May I suggest Train To Busan. To get the bad news out of the way – or, at least, the bad news from my point of view – Train To Busan is not only a zombie movie, it is a Korean movie, and it has subtitles. I’ve not seen many zombie movies so I don’t want to promote myself as an expert, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this has enough virus driving people into crazed zombies action for even the most dedicated zombie aficionado, making it, in a way, an action movie.

Korean movies are raw, I think that is because almost everybody in South Korea has some form of PTSD. Although Korea is rich and very modern now – the movie takes place on a faster more advanced train than any running in the US – when I was in Korea, only sixty years ago, the country was a war wrecked ruin. Everybody had been affected. The result is now, it is everybody’s grandparents who were traumatized and Korean movies reflect that. Not to mention that daily life goes on under the constant threat by the nuclear dictatorship to the north. As for the subtitles, I have a hard time both reading the subtitles and watching the actor’s faces. That doesn’t seem to be universal, however, because almost everybody I talk to about subtitles – who isn’t French – prefers them to dubbing.

With all those qualifications said, the movie is strangely exhilarating in its carnage. It has been a bad week for Michele and me and we were both in down moods when we sat down to watch Train To Busan. We were both in much better moods when we finished. Like every Korean movie that comes to mind, Train has a subtext of classism that must reflect a class divide in Korea. It is also a intimate and almost quaint movie about a too busy father and the world’s most adorable daughter. It is strangely a sort of feel good movie perfect for a low energy day.

I woke up on the morning of September 9th and it was too early, it was still very early twilight so I went back to sleep. When I woke again, it was still twilight except it was nine o’clock, well past dawn. Something was wrong. Well, duh! Something has been wrong for months, years, really. But this was more wrong. There was a doe with two fawns and a yearling in the back yard and she knew something was wrong. As the day wore on, it got darker not lighter.

Michele and I were both born in California so we are true Californians who know that, when something weird happens, it is time to get in the car and drive around. We started by going to what passes as the local shopping center to drop Precious Mae off at the vet. (She had insisted that she be allowed outside to play and the result was that she had a runny eye which turned out to be caused by a small piece of ash.) Under the new reality, we dropped Precious Mae off by putting her in her carrier and leaving it on the bench outside the vet’s office, they then came out and took both Precious Mae and the carrier inside and told us they would call us when she was ready to pickup.

By now it was 2:30 in the afternoon, dark, and, surprisingly, cold at 61°F. We decided to drive up to a view spot overlooking Crystal Springs Lakes but they were all closed so we drove up to Skyline which runs along the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains and then back to the vet to pick up Precious. The world looked terrifyingly beautiful.

It has been obvious ever since Trump first ran for president that many of his core supporters actually hate the people who hate Trump, more than they care about Trump or any particular action he takes, no matter how awful. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times

Of course, I think it is right on because I completely agree and have, inexpertly, been trying to say something close to this since early 2016 when I wrote a Post entitled Driving down the fault thinking about stupid. The essence of the Friedman Editorial is in a quote by Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, s “Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer.” These grievances “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.”

Friedman goes on to say that Humiliation, in my view, is the most underestimated force in politics and international relations. The poverty of dignity explains so much more behavior than the poverty of money. Check it out here (and my post here).

Your SF Bay Area friends are not OK. We are baking inside our homes. But we can’t open the windows not only because of the heat wave, but because the air quality is in the red zone. A Tweet from Melissa Hung @melissahungtx Writer & Journalist. Words in NPR, Vogue, Longreads on culture & immigrant communities. Writing about chronic pain @catapultstory. Founding editor @hyphenmag. San Francisco, CA melissahung.xyz

The things to me that makes 2020 different than other moments of national and global crisis are: 1) the scale of the threats 2) the absolute ability we have to mitigate those threats 3) our inability to actually do so for political or societal reasons the climate crisis in particular operates on a scale that is apocalyptic, and yet we mostly understand it, we already have the technologies to mitigate its impact, and we just aren’t doing it, covid, nasty as it is, is much less in scale, but again we understand how viruses work and how it spread and we just aren’t doing the things we need to do. There have been so many moments of intense crisis throughout human history, but I can think of nothing compared to a world on fire and oceans rising, happening with the full knowledge and understanding of humanity, and yet no action. A series of Tweets from David M. Perry @Lollardfish Journalist and historian. Pub musician. Dad. Husband. I also do dishes. #TheBrightAges http://patreon.com/lollardfish. https://paypal.me/lollardfish.Twin Cities davidmperry.com

Yesterday, it was somewhere around one hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside and we spent the day inside – no air-conditioning of course, this is coastal Northern California, for crying out loud – waiting for it to cool off outside as the inside temperature slowly climbs. At ninety one inside, it is still warmer outside but feels more comfortable. Only slightly, still, the air is clear and we go outside seeking the fresh air. Sitting In the late afternoon shade, it feels great after waiting most of the day in a stuffy house.

This has been a year of waiting, mostly inside. Waiting for the plague to run its course and waiting for the smoke to go away. Waiting for widespread testing, waiting for a vaccine. Waiting through a chilly early summer for it to get warmer and now waiting for it to get cooler. Waiting for summer and, now, waiting for summer to end. Waiting for Biden to pick a running mate and waiting for the ballots to arrive so we can vote and then wait for the results.

In the background, always in the background – and that’s the problem with watching the world while quarantined, everything seems to be in the background – the headlines announce some daily carnage; protests in Oregon getting violent, a colossal explosion in Beirut destroying much of the waterfront, two hurricanes hitting the gulf coast, fires in California, fires in Siberia and the Amazon, and on and on. All the time, every day, the plague invisibly getting worse, people we don’t know dying. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the death count is raising – today it totaled 136 deaths in San Mateo County, 13,764 in California, 189K in the United States, and is approaching 900K in the world – as we sit trapped inside and waiting, feeling fortunate we have an inside in which to sit.

The Green New Deal is not radical, but let me tell you what is: A president who rejects science and calls climate change a hoax while unprecedented hurricanes batter the Gulf, wildfires rage in the west, an 800-mile derecho destroys towns and the Arctic melts. That’s radical. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the longest-serving independent in congressional history. Vermont/DC sanders.senate.gov

@SpeakerPelosi please apologize for condescendingly saying “green dream or whatever.” We need a GreenNew Deal to halt rapid irreversible climate and ecological breakdown. Decisions we make over the next few years will affect humanity and the living Earth for millions of years. Peter Kalmus (climate scientist) @ClimateHumanClimate scientist terrified by what I see. Shifting norms & living on 1/10th the fossil fuel. BLM. Book: Being the Change (link) #NotMeUs Views me not NASA Altadena, CA…according to Wikipedia, Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist, writer and climate activist based in Altadena, California. He is a data scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an Associate Project Scientist at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering. 

I just got a new Green New Deal T-shirt through Ocasio Cortez’s website and I am pleased to report that it is on brand.

On brand for AOC because the T-shirt is made in America and has an Union Bug¹ on it. The shirt is made by Bayside, a company I have never heard of before and, when I Google Bayside T-shirts, the first site to come up is not Bayside but ssactivewear.com, then Amazon, T-Shirt Wholesaler, ClothingShop On Line, BlankApparel, blah, blah, but no Bayside. My guess is that Bayside is a manufacturer who only sells to wholesalers. Whatever , or whoever Bayside is, they really, really, really, want us to know that the shirt is Cotton harvested in USA, Cotton grown in USA, Yarn spun in USA, Knitted in USA, Fabric Dyed in USA, Sewn in USA, Made in USA.

On brand for the Green New Deal because this is the most uncomfortable T-shirt I can remember ever wearing. It is rough and scratchy, sort of like a hair shirt² (although, I have to admit, I’ve never worn a hair shirt before and always considered them a strange, outdated, religious tradition). I have nothing against rough cloth, I enjoy using towels that have been line-dried, and I don’t like super high-quality sheets that feel slick, so the uncomfortableness of this shirt has surprised me. Where it is most uncomfortable is by the back of my neck because the the huge, stiff, tag, telling me all the ways it is made in the USA, keeps rubbing me there. In that way, I am constantly reminded that The Green New Deal is not going to be easy, it will entail massive discomforts.

Our society, our world, really, is based on the massive burning of carbon based fuels, turning the carbon into CO2, which, in turn, is heating up our planet and, increasingly, making it uninhabitable. Uncomfortable is not fun, but it is better than uninhabitable and those are our only choices. We are going to have to stop burning coal, the worst offender, which we all know is bad, but also, burning Natural Gas, and barbecuing with briquets, and having comforting wood fires. We are going to have to cut way back on meat which is a staggering inefficient way to provide calories, and air travel (at least, short term). We are going to have to radically change our lives and that thought is uncomfortable.

1. A Union Bug is also known as a Union Label and it means that the item has been made/printed by Union workers.
2. According to the Collins English Dictionary, 1. A hair shirt is a shirt made of rough uncomfortable cloth which some religious people used to wear to punish themselves. 2. countable noun. If you say that someone is wearing a hair shirt, you mean that they are trying to punish themselves to show they are sorry for something they have done.