching the laborious process of hooking the hoses of a tanker truck to fill up one of the two gas stations outside my home.

acknowledgetheabsurd:

“There is no way for a thinker—or indeed, a user of language—to eschew abstraction entirely, of course, but Camus was deeply attuned to the dangers of excessive abstraction. This may not sound particularly heroic, but it can be, and it certainly was in Camus’s day. Camus’s peers, mid-century French intellectuals, were all too susceptible to the raptures of abstraction. The Left Bank bien pensants were, with few exceptions, stalwart armchair Marxists, obliquely aware that the divine dream of the worker’s paradise was exacting a brutal toll on the actual humans of the Soviet bloc, but blissfully unmoved by this fact. Camus publicly, angrily, charged that their fixation on beautiful ideas made them insensate to the ugly cost such ideas imposed on the much-beloved proletariat. And indeed, it is now difficult—impossible—to think Camus wrong.”

— Ian Corbin, Entranced by Reality [x]

wolfliving:

*They’ve got too many tourists, but they’ve also got a lot of cultural sway.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/overtourism-a-growing-global-problem

The summer holidays are in full swing – and protests against overtourism have begun (yet again) in a number of popular European cities. Overtourism is not a new problem.

Barcelona, in particular, is at the centre of these mounting concerns about the rapid growth of tourism in cities, especially during peak holiday periods. In fact, Destination Barcelona estimates that there were 30m overnight visitors in 2017, compared to a resident population of 1,625,137.

But across southern Europe protests and social movements are growing in number. This has led to the formation of organisations such as the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Sustainable Tourism (ABTS) and the Network of Southern European Cities against tourism (SET). They are at the forefront of the fight against overtourism and the impact it has on local residents.

While many tourists want to “live like a local” and have an authentic and immersive experience during their visit, the residents of many tourism-dependent destinations are seeing the unique sense of place that characterised their home towns vanish beneath a wave of souvenir shops, crowds, tour buses and rowdy bars. They are also suffering as local amenities and infrastructure are put under enormous strain.

It is a truly global issue. Other destinations where overtourism has reached disruptive proportions include Palma de Mallorca, Paris, Dubrovnik, Kyoto, Berlin, Bali and Reykjavik. Recently, Thai authorities were forced to act when the number of tourists visiting Maya Bay, the beach made famous by Danny Boyle’s film The Beach, led to shocking environmental damage….

Oh no, Kyoto, too… This makes me want to never want to go to any of these places. Reykjavik, last time, was depressing for the very same reason.

mawbli:

as if a world opened but only to tell you it could not hold you

The leaves in the park are already dropping. L asks why are they yellow. It is still 100°F. Can it already be fall?

stoweboyd:

“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.”

— | Paul Goodman, New Reformation, cited by Neil Postman in Technopoly