Whilst waiting for a program to install I came across this article. Blurb:

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.

I then had the thought that there is no evidence that nature, though beautiful, likes us. Then I thought of the metaphor that everyone views the environment like it’s their grandparent’s house. “Oh, everything is so old and irreplaceable, let us gaze in rapt awe and try to be worthy of it someday”. Mind you, what we do with it is another story.

Then I was reminded of an Ayn Rand line which goes something like “Technology is man’s victory over nature”. Then I Googled that trying to find the exact quote. That led me, somehow, to this page about one of my favorite thinkers, Albert Jay Nock. His excellent auto-biography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is still one of my favorites. Then I started thinking of my other favorite social critics and came up with Eric Hoffer, H.L. Mencken, as well as Nock. All three of them have a distinctive, elegant style which I associate with urban living prior to the fifties. All three of them wrote from cities (San Francisco, Baltimore and New York) and two of them published all their work between 1900 and 1950. I’m also drawn to movies set in cities in that era.

I wonder why those circumstances have that appeal to me, then I decided to write it all down to clarify it in my head.

And there you go.