Recently on the Kottke Ride Home Podcast
It’s been awhile since we’ve checked in on the Kottke Ride Home podcast here, so let’s see what host Jackson Bird has been talking about on the show lately. (If you’re just joining us, KRH is a daily podcast that promises “in just 15 minutes, the coolest stuff that happened in the world today”. Subscribe here!)
From today’s episode, we learn that shortages of various kinds (lumber, food) are still happening in America. The lumber shortage is a climate change story:
The week of Thanksgiving, British Columbia had an atmospheric river. Typically it’s snow. But they had counter-seasonal, torrential rain in Vancouver and up into the lumber-producing region. And when you have fires, you don’t have soil control, so now you have erosion-and when it rains, you have mudslides and floods.
And that is what started the second lumber rally. I think the second lumber rally was inevitable, but this started it early. You could pinpoint the bottom and the reversal in price to the pictures and the headlines of the flood. It destroyed not the trees, not the sawmill operations, but the infrastructure to get the lumber to market.
On Tuesday’s show, Jackson talked about why we might benefit at times from “deliberate ignorance”:
Deliberate ignorance is not rare. It’s an often reached for mental tool that pervades much of our lives, even outside of extreme wartime situations. It even has many benefits: It effectively helps regulate emotions by warding off negative ones and prolonging positive ones. It’s a way to maintain our beliefs about ourselves and others, it can be a mechanism for fairness or to remove bias, or a way to avoid overwhelm when bombarded with information.
And on Monday’s episode, MLK Day and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. was the main topic. From The public has underestimated the radicalism of Martin Luther King Jr.’s early work by Victoria W. Wolcott:
King wrote Scott a letter to thank her for the book and included his response to Bellamy’s utopian vision. “I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. … Today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” He finished his letter, “Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color.” This utopian socialist vision of full equality, embraced by both Scott and King, was central to the campaigns they launched in the next decades.
If you find those sorts of stories interesting, you should consider adding Kottke Ride Home to your daily podcast routine.
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