Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Our two youngest kids are now pre-teen and teen and let me put it this way: I oftentimes question their sanity when they get into the absurdest arguments and fight about nonsensical stuff. I know it is a phase and we just have to get through it. As a parent I will somehow cope with it, yell a bit and then hug a lot. In a few years time we will all laugh about it.
Compared to Donald Trump, my kids look very mature and composed. Lake America, really? He belongs into a mental institution, not into the White House. And with this kind of idiocy he dominates the airwaves. Under normal circumstances people would call the guys to bring the straightjacket and transport him of, fearing he would harm himself while trying to put on his socks.
Unfortunately, flooding the zone with shit has worked and it will take decades to rebuild everything.
Anyhow, read these five articles now, it might help.
The End of the European Summer
In the past five years, however, Europe’s heat has become too lethal to ignore: an estimated seventy thousand heat-related deaths in 2022, forty-eight thousand in 2023, and sixty-three thousand in 2024. This June—Western Europe’s hottest on record—at least ten thousand excess deaths were recorded as Paris topped a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, Bordeaux hit 108.5, and Gascony reached 111.7. The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre closed early, the museum explaining that its building is “not sufficiently adapted to climate change.” A nuclear plant in southwestern France shut down a reactor because the river water used to cool it was too warm. Dozens of young people, including a twenty-one-year-old professional footballer, drowned while seeking relief in open water; three French children died in broiling cars. Some Parisians took refuge in air-conditioned hotels.
The Baltic Sea will soon be the new Mediterranean Sea as summer temperatures will be too unbearable in Southern Europe. It’s not something I ever wanted.
Dolly Parton Will Always Love You
Parton died on Tuesday, somehow. She was 80. It’s strange and does not feel possible. Someone with that much vitality, that much magic, I was always pretty sure she’d live forever. Death seemed too ordinary for her. I assumed that when the reaper came calling she’d just laugh, say, “Oh, sweetie, I’m fine,” and keep it moving. That she would be our first immortal, outlive the sun, and become our planet’s primary source of warmth and light. Even now, I’m not sold that death can hold her. Who knows, in a few days, she may be back and better than ever. Until then, we remember.
I once slaughtered I will always love you singing karaoke in a pub in Southern England and I hope the patrons eventually forgave me. For me, Dolly Parton was one of my favorite singers and songwriters. From what I read in all the obituaries, she must have been a truly remarkable woman that cared a lot about the people around her. I like her music a lot and I am sad she’s gone.
The rich aren’t your role models – they’re your oppressors
A trillionaire does not represent the triumph of human potential. It represents a historic failure of human society. The existence of a trillionaire demonstrates that the wealth produced by countless workers has been concentrated into the hands of one individual on a scale without precedent. It reveals a world where economic power has become so centralised that a single person can command resources greater than those available to many nations. It exposes the absurdity of a system that struggles to house, feed, educate, and care for billions while allowing one man to accumulate wealth beyond any conceivable personal use. The question is not whether Elon Musk deserves a trillion dollars. The question is how any human being can possess such wealth while millions remain trapped in poverty and insecurity.
I don’t mind people getting rich. I do mind people getting obscenely freaking rich and powerful. Too me that means that our tax system is not working correctly. And I really hate it when people then think their philanthropic efforts is something we should all be thankful for. No, pay taxes and let the people decide what to spend the money on, not the rich.
Is This a New Era of Class Warfare?
Class inequality has surged into the view of American politics in recent years, but this isn’t the first bout of class violence this country has seen. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when 12-hour working days were common and child labor legal and federal minimum wages nonexistent, neither political party offered meaningful relief, pressing the working class to the wall. Violence — sabotage, dynamite, assassinations — ensued.
But there’s a key difference. In that earlier era, the anarchists and trade unionists who committed acts of violence did so, however rashly, in the hopes of effecting change. What is more, there were labor organizations and political movements committed to bringing about better conditions for working-class people. In time, they achieved at least some of these goals.
Today’s class violence lacks logic; it seems only animated by revenge, resentment and despair. There is no conspiracy or political mobilization. The people committing these acts are acting alone. The very fact of their isolation hints at a society that is beginning to abandon the hope of transformation.
So essentially the people who always try to dismantle institutions that allow for collecitve bargaining must now fear that people feel powerless and lonely - and therefore resort to violence. I think we should do something about the widening gap between poor and rich - and obviously we have to make sure that large parts of the middle class do not slide into poverty. I might have mentioned it before, but taxes are a really good way to do this.
The Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole Ever
The team of scientists who plotted the dig for a decade before the project launched had real ambitions: They hoped to bore through the continental crust and reach the Mohorovičić discontinuity—the boundary separating Earth’s crust from the mantle below. Crossing it would give scientists their first direct look at the vast layer that drives plate tectonics, feeds volcanoes, and ultimately shapes the continents.
The dig was, in a sense, a mirror of the space race. If Sputnik and Gagarin proved Soviet superiority in the heavens, an ambitious drilling project into the bowels of the planet meant the Soviets could reign in the underworld, too. The date the Soviets chose to formally begin the first round of drilling was May 24, 1970, the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. The project was tied to the Soviet Union’s own founding myth.
They didn’t make it all the way to Australia and also didn’t find what they were looking for, but at least they tried, I guess. It’s a bizarre story, but then again, not that bizarre for the Soviet Union.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico