Welcome to the very first edition of what I hope will become a regular weekday post rounding up various bits of news and entertainment I’ve found during my online travels, and various thoughts, anecdotes, trivia, and analysis pertaining thereto. What ground I’ll cover is up for grabs; there’s sure to be some socio-political content every day because that’s where I live, and likely to be plenty of stuff about music, films, etc.
While “news” will play a role, it’s not my intent to be just another copy-paste gimmick that does crappy rewrites of articles from bigger sites and passes it off as original material. Expect anything that catches my attention and inspires 250-500 words of thought, with maybe four to eight stories per day.
With that said, let’s get right in to it!
In today’s issue: Greta Thunberg reminds us that she ran out of f**ks to give about five minutes after she was born and good for her; Neil Young sings about other people; YouTube bans antivaxx misinformation. Read more using the navigation links (pro tip: the header is a drop-down menu), and don’t forget to add me on social media so you don’t miss anything!
Greta Gives ‘Em Hell
Climate and autism activist Greta Thunberg hit another one out of the park this week while speaking at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy. Reading like a classic George Carlin stand-up routine, Thunberg read through the obligatory list of cliches and empty promises – creating a new prosperous future full of green jobs and so forth – with open scorn and mockery before dismissing the lot as “thirty years of blah blah blah.” CNN’s report is at https://us.cnn.com/2021/09/28/world/greta-thunberg-climate-intl/index.html and features some highlights or you can watch the video in the embedded tweet below. One of my favorite passages, via WaPo:
They invite cherry-picked young people to pretend they are listening to us, but they are not. They are clearly not listening to us. Just look at the numbers. Emissions are still rising. The science doesn’t lie.
– Greta Thunberg
What I love about this particular quote is that she doesn’t flinch even a little bit while citing her own presence in that place at that moment as another attempt at performative distraction, a bit of token attention to settle the kids down. In the “bigger picture” sense again we see a dramatic shift in decorum over the last few decades; no more are these folks all just showing up to have their pictures taken and get their name in the paper. They haven’t come to recycle the same old talking points that benefit nobody except those desperately working to preserve the status quo that keeps them extraordinarily wealthy. Moreover they’ve come to eject those who do.
It absolutely must be taken as critical to this conversation that we stop playing word games and employing euphemism and trying to protect the feelings of the guilty at the expense of the lives of the innocent. Seeing this ongoing evolution of discourse is heartening and I certainly encourage everyone to do what they can to emulate it. Enough with the “blah blah blah” already, let’s get something done.
This is the generation of kids I was trying to be in thirty-five years ago and we weren’t ready. We’re not ready now…but the universe isn’t gonna wait for us to be ready. Change is happening, evolution is here, and it’s get on board or get left behind.
When I think about what “on board” looks like, it usually looks like this.
“We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah blah blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action”
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) September 28, 2021
My speech at #Youth4Climate #PreCOP26 in Milan. pic.twitter.com/BA62GpST2O
Neil Gives ‘Em Grief
There’s a pretty nifty little trivia-listicle over at Far Out magazine (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/neil-young-songs-wrote-about-fellow-musicians/) in the UK which lists songs Neil Young wrote about other musicians. If you’re into Young or music trivia it’s well worth scrolling through on your lunch break or whatever. Of course it’s not exhaustive, just a handful of tracks, but if you’re of a mind you can start following links and reading and learning all kinds of stuff about Young.
Of course it’s almost endemic to Neil Young that you think his songs are “about somebody,” and often their subjects are obscured through metaphor. Sometimes it’s an obvious homage (“Buffalo Springfield Again”), sometimes it’s a callback to himself (“Harvest Moon”). Sometimes he gets “feisty” ($1 Eddie Vedder, see embed) and takes on a whole idea (“This Note’s For You”), or a whole region of the country (“Southern Man”). Then there are the songs that you didn’t even realize he wrote, or about whom (“Lotta Love,” made famous by Young’s then-partner Nicolette Larson), and you could spend a lifetime speculating on the veiled references to his various interpersonal loves and hates with old bandmates like David Crosby and Stephen Stills.
Part of Young’s appeal as a songwriter is he knows how to make the specific feel general and vice-versa; he resonates, because he finds the resonance between the individual, subjective, personal experience and the collective, shared, objective “world” in which it happens.
Enjoy this fun video of Eddie Vedder inducting “Uncle Neil” into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, in 1995.
Things I Love Today
YouTube Bans Vaccine Disinfo
Another entry in the “Big Brother?” argument: NPR reports (https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041493544/youtube-vaccine-misinformation-ban) that YouTube has now announced a generalized ban on vaccine disinformation. This extends the existing ban on fake or misleading info about COVID and related vaccines and other management measures. You can read the details of YouTube’s position on the matter in the linked article.
This naturally brings to the surface questions about censorship and information control, and it’s quite reasonable to be concerned when any private company has the ability to exercise that level of content control over public discourse. Sorting out the imperatives of free expression and public safety in a moment like this was never going to be easy, and the flag-waving and sloganeering around the issue from all directions don’t help.
The real, core solution to all of this is of course education, but that takes time we don’t really have. The problems with our failure to sufficiently educate are manifest and must be dealt with on a basis of exigent need, even as we work diligently to construct robust, effective, and meaningful core solutions. How that will play out, I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling free expression is going to take a hit in the end.
Meanwhile, those of us who would like to help educate others (or ourselves) should find this video from UNESCO quite handy.
Thanks for reading, please remember to like, share, comment, and subscribe, and we’ll be back Friday…you know The Drill 😉