This live tree out on the porch makes me happy. It loves the rain and snow and will get planted in the spring. From my desk which has been moved into the living room for the deep cold season I can glance to the left and see it. The windows on my right show deepening sunset on a frozen lake. Saturday we drove in a snow storm to Bangor because nothing preempts getting a haircut. That was alternately boring/slow and harrowing. When an 18-wheeler passes you on the interstate, you are in a snow cloud for about 30 seconds with no visibility. And getting off at an exit is almost a guess as to where the ramp is.

One thrashes around at a terrible historic moment like this election and tries to rise above it all and get a sense of some big picture and where these events fit in. The most helpful piece I read in that regard is this one: Trump, Putin and the Pipelines to Nowhere by Alex Steffen. Climate change is the big picture and Trump's cabinet of horrors are those folks who will lose a lot of money when the Carbon Bubble pops. "And here’s the thing about bubbles: they always pop."

Climate action will trigger an enormous shift in the way we value things. If we can't burn oil, it’s not worth very much. If we can't defend coastal real estate from rising seas (or even insure it, for that matter), it’s not worth very much. If the industrial process a company owns exposes them to future climate litigation, it’s not worth very much. The value of those assets is going to plummet, inevitably… and likely, soon.

Here’s something critical it took me a long time (and the patience of a few smart friends) to understand: the Carbon Bubble will pop not when high-carbon practices become impossible, but when their profits cease to be seen as reliable.
As it becomes clear that these assets will not produce profit in the future, their valuations will drop — even if the businesses that own them continue to function for years. The value of oil companies will collapse long before the last barrel of oil is burned; the value of beachfront hotels will collapse long before rising tides flood their lobbies.
Put another way: The pop comes when people understand that growth in these industries is over and that, in fact, these industries are now going to contract. That’s when investors start pulling out and looking for safer bets. As investors begin to flee these companies, others realize more devaluation is on the way, so they want to get out before the drop: a trickle of divestment becomes a flood and the price collapses. What triggers the drop is investors ceasing to believe the company has a strong future. Because that risk already exists, the pop is way closer than most people understand.

Just as the light has flown to the other side of the world at the nadir of the year, and the news gets meaner and scarier, and Time Mag prepares to put the orange thing on its cover alongside its Hitler and Stalin issues, and poor people vote themselves into more misery, just at this time we get to sit in a catholic church in Belfast with our whole community and mourn the death of John Fox, a local young man and senior at Unity College. This spring he and a friend helped me put the dock in. We've know the family a long time. I was dreading the most mournful song ever, the Dies Irae, but not to worry, the music was only slightly less bland than the priest's generic words. And I guess they got rid of In Paradisum, the piece that let you know it was all over, "May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your arrival and lead you to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive you and with Lazarus, once (a) poor (man), may you have eternal rest." I always liked that one. But don't worry, they have kept the child's introduction to torture, the Stations of the Cross, best experienced in a 90 degree church on an empty stomach.

It's a good time to dive into fiction. I bought this bestseller to give away but read it first. Like the author, I can read about it but I cannot watch it on a screen. Just too upsetting.

My cousin Mark, an Esquire editor, links to quality stuff on FaceBook like this article: Notes from the Resistance: A Column on Language and Power by Summer Brennan. Here are a couple of quotes.

We have been beset with dangerous euphemisms. A neo-nazi becomes “an economic populist.” A lie becomes “a claim.” A propagandist becomes “a maverick” or “a provocateur.” Equality becomes “identity politics.” A public school privatizer becomes “a school reformer.” A climate change denier becomes “a climate contrarian” and a climate scientist “a climate alarmist.” Journalists are being called “presstitutes” or “lügenpress,” which is German for “lying press,” a term adopted by the Third Reich. There has been a kind of doublespeak silencing on social media in which those speaking out against white supremacists are themselves called “racists,” and those pointing out misogyny are called “sexist.” A protestor becomes “an economic terrorist.” White people become “the working class.”
Words have power.

No one person can defend everything in America that will need defending in the age of Trump. What we must do, instead, is to find our particular hills to defend, and then to defend them as if our freedom depended on it. Even if these battles are lost, the very act of writing down the progression of that loss, as Winston did, is an act of resistance. The hijacking of public language, as is happening now, is a way to shift perception—to bend and control thought—and must be resisted.