Joel Curzon

The Executive is laying taxes without the consent of Congress.
The Executive is spending money without the consent of Congress.
Other than that, everything is totes normal.

I get the Covid booster every year. Flu, about half the time. Covid scares me much more than influenza (I haven’t had influenza since the 1990s; it’s easier to avoid).

If the Democratic Party were a functional, reasonable party, Trump never could have won. It’s not sufficient to say, “The voters are just bad.” A country doesn’t elect a demagogue like Trump without major preexisting dysfunction, and the Democratic Party is part of the problem.

Did Forest Service negligence make the Garnet Fire worse? Years of inaction by the US Forest Service station near Fresno put one of the agency’s last stands of old growth forests in California on the brink of

One of the most important stories of this fire season -- how USFS repeatedly dragged it's feet every step of the way to prevent prescribed burning in the Teakettle Forest, which as a result burned to a crisp in the Garnet fire. An avoidable tragedy. 🌎 fresnoland.org/2025/10/14/g...

The Trump Team's plans to exploit public lands follow the blueprint of Reagan's Interior secretary James Watt led a similar effort to privatize natural resources for mining, energy development, logging, and sprawl.

Shout out to @motherjones.com for republishing this and adding the alt title.

Trump Team’s Plans to Exploit Public Lands Follow the Blueprint of Reagan’s Interior Secretary. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

“The earth has a skin; and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called ‘man.’”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

I see that the trans cult still dominates this platform. One reason I spend little time here. Get a grip.

Congrats to the folks who say that AI is just a tool.

Disease is catastrophically reshaping the planet's most protected landscapes A new report from the IUCN warns that the next great biodiversity crisis may already be underway, as wildlife diseases spread quickly

Forests collapsing, bats dying, apes infected—the planet is running a fever.

Habitat loss and climate change are creating a perfect storm of pathogens.

Like COVID, humanity will treat it as fiction until it becomes the headline.
www.thecanary.co/global/world...

I haven’t, but I will. :-)

I am sure that there were oral traditions in play, but, in most cases, I see no reliable way of differentiating what may have been an oral tradition from what may have been simply invented by the author for his own purposes. The gospels are primarily works of literature, not history.

3/n

This strikes me as the most charitable reading of the gospels that the evidence reasonably allows. The gospels are written so as to *appear* as history, but that appearance does not hold up. I think they are primarily works of literary invention. Historical fiction.

2/n

“Jesus in the gospels is neither pure historiography nor pure mythography. Even if the Christ of the gospels is pure myth, Jesus may still have existed — or at least his existence is the most plausible hypothesis to explain the gospels as literary products.”

—M. David Litwa

🧵

1/n

“[Jesus was] a fool, a madman, a wretched fanatic, and a miserable scoundrel.”

—Jean Meslier, an active Catholic priest, died 1729.

*************
(Meslier left this in a written manifesto, notarized, directed to his parishioners and the public, to be released upon his death.)

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t a contest between perfect good and metaphysical evil: it is a contest between deeply flawed (Israel) and utterly unacceptable (Palestinian culture). That isn’t a difficult choice for me.

What are the children of Gaza taught to believe? They are taught to believe this:

⬇️

It’s October 7th, and I want to say for the record that when it come to the conflict between Israel and Gaza, I am firmly on the side of Israel. As a rule of thumb, I’ll never side with Islamists. I don’t have to overlook Israel’s faults to make this choice.

“Theology . . . induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe.”

— Bertrand Russell, “A History of Western Philosophy”

Trump Is Setting the National Parks Up to Fail — The Atlantic Workers say the real crisis is happening behind the scenes.

We’re keeping the gates open while the foundations crumble. National parks look “normal,” but ecosystems, science, stewardship & staff are being gutted. It’s the same story everywhere: we sacrifice both nature and our health for profit.
apple.news/AlHfxyGInRKu...

As you say Lyle, >95% of western larch forests have been lost, and nobody around now has much of an idea what they were like before logging. But we know the species is very long lived, at least up to 1,000 yrs old and growing over 9' diameter. Just a few exemplars of their real potential remain.

A small grove of towering western larch, their thick plated bark glowing in the sunlight—a rare remnant of centuries-old trees.

Old-growth western larch (tamarack) is among the rarest forests in North America.
Once scattered across Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and into BC, nearly all were logged for their durable wood. What remains are scattered relics.

horrible

U.S. Political Parties Historically Polarized Ideologically While Americans' overall ideology held steady in 2024, the shares of Republicans identifying as conservative and Democrats as liberal saw new highs.

Finally, of course, ‘moderate’ is a word that lacks content. “Moderate” with respect to what?

This whole abomination of a poll can be seen here:

5/n

news.gallup.com/poll/655190/...

Similarly, “conservative” hardly exhausts the ideological positions available on the right. Authoritarian, anti-liberal ideologies are prominent on both sides of the traditional political spectrum. A Maoist is no liberal; a bona fide fascist is no mere conservative.

4/n

It is trivially easy to find examples of people on the left who are anti-liberal. Maoists are not liberal. Stalinists are not liberal. Gender ideology is not liberal. Anti-colonialism, as an ideology, is not liberal. Postmodernism is not liberal.

3/n

The problem, of course, is that the posed question assumes that a meaningful political spectrum can be comprehensively described by the categories, “conservative,” “moderate,” and “liberal,” with “very” as an intensifier. This is absurd.

2/n

Who sees how bad this polling question is? Raise your hand if you understand the problem.

This is from Gallup. Widely quoted, highly respected, worse than useless.

🧵

1/n

As between Coates and Klein, I’ll take “neither.” Thanks.

Saguaro cacti in an afternoon storm. Southern Arizona.

Salman Rushdie and the Cult of Offense This is what happens when you debase free expression in the name of free expression.

“‘[N]obody would have the balls’ to write The Satanic Verses today. More precisely, nobody would publish it, because sensitivity readers would notice the theological delicacy of the book’s title and plot. The ayatollahs have trained them well . . .”

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...